This course provides an understanding of Australian society and culture, and of the historical forces which shape contemporary realities. This subjects forms the basis for your explorations in elective modules.
Topics covered include relations between settler and indigenous Australians, debates over Australian identity, and the distinctive forms democracy has taken in Australia. A particular focus of the subject is on the similarities and differences between Australia and America.
Lectures are followed by a tutorial discussion group, and in some cases by a related film. The set of readings has been prepared for each tutorial, and you are expected to have done this preparation. You should come to tutorials ready to engage with the readings critically; they are intended to stimulate our discussions rather than be a last word on the subject.
For most weeks, I have added references to some additional readings if you want to explore these issues further in the library, particularly in preparation for the exam.
Learning outcomes:
When you complete this subject, you should be able to:
understand the historical and political foundations of modern Australia
identify how Australian identities have been constructed and contested, and
analyse representations of Australia through a variety of media
Required work and form of assessment:
The assessment for this subject has four components. Students must successfully pass each component in order to satisfy the requirements of the subject.
Under each of the headings below I have identified the key criteria that will be used in assessing your work in the subject.
1. Tutorial participation (10%)
This is an assessment, completed by your tutor, about the level of your engagement with the course during the tutorials. I will be looking for:
how much you have taken up the opportunities to learn through discussion in tutorials,
how much you have drawn on the prescribed reading for tutorials, and
how well you engaged with others in co-operative discussion and debate.
2. Small group presentation (10%)
In groups of not more than four, you will give a 15 minute presentation on a contemporary issue or conflict in Australia, as if you were briefing a party of visiting US diplomats or executives. You are expected to draw on the material of lectures, field trips, tutorials as well your own experiences. I will be looking for:
your critical engagement with contemporary Australia as presented through course material,
how well you have engaged with members of your group, and
the qualities of organisation, coherence and insight in your oral reflection.
3. Film written exercise (750 words – 20%)
During the first few weeks of the course I will be showing four Australian films. This assessment task requires you to write a paper dealing with any three of these films.
Drawing upon material from the lectures and tutorials you are required to discuss how these films present or comment upon Australian experiences, history and culture.
I will be looking for:
your reflection on the themes and ideas in three chosen films,
your critical analysis of how these films depict the themes in the subject, and
the qualities of organisation, coherence and insight in your written reflection.
4. Open Book Exam (2,000 words – 60%)
In the exam you are required to answer two short essays of approximately 1,000 words each. The essay questions will relate to material and themes covered in the subject.
I am not looking to test your ability to recall ‘facts’ but instead to assess your critical engagement with the subject.
You may bring your reader, and your notes from the lectures and the tutorials, but you cannot use mobile phones, IPads or other electronic devices during the exam.
I will be looking for:
evidence of your critical engagement with key themes covered in the subject,
reflection and evaluation of the debates concerned, and the qualities of organization, coherence and insight in your written reflection.
content:
Lecture and tutorial
Introduction: Creation Myths in Australia and America
In 1976 and in 1988, the United States and Australia celebrated their respective bicentenaries. The former was celebrated a moment of national independence, wrested from a colonial power, while the latter was celebrating the original establishment of a penal colony. Both were only obliquely remembering the dispossession of the original inhabitants. What do these two starting points tell us about ways the nation is constructed and remembered?
Set reading:
Sargent Bush Jr., ‘America’s Origin Myth: Remembering Plymouth Rock’, American Literary History, vol. 12, no. 4 (2000), pp. 745-56.
Tom Kenneally, The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Sydney Experiment (2005), pp. 3-39.
Additional reading:
Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, Vol. 1, (1997), esp. chapter 5
Tutorial Questions:
What are the lingering effects of free and unfree settlement?
How might the different beginnings of the two nations have shaped characteristics in the present?
What about founding ideals like ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’ and ‘national progress’? How important are they – as rhetoric and/or reality?
Who gets to tell these stories of origin, and why?
Australian Cinema Program 1
Australia (2008) director Baz Luhrmann, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and David Wenham.
Set in northern Australia between 1939 and 1942, Baz Luhrmann described his film as depicting ‘a mythologized Australia’. When it came out, it was very successful, even though some thought it was over the top. But Luhrmann’s films are usually over the top. Do we need to distinguish mythologies – about ‘the bush’ and about Australian egalitarianism – from historical ‘reality’??
