Australian Identity Research Articles

Representing (real) Australia: Australia’s Eurovision entrants, diversity and Australian identity

Since 2014, Australia has had a presence on the Eurovision stage, first as guest performer, then as wild-card entrant and most recently as official competitor. The first three representatives, Jess...

Constructing Australian Architecture for International Audiences: Regionalism, Postmodernism, and the Design Arts Board 1980–1988

In May 2015, a new Australian Pavilion was inaugurated at the Giardini dell Biennale in Venice. Designed by Denton Corker Marshall, it has been described as moving beyond the issues of Australian identity that were the concern of its predecessor, designed by the architect Philip Cox and opened in 1988 to mark Australia’s bicentenary. This paper revisits the work of the Australia Council’s Design Arts Board in the 1980s in promoting Australian architecture through exhibitions, international design journals, and finally the first Australian Venice Biennale pavilion. During this period, a concern with identity preoccupied Australian architecture, manifest in an idiom of exposed steel frames and corrugated iron and a concern with landscape. This view aligned with one of the period’s prevailing international orthodoxies in architecture: Kenneth Frampton’s concept of “critical regionalism.” Countering this was the position put by the Italian design journal Domus, in a 1985 special issue on Australia, which depicted Australian architecture as contested, fragmentary, and citational – in a word, “postmodern.” While the Design Arts Board’s engagement with the international design media could lead to unanticipated outcomes such as Domus’s radical view, it is apparent in readings of the 1988 Biennale pavilion design that mostly engagement continued to be on the basis that Australian architecture should proffer images of identity.

Peter Corrigan, the Bodgie Wolf, and Other Larrikin Tygers of Wrath

In the face of being “othered” over issues to do with cultural isolation and derivation, a new generation of Australian architects arose in the 1970s, celebrating Australia’s distinctive regionalism. This regionalist current chimed with the growth of the postmodern movement, which, had done much to liberate the Australian architect from the so-called “cultural cringe,” as he or she no longer felt that they had to hobble after what was happening elsewhere. Among this new cohort of architects, the work of Peter Corrigan is notable for advocating a mongrel postmodern architecture that was positively and distinctively Australian, sampling from the ordinary and dreary Australian suburbs. This article seeks to clarify the architectural quest for an Australian identity in Corrigan’s work, by exploring in depth the interdisciplinary and transatlantic transfer of ideas from theatre to architecture. Corrigan had a long-standing engagement with stage design, and this article will argue that his involvement in “New Wave theatre,” notably the Australian Performing Group (APG), and the appropriation of concepts from directors and playwrights like John Vaccaro, John Romeril, Jerzy Grotowski, Casper Neher, and Bertold Brecht, determined how he transplanted postmodern ideas onto Australian soil.

Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900 by David Wyn Jones

Reviews 286 rendition of Kraus’s drama or of Michael Russell’s roughly simultaneous translation of Die letzten Tage would be a fruitful endeavour. But this reviewer cannot find any major faults in this first complete English translation. If there are moments where the drama seems almost too contemporary — where the parodies of journalistic spin or bureaucratic newspeak feel all too imitative of our own epoch — this cannot be solely attributed to the translators’ intentions, but rather to the prescience of the drama itself. Ari Linden University of Kansas Music in Vienna: 1700, 1800, 1900. By David Wyn Jones. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer. 2017. x + 277 pp. £25. ISBN 978–1-78327–107–8. David Wyn Jones’s new book enters a crowded market. Notwithstanding periodic attempts at revisionism, Vienna remains musicologically pivotal. The secondary literature is predictably vast, and the impulse to augment it shows no signs of dissipating. Music in Vienna’s novelty resides in its underlying idea: it comprises three case studies, each centred on the turn of a century, which reconstruct Vienna’s musical economy. The first concerns the relationship between the Habsburg monarchy and its musical infrastructure in the decades around 1700; the second tracks this infrastructure’s migration into aristocratic hands 100 years later; the third explores the influence of the bourgeoisie around 1900. In this respect, the book is really a narrative of what economists might call modernization: Vienna’s musical history reflects feudalism’s decline and the rise of a market economy propelled by industrialization and liberalization. Two further tripartitions support this narrative. Wyn Jones’s chronology reflects a division into Baroque, Classical and Modern style periods, in which respect its task is more complex for 1700 than it is for 1800 and 1900, since, unlike Viennese Classicism and Modernism, the Austrian Baroque still lives in the shadows of its Italian, German, English and French counterparts. Simultaneously, he narrates the contraction of Viennese political identity: in 1700, music is indentured to Habsburg authority; after 1800, it mirrors the politics of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, provoking the emergence of a more specifically Austrian identity; and for 1900, Wyn Jones posits a more highly developed Viennese identity, presaging the Empire’s ultimate collapse after the First World War. The book’s impressive resource of documentary evidence — including records detailing the changing composition of the imperial Hofkapelle, the copying and publishing industries, the structure of musical institutions and the repertoire they helped to maintain — allows an historical picture to grow out of the documentary traces of Vienna’s cultural economy. Although the resulting narrative is occasionally dry (what the account of the Hofkapelle’s personnel and structure gains in thoroughness it arguably loses in vitality), there is no contesting the weight of scholarship that underpins it. Reviews 287 The methodology’s drawback is that historical detail often obscures larger debates. Although Wyn Jones erects his conceptual scheme very clearly, its application is practical rather than theoretical, serving more as a framework for historical information than a platform for historiographical speculation, which means that opportunities for critical speculation are missed. Comparison of 1700 and 1800 for example affords a chance to critique Tim Blanning’s idea, expounded in The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), that eighteenth-century history charts the demise of representational culture and the emergence of the public sphere. Although Wyn Jones distances himself from Blanning’s French paradigm, he nevertheless implicitly confirms the perception that the Hofkapelle’s liturgical and ceremonial music was above all an expression of imperial authority (for example, p. 27). The Empire’s disparate character did not diffuse artistic expressions of political authority, but shifted their locus towards the projection of religious identity, engendered in the concept of pietas austriaca, the Habsburg affiliation with counter-reformation Catholicism. This notion also informed secular music: the cycle of courtly operas, composed for the fixed events of Fasching, the imperial name days and birthdays of the Emperor and Empress, invariably expressed the virtues of pietas austriaca in secular form, funnelled symbolically through the personality of the Emperor, about whom all operas were ultimately composed (p...

Belief Systems in Austrian Literature, Thought, and Culture ed. by Michael Boehringer, Allison Cattell, and Belinda Kleinhans

