SMJ09049 Reading Australia

This sub-major is an exploration through time and place, literature and writing, film and images of what 'Australia' is. It requires students to rethink what they call 'an Australian', and reconsider where the boundaries of Australia arise and produce the possibilities for new Australias to exist. In all the subjects students are asked to 'read' Australia in new ways: read it as a particular result of contingently recorded histories and arbitrarily mythologised places. Students are also asked to question Australia as a place that has produced workable myths like the 'outback' and 'the beach' and think about why Crocodile Dundee and Mad Max never could live in Glebe and why 'multicultural Australia' doesn't quite capture the global and inter-nation flows that have helped produce Australia. In addition, students are asked to consider the critical and creative ways in which something as persuasive and pervasive as Australia makes and remakes itself through the circulations of particular knowledges.

The subjects involve the study of the many modes of knowledge production (electronic, filmic, textual) but also the many interdisciplinary forms that encourages looking at pasts and places and categories like literature and film in new and exciting ways. Students produce work in a variety of forms including essays, archives, fiction and images.

Students enrolling in this sub-major need to have a willingness to have their answers questioned; in doing so they should discover that at least one Australia they learn about is a place they have never been.

Completion requirements