Books

Preparing a Nation?, based on extensive archival research, addresses perennial questions of Australian colonialism in Papua New Guinea. To what extent did Australia prepare Papua New Guinea for independence? And what were the policies and the ideologies behind colonial development, implemented after World War II? A key innovation of this book is to take these questions from policy desks in Canberra and Port Moresby to the villages of four administrative areas: Chimbu, Milne Bay, Sepik and New Hanover. How successful were Australian colonial planners in designing and implementing programs that could ameliorate the potential harm of market capitalism and develop ‘new’ socioeconomic structures that would combine a disparate people into an ‘imagined community’, capable of becoming an independent nation-state in the far distant future? Colonial intention is contrasted with Indigenous experience. Bradley Underhill explores an Australian governmental tendency to prioritise colonial control over Indigenous autonomy in circumstances where subjugated people do not necessarily fit within an expected narrative of compliant or westernised ‘native’.

‘I expect it will become the standard reference for its subject, which covers a pivotal aspect of Australia’s colonial administration.’
—Bill Gammage

Brad Underhill

ANU Press

Addressing the topic of expertise in international cultural conservation, this book argues that the UNESCO World Heritage regime emerged as a Faustian pact between protection and prestige, and a productive tension between these elements remains at its core, embodied by the heritage expert. Tracing experts’ practices in the World Heritage regime, this book shows how they burnish, broker and themselves benefit from World Heritage prestige. As World Heritage prestige also contributes to states’ international status claims, the stakes are raised, with both the denouement of the pact and the future for World Heritage poised between condemnation and redemption.

Luke James

Palgrave Macmillan

This book is the first of its kind to showcase a range of fresh and expert perspectives on decolonising history education in Australia. The research-informed chapters by First Nations and non-Indigenous educators and scholars provide guidance on applying practical strategies for decolonising learning and teaching, and moving beyond the ‘history wars’.

History has long been the most contentious area of education in Australia. This book tackles the narrow and overtly politicised ‘history wars’ debates and foregrounds the need to re-examine impacts of settler-colonialism on Australia’s history. First-hand knowledge and much-needed teaching practices are presented, demonstrating how decolonisation can be put into action through Australian history education. The chapters present a range of perspectives from the early years right through to higher education settings and argues that there is an increased need for greater awareness, appreciation, and willingness to explore and engage with multiple narratives of truth-telling that are so often contested. Readers are guided to discover how this translates to classroom practice through unique, provocative, and research-informed strategies that foreground applied decolonising approaches.

Combining theoretical perspectives and practical ideas, this book is an essential resource to support pre- and in-service teachers, in all education contexts, in navigating the decolonisation of Australian history education. This makes it an important contribution to local, as well as global, decolonising efforts.

Edited by Rebecca Cairns, Aleryk Fricker, Sara Weuffen

Routledge

The question of how to respond to migrants in general and forced migrants in particular has loomed large in the new Germany. In the early 1990s, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers was perceived to be a more pressing issue than the upheavals caused by unification. Today, a majority of Germans consider issues of migration and forced migration to be more urgent problems than the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, climate change and the lacklustre performance of the German economy.

Blumen und Brandsätze (Flowers and Molotov cocktails) is an attempt to chart German responses to refugees from the fall of the Wall until the present day. It does so by focusing on local policies and politics in two areas of Germany that could not be more different: the Altona district in the West German city state of Hamburg, and the shire of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge in regional and rural Saxony. While many of Altona’s residents have a migrant background, and most of them vote for the Greens or other left-of-centre parties, much of Saxony has an ethnically homogeneous population and is a stronghold of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews, archival and administrative records and ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores how neighbourhoods, local councils and local parliaments respond to camps and other facilities accommodating asylum seekers. It also investigates the impact of xeonophobic discourses and racist violence, analyses the role of East and West German identities, and discusses how conflicts over refugee hostels intersect with concerns over the lack of democratic participation.

Klaus Neumann worked at Deakin University as professor of history until 2018 and has held an appointment as honorary professor since then. He is the author of many books and articles about postcolonial histories, memory politics, historical justice, and immigration and refugee policies, including the award-winning Across the Seas: Australia’s Response to Refugees: A History. Blumen and Brandsätze is his first book in German.

