Australia Day Meaning

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To understand the significance and meaning of Australia Day, we must first understand what it means to be ‘Australian.’ Ideas surrounding Australian nationalism are based on a feeling of ‘imagined’ national consciousness. The term imagined, for Anderson is not used to falsify the entity as fabricated, but to ‘express the link between members who will have never met, but are related through a shared culture. It is then the belief of these members that create a community’ (Anderson in Beatty, 1999, p.1). In the past, the defeated Liberal Government led by John Howard had promoted a particular view of Australia as a nation (Bielefeld, 2010, p.87). Australia was characterised by moral goodness, this fantasy of the ‘good, white’ nation, which was