Cirrus@Austlit

The appropriate content of Australian history courses is openly debated. Even the nation called Australia is problematic as competing identities, discourses, conceptualisations and nations-within-the-nation claim space in the academic, community and personal fabric. There are now competing ideologies and contexts shaping, dominating and influencing the way we think historically about Australia. In national debates in the 1980s it was argued strongly that all tertiary students should take a course of study on "Australia in international contexts or studies which explain Australia's cultural inheritance". This statement was immediately criticised for what it included and for what it left out! The arguments continue. The first part of the lecture program offers a survey of Australia's history from 60000 years ago to the present. The second part interrogates how histories of the past have been presented. Essay questions, student seminars and lectures are based around the ideas presented in Australia's history; Themes and debates edited by Martyn Lyons and Penny Russell (2005) and in the journals Australian Historical Studies, History Australia and the Journal of Australian Studies. These texts are offered as a convenient platform and are contested by many other new books, articles and essays on Australian History. This unit presents a past in Australia that is constructed, invented, contested and open to interpretation.

Aims

1. To study the full spectrum of historical events in Australia's past

2. To study the practice of historians

3. To develop an understanding of public debate, national interest and academic involvement in Australia's past

Objectives

At the end of this unit students will be able to:

1. major themes and patterns in the Australian historical experience

2. Apply historical knowledge and methodologies to a specific issue

3. Identify current theories and debates in historiography

4. Gather evidence, analyse, synthesise, argue logically and express ideas coherently

Content

1. Competing historical approaches

2. Indigenous histories to 1788 and in the present

3. Turning points and key events; a survey 1788-2006

4. Historiography

5. Postcolonial and post-structuralist Histories

6. History in fiction and film

7. History in schools

8. History in museums

9. Environmental histories

10. History in commemorations and festivals

11. History and Biography

Course structure:

The subject matter is presented in four related activities; a lecture program which will focus on the historical narrative 60000BP to 2006, and then on historiography or the ways that Australia's past is presented in the public domain, (Objectives 1 and 3); a student seminar program that offers a chance to debate the approaches of historians who assert particular views on key themes and debates in Australian history(Objectives 2 and 4), a research project or essay that involves analysis of an historical problem or issue (Objectives 1, 2 and 4) and a final examination that offers an opportunity to argue holistically about the discipline and to express personal opinions and interpretations (Objectives 1 and 3).