Klaus Neumann

Hamburger Edition

The Geelong Cricket Club’s present-day logo declares that the club was “established in 1993”. Through painstaking analysis of historical evidence, however, Line & Length reveals how the club can trace its history to the 1840s and Geelong’s first decade as a township. That rich journey reveals a story that has historical threads woven deep into the fabric of the broader Geelong community and its surrounding regions. It begins in the club’s foundational years—from the mid 1800s up to the 1880s—during which time it was known as the Corio Cricket Club, the earliest iteration of today’s Geelong Cricket Club. Next, there came an amalgamation with the Geelong Football Club in 1884, which saw the town’s leading cricket and football teams joining forces under the banner of the Geelong Cricket & Football Club.

It was during this period that the club was involved in several historic firsts, including participating in the Geelong Cricket Association’s inaugural season of 1896-97, and its entry into metropolitan pennant via the Victorian Cricket Association’s Sub-District competition on the eve of WWI. After the amalgamation with the football club was dissolved—amicably—in the middle of the 20th century, Geelong Cricket Club went into a hiatus before reforming so it could re-join Melbourne’s Sub-District competition in the 1960s. Through all these iterations the club’s ultimate aim was to reach Victoria’s elite competition, District Cricket—later Premier Cricket—but failed bids tested the resolve of all involved. Success finally came with the VCA’s invitation to Geelong to join Premier Cricket for the 1993-94 season.

Tony Joel and Mathew Turner

Slattery Media

Mandates and Missteps is the first comprehensive history of Australian government scholarships to the Pacific, from the first scheme in 1948 to the Australia Awards of 2018. The study of scholarships provides a window into foreign and education policy making, across decades, and the impact such policies have had on individuals and communities. This work demonstrates the broad role these scholarships have played in bilateral relationships between Australia and Pacific Island territories and countries. The famed Colombo Plan is here put in its proper context within international aid and international education history. Australian scholarship programs, it is argued, ultimately reflect Australia, and its perception of itself as a nation in the Pacific, more than the needs of Pacific Island nations. Mandates and Missteps traces Australia’s role as both a coloniser in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea and a participant in the process of decolonisation across the Pacific. This study will be of interest to students and scholars of international development, international education and foreign policy.

Anna Kent

ANU Press

Examining urban heritage in twentieth-century Australia, James Lesh reveals how evolving ideas of value and significance shaped cities and places. Over decades, a growing number of sites and areas were found to be valuable by communities and professionals. Places perceived to have value were often conserved. Places perceived to lack value became subject to modernisation, redevelopment, and renewal. From the 1970s, alongside strengthened activism and legislation, with the innovative Burra Charter (1979), the values-based model emerged for managing the aesthetic, historic, scientific, and social significance of historic environments. Values thus transitioned from an implicit to an overt component of urban, architectural, and planning conservation. The field of conservation became a noted profession and discipline. Conservation also had a broader role in celebrating the Australian nation and in reconciling settler colonialism for the twentieth century. Integrating urban history and heritage studies, this book provides the first longitudinal study of the twentieth-century Australian heritage movement. It advocates for innovative and reflexive modes of heritage practice responsive to urban, social, and environmental imperatives. As the values-based model continues to shape conservation worldwide, this book is an essential reference for researchers, students, and practitioners concerned with the past and future of cities and heritage.

James Lesh

Routledge

This book presents methodological approaches that can help explore the ways in which people develop emotional attachments to historic urban places.

With a focus on the powerful relations that form between people and places, this book uses people-centred methodologies to examine the ways in which emotional attachments can be accessed, researched, interpreted and documented as part of heritage scholarship and management. It demonstrates how a range of different research methods drawn primarily from disciplines across the arts, humanities and social sciences can be used to better understand the cultural values of heritage places. In so doing, the chapters bring together a series of diverse case studies from both established and early-career scholars in Australia, China, Europe, North America and Central America. These case studies outline methods that have been successfully employed to consider attachments between people and historic places in different contexts.

This book advocates a need to shift to a more nuanced understanding of people’s relations to historic places by situating emotional attachments at the core of urban heritage thinking and practice. It offers a practical guide for both academics and industry professionals towards people-centred methodologies for urban heritage conservation.

