The Banality of Arcadia

Abstract

Flags are highly valued – flown at sporting events, in war and even placed on the moon – but, nevertheless, are under-researched as symbolic devices. This thesis employs and extends Michael Billig’s Banal Nationalism theory to examine how a local flag operates within the context of Lord Howe Island, a small island 600km east of the Australian mainland. Utilising a combination of survey data and in-depth interviews, it firstly demonstrates the significance of “place” for the creation and remembrance of a unique Lord Howe Island identity as well as exploring the interaction of the Islanders between their spatial context and their civil–political relations. It secondly argues how flags can be simultaneously unifying and divisive symbolic devices within and without communities by exploring the process of encoding locally constructed mythologies onto flags, before finally examining the relationship between the social construction of meanings of flags and the citizens who themselves construct it, including the importance of origin myths in establishing the legitimacy of a flag.