Left-wing Nationalism - Australia

Australia

During the 1890s, Australian-born novelists and poets such as Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy and Banjo Paterson drew on the archetype of the "Australian bushman"; these and other writers formulated the "bush legend", which included broadly left wing notions that working class Outback Australians were "democratic", egalitarian, anti-authoritarian and cultivated "mateship". However, terms like "nationalist" and "patriotic" were also utilised by pro-British Empire political conservatives, culminating with the formation in 1917 of the Nationalist Party of Australia, which remained the main centre-right party until the late 1920s.

During the 1940s and 1950s, radical intellectuals, many of whom joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), combined philosophical internationalism with a radical nationalist commitment to Australian culture. This type of cultural nationalism was possible among radicals in Australia at the time, because:

• of the "patriotic turn" in Comintern policy from 1941, and;
• the most common understanding of what it meant to be "patriotic" at the time was a kind of pro-Imperial "race patriotism" and anti-British sentiment was, until the late 1960s, regarded as subversive and;
• radical nationalism dovetailed with a growing respect for Australian cultural output among intellectuals, which was itself a product of the break in cultural supply chains – lead actors and scripts had always come from Britain and the United States – occasioned by the war.

Post-war radical nationalists consequently sought to canonise the "bush" culture which had emerged during the 1890s. The post-war radical nationalists interpreted this tradition as having implicitly or inherently radical qualities: they believed it meant that working class Australians were "naturally democratic" and/or socialist. This view combined the CPA's commitment to the working class with the post-war intellectuals' own nationalist sentiments. The apotheosis of this line of thought was perhaps Russel Ward's book The Australian Legend (1958), which sought to trace the development of the radical nationalist ethos from its convict origins, through bushranging, the Victorian gold rush, the spread of agriculture, the industrial strife of the early 1890s and its literary canonisation. Other significant radical nationalists included the historians Ian Turner, Lloyd Churchward, Robin (Bob) Gollan, Geoffrey Serle and Brian Fitzpatrick, whom Ward described as the "spiritual father of all the radical nationalist historians in Australia", and the writers Stephen Murray-Smith, Judah Waten, Dorothy Hewett and Frank Hardy.

The radical-nationalist tradition was challenged during the 1960s, during which New Left scholars interpreted much of Australian history – including labour history – as dominated by racism, sexism, homophobia and militarism. Since the 1960s, it has been uncommon for those on the political left to claim Australian nationalism for themselves. The "bush legend", however, has survived the above changes in Australian culture: it informed much cultural output during the period of the "new nationalism" in the 1970s and 1980s, the Australian nationalism was usurped by centre-right politicians such as Prime Minister John Howard for the political right during the 1990s. In the 21st century, attempts by progressive intellectuals to re-claim nationalism for the Left are few and far between.