Academic literature on the topic 'Australians, fiction'

The difference between how multicultural Australia is ‘in real life’ and ‘in broadcasting’ can be seen through data from the Census, and from Screen Australia’s most recent research into on screen diversity. In 2016, these sources of data coincided with the Census, which takes place every five years. Conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this presents a ‘snapshot’ of Australian life. From the newest Census figures in 2016, it appears that nearly half of the population in Australia (49 percent) had either been born overseas (identifying as first generation Australian) or had one or both parents born overseas (identifying as second generation Australian). Nearly a third, or 32 percent, of Australians identified as having come from non-Anglo Celtic backgrounds, and 2.8 percent of Australians identify as Indigenous (Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander). Nearly a fifth, or 18 percent, of Australians identify as having a disability. Screen Australia is the government agency that oversees film and TV funding and research. Conducted in 2016, Screen Australia’s study looked at 199 television dramas (fiction, excluding animation) that aired between 2011 and 2015. The comparison between these two sources of data reveals that with one exception, there is a marked disparity between diversity as depicted in the lived experiences of Australians and recorded by the Census, and diversity as depicted on screen and recorded by the Screen Australia survey.

This article examines children's novels and short stories published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that feature bushfires and the ceremonial fires associated with Indigenous Australians. It suggests that British children's novels emphasise the horror of bushfires and the human struggle involved in conquering them. In contrast, Australian-authored children's fictions represent less anthropocentric understandings of the environment. New attitudes toward the environment are made manifest in Australian women's fiction including J. M. Whitfield's ‘The Spirit of the Bushfire’ (1898), Ethel Pedley's Dot and the Kangaroo (1899), Olga D. A. Ernst's ‘The Fire Elves’ (1904), and Amy Eleanor Mack's ‘The Gallant Gum Trees’ (1910). Finally, the article proposes that adult male conquest and control of the environment evident in British fiction is transferred to a child protagonist in Mary Grant Bruce's A Little Bush Maid (1910), dispensing with the long-standing association between the Australian bush and threats to children.

In his interesting study 'Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920', Martin Crotty argues that turn-of-the-century Australians firmly rejected the androgynous, domesticated gender role that both children's fiction and the public schools had offered Australian boys in the 1870s... Work such as Crotty's should help to inspire any number of reexaminations of the masculine gender role in texts that sought to acculturate young readers before, during, and after the Great War.

The status of the subjunctive is examined in this Australian study of its manifestations in subordinate clauses: in mandative constructions as well as those expressing purpose, condition, concession and the counterfactual. Data from the Australian ACE corpus (1986) is compared with (a) those from the American Brown corpus and the British LOB corpus (both 1961); and with (b) findings from an Australian elicitation survey of 1993. Both the diachronic corpus comparisons and the sociolinguistic profiles associated with the survey indicate declining use of the subjunctive in adverbial clauses, most notably the counterfactual type, but also those expressing purpose, concession and ordinary conditions. However the use of mandative subjunctives is stable, written into a range of corpus materials (fiction and non-fiction), and endorsed by Australians across the age range. The resilience of the mandative subjunctive in Australian (and American) usage contrasts with the prevailing view of British usage commentators, that the subjunctive, if not obsolescent, should not be preserved.

During the first century of Australia's colonization, settler thanatopolitics meant both casual killing of individual Natives and organized massacres of Aboriginal clans. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, Aboriginal Protection Boards sought to disappear their charges by more covert means. Thus, biopolitics of biological absorption, cultural assimilation, and child removal, designed to bring about the destruction of Aboriginal peoples, came to be represented as being in the victims' best interests. Even today, coercive assimilation is framed in the now-threadbare terms of welfare discourse. Yet, Australia's Indigenous peoples have survived the genocidal practices of the frontier era and continue to resist the relentless succession of normative policies deployed to eradicate their “recalcitrant” lifeways. This essay presents a brief historical overview of settler Australia's biopolitics and analyzes the sociocultural factors enabling Aboriginal Australians both to survive the devastating impact of settler biopower and to resist the siren call of assimilationist rhetoric. Drawing on Kim Scott's Benang and Alexis Wright's Plains of Promise, I discuss how that resistance is reflected in contemporary Indigenous life-writing and fiction.

