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Browse the range of exciting titles ANU Press is currently working on. If you wish to receive an alert when a new title is published, click the ‘Notify me’ button next to the relevant title and register your details.
Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity »
Aceh’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity examines the role of Indonesia’s first truth and reconciliation commission—the Aceh Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or KKR Aceh—in investigating and redressing the extensive human rights violations committed during three decades of brutal separatist conflict (1976–2005) in the province of Aceh.
The KKR Aceh was founded in late 2016, as a product of the 2005 peace deal between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). It has since faced many challenges—not least from Indonesia’s security forces and former GAM leaders, who have joined together in their determination to maintain impunity for their respective roles in the conflict. Indeed, the commission would not have been established without the tireless work of civil society actors, including non-government organisations and other humanitarian groups.
In Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity, the editors set out to amplify the role of these civil society actors in the KKR Aceh and in transitional justice in Indonesia. Each chapter has been written by a team of authors, composed predominantly of commissioners and staff from the KKR Aceh itself, members of key civil society organisations, and academics. Further, the editors aim to scrutinise the KKR Aceh from the inside and analyse the establishment and operation of what is perhaps the only genuine state-sponsored attempt to implement transitional justice in Indonesia today.
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Watershed »
The 2022 Australian Federal Election
Australia’s 2022 federal election played out in ways that few could have expected. Not only did it bring a change of government; it also saw the lowest number of primary votes for the major parties and the election of the greatest number of Independents to the lower house since the formation of the Australian party system. The success of the Teal Independents and the Greens, along with the appetite voters showed for ‘doing politics differently’, suggested that the dominant model of electoral competition might no longer be the two-party system of Labor versus Liberal. At the very least, the continued usefulness of the two-party-preferred vote as a way of conceptualising and predicting Australians’ voting behaviour has been cast into serious doubt.
In Watershed, leading scholars analyse the election from the ground up—focusing on the campaign issues, the actors involved, and the successes and failures of campaign strategy—and show how digital media, visual politics and fake news are changing the way politics is done. Other topics include the impact of COVID-19 and the salience of climate, gender and integrity issues, as well as voting patterns and polling accuracy. This authoritative book is indispensable for understanding the disenchantment with the major parties, the rise of Community Independents, and the role of the Australian Greens and third parties.
Watershed is the 18th in the ANU Press federal election series and the tenth sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
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China between Peace and War »
Mao, Chiang and the Americans, 1945–1947
Authored by: Victor Cheng
In China between Peace and War, Victor S. C. Cheng explores the gripping history of peace talks and international negotiations from 1945 to 1947 that helped determine the shape of the Chinese Civil War. The book focuses on the efforts of the two belligerent parties—the Chinese Nationalists, or Guomindang, and the Communists—to achieve an enduring peace. It presents previously unexplored major elements of the peace talks: ambiguous treaties, package deals and short-term solutions. It identifies the burning challenges that confronted attempts at peacemaking, including the two warring parties’ high-risk decision-making styles and the temptation to veto agreements and resume fighting. Cheng argues against popular notions that differences between the two belligerents in the Chinese Civil War were irreconcilable, that the failure of the peace talks was predetermined and that the US government mediators needed to remain neutral.
Because the actions around the negotiating table occurred in a developing theatre of war, Cheng also explores the military decision-making of the opposing sides as well as the conflicts that ultimately plunged China into the world’s largest military engagement of the seven-plus decades since World War II. China between Peace and War highlights the contradictory role of political leaders who micromanaged the military, including their struggle to connect political objectives and military power, their rhetorical use of the ‘decisive war’ concept, and their pursuit of radical military-political goals at the expense of a negotiated peace.
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Dilemmas in Public Management in Greater China and Australia »
Rising Tensions but Common Challenges
This book draws on more than a decade of workshops organised by the Greater China Australia Dialogue on Public Administration, involving scholars and practitioners from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia. Although these workshops recognised the major differences in the institutional frameworks of these jurisdictions, until recently they focused largely on the shared challenges and the diffusion of ideas and approaches.
As rising international tensions inevitably draw attention to areas where interests and philosophies diverge, it is the differences that must now be highlighted. Yet, despite the tensions, this book reveals that these jurisdictions continue to address shared challenges in public administration.
The book’s contributors focus in detail on these four areas:
intergovernmental relations, including the shifting balance between centralisation and decentralisation
budgeting and financial management, including during and after the COVID-19 pandemic
the civil service, its capability, and its relationship with government and the public
service delivery, particularly in health and aged care.
This book is aimed at a wide readership, not only at those within the jurisdictions it explores. It emphasises the importance of continued engagement to understanding different approaches to public administration—confirming fundamental philosophical differences where necessary but also looking for common ground and opportunities for shared learning.
