Peter Kirkpatrick

The modernity of colonial nations has often seemed belated, but in Australia it has been especially troubled by ongoing doubts about the authenticity of the nation itself. According to Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra in Dark Side of the Dream: “Legitimacy is a raw and buried issue in the contemporary Australian consciousness for good reasons. The current system of government, law and property derives from a chain of judicial acts which leads inexorably back to the founding event itself: an act of invasion by which the Aboriginal owners of the land were dispossessed with some cruelty and without compensation.” The same might be said of other colonial cultures, but Hodge and Mishra highlight the way in which “bastard” became a characteristic term of affection in Australia, arguing that “the basis of identity that it constructs is a shared sense of illegitimacy,” one related to a more deep-seated “bastard complex” ( Dark Side of the Dream, 23). For this reason, “white Australians have had a continuous need to generate new forms of the foundation myth, which exists to annul, defuse, displace and negate the intractable conditions of the foundation event” (26). That Australia is a nation of bastards is perhaps echoed by the country’s lack of an unambivalent foundation moment, a proper “birthday”; for when might modern Australia be said to have begun? Debates about the suitability of January 26 as Australia Day have lately come to prominence again, since it marks the date in 1788 when Governor Phillip raised the British flag at what is now Sydney, and many Indigenous people rightly feel that “Invasion Day” hardly merits general celebration. Besides, outside the eastern states, South and Western Australia also mark their own dates of colonial takeover. The anniversary of Australian Federation on January 1, 1901 was widely commemorated only on its centenary in 2001, and with little public enthusiasm compared to the solemn annual response to Anzac Day on April 25. Invested with forging a popular version of white male Australian identity, Anzac Day has traditionally had a stronger claim as a truly national foundation moment, but it is shared with New Zealand—which has Waitangi Day, marking the 1840 treaty with the Māori people, as its national day. Anzac Day also celebrates another seaborne invasion, when in 1915 Australasian troops were part of a failed Allied assault on the Ottoman Empire. Will Australia finally come into its own if and when it becomes a republic? “Where is Australia, singer, do you know?” asked the poet Bernard O’Dowd in his 1912 visionary poem The Bush, only to answer himself, “She is a prophecy to be fulfilled!” Implicit in the where of O’Dowd’s question is when will the “real” nation come into being? The status of modernism in Australia has been similarly fraught, even when narrowed to the field of poetry, since here too there has been a sense of inauthenticity, belatedness, or deferral. For example, the relative absence of a strong local avant-garde heritage meant that, as late as the 1970s, the diffuse grouping of baby boomer poets that John Tranter dubbed “the Generation of ’68” were apt to see themselves as the first true moderns, impelled as they were by sixties youth culture and recent experimental American poetics. In influential late twentieth-century monographs, both Andrew Taylor and Paul Kane have argued—for somewhat different reasons—that Australian poetic modernism was stalled by the failure of a romantic tradition to take hold. Yet, leaving aside the ever-porous relationship between romanticism and modernism, Taylor and Kane each reflected an older canonical sense of modernist poetics strongly inflected by Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence and a concern with poetic patrimony. Kane’s account is more nuanced, and more invested in problems of romantic identity and self-authorization, and yet he seems to concur with Taylor’s view that Kenneth Slessor is “Australia’s first strong poet,” and therefore a founding father of local modernism.