Subject Area: English

‘Seeing Australia’ is an online course which examines the way Australia has been ’seen’ over the last two centuries, in art, literature and photography. The course explores the way Australia has historically been depicted and understood, investigating some of the most fundamental cultural myths that have gone to shape Australian society. We will investigate how Australia has come to exist in the mind of its own people and those from other countries. Australia is therefore seen as the subject of many culturally disparate ‘ways of seeing’. We begin the process by analysing the concept of ‘seeing’ itself. ‘Seeing’ stands for many different ways of knowing and representing and these will be explored in a range of texts: written texts in poetic and narrative form, and visual texts of various kinds.