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Deeper, Strategic Collaboration in the Securities Sector »
India and Australia
Authored by: Sonia Khosa
In an era of globalised finance and increasing cross-border activity, regulatory cooperation has become essential for market integrity and development. This book examines the potential for strategic collaboration between India and Australia in the securities sector—two nations with distinct but complementary economic and legal frameworks. Through a comparative analysis of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), it evaluates alignment with International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) principles, focusing on supervisory powers, enforcement mechanisms and compliance effectiveness. The analysis identifies shared regulatory goals and governance principles, highlighting opportunities for bilateral cooperation.
Offering a roadmap for capital market integration and regulatory innovation, the book makes a timely contribution to international financial scholarship. It delivers practical insights for policymakers, legal scholars and regulators interested in forging resilient cross-border partnerships—both within the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
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Ink and Land »
Documenting Factionalism around a Prospective Mine in Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Willem Church
Ink and Land is an ethnographic account of political and legal struggles over landownership in Papua New Guinea, in which competing factions seek recognition as customary landowners of Wafi-Golpu, a major prospective copper-gold mine. Drawing on extensive archival research, oral histories, court documents and fifteen months of fieldwork, the book examines how different groups attempt to harness resource extraction for their benefit and how, in doing so, they reshape their social worlds through the medium of affidavits, court declarations and incorporation certificates. To analyse this process, the book advances the concept of antagonistic documentality—a form of conflict in which parties engage in conflicting world-building projects through and about documents and, in doing so, create an order of paper that outlasts the disputes themselves. Through this detailed case study, Ink and Land reveals how legal and bureaucratic battles over resource extraction in Papua New Guinea formalise factionalism, consolidate elite control over new sources of wealth, and redefine the nature of groups and landownership. By focusing on conflict over documents as a process of social transformation, the book offers fresh insights into the politics of land, law and resource extraction in the contemporary Pacific.
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Rethinking Histories of Indonesia »
Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality
Edited by: Sadiah Boonstra, Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones, Katharine McGregor, Ken M.P. Setiawan, Abdul Wahid
Rethinking Histories of Indonesia: Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality provides a critical evaluation of histories of Indonesia from the formal period of colonisation to the present day. The volume approaches Indonesian history through the lens of coloniality, or the structures of power and control that underpin colonisation and which persist into the present. Bringing together seventeen authors from across the world, the volume offers alternative conceptualisation of Indonesian history and lays bare the enduring legacies of and processes that reproduce coloniality.
“This is a significant and exciting volume in terms of its scale, the range of disciplines, approaches and topics included and, ultimately, for its contribution to the field of Indonesian history and historiography, and Indonesian studies and decolonial studies more broadly … The contributors to this book do [a great service to] students of Indonesian history, its cultures, society and politics, offering new sources, voices, approaches and perspectives. Overall, they provide a fresh and vital critique of not only Indonesia’s colonial history but its continuing lived influences on present day Indonesia and beyond.”
—Jemma Purdey, Australia-Indonesia Centre, Monash University
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Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust »
An Economic History of Papua New Guinea since Independence
Authored by: Stephen Howes, Martin Davies, Rohan Fox, Maholopa Laveil, Manoj K. Pandey, Kelly Samof, Dek Joe Sum
Since Papua New Guinea’s independence in 1975, economic growth has been slow but volatile, with major changes in economic structure and policies, as well as in politics and governance.
This economic history, written to commemorate the fiftieth year of independence and the first to be produced in some 15 years, divides the half century since independence into four periods: the relative stability but also early struggles of the seventies and eighties; the crises and reforms of the nineties; the boom of the 2000s; and the quiet bust of the 2010s. Two chapters cover each period’s major economic, policy, institutional and political developments. The final three chapters provide an overall assessment of economic performance and policies since independence and link them with its politics and institutions.
The book combines painstaking documentation with original analysis to reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the PNG economy, and theorises that the country’s hyper-politics and insecurity have combined to produce, and are reinforced by, a weak but stable state, and low and increasingly resource-dependent growth.
Data-driven, frank, insightful and engaging, Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust is written by an expert team of economists from the University of Papua New Guinea and The Australian National University under the leadership of Professor Stephen Howes, Director of the ANU Development Policy Centre. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in the economy of Papua New Guinea, as well as an important contribution to the literature on the challenges and institutional determinants of post-colonial development.
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Strategic Imagination »
Essays in Honour of Brendan Sargeant
Edited by: Andrew Carr
This book examines the concept of ‘strategic imagination’ developed by Brendan Sargeant during his distinguished career at the Australian Department of Defence and later as a scholar at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), The Australian National University. His tragic passing has left this powerful idea awaiting a proper examination. This volume seeks to provide that scholarly account and carry both the concept and Brendan’s legacy forward.
The book is organised in three parts. First, former officials like Dennis Richardson join leading scholars, including Mark McKenna, Anthea Roberts and Ian Hall, to explore the unusual conjunction of strategy and imagination, demonstrating its crucial role in effective scholarship and policy.
Second, analysts from Australia and worldwide examine how strategic imagination improves strategic practice by revealing hidden possibilities, catalysing essential conversations and challenging core assumptions.
The final section offers personal reflections from Brendan’s colleagues at the SDSC, providing a fitting tribute to his life and contribution. The volume also includes selections of Brendan’s own writing on strategic imagination, ensuring his voice continues to inspire scholars and officials to explore this rich and powerful concept.
