Uses of the past: settler culture, regional identity and the modern nation

Abstract

Over six days from the eighteenth to the twenty-third of March in 1924 the regional city of Grenfell coordinated a sustained civic celebration that it called the 'Back to Grenfell Week'. A commemorative festival of substantial proportions, 'Back to Grenfell Week' was intended to encourage former residents to return to the district, honour the pioneers, and promote the central New South Wales region. My discussion of the 'Back to Grenfell Week' Festival of 1924 and the 'Grenfell Henry Lawson Festival of the Arts' from 1958 is an exploration of the expressed tension between these two imperatives and their effects upon the strategically shifting social identities of a regional Australian culture.