Last Gothic Thoughts on Australia's Character

Australian identity has rarely been a simple inheritance. It has more often been a cultural manufacture: a story told with unusual confidence because its foundations are unusually uncertain. From the penal era through Federation, the need to distinguish the settler society from Britain produced a national mythology centred on the bushman: white, male, laconic, physically hardy, loyal to his mates, hostile to authority, and supposedly innocent of class pretension. This figure offered a convenient answer to the colonial problem of belonging. If Australia could not claim ancient European continuity, it could at least claim a new democratic type, forged by hardship and purified by distance from the old world.