Cirrus@Austlit

‘It is fair to state that one of the most important and heated debates in twentieth-century Australia, both inside and outside academia, is the constitution of the nation’s identity. Were Australians to be seen as the result of a miscegenating convergence of many European (with a certain centrality of British values) and native cultures or should Australians be acknowledged as the result of a powerful resistance against such miscegenation? Both discourses circulated somewhat freely and strongly, especially from the second half of that century; however, it was Russel Ward’s normative account of the constructive elements of the typical Australia that was more deeply embedded in the nation’s imagination. Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958) claims that the Australian national identity is formed by the convergence of a cultural and biological Anglo-Saxon heritage and what he refers to as a unique Australian construction of masculinity, based on notions of mateship, egalitarianism, and (implicit, though questioned) heterosexuality. With the advent of both the New Left and second-wave feminism in Australia, though, Ward’s ideas came under intense attack and dissent brought to the table a disruption of the Wardian formative elements of national identity, bringing as a result a displacement of the central, ‘typical’ Australian that made other dissenting identities (women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and other ethnicities) invisible. The grounds for a policy of multiculturalism were laid and the questioning of an Australian monocultural identity would be at the centre of the most important celebratory event of the end of the twentieth century: the Bicentenary of the arrival of the First Fleet, which marked the official beginning of British colonisation of Australia.’ (Introduction)