Authors & editors
ANU Press has collaborated with a diverse range of authors and editors across a wide variety of academic disciplines. Browse the ANU Press collection by author or editor.
Territorians or mobile Australians? a profile of the urban electorate »
Publication date: 2025
At the end of the first world war the Northern Territory contained less than 4,000 whites and a larger, but uncounted, population of Aborigines. The non-Aboriginal population remained small throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and at the time of the 1947 Census it had not quite reached 11,000. Rapid growth came in the 1960s, and vas marked by successive Censuses: 44,500 in 1961 (Aboriginals were counted for the first time), 56,500 in 1966, 85,700 in 1971, 98,200 in 1976, and 122,800 in 1981. If this steady growth continues, the Territory's population will have begun to match that of the slowly-qrowing Tasmania some time in the middle of the coming century. Long before then it will have become a considerable force in national politics. For the Territory is politically distinctive. One in every four Territorians is an Aborigine, a proportion vastly greater than in any Australian State. only a small proportion of the white population was born in the Territory, and most of its immigrants are very recent indeed. The Territory's citizens have political concerns which the citizens of the States were last preoccupied with a century ago: the building of railways and of roads, isolation, the lack of educational facilities for their children, the provision of water-supplies, and the other imperatives of a frontier society in an often harsh environment. Such a society is worth studying tor its own sake. But in addition it provides a fascinating contrast with more settled societies, which have been the source of most of the 'findings' of the social sciences. A rapidly growing society made up of a diversity of immigrants can offer its citizens few of the community structures and support systems that abound in older, established societies. If a person's political stance comes to some extent from his social milieu, what happens when people leave these milieux and go to a town where no political tradition of any consequence exists and where colleagues and neighbours have made similar departures? How much of anyone's political outlook is portable, how much relates to a particular environment? The authors of this well-designed study show that much is indeed portable. The Territory's party system is clearly a member of the family of Australian party systems, with the ALP facing a fusion of the Liberal and National Country Parties, here labelled the Country Liberal Party. And party allegiances formed elsewhere can be transferred to Territory politics with a minimum of refurbishing. But - and it is an important saver - there is no inevitability about the transfer. The smaller size of the constituencies, the intimacy of life in what are small towns, the practical roads-and-bridges focus of much politicking, the lack of a powerful union movement, the high level of government employment - all these factors operate to subdue the socio- economic ambience in which Australian political life customarily takes place. New arrivals are able either to reconsider their politics or to operate politically in different ways at the Federal level and at the Territory level. To study these processes in any detail requires the chief instrument of the modern social scientist, the sample survey, as well as the patience and dedication necessary if survey research techniques are to be used at all. The Northern Territory survey that is at the heart of this book was designed both to bring Territorians under scrutiny and also to allow comparisons with Australians in the rest of the nation. It has served its purpose well, and the authors and editors have been able to produce a book that provides new insights on the political behaviour of all Australians, not simply those adventurous citizens that have chosen to live and work in the Northern Territory.
Kate Senior »
Kate Senior is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle. She has worked in collaboration with Daphne Daniels and the Ngukurr community for the last 20 years, with a particular emphasis on the lives and wellbeing of young people in the community. Research conducted for her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship provided the impetus for this publication.
Richard Chenhall »
Richard Chenhall is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. He has conducted research with Indigenous communities and organisations for over 20 years in the area of the social determinants of health, alcohol and other drugs, sexual health and youth wellbeing.
Victoria Burbank »
Victoria Burbank PhD, FASSA, was a professor of anthropology at the University of Western Australia between 1994 and 2014. Drawing upon her experiences in the south-eastern Arnhem Land community of Numbulwar, she has published three books: Aboriginal Adolescence, Fighting Women and An Ethnography of Stress, along with a number of papers and book chapters. Now ‘retired’ she continues to draw on her expertise in psychological anthropology via public presentations, postgraduate supervision, reviewing and editing.
Kenneth Locke Hale »
Kenneth Locke Hale (1934–2001), who preferred to be called Ken, carried out fieldwork and published on a very large number of languages, not just in Australia but internationally. He was a supremely gifted polyglot and also an academic linguist of distinction, who taught in the Linguistics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1967 to 1999. In 1960 Hale carried out comparative work on a large number of languages of Cape York Peninsula, Queensland. On the basis of that work, he wrote expert submissions for the Wik native title claim in 1997. The claim’s historic success was due in no small part to Hale’s contribution.
