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The need to redefine Australia has been particularly urgent in the recent two decades when the image of this antipodean society as almost a model multicultural one, craving for freedom and tolerance, was demolished by growing intolerance and nationalisms. In today’s world, torn by conflicts of interests, racial hatred and social divisions, the nineteenth-century concept of a nation and national ideology, which only apparently faded away in the era of the late twentieth-century globalisation, is now being given a new prominence not just by minor politicians who want to win the favour of their electorates (Pauline Hanson and others), but by surprisingly large sections of democratic, egalitarian societies – which Australia undoubtedly is. The eleven articles collected in this issue represent a wide spectrum of approaches to the notions of Australia’s national identity, its literature art, culture, history and politics. They comprise an insightful, informative and original contribution to Australian studies and attempt to redefine the concepts of national and individual identities.

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Australia |El Niño cycles |global change |environment and identity |eco-fiction |Janette Turner Hospital |Jane Harper

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As global climate change shifts seasonal patterns, local and uncertain seasons of Australia have global relevance. Australia’s literature tracks extreme local weather events, exploring ‘slow catastrophes’ and ‘endurance.’ Humanists can change public policy in times when stress is a state of life, by reflecting on the psyches of individuals, rather than the patterns of the state. ‘Probable’ futures, generated by mathematical models that predict nature and economics, have little to say about living with extreme weather. Hope is not easily modelled. The frameworks that enable hopeful futures are qualitatively different. They can explore the unimaginable by offering an ‘interior apprehension.’

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Australia |bush ballads |Slim Dusty |cultural landscape |the Outback |the Aborigines

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The concept of the “cultural landscape” designates tangible and intangible elements of human activity, such as the natural environment, material culture, values, behaviours, and language (Taylor 2008, 6; Taylor and Lennon 2011, 538–540; Wierzbicka 1997, 201). These themes are all present in Australian bush ballads – a literary and folk genre that reflects the country’s unique heritage and way of life in simple artistic forms. Slim Dusty’s Aussie Sing Song (1962) – a representative selection of ballads – depicts Australia’s fauna and flora, the Aborigines, the beginnings of European settlement, the economy, the Great Outback, and the social role of drinking beer. The popular texts contain condensed and vivid images of the country’s culture.

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Antipodean fiction |Anthony Trollope’s Harry Heathcote of Gangoil |“Catherine Carmichael” |class boundaries

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The following article concentrates on the representation of social class in Anthony Trollope’s Antipodean stories, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874) and “Catherine Carmichael” (1878). Although Trollope was aware of the problematic nature of class boundaries in the Antipodes, he nevertheless employed the English model of class distinctions as a point of reference. In the two stories he concentrated on wealthy squatters’ attempts to reconstruct the way of life of the English gentry and on the role of women, who either exposed the false pretences to gentility, as in “Catherine Carmichael,” or contributed to consolidation of the landowning classes as in Harry Heathcote of Gangoil.

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Australia |nation-building |Racism |Broome |pearl-shelling |Australian Labor Party

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With the Federation of Australia, aspiration for racial homogeneity was firmly established as being fundamental to national identity. Therefore, increasing criticism was directed against Asian employment in the pearl-shelling industry of Broome. It was not least against the backdrop of population politics, that several efforts were implemented to disestablish the purportedly ‘multiracial enclave’ in ‘White Australia.’ These culminated in “the white experiment,” i.e. the introduction of a dozen British men to evince European fitness as pearl divers and initiate the replacement of Asian pearling crews. Embedded in these endeavours were reflections of broader discourses on ‘white supremacy’ and racist discrimination.

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Australia |Fremantle |WA |colonial violence |“Australia Day” |“One Day” celebrations |memorialization

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The aim of this paper is to analyse the Fremantle City Council’s decision to celebrate One Day on January 28th 2017 instead of the usual Australia Day on January 26th, as well as the ensuing media debate between its supporters and opponents, especially Noongar leaders and WA Government. The discourse is examined in the context of the disruption of colonial violence. The City of Fremantle, as a place, itself serves as a point of reference for the analysis. Although today Fremantle is often perceived as a “progressive island” in a largely conservative Western Australia, the Fremantle prison and nearby Rottnest Island are stark reminders of the maltreatment of the Whadjuk people after the formation of the Swan River Colony in 1829.

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multiculturalism |Australia |Aboriginal art |national identity |colonel painters |cross-cultural cooperation

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The paper examines the presence of Aboriginal art, its contact with colonial and federation Australian art to prove that silencing of this art from the official identity narrative and art histories also served elimination of Aboriginal people from national and identity discourse. It posits then that the recently observed acceptance and popularity as well as incorporation of Aboriginal art into the national Australian art and art histories of Australian art may be interpreted as a sign of indigenizing state nationalism and multicultural national identity of Australia in compliance with the definition of identity according to Anthony B. Smith.