Working with beginning teachers to assist them to begin to ‘think what we do’ (Arendt, 1998) in both mainstream and Indigenous education is problematic. This is particularly so because the majority of our teacher candidates, and indeed most of their university lecturers, are positioned close to the racial, social and cultural centre of Australian education. That is, teachers and teacher educators tend to be white, middle class, educationally successful, and accepting of the main premises and assumptions, purposes and values of formal schooling in Australia. This proximity to the centre can lead to an inability to question ideas and practices that, while everyday and seemingly innocuous, are frequently dangerous and destructive for those at the margins. In this article, we illustrate the normative power of hegemonic ideas by using aspects of the teen fiction The Hunger Games as an analogy for ‘thoughtless’ and unquestioning acceptance of authority. We then describe and discuss a pedagogic practice used within the Master of Teaching program at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. The practice is designed to challenge normative understandings about Australian history, teaching Indigenous Australian students, and to encourage engagement with the German-American Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt's provocative question ‘What are we doing?’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 5). We conclude the article with a challenge to re-think current policies and practices in the education of Indigenous Australians.

Theorising about identity has become fashionable. During 1999 alone several conferences and seminars were dedicated to identities in Australia: “Alter/Asians: Exploring Asian/Australian Identities, Cultures and Politics in an Age of Crisis” held in Sydney in February, the one-day conference “Cultural Passports” on the concept and representations of “home” held at the University of Sydney in June, and “Asian-Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia” at the Australian National University in September. To me as a Chinese who had his childhood and education in New Zealand this concern with identity is not exceptional: I remain a keen reader of New Zealand fiction and poetry in which Pakeha New Zealanders have agonised and problematised their search for identity as an island people living among an aggressive indigenous population and in an insecure dependent economy. New Zealand identity has always been problematised as has Chinese identity: what does it mean to be Chinese? Now Asian identity has become the current issue: “We're not Asians” was the title of the paper by Lily Kong on identity among Singaporean students in Australia. White Australians appear much more content and complacent with their identity and do not indulge as much in navel gazing. And yet it may be that it is the “Australian identity” that needs to be challenged and contested so that it becomes less an exclusively WASP-ish male mateship and more inclusive of women, Aborigines and Asians.

Since the education explosion in mid-nineteenth century England, when astute publishers began to capitalise upon a newly created and burgeoning market, Australia has always featured prominently in fiction aimed at children and adolescents. Those British children who initially made up the bulk of the reading audience for books set in Australia were eager to read episodic stories set in exciting countries far from home, and an Australian setting offered a glamorous backdrop for tales of high adventure. Moreover, it appears that while the nineteenth-century British reading public perceived Australia as an exotic place, then Queensland was quintessentially so. A disproportionate number of early tales about life in Australia is set in this colony, most often in the outback regions, but also in the vicinity of the coastal tropics. Nineteenth-century Queensland was viewed by the British, as well as by many Australians, as a remote outpost of Great Britain; it was commonly thought of as the least urbanised, the least “civilised”, the least industrialised and perhaps the most remote of all the regions of Australia. It was widely seen as an area of great and diverse (if also mysterious and desolate) natural beauty, of rural innocence as yet unpolluted by dark, satanic mills (even Brisbane was a sleepy, sprawling country town in picturesque contrast to the bustling southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne). Children's novelists capitalised on the mystique of Queensland, archetypal frontier colony, by creating a cluster of tales showing what it was like to be a Queensland kid.

Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have undertaken important critical work on Australian women’s writing of earlier eras, profiling and promoting their fiction. Less attention has been afforded to the popular non-fiction produced by Australian women writers and, in particular, to that produced before the Second World War. Yet this writing is important for several reasons. First, the non-fiction writing of Australian women was voluminous and popular with readers. Second, this popular work critically engaged with a tumultuous political, social and moral landscape in which, as women’s rights were increasingly realized through legislation, the subjectivity of women themselves was fluid and contested. Third, as many of these women were also, or principally, fiction writers, their non-fiction can be shown to have informed and influenced many of their fictional interests, themes and characters. Lastly, and critically, popular non-fiction publication helped to financially sustain many of these writers. In proposing a conceptual framework informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyse examples of this body of work, this article not only suggests that important connections exist between popular and mainstream non-fiction works – newspaper and magazine articles, essays, pamphlets and speeches – and the fictional publications of Australian women writers of the early twentieth century but also suggests that these connections may represent an Australian literary habitus where writing across genre, form and audience was a professional approach that built and sustained literary careers.