Peter Sutton »
Peter Sutton is an Affiliate Professor at the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Museum. He is an author, anthropologist and linguist who has lived and worked with Australian Aboriginal people since 1969. He is a specialist in native title anthropology, Cape York languages and Aboriginal art. He has been an author or editor of 16 books, the most recent being The Politics of Suffering (2009), Iridescence (2015, with Michael Snow) and Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate (2021, with Keryn Walshe). He played various roles as an anthropological researcher 1979–2021 in 87 Aboriginal land claims.
Lisa Palmer »
Lisa Palmer teaches and researches on indigenous environmental knowledge and practices at the University of Melbourne. She lives in Melbourne and regularly travels to Timor-Leste to carry out research and visit extended family. She has published widely and is the author of an ethnography on people’s complex relations with water in Timor-Leste titled Water Politics and Spiritual Ecology: Custom, Environmental Governance and Development (2015, Routledge). Working also through visual methods she has directed two films, Wild Honey: Caring for Bees in a Divided Land and Holding Tightly: Custom and Healing in Timor-Leste.
Emilia E. Skrzypek »
Emilia E. Skrzypek is an MSCA (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions) Research Fellow at the Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of St Andrews, and an honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at the University of Queensland. Her work to date has largely focused on Papua New Guinea, where she investigates issues related to broadly conceived resource relations and interdependencies. She is particularly interested in stakeholder engagement and social impacts at undeveloped complex orebodies. She is the author of Revealing the Invisible Mine: Social Complexities of an Undeveloped Mining Project (Berghahn, 2020).
Achieving reconciliation and reconnection through a re-remembering of our past »
It is some 250 years since the Endeavour limped into what is now known as Cooktown, in North Queensland. There, Cook has been remembered conflictingly as the town’s founder and as the instigator of violence towards Guugu Yimithirr people. Yet, from the late 1990s, as the Guugu Yimithirr people
Cameron Hazlehurst »
Dr Cameron Hazlehurst FRSL FRHistS, is an honorary professor in the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University and a foundation principal of The Ethicos Group, a specialist consultancy in public sector ethics and governance. He has held fellowships at Nuffield College and The Queen’s College, Oxford, and The ANU’s Research School of Social Sciences. He was foundation professor and head of the School of Humanities at Queensland University of Technology. He served in senior government posts in Urban and Regional Development and Communications, has undertaken numerous policy consulting and advisory roles, and acted as executive producer or research consultant for several television series. Dr Hazlehurst has published widely on Australian government and political history, including biographical studies of Robert Menzies (Menzies Observed) and Gordon Chalk (Gordon Chalk: A Political Life), the official history of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and studies of the advent of commercial television and satellite broadcasting in Australia.
Sana Ashraf »
As a young woman growing up in a mixed-sect family in Pakistan, Dr Sana Ashraf spent her formative years grappling with how to be a good Muslim. This sparked her interest in religious and cultural understandings of purity and, later, their connection with violence. She formally studied this link first as a Master’s student in Anthropology at the Central European University and then as a PhD candidate at The Australian National University. This book is based on her PhD thesis, which has won multiple awards including the Australian Anthropological Society’s PhD Thesis Prize 2020. She now works in the policy sector in Australia on issues of gender and migration.
Owen Edwards »
Owen Edwards has carried out primary fieldwork on a number of languages of Indonesia, including Meto for which he wrote his doctoral thesis at The Australian National University, describing and analysing morphological metathesis. His linguistic interests include morphology, phonology, historical linguistics and Austronesian linguistics. He is the managing editor of Oceanic Linguistics and is currently based in Germany where he continues his linguistics research.
Cecelia Cmielewski »
Dr Cecelia Cmielewski is a researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, cultural consultant, curator and arts manager and has held senior positions at the Australia Council for the Arts. Her work analyses the relationship between Australian cultural policies and the fostering of creative practices including cultural infrastructure research for NSW local councils.
