Does Australia have a national culture? Should this be a goal – are there better ways to value culture? Honorary Associate Professor Esther Anatolitis chairs a panel of leading culture scholars and leaders, Professor Justin O’Connor, Dr Mathew Trinca FAHA, Mr Kim Williams AM & Professor Jacqueline Lo.

Friday 15 November, 1.30-3.00pm

Culture has long been integral to national community, and this relationship was being reshaped and reinvigorated at the time Donald Horne wrote The Lucky Country. Horne celebrated the culture and lifestyle of ordinary Australians while bemoaning the quality of Australia’s elite, and the 1970s and 1980s witnessed greater investment in the cultural domains, seeing the rise of commercial sport as spectacle and the lavish, colourful and contested Bicentenary of 1988. The present century, however, has arguably seen a faltering of the idea of culture as a basis of national identity, as well as less willingness on the part of government to fund it. How did culture lose some of this purchase as a public good, and how has the idea that it is an elite project been so easily politicised to fight culture wars? The session will explore whether the project of a national culture is still either possible or desirable, and what role a renovated and inclusive concept of culture might play in Australia’s future.

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IMAGE CREDIT: Rhoda Tjitayi, Piltati Tjukurpa, 2023