Exclusive Inclusion: Aboriginality, The 'Juggernaut' of Modernity and Australian National Identity.

Abstract

Recent studies of the problems inherent to Australian nationalism throughout the twentieth century have highlighted the consequences of Britain's efforts to dissociate itself from its imperial ties following the Second World War. The issue of defining the key elements of Australian nationhood has thus become oriented around how Australians have reacted to the increasing absence of Britishness as a source of cultural and civic identification. While not questioning the historical circumstances leading to this crisis in the Australian national imaginary, this thesis draws attention more towards the narrative of Australian nationalism which deals with the issue of securing a deeper connection to the Australian landscape in terms of a national homeland. The presence of this narrative within the twentieth century is intimately caught up in the romantic representation of Aboriginal people and their culture through European discourse, specifically how Aboriginality could be appropriated as a means of consolidating a more distinctive national culture and secure sense of place for white Australians. As will be shown in light of rhetoric emerging out of anthropological and literary discourse from the 1930s, the central problem with this intercultural dialectic involving Aboriginality and Europeanality is the way in which it has tended to include Aboriginal people only by way of their exclusion, and, moreover, functioned to undermine Aboriginal political agency.