Australian Studies

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.

This course examines what a national literature means, and how it makes itself significant to the nation and beyond. It will think about colonialism and colonial writing in Australia, modes of Australian social realism, the emergence of an Australian modernism, ways of representing region, suburb and city, postcolonialism in Australia, 'multicultural' writing, and Indigenous literature. The focus is on the novel, short stories, poetry and genres such as romance and the Gothic.