Becoming Australia

This inaugural title in the JAS Symposium Series gathers together a number of Australia's most highly regarded cultural historians and critics. The result is an illuminating new book on that hoary old gum nut of Australian identity. Becoming Australia explores the many possibilities of a nation vigorously engaged in a process of defining and re-defining itself. It celebrates Australia's indigenous origins and the cultural diversity which has grown from settlers who have made their homes here and who have become part of the ambitious experiment of making a new society. In an act of reconciliation, Becoming Australia critiques Australia's past, its present predicaments, and its future possibilities. Becoming Australia investigates some of the many sites of being the past and the future, native title, Aboriginality, place, children's culture, popular pastimes, relations with Asia, immigration and multiculturalism, radicalism and war.