Aussie battler in crisis? Shifting constructions of white Australian masculinity and national identity

Abstract

In the last decade, the white 'man in crisis' - a prominent figure in American society - has entered the Australian cultural conscious, and now begins to challenge the position of the 'Aussie battler' as the dominant version of Australian masculinity. This paper investigates the implications of this shift for Australian national identity - a construction historically and contemporaneously tied to white male identity - by exploring the manifestation of the 'man in crisis' in current political and popular debates, before moving to consider the ways in which these debates emerge and are affirmed and transformed in contemporary Australian women's fiction. Specifically, I argue that in the popular and political arenas, the identities of the Aussie battler and the man in crisis currently exist in tension. Some contemporary Australian women's fictions, like Jillian Watkinson's The Architect, resolve this conflict by privileging of the man in crisis to the exclusion of the Aussie battler. Although such narratives appear to offer a more sensitive and emotional model of masculinity, closer analysis evinces the sexist, racist and homophobic undertones of this emerging phenomenon within Australian fiction and society. Other contemporary Australian women's fictions, such as Fiona Capp's Last of the Sane Days and Sarah Myles's Transplanted, depict and engage with both the man in crisis and the Aussie battler to produce a refiguring of Australian identity in ways that depart from the longstanding affiliation of nationhood with masculinity. Yet despite their reconfiguration of gender, these contemporary Australian women's fictions continue to imagine Australian identity in terms of whiteness. Show more