Colonies and Post-colony: Nineteenth-Century Australia and its Legacies

This course investigates Australia across the nineteenth-century, using cultural and cross-cultural historical approaches. It emphasises the plurality of colonial experiments and experiences across the continent, and critically considers the ways in which they were shaped by distinctive histories of encounter, foundation, geography, and connectedness to places, including other colonies, beyond Australia. Indigenous perspectives will also be highlighted. While the course will canvass some conventional major themes in nineteenth-century Australia such as convicts, frontiers, and gender relations, it will do so by focusing on unconventional, marginal, and unfamiliar places, people, episodes, institutions, and practices. Students will be given opportunities to work with and interpret the detritus of colonial Australia, including objects, images, and ruins. In addition, some attention will be given to the ways in which "history-making" in diverse forms - e.g. writing, commemorating, reenacting, painting -- accompanied colonial occupation, and how the historical mythologies produced have since been challenged, making way for new perspectives and voices in Australian history. This will allow for a dialogue between colonial and postcolonial histories and perspectives.