Peter Allen and then Qantas.

This paper reports on a continuing study into the understandings of young Australians about the country in which they live and their place in it. In the section of the study to be reported here, we analyze the responses to 'being Australian' as derived from conversations with groups of young people whose culture and heritage is markedly different from that of the traditional white Anglo Saxon Australian families. Our research involved working with children in primary schools with large numbers of indigenous and Asian families. The small group interviews routinely involved a mix of cultural, racial and ethnic backgrounds. In this way we attempted to draw out the children's ways of thinking about nationalism, but also we were thus able to capture the dynamic ways in which Australian-ness was being discursively constructed in the children's talk.. Ultimately we contend that standard educational approaches to questions of national identity and civics education are out of touch with the ways in which current generations of young people respond to the idea of place and belonging

At the beginning of the twenty first century, there appears to be a renewed interest in the meaning of being Australian. The new National Museum in Canberra is collecting Australian memorabilia (Australian, 11/00). Among other things, they have an outfit worn by Azaria Chamberlain, the word 'Eternity' scribbled on a board and Phar Lap's heart. Somehow the eclectic nature of the collection is itself representative of the range of views currently held by people who live in this country and who count themselves as Australian. Veteran film star, Jack Thompson, whose credits include vintage Australian films such as SundayToo Far Away, Breaker Morant etc , when speaking recently of the need for people to think about what being Australian really means, said 'It's something we've avoided for a long time'. The national broadcaster has of course been trying to tell us that Australians are a diversified people - and that they are prepared to laugh at themselves. The short clips that have interspersed ABC TV programming for some years now offered different glimpses of Australians, young and old, covering a range of nationalities, locations and cultural festivals. Essentially their message appears to imply that above all else Australians are an inclusive people. The same message comes with the much repeated Qantas commercial wherein the large group of child choristers sing positioned in front of beautiful places all over the world - still calling Australia home. With the Sydney Olympics, the messages about 'being Australian' became almost belligerent. ' I ride in the front seat of a taxi!' screamed the TV commercial with a fairly confrontational mix of the traditionally recognizable Ocker and possibly new found national pride that sought to make a point about the specific sort of difference being Australian in 2000 might bestow.

Media representations of Australia as a country to which we all 'naturally' belong are centred around particular versions of place and people - the laid back casual sports-loving humorous Paul Hogan and his lookalikes, the majestic scenery of the outback and the beach, the universal friendliness of the people and so on. The degree to which these calls are being heard, much less taken up, by the populace is an open question. This question lies at the heart of our presentation. In ongoing investigations of young children's understanding of the workings of power and politics, we found ourselves increasingly drawn to the question of the ways in which young people understand themselves as Australian, how they feel about this country and their place in it. The data reported here are drawn from the larger study, which originated as a consequence of the many reports of widespread ignorance of young people about the official structures of government. These reports led to the development of the national curriculum package Discovering Democracy. Having accepted that civics and citizenship education were areas which had been neglected in formal schooling, we turned our attention not to what young people know, but how they feel about the government, the politicians and the whole democratic process. This shift led us to raise questions around the whole notion of belonging to a country, identifying with it and caring about the place and its people from the perspective of being one of them.

Coincidentally with the rise in interest in 'being Australian' in various forms of popular media, come increasing demands on Australian schools for more input about national identity. This press has occurred in a range of locations - from the RSL spokesperson who urged the reintroduction of the flag ceremony at school on Monday morning, the Old Soldiers giving talks to students about their war experience, the renewed emphasis on Anzac day with the Prime Minister, John Howard, attending a ceremony at ANZAC cove. This latter event involved schoolchildren who had won prizes for their essays on Australia's war heroes. In all of these instances there is the repeated coupling of issues to do with nationalism linked to some very traditional forms such as war and national defence. Running through these themes is the place of the school as the paramount site for instilling these values and orientations into the next generation of Australians.

In addition, the recurring discussion about a Republic, the fairly frequent reports of refugees landing- or trying to land - on 'our shores', questions of detention camps and citizenship rights continue to be aired. Above all the staging of the Sydney Olympics brought renewed attention to Australian nationalism, its forms and representations. As never before Australians were observed singing lustily the relatively new and difficult national anthem - public and news pundits alike reported that Olympic events brought tears to their eyes. Even - and perhaps particularly - the comics Roy and HG were feted as being quintessentially Australian - whatever that is, their comments were repeatedly reported, along with foreigners' misunderstandings of their remarks, showing that 'they' didn't get it because they weren't Australian.

In designing this study we approach the idea of 'being Australian' as a construction of people belonging together in ways that are generative of social, cultural and affective responses that are widely shared. In these responses people are able to make links between their present experience of living in a particular place and their understanding of its history in the stories that are told about the place (Hall,1994). We also take the position that the ways in which the country is understood exist more in the collective imaginary than in any particular and designatable place or time (Anderson, 1983; Barker, 1999). And, possibly most importantly, in our view these constructions of place and belonging, being creations of people at particular places and times, are malleable and likely to change over time. Being Australian at the beginning of the twenty first century connotes a very different impression from being Australian at the beginning of the twentieth century, although the latter is probably more readily recognisable in terms of national art, architecture, ways of speaking, dressing, public demeanour etc. At the same time we know very little about what it actually means, only that it will be different from earlier versions.

The question of popular response to one's country appears to involve inevitably the nation's schools. This is not a new phenomenon. Hitler's National Socialist Movement, for example, depended to a large degree on its ability to appropriate and indoctrinate young people as the Youth Rallies so dramatically demonstrated.. Similarly it was the young Maoists who looked scarcely old enough to go to school, walking around with their red armbands who so symbolized the Cultural Revolution. What is it about schooling that connects it to national movements? Before dismissing these images as typical products of totalitarian regimes and 'brain washing' it seems important to attempt to gather a picture of the ideas of the current generation of young people about the country in which they live and with which they possibly identify.

Some time ago Shirley Grundy described the content of many school lessons as constitutive of 'the official storylines of a society' (Grundy, 1994,p.17). The implication here is that school texts, possibly especially those from history or literature, would carry explicit messages about being Australian. Others have commented that a striking feature of Australian education has been the lack of emphasis on 'race and place' and the repeated references to things European (in particular English) (Stokes,1999). For most of the last century school subjects carried labels such as English Literature, British History etc and operated as unremarkable and totally accepted parts of the common curriculum. Most recently however there has been considerable lament over the fact that the traditional curriculum has virtually disappeared, students study little history and are unaware of the classics. Their lack of civic understanding has been well documented. What has been left largely unexamined is how young people feel about the country in which they live and their part in it.

The work reported here comes from a large and ongoing qualitative study of the meaning of 'being Australian'. In this study, small groups of primary school children take part in recorded discussions about their views on life in this country, distinguishing features of Australianness, and so on. Thus far we have interviewed over 85 young people, mostly in the senior years of primary school. The discussions take place with groups of four or five, usually including boys and girls and they are structured around a set of stimulus questions. In our view the richness of the data is associated with the generative quality of these small group discussions in which the young people, interact, agree, contradict and generally work together to build up a more complete picture of their understanding.

Bearing in mind the fact that several British researchers had discovered that young English and Scottish children were profoundly uninterested in what it meant to be British (Carrington and Short, 1995,1998), we were a little surprised and pleased to find that the young people in our study did offer a range of responses to being Australian. As reported in a previous paper (Howard and Gill, 2000) we discovered that those children who had travelled to other countries were more likely to identify difference between being Australian and being from elsewhere than those who had lived in Australia for all of their lives.