Leland Turner

Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar

Media Profile

"Popular culture has merged the cowboy myth with the bush ethos in Australia and contributed to the growing Americanisation of Australian culture. Without doubt, the pastoral cultures of the Outback and Southwest left frontiers legacies that inform and advance regional myths and contribute to national identities in rapidly globalising societies."

Leland Turner, is one of fifteen Americans to be granted a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship to Australia in 2007. A graduate of the University of Tulsa and current PhD student in history at the Texas Tech University, Leland will carry out his Fulbright research at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Leland’s research project, Grassland Frontiers of the Outback and Southwest: Australian and American Cattle Economies, Environment, and Enduring Myth will examine the growing Americanisation of Australian cultures.

“The frontier has long been a rich breeding ground of national myth and the birthplace of many an enduring hero – particularly the American Cowboy and the Australian Bushman. Last century pastoral economies of the Outback and Southwest shared a common and dramatically important natural condition – aridity. Those cultures left frontier legacies that continue to define national identities in a rapidly globalising society.”

A need exists, Leland explains, to examine the affect of environment on economic activity in grasslands cattle cultures of America and Australia and how frontier experiences influenced regional mythology and subsequently, national identities.

“The influence on American culture of cowboy mythology and Hollywood’s Wild West imagery cannot be denied. On the other hand, the Australian stockman has not reached the lofty heights of the iconic cowboy. The bush ethos and mateship culture, however, like the cowboy myth, stress honesty, a positive work ethic, egalitarianism, and rugged individualism.”

Leland’s study will also argue that white settlers relied on their European social, political, and economic traditions to cope with adverse frontier conditions. “I will utilize a regional study and base the comparison on the environmental similarity of Australia’s interior grasslands and America’s Southern Great Plains. An understanding of drought patterns, pestilence, and water and land availability will help explain the progress of Anglo settlement.”

When Leland returns to the U.S. he plans to complete his PhD with the hope that his research will provide a foundation for a body of work that will utilise area studies to consider myth, national identity, and globalisation in history.

Leland’s achievements academically have been recognised with the 2006 Summer Dissertation Research Award, the E. Wallace Graduate Research Grant and the Dissertation Research Grant at the Texas Tech University.