Reviewed by: Belief Systems in Austrian Literature, Thought, and Culture ed. by Michael Boehringer, Allison Cattell, and Belinda Kleinhans Vincent Kling Michael Boehringer, Allison Cattell, and Belinda Kleinhans, eds., Belief Systems in Austrian Literature, Thought, and Culture. Vienna: Praesens, 2017. 260 pp. This richly varied collection of essays, based on papers delivered in 2013 at the University of Waterloo, ranges informatively across a number of disciplines related to literature and other aspects of Austrian identity. The title, Belief Systems, is broad enough to compass architecture, hagiography, politics, feminist studies, opera, and examinations of the periphery in its influence on the center. The main forebear for studies of belief systems is historian Friedrich Heer—here invoked more than once—who explored the many cultural bases (politics, religion, literature) on which Austrians ground their identity in controversial studies such as Der Kampf um die österreichische Identität and Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler. The editors provide a very helpful listing of general works on the subject (17). Collections like these are all the more valuable since opportunities for publication have dwindled in the English-speaking world. It is disheartening to note how trade presses and university imprints alike have yielded to market forces, repackaging narrow, politically correct platitudes about gender studies or class or race. A structural or historical study, an examination based on aesthetics, a close reading—these hardly stand a chance any more. On the other hand, smaller, serviceable European presses like Praesens Verlag, the publisher of this volume, have often benefited from subsidies that make it possible to preserve relatively ephemeral material—like conference proceedings—whose survival might otherwise not be guaranteed. Even topics that could by nature be ideologically skewed are preserved from narrow vision by the scholarly vigor of their treatment. Dagmar Lorenz, for example, in "The Struggle of Ideologies: The Defeat of Socialist Feminism in 1930s Vienna as reflected in Veza Canetti's Fiction" (175–93), founds her research on meticulous examination of primary sources and treats the issue with balance, illuminating the extent to which Canetti both "wrote from the headlines" but shaped her fiction into self-contained entities. Likewise, Sarah Painitz ("A Neue Frau?: Women in Austria during the First Republic," 152–74), under the heading of "Weib, Frau or Mensch" (162–65), sketches the discrepancy between the glamour of women's lives as depicted in popular novels and the harsher reality confronting working women. Having once published on women as redeeming characters in Hofmannsthal's libretti, the [End Page 112] present reviewer was especially persuaded by Kathleen Hulley's examination of "Women as Muse, Women as Music in Fin-de-Siècle Viennese Opera: Female Sexuality as Inspiration in Franz Schreker's Der ferne Klang" (108–28), which reveals the ambiguity of Grete as muse who both inspires and thwarts creativity. A general examination of the trope of the Muse in Vienna around 1900 (inevitably, Alma Mahler-Werfel takes center stage) is followed by a close analysis of the tensions in Schreker's libretto. A history of the uses to which religious impulses (very literally a "belief system") can be put is found in Kerstin S. Jobst's provocative "Making Politics with Saints: The Initialization of the Josaphat-Kuntsevych Cult in the Habsburg Monarchy (1860s–1918)" (18–36). Malleable because of what Jobst calls his "globality" (Orthodox and Roman Catholics alike venerated him; he had a large following in Poland and Ukraine, even in Brazil), Josaphat "could not easily be instrumentalized" (19) along nationalistic lines, but his very adaptability has always made him a convenient screen on which to project assorted fervors. Single-author studies examine Austrian belief systems from a fascinating multiplicity of approaches. Marie Kolkenbrock traces the function of stereotypes about destiny or fate in several of Schnitzler's works that center on negative perceptions of Jews and Jewishness (85–107). Doris McGonagill parallels the banishment of Ovid in Christoph Ransmayr's novel Die letzte Welt to binary views of such imperial configurations as East and West, center and periphery, regime-upholding religion and menacing cultism (194–215); memory, identity, and narrative are the three vehicles of apprehending binaries. Liminality, the space or energy where times, places, and identities overlap, is...

The Development of the Austrian Jazz Scene and Its Identity 1960-1980

In Austria, a country steeped in music history and famous for composers such as Mozart, Haydn, and Bruckner, jazz was quick to earn a place in the cultural landscape. After World War II, important jazz scenes rapidly evolved in Vienna and Graz and, particularly from the 1960s onwards, grew into a strong and independent national jazz scene. Its musicians and ensembles focussed on developing their own characteristics and styles. This article examines primary aspects of the jazz scene during these formative years, such as the series of amateur jazz festivals held in the 1960s, Friedrich Gulda's commitment to jazz, Graz as a jazz centre and the institutionalisation of jazz at the Academy of Music in Graz in 1965, the role of the Austrian broadcasting network (ORF), and the impact of the Vienna Art Orchestra. In addition to archival records and musicological and journalistic texts, interviews conducted with members of different parts of the jazz scene offer important insights into the development of jazz during this period (with musicians, ensembles, educators and researchers, festival and venue organisers, agencies and policy makers, members of the media). This article offers an overview of pertinent aspects of the Austrian jazz scene between 1960 and 1980, revealing opinions about the influence of these aspects on the formation of Austrian jazz identity.

