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Leading from the North »
Rethinking Northern Australia Development
Edited by: Ruth Wallace, Sharon Harwood, Rolf Gerritsen, Bruce Prideaux, Tom Brewer, Linda Rosenman, Allan Dale
Leading from the North aims to improve public dialogue around the future of northern Australia to underpin robust and flexible planning and policy frameworks. A number of areas are addressed including social infrastructure, governance systems, economic, business and regional development, climate and its implications, the roles and trends in demography and migration in the region.
This book not only speaks to the issues of development in northern Australia but also other regional areas, and examines opportunities for growth with changing economies and technologies.
The authors of this book consist of leading researchers, academics and experts from Charles Darwin University, The Australian National University, James Cook University, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and many other collaborative partners.
Many of the authors have first-hand experience of living and working in northern Australia. They understand the real issues and challenges faced by people living in northern Australia and other similar regional areas. Backed by their expertise and experience, the authors present their discussions and findings from a local perspective.
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The Viṣṇu Purāṇa »
Ancient Annals of the God with Lotus Eyes
Authored by: McComas Taylor
Viṣṇu is a central deity in the Hindu pantheon, especially in his manifestation as the seductive cattle-herding youth, Kṛṣṇa. The purāṇas are sacred texts, which, as the Sanskrit name implies, are collections of narratives from ‘long ago’. The Viṣṇu Purāṇa is thus an ancient account of the universe and guide to life, which places Viṣṇu-Kṛṣṇa at the centre of creation, theology and reality itself.
This text, composed about 1,500 years ago, provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the most important themes and narratives that constitute the Hindu imagination: the creation and destruction of the universe, the origin of gods and mortals, the peopling of the world, and the structure and conduct of ideal brahminical society.
The Viṣṇu Purāṇa describes the trials of exemplary devotees, the existential struggles between gods and demons, and the exploits of legendary cultural heroes. It also contains many ecstatic songs of praise for the deity. The ever-popular accounts of Kṛṣṇa’s love games with the cattle-herding girls of Vṛṇdāvana, which have proliferated in literature, dance, song and visual arts over the millennia, are found here in authoritative form.
This faithful yet fluent blank-verse rendering of this great Hindu classic is the first new English translation in over 100 years. It will be welcomed by the scholarly community, while remaining readily accessible to a general readership.
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Crisis »
Edited by: Jane Golley, Linda Jaivin, Sharon Strange
The year 2020 was marked by a series of rolling crises. The Australian wildfires at the start of the year were a catastrophic sign of the global climate crisis. Xi Jinping’s announcement in September that the People’s Republic of China would become carbon neutral by 2060 could help alleviate the crisis, but China has to fix its coal problem first. The big story was, of course, the global COVID-19 pandemic. Appearing to originate in a Wuhan wet market, by year’s end the pandemic had claimed nearly 2 million lives worldwide, put whole countries into lockdown, and sent economies around the world tumbling into recession. China itself successfully suppressed the disease at home and recorded positive economic growth for the year — proving, at least according to the Chinese Communist Party, the ‘superiority of the socialist system’. Not everyone was convinced, with persistent questions about the CCP’s initial cover up of the outbreak, and how the lack of transparency helped it become a pandemic in the first place.
The China Story Yearbook 2020: Crisis surveys the multiple crises of the year of the Metal Rat, including the catastrophic mid-year floods that sparked fears about the stability of the Three Gorges Dam. It looks at how Chinese women fared through the pandemic, from the rise in domestic violence to portraits of female sacrifice on the medical front line to the trolling of a famous dancer for being childless. It also examines the downward-spiralling Sino-Australian relationship, the difficult ‘co-morbidities’ of China’s relations with the US, the end of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ in Hong Kong, the simmering border conflict with India, and the rise of pandemic-related anti-Chinese racism. The Yearbook also explores the responses to crisis of, among others, Daoists, Buddhists, and humourists — because when all else fails, there’s always philosophy, prayer, and laughter.
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Politics, Policy and Public Administration in Theory and Practice »
Essays in Honour of Professor John Wanna
This festschrift celebrates the extensive contribution John Wanna has made to the research and practice of politics, policy and public administration.
It includes both personal acknowledgements of his work and substantial essays on the issues that he focused most closely upon during his academic career: budgeting and financial management, politics, and public policy and administration.
The essays address contemporary developments in public sector financial management in Australia and overseas, changing political processes in Queensland and the Commonwealth, and public governance and administration reform trajectories in Australia and internationally, including in China.
A common theme is the importance of linking research to practice, reflecting John Wanna’s own style and contribution. Essays include exploration of the interface between academia and practice, including from the perspective of practitioners.
The authors of the essays in this volume include eminent Australian and international scholars of public administration, experienced public service practitioners and younger scholars influenced by John Wanna.
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Austronesian Paths and Journeys »
Edited by: James J. Fox
This is the eighth volume in the Comparative Austronesian series. Each of the papers in this volume examines various cultural expressions of metaphors of path and journey within a specific Austronesian society. While these extended ethnographic accounts focus on a diversity of metaphoric expressions among widely scattered societies from Taiwan to Timor and from Madagascar to Melanesia and the Pacific, they also point to similar common cultural usages across the Austronesian-speaking world.
