Literature and Politics

Fifty years ago Russel Ward wrote the Australian Legend which traced the apparent origins of a stereotype and a national mystique and a set of assumptions about the 'typical Australian'. From its first printing and throughout the 1960s Ward's book remained a best seller. By 1971 the book had been reprinted in 50 editions and nearly 2 million copies had been sold. This paper will examine the politics of the book's meaning in the context of  Cold War Australian anxieties about immigration, assimilation, race,gender and masculinity. Ward's book inadvertently offered a necessary mythology about a white settler Australian past as a salve if not a reassurance about Australian identity as a flight from being in the midst of the Cold War.