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A society’s functional memory “is built on a small number of normative and formative texts, places, persons, artefacts, and myths” that are “actively circulated and communicated” and, as such, work to "store and reproduce the cultural capital of a society” to ensure such knowledge is “recycled and re-affirmed" on a continual basis.[1] Much writing about Australia from 1788 to the mid 1800s included depictions of: the bush, its beauty and strangeness; unfamiliar plants and animals; women and men in towns and the bush who worked hard, succeeded and failed, to create new lives; positive and negative responses to Indigenous people; desire to belong; nostalgia for and desire to return to their homeland. The sentiments and representations were complex. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, pre- and post- Federation politics and the desire by some for depictions of Australia and Australians that foreground a national character – a crude and simplistic articulation that denies the many complexities – skewed representations towards restricted notions of the city and the bush, men and women, masculinity and more. The complexities and intricacies of the Bush and its inhabitants were often downplayed in the late 1800s and early 1900s as representations of the Bush focused on the national character became simplified and later stereotyped by those creating a mythology. Richard Waterhouse, whose article “Australian Legends: Representations of the Bush, 1813–1913”[2] you read, argues that portrayals of men and women became limited to Anglo-Saxon heroic pioneers working on the frontier towards the progress and prosperity of the nation. Stories of the frontier ceased to acknowledge differences in backgrounds, economic classes and occupations of Bush inhabitants. Australians were increasingly painted as an homogeneous population and described in dualistic terms such as city/country, man/woman and white/black.
[1] Assman, Aleida. 2008. “Canon and Archive: The dynamics of cultural memory between remembering and forgetting.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Erll, Astrid and Ansgar Nünning, Eds. De Gruyter, Inc., 100.
[2] 2000. Waterhouse, Richard. “Australian Legends: Representations of the Bush, 1813–1913.” Australian Historical Studies 31:115, 201-221