The Humanities in Australia and the Problem of Europe

This article offers an intellectual history of twentieth-century understandings of the humanities in Australia, with special reference to the problem of their Europeanness. Eurocentric ideologies associated with the term “the humanities” have particular pertinence in Australia, which in this period generally saw itself as a fragment of Europe in the Asia-Pacific. Transformations in the humanities’ methods and approaches have in Australia been bound up with questions of the country’s settler-colonial status and proximity to Asia. The significance of Australia’s geographic location for its intellectual heritage is evident in the changing meanings given to “the humanities” in the programmatic and definitional statements of prominent humanists. In tracing these changes, the article makes a broader methodological case for attention to the historicity of local understandings of “the humanities,” as it is by such an approach that we can most clearly see what the humanities have been and the functions they have served.