SOURCE: Rowley, Susan. “Imagination, Madness, and Nation in Australian Bush Mythology.” In Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, edited by Kate Dorian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall, pp. 131-44. London: Routledge, 1996.

In the following essay, Rowley affirms the “imaginative formation of Australian national culture” by the late nineteenth-century writers who employed the images and themes of bush mythology in their works.

Recent theories of nationalism and national culture and identity have emphasised the active role of the imagination in the formation of nations. Benedict Anderson's most influential and persuasive argument for theorizing nations as ‘imagined communities’ exemplifies a recurrent theme in writing on nation formation.¹ Anderson cites Ernest Gellner's frequently quoted observation that nationalism ‘invents nations where they do not exist’.² The centrality of the imagination is echoed in the titles of recent publications on the formation of Australia as a nation...