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Twenty K.R. Narayanan Orations »
Essays by Eminent Persons on the Rapidly Transforming Indian Economy
Edited by: Raghbendra Jha
The Australia South Asia Research Centre (ASARC) was established in 1994 in one of the premier universities of the world—The Australian National University (ANU). Apart from its research and doctoral training activities, ASARC also needed a public forum with a global reach to involve the best minds working on economic development in India as well as to honour its founder, Dr K.R. Narayanan, President of the Republic of India. The K.R. Narayanan Oration series was developed in response to these twin needs.
The first oration was held in 1994 and the latest (the 20th) was held in 2018. The first 10 orations were published by ANU Press in 2006. This new edition updates the volume to include all 20 orations delivered so far and provides an updated introduction. All these orations have been delivered by leading academics, scientists and policymakers deeply involved in the transformation of the Indian economy.
This collection of the Narayanan Orations is thus at once both an expert account of key aspects of the economic development process in India and a peek into India’s potential in the future. As such, the publication of this volume marks a watershed in the intellectual debate on India’s economic reforms program and should be welcomed by all those interested in the economic development of the country.
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Sound Citizens »
Australian Women Broadcasters Claim their Voice, 1923–1956
Authored by: Catherine Fisher
In 1954 Dame Enid Lyons, the first woman elected to the Australian House of Representatives, argued that radio had ‘created a bigger revolution in the life of a woman than anything that has happened any time’ as it brought the public sphere into the home and women into the public sphere. Taking this claim as its starting point, Sound Citizens examines how a cohort of professional women broadcasters, activists and politicians used radio to contribute to the public sphere and improve women’s status in Australia from the introduction of radio in 1923 until the introduction of television in 1956. This book reveals a much broader and more complex history of women’s contributions to Australian broadcasting than has been previously acknowledged.
Using a rich archive of radio magazines, station archives, scripts, personal papers and surviving recordings, Sound Citizens traces how women broadcasters used radio as a tool for their advocacy; radio’s significance to the history of women’s advancement; and how broadcasting was used in the development of women’s citizenship in Australia. It argues that women broadcasters saw radio as a medium that had the potential to transform women’s lives and status in society, and that they worked to both claim their own voices in the public sphere and to encourage other women to become active citizens. Radio provided a platform for women to contribute to public discourse and normalised the presence of women’s voices in the public sphere, both literally and figuratively.
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Russian Energy Strategy in the Asia-Pacific »
Implications for Australia
Edited by: Elizabeth Buchanan
Given Australia’s lack of energy security strategy, it is not surprising that the country is void of institutional knowledge and know-how of Russian foreign energy strategy. The ‘lucky country’ as it were, relies entirely on sea-lines of communication to the north to supply fuel and to export Australian coal and natural gas. Australia has entered the 2020s as the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter; however, maintaining complacency in Canberra’s current export activities will ultimately lead to a long-term security crisis. This book critically examines Russian energy strategy in the Asia-Pacific, with a view to determining the security implications for Australia. Russia is important for global energy security chains because of its vast resource wealth and its geographical position – a pivotal position to supply both the European and Asian markets. Australia has no such luxury, geographically constrained as an island continent; it relies on the nearby Asia-Pacific import market to demand our energy and to facilitate the delivery of our national oil supplies. Understanding Russian foreign energy strategy in the region is crucial given the growing energy requirements in Australia’s emerging Asia-Pacific arena.
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Like Fire »
The Paliau Movement and Millenarianism in Melanesia
Authored by: Theodore Schwartz, Michael French Smith
‘Like Fire consummates remarkable longitudinal ethnographic research on the Paliau Movement in Papua New Guinea, pursued from the 1950s into the 1990s by Theodore Schwartz, with Michael French Smith as his sometime assistant, and updated by Smith in 2015. The theoretical arguments are highly provocative and the book is well-written and fascinating throughout. Like Fire poses important questions about the driving forces and contours of Pacific Island history and the place in it of cargo cults and other millenarian movements.’
—Aletta Biersack, Professor Emerita, University of Oregon
‘Like Fire synthesises old, but inaccessible, and new material on an important and long-lasting indigenous Melanesian movement, while making extensive use of the wider literature on cargo cults and millenarianism. I find the theorising in this book both very original and an important contribution to the debates on Melanesian religion, cargo cults, and millenarianism more generally. As the authors state, the topic of millenarianism has great relevance because of its ubiquity in the contemporary world.’
—Ton Otto, Professor of Anthropology, Aarhus University, Denmark, and James Cook University, Australia
Like Fire chronicles an indigenous movement for radical change in Papua New Guinea from 1946 to the present. The movement’s founder, Paliau Maloat, promoted a program for step-by-step social change in which many of his followers also found hope for a miraculous millenarian transformation. Drawing on data collected over several decades, Theodore Schwartz and Michael French Smith describe the movement’s history, Paliau’s transformation from secular reformer and politician to Melanesian Jesus, and the development of the current incarnation of the movement as Wind Nation, a fully millenarian endeavour. Their analysis casts doubt on common ways of understanding a characteristically Melanesian form of millenarianism, the cargo cult, and questions widely accepted ways of interpreting millenarianism in general. They show that to understand the human proclivity for millenarianism we must scrutinise more closely two near-universal human tendencies: difficulty accepting the role of chance or impersonal forces in shaping events (that is, the tendency to personify causation), and a tendency to imagine that one or one’s group is the focus of the malign or benign attention of purposeful entities, from the local to the cosmic. Schwartz and Smith discuss the prevalence of millenarianism and warn against romanticising it, because the millenarian mind can subvert rationality and nourish rage and fear even as it seeks transcendence.
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