This chapter is about the flourishing of a variety of distinctively postmodern ‘alternative realisms’ in the early Twenty-First Century, which are predicated on the ontological questions Brian McHale famously identified as a recurrent element of postmodernism. It shows how a range of novels – especially examples by David Mitchell, Ali Smith, Maggie Gee and Kazuo Ishiguro – are charged with a postmodern sense that literature evokes a ‘plurality of worlds’, as dream-logic and mundane reality collide in comic and destabilizing ways, and the boundary between the mundane and the magical is rendered porous. These novels, the chapter contends, might productively be considered apocalyptic, a form of narrative in which veiled, hidden or buried stories are revealed. As a result, twenty-first-century alternative realism redoubles the impetus of late twentieth-century postmodernism to convey a distrust of authoritarianism by preserving a sense of the sublime.

This chapter will introduce global education. While global education is not a subject in its own right in Australian educational settings, developing learners’ understanding of globalisation and supporting them to become and be informed, responsible and active global citizens is an aim that sits across the Australian Curriculum. In this chapter, we engage with what globalisation means, as well as the ways in which learners in different educational settings learn about, and for, globally oriented citizenship. The chapter has three main sections. In the first, we set out what is meant by the terms globalisation and global education, and introduce the concept of the globally oriented citizen. In the second, we set out the key building blocks of global education – concepts, knowledge and understandings, skills and processes and attributes. In the third, we explore pedagogical approaches to global education, as well as how global education connects to the curriculum from the early years to Year 10. We also consider how connections can be made across the various learning experiences that constitute global education.

Sea power, classically defined as a strategy to control communications, was an essential asset for the creation of European maritime empires, enabling them to secure seaborne trade, open new markets, and acquire territory. It has often been conflated with seapower, a concept developed by the ancient Athenians to distinguish states like their own, whose economy, culture, and identity were enmeshed in the maritime sphere, from continental military powers like Sparta and Persia. In this period Britain, the only seapower Great Power, created an extensive maritime empire outside Europe, one combining colonies of settlement, like Australia, with those of occupation, and informal imperialism based on economic power. While many Continental European powers created maritime empires after 1815, they did so in the knowledge that their possessions would be exposed to British naval power in the event of war, and tended to focus on land and security rather than commerce.