Debutante Nation

For many, the last ten years of a century become a milestone and fulcrum, and our Bicentennial provoked critical examination of our national culture and identity. However, assertions of national identity, unity, and community are constructed through exclusions and repression, not simple incorporation as was attempted. Critical questions then led to renewed interrogation of the twin births of Australian political nationalism and a distinctively Australian national culture in the 1890s, a decade that those histories have deemed "legendary". "Debutante Nation" sets out to show that such historiography has been historicist and parochial. As well it shows how much more varied, and contested, were the social relations, livelihoods, sexual behaviour, representations of masculinity and femininity, than narratives about "the legend of the nineties" would allow. Three kinds of contestation were occuring: one between people, actions and behaviours, and meanings and understandings; another between the historians who created "the legend", and the third between the contributors, among them Australia's best known cultural commentators. There is no single 1990s perspective presented.
To set questions about women and gender at the centre of analysis as "Debutante Nation" does is not to propose that conflict between the sexes was "the only show on the road"; but rather to demonstrate that the other shows - nationalism, colonialism, class struggle - look very different when they are included. The aim is not to insert gender as a single central interpretative device around which an 1890s coherence can be constructed. Rather it posits, as central questions, how the circumstances of women's lives and struggles were mutually constitutive of issues of culture, economics and politics through which the 1890s have been conventionally understood. Interdisciplinary in nature and illustrated with reproductions of contemporary artworks and cartoons from the period, "Debutante Nation" is a revolutionary look at the 1890s, a period generally held to have been formative in the making of Austrialian society.