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Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 46 »
Edited by: Crystal McKinnon, Ben Silverstein
The articles in Volume 46 each take provocative and generative approaches to the challenge of historical truth-telling. Examining the public memory of massacres in Gippsland, Victoria, Aunty Doris Paton, Beth Marsden and Jessica Horton trace a history of contestation between, on the one hand, forms of frontier memorialisation articulated to secure colonial possession and, on the other, the sovereign counter-narratives of Gunai Kurnai communities. Heidi Norman and Anne Maree Payne describe Aboriginal campaigns to repatriate Ancestors’ stolen remains over the past fifty years, showing how these campaigns have proceeded along with and as part of nation-building movements towards land rights and self-determination. Their call for Aboriginal relationships with Ancestors to be represented in a National Resting Place aligns their research with these movements. We return to Gunai Kurnai Country in a piece authored by Rob Hudson and Shannon Woodcock, who show how the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place has formed an important site and tool of community work towards cultural resurgence; the article itself demonstrates the value and importance of collaborative and co-designed research methods. The volume then includes a conversation between Laura McBride and Mariko Smith about their curation of the Australian Museum’s Unsettled exhibition, through which they responded to the 250th anniversary of Cook’s Endeavour voyage along Australia’s east coast by telling true stories that put Cook in his place.
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Chains »
Edited by: Linda Jaivin, Esther Sunkyung Klein, Annie Luman Ren
Speaking to the Twentieth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, in October 2022, President Xi Jinping reiterated his commitment to the ‘opening up’ policy of his predecessors — a policy that has burnished the Party’s political legitimacy among its citizens by enabling four decades of economic development. Yet, for all the talk of openness, 2022 was a year of both literal and symbolic locks and chains — including, of course, the long, coercive, and often brutally enforced lockdowns of neighbourhoods and cities across China, most prominently Shanghai. Then there was a vlogger’s accidental discovery of the ‘woman in chains’, sparking an anguished, nationwide conversation about human trafficking. That was part of a broader (if frequently censored) conversation about gendered violence and women’s rights, in a year when women’s representation at the highest levels of power, which was already minimal, decreased even further. There was trouble with supply chains and, with the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, in August, island chains as well. Despite the tensions in the Asia-Pacific, the People’s Republic of China expanded its diplomatic initiatives among Pacific island nations and celebrated fifty years of diplomatic links with both Japan and Australia. As the year drew to a close, a tragic fire in a locked-down apartment building in Ürümqi triggered a series of popular protests that brought an end to three years of ‘zero COVID’. The China Story Yearbook: Chains provides informed perspectives on these and other important stories from 2022.
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International Review of Environmental History: Volume 9, Issue 1, 2023 »
Edited by: James Beattie, Brett Bennett
Inspired by recent scholarship on disaster history and situated within the broader field of environmental history, this special issue highlights structural factors that have exacerbated the effects of extreme weather and explores how states and societies have responded and adapted (or not) during and after disasters. The five case studies all focus on the Indian Ocean World (IOW), a macro-region stretching from eastern Africa to East Asia and Southeast Asia, and align chronologically with the so-called Anthropocene, the period during which the industrial Global North began to leave its indelible imprint on the world’s climatic systems. They build on a small but growing scholarship that looks at historical disasters and disaster responses within the IOW, arguing collectively for the application of historical methodologies in approaching the challenge of extreme weather now and in the future.
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Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 7, 2023 »
Special Issue: Convict Lives
This special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History explores the lives of convicts transported to Australia and asks how they can be investigated through various forms of biography. Given the ever-increasing range of methodologies for researching convict lives, this issue offers a timely reflection on their varying strengths, limitations and functions as well as on the future of convict history research. Nine refereed articles and two research notes provide new insights into various aspects of convict lives and experiences, combined with broad discussions on methodology.
In their introductory article, Matthew Cunneen and Malcolm Allbrook delve into the history of convict biography and the ways previous historians have attempted to explore and understand such lives. To overcome the gaps and silences in the archives, they argue, historians of convict Australia should employ a range of methodologies that each have their own particular domains of enquiry. In her research note, Janet McCalman reflects on the historiographical discoveries that have been made possible by the digitising, indexing and linking of convict records. She calls for future researchers to continue the work behind large datasets so that one day a fully comprehensive database of convicts can be created. Adopting a more fine-grained approach, Jennifer Bird reconstructs in detail from the archives the penal life of the convict Robert Edward Knox. Her analysis of Knox demonstrates an alternative to big-data approaches for understanding convict agency.
