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.
The Mariana Islands »
People, History and Archaeology
Edited by: Jolie Liston, Geoffrey Clark
Publication date: 2026
The Mariana Islands: People, History and Archaeology brings together new research about the history of the Mariana Islands through community perspectives, archaeological investigations, and anthropological and historical studies. The colonisation and growth of societies in the Mariana Islands, and of those elsewhere in Micronesia, are often seen as peripheral compared with those of Melanesia and Polynesia that tend to dominate scholarly and public views of Pacific history. The Marianas were the first remote archipelago to be recorded by Europeans with the arrival of Magellan in 1521, and the islands have a long and complicated history with colonial ‘great powers’, which during World War II involved the establishment of the remote Pacific’s sole concentration camp. Initial colonisation over 3,000 years ago was by migrants from East Asia who were related to, but genetically different from, Lapita groups who extended human occupation as far east as Tonga and Samoa. Later population movements to the Marianas, some involving Papuan people, point to a mobile Pacific that was connected to insular Asia, New Guinea and other parts of Oceania. Migration and local development contributed to the formation of a unique and vibrant CHamoru culture. The volume is dedicated to two pioneer archaeologists, Darlene Moore and Roz Hunter-Anderson, who established modern archaeological practice in the Marianas through projects involving community members and elders in the preservation of cultural heritage sites and the creation of new land use histories.
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At the Brink? »
Asia in the Global Economic Order
Edited by: Shiro Armstrong, Yves Tiberghien
Publication date: 2026
The global economic order is undergoing a period of profound transformation. Heightened geopolitical rivalry, rapid technological change and growing concerns about economic security are reshaping trade, investment, supply chains and global governance. These developments raise fundamental questions about the future of openness, cooperation and economic growth for Asia and the Pacific region.
This volume brings together leading scholars and policy experts from across Asia and the Pacific to examine how the region is navigating an increasingly contested international economic environment. The chapters explore the dynamics of great-power competition, the restructuring of global supply chains, the strategic role of technology and the pressures facing the liberal international economic order. They also consider the prospects for regional cooperation and the policy choices that may allow the region to sustain economic integration and prosperity in a more fragmented world. The book offers nine innovative proposals to buttress the global economic order and respond to current challenges.
Based on papers presented at the 41st Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD) Conference, At the Brink? offers timely analysis of the evolving global economic landscape and provides insights into how Asia and the wider international community can respond to the challenges of a shifting world economy.
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Experiencing Indonesia »
30 years of ACICIS
Publication date: 2026
This book examines the many and varied dimensions of the Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) and celebrates its 30th anniversary. Charting the institutional history of ACICIS alongside the development, innovation and impact of its programs, this volume captures personal insights from ACICIS alumni as well as staff members and partners from Australia and Indonesia. Contributors bring diverse perspectives and insights to reflect on and analyse the significance of ACICIS programs.
This book highlights the pioneering structures that enabled in‑country, experiential learning for young Australians in Indonesia; the development of highly innovative programs created in collaboration with Indonesian partners; and the impact of ACICIS on participants, staff, partners and host communities as well as on broader Australia–Indonesia bilateral relations. This rich and varied account of ACICIS’ context, operations and impact can inform decision-making and program design for learning abroad programs in Indonesia and beyond.
A central theme of this book is ACICIS’ commitment to experiential learning and its transformative impact on lives and relationships for individuals, institutions and communities. There are indeed many human faces of ACICIS; this volume presents their voices.
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Believing on Upside Down Country »
The Changing Faith-scape of Bendigo
Publication date: April 2026
The city of Bendigo and surrounds, in central Victoria, Australia, is described today by its Traditional Owners, the Djaara people, as ‘upside down country’, because since 1851 the sacred earth has been rotated and removed by mining, changing its spiritual ‘faith-scape’. Since the arrival of settlers and sojourners of European and Chinese descent, relations between peoples in this region have been powerfully shaped not only by the quest for gold and subsequent bases of material wealth, but also by developments in this religious and spiritual faith-scape. In this innovative study, the authors examine a range of historically distinctive Bendigo customs, rituals, activities and events, from the famous Easter Fair, saved for posterity by the intervention of a Chinese community figure in the 1870s, and now led each year by Djaara people, to demonstrations associated with the Bendigo mosque controversy of 2014. They find that an understanding of spirituality and belief has often been a strong basis for connecting with and showing humanity towards others. Drawing on both oral sources and the objects and spaces of the material culture of religion and belief, the authors provide a fascinating elucidation of past and present meanings of faith, in and around Bendigo, as a lived dimension of experience.