North by North

[Extract] Seven centuries of cartographic convention has placed north at the top of maps, and by logical extension at the top of the world. This convention has been closely aligned with another, known as the Mercator projection. Devised by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1659, this system of map-making has been uncritically handed down through the centuries to the present time and continues to be the cartographic standard in many parts of the world. Mercator’s projection not only points northward but exaggerates northern landmasses at the expense of the south. For example, it magnifies Greenland to be approximately the same size as Africa, which is actually fourteen times larger. The Greenland example is one of many northern amplifications and conceits that belittle the south. The specific contrast with Africa was presented with deadpan humour and devastating effect in a 2012 episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Cartographers for Social Equity lobby President Bartlet’s White House to withdraw all Mercator maps from US schools and replace them with Gall-Peters maps. The Gall-Peters projection represents with greater fidelity and accuracy the relative proportions of the world’s landmasses. The Cartographers for Social Equity fail in their representation but, coincidental or not, five years after the screening of The West Wing episode Gall-Peters maps began to be phased in at schools in two American states. North and south are cardinal directions and polar opposites that refer to exact locations at either end of the globe. Within ice-bound regions, the North Pole defines the Arctic, an old term derived from Latin and Greek to mean north. By contrast, its antithesis—the Antarctic—is a negative term that means opposite to north. It is defined by the South Pole. This linguistic preference suggests that north is the one while south is the other.

Australia's Northern Safari

[Extract] Filmed during a 1955 family trip from Perth to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Keith Adams’s Northern Safari showed to packed houses across Australia, and in some overseas locations, across three decades. Essentially a home movie, initially accompanied by live commentary and subsequently by a homemade sound track, it tapped into audiences’ sense of Australia’s north as a place of adventure. In the film Adams interacts with the animals of northern Australia (often by killing them), and while by 1971 the violence apparent in the film was attracting criticism in letters to newspapers, the film remained popular through to the mid-1980s, and was later shown on television in Australia and the United States (Cowan 2; Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 261). A DVD is at present available for purchase from the website of the same name (Northern Safari). Adams and his supporters credited the film’s success to the rugged and adventurous landscape of northern Australia (Northeast vii), characterised by dangerous animals, including venomous spiders, sharks and crocodiles (see Adams, “Aussie”; “Crocodile”). The notion of Australia’s north as a place of rugged adventure was not born with Adams’s film, and that film was certainly not the last production to exploit the region and its wildlife as a source of excitement. Rather, Northern Safari belongs to a long list of adventure narratives whose hunting exploits have helped define the north of Australian as a distinct region and contrast it with the temperate south where most Australians make their lives. This article explores the connection between adventure in Australia’s north and the large animals of the region. Adams’s film capitalised on popular interest in natural history, but his film is only one link in a chain of representations of the Australian north as a place of dangerous and charismatic megafauna. While over time interest shifted from being largely concentrated on the presence of buffalo in the Northern Territory to a fascination with the saltwater crocodiles found more widely in northern Australia that interest in dangerous prey animals is significant to Australia’s northern imaginary.

Living between two cultures: reflecting on Greek orthodox mourning practices

ABSTRACTThis paper draws on the author’s personal experience as a second-generation Greek-Australian woman caring for aging parents living in Australia to illustrate issues that arise for Greek Orthodox Australians in response to mourning practices. The Greek diaspora, at its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is now an aging population in Australia. Burial and mourning practices for Greek Orthodox Australians are much the same as they are for Greeks living in Greece. However, this paper argues that some of these practises are not easily reconciled with an Australian identity.

Returning to that which was never lost: Indigenous Australian saltwater identities, a history of land claims and the paradox of return

ABSTRACTIn this paper I explore the kincentric ecologies that define sea country for Indigenous Australians, in particular the Yanyuwa of Northern Australia. Despite colonial alienation from their coastal territories, Yanyuwa have sustained a four-decade long legal fight for restitution. Using the framework of ‘urgent patience’ as resistance against ‘social death’, this paper tracks the historical legacy of legislative land rights for saltwater peoples.

