Aborigines and Contemporary Australian Nationalism: Primordiality and the Cultural Politics of Otherness

Abstract

Australia's Bicentennial celebrations were an exercise by the state in the production of nationalism nationalism being one of the major currencies the state trades upon for its existence. They were an attempt by the state to profit from its investment in the creation and circulation of a culture of nationalism and represented a massive investment of capital in the symbolic production of a corporate cultural identity for its citizens. This is to say that the celebrations were an exercise in the production of symbolic capital. This investment in culture was also a process of investiture, that is a process through which the state conferred ceremonial honours upon itself by mediating the relationship of the people back to their 'history', back to those primordial truths of origin that have created the fiction of a national identity and the mythic space of the nation. Through mediating the identity of its citizens, the state authorizes itself. It re-confirms its sovereignty in the process of creating and celebrating the identity of those it governs. Through its investment in these celebrations, the state renews and establishes its authority as a sovereign. The state is empowered and discovers its legitimacy through the investments it makes in mediating the identity of its citizens.