Lecture and tutorial
Convict society and its enemies
The received wisdom in Australia used to be that the penal settlements at Sydney and then at Hobart meant Australia was built on fear, terror and suffering. Robert Hughes’ Gothic description in The Fatal Shore is a lurid rendering of this account, as a memory that Australians had worked hard to forget.
But others have tried to explain how a vibrant democracy emerged fairly quickly from the original penal settlement. Part of this may be about how government wanted convict society to gradually merge into a freer and more stable settlement – particularly through the institution of marriage – and part of the story is also about the emergence of demands for the end of convict transportation and – often associated with that demand – for the institution of democratic government and the popular vote.
Set reading:
John Hirst, ‘Convict Society’ in Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, (2006) pp. 107-113.
Pat Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly, Creating a Nation (1994), ‘Making Male and Female Worlds’, pp. 79-105.
Additional reading:
Lyn Spillman, Nation and Commemoration: creating national identities in the United States and Australia, (1997)
Peter Cochrane, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy, (2008).
Tutorial questions:
Why do Grimshaw et al place so much emphasis on marriage?
What is Hirst’s view about how bad convict Australia really was?
What parallels and differences are there between American demands for independence in the 1770s, and Australian demands for democracy in the 1840s?
Australian Cinema Program 2
Little Fish (2005), director Rowan Woods
Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving and Sam Neill
Set in contemporary Sydney, Little Fish is a very different film from Luhrmann’s Australia. A grim story about trying to stay off drugs and about the nature of ordinary deception, it is far from ‘mythologizing’ anything.
Australian Cinema Program 3
The Tracker (2002), director Rolf de Heer
David Gulpilil, Gary Sweet, Damon Gameau
This film anticipates some of the themes of tomorrow’s lecture and tutorial. Set in 1922, somewhere unspecified on the Australian frontier, The Tracker is a bleak but subtle depiction of race relations. Three white men (The Fanatic, the Follower and the Veteran) set out with an Aboriginal tracker on a mission to capture a murderer.
Lecture and tutorial
Settler societies and indigenous people
The latest estimates are that Aboriginal people arrived in Australia from Southeast Asia at least 60,000 years ago, and that by 1788 there were some 300,000 inhabitants across the continent, divided into over 500 tribes. As in America, white settlement displaced people, often through introduced diseases, but also in frontier conflict.
In this lecture, we look at how this frontier moved over time, and what the impact was on Aboriginal people. Policies changed over time, from a period of ‘protectionism’ to one of ‘assimilation’.
Set reading:
Ann McGrath, ‘A National Story’ in Ann McGrath (ed) Contested Ground (1995), pp. 1-54.
Additional reading:
Robert Manne, ‘The Stolen Generations’ in The Way We Live Now (1998), pp. 15-41.
Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians, (1982)
Edmund S. Morgan, The Genuine Article: A historian looks at early America, (2004)
Tutorial questions:
What is the significance of saying Australia and America were both ‘settled’, compared with saying they were ‘invaded’?
Is the history of contact the same in Australia and America?
Does it matter when the ‘frontier’ is opened up?
Is assimilation in both Australia and America a form of ‘genocide’?
How much recognition does each society today give to this past?
Lecture and tutorial
War and Identity
On 25 April 1915 Australian and New Zealand soldiers took part in an Allied invasion of Turkey on the Gallipoli peninsula. The eight month campaign was a resounding military defeat for the Allies. Yet ‘Anzac’ came to quickly assume an important place in Australia’s sense of itself as a nation.
Set reading:
David Carter, ‘War, Nation and Public Commemoration: The Meanings of Anzac’, Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity (2006), pp. 108-130.
John Hirst, ‘Labor and Conscription’ in Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, (2006) pp. 210-229.
Additional reading:
Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (2008).
Marilyn Lake (ed), What’s wrong with Anzac?: The militarization of Australian history (2010)
Tutorial questions:
Why was Gallipoli so quickly seen as a ‘baptism of fire’ and as ‘the birth of a nation’?
Why did some parts of the Labor Party oppose conscription so vigorously?
