ABSTRACT
European modernism's origins correlate to the founding of the commonwealth of Australia, a time when the national consciousness was being defined in relation to colonial origins. The will to nation and hunger for identity played out in the political, social, psychological, and mythic enterprise of defining the narrative of a young country. Australia's colonialist history imposed a ‘precise and exclusive alignment of unitary ethnic, national territory and literary traditions’ on the country's historicizing nationalisms (Mead 2009: 549). Colonialism established a need to demarcate between winners and losers, colonized and colonizer, and drew on European heroic models of conquest which have permeated the discourse of Australian literature and nationhood. The need to perpetuate a unified nationhood fed into a narrative of Australia which was symbolically, historically, and culturally exclusive and in which Australian literature operates within ‘its own terms of displacement’ (Kinsella 2009: 473).
