ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author examines the commemorative festivals of three countries which in the last 25 years have celebrated their birth as national communities: Canada in 1967, the centenary of its establishment of a federal state; the United States in 1976, the Bicentenary of the Declaration of Independence; and Australia in 1988, the Bicentenary of its settlement by Europeans. Firstly, although there had been earlier commemorations of the national founding in both Australia and the US, they were the first officially organized, territory-wide commemorations of the nation’s founding staged by these countries. Secondly, they were products of liberal–democratic federal societies established by European colonists and shaped largely by a British heritage. Even in new world societies with a relatively weak historical sense and without mythic claims to 'primordial' homelands, foundation myths are associated with a specific ethnic core population and with patterns of power and exclusion, and cannot easily be manipulated.
