Australian Identity Research Articles

Towards an ‘Australian voice’: A.G. Mitchell and debates over Australian speech, 1940–1960

This article examines language ideologies around the Australian English accent in 1940s and 1950s Australia. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, debates about the Australian accent and its relationship to Australian identity were reconfigured. Concerns about effective communication, Australia’s role on the world stage, modernity, and national belonging were all reflected in commentary around the Australian voice. A.G. Mitchell emerged as a key figure advocating for an ‘educated Australian’ accent and his public advocacy and work with the ABC was central to changing public understandings of the Australian voice during this period.

Musiker als Heroen einer österreichischen Identität und Kulturpolitik in der Zwischenkriegszeit

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the new Republic of Austria had problems to define a specific Austrian nationality. In search for such a national identity, politicians and scholars referred to a particular Austrian culture, stressing the role of music that defined Austria as a “Musikland” (land of music). A critical analysis of musicological texts published by Austrian scholars such as Robert Lach, Alfred Orel and Adolf Sandberger in the interwar years reveals a strong reliance on a narrowly circumscribed group of musicians, who were singled out as exemplary bearers of an Austrian national identity, with a strong emphasis on Viennese musical culture shaped by the native landscape. In this capacity Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert (flanked by Brahms, Bruckner, Strauß and Wolf ) were presented to the general public as “heroes”, using not only scholarly texts but also films and music festivals for the dissemination of this musical Austrian identity.

Australian Identity Politics Playing Tricks for Young South Sudanese Australians

ABSTRACT This article explores the key themes of African diaspora life for young people in Australia and their interplay with identity politics, primarily focusing on young South Sudanese Australians. This is captured through their participation in youth participatory action research (YPAR) facilitated by a small non-profit, Footprints. The notion of ‘identity politics playing tricks’ was derived from observing Footprints YPAR projects as South Sudanese Australian (SSA) Hip Hop artists discern their diaspora identities in the backdrop of a nation that often displays a political agenda about their presence. Alternatively, young people re-frame and assert their identity formation through their Blackness and pride in culture and establish themselves as social agents in the world. Utilising ‘critical race theories’ through the lens of ‘urban youth culture’, this article demonstrates how participants examine their multifaceted experiences whilst navigating cultural codes; how they negotiate and articulate their own identities in challenging circumstances and seeks to understand communities’ views on diaspora, social, national and cultural identities’ in a diverse environment. It addressed the themes of the politics of ‘reclaiming identity’. Findings point to the necessity to further explore racialisation discourses in localised contexts whilst prioritising the self-articulation of identities reviewing how young people enact agency and resilience.

Racist Ideology and Hashtag Activism

Racist ideology is reproduced in daily communications and in art. Racism is also challenged. In this essay I explore the way ideology is present in Peter Drew’s ‘Monga Khan’ posters — artwork designed to provoke critical reflection about representations of race and Australian identity. Part I discusses the ideological engagement Peter Drew anticipated arising from his art ‘hactivism’ and critical reception of the work. I compare Drew’s oeuvre to 1970–80s protest posters, showing the effects of greater exposure to intellectual property constructs, marketing, and commercial branding on the ambition of art activism. Part II shows how attribution practices in the art world and media connect the politics of hactivist art with commodification. I discuss how ‘Blackness’, represented by Drew in the form of challenge to racialized ideas of Australian identity, functions as Drew’s ‘second skin’, or brand identity. Subaltern voices also challenge the authority of white artists to speak for the ‘Other’, but due to the way today we attribute ownership to image and voice, these protests metamorphise into a passing parade of objectified cultural difference. Part III draws out the implications for law, addressing the socio-legal reproduction of ideology, outside of relations normally identified with the lived experience of law.

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

Narrative Strategy of Skepticism in N. Gstrein’s Novel “Die englischen Jahre”

The novel of the modern Austrian writer Norbert Gstrein (born 1961) “Die englischen Jahre” (1999) is studied as an experience of critical rethinking of the “Austrian identity” in the context of “national identity” (R. Menasse). The relevance of the study is due to the need to comprehend the phenomenon of “Austrian literature” in the second half of the 20th — early 21st centuries. A review of the most significant works of Gstrein is made, it is proved that the novel “The English Years” is a “turning point” in the writer's work. The novelty of the study is seen in the fact that until now Gstrein’s work has not been an object of study in Russian literary criticism. The concept of a narrative strategy is involved in the study, the methods and specifics of the implementation of the “narrative strategy of skepticism”, which actualizes the author’s position to a critical attitude to historical events, are considered. The question is raised about the influence of the “narrative strategy of skepticism” on the reception of the novel. It is proved that the “narrative strategy of skepticism” allows us to trace the changes in the development of the plot of the novel, to identify the features of its poetics, to realize the semantic content of the text when considering the problem of identity on the example of a biographymyth. The methodological basis of the work is the research of foreign and domestic scientists concerning Austrian literature, as well as the nature of the narrative strategy implemented in the genre of the novel.

