Why go
Use a film screening, play or exhibition to ask whose version of Australia is on show. Bushranger tales and Gallipoli have been retold repeatedly, while works about Pitjantjatjara experience show why a single national narrative cannot cover every community or landscape.
The full story
Early Australian writing gave the bush a powerful place in national imagination. Banjo Paterson's romantic verse and Henry Lawson's harder view of bush life show that even familiar rural subjects were debated. The Kelly story travelled across forms: the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang turned bushranging into an early screen narrative. Such works are useful for understanding how a frontier image became widely recognisable, but they do not describe the whole country. Theatre offers a different way to examine national memory. Alan Seymour's The One Day of the Year questions the meaning of Anzac Day commemoration. Ngapartji Ngapartji, by Scott Rankin and Trevor Jamieson, addresses the effects of nuclear testing in the Western Desert on Pitjantjatjara people, using a cast with several cultural backgrounds. Indigenous Australian arts encompass their own traditions and contemporary work; they should not be folded into a colonial bush story. At an exhibition or performance, the artist, community and place named in the work are the best starting points for understanding what you see.