I’m not sure about your “three dialects” reference, Adrien. It’s more accent than dialect in Australia - dialect normally implies syntactical, lexical and grammatical variation.

Yeah sorry Kim, you’re quite right we don’t have dialects here. There a bit stronger than accents but quite a bit less than dialects. The notion comes (I think) from The History of English which idetified three logos in Australia: Broad, General and International.
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The broad Strine is the Dave Hughes types lingo, the general is the ordinary suburbanite stuff and the international is pretty obvious. From my experience I reckon there probably are other more regional accents (Gippsland for example). And yes the authors of the aforementioned book (or wherever I actually got it from) do note that, unlike England, ‘Strine accents do not necessarilly denote socioeconomic status and in fact all three lingos may appear within the same family.
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I do believe however that this changing. There’s a sort of specifically urban and yet very ‘coarse’ lingo that is definitely associated with low levels of education etc apparent in major Australian cities. A signifier of the sadly ending days of ‘classless’ Australia.

“I’m not sure about your “three dialects” reference, Adrien. It’s more accent than dialect in Australia - dialect normally implies syntactical, lexical and grammatical variation.”

Quite right Kim - and the same goes for most of the English spoken in North America [excluding the Caribbean].

Lefty E [16 & 19]:

Surely you’re not thinking of going further and suggesting that we forget all about the 26th January, 1788, are you? Leaving aside all the political opportunism, all the “black armband”, all the justification for stealing land, all the hypocritical glorification of a system more brutal than that of the Russian Tsars, all the genuine feelings of pride and patriotism and, of course, all the excuses to have another summer holiday …. it is still a day that marks the first enduring contact between two peoples of different race and of different cultures …. and, like it or not, it marks the inauspicious start of the painfully gradual coming together of those two peoples [and NO!, I don’t mean old-fashioned assimilation either - so keep your shirt on].

I think we’re in furious agreement here.

David Brooks (the Australian literature scholar, not the NY Times columnist) offers the starkest example of self-authentication in the historical record of the British arrival in ‘Australia’ - as the name for the continent was first suggested by explorer Matthew Flinders following his circumnavigation 15 years after the First Fleet. The notion that ‘the British arrived in Australia in 1788’ presupposes the existence of ‘Australia’ as a cultural artefact which is retrospectively written into history and literature.

I’m not sure that’s quite right, Mercurius. Terra Australis had been around for a long time. In some ways, geography and map making are also political technologies in the same way as history. The act of naming/circumscribing/inscribing is the first step to the act of taking possession.

As in England the range still exists but because of the aformentioned standardization and of course broadasting there is a ’standardized’ lingo.

Actually, some of the shifts in language within England are interesting - the “Thames Valley” accent, Tony Blair adopting a glottal stop, etc. Boris Johnson sounds a lot posher than “Dave” Cameron now, but even Her Maj sounds far less nasal than once upon a time.

I’m not sure about your “three dialects” reference, Adrien. It’s more accent than dialect in Australia - dialect normally implies syntactical, lexical and grammatical variation. It’s less complex than in England where accent is a marker of class as well as region, though there’s a bit of that in that the “broader” Aussie accent is also a regional or at least non-urban one.

Perhaps you could elucidate?

Thank you very much for that link to the Anabaptists and Mennonites Encyclopaedia [GAMEO] where I found a refreshingly factual and unlurid account of the “New Jerusalem” in Muenster http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/M850.html Quite a change from the usual “victors’ history” where both Catholics and Lutherans, though mortal enemies during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, told much the same story about what happened in Muenster …. and a stark lesson in the pitfalls of historiography as well.

Everyone:

That article on the GAMEO site also showed it is not only national and ethnic identity that is not necessarily set in cement - but that religious identity too may not necessarily be as rigid as is sometimes supposed, despite the fervour with which those religious beliefs are expressed.

There’s a fair bit of evidence that national identity was much stronger in England much earlier on than on the Continent.