The potential of using the forensic profiles of Australian fraudulent identity documents to assist intelligence-led policing

ABSTRACT The manufacture and distribution of fraudulent identity documents (IDs) is a pervasive and prolific crime problem, enabling the activities of organized crime networks and terrorist cells. As reactive policing methods are ill-equipped to handle the transversal and repetitive nature of document fraud, in 2012 Baechler et al. suggested a complementary method that uses the systematic profiling and comparison of fraudulent IDs to identify those produced by the same source. While this method has been successful in Europe, it is yet to be implemented worldwide, and there is currently little known about the Australian fraudulent document climate. In this pilot study, 43 fraudulent IDs from Sydney-based New South Wales police stations were examined. Adapting the method used in Europe, these documents were imaged, and their visual characteristics were extracted before being organized into an excel database and manually compared. The characteristics chosen are fundamentally linked to the manufacturing process, including the printing methods and replication of security features. Of the documents examined 88% were linked to at least one other document, and five series emerged. These results suggest that the Australian document market may be structured, and that there may be prolific offenders operating at its core, much like in Europe.

Aufnahme und Ablehnung: Die Sudetendeutschen in (Nieder-)Österreich 1945/46

The article deals with the process of the reception of the so called “Sudetengermans”, who have been expelled form Czechoslovakia in 1945 and arrived completely without means to (Lower-)Austria. This aggravated the situation in the country occupied by the Allies and scarred by war and Nazi terror, where about 1.6 million so-called „displaced persons“ were staying, almost 25% of the whole population However, Austrian policy was also hostile to the persons concerned because they regarded them as „Germans“ in the course of now strongly emphasising an independent Austrian identity. The article deals with the actions of politics and authorities as well as the reactions of those affected and the civilian population. Therefore the article used a combination of archival sources as well as narrative interviews with people, who were children or adolescents at the time.

Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art

Comic Empires: Imperialism in Cartoons, Caricature, and Satirical Art

Russh and the ‘all-Australian’ girl?

A central preoccupation that constantly arises in Australian culture is the question of who ‘we’ are and where ‘we’ belong. So much is evident in independent women's fashion magazine Russh, the focus of this article, in which pride and uncertainty about Australian identity (and fashionability) are representationally resolved through a sensual, girlish and white fashionable ideal. By closely analysing magazine issues selected from its archive, this article charts the ways that Russh imagines Australian fashion as both imbricated with global flows as well as reaching from the periphery towards where fashion really originates. It then reads the fashionable femininity represented in the magazine in light of settler colonial fantasies that imagine the actualisation of national character amongst the Australian landscape – a landscape in which white presence is positioned as originary. This fashionable ideal symbolically rejects cosmopolitanism through her ‘return to the bush’ whilst embodying fashion itself, thus reconciling the tension between far and near. As such, Russh can be read as actively reinforcing a hegemonic Australian imaginary that elides the diversity of contemporary Australian culture/s whilst escaping censure, because as a niche fashion magazine peopled with dreamy protagonists, its content is situated firmly within the realm of fashion's fantasy.

Social security conditionality as a corrective to ‘flawed consumption’: the use of the cashless debit card to reframe Australian norms of social protection

ABSTRACT This article explores discursive legitimation of intensified conditionality in Australian social security policy, by the association of responsible consumption with a revised construction of Australian identity. Discursive rationalization of the use of cashless debit cards to constrain consumption choices by citizens is situated in representations of Australian identity and social citizenship. Against growing empirical evidence of a lack of conclusive efficacy and emergent social harms, political rationalizations for the card’s introduction assert a normative Australian way of life that frames card users as ‘flawed consumers,’ lacking in the characteristics of imagined Australian citizenship. The compatibility of this imagined Australian identity with the values of market liberalism completes the substitution of market citizenship for its antecedent welfare state conception of citizenship based on rights. In this substitution, the idea of a right to social protection is subordinated to conditional support that promotes the sentiment that social welfare is ‘un-Australian.’

