Australian Cultural Studies

This course introduces students to the field of Australian Studies through a focus on different Australian places. It asks how these places are often simultaneously understood and imagined as Indigenous Country, as the site of colonisation and settler homemaking, or as locations of a modern multicultural nation. The process of narration plays an important role in such understandings and imaginings of places and we will focus on how and why such narratives (in the broadest sense) are constructed and what forms they might take. Starting out from an engagement with the Aboriginal Australian concept of ‘Country’, we will focus on iconic Australian locations such as the outback, the beach, the city, or the border and ask how they are narrated across a range of cultural productions including literature, film and the visual arts.