For the people of South Australia, one point of interest in the upcoming NSW election concerns Dominic Perrottet’s repeated comparisons between Sydney and Adelaide. In Perrottet’s view, Sydney’s greatness is best measured against Adelaide because the South Australian capital leads the country in one respect only – dysfunctionality. His comments to this effect, which include two so far in the current election campaign, raise the question posed by Melbourne journalist MacKenzie Pennycook in her article, ‘Dom Perrottet has another weird swipe at Adelaide for literally no reason’. Mr. Perrottet, ‘what has South Australia done to you?’
There has been some high-brow analysis of Australian boganhood recently. The 2022 compilation of essays, Class in Australia, where writers ‘take class as their analytic focus, bringing empirical and conceptual light to the ways in which class offers a relational and structural understanding of inequality, social and cultural relations, and affective modalities’, includes the essay, ‘Bogan Talk: What It Says (and Can’t Say) about Class in Australia’. Then, the November issue of the Australian Book Review has an article, ‘On boganism: Reflections on class and Australian English’. This article, written by the Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre with an accompanying podcast, discusses the need for an expanded entry for ‘bogan’ in the Dictionary’s next update.
In his new book, The Brothers York: An English Tragedy, Thomas Penn patches over an important detail relating to Edward IV, who reigned from 1461 to 1483. Penn describes Edward as having been the legitimate son of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, and his wife Lady Cecily Neville. However, Edward’s legitimacy was a point of contention even in his own time and evidence discovered in 2003 goes a long way to proving, firstly, that Edward could not have been fathered by Richard, and secondly, that if the monarchical line had followed its true genealogical path through Edward’s younger brother, George, it leads eventually to rural Australia. Continue reading “My kingdom for a horse in Australia”→
Television advertisements in the lead up to Australia Day on 26 January 2017 have been telling the Australian people to celebrate the day “how you want to”. It is an interesting message from the Australian government. A typical Australian reaction to it might be to ask, if now we are to celebrate it how we want to, what was the prescribed method beforehand? Another broad section of the community might wonder whether the day has ever been celebrated at all – isn’t it just another public holiday? But, taking it in good faith, clearly this message is intended as an open and friendly acknowledgement of the fact that, for many of the people of Australia in 2017, Australia Day is not what it once was. Although the Queen of England remains our constitutional head of state, in today’s multi-cultural, multi-faith community the observance of Australia Day as a celebration of its anniversary is becoming more marginalised every year. The fact is that, quite apart from the ancient claim of the aboriginal people, many countries and cultures can say they have had a part in the creation of modern Australia. Some have done so during the 20th and 21st centuries with contributions to culture, cuisine or the arts. Others have done so by virtue of a particular historical incident.
Here is a story of the latter kind. It is a little-known historical incident that gives one particular country – Holland – a small but meaningful stake in Australian history. Most Australians know that the first British settlement arrived on 26 January 1788. Many Australians are also familiar with the fact that there were previous European landings, such as by Willem Janszoon in 1606 and William Dampier in 1688. But few Australians know that the first Europeans to actually live permanently in Australia were the two Dutchmen, Wouter Looes and Jans Pelgrom, from 1629.
With Australian Heritage Week nearly upon us (16 – 24 April), the following is a post concerning a particular perspective of Australian colonial history, being a perspective that can be researched in detail with Gale’s Primary Source Collections. It concerns Australia’s paradoxical relationship with England since 1788, as reflected within the pages of London’s Punch magazine and its Australian editions – most of which can be seen in Gale’s Primary Source Collections, Punch Historical Archive, 1841 – 1992 and 19th Century UK Periodicals.
Craig Pett 