History and cultures have some impacts to know the identity of a country. We can say that history and cultures somehow represent the country itself. It also happens to Australia. Though Australia is a continent, it’s also a country. We all have known this fact. But for some people who really love history and cultures, the fact absolutely doesn’t enough for them. A way to know more about the history of a country is to define it. Starting to think about defining Australia is to see what people say about Australia at a time when they are encouraged to think about what it means.

It’s a common issue that there’s a debate about the nation “Australia” has really a significant meaning to all Australians or not. Through this statement, there are considerable difficulties: at a time when Australians celebrate Australia national day on January 26 which makes a big impact for Aborigines. There is the problem of what this celebration means to the Aborigines.

We have to remember that to the Aborigines, the first settlement was a straight-out invasion. [Fred Daly, Age, 23 January 1981]

Taking a historical viewpoint, it is evident that the Australia of the Aborigines was a different Australia from that understood by British settlers between 1788 and 1988, through the uniqueness of Aborigines of Australia country and society. From a contemporary perspective, it seems that distinctive views of Australia may be held by different cultural groups. It may make sense to talk about the Aboriginal-Australian Australia, the Italo-Australian Australia, the Anglo-Celtic Australia, and so on. Nevertheless, if Australia means different things to different people it is not surprising that defining Australia does present a real problem.

An issue comes up to the surface asking whether Australia means “the nation” or not. The terminology of “nation” and “national” was first used in a political sense in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to discuss culture and society. Then, the idea of nationalism became common in the mid-nineteenth century, at the same time as the number of white, native-born Australians came to equal the number of immigrants in 1890s. There is a paradox here since those who identified with the colony were looking for a way of making a break from “the old country” into modern Australia in a distinctively Australian way, and yet it didn’t seem as a representation of Australian ideas, but through European concepts at that time.

Most of the contemporary discussion of Australia as a nation has been in terms of a political formation. The concepts of nation and nationalism have been used to persuade people in a country controlled by an outside political grouping which has unified common interests and should resist such outside control. When people talk of “the nation” to imply the whole people of a country, they are encouraging acceptance of “the persuasive unitary sense” of the nation. From one point of view, nationalism may be regarded positively when it is seen as a way persuading a group within a country (or political formation).

Alternatively, “nation” and “nationalism” may be used in many ways intended to involve exclusivist, even racist, attitudes. They may also be used to persuade people to subordinate the particular interests of their own group rather than the common interests of the whole country. It means that most people easily choose to be selfish and against the national interest.

The radical-nationalist historians who concentrated on “the Australian legend” were very much involved in the construction of an “imagined community”. It was because of their pro-Australian stance they came to be called the radical-nationalists. They decided that the history of Australia was the history that produced what they saw as an “essentially” Australian character. The radical-nationalist project has been described as historicist and evolutionary because it postulates a set of historically evolving circumstances. This approach has been called “contextualist” because it seeks to evaluate the literature on the basis of how representative or expressive it is of the society it portrays.

The history builds a picture of a society (imagined community) characterized by unity, consensus, solidarity, and fraternity: “the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship”. That is, the history is not a description of nation-building, but a part of the process of nation-building. As we look closely at the politics of nationalism and history at transitional points in the past, there is also political and economic focus which still engages with the public rather than the domestic world.

Thus, the issue about defining Australia will never be resolved because there are no right or true answers to such questions as “What is the ‘real’ Australia?” but there are processes of cultural production through which versions of Australia are arrived at, and academic inquiry should alert us to these. Furthermore, we can conclude that by seeing from the historians and commentators perspectives, there are 3 main aspects which represent Australian characters, such as traditions or values perspective, ideas or institutions, and political and economic relations.

Whose Australia? An article by James Walter: Defining Australia. [from the book Images of Australia: an introductory reader in Australian studies]

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