Modern Australia emerging 1960s+

Arts and the "new nationalism"Main article: culture of Australia
 
"Australian to the bootheels": Prime Minister John Gorton established government support for Australian cinema.
The Sydney Opera House was officially opened in 1973.By the mid-1960s, a new nationalism was emerging. The National Trust of Australia began to be active in preserving Australia's natural, cultural and historic heritage. Australian TV saw locally made dramas and comedies appear, and programs such as Homicide developed strong local loyalty while Skippy the Bush Kangaroo became a global phenomenon. Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton, a battle scarred former fighter pilot who described himself as "Australian to the bootheels", established the Australian Council for the Arts, the Australian Film Development Corporation and the National Film and Television Training School.[376]

The iconic Sydney Opera House opened in 1973. In the same year, Patrick White became the first Australian to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.[377] Australian History had begun to appear on school curricula by the 1970s.[378] From the early 1970s, the Australian cinema began to produce the Australian New Wave of films based on uniquely Australian themes. The South Australian Film Corporation took the lead in supporting filmmaking, with successes including quintessential Australian films Sunday Too Far Away(1974) Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Breaker Morant (1980) and Gallipoli (1981). The national funding body, the Australian Film Commission, was established in 1975.

Significant changes also occurred to Australia's censorship laws after the new Liberal Minister for Customs and Excise, Don Chipp, was appointed in 1969. In 1968, Barry Humphries and Nicholas Garland's cartoon book featuring the larrikin character Barry McKenzie was banned. Only a few years later, the book had been made as a film, partly with the support of government funding.[379] Barry McKenzie both celebrated and parodied Australian nationalism. Historian Richard White also argues that "while many of the plays, novels and films produced in the 1970s were intensely critical of aspects of Australian life, they were absorbed by the 'new nationalism' and applauded for their Australianness."[380]

In 1973, businessman Ken Myer commented; "we like to think we have a distinct style of our own. We have outgrown a lot of our inadequacies.... There was a time when an interest in the arts threw doubts on one's masculinity."[381] In 1973, historian Geoffrey Serle, in his 1973 From Deserts the Prophets Come, argued that while Australia had finally arrived at "mature nationhood,"[382] until that time that the "most important study of Australia had been found in creative treatments," rather than academic study at universities and schools.[383]