Welcome to Essays from a Strange Country, a podcast about Australian identity. I’m your host Jasmine Wolfe. Each episode, through the lens of what our culture has produced, such as an Australian film, literature, art, and music to ask how this country has imagined itself, and who has been conveniently left out of the portrait. This is not a search for one neat national identity. Mercifully, no such thing exists. Instead, we’ll read the mess: the stories, images, songs, and screen myths that make Australia feel familiar, strange, beautiful, brutal, and faintly ridiculous.
Essays From A Strange Country
Claim This Podcastby Jasmine Wolfe
9 episodes
Updated Daily
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Podcast Overview
Welcome to Essays from a Strange Country, a podcast about Australian identity. I’m your host Jasmine Wolfe. Each episode, through the lens of what our culture has produced, such as an Australian film, literature, art, and music to ask how this country has imagined itself, and who has been conveniently left out of the portrait. This is not a search for one neat national identity. Mercifully, no such thing exists. Instead, we’ll read the mess: the stories, images, songs, and screen myths that make Australia feel familiar, strange, beautiful, brutal, and faintly ridiculous.
Language
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Publishing Since
5/30/2026
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Recent Episodes
July 12, 2026
Enduring the End of the World: Mudrooroo and the Unfinished History of Settlement
<p>Australian cultural identity has often been composed around an ending that would not end. In Van Diemen’s Land, British colonisation drew authority from a rhetoric of extinction: the Palawa were imagined as a “dying race”, their disappearance rendered as melancholy inevitability rather than organised dispossession. This was not merely a bad prediction. It was a political convenience. If Aboriginal people were already vanishing, then invasion could be redescribed as settlement, theft as progress, and genocide as the sombre weather of history. The fiction of extinction allowed the colony to mourn what it was actively destroying.</p>
July 5, 2026
Stolen Spirit: The Gothic Reconstruction of Aboriginal Identity
<p>Aboriginal Gothic begins as a refusal of a convenient inheritance. The European Gothic arrived in Australia with its familiar machinery of haunted houses, ancestral crimes, spectral returns and threatened innocence, but on this continent those conventions could not remain merely decorative. Transplanted onto stolen land, the Gothic’s old anxieties about inheritance, legitimacy and buried violence acquired a sharper historical charge. What had often functioned as a “silencing discourse” within colonial writing—casting Indigenous presence as primitive, uncanny, vanishing or monstrous—becomes, in Aboriginal Gothic, a means of writing back to Empire. The genre turns the settler’s own imaginative apparatus against him.</p><p><br></p>
June 28, 2026
Picnic At Hanging Rock: Literature, Landscape, and Cinema.
<p>Picnic at Hanging Rock endures because it gives elegant form to a less elegant national disturbance: the suspicion that European settlement in Australia has never quite settled anything. Joan Lindsay’s novel, Peter Weir’s film, and later theatrical reworkings return obsessively to the same scene of colonial confidence undone: white schoolgirls, dressed for discipline and display, enter an ancient volcanic landscape and fail to come back. The mystery is usually treated as the work’s great seduction. Yet the more consequential mystery is cultural rather than narrative. Why has a fictional disappearance of white girls become one of Australia’s most durable myths, when the historical disappearance of Aboriginal children under state policy was, for so long, denied the same imaginative and civic attention?</p><p><br></p>
9 total episodes available
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- What is Essays From A Strange Country?
- How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates daily.
- Where can I listen to this podcast?
This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
- Does this podcast accept guests?
No, this podcast does not typically feature guests.
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