ABSTRACT
Australia is indeed characterized by both a ruling class and a ruling culture. The incorporation of the Australian working class in the postwar period was an effect of postwar reconstructionist politics, social reformism and the relative success of the economy within the world economic system. The central peculiarity of Australian society historically was that the state preceded the existence of civil society. The Australian settlements were seen to be important experimental locations for the new penitentiary system developed under a Benthamite ideology of prison reform. Australia was the first society to provide the location for a complete experimental testing of the system of panopticism. The Australian civil religion can be said to have the following components: male chauvinism, militarism and a nostalgic conception of the bush. The weakness of most sociological accounts of ideology and culture in Australia is the absence of any clear or decisive evidence for the existence of a hegemonic culture.
