Digital disruption and co-creating Australian Studies

In the early 1990s, designing curricula was a fundamentally different exercise to what it is today: teaching was face-to-face, resources were print-based, overhead projectors were state of the art in lectures, while VHS had only recently taken over from over Betamax videos. Computers were little more than text editors, as floppy disks gradually reduced in size from eight inches to three and a half. Compact disks vied for supremacy with vinyl in music stores, not as storage devices, while DVDs had not yet been invented. I had arrived in London in August 1989 to work at the Menzies Centre in the midst of immense transformations in the world. Less than twelve months into the job, I received a call from the Australian Ambassador in Budapest with a request to scope the prospects of mounting Australian Studies programs at Hungarian universities. The present article gives an overview of the development of Australian Studies and compares what it was like to teach an Australian Studies course in Hungary then and what it is like today