Foreclosure: Why Australian modernisms are implausible

This article appraises debates about modernism in 1930s and 1940s Australia in relation to the cultural and political traditions of settler colonialism. We theorise settler modernist and anti-modernist engagements as conditioned by a succession of negations constituting ‘Australia’ as what we have previously termed ‘the negative Commonwealth’. Both rejections and affirmations of European modernist traditions considered the imminent arrival in Australia of the ‘dangers’ of modernity. One response was the attempt to keep modernity and its contradictions ‘out’, and to maintain the supposed advantages of being an island continent. When isolation could no longer be maintained, attempts were made to leap over the implications of imminent reconnection by asserting that Australia was always already modern. Here, we survey settler cultural expressions and their embrace or rejection of ‘Old World’ traditions. Beyond complex engagements with these traditions, Australian modernist and anti-modernist experiments similarly struggled to establish their own indigenising settler nationalist traditions.