Part III Australian Culture
Unit 8 Literature and the Arts
Unit 9 Australian Cultural and
Educational Institutions
Unit 10 The Language Situations in
Australia
Definition of Culture
The totality of socially transmitted
behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions,
and all other products of human work and
thought.
These patterns, traits, and products
considered as the expression of a particular
period, class, community, or population:
Unit 8 Literature and the Arts
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Introduction
Australian Spaces: The Land
What Now?
Conclusion
Questions for Discussion
Introduction
This chapter explores the themes of land and sense of
place for Australian writers and artistes. Despite the fact
that Australian has been a predominantly urban society
since at least the turn of the last century, Australian
writers and artists have long been preoccupied with the
bush. Both those who live here and those overseas who
imagine Australia think of wide open spaces, the desert,
inland, the beaches, the bush and outback. Many of the
best known images of Australia are non-urban. We will
explore how themes of the bush are represented in the
work of immigrants and Indigenous Australians, past and
present.
Reading about the Representative Bushranger Ned Kelly
(147- 48)
Australian Spaces: The Land
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The Bush
The Bush Myth
The Legend of the Bushman
Mateship
The Bush
• It would be hard to over-estimate the importance of the
land, especially ‘the bush’, in Australian literary culture.
From the nineteenth century onwards, the bush has been
used to define Australia’s difference and distinctiveness.
But the ‘bush’ is a myth, not only because most
Australians live in cities, bush also because many
different meanings and values have been attributed to the
bush over time. Further, many different kinds of nonurban landscapes have been referred to as ‘the bush’. In
other words, the meaning of ‘the bush’ has changed as
Australia’s culture and society have changed and as
people’s sense of where the ‘real Australia’ is to be found
has altered.
The Bush Myth
• The bush appears as a desirable vision in the daydreams
of a man trapped in the city office. This utopian
representation of the bush as a free, natural space in
contrast with the drudgery and ordinariness of city life
can also be found in the contemporary films and
television series, as well as advertising. This dream—
often called the bush myth—is central to definitions of
Australian identity. This is how ‘Australia’ is most
commonly represented, both at home and abroad.
The Legend of the Bushman
In the city/bush binary, city men are constructed as being
as than men, ineffectual. The bushman, by contrast, is
independent, authoritative, powerful and competent.
The isolation of the bush led to a real need for a sense of
solidarity. A sense of community developed based on a
mutual dependency. There were few women in the bush
and men kept company with each other. At the same time,
male solidarity was accompanied by a degree of
competitiveness and aggression towards each other.
 As the bush became more settled, it was increasingly
domesticated. There were more women, families and also
‘small men’-men from the town, men with white-collar
jobs.
Mateship
 This is a very important concept in male working class solidarity – as a form of
resistance against landowners, police, and all figures of authority, including the
'squattocracy' or 'bush aristocracy' that developed in the country.
 Within this was a distaste for the manners and sophisticated ways of urban people,
who were seen as physically weaker and inferior to the rugged manliness of rural
people.
 Foreigners were also outside this solidarity; recent arrivals were seen as inferior
to those bush people born and bred in Australia.
 There was also antagonism against the Chinese in 1850s/60s and towards
Aboriginal Australians (ref p. 170).
 In other words, almost everybody was seen as an enemy, or inferior, to the bush
man. This included women, who were seen as the enemy of man's freedom - as
the domesticating influence, as agents of entrapment.
 Note, however, the conflict between mateship and individualism. The gang is a
hierarchy, but can only survive through mateship. It's a solidarity that is informed
by the gang's sense of itself as a minority group - an ‘us against them' solidarity.
What Now?
• This section explores the meanings of Australia
being a ‘multicultural’nation in contemporary
writing. Indigenous Australians do not think of
themselves as part of the multicultural nation,
being the only non-migrants to this land. Some
Aboriginal writing is introduced in the following
reading materials (151-57). We then explore the
writing of postwar migrants, largely from
European backgrounds, and of more recent
migrants, largely from Asia.