James Lesh and Rebecca Madgin

Routledge

Robert Marsden Hope (1919–99), a NSW Supreme Court judge, shaped the structures, operations and doctrines of Australia’s intelligence agencies more than any other individual.
Commissioned by three Prime Ministers to conduct major inquiries, including two royal commissions, Justice Hope prescribed the structures, legislation, operational doctrines, and national and international arrangements that would ensure Australia had agencies that were effective in countering threats to its security, while also being fully accountable to the government, the law and the parliament.
More than a biography of Hope, Law, Politics and Intelligence also makes an important contribution to the history of Australia’s environmental policies, adds significantly to the debate on judges acting as Royal Commissioners, and contains new insights into the appointment of High Court and Supreme Court judges, as well as the dismissal of the Whitlam Government.
This landmark biography is a ground breaking account of the life and times of a man who shaped the way our intelligence agencies have operated for four decades.

Peter Edwards

NewSouth Books

Remembering the Cold War examines how, more than two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cold War legacies continue to play crucial roles in defining national identities and shaping international relations around the globe. Given the Cold War’s blurred definition – it has neither a widely accepted commencement date nor unanimous conclusion – what is to be remembered? This book illustrates that there is, in fact, a huge body of ‘remembrance,’ and that it is more pertinent to ask: what should be included and what can be overlooked?

This richly illustrated volume considers case studies of Cold War remembering from around the world. It engages with growing theorisation in the field of memory studies, specifically in relation to war. David Lowe and Tony Joel afford careful consideration to agencies who identify with being ‘victims’ of the Cold War. In addition, the concept of arenas of articulation, which envelops the myriad spaces in which the remembering, commemorating, memorialising, and even revising of Cold War history takes place, is given prominence.

David Lowe and Tony Joel

Routledge

Among the greatest intellectual heroes of modern times, Raphael Lemkin lived an extraordinary life of struggle and hardship, yet altered international law and redefined the world’s understanding of group rights. He invented the concept and word “genocide” and propelled the idea into international legal status. An uncommonly creative pioneer in ethical thought, he twice was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Although Lemkin died alone and in poverty, he left behind a model for a life of activism, a legacy of major contributions to international law, and—not least—an unpublished autobiography. Presented here for the first time is his own account of his life, from his boyhood on a small farm in Poland with his Jewish parents, to his perilous escape from Nazi Europe, through his arrival in the United States and rise to influence as an academic, thinker, and revered lawyer of international criminal law.

Donna-Lee Frieze (ed.)

Yale University Press

The firebombing of Dresden marks the terrible apex of the European bombing war. In just over two days in February 1945, over 1,300 heavy bombers from the RAF and the USAAF dropped nearly 4,000 tonnes of explosives on Dresden’s civilian centre. Since the end of World War II, both the death toll and the motivation for the attack have become fierce historical battlegrounds, as German feelings of victimhood compete with those of guilt and loss. The Dresden bombing was used by East Germany as a propaganda tool, and has been re-appropriated by the neo-Nazi far right. Meanwhile, the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche – the city’s sumptuous eighteenth-century church destroyed in the raid – became central to German identity, while in London, a statue of the Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command Sir Arthur Harris has attracted protests. In this book, Tony Joel focuses on the historical battle to re-appropriate Dresden, and on how World War II continues to shape British and German identity today.

Tony Joel

I. B. Tauris

This book critically examines a wide range of contemporary literary scandals in order to identify the cultural and literary anxieties revealed by controversial works. It explores how scandal predominantly emerges in relation to texts which offer challenging representations concerning children, women, sexuality, religion and authenticity, and how literary controversies bring to the surface a series of concerns about the complex construction of identity, history and reality. Including works such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1996–2007), Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991), James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), Misha Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust (1997), Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (1995–2000), the author analyses a broad spectrum of texts in order to examine why books continue to provoke public debate and outrage, and what the arguments surrounding scandalous works suggest about literature and the world.

Alyson Miller

Peter Lang

Focusing on six popular British girls’ periodicals, Kristine Moruzi explores the debate about the shifting nature of Victorian girlhood between 1850 and 1915. During an era of significant political, social, and economic change, girls’ periodicals demonstrate the difficulties of fashioning a coherent, consistent model of girlhood. The mixed-genre format of these magazines, Moruzi suggests, allowed inconsistencies and tensions between competing feminine ideals to exist within the same publication. Adopting a case study approach, Moruzi shows that the Monthly Packet, the Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl’s Own Paper, Atalanta, the Young Woman, and the Girl’s Realm each attempted to define and refine a unique type of girl, particularly the religious girl, the “Girl of the Period,” the healthy girl, the educated girl, the marrying girl, and the modern girl. These periodicals reflected the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls’ lives while also attempting to maintain traditional feminine ideals of purity and morality. By analyzing the competing discourses within girls’ periodicals, Moruzi’s book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

Kristine Moruzi

Routledge

Over the last seven decades, Papua New Guinea (PNG) has grown from a disparate collection of traditional societies loosely governed by its neighbour, Australia, to a thriving, developing state.