Of education, the bush and other strange creatures: Environmental conservation in Australian fairy tales

Fairy tales were late to appear in the Australian context but they quickly reflected contemporary concerns over the treatment of the native flora and fauna. Writers of early Australian fairy tales promoted the conservation of the Australian environment, educated children in the realities of living in the harsh Australian landscape and warned of the dangers that humans posed to the native animal population. This article posits that this movement in fairy tales was due to contemporary changes in curriculum and attitudes towards children’s education, and a growing sense of nationalism postFederation in 1901 that tied the Australian identity to the landscape.

Remembering Gallipoli: Anzac, the Great War and Australian Memory Politics

Few could have predicted that an ill‐fated landing of Allied troops in modern‐day Turkey in April 1915 would become the founding moment of the Australian nation. Australians were amongst several nations represented and did not suffer the most casualties, while the battle itself and the campaign of which it was a part was a military failure. Yet the notion that this battle constituted a “coming of age” for a nascent nation, and that Australian soldiers had exhibited the defining characteristics of a national type, has become a powerful — even hegemonic — story of Australian identity. Many analysts have pointed to the militaristic, masculine and mono‐cultural dimensions of a myth that weds the nation to a colonial past and in the process imposes limits on the ways in which we can imagine the nation and its role in the world. Yet as the Australian government geared up for the 2015 centenary of that landing — Anzac Day — with an unprecedented commitment of resources for commemorative activities, the shadow cast by the broader Anzac myth over Australian society and politics triggered surprisingly little public debate. This paper explores the key contours of the Anzac myth, examining the politics of Anzac memory and memorialisation in the context of the centenary of the Great War and the landing of Australian troops at Gallipoli.

Deceptive Threads: Staging a Migrant Archive

David Joseph’s solo show, Deceptive Threads, dramatizes the story of his two grandfathers by drawing on archival material that exposed the hidden history of these two men, and ultimately his wider family. The recipient of the 2015 Moise A. Khayrallah Center art prize, Joseph’s play skillfully unravels the many threads that constitute the playwright’s complex Lebanese and Australian identity. In the following piece, Joseph explains his motivations for writing this solo play, his attempts to recover his Lebanese identity through it, and the significance of particular theatrical techniques and props used for this recovery. Also included is the full script of Deceptive Threads, as well as a link to a recording of his performance.

Claiming Chinatown: Asian Australians, Public Art and the Making of Urban Culture

ABSTRACTChinatowns have traditionally functioned as ethnic enclaves that were despised by the dominant Western culture, while functioning for Chinese immigrants as a refuge from the hostile white society they were surrounded by. In today’s globalised world, the meaning of Chinatowns has been transformed, as they have become more open, hybrid and transnational urban spaces, increasingly interconnected within the broader Asia-Pacific region. For Asian Australians, Chinatown may be a site of conflicting memories of Australia’s racist history and of cultural marginalisation and ethnic survival, but it is also—in today’s multicultural and cosmopolitan age—an area to be claimed for the expression of new Asian Australian identities. In Sydney’s Chinatown, public art projects by Asian Australian artists such as Jason Wing and Lindy Lee articulate some of the complexities and ambiguities of what it means to be Asian in Australia today.

British History is Their History: Britain and the British Empire in the History Curriculum of Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia 1930-1975

This article investigates the evolving conceptions of national identity in Canada and Australia through an analysis of officially sanctioned history textbooks in Ontario, Canada and Victoria, Australia. From the 1930s until the 1950s, Britain and the British Empire served a pivotal role in history textbooks and curricula in both territories. Textbooks generally held that British and imperial history were crucial to the Canadian and Australian national identity. Following the Second World War, textbooks in both Ontario and Victoria began to recognize Britain’s loss of power, and how this changed Australian and Canadian participation in the British Empire/Commonwealth. But rather than advocate for a complete withdrawal from engagement with Britain, authors emphasized the continuing importance of the example of the British Empire and Commonwealth to world affairs. In fact, participation in the Commonwealth was often described as of even more importance as the Dominions could take a more prominent place in imperial affairs. By the 1960s, however, textbook authors in Ontario and Victoria began to change their narratives, de-emphasizing the importance of the British Empire to the Canadian and Australian identity. Crucially, by the late 1960s the new narratives Ontarians and Victorians constructed claimed that the British Empire and national identity were no longer significantly linked. An investigation into these narratives of history will provide a unique window into officially acceptable views on imperialism before and during the era of decolonization.

