Australian Identity Essay

Australia is filled with many different aspects in which makes it the country it is today. I believe it is important to study texts that explore aspects of Australia by studying texts such as ‘The Club’, by David Williamson, a play written in 1977 about an Australian football club and movies such as “The Castle”, directed by Rob Stitch in 1997, about the daily life of an Australian family when their happiness is threatened when developers attempt to buy their house to expand the neighboring airport. Both these texts show us what Australian life was like in the past. By us looking at themes such as language, tradition and the mateship shown we are able to explore different aspects of Australia that make it what it is today.

Given the diversity of Australia and the increase in multiculturalism, the definition of the true Australian identity has changed over time. However, I believe the two main characteristics

Mateship. Adventurous. Loyal. Free. Proud. These are the typical words Australians use to describe themselves, to identify themselves as different from the rest of the world. But who is an Australian? Someone that was born in Australia? Only people we choose to call Australian? People with great achievements that we choose to take credit for? Only people that love sport and vegemite? Or maybe only people with ‘Aussie’ accents? The Australian population is a proud one indeed, proud of their nation, their achievements and their own independent way of life, but sometimes us Aussies, forget about the rest of the world and all those other people that make us, who we are.

The concept of being a ‘nation of immigrants’ is at the center of Australian identity.

Identity is what defines us as a person. Everyone one on earth has their own unique identity. To showcase my identity, I created a collage of images and descriptive words, called an identi-kit. This identi-kit shows what I feel like is my identity to myself and the others. My identi-kit identifies me as a mixed martial artist. The identi-kit has images of a deadly shark with mixed martial arts gloves on that say mixed martial arts on the front and fight shorts with the words competitor and warrior on them. It also has descriptive words like “killer instinct” and “fight” which describe my spirit. There are three assumptions that come to question when asking about one’s identity. The first is if you were born with this

to be targets of discrimination. The Stolen Generation refers to the forced removal of over

The pursuit for a national day has been a part of an effort to define our unique national identity and a day that defines it. Australia Day is a subject of debate, reflecting the fact that national identity is unsolidified and difficult to delineate. In this essay I will outline the argument that Australia’s national day should reflect both its present day society and history, with the help of articles from ‘The Conversation’, ’Modern Australia’s defining moment came long after the First Fleet’ and ‘Australia Day nationalism walks in the footsteps of ugly precedents.’ Australia day should be completely unrelated to British colonialism and its catastrophic impacts on Aboriginal people and their culture and encompass the multicultural society it is today. More significantly however, it should quite simply be a day that has significant historical relevance for present day

Australia’s identity has always been a complicated one. Starting with Aboriginal genocide, 1800’s cowboys and villains, two world wars and a bunch of poems describing them, it makes it difficult to conclude on what being an ‘Aussie’ really is. Thankfully, the two thought-provoking poems Nobody Calls Me a Wog Anymore by Komninos Zervos, and My Country by Dorothea Mackellar both use their discerning selection of themes to reflect modern attitudes in some extent. Along with their themes, Nobody Calls Me a Wog Anymore and My Country both use their story to capture the attributes modern Australians possess to some degree.

How a country is designed and subsequently populated will have an indelible impression on the joint psychology of that country's population. The people's understanding of themselves as a country will also affect how that nation presents itself to the rest of the world. Much of this will have to do with the country's concepts of nation, nationalism, and community. A nation is a socially-constructed concept dealing with the country itself as well as the population in the lands of that country. Nationalism, on the other hand, is a political principle which deals with the joint consciousness of that nation, including their shared targets of antagonism and satisfaction (Gelner 2006). All countries are affected by their concepts of nation and nationalism, and also by their sense of constancy and community. The history of any given nation will have an indelible impact on the way that the nation constructs itself and develops in the present and also into the future. This is particularly true of a nation which has a history filled with negative perception and has tried to evolve from that primary function. Every nation will invariably develop a unique culture which will be born of the ethnicity and religion of the people who inhabit a given community. Australia has become linked to the concept of an imagined community. Social critic Benedict Anderson coined this phrase by defining an imagined community as one in which there is not innate sense of

Identity is a very important part of being Australian; it is a feeling of being associated with a national group, defined by a common heritage, which may be based on many attributes, including race, territory, language and history. "The Men of the Open Spaces", written be Will H. Ogilvie addresses these issues of Australian identity, constructing a powerful representation of the Australian 'bush ' culture. The text uses past views of popular culture that are still ubiquitous today, to construct a sense of national ideology. The text focuses on a very traditional concept of nationhood and constructs a stereotypical representation of Australian culture. This essay will explore this in relation to the discourses

Paterson’s other purpose of this text is to promote nationalism amongst Australian men, persuading them to enlist. He deliberately emphasises on how everyone in Australia is an Australian, through this line ‘English, Scotch, and Irish-bred, They're all Australians now!’ This would make everyone at the time feel obliged to join.

There are many views pertaining to the Canadian identity yet, all the interpretations come unify Canada into a strong and resilient homeland. Canadian identity has been characterized by its diverse and amalgamated society and its heritage in sports. The example chosen to represent Canadian identity is a Canadian commercial “We All Play for Canada” by Canadian Tire (Youtube, 2014). This commercial represents Canadianess through enthusiastic approach towards 2014 Winter Olympics. Through various signs and symbols, this commercial takes on the semiotic approach to convey the message of Canada’s pride in being Canadian.

Noel Pearson’s speech ‘an Australian history for us all’ discusses his approach to trying to solve some of the most systemic problems facing Australian Aboriginals today. The speakers are successful in understanding the ideas and values of the speech. Through the uses of various language techniques and context, Pearson’s speech details the struggles of the relationship between the first European settlers and Aboriginal Australians.

The arrival of Arthur Phillip’s first fleet in 1778 and the following arrivals of convicts and free settlers during the nineteenth century has been known as ‘the settlement of Australia’ a term believed to be a racial and cultural bias. Due to our history being dominated by the white man, and the influence of the concept of ‘terra nullius’, we are brought up to believe, from a European point of view, that the settlement was peaceful, and lawfully correct. However, being recorded as the first nation genocide, the word invasion best suits this colonization. In 2017 this argument is still debated, as protest and outcries attempt to force Australia to change its national day from the 26th of January to another date, as many indigenous

Australia is, and always has been an immigrant society. Without a continuous stream of immigration, our modern society would not be as urbanised, affluent and economically stable as it is today. Australia, once a British colony, was termed ‘a new Britannia’, as it was viewed as one of the most ‘British’ societies in the world outside of the UK. Since its conception and its obvious need for settlers, Australia has used deliberate and careful selection of its new potential citizens as a method of controlling population change, but also to construct a successful society. Although it may be morally wrong, it produced a better social outcome than a nation with a free market of labour such as the South Asia and the Caribbean, where sweat-shops are commonplace . Australia has long and strong xenophobic traditions, and ideologies of racism and imperialism, that have always been allowed to influence immigration, as is shown through the use of dictation tests and selective migration. Our first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton stated that unless the Commonwealth kept out all ‘coloured people’, Australia would eventually be overwhelmed by an ‘inferior race’. The issue of white supremacy being maintained in Australia throughout the 20th century derives from the intertwining of ‘Social Darwinism’; the belief that humans can be divided into ‘castes’ according to race, with policymaking. By 1947, the non-European (excluding indigenous) population of Australia was measured at less than a