The story of how PNG came to lose its colonial shackles and gain independence is one of collective endeavour, as the tiny group of Papua New Guineans who gathered in the dusty streets of Port Moresby transformed into the leaders of the new nation. One of them was the young teacher, Ebia Olewale, who in his own journey from the village to the nation experienced many triumphs and tragedies.

PNG’s story – from the village to the world – is retold in this book, through the experiences of Ebia Olewale.

Jonathan Ritchie

University of Papua New Guinea Press

The Heritage of War is an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which heritage is mobilized in remembering war, and in reconstructing landscapes, political systems and identities after conflict. It examines the deeply contested nature of war heritage in a series of places and contexts, highlighting the modes by which governments, communities, and individuals claim validity for their own experiences of war, and the meanings they attach to them.

From colonizing violence in South America to the United States’ Civil War, the Second World War on three continents, genocide in Rwanda and continuing divisions in Europe and the Middle East, these studies bring us closer to the very processes of heritage production. The Heritage of War uncovers the histories of heritage: it charts the constant social and political construction of heritage sites over time, by a series of different agents, and explores the continuous reworking of meaning into the present.

What are the forces of contingency, agency and political power that produce, define and sustain the heritage of war? How do particular versions of the past and particular identities gain legitimacy, while others are marginalised? In this book contributors explore the active work by which heritage is produced and reproduced in a series of case studies of memorialization, battlefield preservation, tourism development, private remembering and urban reconstruction. These are the acts of making sense of war; they are acts that continue long after violent conflict itself has ended.

Bart Ziino and Martin Gegner (eds.)

Routledge

On 3 September 1939, Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, broadcast to the Australian people the news that their country was at war with Germany. He outlined how every effort had been made to maintain the peace by keeping the door open to a negotiated settlement. However, as these efforts had failed, the British Empire was now ‘involved in a struggle which we must at all costs win, and which we believe in our hearts we will win’. Christopher Waters here examines Australia’s role in Britain’s policy of appeasement from the time Hitler came to power in 1933 through to the declaration of war in September 1939. Focusing on the five leading figures in the Australian governments of the 1930s – Joe Lyons, Stanley Bruce, Robert Menzies, Billy Hughes and Richard Casey – Waters examines their responses to the rise of Hitler and the growing threat of fascism in Europe. Australian governments accepted the principle that the Empire must speak with one voice on foreign policy and were therefore intimately involved in the decisions taken by successive governments in London.

As such, this book provides new insights into the making of imperial foreign policy in the inter-war era, imperial history, the origins of World War II and Australian history.

Christopher Waters

I. B. Tauris

By analyzing one of the world’s greatest collections of Indigenous song, myth, and ceremony—the collections of linguist/anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow—Ceremony Men demonstrates how inextricably intertwined ethnographic collections can become in complex historical and social relations. In revealing his process to return an anthropological collection to Aboriginal communities in remote central Australia, Jason M. Gibson highlights the importance of personal rapport and collaborations in ethnographic exchange, both past and present, and demonstrates the ongoing importance of sociality, relationship, and orality when Indigenous peoples encounter museum collections today.

Jason Gibson

State University of New York Press

In Remembering Genocide an international group of scholars draw on current research from a range of disciplines to explore how communities throughout the world remember genocide. Whether coming to terms with atrocities committed in Namibia and Rwanda, Australia, Canada, the Punjab, Armenia, Cambodia and during the Holocaust, those seeking to remember genocide are confronted with numerous challenges. Survivors grapple with the possibility, or even the desirability, of recalling painful memories. Societies where genocide has been perpetrated find it difficult to engage with an uncomfortable historical legacy.

Still, to forget genocide, as this volume edited by Nigel Eltringham and Pam Maclean shows, is not an option. To do so reinforces the vulnerability of groups whose very existence remains in jeopardy and denies them the possibility of bringing perpetrators to justice. Contributors discuss how genocide is represented in media including literature, memorial books, film and audiovisual testimony. Debates surrounding the role museums and monuments play in constructing and transmitting memory are highlighted. Finally, authors engage with controversies arising from attempts to mobilise and manipulate memory in the service of reconciliation, compensation and transitional justice.

