Unsettling Australia: Readings in Australian Cultural History (Hardcover)  | Released: 2005

This book is a critical intervention into debates on Australias cultural history. The book demonstrates the interconnectedness of themes commonly seen as separate discursive formations, and shows the fruitfulness of bringing a combined cultural studies and post-colonial approach to bear on a number of fields, seen as pivotal to the formation and particular expression of Australian culture today. The book argues that a redefinition of the borders between what has been regarded and patrolled as discrete fields of Australian Studies is mandatory in order to alter definitions of Australias cultural history and identity away from the conventional histories of a settler culture gradually embracing a multicultural society. The Introduction argues for the productiveness of combining a cultural studies approach with post-colonial criticism and explains why the placement of Australian cultural history in the unconventional territorial representation of its Asian other is not only enabling but necessary in order to divest Australian Studies of settlement historys monolithic grasp on definitions of Australias cultural history. The subsequent Chapters examine Australian historiography (focusing on colonial beginnings), political history (focusing on relations with Indonesia and East Timor), multiculturalism (focusing on the Chinese in Australia), and anthropology (focusing on Aboriginal-Asian contact history) from this new angle.Table of Contents: 1. Infinite Rehearsals: Historiography and Australian Beginnings 2. Towards an Aboriginal-Asian Colonial Contact History 3. Geographic Dislocation: From European Satellite to Asian Backwater? 4. Multiculturalism and the Chinese-Australians