Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ocean and the Antipodes
- 2 Artful Killings
- 3 The Art of Settlement
- 4 The Bad Conscience of Impressionism
- 5 Aboriginalism and Australian Nationalism
- 6 The Aboriginal Renaissance
- 7 Aboriginality and Contemporary Australian Painting
- 8 Painting for a New Republic
- Postscript: The Wandering Islands
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Aboriginalism and Australian Nationalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Ocean and the Antipodes
- 2 Artful Killings
- 3 The Art of Settlement
- 4 The Bad Conscience of Impressionism
- 5 Aboriginalism and Australian Nationalism
- 6 The Aboriginal Renaissance
- 7 Aboriginality and Contemporary Australian Painting
- 8 Painting for a New Republic
- Postscript: The Wandering Islands
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Australia became a fundamentally different place after the First World War. It might seem that the bushie merely became the Anzac digger, but in becoming so, he was transformed from a largely literary emblem of national type into an institutionalised symbol of nationhood. Only after the war did the late nineteenth-century interest in place, nativism and local heritage values transform into a nationalist agenda. Suddenly national monuments sprung up in every country town, the most ubiquitous being to the Anzac digger. ‘Most Australians’, wrote Geoffrey Serle (in disbelief), ‘firmly believed Australia actually became a nation at Gallipoli’.
The war irredeemably altered Australia's relations with Europe. ‘The truth is’, wrote Russel Ward, ‘that the war had shown the mother country to be so much less omnipotent than the men of the early Commonwealth had believed her to be … Australia … [was now] much more important in her own right than before’. Its importance was not just moral. ‘On the basis of its contribution to the war effort’, wrote Ian Burn:
Australia first gained equal and permanent representation at the War Cabinet in Britain, thus obtaining recognition as a nation within Empire, and separate representation at the Peace conference at Versailles in 1919 and on the Assembly of the League of Nations. Political autonomy was thus assured and it was widely held that Australia's separate national status had been secured.
Further, wrote Burn, the war was particularly influential on Australian art.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- White AboriginesIdentity Politics in Australian Art, pp. 74 - 97Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998