Australian Studies

This course combines formal classes with exploratory field trips. Traditional lectures are used as a space for conveying important concepts and information to students. Formal lectures are also supported by smaller tutorial classes where collaboration, discussion, and group work are employed to facilitate social learning and increase student knowledge and understanding of key ideas. The traditional lectures and tutorials are then enhanced by two unique expeditions into significant coastal and mountainous regions of New South Wales. These bushwalking field trips into The Royal National Park and Blue Mountains give students a chance to experience and be immersed in two distinctive Australian ecosystems.

This course examines key issues and themes relating to Australian society and culture across a wide time-frame including before colonization and the most recent past. It covers the brutalities of the colonial process; the relationships of the Europeans to this 'new' land; the developing society in the Antipodes; the new cultural forms of nationalism in the late nineteenth century; the importance of White Australia; the impact of wars and Depression; and the cultural shifts of liberation movements.

This course examines Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge, perspectives and insight into Indigenous Australia's historical and contemporary matters.

This course introduces students to the many layers of Aboriginal heritage which continue to occupy the Sydney region. Starting from within the literature and developing knowledge of the continuing presence of Aboriginal peoples, knowledge, voices, and perspectives, students engage with a deeper understanding and significance of "place." From rock art sites, place names and keeping places to traditional ecological knowledge, land management practices, and various forms of cultural expression, students learn about the presence of an ancient knowledge system in the local Sydney area as well as the importance this holds for Aboriginal people today. Students have the unique opportunity to visit specific places and sites of significance across Sydney throughout the course.

This course examines 20th century Australia from the time of Federation to the Apology in 2008. 20th century Australia was a period of vision and revisioning, a time of grand schemes and grand failures, and of intense questioning around notions of identity, place, race, and nation. This course examines the events that Australians lived through and the issues that preoccupied them, their cultural lives and the myths, legends, visions, and prejudices through which Australians imagined themselves and others. Major topics include: Federation, World War One, the Depression, World War Two, immigration, the Petrov Affair, Vietnam, the Dismissal, Mabo, the Tampa, and the Apology. These events become sites for analyzing concepts of nation, the politics of race, ideologies of domesticity and the family, social movements, the impact of modernity, the cinema, the experience of the cities and the bush, and importantly, Australia's place in the region and the world.