My thesis is a creative writing doctorate which focuses on one Chinese family's adaptation to living in Australia in the mid-twentieth century. The thesis is in two parts. Part I is an examination of Chineseness and identity within the context of the short stories that make up Part I1 of the thesis. In Part I, I have looked at the place of the Chinese within the larger, dominant cultures of America and Australia. In particular, I have discussed the way in which the discourses of the dominant culture have framed Chineseness; and also what it might mean to describe authentic and essential qualities in Chineseness. The question I ask is whether the concept of Chineseness shifts according to time, location, history, and intercultural encounters. This leads me to try to "place" my family and myself. I provide some background on my family and on specific incidents that have served as springboards for the fiction. Part I also discusses some aspects of narrative theory in relation to the stories and considers the stories within the context of other Chinese- Australian fiction and performance. Ln Part 11, I have written a collection of nine short stories about the lives of a fictitious family called the Tangs. The stories can be described as a cycle that is unified and linked by characters who are protagonists in one story but appear in a minor or supporting role in other stories. Composing a linked cycle of stories has given me the opportunity to extend the short story form, especially by giving me scope to expand the lives of the characters beyond a single story. The lives of the characters can take on greater complexity since they confront challenges at different stages of their lives from different perspectives.

This thesis is a seminal in-depth study of how non-indigenous writers and illustrators construct Aboriginal childhood in children's fiction from 1841-1998 and focuses not only on what these say about Aboriginal childhood but also what they neglect to say, what they gloss over and what they elide. This study probes not only the construction of aboriginal childhood in children's fiction, but explores the slippage between the lived and imagined experiences which inform the textual and illustrative images of non-Aboriginal writers. This study further contends that neo-colonial variations on the themes informing these images remain part of Australian children's fiction. Aboriginal childhood has played a limited but telling role in Australian children's literature. The very lack of attention to Aboriginal children in Australian children's fiction - white silence - is resonant with denial and self-justification. Although it concentrates on constructions of aboriginal childhood in white Australian children's fiction, this study highlights the role that racial imagery can play in any society, past or present by securing the unwitting allegiance of the young to values and institutions threatened by the forces of change. By examining the image of the Other through four broad thematic bands or myths - the Aboriginal child as the primitive; the identification of the marginalised and as the assimilated and noting the essential similarities that circulate among the chosen texts, this study attempts to reveal how pervasive and controlling the logic of racial and national superiority continues to be. By exploring the dissemination of images of Aboriginal childhood in this way, this study argues that long-lived distortions and misconceptions will become clearer

This research project asserts the primacy of creative practice as a key method of enquiry and explores how fictional stories, re-imagined from historical events of the mid-twentieth century, may provide different ways of viewing a world which was inhabited by once-silenced children, now known as the ‘forgotten Australians’. To this end, the thesis is made up of a creative component in the form of a book-length collection of short fiction that is accompanied by a critical component positioning the thesis contextually, theoretically and methodologically. The research reveals overwhelming evidence of a culture of endemic abuse within Australian child welfare organisations whereby harm was done to children in the context of policies and programmes that were designed to provide care and protection. During this era, ideologies underpinning community beliefs were patriarchal, conservative and insular. It was purported that children were ‘committed’ to imposing, regimentally run institutions ‘for their own good’. The project draws on sources from disciplines including history, psychology and literary studies, as the investigation exposes the blurred boundaries which exist between fiction and nonfiction; personal and social memory; official and unofficial narratives; knowing and not-knowing the past. In doing so, it argues that although there can be no single narrative of history, fictional narratives provide another conduit into stories from the past and have the potential to act as agents for social change.

This project involved writing Turrwan (great man), a novel set in Queensland in the nineteenth century, and an investigation into the way historical novels portray the past. Turrwan tells the story of Tom Petrie, who was six when he arrived with his family at the notorious Moreton Bay Penal Colony in 1837. The thesis examines historical fiction as a genre with particular focus on notions of historical authenticity. It analyses the complexities involved in a non-Indigenous person writing about the Australian Aboriginal people, and reflects on the process of researching, planning and writing a historical novel.

