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October 13, 2010
For Bernard Smith to be Antipodean, a deliberately Eurocentric marker, is to imagine one’s identity and the places one belongs to, in transnational ways. It means, at least within Smith’s temporal and spatial positioning, being both an Australian and European. The relationship between the periphery (or should this be semi-periphery?) and the centre is always seen as a dynamic interactive process.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Junction Mine, Broken Hill, NSW
As Peter Beilharz stresses in in his book Imagining the Antipodes, ‘the Antipodes is not a place so much as it is a relation, one not of our own choosing but one which also enables us’. This is a perception that does not ‘set the local against the global but rather re-presents the local as the global’ in myriad relational ways.
The concept of national identity is seen as ‘relational’, implying the intentional establishment of relations. This definition of identity as relational has been developed by Bernard Smith. Beilharz interprets Smith’s argument thus:
Culture is relational, as is identity; neither is usefully viewed as essential, emanating from spirit, place, land, language or race. To imagine the antipodes is to imagine the relations upon which identity rests and changes.
Smith, for example, identifies nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century as primarily a response to imperialism, which he in turn identifies as the first real wave of Australian identity formation. Beilharz says in his Australia: The Unhappy Country, or, a Tale of Two Nations in Thesis Eleven (Number 82 2005) that:
The image of the Antipodes, having the feet elsewhere from the centres of metropolitan civilization, suggests that identity results from relationship between places and cultures rather than emerging from place, or ground. We, in the Antipodes, do have practical as well as romantic connection to or affection for our place; but we are placed in it by the movements of empire and world system, migration and cultural traffic. We feel, in Australia, or at least many of us do, that we are simultaneously here, and there, home and away. The image of hybrid- ity or grafting appeals, however clumsily. But the image of the Antipodes captures our predicament better, as it suggests movement rather than fixity, as the hard physiological metaphor of hybridity does.
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