Symbols of Australia
Melissa Harper and Richard White (eds.)
UNSW Press

Symbols of Australia is a fascinating read, with a total of thirty writers dissecting and analysing the symbols of Australia, from the Opera House to the Coat of Arms, to the Pavlova Cooee and all in-between, everything’s up for grabs.

Symbols of Australia is much more than a brief history of Australian symbols; it’s a study of the symbols from a cultural studies perspective. The myriad meanings and contestations of the symbols are discussed as well as historical origins. Perhaps the best example of this is the chapter on The Southern Cross by Jane Taylor. She charts its existence from a constellation seen from Europe 2000 years ago, the topic of poems and mystical associations, to its material manifestation in the Eureka stockade. She then moves onto the present day and its embodiment as a symbol claimed by diverse and oppositional groups such as the Australian Communist Party, various unions, rednecks and the racist National Action. (Strangely she didn’t discuss its use by the BLF, probably the most well-known organisation to use it in the present day.)

Not all the symbols written about are as well known as the Southern Cross. Others, such as The Shark, are not symbols that readily come to mind, although Helen Tiffin makes a strong case for their inclusion. She traverses the symbol of the shark from a creature of fear amongst early settlers to an iconographic representation of the Australian – especially male – casual attitude to danger, which has been used to great effect in the selling of Australia.

Dennis Altman offers up a fascinating political interrogation of the stamp. He charts the stamp as a representation of Australian value and meaning to another victim of economic rationalism whereby stamps are developed more to satisfy collectors than as a repository of Australian values.

Altman manages to let loose a few sly digs at Australia’s sports obsession and insular perspective in his discussion and includes some interesting facts about stamps. I didn’t know that Australian colonies were among the first in the world to issue stamps, or that WA only included an image of The Queen in 1901, fifty years after all other colonies had well and truly cemented The Queen as their favoured image.

Marilyn Lake and Penny Russell tackle Miss Australia – not, as I first thought, the beauty pageant, but the representation of women in Australia and the gendered embodiment of the nation. Especially interesting was the idea that in the early days Australia wanted to be male, but was seen as female by bigger powers, but has now had a sex change from female to male. This is a dense but fascinating read, and like most of the contributions is well researched and argued.

Richard White tackles Cooee as a national symbol and enlightened me as to the history and uses of a word seldom uttered in modern Australia. I knew it was Indigenous in origin but was unaware that Indigenous people were using it throughout most of Australia when Whiteman first arrived on the shores.

White takes us on a journey and paints a picture of Australians hollering cooee when lost in London fog and moves into the reinvention of cooee as a non-Indigenous term by the Bulletin, a magazine which prided itself on its whiteness. White also claims that ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi Oi’ serves much the same purpose as cooee did; that of national signifier. Personally I prefer Cooee to ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie Oi, Oi, Oi’, which to me sounds like a skinhead war cry.

The most peculiar incarnation of cooee was created by Maude Wordsworth James, who registered it as a trademark and made cooee brand jewellery, china and pottery. Her most ambitious idea was for every house to have a cooee corner, complete with ‘a clock that bizarrely featured a mechanical Blackfellow with Boomerang in his hand who emerged to cooee the hour and half hour.’

Symbols of Australia is a fascinating book, beautifully presented with colour pictures of posters, musical scores, statues and other artefacts from all eras of Australian history. As a history teacher, I think it’s a brilliant resource for the teaching of Australian History. None of the chapters are especially long, although the language and concepts of the text places it as a resource best suited to senior school, rather than middle school.

For anyone interested in the contestations and multiple meanings of what it means to be Australian and the role symbols have played in this debate, Symbols of Australia is well worth a read.