Australian national identity: empirical research since 1998

ABSTRACT

The question of what Australian identity means has re-emerged, as globalisation and a concerted political effort to reconstruct an ‘Anglo’ identity have caused uncertainty about ‘who we are’. To explore how Australians conceptualise identity, this paper examines empirical research since Phillips’ [1998. Popular views about Australian identity: Research and analysis. Journal of Sociology, 34(3), 281–302. doi:10.1177/144078339803400305] seminal work synthesising research on Australian identity. Nearly two decades on, a civic/ethno-nationalist distinction and traditional socio-political correlates remain; but less dichotomous constructions are also being explored and more progressive values included. Key differences are found in the increased range of meanings of Australianness, as well as an apparent shift, for some, towards a cosmopolitan identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian identity
• civic and ethnonationalism
• nationalism
• multiculturalism
• cosmopolitanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Catherine Austin is a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia, in the faculty of Anthropology and Sociology. She has completed an Undergraduate in Psychology, Honours in Sociology. Research interests and experience included qualitative methodologies, identity, inclusion, nationalism, post-nationalism and human rights, and the interaction of these issues with contemporary forms of communication.

Farida Fozdar is Professor in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Western Australia. She has published widely in the areas of refugee and migrant settlement, race relations, nationalism and citizenship, predominantly using discourse analysis.

Notes

1 See Phillips (1998) paper for a full explanation of his sampling methods.

2 ProQuest, SAGE, JSTOR, Wiley Online Library, Factiva were all searched. Limitations were set for date (post-1998), and search terms included: ‘Australian identity’, ‘national identity’, ‘Australia’ and ‘identity’. Google scholar was also searched for articles that cite Phillips (1998) and other seminal works. While confident in our selection process, we acknowledge that it is possible some articles have been missed. We feel those analysed provide a comprehensive picture of findings from empirical studies.

3 We include both as ‘civic’ in accord with Jones’ own findings.

4 Numerous qualitative studies have been conducted exploring minority perspectives, many of which engage with national identity. However, the studies discussed here were selected for their prioritisation of this topic.

5 We note the use of 2005 and 2007 AuSSA data is an exception to this trend, however its uses have been limited. Such data are already a decade old, and it is strange that while AUSSA data are still collected, after the flurry of articles using it in the late 1990s and early 2000s, little use has been made of this data source since.

6 See Smith and Phillips (2006) ‘Collective belonging and mass media consumption: unraveling how technological medium and cultural genre shape the national imaginings of Australians’ and Phillips and Smith (2008) ‘Cosmopolitan beliefs and cosmopolitan practices: An empirical investigation’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant number FT100100432].