Books

Debating the Nation, a new volume that brings together a selection of key speeches from Papua New Guinea’s House of Assembly in the years leading up to independence (1972–1975). These speeches — many never before published in full — capture the fierce debates, competing visions, and grounded aspirations of Papua New Guinean leaders as they shaped the nation’s path to sovereignty.

Rather than framing independence as a gift from Australia, this curated and annotated collection highlights the agency, insight, and political acumen of PNG parliamentarians. The volume introduces readers to the diversity of voices and ideas that informed the drafting of the constitution and the negotiation of independence — from concerns about land, unity, and development to deeper questions of identity, autonomy, and modernity.

The book is a collaboration between Deakin University and the University of Papua New Guinea. It was jointly supported by funding from the Australian High Commission to Papua New Guinea, the Deakin University Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), and the Deakin Centre for Contemporary Histories.

Edited by Dr Brad Underhill, Associate Professor Helen Gardner, and Keimelo Gima

This book explores the historical and social dynamics of Spiritualism – a religious movement associated in the popular imagination with nineteenth-century parlour séances and ghost photography. It continues to be practised actively today in Australia, the UK, and USA. The authors draw on their deep fieldwork, interviews, and archival research to analyse Spiritualism’s resilience and the enduring popular appeal of mediumship.

There are three key contributions of the book: the first is that the scholarly study of “belief” should be rehabilitated. The authors propose a model of belief as a dialogue between claims to truth and commitments to institutions supporting those claims. The second is women’s agency in Spiritualism. From the movement’s beginnings, strong female leaders have decisively shaped its religious and political profile. The third is the need to analyse Australian Spiritualism as a distinct variant of a transnational Anglophone family of ritual practice.

Andrew Singleton and Matt Tomlinson

Since the publication of the first children’s periodical in the 1750s, magazines have been an affordable and accessible way for children to read and form virtual communities. Despite the range of children’s periodicals that exist, they have not been studied to the same extent as children’s literature. The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals marks the first major history of magazines for young people from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Bringing together periodicals from Britain, Ireland, North America, Australia, New Zealand and India, this book explores the roles of gender, race and national identity in the construction of children as readers and writers. It provides new insights both into how child readers shaped the magazines they read and how magazines have encouraged children to view themselves as political and world subjects.

Kristine Moruzi, Beth Rodgers, and Michelle J. Smith

Drawing on a wealth of material from children’s periodicals from the Victorian era to the early twentieth century, Kristine Moruzi examines how the concept of the charitable child has been defined through the press. Charitable ideals became increasingly prevalent at a time of burgeoning social inequities and cultural change, shaping expectations that children were capable of and responsible for charitable giving. While the child as the object of charity has received considerable attention, less focus has been paid to how and why children have been encouraged to help others. Yet the ways in which children were positioned to see themselves as people who could and should help – in whatever forms that assistance might take – are crucial to understanding how children and childhood were conceptualised in the past. This book uses children’s print culture to examine the relationship between children and charitable institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to foreground children’s active roles.

Kristine Moruzi

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

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

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

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

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

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