Afterword: Undoing the bonds of nation/rediscovering dead souls

In this chapter, the authors' profound the knowledge of Australia's slippery shift from cultural policy to creative industries and its oleaginous embrace of contemporary capitalism as part of that manoeuvre. Australia has dependent cultural relations with the US and the UK and economic ones with those nations, plus China and Japan. The authors' engage with that position in the context of their understanding of prior Australian history before considering nationalism and cosmopolitanism from an international perspective. What of cosmopolitanism as an alternative, emerging from much older origins than those associated with contemporary neoliberalism and globalization? A core Enlightenment ideal, cosmopolitanism suffered with the ongoing triumph of the nation-state and nationalist ideology, but became au courant again due to the need for ways of living together in a globalizing economy with vast migration and cultural exchange. The histories of the League of Nations and the UN stand for the failure of world government.