ABSTRACT
Hughes’ story of convict cannibalism encapsulates two aspects of Australian historical and contemporary social practice which give some hint of the way a society could be formed from such unpromising beginnings. The uneasy conjunction of individualist solutions to a common problem with egalitarian demands for partnership in a common enterprise has been characteristic of Australian social relations for two centuries. It is mythology which structures and manipulates the relations between state and people, drawing upon more or less widespread and collectively held understandings of being in the world to establish and maintain a certain spectrum of those understandings as characteristic of a social formation, an identity, a national self. Much Australian social policy is directed towards overcoming the separation and fragmentation induced by divisions between individuals and groups, whether the political differences be mythologized as natural or artificial.