Nigel Eltringham and Pam Maclean (eds.)

Routledge

The Black Saturday bushfires of 7 February 2009 were the most catastrophic in Australia’s history. One hundred and seventy three people lost their lives and over two thousand homes were destroyed.

Award winning historian and writer Robert Kenny had a sound fire plan and he was prepared. But the reality of the fire was more ferocious and more unpredictable than he could have imagined. By the end of the day, his house and the life contained within were gone.

Gardens of Fire extends his experience of being engulfed by flames to an investigation of the human relationship with fire. This extraordinary and compelling history explores European and Aboriginal mythologies of fire along with the pragmatics of the fire in the hearth.

This is at once an intimate memoir and a meditative analysis of the reality that, as humans, we are children of fire.

Robert Kenny

University of Western Australia Press

Part biography, part transnational history, this study details the life and career of Percy Spender, one of Australia’s most prominent twentieth-century political figures.

David Lowe

Pickering & Chatto

In this book, leading historians reflect on the commemorative splurge, which involved large amounts of public spending, and also re-examine what happened in the immediate aftermath of the war itself.

Carolyn Holbrook and Keir Reeves

UNSW Press

This book is testament to the ways in which contemplations of the A-bomb are endlessly shifting, rarely fixed on the same point or perspective.

David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton and Alyson Miller

Lexington Books

Remembering Independence explores the commemoration and remembrance of independence following the great wave of decolonisation after the Second World War.

David Lowe and Carola Lentz

Routledge

This book will revolutionise the history of Indigenous involvement in Australian football in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Roy Hay

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial was a milestone event in West German history. Between 1963 and 1965, twenty-two former Auschwitz personnel were tried in Frankfurt am Main.

Dr Mathew Tuner

Bloomsbury Publishing

In the age of social media, life writing is ubiquitous. But if life writing is now almost universal—engaged with on our phones; reported in our news; the generator of capital, no less—then what are the limits of life writing?

David McCooey and Maria Takolander

Routledge

Colonial exploration continues, all too often, to be rendered as heroic narratives of solitary, intrepid explorers and adventurers. This edited collection contributes to scholarship that is challenging that persistent mythology. With a focus on Indigenous brokers, such as guides, assistants and mediators, it highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century exploration in Australia and New Guinea was a collective and socially complex enterprise. Many of the authors provide biographically rich studies that carefully examine and speculate about Indigenous brokers’ motivations, commitments and desires. All of the chapters in the collection are attentive to the specific local circumstances as well as broader colonial contexts in which exploration and encounters occurred.

Allison Cadzow, Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam (eds.)

ANU Press

This edited collection understands exploration as a collective effort and experience involving a variety of people in diverse kinds of relationships. It engages with the recent resurgence of interest in the history of exploration by focusing on the various indigenous intermediaries – Jacky Jacky, Bungaree, Moowattin, Tupaia, Mai, Cheealthluc and lesser-known individuals – who were the guides, translators, and hosts that assisted and facilitated European travellers in exploring different parts of the world.

These intermediaries are rarely the authors of exploration narratives, or the main focus within exploration archives. Nonetheless the archives of exploration contain imprints of their presence, experience and contributions. The chapters present a range of ways of reading archives to bring them to the fore. The contributors ask new questions of existing materials, suggest new interpretive approaches, and present innovative ways to enhance sources so as to generate new stories.

Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam (eds.)

ANU Press

Southern Anthropology, the history of Fison and Howitt’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai is the biography of Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880) written from both a historical and anthropological perspective. Southern Anthropology investigates the authors’ work on Aboriginal and Pacific people and the reception of their book in metropolitan centres.

Helen Gardner and Patrick McConvell

Palgrave Macmillan

The Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, Australia, is an internationally recognised museum and research centre dedicated to the memory of the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945.

Steven Cooke and Donna-Lee Frieze

Hybrid Publishers

A chance discovery made on a tour of Anzac Cove provided an immediate link between Gallipoli and Melbourne’s Eastern Suburbs. In the lead up to the Centenary of Anzac, ‘The Sweetland Project’ (named after a Box Hill man, Stephen Sweetland) became a broader search for the connections between Gallipoli and the former Shire of Nunawading, revealing 27 men from the former shire who died during the Gallipoli campaign. This book traces their stories and the reaction to the Great War of the local community, and shows how personal and collective memories of their experiences still resonate today.

