AustLit

'I suspect that there are many questions that could be posed about the significance of the 1950s as context for Ward's conceptualisation of the 'noble bushman'. As others have noted, the idea of an 'Australian legend' percolated across the decade, and Ward was not the first to use the term. Max Crawford first coined the term 'Australian legend' in 1952, and in 1954 Vance Palmer published The Legend of the Nineties.3 Ward's great contribution was to articulate the mythology so movingly and to seek to ground it in nineteenthcentury Australian history. There are multiple aspects of the 1950s that could be explored as relevant from the post-1942 realignment of Australia's military alliance; the developing Cold War; the hegemony of political Conservatism here; the economic significance of the wool industry; and the quest to understand Australian culture in a post-war world. How did these aspects of the political context feed into Ward's thinking, beyond the perhaps obvious influence of his Marxism?'

Source: Article abstract.