Description
Making it National argues that we need to rethink the way national identity is constructed in Australia today. Graeme Turner takes a series of recent instances - the mythologising of Bond and the larrikin entrepreneurs, the Spycatcher trials, Maralinga and the Bicentenary - showing how popular images of national identity are used to serve specific rather than national interests.
'Graeme Turner's writing has a remarkable power to engage its readers with all the immediacy, vividness and drama of our very best journalism, while putting cultural theory to work in new and creative ways.' - Meaghan Morris
'Making it National could be to the 1990s what Richard White's Inventing Australia was to the 1980s.' - Tony Bennett, Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: making it national
2 Bond-ing: business, boast and the national character
3 A taste of the colonial birch: the British connection
4 Picnic at Ayers Rock: the Bicentenary
5 Looking to America: the Crocodile Dundee factor
6 Redefining the nation: from purity to hybridity
7 The media, the nation... and conclusion
Notes
References
Index
