Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity: issues in Australian studies

For undergraduate courses in Australian studies, history, cultural history and cultural studies.

Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity: issues in Australian studies introduces key topics and questions about Australia as a society, a culture and a nation. It engages in major debates within both the academic and public spheres of political discourse and cultural representations, and outlines both historical and theoretical approaches to these.
 
The text examines the social or historical contexts that influence the meanings and structures of 'Australianness', and provides both background detail and further discussion of many issues that can often be covered only briefly in the limited time allowed for lectures and seminars.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: HISTORIES AND IDENTITIES
1. Nations and national identity: too much or not enough?
2. Environment and settlement
3. Colonial identities: race, empire and nation
4. Aboriginal history and Australian history
5. Australia days: the meaning of national occasions
6. War, nation and public commemoration: the meanings of ANZAC
PART II: CULTURES AND COUNTRY
7. Land, place and possession
8. ‘For all Australians’: the Red Centre, Aboriginal landscapes and national symbols
9. Performing Australia: television, cinema and sport
10. Australian modernity
11. Americanisation and Australian culture in a global context
12. Contemporary Aboriginal cultures
PART III: POLITICS AND INSTITUTIONS
13. Australian in the world: from Empire to Asia?
14. ‘A nation of immigrants’: Australia’s immigration history
15. Multicultural Australia or Australian multiculturalism?
16. Egalitarianism: ideals and outcomes
17. Social orders: gender in Australian society
18. First nations: the struggle for Indigenous rights

• Issues boxes
• Photos, cartoons and maps enhance understanding
• Draws on a wide range of disciplinary areas, from literary and cultural studies to political science and sociology
• Each issue-based chapter of the book can stand alone, but contains cross-references to themes across the book. Among the themes and issues explored are:
  - the relationship between national identities and national histories
  - the role of national identities and histories as claims to legitimate possession of the land, and as stories of belonging
  - the interaction of Indigenous and non-Indigenous understandings of history, country and possession
  - the long history of race and racialisation in definitions of the nation, and their intersections with gender and class
  - the meanings of ‘Australian modernity;
  - the nation as shaped by its regional location and global relations