Rethinking the Australian Legend
Abstract Fifty years after its publication Russel Ward's The Australian Legend remains the classic account of our national culture. It was shaped by a long debate, in Europe and Australia, about the cultural basis of national selfhood, as well as by the events of Ward's own time: the 1930s depression, the popular front against Nazism and the early years of the Cold War. Russel Ward was a true believer in the bush legend as well as a critical interpreter of its origins, an ambiguity of purpose that reflected his shift from radical activist to academic, and from folklorist to cultural historian. In its preoccupation with ideas of national belonging it stands in a tradition that begins with the German Romantics and continues in contemporary interests in the Dreamtime.