Fragile Prosperity »
Australia’s gigantic monetary gamble
Authored by: Stuart Kells
Publication date: April 2026
Fragile Prosperity presents a new perspective on the past five decades of economic policy in Australia. This book shows that in important respects the basic pillars of this policy are misconceived, resting on fundamental misunderstandings of money, taxation and fiscal accounting.
Monetary and fiscal policy in Australia are reappraised, along with the nation’s program of financial deregulation: a gigantic experiment in modern money. A new understanding is presented of the causes of inflation in Australia and the drivers of house price growth, along with associated impacts on wealth distribution and inequality.
The implications are stark. While successive federal governments and Australia’s central bank have given up the means to directly control the principal cause of inflation, the current method of inflation control operates like a dead hand on the non-bank economy. Australia now faces a terrible conundrum in public policy and macroeconomic management, one with urgent implications for countries with similar regulatory settings, such as Canada and New Zealand. Further afield, the story of Australia’s experiment with modern money is a cautionary tale for all advanced economies.
‘Many younger Australians no longer feel that hard work brings a better life. In this timely book, Kells reveals the deeper, actual reasons Australia is no longer a land of economic opportunity.’
Thomas Walker, Think Forward
‘The thrust of this excellent work is that the process and consequences of the generation of money have been widely misunderstood by regulatory and government bodies, leading Australia unwittingly clinging to a “fragile prosperity”. Kells sets about offering practical solutions.’
David Merrett, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne
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Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 11, 2026 »
Special Issue: Writing Tasmanian Lives
Publication date: April 2026
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 think about islands, archipelagos, and how connections between people and place are rendered in the historical record. This is not only a biographical, but also a geographical, methodological and formal problem.
The articles in this issue challenge conventional biographical methods and invite approaches that foreground mobility, relationality and imaginative reconstruction. The authors examine lives that are often fragmentary or eclipsed by dominant narratives. They employ diverse methodologies, including deep mapping, eco-biography, legal life writing, and creative engagements with art and literature, to illuminate the lived experiences of individuals across time and place. They interrogate archives, re-story familiar figures and experiment with interdisciplinary techniques to ask what counts as evidence and how imagination can coexist with rigour.
Collectively, these contributions demonstrate that writing Tasmanian lives is not an insular project but an archipelagic one, connecting places, people and ideas across multiple scales. They demonstrate how biography can be a dynamic, relational practice, capable of revealing patterns and possibilities that transcend boundaries of nation, empire and discipline.
Vā Moana »
Space and Relationality in Pacific Thought and Identity
Edited by: Albert L. Refiti, A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul, Lana Lopesi, Billie Lythberg, Arielle Walker, Emily Parr
Publication date: April 2026
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.
As the world grapples with the rise of hyper-individualism, vā offers an urgent and restorative alternative: one that centres connection, responsibility and collective belonging. This rich collection of individually and collaboratively authored chapters explores how vā, wā, and related Indigenous concepts are lived, theorised and practised today. Drawing from diverse disciplines and grounded in specific cultural contexts, these contributions deepen our understanding of relationality, space and place across the Moana.
The AUT Vā Moana Research Centre is dedicated to exploring spatial concepts through Moananui (Pacific) thought. Established in 2012 by Albert L. Refiti and A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul at Auckland University of Technology’s School of Art and Design, Vā Moana brings together a vibrant international network of scholars. Their work reimagines how space is understood and experienced, both in contemporary and customary Pacific contexts.
Format: Hardback
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 49 »
Edited by: Crystal McKinnon, Ben Silverstein
Publication date: 2026
In this volume, Nicholas Pitt and Heidi Norman trace Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan histories of smallpox in the 1830s, emphasising Aboriginal understandings, responses to and treatments for the disease they called either Boulol or Thunna Thunna. This work reveals the networks of knowledge and experience that secured the survival of people in Country. Gary Foley, Clare Land and Shannon Woodcock then document a Community Organisation Course offered at Swinburne College of Technology, 1975–1977. The importance of this course can be seen in the sovereign futures it enabled; participants went on in the following years to organise Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations and other Black Power movements across the southeast of the continent. The following article, by Will Bracks, takes up this theme in describing the networks involved in organising Rock Against Racism concerts in Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney throughout the 1980s. Organised in a manner characteristic of Black Power, this series of concerts raised political consciousness and generated resources to support Aboriginal communities.
