ABSTRACT
At the ‘Dismantle Fremantle’ conference I found myself placed oddly-I thought-on a panel called ‘Australianisms’. Never having heard this word before, I was not sure what it meant. When speakers of English in Australia use an ‘Americanism’ or a ‘Gallicism’, we borrow from a foreign idiom and mix it with local speech. Presumably, speakers of any of the varieties of English in New Guinea or Fiji or England can use an ‘Australianism’ in that sense. But what could it mean for me-a white Australian with no familial or ethnic memories of a history in any other place-to talk metaphorically, in this alienating way, about ‘Australianism’ in Australia? Was I being asked to reproduce the ethnographic style of social critics in the 1950s and 1960s, who had to prove that Australians ‘had’ culture? Or was I being asked to reflect on the radical nationalist tradition deriving from the 1890s, with its passion for what John Docker (1991) calls ‘impossible stories of uniqueness’?