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The Wild Australia Show »
The Story of an Aboriginal Performance Troupe and its Afterlives
Authored by: Paul Memmott, Maria Nugent, Michael Aird, Lindy Allen, Chantal Knowles, Jonathan Richards
The Wild Australia Show was a troupe of 27 Aboriginal performers recruited from northern Queensland in the 1890s for a world tour that would culminate at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Those grand plans were ultimately dashed, and the troupe only performed in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne before disbanding. This book tells the story of the Wild Australia Show from its inception to its afterlives. It traces how the performers were recruited, the places they came from, the repertoire they created, rehearsed and performed, their experiences on tour and the politics of their representation in word and image. Drawing on an extensive archive of newspaper reports, government records, and court proceedings, richly complemented by photographs and other visual images, the authors seek to reconstruct the Wild Australia Show story from the perspectives of the performers themselves. The book contributes to a growing literature on the history of Aboriginal performers and performances under colonial conditions, and the ways in which public performance could be a means for cultural survival and resurgence.
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Globalising Chinese Actors and Internalising the Belt and Road »
Implications for Global and Domestic Governance
Edited by: Miwa Hirono
The literature on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) points out either its negative or positive impacts on global and domestic governance. However, such a dichotomy is too simplistic, not least because it tells us little about the complexity of change in the nature of the BRI as it is implemented. This book argues that the BRI manifests an intricate dynamic comprising two contradictory tendencies: Xi Jinping’s top-down and centralised approach to policy-making, with its focus on producing robust Chinese actors who can succeed in a competitive global economy; and a fragmented and decentralised reality made up of an expanding range of actors engaged in realising myriad BRI projects on the ground. The co-existence of these two contradictory tendencies implies that the BRI has a multidimensional impact on global and domestic governance in general, and on the role of Japan in countries where BRI projects take place. Japan matters because of its ‘in-between’ position between non-Western donors and the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a position that offers a unique dimension to a frequently dichotomous discussion of the BRI. Globally, China’s promotion of the BRI has strengthened an aspect of global governance, the ‘open economy’, while at the same time fostering the Chinese nuance of a ‘planned economy’. Domestically, a Chinese-style approach to state management and investment without political conditions may set back democratisation efforts in emerging countries, but the BRI has also given rise to a renewed sense of democracy in those countries. These multidimensional impacts enable China and Japan to find an on-the-ground complementarity in their approaches to development aid in relation to future cooperation.
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Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 9, 2025 »
Special Issue: Oceania Lives
This special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History, ‘Oceania Lives’, showcases a collection of writing and dialogue from an emerging group of Pacific scholars interested in rethinking Australia’s past and present through historical biography. While spanning multiple time periods, geographies, and communities, the issue draws its thematic coherence from a sustained exploration of the different ways in which Pacific peoples – in this case, South Sea Islanders/Australian South Sea Islanders, Papua New Guineans, Tongans, Pitcairners, West Papuans, Solomon Islanders and Fijians − have and continue to encounter Australian coloniality in its various forms.
The issue is notable for its inclusion of two dialogues, drawn from public events hosted in recent years by the Oceania Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. These dialogues, with their related emphases on indigeneity, relationality and knowledge production, set the scene for the entire special issue which aims to interrogate and explore the position of Pacific peoples on Indigenous lands and waterways which comprise contemporary Australia. Melinda Mann, Kim Kruger and Imelda Miller powerfully demonstrate how this can be done through their approaches to writing South Sea Islander biography while Lisa Hilli also reflects on her artistic and biographical method in conversation with Wendy Mocke about the FMI (or Daughters of Mary Immaculate) sisters of Vunapope, New Britain, who helped save hundreds of lives during the Second World War.
In addition to the dialogues, ‘Oceania Lives’ features four reflective pieces and three research articles. Using the Tongan narrative approach, talanoa-vā, Ruth (Lute) Faleolo and Emma ‘Ilaiū Vehikite use the written records of Wesleyan missionary Walter Lawry to reimagine the early 19th century voyage of Futukava to Australia. In ‘My grandmother is (not just) a small brown fragment’, Pauline Reynolds responds poetically to an archival note attached to a tapa or barkcloth donated to the Macleay Collections. Christopher Chevalier offers valuable reflections on the completion and publication of his biography of Solomon Mamaloni and Romitesh Kant pays special tribute to the work of Professor Brij Lal, a pioneer in Pacific biography and so much more. In their research articles, Talei Luscia Mangioni and Camellia Webb-Gannon bring to life the stories of Melanesian activist women Amelia Rokotuivuna from Fiji and the Black Sistaz from West Papua. Finally, Nicholas Hoare and Theresa Meki ask, ‘What ever happened to the Papua New Guinea Dictionary of Contemporary Biography?’ Their answers – like those of other contributors to this issue − point to both the challenges and opportunities in writing about and working with Oceania lives in 2025.
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Military History Supremo »
Essays in Honour of David Horner AM FASSA
Edited by: Joan Beaumont, Garth Pratten
Professor Emeritus David Horner AM FASSA is one of Australia’s greatest military historians and its fifth official historian of war and military operations. Few who undertake research in the field can do so without consulting his prodigious, authoritative and definitive publications. Serving for 25 years in the Australian Army before joining The Australian National University, Horner is the epitome of the soldier-scholar and has played a key role in establishing military history as an academic discipline in Australia.
This volume honours Horner’s long career of service to history and the nation. Authors pay tribute to Horner’s legacy by engaging with his scholarship, applying his conclusions to new case studies and contexts, reflecting and expanding on the subjects he addressed and the methodologies he employed, and pushing the boundaries of the discipline he was instrumental in founding. The breadth of Horner’s research is demonstrated by the subjects and themes they address, including strategic planning and policy, command, multinational operations, intelligence, and defence policy. Military History Supremo both underscores Horner’s contribution to Australia’s military and intelligence history and highlights the vibrancy and relevance of the field today.
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