'Writing Native explores how Australian interwar nationalist representations of the Aboriginal engaged key political and aesthetic paradigms of the early twentieth century: communism, fascism and modernism. Critics often interpret nationalist engagements with Aboriginal culture as a recent phenomenon, tied to the dismantling of the white Australia policy and the rise of the liberal multicultural state. However, I uncover a longer and more politically varied history. Moving from the far left to the far right, I demonstrate the centrality of representations of the Aboriginal within attempts to imagine alternatives to liberal capitalist modernity in Australia from diverse political perspectives. In doing so, I offer a new way of way of thinking about the relationship between Australian cultural nationalism and modernist cultures in the first half of the twentieth century. ' (Thesis abstract)
