ABSTRACT
Before I left England I used the term ideology relatively loosely. My deeper interest in the concept dates from my arrival in Australia. For various historical reasons emanating, partly, from its colonial past, and the absence of an old established hegemonic ruling class with distinctive indigenous traditions, the manifestations of bourgeois ideology in Australia seemed to me to be quite dissimilar from their more subtle counterparts in England. Their resistance to what I then thought were rational arguments aroused my interest in the nature of the social practices which sustain an ideology which appeared singularly naked and crude. My first afternoon in the country had been spent wandering around Fremantle, where I saw a prison with immense walls heavily guarded by armed warders. I wondered what kind of society was it that could display a coercive apparatus of the state so blatantly in a peaceful sundrenched suburban setting. I began to think of myself as a Marxist for the first time within two weeks of my arrival.
