Spatial Practices and the Rejection of "Modern Aspirations" in Australia ('Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia'‪)‬

Allaine Cerwonka, Native to the Nation: Disciplining Landscapes and Bodies in Australia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 1. In Native to the Nation Allaine Cerwonka explores the ways in which Australians define their place in the world and how their sense of belonging is expressed through physical manipulation of landscape. Although this examination of spatial practices will appeal to scholars in a wide variety of disciplines, Cerwonka declares her work to be "a study of politics" (p. 51) primarily concerned with the manner in which globalisation has "complicated the territoriality of national communities" (p. 47). This book is based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork completed in Melbourne during the 1990s, and the author's inquiry was visibly influenced by the Republican debate that was then being waged in Australia. At that time Prime Minister Paul Keating envisioned his Labor government as the initiator of change and called for the establishment of a republic with an Australian head of state who would "embody our modern aspirations - our cultural diversity, our evolving partnerships with Asia and the Pacific, our quest for reconciliation with Aboriginal Australians" (quoted in Dyrenfurth, p. 191). Heated public debate and national soul-searching did not yield a republic, and Cerwonka views this rejection at the ballot box as evidence that multiculturalism, reconciliation and engagement with Asia posed a major challenge to "the imagined connection between people, place and culture upon which the settler nation-state has been premised" (p. 8). Though numerous books have tackled the topic of republicanism in Australia, Cerwonka uses the referendum campaign as the departure point for her exploration of the subtle linkages between national imagination, landscape sensibilities and lingering "Britishness" in Australian society.