Steven Cooke

Australian Scholarly Publishing

Unpredictable and boisterously entertaining, Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed is a collection of interconnected prose poems exploring the reanimation of canonical texts against a backdrop of popular culture references. Atherton’ s appeals to humour noir and the politicisation of the poet’s private spaces make for an exhilarating and intoxicating read.

Cassandra Atherton

Grand Parade Poets

This chapbook encourages the defamiliarisation of the quotidian by taking the common, household peg and presenting it in a range of new guises in prose poetry. Ultimately, this focus on the peg and ‘peg prose poetry’ aims to demonstrate beauty in the unremarkable. The peg also works as a lynchpin in the way it links, and is linked to, the quotidian in the other chapbooks in this collection. This is part of a practice-led research project that focuses on the way in which poetry can lend wonder to the mundane.

Cassandra Atherton

Authorised Press

This collection of prose poetry creates a naturally intimate world while, at the same time, fluidly examining complex connections between popular and high culture.

Cassandra Atherton

Finlay Lloyd Publishers

Dream Animals is a collection of prose poems which explores the strange and unsettling; those moments of chaos in the otherwise silence of the night; the violence and horror of the everyday. Based on “real world” events – such as curious deaths and accidents, small instances of tragedy, and the haunting beauty of the mundane – Dream Animals is a creative examination of the ways in which we define both self and other, especially in terms of the relationship between the human and the animal.

Alyson Miller

Dancing Girl Press

Wide-ranging in theme and context, Travelling Without Gods explores the imaginative effects of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s writing and in many ways suggests an alternative cultural history of Australia since the 1950s.

Containing biographical and critical pieces, poems (including new work by Chris) and essays that respond to his career Travelling without Gods takes account of the decades in which he has written. It illuminates, celebrates and critiques his work in its various contexts.

This book contains one of Seamus Heaney’s last poems and poetry and articles by David Malouf, Sir Andrew Motion, Peter Goldsworthy and many more.

Cassandra Atherton (ed.)

Melbourne University Press

The Vietnam War was Australia’s longest and most controversial military commitment of the twentieth century, ending in humiliation for the United States and its allies with the downfall of South Vietnam. The war provoked deep divisions in Australian society and politics, particularly since for the first time young men were conscripted for overseas service in a highly contentious ballot system. The Vietnam era is still identified with diplomatic, military and political failure.

Was Vietnam a case of Australia fighting ‘other people’s wars’? Were we really ‘all the way’ with the United States? How valid was the ‘domino theory’? Did the Australian forces develop new tactical methods in earlier Southeast Asian conflicts, and just how successful were they against the unyielding enemy in Vietnam?

In this landmark book, award-winning historian Peter Edwards skilfully unravels the complexities of the global Cold War, decolonisation in Southeast Asia and Australian domestic politics to provide new, often surprising, answers to these questions.

Peter Edwards

NewSouth Books

Remembering the First World War brings together a group of international scholars to understand how and why the past quarter of a century has witnessed such an extraordinary increase in global popular and academic interest in the First World War, both as an event and in the ways it is remembered.

The book discusses this phenomenon across three key areas. The first section looks at family history, genealogy and the First World War, seeking to understand the power of family history in shaping and reshaping remembrance of the War at the smallest levels, as well as popular media and the continuing role of the state and its agencies. The second part discusses practices of remembering and the more public forms of representation and negotiation through film, literature, museums, monuments and heritage sites, focusing on agency in representing and remembering war. The third section covers the return of the War and the increasing determination among individuals to acknowledge and participate in public rituals of remembrance with their own contemporary politics. What, for instance, does it mean to wear a poppy on armistice/remembrance day? How do symbols like this operate today? These chapters will investigate these aspects through a series of case studies.

Placing remembrance of the First World War in its longer historical and broader transnational context and including illustrations and an afterword by Professor David Reynolds, this is the ideal book for all those interested in the history of the Great War and its aftermath.

Bart Ziino (ed.)

Taylor and Francis

In So Many Words features interviews with eleven of the most influential intellectuals, scholars and writers in the United States. Atherton engages with her subjects, and responds to arguments that the public intellectual is endangered, dead or in decline. Interviewees include: Noam Chomsky, Camille Paglia, Todd Gitlin, Harold Bloom, Howard Zinn, Stephen Greenblatt, Paul Kane, Jim Cullen, Dana Gioia and Kenneth T. Jackson.

