“But what is his country?”: Producing Australian Identity through Repetition in the Victorian School Paper, 1896–1918

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Australian schoolchildren were exposed to unique state-based reading curricula. While other nations adopted graded readers, Australian states developed their own compulsory monthly papers that constituted the only reading materials in schools for many years. The Victorian School Paper was first published in 1896 to ensure that children in one of Australia’s most populous states were exposed to educational materials prepared within their own country. It was compulsory reading material until 1927, when a series of eight books, the Victorian Readers, began to be instituted as required reading and the School Paper was demoted to become a supplementary text.¹ The School Paper’s periodical format enabled repetition of important themes and topics in the course of each school year and throughout the duration of each child’s education, making it a unique example of the pedagogic potential of serial reading. Moreover, it is an example of how repetition across serial texts can facilitate the growth of nationalism. To interrogate this interrelationship, I adopt Greg Urban’s theory of metaculture, specifically his argument about the circulation of discourse that explains how repeated acts of reading can instil imagined communal identifications such as that of nation.