有満保江著, 『オーストラリアのアイデンティティ-文学にみるその模索と変容』, 東京大学出版会, 2003年

有満保江著, 『オーストラリアのアイデンティティ-文学にみるその模索と変容』, 東京大学出版会, 2003年

Watching Waleed: celebrity authenticity, Australian national identity, and the ideological work of The Project

ABSTRACTWaleed Aly is the most visible Australian public intellectual from a non-Anglo-Australian background. In 2016, Aly won the most coveted prize in Australian television: The Gold Logie. He was voted the most popular celebrity on Australian television primarily on the basis of his role as the co-host of the news/entertainment panel show The Project. This article interrogates a selection of Aly’s notable media appearances with a focus on his role as the co-host of The Project, a popular current affairs show on Australian television, in order to unpack the complex relationship between his celebrity status and his standing as a public intellectual, which bestows Aly with a symbolic, if not literal, mandate of authority and authenticity. More specifically, the article analyses a series of complex performative acts that align Aly’s public persona with a normative conception of Australian national identity. These acts involve two fundamental co-implicated operations. The first is a conscious self-presentation best thought of in dramaturgical terms. The second is best apprehended with reference to those discursive and institutional factors that make a place ready for us in the order of things. Finally, the article presents an account of the ideological work performed by Aly’s ‘authentic’ celebrity persona.

Peter Carey’s Challenge to a ‘Christian’ Australia in <i>Oscar and Lucinda <i/>

Throughout Australia’s European history, its political leaders have invoked a construction of Australian identity which contends that Australia is ‘a Christian country’: a claim made as recently as November 2014 by Pauline Hanson in her speech to re-launch her One Nation party. Published in 1988, Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda was seen by many as his response to Australia’s bicentenary, and it can be read as a challenge to several of the mainstays used in dominant constructions of ideal Australian life, its ‘Christian heritage’ included. In this article, therefore, I will explore the novel’s critique of the Anglican Church more speci?cally, and Christianity more generally, which it employs as a means of challenging the myth of Australia as a Christian nation. This discussion will call upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Benedict Anderson, as well as Lyn Spillman and Kate Mitchell who examine commemoration and literature as productions of cultural memory.

Review of Jay L. Garfield, <i>Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy </i> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)

Throughout Australia’s European history, its political leaders have invoked a construction of Australian identity which contends that Australia is ‘a Christian country’: a claim made as recently as November 2014 by Pauline Hanson in her speech to re-launch her One Nation party. Published in 1988, Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda was seen by many as his response to Australia’s bicentenary, and it can be read as a challenge to several of the mainstays used in dominant constructions of ideal Australian life, its ‘Christian heritage’ included. In this article, therefore, I will explore the novel’s critique of the Anglican Church more speci?cally, and Christianity more generally, which it employs as a means of challenging the myth of Australia as a Christian nation. This discussion will call upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Benedict Anderson, as well as Lyn Spillman and Kate Mitchell who examine commemoration and literature as productions of cultural memory.

Nationalism, Ethnic Identity, and Jews in the Socialist Ideology of Otto Bauer

This paper examines the ideas of Otto Bauer (1881–1938) on national identity as a theoretical concept, the nationalities question in the Habsburg Monarchy, and the concept of a civic Austrian national identity. Additionally, it demonstrates that the experience of assimilation in Bauer’s family background affected most directly the way he wrote about Jewish identity, and finds that some of his writings reveal a degree of doubt about his own identity as a German.