Politics and Poetics: Narratives of a (Central-)European River

The Danube, along with Galicia and Bukovina, was the landscape most commonly associated—between 1955 and 1989—with a widely understood lost Austrian identity and with Austrian Central Europe. The article examines two books on the Danube which are based on a combination of geographical and historical perspectives and establishing a correlation between the Habsburg tradition and the wider Central European space. Both authors had personally visited the places they write about, but their works are not reducible to mere travel descriptions or trip reports. Ernst Trost’s book Die Donau. Lebenslauf eines Stromes was published in 1968, a few years after the Habsburg heritage study Das Blieb vom Doppeladler, which also contained a description of the Danube journey. Claudio Magris’s book Danubio can in turn be seen as a continuation of a dissertation written twenty years earlier (Der Habsburgische Mythos in der modernen österreichischen Literatur) on the literary “afterlife” of the Habsburg Monarchy. If Trost’s book bears the hallmarks of the Cold War, Magris’s is a product of the new discourses on Central Europe that emerged in the 1980s. Both books are not only embedded in the political discourses of their time, but practically “reinvent” the Danube as a political and poetic theme. In a comparative analysis of the two books, the starting point is the central theme of both texts, each of which is a Danube master-narrative. The paper then considers how the two Danube books structure spaces and set boundaries; then general questions of genre affiliation are treated.

Queering the Happily Ever After: Paradoxes of the Cinematic Trope in Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded

ABSTRACT The 2017 marriage equality referendum was conservative in reach—refuting the entrenched marginalisation of queer existence, a challenge to conflations of happiness (in fact, the ultimate “happily ever after”—marriage) and heteronormativity. The marriage equality debate was an ugly realisation of those discourses of exclusion and prejudice implicated in many Western values, and in Australian national identity broadly. In thinking through these issues, I return to Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Loaded (1995) for its queering of “happily ever after” myths via film referents. Ari’s paradoxical relationship to romantic tenderness is evident in his frequent first-person allusions to various films. A close reading of Loaded and the film’s allusions expose both the operation of exclusion and an individual’s response to that exclusion prior to marriage equality. Loaded invites reflection on these complexities in a call for the universal right to romantic happiness through its deployment of filmic tropes.

‘The filthiest gutter of the realm’?: Negotiating and negotiated Australian identities in Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

The series Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2011–15) and the film Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears (2020) are examples of female-led transnational quality drama. This article argues that both the characters and the series itself are good examples of the negotiations of identity required both of the postmodern layered (, ) or fractured but functional globalized or transnational self, which can give the series increased emotional resonance to the modern audience at a ‘safe’ temporal remove. This is, of course, critically important to transnational sales. This article analyses the negotiations of identity of the regular characters (and, as space allows, recurring characters) that are evident throughout the three series and subsequent film. It focuses on the negotiations regarding national identity and its intersections, which illustrate how the series negotiates between a patina of ‘authenticity’ and the expectations of a modern audience. Where relevant, the spinoff series Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries (2019–present) is also discussed.

Securing the borders of English and Whiteness

This article examines how racial and linguistic identities are constructed on the Australian reality TV show Border Security. Based on an analysis of 108 episodes of the show involving 253 border force officers and 128 passengers, we explore how the hegemonic Australian identity of the White native speaker of English is constructed on the show. Officers are represented as a relatively uniform group of heroes devoted to protecting Australia’s national security. Simultaneously, most of them look white and sound like native speakers of Australian English. In contrast to the officers, passengers, as their antagonists, do not have a predominant racial or linguistic profile. They are represented as highly diverse. What unites them is not any racial or linguistic profile but that they represent a security risk. Threat thus comes to be mapped onto diversity. The show’s schema of heroes and antagonists invites the audience to identify with the heroes. By identifying with the White-English heroes, the audience also comes to take on their power of judgment over its diverse linguistic and racial Others. The analysis shows how the White-English identity bundle is constructed as the authoritative and legitimate position of the judging knower. The article’s main contribution is to show how the raciolinguistic construct of the White-English complex is made hegemonic in a diverse society officially committed to multiculturalism.

