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COURSE INFORMATION

• Aim of Course
• Goals and Outcomes
• Assessment
• Important Information and Reminders
• Guide to the Interpretation of Grades
• Recommended Texts
• Some Key Dates in Australian Social History, 1919-2004

Aim of Course

The aim of this course is to encourage students to ponder the ways in which they themselves are the product of historical developments over the last eighty years. They will be encouraged to interrogate the society around them from an historical perspective, to see the vestiges of the past in the present, to talk to people about their memories, to critique the present as a product of the past. The course will also seek to develop independent research skills, with extensive use of primary sources.

Goals and Outcomes

The point of this section is to encourage you to think about the ‘generic skills’ you are acquiring as you do this course. Arts students are often unaware of their ‘attributes’, assuming that the important life skills honed by Arts courses are simply common sense. But the abilities to think independently, challenge and interpret evidence, exercise critical judgment, write clearly and logically, present a coherent argument etc, are not as common in the wider community as they should be, and Arts graduates often find the skills they have acquired are valued more highly by others than by themselves.  We want you to recognise the skills you have, recognise the often tiresome jargon used to describe them and be able to articulate them, to your own advantage, in the future. It might help in applying for jobs; it might also mean that when you come to complete graduate survey questionnaires, which affect university and faculty funding, you will be familiar with your ‘attributes’ and recognize the language used to describe them, and so tick the right boxes when it comes to deciding what you have gained from your degree!

Knowledge Skills:

By the end of this course you will have acquired a thorough understanding of history of Australia between 1919 and 2000 and the implications of this history for our current society. You will be familiar with library, internet and other resources and technologies which will enable you to continue to extend that knowledge. You will be equipped with theoretical concepts and practical knowledge which will enable you to participate in important debates, hotly contested today, about this history. You will have developed or improved your ability to identify, access, organise and communicate knowledge in both written and spoken English, and you will have an improved understanding of how to exercise the skills of historical research and the standards of historical interpretation in your own work, and to assess their effective employment in the scholarship you have encountered.

Thinking Skills:

You will have increased your capacity for critical and independent thinking about the nature of Australia’s historical development, the significance of historical evidence, and the implications of historical debate. Through participation in tutorial discussion, you will learn to develop and express your own ideas, listen and respond to the ideas of others, accept and offer constructive criticism and reach consensus or a more sophisticated understanding through collective wisdom. In your essays you will hone your ability to bring research and reading to bear on historical problems, to justify your findings and show how they support your arguments.

Personal Skills and Attributes:

You will have increased your capacity for lifelong learning, and your ability to organise your time so as to balance the requirements of this course (attending classes, fulfilling reading requirements before tutorials, meeting deadlines, etc) with the demands of other courses and other aspects of your life. You will have built on your capacity to work co-operatively with others, to work through differences of opinion in a constructive way, and to think responsibly about ethical issues raised in the course content or in your personal interactions with fellow students and staff.

Practical Skills:

You will have practised essential skills of locating and accessing information using information technologies where appropriate. You will have improved your skills of organising and presenting the results of your research. You will be familiar with the technical skills associated with the discipline of history.

Assessment

(see the Assessment page for further details)

Important Information and Reminders

Prerequisites:

The formal pre-requisite for this course is completion of 12 credit points of Junior History or equivalent. In special cases, with the approval of the course co-ordinators, this requirement may be waived. No prior knowledge of Australian history is assumed in this course.

Penalties for late work:

Assignments late without extension will be penalised at the rate of 1% per day for the first week (not counting weekends) and 2 % per week thereafter. Extensions must be sought before the due date.

Appeals:

If you are unhappy with a grade, you should first speak to the person who marked your work. Appeals against academic judgements or grading decisions can be made either to the unit of study co-ordinator, or to the Chair of Department. Appeals may be made informally or in writing. An appeal against a grading decision or a request that work be remarked must be made within six months of the release of results for the unit of study, except in exceptional circumstances.

Attendance:

The Department of History requires satisfactory class attendance as part of participation in a unit of study. Attendance below 80% of the tutorials without written evidence of illness or misadventure will be penalized with loss of marks; attendance at less than 50% of the tutorials, regardless of the reasons for the absences, will result in the student being deemed not to have participated in the unit of study.

Plagiarism:

Plagiarism is the theft of intellectual property.

