(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.

(15) trove.nla.gov.au

http://trove.nla.gov.au
National Library of Australia: Australian Newspapers (1803 – 1954)
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home

Trove is the online search engine of the National Library of Australia. It not only provides access to the vast online resources of the library, it also combines other, high-quality resources that are freely available on the web – including books, journals, videos, music, pictures, photographs, diaries, letters, maps, archived websites and newspapers.

Looking for information about national identity (conveniently, one can search only in “Australian content”) will probably be successful in any of the above categories, but I would like to direct my focus on the extensive digital archive of Australian newspapers, currently ranging from 1803 to 1954, including a full-text search.

This could be a starting point for a research paper on Australian identity, for example, a diachronic analysis of the discourse about national identity, Gallipoli and ANZAC Day, and how it changed over time. The digitalized newspaper archive is an excellent first-hand resource, which can make visible how national identity was represented in the media and at the same time constituted through the process of representation.

Trove further allows searching only in ads or news, a certain decade or date, a minimum word count or a certain newspaper, which might prove very useful in any research article that involves first-hand newspaper resources; or to check and verify second-hand resources in other academic essays.

(14) informaworld.com

http://www.informaworld.com
Journal of Australian Studies: Gendered and racialised discourses of national identity in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a919534640

Informaworld is another major publishing platform for academic journals, books, databases and encyclopedias. It includes all the journals by Routledge and Taylor & Francis, and is therefore a high-quality resource for information on culture and media.

It is also the digital home of the Journal of Australian Studies, a multi- and interdisciplinary journal on Australian culture, history and society by the International Australian Studies Association that has been around in print since the 70s, and is published quarterly.

One of numerous informative essays about Australian national identity in this journal that I found is Gendered and racialised discourses of national identity in Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Australia’, written in 2010 by Jackie Hogan from Bradley University.

The article discusses the blockbuster movie Australia, how it both contents and reinforces stereotypes of male, white Australian national identity at the same time. It touches on the theoretical concepts of Benedict Andersons ‘imagined communities’ and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ‘floating signifiers’, and  lays open how under its glossy surface, the movie reassures a male, dominant white superiority over women, Aboriginal people and also, Asians.

Particularly interesting is the last chapter, where Hogan comments on the relationship between economic and material interests and the discourses of national identity, and the $50 dollar international promotional tourist campaign by Baz Luhrman that was launched as part of the Australia franchise.

(13) media-culture.org.au

http://www.media-culture.org.au/
M/C Journal: Disability, Heroism and Australian National Identity
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/48

Media/Culture was founded in 1998 to offer an intellectual place for discussions about the intersections of media and culture, supported by the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology. On the website of media-culture.org.au, several publications can be found: The M/Cyclopedia of New Media, a record of key issues and terms, the M/C Reviews, which reviews books, movies and music, and the academic journal M/C Journal.

The article Disability, Heroism and Australian National Identity was published in that journal in 2008, written by Martin Mantle, a lecturer at University of New England. It is mostly about the Australian mocumentary We Can be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year, and how the process of inclusion and exclusion, that constitutes a national identity to a great extent, intersects with the ‘ableness’ or the disability of publicly visible bodies.

The satirical view on national ‘heroes’ (what is seen as ‘national’ as well as who is considered to be a hero in that context) in We Can be Heroes goes beyond the binary oppositions of ability/disability and positive/negative. It therefore contests the simple stereotypes that are usually portrayed as national and able bodies, just like they are shown in the opening credits of the show: Surf Life savers, firemen, cricketers, swimmers and running children.

(12) search.informit.com.au

http://search.informit.com.au/
Informit Database – Home Invasion: Television, Identity and Belonging in Sydney’s Western Suburbs
http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=081973108368977;res=IELHSS

Similar to SAGE, informit is an online publishing and database service, with its focus on Australasia. It also automatically recognizes the Griffith University network; and therefore, access to the online journals, working papers and textbooks is mostly free.

In the online journal Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy, published quarterly, there is another essay about national television and Australian identity, called Home Invasion: Television, Identity and Belonging in Sydney’s Western Suburbs and written by Tanja Dreher in 2000.

Though the article is quite specific in its topic, it presents a general approach to television that could be rather useful in any analysis of TV and national identity, especially the chapter Insecure Belongings: TV Talk and the National ‘Home’: Focusing more on reception and consumption of TV rather than the production and the actual content, Dreher draws the attention to “TV talk”. People talking about things they saw on TV provides a discursive site where meanings are constructed and discussed, and where identity and a sense of belonging to a home, a community, and a wider sense of ‘home’ (a nation) is negotiated and contested.

This ‘active’ approach, where the audience is an agent rather than a passive consumer, should definitely be considered when writing a research paper about national identity and the media.