ABSTRACT
Appearance and national identity, photography and Australia - the order in which these things are mentioned is not arbitrary: appearances come first, they pre-figure the ‘real’. National identity, popularly considered to emerge from ‘the land’ and ‘the people’ is not natural or authentic but something that is actively constructed in modern nation states. Components of national identity are products of the category itself more than they are possession of distinct cultures. The concept of national culture is even more recent that than of the nation state. Photographic imagery has been crucial in the construction of national identity, with genres and styles imported from elsewhere and used unaltered to promote and dramatise, for example ‘Australian fashion’, ‘Australian products’ or, the story of ‘Australian industry’. By the 1890s photographic imagery was produced to slot into discourses of national identity.
