| Chapter 1: | In Search of Identities |
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Chapter 1
In Search of Identities
All nations are constructed—all forms of collective identity are culturally produced…definitions of national identity are sites of struggle; the definitions are never static or ‘fixed’.
—Graeme Turner (1993, p. 110; 1999, p. 19)
Australians saw themselves, and were seen by others, as part of a group of new, transplanted, predominantly Anglo-Saxon emigrant societies…the perceived importance of ‘racial purity’ as the symbolic content for the imagined community of the fledgling nation.
—Joe Stratton and Ing Ang (1998, p. 148)
National Identity and Its Formation
Imagined Community and Myths
The formation of national identity is closely associated with the development of sentiments, difference, community, legends, myths, and industrialisation. At the same time, identity is a fluid concept, constructed or invented by human agencies and subject to changes following social and