Book Launch – Learning Policy, Doing Policy »
On 16 June, Professor Ariadne Vromen chaired a breakfast launch of the new ANU Press ANZSOG series publication Learning Policy, Doing Policy. This is the latest in what is a long series of publications from Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), which is rapidly approaching its
Reflections on the ANZSOG series from its contributors »
The final book in the ANZSOG series published this month, so we asked some of the editors and contributors across its long history to contribute some of their thoughts on its impact over the years. Join us as we reflect and celebrate the 56 titles that have published since 2006, and the invaluable
Read a chapter from our upcoming book, ‘Indigenous Australian Youth Futures’ »
In 2014, Angelina Joshua, a young Indigenous woman from the Ngukurr community in the Northern Territory, presented her autobiographical story of living the social determinants of health to the Australian Anthropology Conference. Although we might know something about the ways in which health is
Catriona Malau »
Catriona Malau is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Newcastle. This dictionary is the product of over 20 years of research on the Vurës language. Catriona specialises in documentation and description of Oceanic languages, with a focus on the languages of Vanuatu. She has published grammatical descriptions of two Vanuatu languages: Vurës,Vanua Lava, and Lolovoli, Northeast Ambae.
Celebrating The Australian National University’s 75th birthday »
To celebrate The Australian National University’s 75th anniversary, we have brought together some of our resources here: Find out more about the history of the Press Discussions on forming an electronically based national university press began in 2001. In 2002, Mr Colin Steele, University
Gonzaga Puas »
Gonzaga (Zag) Puas holds a Bachelor of Arts/Diploma of Education, Bachelor of Law (LLB), Master of Political Science and a PhD in Micronesian history. Born and raised in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Chuuk State on the island of Lukunor from the Sor clan, Gonzaga’s research covers the intersecting areas of climate change, Pacific history and politics. His current projects include Australia’s diplomatic relations in the North Pacific, the interaction between constitutional and customary law, China in the North Pacific, the Compact of Free Association between FSM and the USA, as well as health, education and youth culture in the FSM islands.
Heather Goodall »
Heather Goodall is an award-winning author, publishing on Indigenous histories and environmental history and on decolonisation. She has co-authored with Aboriginal activists Isabel Flick and Kevin Cook. Growing up on Sydney’s Georges River, Heather has analysed river environmental history and politics in rural areas and in cities. Her co-authored books on Georges River people and environment include Rivers and Resilience (Aboriginal communities); Waters of Belonging (Arabic-speaking communities) and Waterborne (Vietnamese communities). As Professor Emerita of History, University of Technology Sydney, Heather continues her work as an activist researcher.
Honae Cuffe »
Honae Cuffe holds a PhD in history from the University of Newcastle, and has worked in both the academic and public history sector. Honae has published widely on issues of history, contemporary policy and academic research practices.
Meet the Author: Laura Rademaker »
Dr Laura Rademaker is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and the Deputy Director of the Research Centre for Deep History at the School of History, The Australian National University. Laura has co-authored and edited two books with ANU Press, including The Bible in Buffalo Country, which recently won
Richard Egan »
Richard Egan has a Bachelor of Letters from The Australian National University (1990). He has spent a large part of his career teaching history to Year 11 and 12 students with a focus on settler-society and its interaction with Indigenous Australians. His interest in Aboriginal history was sparked by his study at ANU, under the supervision of Peter Read. In 2012, after self-publishing Neither Amity nor Kindness: Government policy towards Aboriginal people of NSW from 1788 to 1969, he formalised his research by undertaking a PhD (‘Power and Dysfunction: The New South Wales Board for the Protection of Aborigines 1883–1940’) at the University of New South Wales, which was completed in mid-2019.
Doug Munro »
Doug Munro is a Wellington-based biographer and historian, and an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Queensland. In an earlier incarnation he was a historian of the Pacific Islands with specialisms in trade and traders, indentured labour, and the role of Island pastors. Between 2005 and 2012, he collaborated with John Weaver of McMaster University on the history of suicide in 20th century New Zealand. Doug has a particular interest in auto/biographies of historians and is working on a biography of J.W. Davidson, the founding father of Pacific Islands historiography. As well, Doug is engaged in joint work with Geoffrey Gray on academic politics. Doug and Geoff (with Christine Winter) co-edited Scholars at War: Australasian social scientists, 1939-1945 for the ANU Press (2012). His most recent books are The Ivory Tower and Beyond: participant historians of the Pacific (2009) and J.C. Beaglehole: public intellectual, critical conscience (2012).
Meet the Author: Katharine Massam »
Associate Professor Katharine Massam is the Research Co-ordinator at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity. Katharine’s research explores intersections between Christian tradition and wider culture in postcolonial settler societies, including Australia. Katharine’s latest title, A