Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
In an article on contemporary performance in Australia Keith GalIasch, the editor of RealTime, a national journal of contemporary arts, described the Australian body as 'culturalIy complex'. For GalIasch 'a body rich in its diversity', that is, a body or corpus increasingly open to Indigenous Australia and the influence of migrant, feminist and queer Australia has displaced a working class ethos and a culture 'reticent and wary of high culture and the intellect'. What GalIasch is suggesting is a shift from 'unmarked' white Australia - the myth of a mono Anglo-Celtic national culture - to a landscape characterised by heterogeneous 'presences', and in doing so, points to the question of the relationship between cultural identities and the 'imagined community' of the nation.
RIS ID
26597