Humanities Research Seminar

9.30-10.30am Friday 10 October 2014 in A2 (note venue)

Graham Maddox

  America and Australia: Americanization and Political Culture

In 1998 an excellent survey, edited by Philip Bell and Roger Bell, explored the influences of American life and culture on Australia.  Scarcely any aspect of Australian life was unaffected by American example or direct intervention by Americans, almost from the beginning of our colonial history. This fine collection of essays exposed a richvein of observation on the United States, and offered astute commentary on the interactions between our two polities — all the while accepting that America, as vastly bigger than Australia, was the dominant partner in any exchange. Yet the somewhat patriotic tenor of the volume was that, although these American influences were everywhere to be found, they were largely assimilated to our own purposes, and changed into acceptable Australian patterns.  As one of the contributors put it, the process was largely to ‘adopt, adapt and transform’. This applied as much to language as to popular culture, film, television, sport, urbanization, literature, race relations, industrial relations and popular movements.

This paper is not an attempt to update or question the conclusions of the Bells and their collaborators since 1998. The present purpose, rather, is to take up a comment in the essay, ‘Political Culture’, by Elaine Thompson, concerning the rise in Australia ‘of a more individualistic ideology more akin to that which has dominated the United States…’ The individualism, of which Thompson speaks, issues in a distinct aversion to collective effort as exemplified by the activities of the state, and in a deep, if ambiguous, hostility to the federal government. That hostility was built into the federal system of government, an American invention.  Thompson wrote perceptively of the‘profound consequences for the entire definition of Australian politics‘ by anti-statist ideas coming out of the US in the twenty-five years before heressay was written.

Graham Maddox – BA, MA (Sydney), BScEcon, MSc (London), DipEd (Sydney), HonDLitt (UNE) – is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at UNE where he served as Dean of Arts for twelve years. Since 1998 he has been a member of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He has published widely on Australian democracy, the history of political thought, religion and politics, and constitutionalism. His book manuscript on America’s adverse influence on Australia is nearly complete. He is a highly valued adjunct member of the School of Humanities at UNE.

9.30-10.30am Friday 10 October 2014 in A2, followed by morning tea

ALL WELCOME

Enquiries to: Karin von Strokirch – kvonstro@une.edu.au