Cassandra Atherton

Australian Scholarly Publishing

Relations between Australia and Japan have undergone both testing and celebrated times since 1952, when Australia’s ambassadorial representation in Tokyo commenced. Over the years, interactions have deepened beyond mutual trade objectives to encompass economic, defence and strategic interests within the Indo-Pacific region and beyond.

This ‘special relationship’ has been characterised by the high volume of people moving between Australia and Japan for education, tourism, business, science and research. Cultural ties, from artists-in-residence to sister-city agreements, have flourished. Australia has supported Japan in times of need, including the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake.

This book shows how the Australian embassy in Tokyo, through its programs and people, has been central to these developments. The embassy’s buildings, its gardens and grounds, and, above all, its occupants—from senior Australian diplomats to locally engaged staff—are the focus of this multidimensional study by former diplomats and expert observers of Australia’s engagement with Japan.

Drawing on oral histories, memoirs, and archives, this volume sheds new light on the complexity of Australia’s diplomatic work in Japan, and the role of the embassy in driving high-level negotiations as well as fostering soft‑power influences.

David Lowe & Kate Darian-Smith

ANU Press

Beginning in 1943–44, Australia’s relationship with India is its oldest continuous formal diplomatic relationship with any Asian country. The early diplomatic exchanges between Australia and India have teased for their suggestions of potential unrealised, for opportunities missed, especially when compared with the very recent excitement about the future of Australia–India relations. How did Australia’s representatives and their staff in New Delhi negotiate the many dimensions of Australia–India relations? This book brings together expert analyses of the work of the Australian High Commission, its key people and the challenges they faced in New Delhi.

The important India Economic Strategy to 2035 report handed to the Australian Government in mid-2018 begins with the comment: ‘Timing has always been a challenge in Australia’s relationship with India.’ As the Australian Government works to implement some of the ambitious recommendations in the report, this book adds to our understanding of why timing has been a challenge, and how those at the coalface of the relationship have grappled with it.

David Lowe and Eric Meadows

ANU Press

For the past nine years, the ABC has been besieged. Its funding has been slashed. It has been assailed by complaints from ministers and prime ministers. Its board has been stacked with political appointees. It has been relentlessly attacked by commercial media outlets. And it has endured crisis after crisis.

Who Needs the ABC? charts how, in its 90th year, the best-trusted news organisation in Australia arrived at its current plight: doing the most it ever has, with less than it needs, under a barrage of constant criticism.

This book examines the profound changes that have swept through the Australian media, technology, and political landscapes in the past decade, and explores the tense relationship between the ABC and governments of both stripes over the last 40 years. It dispels any complacency about the ABC’s future by charting the very real threat now posed by the Liberal– National Party coalition, and the damage that it has done to the ABC while in office.

Matthew Ricketson and Patrick Mullins

Scribe

Newsrooms, the engine rooms of reporting, have shrunk. A generation of journalists has borne witness to seismic changes in the media. Sharing stories from more than 50 Australian journalists – including Amanda Meade, David Marr and Flip Prior – Upheaval reveals the highs and the lows of those who were there to see it all.
They show us life inside frenetic and vibrant newsrooms at the peak of their influence, and the difficulties of adapting to ever-accelerating news cycles with fewer resources. Some left journalism altogether while others stayed in the media — or sought to reinvent it. Normally the ones telling other people’s stories, in Upheaval journalists share the rawness of losing their own job or watching others lose theirs. They reveal their anxieties and hopes for the industry’s future and their commitment to reporting news that matters.

Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson

NewSouth

The story of a nineteenth-century invention (essentially a tiny greenhouse) that allowed for the first time the movement of plants around the world, feeding new agricultural industries, the commercial nursery trade, botanic and private gardens, invasive species, imperialism, and more.

Luke Keogh

University of Chicago Press

Central Melbourne is filled with markers of the city’s pasts. At its heart are the stories of exploration and settlement, of the so-called first to arrive, and of the building of a colony and nation. But when it comes to its Indigenous pasts, the centre of Melbourne has long been a place of silence. Over the last two decades, Indigenous histories and peoples have been brought into central Melbourne’s commemorative landscapes. Memorials, commemorative markers, namings and public artworks have all been used to remember the city’s Indigenous pasts. Places of Reconciliation shows how they came to be part of the city, and the ways in which they have challenged the erasures of its Indigenous histories. Sarah Pinto considers the kind of places that have been made and unmade by these commemorations, and concludes that the twenty-first century settler city does not give up its commemorative landscapes easily.

