(25) empa.arts.unsw.edu.au

http://empa.arts.unsw.edu.au
University of New South Wales: Australian Cinema & Television
http://empa.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/File/ARTS2062GENT0803_S110.pdf

Another way to get basic information about a certain academic topic is to have a look at online lecture notes of university classes. They provide an essential overview of their area, which usually also includes a very useful list of references (online and print) and the most important readings, articles and theories.

The University of New South Wales for example offers a course titled Australian Cinema and Television, and the course guide is available online. While the course description or other administrative details are less relevant, it is basically the lecture, screening and tutorial program, the recommended readings, must see films and the journal and online resources that are of great interest.

In the lecture program, there is a detailed description of the key concepts on the lecture topic, recommended reading, the most important films and TV shows and further links. The lecture itself covers all the basics of Australian national cinema and TV, from the bush legend and ozploitation to muckumentaries and Indigenous cinema.

Lecture notes like these can be quite useful, as they cover everything a teacher of that subject would consider to be the standard that you should know, and from that basic foundation of knowledge and all the provided references it is much easier to move to a more specialized topic for your own research.

(24) abc.net.au

http://www.abc.net.au
ABC: Art, Reconciliation and the National Identity
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/01/08/1813623.htm

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is one of the two government-funded, national public broadcasters in Australia (the other one being the SBS). In addition to the radio and television broadcasts, the ABC runs a vast website with online TV, radio, podcasts, blogs, news and other resources of information on a huge range of topics.

In 2007, Stephen Sewell (Australian playwright and script writer, for example for the movie “The Long Way Home”) wrote a news story on abc.net.au, titled “Art, Reconciliation and the National Identity“. The article starts with George Miller’s (famous Australian filmmaker, like The Mad Max Trilogy, Happy Feet, Babe), who) comments on Australian film, and national identity.

Sewell quickly describes the Mabo decision of the High Court and the importance of the annulment of the Terra Nullis concept, and he further goes on complaining about the (then current) government for not using that chance to create a totally new identity, instead of maintaining and reassuring an old, flawed identity in the first place. Art (movies, theatre, music, novels…) can be one way of overcoming differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians – a unresolved conflict that will remain until there is a way to include both under one term: Australian.

(23) australiaday.com.au

http://www.australiaday.com.au
2002 Australia Day Address: Dr Tim Flannery
http://www.australiaday.com.au/whatson/australiadayaddress2.aspx?AddressID=12

Every year on January 26^th, Australia celebrates its official national day, the day when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove in 1788 to proclaim British sovereignty over this ‘new’ continent. Celebrations are held all over the country, with the most extensive program of events clustering around Sydney, New South Wales.

The website australiaday.com.au is consequently run by the Australia Day Council of New South Wales, and it offers a lot of information on Australian national identity, from student resources to a record of the Australia Day Addresses or comments about national identity both from intellectuals or writers and everyday users of the website.

By searching through the website and looking at the annual Australia Day Addresses and the Australian of the Year Awards, we can learn a lot about the Australian national identity and its slow and subtle changes over time.

A very interesting Address was delivered at Australia Day in 2002 by Dr Tim Flannery, who was later named Australian of the Year in 2007. He talked about the need for a new Australian identity, and how the typically Australian myths and nation-building historical events (Ned Kelly, ANZAC Day, The Man from Snowy River) reflect more the European desires and roots than a distinctly Australian identity.

For a research paper that focuses on how those myths have shaped the Australian national identity through media representations in the past, Flannery’s speech might be a good starting point to think about the more or less ongoing influence of those representations in the present.

(22) historyteacher.org.au

http://www.historyteacher.org.au/
History Teachers’ Association of Australia: Kevin Rudd’s Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples
http://www.historyteacher.org.au/20080213_Apology_PM_KevinRudd.html

Although Australian national identity is still mostly a white (male) identity, it is nonetheless inextricably linked to the indigenous people of Australia and their identity. The European settlement on the Australian continent and the stolen generations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children separated from their families) are some of the dark chapters in Australian history, and still shape the understanding of what it means to be Australian today.