Vincent Buckley, Colonialism and the Problem of Irish-Australian Identity

Perhaps no Australian writer or thinker has probed the condition of Irishness in Australia more extensively than the poet-critic Vincent Buckley (1925-88). His first memoir Cutting Green Hay (1983) considers how his own family negotiated their Irish heritage, often through modes of strategic amnesia in which Irish cultural modes mutate into Australian identity. This, for him, results in a cultural deprivation that he seeks to remedy in himself, not least through many extended visits to Ireland, his ‘source country’ or ‘imagination’s home’. Yet in Memory Ireland (1985) and other essays, he offers a scarifying analysis of contemporary Irish society also marked by a loss of memory, which he ascribes in this case to the post-colonial torpor and imaginative enervation of independent Ireland. So Buckley seeks to reveal the scotomisation, or mental blind spots, that characterise both Irish-Australia and modern Ireland. Drawing mainly on prose works, including archives and unpublished sources, this essay seeks to bring to the fore the question of colonialism in Buckley’s reflections on Irishness, attentive to some of his own blind spots. It considers his deep debt to Yeats, but also the impossibility for Buckley, as he saw it, to follow Yeats’s example in creating a national imaginary that unified settler and native. This impacts Buckley’s sense of how an artist achieves success in the international literary field, but also maps back onto the question of setter-colonialism in Australia. I argue that Indigenous Australia shadows his thinking about Irish colonialism, sometimes explicitly, as in the poem ‘Gaeltacht’ from The Pattern (1979), but in a more fraught and culpable way than simply through assertions of shared victimhood. If the conquest and dispossession of Gaelic Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mirrors that of Indigenous Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth, it also deflects, redirects and sublimates it for an Australian poet.The Irish have certainly been historical victims of British colonialism, but they have also been beneficiaries of settler-colonialism in Australia, as his poem ‘Dick Donnelly’, the Irish-named Aboriginal man, ‘the last songman of his people’, poignantly attests.

Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: Swansong or Songline?

ABSTRACT Indigenous-Australian fiction offers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices the opportunity to carve out an Indigenous space within as well as without Australian identity after more than two centuries of silencing and oppression. Since the 1990s Indigenous authors such as Alexis Wright have broken new ground by going beyond the typical Indigenous autobiography known as life-writing as a means to recover their Indigenous history and to be heard. They do so by rewriting race and ethnicity from a non-European epistemology emanating from the Dreaming or Dreamtime, their spiritual and material universe or ontology holistically rooted in the land. This essay takes Indigeneity as fundamental in the postmodern and postcolonial construction of contemporary Australianness, and analyses how Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) questions the Enlightenment legacy that enthroned European civilisation and its hierarchical epistemology. In order to do so, it addresses the European encounter with the Indigenous Other through the notions of hospitality, cosmopolitanism, and friendship as developed by Kant in the late 1800s and their re-assessment as “hostipitality” by Jacques Derrida in the early 2000s, and applies these to the reading experience of Indigenous narratives.

Australian Unity in Judith Wright’s Selected Ecopoems

Judith Wright's (1915-2000) concern about man's disintegration with the natural world and the horror of the destruction of the earth reflects a high sense of ecological awareness caused by the threat of pollution that pervades the environment. Wright's ecopoetry draws attention to the danger of displacing oneself from the natural world that would also cause an inner alienation in man. The purpose of this paper is to explore Wright’s ecopoetical representation of the Australian ecology and its integral connection with Australia’s national unity. As the study examines Wright’s various volumes of poems, it argues that the lack of ecological awareness weakens the national and social fabric of Australia and deteriorates its environment. It also asserts that the poet’s ecopoetic quest for preserving the Australian ecology generates a new articulation of the Australian cultural identity and nationhood.

Bushman or Boer – Australian Identity in a ‘White Man’s War’, 1899–1902

This article considers Australian articulations of identity and representations of Boer soldiers in the South African War. Examining accounts from Australian war correspondents and military personnel, we make three observations. First, that widespread expressions of British Empire loyalty shaped rather than excluded expressions of nascent Australian nationalism. Second, that emergent Australian nationalism, particularly the notion of the ‘bushman’, was central to positive and negative comparisons to Boer soldiers. Finally, that transnational discourses of settler colonialism and whiteness enabled such comparisons, which simultaneously facilitated claims about Australian martial superiority and deceptive Boer indolence, despite noted similarities between bushman and Boer.

Inside and Outside the Body Politic: Fortress Australia, Europe, and Spain

ABSTRACT Indigenous Australian artist Tracey Moffatt’s 3-minute short Vigil, part of her My Horizon show at the 2017 Art Biennale in Venice, captures the increasing fear, hysteria and obsession regarding the borders of Australian national identity in the new millennium. Moffatt’s interest in Asian asylum seekers and refugees ties her critique of immigrant control into Indigenous exclusion, both of which define what is known as Fortress Australia. Taking the Australian particulars as its lead, this paper looks at the xenophobic rhetoric and practice that characterize so-called Fortress Europe, which rejects immigration and clamps down on its native minorities’ claims for sovereignty. It narrows the analysis down to Fortress Spain, whose policies of exclusion affect immigrants as well as Peninsular ethnic minorities, such as Catalonia. In using Moffatt’s video as a lead, this paper calls on art and literature as powerful means to unpack and rewrite identity from the margins of the nation.