Journals
Browse or search a variety of academic journals maintained by ANU Press, or find out more about the journal authors. Download the book for free or buy a print-on-demand copy.
Australian Urban Policy »
Prospects and Pathways
Publication date: March 2024
Urban Australia confronts numerous challenges in the 21st century: climate change, housing, transport, greenspace, social inequality, and governance, among them. While state and local governments wrestle with these issues, they are continent wide and require national leadership, direction and participation. As a highly urbanised country without a national approach to urban policy, Australia is an outlier.
Contributors to this book argue that this policy gap needs to be addressed. They ask: How have productive, sustainable and liveable cities so far been enhanced? Where have aspirations fallen short or produced negative outcomes? And what approaches are emerging to challenge existing and devise new urban policy settings?
In the face of ongoing crises and escalating change, the need for policy to quickly transform urban Australia is daunting. Problems, wicked in their complexity, require innovative, ethical solutions. This book offers new ideas that challenge policy orthodoxy.
Yagara Dictionary and Salvage Grammar »
Authored by: Karen Sullivan, Glenda Harward-Nalder
Publication date: March 2024
Most English speakers in Australia know a few words of Yagara, the Pama-Nyungan language traditionally spoken in the area that now includes Brisbane and Ipswich. For example, Australian English yakka ‘work’ comes from the Yagara verb yaga ‘to work’. However, no fluent native speakers of Yagara remain. The current volume compares the written records of Yagara to facilitate revitalisation of the spoken language.
Part 1: Grammar introduces the Yagara sources, which are then compared to extract a picture of Yagara’s structure – its sounds, its words, and its grammar. Attention is also given to the system of kinship terms, moieties, and totems.
Part 2: Dictionary contains the most complete Yagara-English dictionary to date, with over 2,200 entries, the original source spellings for each word, standardised spellings, and anthropological notes. Entries include traditional place names, fun insults, and everyday expressions such as the greeting wi balga ‘Hey, come’. The dictionary is followed by an English word finder list.
Part 3: Texts consist of full versions of all known texts in Yagara, including sentences, songs, and three Bible stories. Standardised versions are accompanied by English translations and the original unedited renditions.
Format: Hardback
International Review of Environmental History: Volume 9, Issue 2, 2023 »
Edited by: James Beattie
Publication date: February 2024
The histories and legacies of extraction and toxicity are innumerable. Globally, these forces have both facilitated and been a by-product of industrial growth, technological advancement and nation-building for centuries, but so too have they enabled and exacerbated environmental degradation, structural inequality, and the continued colonisation of lands and peoples. In addressing the histories and legacies of extraction and toxicity, this special issue of the International Review of Environmental History draws attention to several of the most pressing themes taken up by historians dealing with these processes. The papers within explore how extraction and toxicity have been woven into the colonial fabric of various countries, the ways that the exploitation and contamination of specific landscapes have come to define the history of such places and spaces, the response of various groups to these processes, and the extent to which long-term environmental consequences wrought by extractive practices and their toxic by-products are—in many cases—yet to be revealed. The articles in this special issue span Australia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Southern Ocean, consider the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and draw on a range of disciplinary methods and perspectives. What binds them together is a deep engagement with the significant legacies of extraction and toxicity that endure into the present and inform contemporary environmental debates.
Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 8, 2024 »
Publication date: February 2024
The Australian Journal of Biography and History No 8 (2024) applies biographical methodologies to enliven themes and episodes in Australian history. Studying John Wear Burton, the head of the Commonwealth department of external affairs between 1947 and 1950, Adam Hughes Henry explores some of the ways in which anti-communism in 1950s Australia served to limit critical thinking on the country’s foreign policy. Gary Osmond and Jan Richardson write on the Black sports promoter and entrepreneur Jack Dowridge, who lived and largely thrived in Brisbane between the mid-1870s until his death in 1922. Phillip Deery and Julie Kimber examine the often-overlooked figure of Evdokia Petrov, considering the ‘disjuncture between historical imagination and the archival record.’ In Richard Fotheringham’s article on the variety entertainer and singer Jenny Howard, aka Daisy Blowes, Howard emerges as a character in her own play. Martin Thomas relates in his article ‘Patrick White and the Path to Sarsaparilla’ how the novelist Patrick White demanded a ‘final pound of flesh from his biographer’ by making David Marr ‘sit with him at the dining table while he read it in front of him from beginning to end.’ The result was a biography of ‘complete artistic freedom’, ‘unauthorised’ certainly, but ‘aided and abetted by its subject.’ Patricia Clarke describes the experience of the journalist Iris Dexter, née Norton (1907–1974), in seeking, but until 1950 failing to obtain, a divorce from an abusive husband, and the devastating impact the episode had on her life. Two further articles in this number utilise collective biographical methodologies to illuminate historical episodes which have become emblematic in Australian history: Nichola Garvey relates the story of the ‘death ship’ Neptune, which arrived in New South Wales in 1790 as part of the infamous second fleet; and Peter Woodley examines the 1891 Queensland bush workers’ strike. This affair has generally been portrayed as a ‘war’ between capital and labour, but as Woodley argues, the strike also showed the ‘often intense and fraught intersections of individuals’ lives’, many of which would never have come to light were it not for the strike and its judicial consequences.