In this thesis, I examine in Peter Carey’s early fiction the portrayal of Australia’s struggle to imagine a unique identity for itself. Three different, but overlapping, approaches will be woven together to serve as a lens through which his work can be read. First, it will be useful to situate the work within the context of Australian history and popular culture, which suggests an obsessive search for an “authentic” Australian identity, as well as the theoretical work on the social construction of such identities. Second, I will draw upon the work of Benedict Anderson, paired with that of Pheng Cheah, as a means of discussing the comparative process by which national identities are imagined and how those imagined identities emerge in cultural productions. In particular, I examine the typically unique characteristics and ideologies that are used as a basis when imagining national identities, as many of Australia’s are shared with both Britain and America. I will therefore engage with concepts like “totality,” “unisonance” and “seriality” as a means of discussing Carey’s work. Moreover, I will be utilising Louis Althusser’s concept of national ideology as a means of explicating Anderson’s and Cheah’s work. Finally, since the intersection between the national and the transnational is often conceived of in post-colonial language, especially in terms of Australia’s relationship to Britain and the United States, this thesis will draw on the work of post-colonial theorists like Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Homi K. Bhabha, and Edward Said.

The aim of this thesis is to assess David Malouf’s contribution to the field of gender and men studies in his fiction books. In order to do so, I have proceeded by offering a close reading of each of his novels so as to emphasise those parts of the plot where gender and masculinities are more relevant, and from here engaging in a series of theoretical discourses as I saw convenient in the course of my analysis. We read his largely autobiographical novel Johnno in the tradition of the Bildungsroman. In this tradition, the main characters fulfil themselves when they meet the roles that society expects of them. Therefore, becoming a man or a woman means meeting these expectations. In Johnno, Malouf offers an alternative form of successful socialisation that redeems the main character, Dante as an artist but is also built on personal tragedy. We use Judith Butler’s studies on the performativity of gender, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva’s ècriture feminine and their distinction between symbolic and semiotic language, Eve K. Sedgwick and René Girard’s studies on homosocial desire and triangulation, and Simone the Beauvoir and Pierre Bourdieu’s ethnographic research on women and Kabyle society, respectively, to read An Imaginary Life and Harland’s Half Acre. In An Imaginary Life, Malouf fictionalises the life of the poet Ovid in exile. In Rome, Ovid defies patriarchy and the Emperor writing a poetry that is uncivil and gay. In his exile in Tomis, Ovid decides to raise a feral Child against the advice of the women in the village, who end up using their power, based on folklore and superstition, to get rid of them. In Harland’s Half Acre, Malouf creates a male household where women are mostly absent, and a female one where the women are the main actors and men play a secondary role. When the main character of the novel, Frank Harland, finally recovers the family estate for his family’s only descendant, his nephew Gerald, the latter commits suicide. One of Malouf’s main concerns in his writings, the outcome of the novels privilege a spiritual sort of possession over one based on the values of patriarchy, that is, bloodline succession by right of the first-born male child, hierarchical power relations and ownership: Ovid survives in his poems thanks to the human need for magic and superstition, and so does Frank in his art. Michael S. Kimmel and R. W. Connell’s studies on men and masculinities, and historical research on Australian identity as it was forged during the colonial period and the World Wars help us read Fly Away Peter, The Great World, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek. In Australia, national identity and definitions of manhood are closely tied to frontier and war masculinities. In these novels, Malouf portrays the Australian legend: sceptical of authority, easy-going, egalitarian, larrikin, resourceful, etc. Unfortunately, the legend had a destructive effect on women and the feminine, and that is the reason why we recover from oblivion the important role that women played in the construction of Australia. Edward Said’s research in Culture and Imperialism, Homi Bhabha’s notions of hybridity and mimicry, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness provide us valuable tools to analyse class and ethnic issues when we ask ourselves what it means to be a man in Remembering Babylon. Margaret M. Gullette’s studies on the representation of age bias in literature and Ashton Applewhite’s research against ageism provide the theoretical framework for Ransom, where Malouf tells the story of Priam’s ransom of his son Hector, urging us to wonder what kind of heroism is left to a man in his old age. Finally, we offer a close reading of the outcome of the novels, where the agents of transformation are always male or involve male characters: Dante and Johnno, the eponymous hero of the novel; the Child in An Imaginary Life; Digger and Vic in The Great World; Gemmy in Remembering Babylon or Priam and Achilles in Ransom. In this way, we hope to better understand and more clearly render the world of men that Malouf portrays in his novels.
