School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemDisappointments of the nation: war, disillusionment and narratives of decline in interwar Australia( 2015)This thesis investigates historiographical and literary representations of World War I in Australia. It noted that Australian historiography on the War in Australian cultural memory and representation focus primarily upon the 'martial nationalist' account of WW1 as a site of national birth, most famously articulated by C.E.W. Bean, and that Australian cultural historians argue that the common British tropes and myths of 'lost innocence', 'disillusionment' and nostalgia for an 'Edwardian Summer' associated with WW1, are not represented in Australian creative responses to the war in the interwar period. This thesis argues that there is a tradition of historical interpretation that regards WW1 as an event that frustrated national potential, rendered a formerly consensual society divided, and strangled the young nation's early promise. It furthermore pointed out that this attitude can be discerned in literature of the interwar period, and informed the writing of both the radical cultural nationalists, such as Vance Palmer, and the 'Vision school', such as Norman and Jack Lindsay. In the interwar period, both groups were moved by their sense of the loss and damage wreaked by the war upon Australia, to advocate a return to a nostalgically recalled pre-war past, a renaissance to recapture the innocence that had been lost in war, and a protectionist attitude in culture, that advocated Australia's return to its more self-contained pre-war state and a rejection of the modernising influences that followed in the wake of war. A paranoid nationalism thus emerges in both literary movements, indicating the existence of what Raymond Williams has called a 'structure of feeling' in interwar Australia, structured around nostalgia and disillusionment with the nation that emerged from WW1, that informs later historiography and popular history.