As I understand it nationalism (in its original sense) rose in France and England as a result of the Hundred Years War where the conflict of the Houses Plantagenet and Valois over territory in France ran against the linguistic and other cultural differences between the ‘French’ and the ‘English’. People began to get a general sense of national identity seperate from vassalage allegiance. Contrawise in places like Italy, the German states, Bohemia etc where the folk culture and the political system were variant national identity was slow to develop.
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Of course it also helps that England and France were the cradle of the modern world, where the techniques of the modern state: standardization, regulation, public education helped to produce these imagined communities. Before this such phenomena as ‘the French language’ would be experienced as a spectra of dialects ranging from Italian sounding French in the south to Teutonic French in the north. As in England the range still exists but because of the aformentioned standardization and of course broadasting there is a ’standardized’ lingo.
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Australia being born in the modern era has much less linguistic diversity than European nations - three dialects essentially. Hence much easier for the soldiers on Anzac Cove to regonize each other as compatriots whether they were from Perth, Dubbo or Adelaide.
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In a globalized world where one can imagine global;ly orinetated education, entertainment and the relatively free movement of labour will national identity continue to mean that much?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

(How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power. Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today’s president)

These Busheviks are pretty good at stirring up hornet nests & making moolah out of the consequences.

Bush: “CONSTRUCTING WARS…who me?…i’m FREEDOMS LAST CHANCE”…”What me worry?”

Yes, White Australia certainly kicked off with a bang.

Why don’t we tell kids the best bits?

Hooray to that! Can I recommend a library crawl of “pipes” & “dirty ditties” as an entree to the utter delights of OZHist “as it really happened” aka “I nearly died laughing”!! You can (or could, as late as the early 80s) waste glorious weeks in London’s documentary archives. Try: “Things have reached a pretty pass in Sydney Town when Convict women wear silk and muslin, and dine off fine china.” (Mrs Paterson or Mrs Grouse; forget which). Ships docking in Colonial NSW had to take aboard food stores for the very long voyage to the next port (or long whaling trips). NSW was a barter economy & food (fresh, dried, preserved, pickled etc) was swapped for trade goods. Rum we know about. But during the French/ Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) Europe was closed to trade by French (Continental System) and Brit blockades etc. Indian & Far Eastern trade goods were “dumped” throughout Asian ports - the War ruined China’s porcelain trade - and bought “dirt cheap” by mariners to trade for food - hence the lady’s fury!

I couldn’t work out why Howard was pushing OzHistory - the antithesis of what he was trying to create during the Culture Wars - until I realised it would be His & his Culture Warrior’s sanitised version.

Mercurious @ #22: When analysing OzLit, I believe one needs to do some good, documentary (and non-analytical, especially “not analysed within any critical framework” - & I mean “critical” in its traditional meaning, before it was colonised by “Critical: the framework”) reading on “The Bulletin’s” Red Page, its editorial intention and policy, and the level of censorship exhibited.

What Vance Palmer called The Legend of the Nineties was, to a very great extent, a very deliberation creation of “The Bulletin”, with the deliberate intention of creating a distinctive national heroic character. At the time, WG Spence’s AMA, then AWU captured public imagination as the Depression of the late 1880s & beginnings of the Federation Drought gripped the Outback with iron hands. The failed Jondaryan Shearers Strike, its union’s telegram to Barcaldine, Gathering under the Tree of Knowledge, Bank closures & foreclosures, waterfront & ships’ crew strikes, strike-breaking property owners were all part of The Legend (& fodder for Bulletin Journos & Cartoonists, and The Red Page’s poets and story tellers). Remember also that this literary blossoming was matched by a very similar one in Painting (Roberts, Streeton, McCubbin etc). Running simultaneously were the meetings/ conventions forging a Federation of Australian states. They were all very aware of being “The Nation Builders” - there’s a George Essex Evans poem called that (this is from memory; we all learned it at primary school):

When the land that lies like a giant asleep, shall wake to the victory won.
And the hearts of the nation builders will know that their work is done.

Analysing this, one has to be aware that Oz in the 90s created an international narrative / discourse, rather than “was part of”. There is a very interesting critique (”pæan” is closer) by Lenin on Australian political & workers rights, and his hope to create something similar in Russia (despite Marx’s scepticism about R) It used to be in main UQ library.