The Academic Board of the University of Sydney has defined plagiarism as ‘presenting another person's ideas, findings or work as one's own by copying or reproducing the work without due acknowledgment of the source’. The most common form of plagiarism is presenting written work that contains sentences, paragraphs or longer sections from published work without acknowledgement. (Use footnotes when referring to little known facts or other people’s ideas; use footnotes and inverted commas to acknowledge the use of someone else’s actual words.) In other cases, students (dishonestly) reproduce portions of the work of another student and present it as their own. Using the structure of another’s argument is a form of plagiarism, even if the wording is changed.

The History Department encourages students to think for themselves. In assessing your work we look for evidence of your understanding and capacity for independent thought, so we are always disappointed to discover plagiarism. Our disappointment is only mitigated by the delight of successful detection: academics have very sensitive antennae and derivative phrasing will swiftly alert our suspicions. Plagiarism from the internet, in particular, is absurdly easy to detect.

The Department’s first responsibility is educative, and where plagiarism seems to arise from poor referencing practices or lack of confidence, we will alert you to the problem and suggest strategies for improvement. Regardless of the reasons for it, plagiarised work is never acceptable, and may fail because it does not meet the requirements of academic merit.

Where dishonest intent is apparent, the Department may proceed to disciplinary measures. In the most serious cases, university procedures relating to student misconduct may be invoked and can lead to expulsion.

The Department’s Statement on Plagiarism can be found at : http://policy.rms.usyd.edu.au/000003f.pdf

Referencing:

All written work must include appropriate footnotes and bibliography. In-text (Harvard) style is not acceptable. Before handing work in, read the History Department's Short Guide to the Writing and Presentation of Papers and Essays to ensure that your work conforms to the Department's requirements.

The short guide may be accessed on the web: http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/history/ugresources.html (see "History Style Guide – PDF" at the top of the page. Acrobat Reader is required to access it.)

Guide to the Interpretation of Grades

The Department follows Academic Board and Faculty of Arts guidelines in awarding grades, and may scale marks in order to ensure parity of marking standards.

Recommended Texts

The essential readings for each week can be found in the course reader which you should buy from the University Copy Centre.

For many of the articles set for tutorial reading, you should also buy:

• Richard White and Penny Russell (eds) Memories and Dreams: Reflections on twentieth-century Australia Sydney 1997

For a recent general overview of Australian history, we recommend:

• Stuart Macintyre A Concise History of Australia CUP, Cambridge 1999

Other books that provide a sense of the broad sweep of Australian history, many of which can be readily bought second-hand, are:

• Darian-Smith, Kate and Paula Hamilton (eds) Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia Melbourne 1994 (a valuable collection relating the broad issue of memory and history to a number of relevant topics)
• Day, David Claiming a Continent Sydney 1996 (a recent short general history)
• Denoon, D. and P. Mein-Smith with M. Wyndham, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford, 2000) (Australia in a regional context)
• Connell RW & TH Irving Class Structure in Australian History Longman Cheshire, Melbourne 1980 $27.95. (A classic class analysis of Australian history)
• Grimshaw, Patricia et al Creating a Nation Ringwood 1994 (a stimulating attempt to rewrite mainstream history as gendered history)
• Murphy, John and Judith Smart (eds) The Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s Melbourne 1997 (special issue of Australian Historical Studies 28(109) October 1997; contains many of the set articles on the 1950s)
• Rickard, John Australia: A Cultural History Longman Cheshire, Melbourne 1988 (A good thematic general history with a cultural and 20th century bias)
• Tsokhas, Kosmas Making a nation state : cultural identity, economic nationalism and sexuality in Australian history Melbourne, 2001
• Teo, Hsu-Ming and R. White (eds) Cultural History in Australia (Sydney, 2003) (hot off the press collection of the latest in cultural history)
• Ward Russel A Nation for a Continent: The History of Australia 1901-1975 Heinemann, Melbourne 1977 (A straight political history which at least starts in the twentieth century)
• Waterhouse, Richard Private pleasures, public leisure : a history of Australian popular culture since 1788 Sydney 1995 (A good survey of popular culture)
• White Richard Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980 Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1981 (A history of the development of Australian national identity)

Keep in mind the relevant volumes of the bicentennial history:

• Gammage B & P Spearritt Australians 1938 Sydney 1987
• Curthoys, A., et al., Australians from 1939

The best detailed narrative accounts of Australia’s twentieth century are in the Oxford history:

• Macintyre S., The Succeeding Age 1901-1942, Melbourne 1986
• Bolton, G The Middle Way 1942-1988 Melbourne 1990

Some Key Dates in Australian Social History, 1919-2004