Turning to the West, Sean Winter considers Noongar practices of cultural burning in the mid-nineteenth century, a period of government suppression through legislation that limited the way Noongar people could care for Country; Winter shows us how an insistence on displacing Noongar knowledges has caused cultural and ecological harm. Lastly, Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui brings to the fore the valuable writing of John Naish, a Welsh author based in the Queensland cane fields in the mid-twentieth century. Naish’s realist novels and autobiography, she shows us, offer us insight into the position and resistance of Aboriginal people in tropical north Queensland.
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Lilith: A Feminist History Journal: Number 31 »
Publication date: March 2026
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 women to participate in civic life and assert regional belonging. The third of these articles offers a mother’s intimate oral history of the tensions between the expectations and realities of motherhood when her child struggles with mental health. Turning to 1960s Britain, one article examines arguments for legalising abortion and identifies that while women’s rights and circumstances were important considerations, arguments for maternal health were most successful in achieving abortion rights.
The issue also features ten book reviews spanning diverse thematic terrain. These include a memoir of the Australian Women's Liberation movement, Shauna Bostock's white and Aboriginal family history, and biographies of the nineteenth-century novelist Madame Dudevant (George Sand) and of Doris Punshon's life as a queer woman. Reviewed books also cover the role of women in the intellectual history of international relations, the Women's Weekly's influence on Australian food culture, sexism and harassment in the Westminster parliamentary system, Geraldine Fela's oral histories of HIV and AIDS nurses, the roles of sexuality and gender in remaking Australian citizenship, and trans-misogyny as a project of colonial violence. At a time when studies of gender and feminism are under siege, this issue testifies to the continuing vitality of feminist historical scholarship.
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Landslide »
The 2025 Australian Federal Election
Publication date: March 2026
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’.
Baby boomers were outnumbered in 2025 by Gen Z and Millennials, who related to politics in a different way. Those pursuing their votes needed to do so through social media; influencers and podcasts became central to campaigning, as did humour appropriating popular culture with the help of AI. Increased cultural and linguistic diversity was also important, and there were new efforts to mobilise Muslim voters over the war in Gaza. Overshadowing it all was Trump. While populist themes seemed attractive at first, association with Trump quickly became a liability, and contributors here examine the difficulty of changing discourses mid-campaign.
This authoritative study is indispensable in understanding the new political landscape: polls and voting behaviour, misinformation, gender issues and competing leadership styles. Richly illustrated, the role of visual politics also receives close scrutiny.
Landslide is the nineteenth book in the ANU Press Australian Federal Election series. The series is sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Peter Marralwanga »
Painter of the Djang of western Arnhem Land
Authored by: Luke Taylor, Ivan Namirrkki
Publication date: March 2026
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 rife within Northern Territory towns. Marralwanga established an outstation at Marrkolidjban where he could teach his children how to properly care for Ancestral lands, with part of this care involving a knowledge of how to paint. As a senior person who had travelled widely in his youth, and gained extensive ceremonial knowledge, Marralwanga was highly influential among a broad group of painters. Ivan Namirrkki, a painter of note and Peter Marralwanga’s son, has provided here his own account of his father’s life.
This book tracks Marralwanga’s life of learning about country and conveys the religious meaning of numerous major works, offering outsiders a richer understanding and appreciation of Arnhem Land art. It also shows the crucial role of individuals working for the community arts cooperative Maningrida Arts and Culture in facilitating Marralwanga’s rise to recognition as a major Australian and world artist.
Extensively illustrated, Peter Marralwanga: Painter of the Djang of western Arnhem Land is a study of unique knowledge and beauty.
‘There are only a handful of studies that give such brilliant, in-depth, serious analysis of an individual Aboriginal Australian artist’s life and work. The combination of genealogical, cultural and thematic analysis is superb.’
—Dr Henry Skerritt, University of Virginia
‘Australia’s foremost expert on the bark art of West Arnhem Land provides an exceptional biography of the complex cultural life and oeuvre of the late Peter Marralwanga. This is at once highly accessible, superbly illustrated, well researched and highly collaborative. It is an important resource for art historians, anthropologists and most importantly regional audiences of Aboriginal (Bininj) people determined to maintain the bark painting tradition that is so central to their livelihood and identity.’