Sarah Pinto

MUP

The Asia literacy dilemma brings forward a novel approach to the long-standing global debates of Asia-related teaching and learning. By bringing into focus ‘Asia’ as a curriculum area, the book provides original commentary on the rationale and feasibility of ‘Asia literacy’ and its role and significance within and for twenty-first-century education.

Rebecca Cairns and Michiko Weinmann

Routledge

Does history repeat itself in meaningful ways, or is each problem unique? How can a knowledge of Australian history enhance our understanding of the present and prepare us for the future?

Lessons from History is written with the conviction that we must see the world, and confront its many challenges, with an understanding of what has gone before. A diverse range of historians, including Graeme Davison, Yves Rees, Joan Beaumont, Ann Curthoys, Mahsheed Ansari, Peter Spearritt and Frank Bongiorno, tackles the biggest challenges that face Australia and the world and shows how the past provides context and insight that can guide us today and tomorrow.

Carolyn Holbrook, David Lowe and Lyndon Megarrity

NewSouth

Prose poetry is a resurgent literary form in the English-speaking world and has been rapidly gaining popularity in Australia. Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington have gathered a broad and representative selection of the best Australian prose poems written over the last fifty years.

Cassandra Atherton, Paul Hetherington

Melbourne University Press

Roy Hay

Sports and Editorial Services

Meeting the Waylo is a history of story-making about the experiences of Migeo, Boongaree and Bundle, three Indigenous Australians who were intermediaries on board maritime expeditions in the early nineteenth century. These Indigenous men travelled to the archipelagos of the north-west of Western Australia, where they became central figures in encounters between the crew and local Indigenous groups onshore.

Tiffany Shellam

University of Western Australia Press

On The Take – The 1910 scandal that changed Australian football forever – shines a light on footy’s first major scandal, when one of the VFL’s earliest superstars—Carlton’s Alex ‘Bongo’ Lang, a three-time Premiership hero—experienced a sudden and unexpected fall from grace when he was convicted by the League of taking a bribe to play ‘dead’ in the semi-final of 1910. In thrilling detail, it presents 1910 as arguably the single most turbulent season in VFL/AFL history, contextualising it within the League’s wider development in the formative phase between establishment in 1897 and the outbreak of the First World War.

Tony Joel and Mathew Turner

Slattery Media Group

In White Women, Aboriginal Missions and Australian Settler Governments, Joanna Cruickshank and Patricia Grimshaw provide the first detailed study of the central part that white women played in missions to Aboriginal people in Australia.

Joanna Cruickshank

Brill

In today’s United States, the legacy of the American Revolution looms large. From presidential speeches to bestselling biographies, from conservative politics to school pageants, everybody knows something about the Revolution. Yet what was a messy, protracted, divisive, and destructive war has calcified into a glorified founding moment of the American nation. Disparate events with equally diverse participants have been reduced to a few key scenes and characters, presided over by well-meaning and wise old men. Recollections of the Revolution did not always take today’s form. In this lively collection of essays, historians and literary scholars consider how the first three generations of American citizens interpreted their nation’s origins. The volume introduces readers to a host of individuals and groups both well known and obscure, from Molly Pitcher and “forgotten father” John Dickinson to African American Baptists in Georgia and antebellum pacifists. They show how the memory of the Revolution became politicized early in the nation’s history, as different interests sought to harness its meaning for their own ends. No single faction succeeded, and at the outbreak of the Civil War the American people remained divided over how to remember the Revolution.

eds Michael McDonnell, Clare Corbould and Frances Clarke

University of Massachusetts Press

In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked “African American” in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity.

Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. In plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and the visual arts, they aimed to give stature and solidity to the American black community through a new awareness of the African past and the international black world. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.

Clare Corbould

Harvard University Press

The Sri Lankan ethnic conflict that has occurred largely between Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Hindus is marked by a degree of religious tolerance that sees both communities worshiping together. This study describes one important site of such worship, the ancient Hindu temple complex of Munnesvaram. Standing adjacent to one of Sri Lanka’s historical western ports, the fortunes of the Munnesvaram temples have waxed and waned through the years of turbulence, violence and social change that have been the country’s lot since the advent of European colonialism in the Indian Ocean. Bastin recounts the story of these temples and analyses how the Hindu temple is reproduced as a center of worship amidst conflict and competition.

Rohan Bastin

Berghahn Books