Image: Gough Whitlam Place, Fitzroy, Melbourne October 2014 | Star A Star, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons | CC BY-SA 4.0

»It’s Time!«
Australia and the World at the Crossroads

19th Biennial Conference of the
Gesellschaft für Australienstudien | German Association for Australian Studies
Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, 9 – 12 October 2025

It was 50 years ago that Gough Whitlam – leader of arguably Australia’s most reformist government to date – was sacked by the Governor-General. Labor’s campaign slogan for its election victory in 1972 was »It’s Time!«. With this rallying call, Whitlam convinced voters to approve a radical agenda for effective, wide-ranging political, economic, social and cultural change.

It’s time, again.

Our 2025 biennial conference examines ideas for reform, review and renewal in the context of political, social, economic, ecological and cultural transformations facing Australia and the world today. We focus on three broad themes.

  • Voices: First Nations voices, constitutional reform, and wider debates about Voice, Treaty and Truth are a central focus, while questions of gender, queerness and intercultural dynamics also play a role in considerations of belonging and representation.
  • Places: Land (Country) and space in Australia, whether urban or rural, below or above ground, off-shore or onshore, remain hugely contested. We explore human and more-than-human connections to place, ideas of belonging, identity, spirituality and the environment.
  • Temporalities: Deep Time, ancient and modern, old and new, cyclical and regenerative, memory and forgetting, traditional and novel, colonial and postcolonial are among the terms used to contextualise Australian senses of time. We consider the relevance of such temporalities in shaping identities, societies and environments and in opening up new perspectives on Australia’s past, present and future.

The conference takes place from 9 to 12 October 2025 at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS).

We warmly invite you to participate in our discussions and debates across the fields of cultural studies, history, political science, geography, literary and film studies, linguistics, anthropology and ecology.

The conference is kindly supported by the DFG (WE 4310/6-1) and jointly organized by Carsten Wergin (Heidelberg), Geoff Rodoreda (Stuttgart) and Susann Liebich (Heidelberg).

Contact: GASt2025[at]australienstudien.org

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