—Emeritus Professor Jon Altman, The Australian National University
Format: Hardback
Terra in Our Mist »
A Tūhoe Narrative of Indigenous Sovereignty and Settler-State Violence
Authored by: Pounamu Jade William Emery Aikman
Publication date: 2026
Terra in Our Mist examines the persistence of state violence against Ngāi Tūhoe – the illustrious People of the Mist – whose ancestral homeland of Te Urewera stands as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most storied and contested landscapes. It focuses on a pattern of police violence: the 2007 anti-terror raids, codenamed Operation Eight, which centred on Ruatoki – one of the principal valleys of Te Urewera – and subsequent operations in 2012, 2014 and 2016. The book asks why such actions continue, and what they reveal about the unfinished nature of colonisation today.
These events are situated within a longer whakapapa (genealogy) of colonial engagement: a history of invasion, confiscation and control stretching back to the nineteenth century. Putting Indigenous scholarship in conversation with Michel Foucault’s ideas on power and the state, the book explores how differing understandings of land – terra, a space claimed through violence, and whenua, a living ground of ancestral belonging – continue to shape the relationship between Tūhoe and the state.
The police raids are shown not as isolated excesses, but as contemporary expressions of a colonial logic that has long sought to discipline Indigenous peoples and their sovereignties. By drawing these connections, Terra in Our Mist argues that the state’s claim to sovereignty depends on periodic re-enactments of force upon Indigenous communities. Blending ethnography, visual narrative and political critique, this book traces how the ground itself becomes a site of contest: over history, authority and the meaning of place in an unsettled world.
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Growing Restorative Regulation »
Publication date: 2026
Regulation that prioritises punishment over learning often fails to repair harm or build lasting compliance. It can alienate communities, deepen mistrust and do little to prevent future breaches.
Growing Restorative Regulation reveals an alternative approach – one grounded in dialogue, learning from multiple perspectives and ensuring active accountability. Drawing upon a multi-year institutional ethnography of an environmental regulator, the book shows how the principles of restorative justice can be used to address and prevent pollution and environmental harm. In so doing, it also illustrates how restorative approaches are applicable to a wide variety of other regulatory challenges. Throughout, the authors offer a practical framework for inclusive processes and relationship-building, involving local and Indigenous communities, and for transforming regulation into a system that actively repairs.
Essential reading for regulators, policymakers, business leaders, environmental advocates, community groups and regulatory scholars, Growing Restorative Regulation is a critical and constructive guide to seeding sustainable restorative practices into the very heart of regulatory decision-making.
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Reshaping the State »
Chinese Political Institutions under Xi Jinping
Authored by: Wen-Hsuan Tsai
Publication date: February 2026
‘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, institutions still matter. Indeed, they are holding China together.’
—Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, Copenhagen Business School
‘This engaging and thought-provoking academic work reflects the scholar’s dedication to enhancing our understanding of Chinese governance. It blends institutional resonance with leadership dynamics, addressing the knowledge gap in the West about the complexities of the Chinese Communist Party’s resilience and institutions. By examining the idiosyncrasies, risks and challenges of contemporary China—both a major global influence and the world’s second-largest economy—it encourages readers to reflect deeply on its governance and implications.’
—Hon S. Chan, City University of Hong Kong
‘As a leading scholar on China’s elite politics, Dr Wen-Hsuan Tsai reveals how Xi Jinping reshaped the party-state to achieve institutional centralization and made and implemented domestic and foreign policy as the supreme leader of China. This book opens the “black box” of Chinese leadership politics, policymaking and implementation. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to gain deep knowledge about political dynamics in contemporary China.’
—Suisheng Zhao, University of Denver
Format: Hardback
Made in China Journal: Volume 10, Issue 2, 2025 »
Publication date: February 2026
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. Global LGBTQIA+ discourses, meanwhile, circulate widely but often unevenly, translating local experiences into familiar scripts of rights, visibility, and repression that do not always fit. It is within this dense and contested terrain that this issue of Made in China Journal, ‘Queer China’, intervenes, treating queerness as a critical lens for understanding contemporary Chinese politics, culture, and everyday life.
Wild Partners »
Indigenous Worlds and Industrial Giants in Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Patrick Guinness
Publication date: February 2026
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 administrators, industrial managers and migrant settlers, who like their mythological counterparts have threatened to disrupt the established world.
