J don't think there can be any doubt that Aborigines have been the most important Australian exporters of social theory and cultural production to the northern hemisphere over the past century.How could one come to such a conclusion?When Jock Given approached me to write this paper, he referred to a recent essay of mine.It began like this: 'When Australia became modem, it ceased to be interesting'.I ran the argument there that Aboriginal Australia had provided Europe with a 'photographic negative' of itself.The essence of the north, s~creted by the blllowtng engines and disputatious parliaments of the modern, could be secreted by examining 'the prediarnarue realities of the Antipodean primordial' (Miller T 1994.206-7).Once Australia was a sovereign state, and able to deny Aboriginal people citizenship, it was merely one more place filled with whitefellas.'Australians' were transformed in northern hemisphere theory from dashing blacks living OUt of time into dull Anglo-Celts living out of place.Bur today, the country is returned to the lists of international intellectual pleasure.Lawrence Grossberg announces it as the site for cultural studies on the cover of Stephen Muecke's book about Aborigmaliry and cultural studies (1992) and elsewhere (Grossberg 1994, 17), and postrnodern Aboriginal-style cover an provldes a marketing ploy for Routledge's greatest hits of Australian cultural and media theory (Turner G 1993).So I arrived here with that provocation, derived from a previous publishing folly.My more general briefto discuss the international circulation of Australian sociocultural ideas -is subsumed somewhat by this heritage, but not, I think, No 76-May 1995 unnecessarily.Of course, we could look for the global trace of contemporary Australia by a form of desperate content analysis.Adding up references to it in the Manhanan fiction of Jay Mcinerney, for example: eight in Bright Lights, Big City (986) if you count the 1984 New York Post, none if you don't; four in Ransom (] 987); ten in Story ofMy Life (989) if you count each mention of Nell's, three if you don't; and none in Brightness Falls (992).Or we could turn to the 1995 'Down Under' episode of The Stmpsons, in which a State Department representative briefs the family on bilateral relations: 'As I'm sure you remember, in the late 1980s the US experienced a short-lived infatuation with Australian culture (this is accompanied by a cartoon-slide of Paul Hogan as 'Crocodile' Dundee].For some bizarre reason, the Aussies thought this would be a permanent thing.O( course it wasn't [the latter spoken before a slide of a boarded-up film theatre With 'Yahoo Serious Festival' on the decrepit building].'Alternatively, much could be said about the contributions made by the country's principal passport-holders in this field.My own quick list, compiled from popular repute and academic citauonal texts follows, in as idiosyncratic an order as possible
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