Keen but untutored in bilbies

The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24356502-25192...

LETTER FROM AMERICA: Peter Monaghan | September 17, 2008

A FEW dozen brave souls offer courses about Australia at colleges and universities across North America, and they encounter reactions such as: "Canberra, what's that?" Students may be aware that Australia has indigenous people, yet few will be clear about what kind. Most will be surprised to learn of the nation's colonial history. Not one will pick a bilby from a bandicoot.

Nonetheless, such is American college students' fascination with Australia that enrolments are healthy whenever courses are offered with titles such as Post-1950 Australian Literature, Immigration and Conflict: Australian and American Experiences, or even Inside the Mason Court, as one legal scholar calls his survey of the Australian High Court from 1987 to 1995.

From a smattering of courses, presumably, comes a smattering of knowledge. Australian studies reaches relatively few students: after all, the US has 3300 colleges and universities. Only two host academic centres of Australian studies: Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and the University of Texas. In addition, each year since 1976 an eminent Australian has filled the Harvard University chair of Australian studies, an endowed teaching, research and outreach post.

University of Melbourne historian Stuart Macintyre recently completed his year, succeeding the likes of Geoffrey Blainey, Manning Clark and Gough Whitlam. Macintyre's students revealed plenty about Australia's image in the US. He asked which Australians they knew about: "I thought they might say Rupert Murdoch, but Steve Irwin won by the length of the straight."
About 150 North American academics devote close attention to Australian and New Zealand subjects, while plenty more dabble, say officers of two organisations, the Australian & New Zealand Studies Association of North America and the American Association of Australian Literary Studies, each of which holds an annual conference that draws a modest 50 or so academics.

John Higley, a specialist in comparative politics who directs the Centre for Australian and New Zealand Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, says his courses draw full houses of 50 students and there are a lot more clamouring to get in.

"If you had qualified teachers, you could teach similar courses in virtually any American university," he says. He uses the courses to entice students into going abroad for part of their studies: Texas has exchange programs with 10 Australian universities.

The Texas centre was founded after the Australian bicentenary to capitalise on the university's long history of visiting Australians academics and politicians, and its large Australian book and art collections.

With funds from Texan donors, the centre offers courses in politics, foreign policy, literature and film, mainly at the postgraduate level. The only comparable institute is Georgetown University's Centre for Australian and New Zealand Studies, which offers an undergraduate minor. Both centres hope for a boost from the new US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Like the Georgetown centre, and the Harvard chair, the new US Studies Centre at Sydney University has been run on funding from Australian governments seeking increased academic exchange.

Also bolstered by Australian money is Antipodes, the refereed journal of the AAALS, which has been open since 1986 to literary scholars from across the world. (The next AAALS conference, to be held alongside the ANZSANA meeting, will take place in Calgary, Canada, from February 26 to 28, with the theme Australian Classics: Old and New.)

Antipodes appears each June and December and includes critical essays on Australian literature and culture, as well as fiction, drama and poetry by Australian authors, many of them well known. Its subscribers include about 200 American university libraries, and it has the luxury of a good supply of material that, if rejected, generally finds its way into other journals, says its editor Nicholas Birns, of the New School university in New York. Birns, who co-edited the 2007 anthology A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900, says that almost all Australian writers with a reputation at home are known in the US; however, most of them fade from critical attention even after good reviews of their first releases in the huge but fickle American market.

That has not hurt Antipodes. When Birns took over the editorship in 2001, he was afraid that half the submissions would be on Peter Carey because he's so well known in the US.

"I have had plenty on him," he says. "But there's been a fair distribution among others, too."

Among healthy signs, he notes, is that novelist and critic Nicholas Jose will hold the Harvard chair (jointly with University of Sydney historian Alison Bashford), in 2009-10.

However, specialising in Australia does little for junior academics' job and tenure campaigns. When American college administrators are looking to fill Asian studies jobs, that doesn't include Australia, says ANZSANA president Rhonda Evans Case, a law professor at East Carolina University.

Similarly, in literary studies "lots of post-colonial (specialists) have been hired at American institutions, but Australia has been pushed out of the definition of post-colonial, which focuses on exploitation", says AAALS president Theodore F. Sheckels, who has been teaching courses on literature of the British Commonwealth since the mid-1980s at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia. "I'd like it if we'd embrace the Commonwealth in its entirety," he says.

"Australian studies is not a growth industry in the US," says Alan C. Tidwell, the fifth director of Georgetown's centre. "You could almost describe it as a shrinking industry."

Oddly, his centre gets some of the blame. When the Australian government financed Georgetown - first in 1995, later with an endowment grant of $5 million - other American institutions feared there'd be no seed money for them and shelved any plans of their own, Australia specialists say.
Still, Georgetown's centre, which is part of its school of foreign service, seemed a sensible choice.
In Washington it has access to government circles, and the university has a long record of attracting talented students intent on careers in government and foreign service.

In addition to its courses, the centre has an outreach program of lectures and conferences organised with the Australian and New Zealand embassies and prominent DC think tanks.

Australian and NZ studies will continue to be a labour of love in North America. Increasingly, albeit slowly, faculty exchanges provide opportunities.
Macintyre recommends Australian academics take those up.

"It's always useful to work with students who have no prior assumptions and who often have quite penetrating insights or questions," he says. Besides, he says, Australia impinges on the US much more than it would have even 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, the internet has become a boon for expats who pine, in the vast American radio and television wasteland, for The Science Show or Four Corners. It offers American college students far too many distractions for many specifics to stick, yet a few students in the Texas program have taken to watching ABC's The Hollowmen online.

Higley nonetheless laments: "In terms of covering, for example, Australian policy on carbon emissions, coverage is virtually zip over here."

Australian National University graduate Peter Monaghan writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Copyright 2008 News Limited.