Thinking Australian Studies: teaching across cultures

By David Carter Kate Darian-Smith And Gus Worby Eds, St Lucia: UQP, 2004, 440 pages, paperback, $34.95. Reviewed by Anette Bremer in the June 2005 issue.

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Thinking Australian Studies is a very welcome edition to an area of study not rich in publications; its 24 essays offer histories of the field, examples of Australianist practice and speculations on Australian Studies' future. The volume brings together a diverse array of Australianists; the contributors, hailing from a range of cultural backgrounds, are a combination of better and lesser-known names, practitioners at an earlier stage of their career and those of more established standing, as well as a mix of academics working within and outside of Australian academic institutions. This catholicity of its contributors is one of the strengths of Thinking Australian Studies. The volume offers not only multiple narratives on the history, current state and future of the field, allowing the opinions of pioneers to come into dialogue with their students and a younger generation of academics, but responds to the global nature of the field, as the contributors discuss the pedagogical, cultural and social implications of teaching Australian Studies in such varying locations as Australia, Western and Central Europe, Britain, Japan, Taiwan, China, Indonesia, New Zealand, and the USA.

Applauding Thinking Australian Studies for its mosaic of contributors is not the same thing as saying the volume is representative of the field. Confined to the participants of two International Australian Studies Association conferences, many of whom by and large were nurtured in the innovative educational climate of the new universities established in the 1970s, the volume offers a partial history of the genesis and current state of play within Australian Studies.

I used the term 'field' to describe Australian Studies advisedly because many of the contributors touch upon the vexed question of whether it is a programme of study in its own right -- Australian Studies -- or Australianises the content of established disciplines -- Australian studies. To my mind, this fluctuating sizing of the 's' in studies signals a healthy heterogeneity of approaches and opinions within the field, though I found the textual solution of the fence-sitters -- s/Studies -- typographically tedious.

A number of essays discuss the genesis of Australian Studies and how it benefited from and contributed to new formations of knowledge such as women's, cultural, and Indigenous studies. Lyndall Ryan develops the notion of Australian Studies as the offspring of 1970s disciplinary innovation in her list of the field's seminal texts, citing publications which span the gamut of humanities research and ventures into environmental science. Essays by Bruce Bennett, Ann Curthoys and Susan Ryan focus on the 1984 CRASTE report, commissioned by Ryan, who was then Minister for Education in the Hawke Government. The period leading up to the publication of the committee's report, Windows onto Worlds: Studying Australia at Tertiary Level (1987) marks a brief golden alignment of governmental and academic concerns, backed up with funding commitments to Australianise the contents of tertiary education.

While Australian Studies (in either the guise of an Australianised curriculum, or as a distinct discipline) was a centrepiece of past Labor governments' education policies, the current federal administration still remains to be convinced of the value of this academic line of enquiry. A considerable portion of this volume details the concerted efforts of various academics to secure funding for Australian Studies programmes, both at home and abroad. It could be argued that Australian Studies is not alone at being at the whim of governmental interests, other fields of study find themselves competing for a vanishing higher education dollar. What distinguishes Australian Studies in this familiar narrative of the corporatised university is an irony: what should be central to the education of 'national citizens' has become increasingly marginalised; often its pedagogical value is appreciated more overseas than on the home turf. Given the current government's lack of interest in Australian Studies, more than one contributor argues that academics need to learn to 'talk the talk'; to place Australian Studies within the forum of international relations and trade in which the federal government now operates. In other words, we can not assume the self-evident importance of our field; as David Carter suggests, we need to think of ways to connect our pedagogical agendas with political agendas. (p 108)

Carter's call for connecting academic and governmental agendas comes in the context of a broader plan to re-conceive Australian Studies as a species of cultural diplomacy. Pedagogically and theoretically, this results in re-conceptualising the field in terms of its internationalising perspective, rather than seeing Australian Studies as a specialist field (p 97). Various essays explore Australian Studies' place in an increasingly globalised world; perhaps the most interesting responses are the case studies of teaching in an international context, either domestically to international students or within an overseas institution. In using Australian material in an English-language course, which traditionally relies on English or American content, Shu-Chen Chiang found that the class discovered 'roots' rather than 'routes'. (p 348) Paradoxically, comparing expatriate Taiwanese and Chinese writings on Australia allowed the English-language students to develop a deeper appreciation of Taiwan's history and sense of nationhood. Australian content has at one and the same time internationalised and localised the classroom experience.

Another cluster of essays raise the issue of which group of Australians is typically racialised within Australian Studies. Aileen Moreton-Robinson convincingly argues that Indigenous people have born, and still bare, the burden of race and racial difference; she contends that whiteness needs to be placed 'at the heart of the Australian studies project'. (p 140) What might be the pedagogical pitfalls and windfalls of racialising the white Australian subject is discussed in Peta Stephenson's contribution, while Gus Worby's essay fuses the theoretical and the practical in its discussion of teaching collaboratively with Indigenous academics. Thinking Australian Studies needs to be praised for its mix of the theoretical and the practical: this feature of the volume will be especially appreciated by diasporic Australianists like myself, who are not only geographically isolated from one another but also often situated in English-language departments, whose pedagogical agenda differs from our own. In its valuable assortment of essays, Thinking Australian Studies offers a focus point by which Australianists both at home and abroad can frame their pedagogical practice.

Citation

• Anette Bremer. 'Review: Thinking Australian Studies: teaching across cultures by David Carter Kate Darian-Smith and Gus Worby eds' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• This compelling and lively collectino examines and repositions the place of Australian Studies and the history of ideas about Australia within the Australian and international higher education sectors. By tracing the evolution of cross-disciplinary studies from the 1970s, leading scholars engage with the cultural and political changes which continue to influence the ways we study Australia. How does Australian Studies contribute to new transnational perspectives and alliances? How can new conceptual and pedagogical approaches to Australian Studies help scholars and students think beyond national boundaries and across cultures? In an increasingly globalised educational environment, what is the role of Australian Studies - whether 'at home' or in North America, Europe or Asia? This accessible book responds to these questions through a range of historical and personal reflections, theoretical analyses and case-studies in cross-cultural teaching.

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