In the early 1880s, however, “The Bulletin’s” bushmanwas as unsalubrious as he would, a few years later, become heroic.

Early (white) Australian literature is quite different from that created by the “Red Page”. Like some of the art, literature often reflected The Noble Savage concept. The heroic roles of Jacky-Jacky in Kennedy’s expedition and other Aborigines in those of (eg) Sturt, Burke & Wills etc create a different & much more appreciative impression of Indigenous Australians than those of the “White Man’s Burden” ethos of the post-Gold Rush Era (”King plates” awarded with such flair to brave / noble aborigines were as big a deal as top military awards). While I do acknowledge & deplore massacres, waterhole & flour poisoning; I’m also aware that, to consider these disgraces endemic, is to malign many very decent men & women. It can also be established that, despite dispossession, indigenous Australians fared better, and were more valued, in the first century of white settlement than in the second.

Art & lit also reflect a few other concepts/ realities: RC/CofE (non-Calvinist) attitudes tend to be quite different from and much more tolerant than those of less liberal (esp Calvinist) Sects; pre-1850 remnants of the Revolutionary/ Chartist/ Liberal period different from the less tolerant “Imperial” Victorian Era. Pioneering “old colonialist” families depended on aboriginal help (my grandmothers’ families told stories of their respect for, relationship with, reliance on aborigines when the men took the woolclip to port (away for months), leaving women and children behind; or those who looked after the children (because most pioneering women shared men’s work), and those who tirelessly tracked lost children and adults. Only when stations grew much bigger (& selector plots much smaller) and indigenous people no longer had key roles, did attitudes change for the worse - as did attitudes to women when wars were over & they were no longer needed to “do a man’s job”. Need” and “respect” are all too often interependent.

I get as annoyed by post-Marxist / post-modernist critiques, which tend to slap pejorative terms like “Grand Narratives” on what were highly complex issues, as I do with most paradigms (inc. Romantic, Marxist, structural-functionalist etc & so on). Arguing within a particular framework implies an ability to select/ twist “facts” to fit in - or alternatively to attack it in order to support a different one. In all too many cases (and all too frequently in very turgid prose) this reduction simplifies what is, when one actually studies documentation (including diaries and letters) with as paradigm-free a mind as possible, great complexity and various differing attitudes, behaviours, approaches; robbing people, actions and events of their rich & complex social, social, political etc context to fit them into specific schema.

I won’t repeat what I said on an earlier thread re studying history at UK when Thomas Kuhn’s book hit campus; but I’d like to reiterate that ALL “paradigms” are “grand narratives” - NeoMarxist / Frankfurt School, post-modernist, deconstructionist .. whatever; mere analytical frameworks / puzzle solutions, not “truth” and certainly not unbiased.

I hope that “Sorry Day” in February did “draw a line” under the past, and that Culture Wars were over - and that includes “Black-armband history: for & against.”

National identity, and identification, doesn’t come naturally. Far from it.

and

So the logic of Australian national culture dictates that we must all cultivate an ‘Australian’ identity which is at once non-Indigenous and non-immigrant. It seems to me that such insistence impoverishes the identity, natural history and memory of all who live on this continent.

Yes the construction of national identity is an unnatural act.

It would be useful to consider just who in Australia has been and is in the position to “insist” on the nature of Australian identity.

I would suggest that the creation of this artifice has been a collaborative and a consensual activity. The broader the coalition of forces twisting and kneading this thing called identity into an agreed-upon shape, the less likely it can be that one interest was able to “insist” upon its assertions as being the onlya acceptable formulations of national identity.

Nevertheless, it is mostly true to say that both indigenous and immigrant identities were to a large degree rejected.

One of the conceits of self-identifying Australians is a form of cultural (as opposed to social) Darwinism. This conceit asserts that the whole world would be like Australia if only it had been so “lucky” (here missing the irony of the “Lucky Country”).

Thus Australia is seen to be a place where human nature has had its maximum opportunity to find its fullest and most satisfying expression, untrammelled by past, memory, precedent, dogma, or memory.