Conclusion
• Now, modern artistes have an attempt to
depict the kind of mix and complexity of
identity in contemporary Australia which
Castro is advocating as ‘hybridity’.
Questions for Discussion
• Can you suggest why the natural environment --the land, the bush,etc.---has played such an
important role in Australian writing and visual art?
• What themes and issues have featured in
contemporary Indigenous writing?
• In what ways do you think Australian literature
has developed differently from British of
American literature?
• Discuss in your own words Brian Castro’s idea of
‘hybridity’.
Unit 9 Australian Cultural and Punitive
Institution
• Introduction
• The Courts and the Rule of Law
• Two Cases
Introduction
• In this chapter, we explore the law as both
a cultural and a punitive institution,
because it has both there meanings in the
common law tradition inherited from
Britain.
The Courts and the Rule of Law
• The Common Law
Modern Australia is a common-law country. Its British
origins as a settler society made it so. There are two types of
‘judges’ in the early colonies. District Court and Supreme
Court judges were appointed to decide serious matters in the
criminal and civil jurisdictions. The magistrates dealt with
minor criminal offences and civil matters in the Courts of
Petty Sessions held in many settlements.
• The Court Houses
In Australia, it is sometimes said, the law courts express the
moral and ethical beliefs. Almost everyone is likely to meet
the ‘law’ during their lives.
Two cases
• These two cases, one historic and one
contemporary, give some flavor of the
role of law in Australian lives:
• Ned Kelly, the Bushranger---a Criminal
Trial (207-08)
• Mabo --- a Civil Case (208-09)
Unit 10 The Language Situations in Australia
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Introduction
Indigenous Language
Australia English
Conclusion
Introduction
• Many people overseas, including some Chinese,
take it for granted that Australian is a monolingual
country, where most of the inhabitants speak
English. This is true only partly. Although English
is the dominant language spoken by the majority of
Australians, it is by no means the only language
used in Australian society. Australia is, in fact, one
of the most multilingual societies in the world.
Indigenous Language
• Indigenous languages refer to language used by Aboriginal
Australians. Terms like Aboriginal languages, native languages and
Australian languages are also used with the same reference although
the last term may be a little misleading because it does not include
either the different verities of Australian English or community
languages spoken mostly by migrant Australians.
• As a language group, they are characterized by a number of noticeable
features and numerous and diverse. These native languages are highly
developed instruments of communication and culture. They each
possess a wide vocabulary and an intricacy of grammatical forms so
that Aboriginal Australians are enabled to express the subtleties of
meaning in any aspect of their social life from complicated myths to
detailed and precise information about their everyday activities and
the landscape. Besides, these languages also serve to mirror the social
life of Aboriginal Australians and signify the ethic identity of the
Aboriginal population as a whole.
Australia English
• Although Australian English has been the
dominant language in the country, yet varieties
of Australian English have emerged over the
time of linguistic development. This has had
much diversity of the country’s ethic
composition. Roughly speaking, 3 varieties of
Australian English can be distinguished which
are Aboriginal English, migrant English and
white Australian English.
Conclusion
• This general survey of the language situation in Australia
demonstrates clearly the linguistic diversity, especially the ethnolinguistic diversity in country.
• It is obvious that Australia is a multi-lingual society. It is, however,
not only in the postwar period that the country has a multi-lingual
situation, linguistic diversity existed, and in fact, thrived in some parts
of Australia from the early days of European settlement.
• The country has now adopted a more comprehensive and progressive
policy on multilingualism than any comparable countries in the world.
This paradox, monolingualism versus multilingualism, is
characteristic of a tension that has existed throughout the history of
white settlement between three symbolic relationships of language
and society: English monolingualism as a symbol of British tradition,
English monolingualism as a marker of Australia’s independent
national identity, and multilingualism as both social reality and part of
the ideology of multiculturalism. This tension dates back before the
federation of six British colonies into an Australian nation in 1901,
and has not been resolved (Cylne 1991).