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GRAFICO: SEPARARE LE PAROLE CON UN PALLINO

bush • colonial • counterculture • decades • differences • encouraged • evolved • folk • forgotten • homogeneous • influenced • isolation • landscapes • masculinism • national • reflected • shaping  • society • songs • varied

 

 

 

Australian culture long suffered of 'cultural cringe' (the complex which causes people in a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries). Itwas long dominated by the (1) ………… influence of Britain and has only really succeeded in establishing a vibrant (2) ………… identity in the last seventy-five years or thereabouts. Perhaps understandably in such a vast and (3) ………… land the 'bush' exerted a massive influence over writers, artists and other creative imaginations of the new land. (4) ………… dominated painting, while stories, music and (5) ………… were permeated with the sense of dramatic (6) ………… those landscapes evoked.

Romanticised views of the outback and the rugged characters that inhabited it are found in the rich tradition of (7) ………… songs and popular ballads (such as the most famous Australian verse Waltzing Matilda). They played an important part in (8) ………… the Australian (nation’s psyche) character, just as the cowboys of the American Old West.

Paradoxically, however, Australia has always been a characteristically urban (9) ………… and most recent literature, as well as the other arts, have (10) ………… this truth. The great novelist and Nobel laureate for Literature in 1973, Patrick White, represented this move from (11) ………… to town in Riders in the Chariot and The Vivisector. The urban (12) ………… of the 60s and later, which was greatly (13) ………… by cultural events in America and elsewhere, (14) ………… feminist writers like Helen Garner to totally reject the (15) ………… of the bush thematic.

Writing in Australia (16) ………… through a number of phases searching its own cultural voice. Until the mid-20^th century, Australians had written as though their work was that of a more or less (17) ………… society. In the closing (18) ………… of the 20^th century, however, the country’s literature began the discovery of (19) ………… within itself: regional, cultural, and ethnic.

For Oz the 'cultural cringe' is long (20) ………….

 

 

1. find the main idea in each paragraph.

2. make lists of the famous Australian actors, directors and films mentioned.

 

 

 

In the 1970s a more culturally refined Australian film style emerged. Period films such as Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1980), and Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant (1980) were well received by critics and audiences and brought international acclaim. The success of George Miller’s Mad Max (1979) and The Road Warrior (1981), both violent road movies set in the near future, made an international star of Mel Gibson.

    The bridging of the gap between rural and urban was illustrated by the 1986 light comedy Crocodile Dundee, starring popular comedian Paul Hogan as a bushranger displaced in New York City, which became a major worldwide hit. In the next decade Australian cinema continued to mature and produced such notable films as Proof (1991), Muriel’s Wedding (1994), Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Shine (1996), and Moulin Rouge (2001).

    Since the late 1980s, the most successful Australian directors, most notably George Miller, Peter Weir, Baz Luhrmann, Fred Schepisi and Gillian Armstrong, have, at some stage, been compelled to work in Hollywood to increase the probability for their films to reach the larger international stage. Their films have found the greatest success overseas.

    Moreover, at the turn of the 21^st century, Aussie stars like Nicole Kidman (Batman for Ever, The Hours, Cold Mountain, Australia, etc.), Russell Crowe (Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, etc.) Kate Blanchett (Charlotte Gray, The Lord of the Rings, etc.), Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive, The Ring, 21 Grams, etc.) and Hugh Jackman (X Men, Scoop, Australia) took Hollywood by storm.

The Australian film industry continues to produce a reasonable number of films each year. Moreover, many U.S. producers have moved productions to Australia to utilise new studios in Melbourne and Sydney where filming cost less than in the U.S.A. Notable productions include The Matrix, Star Wars Episodes II and III, Australia, Happy Fee,and many others.

 

 

 

1. What is the ‘Australian Dream’?

2. When did it grow?

3. Is it still living today?

4. Why was it criticized in art and literature?

5. What do most Australians have in their back garden?

6. What is typical of Australian lifestyle?

 

 

The Australian Dream focuses on the notion of home ownership as an expression of success and security. Typically it was the aspirational dream of a detached house on a quarter acre suburban block, surrounded by a garden which featured in the back two of Australia's most recognisable icons: a Hills Hoist rotary clothes line and a barbecue.

The origin of the Australian Dream dates back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the Australian manufacturing industry was expanding, unemployment rates were low, and the standard of living was growing. And in the 20 years after World War II more than 70 per cent of Australian households owned their homes.

The Australian Dream was chiefly identified with a particular lifestyle that included living within a nuclear family, taking an annual summer holiday by the ocean, and, for men, lawn-mowing and washing the family car on Saturday mornings. From the 1970s, the Australian Dream expanded to cover possession of a swimming pool in the back-yard and a second family car.

This dream became an occasional object of ridicule in art and literature as artists sometimes viewed it as representing conformism and narrow-mindedness: a rigidly uniform suburbia of box-like houses surrounded by almost identical gardens where neighbours were spying one another's behaviour.

Today, although the standard of living in Australia is comparatively higher than the rest of the world, rising house prices compared to average wages are making the Australian Dream unachievable for many, especially for those living in large cities.

 

 

1. What was the tragedy of the ‘stolen generations’?

2. When did it take place?

3. Why were Aboriginal children forcefully taken from their families?

4. Did they live a better life with white Australians?

5. How have things changed today?

6. Why is the issue of the restitution of their land to the indigenous population so important?

 

In the period between approximately 1869 and 1969, thousands of indigenous and mixed-descent children were taken away from their families and transferred into institutions (both government and missionary) to be ‘protected’ and ‘civilised’. The evidence indicated that in a large number of cases children were brutally and forcibly removed from their parents, possibly even from the hospital shortly after their birth. This actually was an attempt to eradicate the Aboriginal race and culture, which became notorious as the terrible tragedy of the ‘stolen generations’.

There are thousands of Aboriginal adults currently living in Australia who have not walked over their ancestral lands, cannot tell their people’s stories or sing their songs, cannot speak their native tongue, and do not know the face of their own mother.

“I can remember we used to just talk lingo. [In the Home] they used to tell us not to talk that language, that it’s devil’s language. And they’d wash our mouths with soap. We sorta had to sit down with Bible language all the time. So it sorta wiped out all our language that we knew.” (Testimony of an Aboriginal woman forcibly removed from her parents and placed at Umewarra Mission).

The late 1990s saw a new public interest on all issues related to Aborigines and most notably the Stolen Generations. Formal apologies were passed in the state parliaments, a National Sorry Day was held in 1998, reconciliation events were held nationally. Under increasing public pressure Conservative Prime Minister John Howard described the Stolen Generation as “[…] the most blemished chapter in the history of this country.”

 

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