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Essays From A Strange Country

Essays From A Strange Country

Written by: Jasmine Wolfe
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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.Jasmine Wolfe Social Sciences
Episodes
  • The "Dungeon of the World": Trauma, Landscape, and the Contradictions of Convict Gothic.

    The "Dungeon of the World": Trauma, Landscape, and the Contradictions of Convict Gothic.
    Jun 7 2026

    This essay reads Convict Gothic as one of Australian culture’s less flattering inheritance claims. It looks at the neat British rhetoric of reform and improvement, then sets it against the rather messier business of carceral violence. It argues that the penal system did not simply occupy the landscape; it made the landscape do some of the punishing. From there, it traces the afterlife of this logic through literature and contemporary cinema. What emerges is a national imaginary built, rather inconveniently, on confinement, brutality, and the kind of haunting that refuses to stay historical.


    Soundbites are clipped from the preview/trailer of the 1981 film "For The Term Of His Natural Life."

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    43 mins
  • Why Australian Stories Are Unlike Anything Else On Earth

    Why Australian Stories Are Unlike Anything Else On Earth
    May 31 2026

    Discover why Australian storytelling is gloriously unruly: ancient Aboriginal knowledge systems, Country as living protagonist, Gothic reversals of colonisation, and the national talent for laughing while bleeding. This essay cuts through myths, cringe, Hollywood noise, and polite amnesia to show a literature shaped by memory, land, law, and bruised irony.
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    35 mins
  • EfaSC Preview

    EfaSC Preview
    May 30 2026

    A short introduction to the spirit of Essays from a Strange Country.
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    2 mins
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