The Bush Legend: The Australian Legend

How has the ‘bush legend’ been contested and criticised? The ‘bush legend’ was created in the 1880s and 1890s as a way to characterise Australians. However, it was popularised by Russel Ward’s 1958 book, The Australian Legend, which discusses the ‘typical Australian’, and describes the ‘typical Australian’ as,
“a practical man, rough and ready in his manners and quick to decry any appearance of affectation in others…a great improviser, ever willing to “have a go” at anything, but willing too to be content with a task done in a way that is “near enough”.… He swears hard and consistently, gambles heavily and often, and drinks deeply on occasion.… He is a “hard case”, sceptical about the value of religion and intellectual and cultural pursuits

Gender is also a factor in Australia’s national image (Carter 14). Society deems gender as the biological difference between male and female. However, this belief is problematic because sometimes certain people cannot place themselves in one of those two genders. For instance, there are transgender people. The image of the ‘typical Australian’ is controversial in many ways.
Australia has always been portrayed as masculine, heterosexual, and white. For example, the national image that Australians portray are stereotyped as the ‘frontier explorer’, the ‘bushman’, the ‘larrikin’, the ‘digger’, the ‘workingman’, the ‘breadwinner’, or the ‘globetrotting business tycoon’ (Carter 14). Men represent Australia, whereas women are seen in an inferior and domestic light, for example, they are seen as mothers and housewives (Carter

Ever since the 1970s, Australia has become a multicultural nation. Australia’s multiculturalism is a way to explain the variety of ethnic backgrounds within the Australian people. “It implies that there are many ways of being Australian, not just one ‘Australian way of life’” (Carter 333). Multiculturalism has majorly changed the way that people view Australian history and identity. The history of Australia has been altered through multiculturalism. As Carter explains, “Histories of different ethnic groups – the Chinese, Germans, Scandinavians and so forth – have appeared with increasing regularity in recent decades” (348). Australia no longer has the same relationship to a British heritage (Carter 347). More information uncovers the interracial mixing of Indigenous and Asian, European and non-European, etc. Multiculturalism, furthermore, is allowing Australia to break away from its racist and isolationist history (Carter 348). While this is positive, multiculturalism may be a form of ‘nationalist triumphalism. Ien Ang