Word: australian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When I taught a course on Australian history in the fall, I began by showing slides of Australia's two most recognized icons--Uluru (or Ayer's Rock) and the Sydney Opera House. They make an interesting pair. That extraordinary monolith, Uluru, not only serves as an image of the Outback, but, as an Aboriginal sacred site, of the culture of the first Australians. The Sydney Opera House on the other hand, a symbol of modernism in expansive mood, reminds us that Australia is also a highly urbanized society capable of producing its own monuments...
...Australians have been much given to pondering the question of national identity. Was Australia "born" in 1901 when the colonies federated? Or in 1915 when Australian "diggers" (soldiers) landed at Gallipoli? Or was a sense of nationhood forged during the Second World War when a Japanese invasion seemed possible? Or does the onset of a multicultural society mean that nationhood and citizenship in any case need to be redefined...
...this ambivalence only seems to fuel out preoccupation with what being Australian means. Harvard students might sympathize with this obsession, for this obsession, for this institution continues to give rise to a huge literature analyzing the Harvard experience; The Crimson contributes to it daily...
...daughter lives on Australian Standard Time, eats like a wolverine, gulps down air, stores up pockets of gas that are not easily jiggled out of her. She poops with gay abandon. Her deepest pleasure comes from pooping while feeding, to engage the entire digestive tract at once. Pure bliss. She fights off sleep, afraid she might miss something. Midnight to 6 a.m. is prime time, and if she dozes, she keeps one eye open for the main action. My maneuver for laying her in the crib is very involved, something I learned from a National Geographic special on the praying...
Before she launched her singing career two years ago, Natalie Imbruglia starred in an Australian soap opera called Neighbours, sort of a cheesy Melrose Place Down Under. When she grew tired of soaps, she moved on to London, met a record producer and released an album, Left of the Middle, that became a smash hit. When Left recently debuted in the U.S., it entered the charts at No. 10, outselling the new Pearl Jam album and beating the first-week sales of Alanis Morissette's 1995 debut, Jagged Little Pill...