Is it reasonable to argue that the social impact of the First World War was much greater in Australia than in America?
What is the difference between remembering the war dead, and glorifying war?
Australian Cinema Program 4
Gallipoli (1981) director Peter Weir, Mel Gibson, Mark Lee
This film directly reflects on the lecture and tutorial material this week. When it was first released in 1981, it created controversy, both as a vivid depiction of the war, but also as possibly glorifying the ideas of ‘mateship’ and ‘sacrifice’ associated with ‘the ANZAC legend’.
Lecture and tutorial
Migrant Nations
Australia and the USA can both be characterised as nations built on migration. But there have been some differences between the two nations’ approaches to newcomers and ‘strangers at the gates’. And over the course of the twentieth century there have been key policy changes.
Set reading:
Gary P. Freeman and James Jupp, ‘Comparing Immigration Policy in Australia and the United States’, in Nations of Immigrants: Australia, The United States and International Migration (1992), pp. 1-20
Additional reading:
Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, (2005)
Jon Stratton and Ien Ang, ‘Multicultural Imagined Communities: Cultural Difference and National Identity in Australia and the USA’ in David Bennett (ed.), Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (1998), pp. 135-62.
Tutorial questions:
How similar are the experiences of migration in Australia and America ?
Is the ‘migrant dream’ a different thing in Australia from in America?
Is the American idea of adopting a political message or ideology a more sustainable form of integration of migrants than the Australian idea of assimilating to a ‘way of life’.
Would Australia’s official policy position of ‘multiculturalism’ be impossible in America?
Lecture and tutorial
Democracy and its Institutions
By the beginning of the 20th century, Australia had an advanced form of democracy; with free elections, a secret ballot, votes for women and a commitment to notions of social (but not economic) equality. This had come about through political struggle, but without any dramatic crisis or conflict.
In this lecture, we look at some of the political ideas and political structures that come out of these events, and note the ways that Australia drew on both British and American ideas and precedents about the best arrangement of political institutions.
Set reading:
Ariadne Vromen and Katharine Gelber, Powerscape, (2005) pp. 53-83.
Additional reading:
Graham Maddox, Australian Democracy in Theory And Practice, (2000)
Tutorial Questions:
How is having a Prime Minister different from having a President?
Is Australia more, or less democratic than America and Britain ?
In what ways is Australian federalism different to American federalism?
Our system is sometimes described as ‘Washminster’ hybrid of both Westminster and Washington – what might this mean?
Lecture and tutorial
Australia in Asia
One Australian oddity is that it is part of the western world, but located in Asia. We have looked earlier at some of the lingering attachments to Britain and America, which are not only about cultural and political influence, but also about identity. For most of our history, great power alliances were intended to protect us from Asia, and Asian people were carefully excluded on racist grounds by the White Australia policy until the 1970s. It is only relatively recently that Australians have started to engage with our Asian location with more enthusiasm than fear, with more curiosity than dread.
Set reading:
Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia (1992), pp. 58-73.
Additional reading:
Mark McGillivray and Gary Smith (eds) Australia and Asia (1997)
Ien Ang, ‘Asians in Australia: a contradiction in terms?’ in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand (2000).
Tutorial questions:
How have Australians thought of 'Asia'?
What were the reasons for fear of Asia in Australian history?
How significantly have Australian attitudes towards Asia shifted?
What do we mean when we say Australia has recently sought to re-define itself more in terms of its geography than its history?
Lecture and tutorial
Comparing new worlds
This last lecture and tutorial will be an opportunity both to summarise and synthesize the themes in this subject, but also to reflect on some of the key challenges facing us. Australia and America have a lot in common, such as a democratic system, a free-market or capitalist economy, a basis in immigration and a shared past of dispossession of indigenous people.
But there are also some fundamental differences, which can be expressed in the form of several questions or provocations for tutorial discussion.
Australia is a more secular society than the US, and is hence less affected by religious controversy and division.
Australia is a more genuinely multicultural society than the US.
Australia is a part of the Asian future in ways that American cannot be.
American has the advantages, but also the burdens, of being the centre of an empire.
Set reading:
Robert Manne, ‘Thoughts on Australia’, in The Way We Live Now (1998), pp. 107-112.
