Diggers, Sport and the Bush...

I will come back a bit later to the issue of the big "D" discourse, as I suspect its relevance will continue to reveal itself.  It has something to do with how participants engage with various worlds that are presented to them.  I suspect it has more relevance to interactive play, (e.g. games) rather than watching television, but I am curious to see whether it could apply to early childhood television, where issues around reality and make believe are less concrete (Howard, 1994).

Today though I am looking at trying to identify what is meant by "Australian" identity.  This is a huge field.  A search across Google Scholar and various databases via Metalib has revealed that there are many different viewpoints on this topic.  Although this is an important issue to define for my assignment, I do need to keep an eye on my word limit.  After an initial broad search I have restricted my articles on "Australian" identity to those concerned with diggers/war, sport and the bush.

I will therefore limit my selection of references and discussion to these areas.  This is not ideal, however some boundaries do need to be placed around what I am investigating, otherwise it could very easily get out of hand.

The first topic to be addressd will be the 'digger/war' angle to "Australian identity'.  Again, the reason I am looking at this is to try and work out whether the selection of Australian television show characters - B1 and B2, dirtgirlworld and The Koala Brothers actually can teach children anything about Australian identity.

Source: http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRI8JG-ozJvowdQnlpD0HJji_ZTwwU8IZyRGOG6UDzZIFiBXIU&t=1&usg=__l-r3FAMsaslw2HIELj9vp9Jw8qs=