L’objectiu de la tesi és valorar la contribució de les obres de ficció de David Malouf als estudis de gènere i de masculinitats. Per tal d’aconseguir-ho, hem dut a terme una lectura fidel de les seves novel·les tot emfasitzant aquells elements de la història on el gènere i les masculinitats són més rellevants, i a partir d’aquí hem emprat una sèrie de teories que consideràvem adients en la nostra anàlisi. Hem llegit la seva novel·la àmpliament autobiogràfica, Johnno en la tradició de la Bildungsroman. En aquesta tradició, els personatges principals es realitzen quan compleixen les expectatives que la societat espera d’ells. Així doncs, fer-se un home o una dona vol dir complir aquestes expectatives. A Johnno, Malouf ens dóna una forma alternativa de socialització exitosa que redimeix al personatge principal, Dante, però que també s’erigeix sobre una tragèdia personal. Emprem la recerca de Judith Butler sobre la “performativitat” del gènere, l’ècriture feminine d’Hélène Cixous i Julia Kristeva i la distinció que fan entre llenguatge semiòtic i simbòlic, els estudis de Eve K. Sedgwick i René Girard sobre desig homosocial i el triangle amorós, i la recerca etnogràfica de Simone the Beauvoir i Pierre Bourdieu sobre la dona I la societat Kabyle, respectivament, en la nostra anàlisi d’An Imaginary Life i Harland’s Half Acre. A An Imaginary Life, Malouf narra la vida del poeta Ovidi a l’exili. A Roma, Ovidi desafia el patriarcat escrivint una poesia que és impertinent i divertida. Al seu exili a Tomis, Ovidi decideix criar un nen salvatge, contradient el consell de les dones del poble, que acaben utilitzant el seu poder, basat en les tradicions populars i la superstició, per lliurar-se’n. A Harland’s Half Acre, Malouf crea una llar principalment masculina on les dones hi són absents, i una de femenina on les dones porten les rendes de la casa i els homes hi tenen un paper secundari. Quan el personatge principal de la novel·la, Frank Harland, finalment recupera l’herència de la seva família i la vol entregar a l’únic descendent que queda de la família, el seu nebot Gerald, aquest es suïcida. Un dels temes més recurrents a les novel·les de David Malouf, el desenllaç de les novel·les privilegien una possessió de tipus espiritual per damunt d’una possessió basada en els valors del patriarcat, és a dir, la descendència basada en els fills legítims o de sang i els privilegis del fill primogènit, relacions jeràrquiques de poder i la propietat. Emprem els estudis sobre homes i masculinitats de Michael S. Kimmel i R. W. Connell, la recerca històrica de la identitat Australiana tal com es va forjar durant el període colonial i les dues Guerres Mundials en la nostra anàlisi de Fly Away Peter, The Great World, Remembering Babylon i The Conversations at Curlow Creek. A Austràlia, la identitat nacional i les definicions de masculinitat estan estretament lligades a les masculinitats de fronteres i de guerra. En aquestes novel·les, Malouf representa la llegenda del típic Australià: escèptic de l’autoritat, relaxat, igualitari, malparlat, informal, amb recursos, etc. Malauradament, la llegenda va tenir un efecte molt destructiu en les dones i els valors femenins, i per això recuperem de l’oblit l’important paper que van jugar les dones en la construcció d’Austràlia. La recerca d’Edward Said a Culture and Imperialism, les nocions d’hibridització i mimetisme d’Homi Bhabha, i la novel·la Heart of Darkness, de Joseph Conrad, ens proporcionen eines valuoses per la nostra anàlisi de qüestions ètniques i de classe quan ens preguntem què vol dir ser home a Remembering Babylon. Els estudis de Margaret M. Gullette sobre els prejudicis de la representació de l’edat a la literatura, i la recerca d’Ashton Applewhite contra els prejudicis de l’edat, ens proporcionen el marc teòric de la nostra lectura de Ransom, on Malouf explica la història de Priam, que rescata el cos del seu fill Hèctor de les mans d’Aquil·les, tot preguntant-nos quin tipus d’heroisme li queda a un home quan es fa vell. Finalment, oferim una lectura atenta de la resolució de les novel·les, on els agents del canvi són sempre masculins o impliquen personatges masculins. Per exemple, Dante i Johnno, l’heori epònim de la novel·la; el nen salvatge a An Imaginary Life; Digger i Vic a The Great World; Gemmy a Remembering Babylon o Priam i Achilles a Ransom. D’aquesta manera, esperem entendre millor i transmetre més clarament el món dels homes que Malouf ens representa a les seves novel·les.