Course Discussion / Review
Exam
Brief Biography of Instructor:
Associate Professor John Murphy was Associate Dean (Research & Research Training) in the Faculty of Arts (2007-10) and Director of the Australian Centre in 2006. He completed a research MA in politics at Monash, and then a PhD in history at Melbourne. He previously taught at RMIT University where he was Director of the Centre for Applied Social Research.
His research focuses on Australian social and political history, on the history of social policy, on public narratives about welfare, masculinity and nation, and on the interplay of memory, history and biography.
In July 2011, Allen and Unwin will publish Half a Citizen: Life on welfare in Australia, jointly written with Suellen Murray, Jenny Chalmers, Sonia Martin and Greg Marston.
This course provides an understanding of Australian society and culture, and of the historical forces which shape contemporary realities. This subjects forms the basis for your explorations in elective modules.
Topics covered include relations between settler and indigenous Australians, debates over Australian identity, and the distinctive forms democracy has taken in Australia. A particular focus of the subject is on the similarities and differences between Australia and America.
Lectures are followed by a tutorial discussion group, and in some cases by a related film. The set of readings has been prepared for each tutorial, and you are expected to have done this preparation. You should come to tutorials ready to engage with the readings critically; they are intended to stimulate our discussions rather than be a last word on the subject.
For most weeks, I have added references to some additional readings if you want to explore these issues further in the library, particularly in preparation for the exam.
When you complete this subject, you should be able to:
The assessment for this subject has four components. Students must successfully pass each component in order to satisfy the requirements of the subject.
Under each of the headings below I have identified the key criteria that will be used in assessing your work in the subject.
1. Tutorial participation (10%)
This is an assessment, completed by your tutor, about the level of your engagement with the course during the tutorials. I will be looking for:
2. Small group presentation (10%)
In groups of not more than four, you will give a 15 minute presentation on a contemporary issue or conflict in Australia, as if you were briefing a party of visiting US diplomats or executives. You are expected to draw on the material of lectures, field trips, tutorials as well your own experiences. I will be looking for:
3. Film written exercise (750 words – 20%)
During the first few weeks of the course I will be showing four Australian films. This assessment task requires you to write a paper dealing with any three of these films.
Drawing upon material from the lectures and tutorials you are required to discuss how these films present or comment upon Australian experiences, history and culture.
I will be looking for:
4. Open Book Exam (2,000 words – 60%)
In the exam you are required to answer two short essays of approximately 1,000 words each. The essay questions will relate to material and themes covered in the subject.
I am not looking to test your ability to recall ‘facts’ but instead to assess your critical engagement with the subject.
You may bring your reader, and your notes from the lectures and the tutorials, but you cannot use mobile phones, IPads or other electronic devices during the exam.
I will be looking for:
Introduction: Creation Myths in Australia and America
In 1976 and in 1988, the United States and Australia celebrated their respective bicentenaries. The former was celebrated a moment of national independence, wrested from a colonial power, while the latter was celebrating the original establishment of a penal colony. Both were only obliquely remembering the dispossession of the original inhabitants. What do these two starting points tell us about ways the nation is constructed and remembered?
Set reading:
Additional reading:
Tutorial Questions:
Australian Cinema Program 1
Set in northern Australia between 1939 and 1942, Baz Luhrmann described his film as depicting ‘a mythologized Australia’. When it came out, it was very successful, even though some thought it was over the top. But Luhrmann’s films are usually over the top. Do we need to distinguish mythologies – about ‘the bush’ and about Australian egalitarianism – from historical ‘reality’??
Convict society and its enemies
The received wisdom in Australia used to be that the penal settlements at Sydney and then at Hobart meant Australia was built on fear, terror and suffering. Robert Hughes’ Gothic description in The Fatal Shore is a lurid rendering of this account, as a memory that Australians had worked hard to forget.
But others have tried to explain how a vibrant democracy emerged fairly quickly from the original penal settlement. Part of this may be about how government wanted convict society to gradually merge into a freer and more stable settlement – particularly through the institution of marriage – and part of the story is also about the emergence of demands for the end of convict transportation and – often associated with that demand – for the institution of democratic government and the popular vote.
