Out from the Legend's Shadow: Re-thinking national feeling in colonial Australia

A century on from Federation, the conventional frame fordiscussing the development of national consciousness prior to1901 is the whole territory and people of what was to becomethe Australian Commonwealth. This continental mind-set owes muchto Russel Ward, and the impact of his argument, first made half acentury ago, about the nineteenth-century origins of Australiannational identity. In this article I discuss the development of national feeling with a more restricted geographic focus, a phenomenonwhich in Ward's thesis, and since, has been too much overlooked.