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Australia |national identity |the ANZAC |Gallipoli |children’s literature |practices of remembrance

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Generations of Australian children have been presented with iconic figures and values associated with the events of 1915 at Gallipoli and involved in the ritual practices of remembrance exemplified by Anzac Day ceremonies throughout a corpus of children’s literature which ranges from picture books for pre-schoolers to young adult fiction. This paper aims to broadly identify the narrative strategies at work in a selection of recent stories of brave animals helping the Aussie boys under fire or paeans to the duty of personal and communal remembrance and to examine them in a larger context of national self-representation.

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trauma |Australian fiction |the First World War |the ANZAC myth |the gothic apocalypse |Mourning |Chris Womersley

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The article focuses on Bereft (2010), a novel by Australian writer Chris Womersley, which applies the framework of trauma to depict the (failed) reintegration of the returning soldiers after the First World War. Using Gothic and Apocalyptic tropes, Womersley addresses the question of the aftermath of violence in the lives of an Australian family and the Australian nation. By combining the insights of trauma and Gothic studies, the article demonstrates how Bereft undermines the meta-narrative of Australian participation in the First World War, questioning the myth of Anzac and national cohesion. It proposes to read the novel as an example of critical mourning, which, rather than cure from trauma, suggests a re-examination of the dramatic sequels of the imperial conflict. Rage seems to offer here an intriguing alternative to the forgetful practices of commemoration. By revising the militarized national mythology, Bereft redefines the First World War in terms of loss, trauma and desolation, and negotiates a place for broken bodies and minds in Australian cultural memory.

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national identity |Australia literature |Flâneurs |migrant communities |Arnold Zable |post-memory

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Nadine Fresco in her research on exiled Holocaust survivors uses the term diaspora des cendres (1981) to depict the status of Jewish migrants whose lives are forever marked by their tragic experience as well as a conviction that “the[ir] place of origins has gone up in ashes” (Hirsch 243). As a result, Jewish migrants and their children have frequently resorted to storytelling treated as a means of transferring their memories, postmemories and their condition of exile from the destroyed Eastern Europe into the New World. Since “[l]iterature of Australians of Polish-Jewish descent holds a special place in Australian culture” (Kwapisz Williams 125), the aim of this paper is to look at selected texts by one of the greatest Jewish-Australian storytellers of our time: Arnold Zable and analyse them according to the paradigm of an exiled flâneur whose life concentrates on wandering the world, sitting in a Melbourne café, invoking afterimages of the lost homeland as well as positioning one’s status on a map of contemporary Jewish migrants. The analyses of Zable’s Jewels and Ashes (1991) and Cafe Scheherazade (2001) would locate Zable as a memoirist as well as his fi ctional characters within the Australian community of migrants who are immersed in discussing their un/belonging and up/rootedness. The analysis also comprises discussions on mapping the past within the context of the new territory and the value of storytelling.

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Martin Heidegger |Jacques Derrida |Poland |Australian poetry |Andrew Taylor |“ash poems”

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Andrew Taylor (b. 1940), one of the most eminent living Australian poets, has had a lasting relationship with Poland and Opole in particular. As a result of one of his several visits to Opole, he wrote two poems, “Dinner by the River,” which was later included in the volume edited by Peter Rose The Best Australian Poems 2008 (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008), and “Driving to the Airport,” which appeared in The Unhaunting (London: Salt, 2009). Both poems were originally included in the volume Australia: Identity, Memory and Destiny (ed. Wolny and Nicieja, Opole 2008). The aim of this paper is, therefore, to explore the image of Poland, and the Odra River in particular, the Australian poet has created, alongside the memories of the past his visit to Poland evoked. The elements that unite the Polish poems are the ones connected with coal, soot, fi re, ashes, embers and what Jacques Derrida called cendre (cinder) in one of his most important books, Feu la cendre [Cinders] (Minneapolis, London 2014).

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Australia |national identity |the “Other” |immigration policies |asylum seekers |the Tampa Affair

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Ideas of Australia being invaded by a foreign ‘Other’ have been present throughout much of its history and this legacy is still present today. My paper will reveal the red thread of control that runs through Australia’s attitude and policy towards asylum seekers since European arrival. Claims of current restrictions against asylum seekers being mere Islamophobia ignore this history. From the grudging admission of Jewish refugees during times of Nazi oppression to quotas placed on certain nationalities and later draconian punishments for those claiming asylum without a prior visa, control of the ‘Other’ has been a constant theme, with current policies of mandatory detention and off shore processing on far away Pacific islands separating the Australian ‘Self’ from the foreign ‘Other.’