Thus, it is quite understandable why Australia is subject to bouts of paranoid xenophobia when it is suggested that foreign influences bringing in the viruses enumerated above threaten to invade our aseptic, but vulnerable, shores.

A thoughtful and very good topic you have here.

Hey, fair crack of the whip! I haven’t even got hold of David Blackbourn’s The Conquest Of Nature and now you’ve put David Sayer’s the Coasts of Bohemia and Guenther Grass’s The Meeting at Telgte [the novel, not the opera] on my reading list.

You said

” History becomes a sort of political technology. “

That’s just about the size of it - and one of the reasons oral history, family traditions and folk songs [genuine - as opposed to official folkloric] are so disliked and scorned and belittled by ruling authorities and their servants.

A random glimpse: Just a brisk walk down the road from Telgte is Muenster, a town founded by English missionaries, where a pub that opened in the 13th Century still serves good beer at the same tables, where the evil Anabaptists were suppressed so brutally, where the Peace of Westphalia was signed, where their great Cathedral was rebuilt after being flattened by the RAF - the locals a justly proud of their long and colourful history …. and are rather forgetful of all the hopeful and progressive things that happened in that brief period during the 16th Century when rebellious former priests and nuns ran their own republic there. So much for memory.

The invented traditions and frequently inaccurate historicity upon which national identity depends can result in a national discourse that is fossilised . The ideas of 19th century Australian nationalist Bernard O’Dowd included paeans to ‘mateship’, the ‘exclusion of elements likely to make trouble’ and protecting our seas from ‘foreign neighbours’. They could be printed unedited in the op-ed column of The Australian today.

Founded as a colony, the literature that came to define Australia’s identity is colonial in outlook. Nick Mansfield demonstrates how this kind of thinking resolved ambiguous, distressing or complex historical questions into unquestioned grand narratives. Thus the plight of Australian Aborigines can be resolved into a ‘noble failure’ of European peoples to ‘elevate’ them. And wholesale environmental devastation can be portrayed as an heroic conquering of a harsh, unforgiving land. Mansfield describes this process, rather kindly, as ‘self-authentication’ — though I call it begging the question.

David Brooks (the Australian literature scholar, not the NY Times columnist) offers the starkest example of self-authentication in the historical record of the British arrival in ‘Australia’ - as the name for the continent was first suggested by explorer Matthew Flinders following his circumnavigation 15 years after the First Fleet. The notion that ‘the British arrived in Australia in 1788’ presupposes the existence of ‘Australia’ as a cultural artefact which is retrospectively written into history and literature.

Sneja Gunew suggests that Australia is autocultural, autodidactic and autonational —as it were, a hermaphrodite nation. Akin to Mansfield, Gunew posits that Australian culture was created in a culturally empty space (terra nullius, anyone?) because the colonisers took no cues from the Indigenous cultures, yet they also sought to reject their British/European ‘old world’ heritage in this new country.

Gunew argues that Australia’s status as a nation of immigrants continues to overwhelm the Indigenous cultures, while there remains the persistent trope that immigrants must largely abandon their cultural heritage in order to become a ‘real Australian’. So the logic of Australian national culture dictates that we must all cultivate an ‘Australian’ identity which is at once non-Indigenous and non-immigrant. It seems to me that such insistence impoverishes the identity, natural history and memory of all who live on this continent.

Why don’t we tell kids the best bits? That’d really get em into January 26 spirit. It could be done “facts and dates” style, or “stew of themes and narratives” wise. So everybody’s happy!

And make it part of citizenship test while you’re at it. Frankly, it annoys me that people come here, expect to fit it, and don’t know the basics, like about the Don, ANZACS, and our indiscriminately shagtastic founding moment.

You had some uptight puritans on the Mayflower - we had Lovestock 1788!

I’m finding anthropologists are way ahead on a lot of things at the moment. My own work is looking a bit at Australian frontier history in public discourse, novels etc and the anthropologists - especially working in what Gillian Cowlishaw calls ‘Critical Indigenous Studies’ and related areas - have provided some of the most insightful work on history and cultural politics.