AustLit

The rejection of the 1999 republic referendum has sharpened scholarly concern with Australian citizenship and nationality, both as concept and practice. In the last decade historians from quite disparate fields-constitutional, legal, political, administrative, educational, literary, cultural-have addressed aspects of these histories. At the same time historians from reformist traditions-indigenous, feminist, multicultural, post-colonial-have reassessed mainstream accounts as exclusionary. This unit reads secondary texts as the products of particular disciplinary traditions and seeks to understand the multiple meanings imagined for 'the Australian citizen' in the twentieth century.