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Australia in both WWI and WWII. The focus of the Parkes extract is concerned with the
emotional ties Australians had to Great Britain during this time. For example, Parkes
encourages Australians to start seeing Australia as home, rather than Great Britain, through
the statement “make yourselves united people, appear before the world as one, and the
dream, of going ‘home’ would die away” (Power et al., 1985, p. 214, emphasis added).
In The modern world emerges (Lawrence et al.,1986), the discourses of dissociation are seen
as an important factor in shaping Australia’s political context and foreign policy decisions of
the 20 th century. There is significant content over a number of different topics and eras that
discuss this category, emphasized in particular during times of international conflict—WWI
and WWII.
7.16.2 Discourses of Australia’s growing independence from Great Britain and
‘coming of age’.
The first example for analysis within this discourse is the growing independence of Australia
from Great Britain during the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles (the peace treaty that
officially ended WWI). This is demonstrated in the senior high school Modern History
curriculum, within the textbook Crossroads: Asia and Australia in world affairs (Cowie,
1980), as seen in Source 7.72. In particular, the first sentence demonstrates the intention of
the author for students to develop an historical understanding of Australia’s developing
independence in the early to mid 20 th century: “The growing sense of Australia’s
distinctiveness in world affairs was significantly advanced... [because]...she was granted
separate-nation status at the 1919 Peace Conference...” (Cowie, 1980, p. 205), and attributing
this to the efforts of then-prime minister, Billy Hughes.
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