"Lest We Forget": Mateship, Masculinity, and Australian Identity

Abstract

The cats, brick and water are metonymic of the relationship between father and son. The image also captures something of their respective predicaments and vulnerabilities: the son caught by his father's parental sack, the father caught in his own sack of desperation and circumstance, both of them drowning. National identity, as Richard White observed nearly 40 years ago, is an invention. Australian national identity can be read through a masculinist discourse which simultaneously speaks for men and their place in the world, just as it also speaks to - and silences - women. Discursive practices are ultimately about exercising power and influence. No one looking at Canberra's design can miss the centrality of the military to national identity. The bushman legend encompasses moral, racial, and physical elements, but gender politics are at its core. It is a classic settler narrative, writing new history on an old page, erasing or diminishing Indigenous history in place of the stories of colonization.