Becoming Australians

To go to bed on 31 December 1900 and, having slept soundly, rise the next morning, was to find oneself transformed literally overnight from a ‘citizen’ merely of a colony into a citizen of a nation. Even the most prosaic or preoccupied among the residents of Australia’s six new states must have been aware that such an event does not occur every day.

In 2001 Australia will celebrate the Centenary of Federation, but what does this really mean? The beginning of a the twenty-first century is bringing rapid technological and social changes that demand fresh analysis of how the past has shaped the present. The essays in this book pose questions for Australians as a people with a sense of national consciousness in a world dominated by supranational, global forces.