This study captures Maututu approaches to the threats and challenges they have faced over the last hundred years—the proclamation of the Christian world, the dislocation of the Pacific war, the development programs of the colonial and independent governments and the industrial expansion of oil palm. The challenges have at times threatened the very essence of their being through the destruction of forests, loss of land, competition for schooling and health care, marginalisation within the oil palm industry and the emergence of ‘big shot’ individuals who ignore community obligations.
Maututu have adapted to these threats, becoming successful oil palm producers and prominent professionals throughout Papua New Guinea while seeking to rejuvenate Christianity, protect forest and marine environments and build partnerships that benefit their village communities. Central to these efforts has been partnership with outside forces.
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 18, Number 1, 2026 »
Publication date: February 2026
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 nationalism’, and assesses the implications for regional growth and the global energy transition. Strategic competition may be reshaping mineral supply chains, but the region’s enduring complementarity between producers and consumers suggests that managing vulnerabilities—rather than dismantling interdependence—offers the more durable path forward.
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Uneven Rewards »
Milestones in Labour Economics
Authored by: Alison L Booth
Publication date: 2026
Uneven Rewards brings together major studies of workplace relations and behaviour from the distinguished labour economist Alison L Booth. Over more than three decades, Booth has forged a distinctive intellectual path combining a strong interest in the role of gender and culture on labour markets with acute expertise in data collection, and cognate social science fields and methods.
With her co-authors, Booth examines the effects on men and women of evolving industrial relations’ rules and contexts. She studies the changing gendered and culturally specific nature of labour markets, and analyses the findings of a set of data-rich social experiments to reveal insights about women’s and men’s behaviour in labour, educational and wider social settings.
Finally, Booth shares new conclusions arising from this extensive body of research. She shows how culture and nurture associated with the upbringing of boys and girls can have profound implications for educational and labour market performance and relative outcomes by gender:
There is no right or wrong place for young women and men to be. What matters is that they are given the opportunity to go where their talents lead them without being thwarted by cultural pressures.
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Law in the New Democracy »
Authored by: Paula Jane Byrne
Publication date: January 2026
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 lives; in the north west of the colony, publicans dominated; on the north coast, violence against First Nations/Aboriginal people was forcibly meshed into the day to day working of the courts. This study shows a ‘frontier’ centred on the coasts and in the minds of legal officials of the metropolis, but elsewhere, some recognition of the Aboriginal polity and an early understanding of Aboriginal rights.
With right of reply by First Nations/Aboriginal people
ANU Historical Journal II: Number 5 »
Publication date: January 2026
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 1930s Stalinist Russia and the national legacy of Victor Hugo. Other contributions examine slave resistance in colonial Haiti, the political power of documentary film in shaping narratives of Guantanamo Bay, the Vietnam-era historiography of Australia’s role in the Boer War and scholarly memory of the Watergate scandal. Five book reviews round out the issue, engaging with recent publications in Australian, political and global history.
Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 10, 2025 »
Publication date: December 2025
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.
Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui relates the complex and conflicted story of the writer John Naish (1923–1963). Born and raised in Wales, he came to North Queensland in his twenties and produced a significant body of literature on life in the sugar cane industry and the tropical north. Uncertainty and conflict also feature in James Cotton’s article on the two years (1921–23) Edward Selby Little spent as Australian trade commissioner in Shanghai. In a brief and unhappy but still portentous career, Little was in part a victim of the ad hoc and personal nature of the policy experiments of Prime Minister W. M. Hughes, while also a victim of the machinations of his countrymen. Georgina Fitzpatrick’s portrait of Eric Shimada (Shimada Masakazu) considers an individual whose bicultural identity brought a seemingly fluent transformation from Japanese soldier to interpreter for the Australian and British occupation forces and then the International Military Tribunal in Japan.
In his article ‘A Cat with Two Tales’, Andrew Marshall examines the conflict between the Australian-born cartoonist and entrepreneur Patrick Sullivan and the American illustrator Otto Messmer over who was the rightful creator of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat. James McDonald uses collective biographical methods to discuss the way the largely forgotten racist term ‘King Billy’ was deployed in colonial Australia to diminish and mock the status of senior Aboriginal men. Similarly, Toby Raeburn, Paul Sanders and Kerry Doyle, in their article ‘Boorong of the Burramattagal’, elevate the status of a young woman from indentured servant to important cultural and linguistic intermediary. Kate White’s article ‘Creating the Mirage’ considers the private, along with the public, lives of the 1980s business couple Christopher and Pixie Skase. This private world is also the focus of Kay Whitehead and Belinda MacGill in their article on Annie Sharpley, a teacher at Naracoorte. While Sharpley’s career seems extraordinary in length, the selfless woman teacher in a country school is a typical personification of rural education in settler countries such as Australia.
