White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980

Description

Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980
by Richard White.

Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 1981.
First Edition, stiff paperback.

Cover: ‘Narcissus and the Three Clouds,’ – Arthur Boyd.

‘[T]here is no “real” Australian waiting to be uncovered. A national identity is an invention. There is no point in asking whether one version of this essential Australia is truer than another because they are all intellectual constructs, neat, tidy, comprehensible—and necessarily false. They have all been artificially imposed upon a diversified landscape and population, and a variety of untidy social relationships, attitudes and emotions. When we look at ideas about national identity, we need to ask, not whether they are true or false, but what their function is, whose creations they are, and whose interests they serve’ (White, Introduction, p. viii)

White’s pioneering history plots the manufacturing of Australian national identity and the cultural and political purposes it serves. Published two years after the establishment of Allen & Unwin Australia, Inventing Australia is an example of A&U’s ambitions in the 1980s to produce cutting edge academic texts, under publisher John Ironmonger (formerly of Hale and Ironmonger). (See: Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946-2005.)

Condition: Cover and pages in very good condition.