This thesis responds to gaps in the scholarship of 'minority literatures' and makes a new contribution to diversifying the field of literary criticism. Given the prominence of South Asian diasporic fiction overseas, the study of South Asian-Australian fiction is now overdue. Given the growing recognition of multicultural and Asian-Australian literatures, the study of South Asian-Australian cultural production now requires attention. Working from the premise that a fictional text is a storytelling device open to a number of interpretations and a commodity with a degree of cultural capital, this thesis examines the tactics employed in and around selected works of fiction. Literary texts are marked by the politics publishing and academic theory. This thesis examines some of the 'invisible layers of intervention' that shape cultural production by indicating the placement of South Asian-Australian fiction within overlapping sets of academic, commercial and policy environments (Apter, 2001: 4). Having affirmed the importance of bringing a relatively invisible area of study into view, this thesis also considers the productive limits and limitations of literary categorisation. To this end, it draws on interviews with a number of writers who speak about their (self)-positioning. It remains crucial to consider the narrative detail of South Asian-Australian fiction: what types of stories do South Asian-Australian writers choose to tell and how do they craft them, what are the effects of such narratives and how are their complex cultural locations conveyed? The majority of this thesis is concerned with fleshing out these questions through detailed textual analysis that focuses on the w/rites of passage arising from the act of migration. Testing the utility of concepts drawn from postcolonial studies, theories of diaspora and critical multiculturalism, this thesis argues for an integrated theoretical approach to a set of texts that operate across local, national and transnational literary contexts.

Controversies surrounding the restoration and representation of the narrative and memory of Notre-Dame de Paris are not new. The latest debates remind us that the building has been at the centre of conservation controversies since the nineteenth century. But why is Notre-Dame de Paris central to these debates? The answer appears to lie in its function as a mnemonic device for Paris and the French nation. This paper focuses on the four literary pieces published by Victor Hugo in the period between 1823 and 1832 – ‘Le Bande Noir’ (‘The Black Band’), ‘Note sur la Destruction des Monuments en France’ (‘Note on the Destruction of Monuments in France’), ‘Guerre aux Démolisseurs!’ (‘War on the Demolishers!’) and Notre-Dame de Paris (also known as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Through an analysis of these four texts, the paper will attempt to understand Hugo’s convictions about the role of buildings – especially Notre-Dame de Paris – in establishing the memory of the city and the nation, and how these in turn underpinned his arguments for conservation. Whilst these texts were all written in a period before the development of key contemporary concepts in the psychology and neuroscience of memory, this paper nevertheless uses the concepts of memory, imagination and Mental Time Travel to try to understand the kind of memory work that the Cathedral performs, and that Hugo suggests it performs in his writing. By examining how Hugo’s literature augmented and engaged the reader’s memory and imagination of the past, this paper will explain how Hugo romanticised the idea that the building was a witness to history. The paper ultimately argues that Hugo positioned Notre-Dame de Paris not only as the centrepiece in his own fiction, but as a beacon of memory for Paris and France, and as such the building came to represent Paris, and indeed the nation as a whole.

This paper argues that liberal democratic politics in Australia is in a life-threatening crisis. Australia is on the verge of slipping into a techno-feudal (post-capitalist) and post-political (new Centrist) state of perpetual emergency. Citizens in Australia, be they of the Left or Right, must make an urgent attempt to wrest power from an increasingly non-political Centrism. Within this Centrism, government is deeply captured by the international corporate interests of Big Tech, Big Natural Resources, Big Media, and Big Pharma, as beholden to the economic necessities of the neoliberal world order (Big Finance). Australia now illustrates what the post-political ‘new normal’ of a high-tech enabled bio-security state actually looks like. It may even be that the liberal democratic state is now little more than a legal fiction in Australia. This did not happen over-night, but Australia has been sliding in this direction for the past three decades. The paper outlines that slide and shows how the final bump down (covid) has now positioned Australia as a world leader among post-political bio-security states.