'Australia and Home' asks you to forget whatever you thought you knew about Australia and begin the process again. The starting point is in Australia’s unique writing and films. Is Australia a 'frontier' country, a wild-west of the kind that is portrayed in the film The Proposition, written by Nick Cave, or in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia? Is Australia a nation of immigrants, a multicultural melting pot of distinct traditions and histories? What about the Indigenous population of Australia? 'Australia and Home' looks to poems and fiction and films to find answers to these questions. More importantly, it looks to our writers and film-makers to help students better frame the question themselves.
Students are able to (1) grasp Australian literature and film as an evolving creative response to the situations of our history; (2) participate intelligently in debates about what it means to be Australian; (3) hone and develop the techniques of literary and screen analysis; and (4) expertly formulate the results of these analyses in written and oral form.
