This special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History explores what it means to write lives connected to Lutruwita/Tasmania, an island shaped by both isolation and connection. For most of its more than 40 thousand years of human history, Tasmania was a peninsula. Later, it became a node in global networks of Indigenous voyaging, colonial expansion, commerce and incarceration. Writing Tasmanian lives, therefore, requires us to...
Vā may be a small word, but it carries expansive meaning. Rooted in Indigenous Pacific knowledges—Samoan vā, Tongan tā-vā, Māori and Hawaiian wā—this concept of relational space binds people, ancestors and cosmologies across time and place. Since the late 1990s, vā has become a powerful framework in academic and cultural contexts, energising conversations across Oceania and beyond. ...
The 2025 Lilith presents four research articles focused on gender-based issues and experiences in twentieth-century Australia and Britain. The Australian-focused articles examine Lillie Beirne’s maternal feminism and related campaigns for social credit in the 1930s and 1940s, and how the ‘Citrus Queen’ beauty pageants of South Australia’s Riverina region articulated ideals of Anglo-Australian womanhood while also creating space for migrant...
The 2025 Australian federal election saw an unexpected landslide victory for the Labor Party, the Liberal Party’s worst ever result and the continued rise of the non-major-party vote. In this book, Australia’s leading election analysts explore what contributed to this outcome, including the effectiveness of party and third-party campaigns, the changing demography of the electorate and external factors such as the ‘Trump effect’. ...
Peter Marralwanga (1916–1987) was a leading figure in one of the great art practices of the world. He grew up in western Arnhem Land surrounded by artists painting in rock shelters and he learned to paint this way himself. The subjects of his paintings were the Djang who made his country and placed the spirits of people within it. Marralwanga’s story highlights the way bark painting became important as a way of evading assimilation policies...
‘Based on extensive fieldwork and impressive analytic skills, Wen-Hsuan Tsai has produced the most detailed and informative account of the evolving political system in Xi Jinping’s China that I have ever read. It is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the management and deployment of political power in contemporary China. The book convincingly shows that even though Xi Jinping may have centralized power in his own hands,...
Across the world, questions of gender, sexuality, and intimacy have become central to struggles over belonging, citizenship, and moral order. In China, these questions have acquired a particular urgency as the state seeks to stabilise social life through an increasingly narrow vision of family, reproduction, and normative personhood, even as people continue to forge relationships, identities, and communities that exceed those boundaries....
Wild Partners traces the history of the Maututu Nakanai of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. According to a Maututu ontology, or worldview, they are surrounded by a forest filled with threatening wild forces. It is believed that outstanding men and women pioneer ways to engage these forces to bring benefit to their village community. In recent times, the Maututu have had to engage with human outsiders, including government officers, church...
Critical minerals and rare earths have moved to the centre of economic security agendas. As decarbonisation accelerates and US–China rivalry deepens, governments are racing to secure the supply chains that power green technologies and advanced manufacturing. This issue of the East Asia Forum Quarterly examines the geopolitics of Asia’s resources trade. It explores the tensions between interdependence and rising protectionism, or ‘resource...
In the 1850s, opposition to the Crown in New South Wales made for unsteady ground for the administration of criminal law. This study of skirmishes between magistrates, constables and the metropolis reveals just how far understandings of law could be stretched and warped by recalcitrant local populations. At Carcoar, the local population entirely controlled how law worked; on the South Coast, ‘the people’ influenced how law intervened in their...
Published amid rising student fees, shrinking university departments and increasing political scrutiny of research, this fifth issue of ANU Historical Journal II brings together eight peer-reviewed articles examining how histories of place, memory and violence are made and contested. Articles explore community collaboration in the Mount Ainslie Labyrinth, grassroots memorialisation of the Spanish Civil War in Canberra, Australian tourism to...
The articles in the Australian Journal of Biography and History No. 10 cover a diverse range of people, most of them little known in the annals of Australian history. Each lived on the edges of societal expectations and norms and so raise questions about Australian identity. These articles utilise biographical methods to illuminate lives full of risk, excitement, uncertainty and unconventionality. ...
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