Projecting Voices »
Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honour of Jane Simpson
Publication date: December 2025
This volume provides cutting-edge research on a wide range of questions in linguistics research, mostly centred on Australian Indigenous languages. Written by world-leading experts, the chapters take a fresh look at current questions in each topic, inspired by the work of Australian linguist Jane Simpson.
The chapters have implications for linguistic theory in the areas of historical linguistics, morphosyntax, semantics, the lexicon, language acquisition and issues in languages in education, and renewal of endangered languages.
This volume is essential reading for students and experienced researchers alike, with interests in theoretical and applied linguistics, especially in topics and issues related to Australian Indigenous languages.
Gender and Politics Reimagined »
Centring Oceanic and Asian Lenses
Publication date: December 2025
This timely collection reflects a coming together of academics, gender and development practitioners and activists to reflect on the gendering of politics. By centring Asia and Oceania and traversing numerous disciplines, the volume disrupts the illusion of certainty and clarity as to what is known about gender and politics. Individual chapters present specific research projects, while providing epistemological, theoretical and methodological reflections on how knowledge is produced and by whom, challenging the existing canon. The contributions collectively demonstrate the possibilities for theorising from Asia and Oceania to address the lack of diversity in political representation and leadership on a global scale, in which gender, race, class, caste, (dis)ability and sexual identity are powerfully interconnected.
Arising out of the Gender and Cultural Diversity in Politics: Australia, Asia and the Pacific workshop held at The Australian National University in 2022, this collection underscores the importance of fostering scholarship and mentorship in the academy. The diversity of authorship encompasses differences in ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and career stage, with an emphasis on the inclusion of authors from various Oceanic and Asian countries. The volume promotes academic practice as integral to social change, and social action as a form of knowledge production. As such, Gender and Politics Reimagined is sure to be a cornerstone in future scholarly and activist discussions.
Format: Hardback
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 17, Number 4, 2025 »
Publication date: December 2025
Industrial policy has returned to the mainstream, with subsidies as an increasingly popular policy instrument of choice. While East Asia is deeply invested in the open global trade regime, multilateral rules are outdated, weakly enforced and ill-equipped to manage the widening gap among countries with unequal fiscal capacity. This issue of the East Asia Forum Quarterly examines the rationale, forms and effects of industrial policy resurgence, identifying both its risks and the conditions for its success. It argues that regional coordination of industrial policy would require greater transparency and peer review, using existing frameworks as well as new plurilateral agreements for that purpose. The region has the platforms and leverage to lead collective efforts to manage industrial policies without undermining the rules-based multilateral order, but whether it can will depend on mobilising the political will.
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The Great Energy Transformation in China »
Edited by: Ligang Song, Yixiao Zhou
Publication date: November 2025
In 2020, China started the drive to commence a reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060, setting in motion a transition to a green, sustainable and clean economy. China has ambitiously developed clean energy alternatives to coal. This transformation encompasses multifaceted strategies ranging from investment in renewable energy and the development of low-emission technologies to more stringent policy regulations on emissions. Renewable energy sources like hydroelectric power, wind, solar and biomass have received substantial attention and investment, with China emerging as a global leader in renewable energy capacity.
In the technology space, China’s transitioning to electric vehicles (EVs) has catalysed the development of a robust EV market, fostering innovation in battery technology and charging infrastructure. China has now become the largest exporter of EVs in the world market. These developments have the potential to materially help curb the world’s carbon footprint and mitigate environmental degradation.
Nevertheless, challenges persist domestically, including the need for grid modernisation to accommodate intermittent renewable energy sources and addressing the socio-economic impacts on coal-dependent regions. In the international market, China’s efforts towards a cleaner and more sustainable energy landscape have helped position it as a leader in sustainable economic development. This could enhance trade of green products, the development of global renewable energy and international investments in energy transformation. However, global trade and investment in green technologies and products are faced with rising geopolitical tensions and trade protectionism. This book discusses China’s achievements in its transition towards renewable energies and identifies new opportunities and challenges for deepening energy transformation in China.