Turner - Making It National

Australian Cultural Studies

Editor: John Tulloch

Nationalism and Australian popular culture

Graeme Turner

ALLEN & UNWIN

To my son Jackson

Graeme Turner 1994

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved.

First published in 1994

Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

9 Atchison Street, St Leonards

NSW 2065 Australia

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Turner, Graeme.

Making it national: nationalism and Australian popular culture.

Includes index.

ISBN 1863737227
eISBN 9781742696713.

1. NationalismAustralia. 2. Popular cultureAustralia 20th century. 3. AustraliaCivilisation20th century. I. Title. (Series: Australian cultural studies.)

Typeset by DOCUPRO, Sydney

Nowadays the social and anthropological definition of culture is probably gaining as much public currency as the aesthetic one. Particularly in Australia, politicians are liable to speak of the vital need for a domestic film industry in promoting our cultural identityand they mean by cultural identity some sense of Australianness, of our nationalism as a distinct form of social organisation. Notably, though, the emphasis tends to be on Australian film (not popular television); and not just any film, but those of quality. So the aesthetic definition tends to be smuggled back inon top of the kind of cultural nationalism which assumes that Australia is a unified entity with certain essential features that distinguish it from Britain, the USA or any other national entities which threaten us with cultural dependency.

This series is titled Australian Cultural Studies, and I should say at the outset that my understanding of Australian is not as an essentially unified category; and further, that my understanding of cultural is anthropological rather than aesthetic. By culture I .mean the social production of meaning and understanding, whether in the inter-personal and practical organisation of daily routines or in broader institutional and ideological structures. I am not thinking of culture as some form of universal excellence, based on aesthetic discrimination and embodied in a pantheon of great works. Rather, I take this aesthetic definition of culture itself to be part of the social mobilisation of discourse to differentiate a cultural elite from the mass of society.

Unlike the cultural nationalism of our opinion leaders, Cultural Studies focuses not on the essential unity of national cultures, but on the meanings attached to social difference (as in the distinction between elite and mass taste). It analyses the construction and mobilisation of these distinctions to maintain or challenge existing power differentials, such as those of gender, class, age, race and ethnicity. In this analysis, terms designed to socially differentiate people (like elite and mass) become categories of discourse, communication and power. Hence our concern in this series is for an analytical understanding of the meanings attached to social difference within the history and politics of discourse.

In Making It National, Graeme Turner examines the ways in which the Australian nation is represented in the media and elsewhere, as well as the uses to which these representations are put. On the one hand, buried under the detritus of nineteenth century definitions of a masculinist national type, bombarded with tourist imagery that offers impossible dreams of an Australian lifestyle, and diverted by complacent invocations of national identity which deliberately obscure the material relations within which we all live, Australias national imagination is looking pretty groggy. In particular Turner challenges increasing concentration of media ownership, the ever-lengthening list of alternative news outlets that have died, the complicit relationship of journalists and politicians and the seamless identification of Australian national interests with those of Australian business which helped create singular, exclusivist and traditional myths of Australianness, including the larrikin capitalist excesses of the 1980s. It is the lack of a dissenting voice or competing definitions that Turner most regretswhether in relation to the making or to the breaking of Alan Bond. On the other hand, though, Turner constantly asks the question: how can Australian cultural events like Sydney 2000 or the Bicentennial celebrations be turned in a more progressive direction? Analysing significant popular texts and eventsthe music of Yothu Yindi, the filming of the Bicentennials Australia Daze, the mainstream medias own contradictory concentration on 1788 as both the moment of settlement and invasion, and recent films like Strictly Ballroom and the Heartbreak Kid, Turner examines the progressive potential of the Australian mix of identities and accents. He promotes the notion of the hybrid text as part of a creative, resistant, cultural and political process of becomingrather than a conservative, already completed, project of exclusion. In this way difference and contradiction become actually constitutive of identity.

Nations, Turner argues (in affirming the continuing, progressive importance of nation) are made necessary by the divisions, not the unity, within cultures: there can be no return to a unitary explanation of national identity. Culture, as Fiske, Hodge and Turner say in Myths of Oz, has to work to construct any unity it has, rather than simply celebrate an achieved or natural harmony. Australian culture is then no more than the temporary, embattled construction of unity at any particular historical moment. The readings in this series of Australian Cultural Studies inevitably (and polemically) form part of the struggle to make and break the boundaries of meaning which, in conflict and collusion, dynamically define our culture.

JOHN TULLOCH

A number of people have assisted me in this project who deserve acknowledgement. Some may not realise that our conversation was of help to me; others have read draft sections and commented on them at some length. Those who have been of direct assistance include Tony Bennett, Frances Bonner, Patrick Buckridge, Robert Cockburn, Stuart Cunningham, John Brow, John Hartley, Chris Awe Da-vies, Meghan Morris, John Bullock and James Walter. Others whose assistanceg was less direct but still greatly appreciated include Con Castan, John Fiske, Dinah Hall, Alan Lawson, Jim McKay and Helen Tiffin. I am particularly indebted to Jo Robertson, my research assistant; her enthusiasm and intellectual generosity made the beginnings of the project productive and exciting. Elizabeth Weiss at Allen & Unwin deserves my gratitude for her astute advice and criticism; she has made a substantial and a positive contribution to the final shape of the book. Finally, I would like to thank an exceptionally sharp and interested Honours class at the University of Queensland in 1992, who allowed me to try out some ideas and participated vigorously in the attempt to refine them.

For permission to reprint material published elsewhere I would like to thank the editors of Westerly, where part of Time Out, The Sunday Mail, Warner Bros. Movie World and View Films. In some cases, I have failed to trace copyright holders. For this I apologise and undertake to make any necessary corrections or additions in subsequent editions.