>It's too late in western
>history, methinks, to define a coherent national sentiment.
I hope you're right, but the bastards just keep on trying.
>As for the defining moment of national self-authorship - according to our
>prime-bastard that was Gallipoli. A few thousand Australian boys joined
>lots of other thousands in attacking a beach in a country we'd never heard
>of at Winston Churchill's behest in 1915. We got our arses kicked off that
>beach a few months later, and we left the body parts of 9000 of our lads
>(and gawd-only-knows-how-many Turkish boys) on said beach. The birth of a
>nation, eh?
which must explain why I think of slaughter and the sacrifice of thousands as the building block of nations, huh? south Africa (the Afrikaans nationalism) had this moment. Serbian nationalism with Kosovo. what else? what's the US's bloody moment?
now, this is taught in schools, but poorly. though I confess that until I was fifteen I always thought that the five minutes silence in November that we all had to do was for the sacking of the Whitlam govt (which happened on the same day in 1975). I kid you not. all I remember is being told to stand and bow my head in school, and next thing I knew I was confronted by angry and upset adults talking about the coup.
>Our 'culture industry' has spent a
>fortune and an age promoting the 'sheep, convicts, alcoholism, lamingtons'
>aesthetic to our foreign brothers and sisters. I don't know how you're
>supposed to think anything else! There's not much else, actually. And not
>that any more either.
'rum, sodomy and the lash' used to be the depiction, but it's not one made for tourism -- well, unless it's a very niche tourism. and, how could you be offended if you already don't think there's much of anything else? you can't be serious?
kelley wrote:
>well it's unfortunate that anyone was offended in the sense that you
>thought i was stereotyping out of ignorance or meanspiritedness.
I wrote: "bears little relationship to my experience. you're thinking Anglo-Irish, which is not only anachronistic, but leaning towards the offensive." stereotypes are not the issue, it's the boundary of the definition that is. I suppose those who are included in that boundary wouldn't approach it in quite the same way.
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au