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Australia, the Island Continent: How Contradictory Geography Shapes the National Imaginary

This article argues that Australia reimagined its geopolitical identity in the mid-20th century by recollocating the two terms of its unique, contradictory status as an island continent. Whereas colonial Australia had stressed the continental element of this descriptor, the middle years of the 20th century witnessed a shift in self-perception that laid stress on Australia as an island. This article identifies a wide, interconnected range of reasons for this change that turns on the dilemma of national interiority. Where Walter Benjamin identified the correlation between the domestic interior of the bourgeois dwelling in modernity and the imagined interior life of its inhabitant, the Australian encounter with European modernism transposed this analogy onto the newly colonized interior of the continent itself. At this complex intersection between identity and space, this article argues, the dilemma of a national interiority in played out as a predicate of possession.