With a similarly refined scope—though one that looks at the convict system from the outside in—Jennifer Brookes examines the struggles of Lydia Anne to join her transported husband, Laurence Hynes Halloran, in Australia. Brookes’s article suggests that historians might consider how contemporary understandings of convicts can be enhanced by studying the lives of non-convicts associated with transportation. Matthew Cunneen reconstructs the lives of three convicts to further inform the experiences of people of colour under transportation. He argues for collective biography as a way of bridging the methodological shortcomings of purely biographical and prosopographical approaches. In the first large-scale study of the subject, Patricia Downes examines the social and legal conditions that saw freely arrived British soldiers sentenced to transportation within the Australian colonies. Complicating old narratives of the soldiers as contaminated by the convicts around them, she explores how military crimes resulting in transportation were sometimes driven by desires for freedom from military life and to protest service conditions.
Christine Fernon reports in her research note on the progress made in the National Centre of Biography’s First Three Fleets and Their Families project, an ambitious intergenerational study of Australia’s early colonial history. The preliminary findings give a sense of the insights that the project will provide into how convict lives formed the fabric of Australian colonial history. Kristyn Harman and Anthony Ray explore the intergenerational effects of the convict system through the experiences of three convicts of colour. In analysing these lives, they contribute to our understanding of interracial marriage, family formation and recidivism in Van Diemen’s Land. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, David Andrew Roberts and Mark McLean draw on a wealth of convict records to show the potential of using big data to analyse thousands of convict lives in parallel. Doing so would allow the individual to be contextualised within the greater population and would present opportunities for temporal and spatial analysis, thereby deepening understandings of British criminal management.
Visually illustrating the potential of big data in studies of convict protest and collective biography, Monika Schwarz examines collective resistance networks in female factories in Van Diemen’s Land. She draws together the stories of previously unconnected women and uncovers episodes of resistance. Returning convict history to its material origins, Richard Tuffin, Martin Gibbs, David Roe and Sylvana Szydzik draw on archaeological methods of digital technology to recontextualise convict lives. By mapping sites of convict labour and quantifying the outputs from them, the authors collectively argue that adopting multi-scalar and multidisciplinary approaches to studying convict environments can deeply enhance the histories of those who were involved with them. This issue deepens understandings of Australia’s convicts, the lives they led and the ways historians can best study them.
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Ebenezer Mission Station, 1863–1873 »
The Diary of Missionaries Adolf and Polly Hartmann
Edited by: Felicity Jensz
This book contains the annotated diary of Adolf and Mary (Polly) Hartmann, missionaries of the Moravian Church who worked at the Ebenezer Mission Station on Wotjobaluk country, in the north-west of the Colony of Victoria, Australia. The diary begins in 1863, as the Hartmanns are preparing to travel from Europe to take up their post, and ends in 1873, by which time they are working in Canada as missionaries to the Lenni Lenape people.
Recording the Hartmann’s eight years at the Ebenezer Mission, the diary presents richly detailed insights into the daily interactions between Aboriginal people and their colonisers. The inhabitants of the mission are overwhelmingly described in the diary as agents in their lives, moving in and out of the missionaries’ sphere of influence, yet restricted at times by the boundaries of the mission. The diary reveals moments of laughter, shared grief, community, advocacy and reciprocal learning, alongside the mundane everyday chores of mission life.
Through the personal writings of a missionary couple, this diary brings to light the regular, routine and extraordinary events on a mission station in Australia in the third quarter of the nineteenth century—a period just prior to British high imperialism, and a period before increasingly restrictive legislation was enforced on Indigenous people in the Colony of Victoria.
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A Grammar of Nese »
Authored by: Lana Grelyn Takau
Nese is a dying Oceanic language spoken on the island of Malekula, in northern Vanuatu. This book, based on first-hand fieldwork data, and without adhering to any particular syntactic framework, presents a synchronic grammatical description of Nese’s phonology and syntax. Despite being on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 20 living speakers, the language displays intriguing properties—including but not exclusive to the cross-linguistically rare apicolabial phonemes, interesting vowel-raising patterns in some word classes, and a discontinuous negation relationship that is obligatorily expressed with the irrealis mood marker. This book will probably be the last work published on Nese.
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Humanities Research: Volume XX, Number 1, 2023 »
Public Humanities of the Future: Museums, Archives, Universities and Beyond
Edited by: Kylie Message, Robert Wellington, Frank Bongiorno
‘Public Humanities of the Future: Museums, Archives, Universities and Beyond’ explores the roles, responsibilities and challenges of the humanities in 2022 and beyond. It examines if and how our public cultural institutions and disciplines engage ethically and meaningfully with the challenges of contemporary life, and sheds light on how the conception and practice of humanities research is developing institutionally as well as through collaboration with partners and communities beyond the university context.
This high-profile publication marks a number of historic moments, including the increasing urgency of the humanities in contemporary life, as well as the rapid development of interdisciplinary, digital and public humanities over the last decade, and the opportunities for international collaboration reflected in the post-COVID 19 resumption of international travel in 2022. It also marks the 50th-year anniversary of the Humanities Research Centre at The Australian National University, and the re-launch of Humanities Research.
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