Nation Building, Gender, Politics and Historical Memory in Australia
Deborah Jordan
University of Queensland
(Australia)
The current 'history wars' in Australia debate the nature of white occupation – whether of invasion or genocide (Black Arm Band view), right of conquest or settlement of terra nullus. Australia is often considered as a ‘settler society’ or even a ‘post-colonial society’, however, it is useful to see Australia, white Australia, as a dominion, part of the British Empire, in the process of de-dominionisation when looking at its culture. Nation-building has always been a reluctant process in Australia, given its largely unacknowledged dispossession of its Indigenous people and its dependence on overseas powers – initially Britain, now United States.
This paper will trace one of the many strands - the lives of a group of writers who dreamed their vision of a creative Australia in the heady days of the federation of the separate colonies and grew to maturity in the days of hope in social and legislative reforms and socialism, and consciously sought to build a national culture. With Australia's involvement in the First World War in defence of the Empire, and debates about the meaning of nationhood, these writers associated with egalitarianism, environment and Australian nationalism were marginalized by the forces of conservatism and nationhood was aligned with Empire and militarism, men defined as Anzac warriors and women as in need of protection, in the popular imagination.
These so called ‘radical nationalist’ writers took refuge in the country and produced a stream of novels, short-stories, essays and newspaper journalism, often celebratory of the lives of the ordinary people but addressing the issues of race, colonisation and gender. With the catastrophic economic depression in Australia, Nettie Palmer worked with the National Council of Women, a conservative umbrella group, to produce a successful anthology of women's writings, women's history and art (at the expense of developing her own eco-writing). Vance Palmer used this strategy for the extremely successful publication of National Portraits – of significant white men in Australia's past, written for the masculine audience at the war front during the Second World War. These writers, as mature cultural producers, were positioned to ride the upsurge of nationalism and interest in country during the Second World War. The works of the Palmers, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Louis Esson became an essential part of the cultural revival in the arts and universities, with the loosening of imperial ties in the 1970s and a federal Labor. But the process of de-dominionisation or cultural maturity is never inevitable and as popular nationalism is appropriated by politicians and commerce, initiatives made in the decade of multiculturalism and then reconciliation, with the establishment of Aboriginal and Torrens Strait Islander presses, falter under the onslaught of the conservative Federal government. Australia is not yet a republic – that ratification of our de-dominionsation - failed at referendum in 1999.