National identity, Australian plants, and the natural garden in post-WWII Australia, 1945 to 1986

Dramatic changes to Australian cultural life following the Second World War prompted the search for new understandings of Australia’s national identity. Between 1945 and 1986, post-WWII Australian plant and natural gardens and the ideas and activities associated with their promotion, legitimation, and creation served important functions in the reformulation of Australian identity and nationalism. These gardens, ideas, and activities provided spaces for the development and articulation of distinctly national forms of cultural expression. They also offered a way for Australians to imagine a national community, and conceive new foundational myths. This thesis explores the ways in which Australian plant and natural gardens served, or reflected, national identity formulation and nationalism. It does this by investigating a rich and diverse body of sources which include: archival and documentary materials; popular gardening and horticultural literature, popular natural history writing, nursery catalogues, other popular media, garden design treatises, and professional landscape design discourses contemporary with the period studied; oral testimony; and. two physical places. This thesis also considers a range of events and activities related to Australian plant gardens which produced and disseminated knowledge and enthusiasm, the social spaces in which these occurred, and a network of native plant enthusiasts. Importantly for this thesis, the wide spectrum of views provided by this multiplicity of sources allows several voices and stories to emerge, thus helping to question current generalised views of the time and space under consideration. The first part of this thesis presents an innovative framework for the analysis and interpretation of national identity and nationalism through the prism of garden history and garden making. The second part examines the cultural activities and ideas that legitimated post-WWII Australian plant and natural gardens. Two case studies examining the post-WWII histories of the Canberra Botanic Gardens in Canberra, the Federal capital of the Commonwealth of Australia, and Royal Park in Melbourne, the capital city in the state of Victoria, follow in the third part. These case studies enable detailed exploration of state-sponsored and managed Australian plant gardens, one at a national scale and the other at a local government level. The case studies reveal the different functions and ways in which public Australian plant and natural gardens of the post-WWII period reflected attempts to formulate understandings of national identity and nationalism. By developing a theoretical and evidence-based discourse and applying it to the analysis of relevant archival documentation, oral testimony, ideas, and physical places, this thesis provides a new and richer understanding of the ways in which Australia’s national identity was shaped through garden making