AustLit

'The propagation of a national imaginary is a central concern of early twentieth-century School Readers. Produced by various state education departments from around Australia, these reading books draw on the literary and visual effects of a maturing Australian imagination, instituting a particular narrative of the nation's history and development. This story, what I am calling a metanarrative of national growth, encompasses heroic portraits and finely drawn landscapes. In the telling, it reiterates that which, for the colonial or settler subject, is a profoundly reassuring and powerful quest narrative. This article examines significant textual and visual instances of how portrayals of an Australian pioneering spirit play out as part of School Reader fantasies of national growth.' (p. 35)

'This article examines Australian nationalism as disseminated to Victorian primary school children in the 1950s. Drawing on school readers it argues that by that decade Australian identity was told as focused around 'the home'. Following the structure of Robert Menzies' 'Forgotten People' speech the concept of home is divided into three: homes material, homes human and homes spiritual. Under 'homes material' cluster the primacy of home ownership in the 1950s, the firming of the nation-state's boundaries and the acceptance into the Australian home of migrants who had crossed the sea. 'Homes human' refers to the economic relationships that would hold Australians together. By membership in the networks of production and consumption and by comfortable residence in the Australian rural landscape, 1950s Australians were to belong to the Australian family. With 'homes spiritual' the article turns to Britain and its royal family, arguing that by the 1950s the Queen was located as belonging in Australia instead of, as previously, Australia belonging to the Empire. This enabled links to Britain to be retained even as nationalism grew. This home-centered nationalism meant, however, the contraction of identity into an exclusionary political space.' (p. 49)

'Nations are more than geopolitical bodies. They are, to quote Benedict Anderson, 'imagined communities,' constituted in part by cultural representations of national belonging, or discourses of national identity. These are the stories that all nations tell themselves: stories about the nation's origins, its character, its values. Such stories are found in a wide range of cultural texts, from parades to t-shirts to popular music and film, and they often carry meanings about gender and race. This article examines Baz Luhrmann's 2008 film Australia for gendered and racialised discourses of Australian national identity. It argues that such discourses are underpinned by material relations and potentially have material consequences for the nation.' (p. 63)

'This article charts the early stages of the Australian Broadcasting Commission's engagement with reporting from Asia. It argues that, in the absence of regular reports from foreign correspondents, something that did not start to occur until the late 1950s, the ABC took reports from an enterprising travel writer, Frank Clune. While Clune's 'on-the-spot' reports were presented as scripts once he returned and his reportage was compromised by the commercial arrangements he undertook as part of his 'assignments', he nonetheless established an audience for international reportage on the ABC. Clune's popular style and commercial aspirations eventually led to an end to his ABC broadcasts. However, the tensions that arose tell us as much about the development of the ABC's cultural mission as they do about Frank Clune's enterprise. (p. 95)