Set reading:
Additional reading:
Tutorial questions:
Australian Cinema Program 2
Little Fish (2005), director Rowan Woods
Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving and Sam Neill
Set in contemporary Sydney, Little Fish is a very different film from Luhrmann’s Australia. A grim story about trying to stay off drugs and about the nature of ordinary deception, it is far from ‘mythologizing’ anything.
Australian Cinema Program 3
This film anticipates some of the themes of tomorrow’s lecture and tutorial. Set in 1922, somewhere unspecified on the Australian frontier, The Tracker is a bleak but subtle depiction of race relations. Three white men (The Fanatic, the Follower and the Veteran) set out with an Aboriginal tracker on a mission to capture a murderer.
Settler societies and indigenous people
The latest estimates are that Aboriginal people arrived in Australia from Southeast Asia at least 60,000 years ago, and that by 1788 there were some 300,000 inhabitants across the continent, divided into over 500 tribes. As in America, white settlement displaced people, often through introduced diseases, but also in frontier conflict.
In this lecture, we look at how this frontier moved over time, and what the impact was on Aboriginal people. Policies changed over time, from a period of ‘protectionism’ to one of ‘assimilation’.
Set reading:
Additional reading:
Tutorial questions:
War and Identity
On 25 April 1915 Australian and New Zealand soldiers took part in an Allied invasion of Turkey on the Gallipoli peninsula. The eight month campaign was a resounding military defeat for the Allies. Yet ‘Anzac’ came to quickly assume an important place in Australia’s sense of itself as a nation.
Set reading:
Additional reading:
Tutorial questions:
Australian Cinema Program 4
This film directly reflects on the lecture and tutorial material this week. When it was first released in 1981, it created controversy, both as a vivid depiction of the war, but also as possibly glorifying the ideas of ‘mateship’ and ‘sacrifice’ associated with ‘the ANZAC legend’.
Migrant Nations
Australia and the USA can both be characterised as nations built on migration. But there have been some differences between the two nations’ approaches to newcomers and ‘strangers at the gates’. And over the course of the twentieth century there have been key policy changes.
Set reading:
Additional reading:
Tutorial questions:
Democracy and its Institutions
By the beginning of the 20th century, Australia had an advanced form of democracy; with free elections, a secret ballot, votes for women and a commitment to notions of social (but not economic) equality. This had come about through political struggle, but without any dramatic crisis or conflict.
In this lecture, we look at some of the political ideas and political structures that come out of these events, and note the ways that Australia drew on both British and American ideas and precedents about the best arrangement of political institutions.
Set reading:
Additional reading:
Tutorial Questions:
Australia in Asia
One Australian oddity is that it is part of the western world, but located in Asia. We have looked earlier at some of the lingering attachments to Britain and America, which are not only about cultural and political influence, but also about identity. For most of our history, great power alliances were intended to protect us from Asia, and Asian people were carefully excluded on racist grounds by the White Australia policy until the 1970s. It is only relatively recently that Australians have started to engage with our Asian location with more enthusiasm than fear, with more curiosity than dread.
Set reading:
Additional reading:
Tutorial questions:
Comparing new worlds
This last lecture and tutorial will be an opportunity both to summarise and synthesize the themes in this subject, but also to reflect on some of the key challenges facing us. Australia and America have a lot in common, such as a democratic system, a free-market or capitalist economy, a basis in immigration and a shared past of dispossession of indigenous people.
But there are also some fundamental differences, which can be expressed in the form of several questions or provocations for tutorial discussion.
Set reading:
Robert Manne, ‘Thoughts on Australia’, in The Way We Live Now (1998), pp. 107-112.
Course Discussion / Review
Exam
Associate Professor John Murphy was Associate Dean (Research & Research Training) in the Faculty of Arts (2007-10) and Director of the Australian Centre in 2006. He completed a research MA in politics at Monash, and then a PhD in history at Melbourne. He previously taught at RMIT University where he was Director of the Centre for Applied Social Research.
His research focuses on Australian social and political history, on the history of social policy, on public narratives about welfare, masculinity and nation, and on the interplay of memory, history and biography.
In July 2011, Allen and Unwin will publish Half a Citizen: Life on welfare in Australia, jointly written with Suellen Murray, Jenny Chalmers, Sonia Martin and Greg Marston.