To get a fair insight into Australian culture (and consequently, to be able to write a research paper about Australian identity and the national media), I think it is important to know about Australian history as well as the latest developments concerning the extent to which a national identity is both an indigenous and non-indigenous identity.

One of the sources for such historical information is the History Teachers’ Association of Australia, which tries to promote interest in Australian history to everyone and provides resources for teachers. Their website for example offers links to podcasts and radio shows, the national curriculum and conferences on Australian history, and also transcripts of important speeches of politicians.

It also includes the formal apology to the indigenous Australians by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Leader of the Opposition Brendan Nelson in 2008, which can be considered a milestone in the development of a shared Australian identity – and therefore, it is worth knowing more about it, especially when judging for example the mentioning of the apology at the end of Baz Luhrmann’s movie Australia (see link #14).

(21) sbs.com.au

http://www.sbs.com.au/
Open Season Blog @ SBS: World Cup war questions Australia’s national identity
http://www.sbs.com.au/blogarticle/114992/World-Cup-war-questions-Australia-s-national-identity/blog/Open-Season

The SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) is a multilingual and multicultural radio and TV network, which intends to reflect Australia’s multicultural society and culture, and offers high-quality media content to everyone.

SBS Online, the SBS website, provides access to some of the radio and TV content, and also is a excellent source for the latest national and international news. The website features several blogs on topics like TV, film, news, current affairs or sports.

Focusing on the “stories behind the headlines”, Mathew Hall writes in his SBS blog Open Season about incidents and developments in the sports world. In his post World Cup war questions Australia’s national identity, written in December 2009, he discusses Australia’s bid for the FIFA soccer World Cup in 2018/2020 and the reactions of the Australian public.

After Andrew Demetriou, chief executive officer of the Australian Football League (AFL), has (misleadingly) claimed in December 2009 that a World Cup in Australia would be a threat to the AFL, the sport and the AFL clubs, a fiery discussion arose in the media and the public about sport and national identity, and about what was considered as Australian/good opposed to foreign /bad. Especially the comment sections is worth reading – it might not be ‘academic’, but it is nonetheless a very enlightening source to get an understanding of Australian culture and what Australians think about their national identity.

(20) allacademic.com

http://www.allacademic.com/
American Sociological Association – Mass Media Formats and National Identity Formations: Benchmarking Technology and Genre Impacts

http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/0/8/9/5/p108956_index.html

All Academic is a publishing platform which features not only access to free academic journals, but also to abstracts and convention papers, and it provides online content management solutions for academic conferences. Most of the submitted articles are viewable online and available as download, and the abstract of an article or paper comes with a ready-made citation suggestion (MLA and APA style), which is very convenient when citing that article in a research paper.

Mass Media Formats and National Identity Formations: Benchmarking Technology and Genre Impacts was a conference paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco in 2004, written by Philip Smith (Yale University) and Timothy Phillips (University of Tasmania), both professors of Sociology.

With my general topic of enquiry being the relationship of national identity and the national media in Australia, this article is a helpful source to scientifically support the claim that there actually is a connection between the two. It summarizes the approaches on mass media and identity formation both from a Media Studies and a historical Sociology point of view, and compares the research done on different types of media (print, radio, television, movies and the internet) and to what extent they actually have an impact on a sense of belonging to a national community.

(19) kirj.ee

http://www.kirj.ee
TRAMES: History, Myth and Allegory in Australian Cinema
http://www.kirj.ee/14096?id=14124&tpl=1061&c_tpl=1064

TRAMES is a journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, published quarterly by the Estonian Academy Publishers since 1997. Though the website is rather basic, it provides free and easy access to all the journal articles either as HTML abstract with references or as pdf (full text).

The article History, Myth and Allegory in Australian Cinema was published in TRAMES in 2008, written by Felicity Collins, a professor of the Cinema Studies Program at La Trobe University, Victoria. As with the sociological perspective on our research topic in link #18, it might be quite useful to shed light on the subject from a more historical viewpoint, as history, myth and national identity are closely intertwined, especially regarding Australia.

