A Future for Australian Studies?

This article provides a personal and anecdotal reflection on the question of a future for Australian studies. It briefly recounts the history and signification of the interdisciplinary descriptor “Australian studies” and its political and social context from the late 1980s. In particular, it emphasises the importance of Indigenous and constitutional foundations to any new Australian studies and its shaping of knowledge. The anecdotal topics I explore include Indigenous writers, the national capital's inflection of Australian studies, Garma, Global South film studies and Australia's geographical relations to the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the North. It argues that modelling a new Australian studies needs to countenance the idea that Australia has to be begun again.