This is Australia: the panoramic narrative, graphic design and spatial consciousness

We encounter 'This is Australia' stories everyday, in tourist advertisements and brochures, in celebrations of nationhood like the opening of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, in promotional posters and those glossy photographic books that are so often titled 'Australia'. The key trope of these depictions of nationhood is the use of the panoramic narrative and the language of stereotypes to construct an all-encompassing vision of an instantly recognisable and reassuringly familiar Australia. Inherently commercial and propagandistic they give visual form to the popular imagination of what it means to be Australian and playa central role in shaping what Meaghan Morris terms, the 'national image-space'. This imagespace being the public zone in which popular histories, aesthetic symbols, ideas and myths circulate and endure through the agency of design, giving visible form to the imagined community that binds people and place into a nation. [Introduction]