History, Myth and Allegory in Australian Cinema is basically dealing with the kind of ‘truth’ that lies in historical fictions like movies opposed to the ‘actual’ history they are based on, but not identical with (the historical truth). Collins applies theories from both Cultural Studies and Historiography to discuss how fictional films like The Proposition (2005) achieve to complement conventional history and add new perspectives on historical events. She introduces the concept of an allegory instead of a myth, and analyzes the relationship of the two concepts to notions of a national identity.

(18) eprints.utas.edu.au

http://eprints.utas.edu.au/
UTas ePrints: Colonial and Post-colonial Aspects of Australian Identity
http://eprints.utas.edu.au/3519/

UTas ePrints is an online archive of journal articles, books and other academic publications by students and staff of the University of Tasmania. It was established in 2004 and provides free access to everyone through a full-text search.

One of the texts about Australian identity available on UTas ePrints is the article Colonial and Post-colonial Aspects of Australian Identity, originally published in the British Journal of Sociology in 2007 and written by Bruce Tranter and Jed Donoghue, both professors for Sociology at the University of Tasmania.

Writing a research paper in such a multi- and interdisciplinary academic field as Cultural Studies, it is always rewarding to approach a subject from a different but close-by angle, for example from a sociological point of view.

The article examines the Australian mythscape and the influence of historical figures (and the myths surrounding them) on the construction of national identity. Apart from the very interesting survey and the analysis of the data, the essay contains a quite helpful introductional part, which summarizes the emergence and the development of Australian foundation myths and national identity.

The bibliography at the end with other articles, elemental books and links on the concept of national identity completes this very useful publication.

(17) proquest.co.uk

http://www.proquest.co.uk
Journal of Popular Film and Television – In Quest of Self-Identity: Gallipoli, Mateship, and the Construction of Australian National Identity
http://proquest.umi.com.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/pqdlink?Ver=1&Exp=05-16-2015&FMT=7&DID=5015922&RQT=309

Proquest is just one of numerous online providers of academic journals, articles and books that are linked to the Ex Libris SFX: A service available through the local university libraries that features full text access if visited from a computer (or wireless network) within the university network.

The article In Quest of Self-Identity: Gallipoli, Mateship, and the Construction of Australian National Identity (only accessible from a computer within the Griffith University network!) was published in 1993 in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, and written by Marek Haltof, now a professor for cinema, film and literature at Northern Michigan University.

It is a detailed analysis of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981) in terms of Australian national identity, and describes how national stereotypes and myths in the movie are reinforced rather than deconstructed. Australia and Australianness are portrayed in contrast to Great Britain and as an Anti-Britishness, as something innocent and egalitarian opposed to the corrupted, violent outside world.

The article also suggests a comparative view of the construction of the Australian bush and the American frontier, which could be a very fruitful approach for a research paper – especially considering the fact that in most universities in Germany Australia is neither part of the English Studies department nor of the American Studies department, and therefore a research paper about Australia could only be written in terms of a comparative analysis.

(16) theaustralian.com.au

http://www.theaustralian.com.au
The Australian: “What lies beneath a national legend”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/anzac-day/what-lies-beneath-a-national-legend/story-e6frgdaf-1225857331747

In addition to an online archive of historical newspapers (see link 15), contemporary newspapers and their websites are an excellent resource on national identity. They provide not only a vast selection of articles and essays, archived over years and with a full-text search, but they also offer it (mostly) for free. An analysis of newspaper articles about a certain topic at a certain time is a good way to reconstruct and understand the zeitgeist of a community or a nation, and to see how national identity is reflected and constructed in the media.

The Australian for example is one of the biggest-selling Australian newspapers with a huge online presence. One rather interesting article was published there recently about the ANZAC remembrance ceremonies: “What lies beneath a national legend: Much of what we commemorate on Anzac Day is a journalist’s construct“, written by Christopher Bantick.

It comments on the events at Gallipoli, and how they were communicated by the British journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Australias’s war correspondent Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean. The article demonstrates the principles of New Historicism: How history works as a literary construct, how it is actually ‘made’ in retrospect, and how national myths are constructed to suit the needs of an ‘imagined community’, a nation.