Mandates and Missteps »
Australian Government Scholarships to the Pacific – 1948 to 2018
Authored by: Anna Kent
Publication date: February 2024
Mandates and Missteps is the first comprehensive history of Australian government scholarships to the Pacific, from the first scheme in 1948 to the Australia Awards of 2018. The study of scholarships provides a window into foreign and education policy making, across decades, and the impact such policies have had on individuals and communities. This work demonstrates the broad role these scholarships have played in bilateral relationships between Australia and Pacific Island territories and countries. The famed Colombo Plan is here put in its proper context within international aid and international education history. Australian scholarship programs, it is argued, ultimately reflect Australia, and its perception of itself as a nation in the Pacific, more than the needs of Pacific Island nations. Mandates and Missteps traces Australia’s role as both a coloniser in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea and a participant in the process of decolonisation across the Pacific. This study will be of interest to students and scholars of international development, international education and foreign policy.
The Chinese Communist Party »
A 100-Year Trajectory
Edited by: Jérôme Doyon, Chloé Froissart
Publication date: January 2024
This volume brings together an international team of prominent scholars from a range of disciplines, with the aim of investigating the many facets of the Chinese Communist Party’s 100-year trajectory. It combines a level of historical depth mostly found in single-authored monographs with the thematic and disciplinary breadth of an edited volume. This work stands out for its long-term and multiscale approach, offering complex and nuanced insights, eschewing any Party grand narrative, and unravelling underlying trends and logics, composed of adaption but also contradictions, resistance and sometimes setbacks, that may be overlooked when focusing on the short term.
Rather than putting forward an overall argument about the nature of the Party, the many perspectives presented in this volume highlight the complex internal dynamics of the Party, the diversity of its roles in relation to the state, as well as in its interaction with society beyond the state. Our historical approach stresses impermanence beyond the apparent permanence of the Party’s organisation and ideology while also bringing to light the recycling of past practices and strategies. Looking at the Party’s evolution over time shows how its founding structures and objectives have had a long-lasting impact as well as how they have been tweaked and rearranged to adapt to the new economic and social environment the Party contributed to creating.
Redeveloping China’s Villages in the Twenty-First Century »
The Dilemmas of Policy Implementation
Authored by: Lior Rosenberg
Publication date: January 2024
Implementing national policies is a crucial function of the local Chinese bureaucracy and an indispensable part of Beijing’s overall state capacity. Yet the specifics of how and why local officials interpret and implement such policies have so far escaped detailed attention. In Redeveloping China’s Villages in the Twenty-First Century, Lior Rosenberg fills this gap by examining the national Village Redevelopment Program, one of China’s most significant policies of recent decades to promote rural change.
Based on Rosenberg’s on-site research, Redeveloping China’s Villages in the Twenty-First Century investigates the Village Redevelopment Program’s implementation in both the industrialised county of Chenggu, in Shandong province, and the predominantly agricultural county of Beian, in Anhui province. At the book’s heart is a puzzle: the program was supposed to prioritise poorer villages, but in both Chenggu and Beian—despite being carried out in surprisingly divergent ways—it has subsidised improved infrastructure and services in already industrialised and prosperous villages, while leaving behind poorer ones. In explaining this outcome, Rosenberg elaborates on the larger economic, political and social environment in which Chinese local officials operate, as well as the pressures they face from above. He analyses the dual role played by higher-level authorities, as both policy enablers and thwarters in a system that sanctifies commandism but where the distinction between principals and agents is blurred.
Lilith: A Feminist History Journal: Number 29 »
Publication date: December 2023
The 2023 issue of Lilith showcases the journal’s dedication to encouraging underrepresented voices in historical writing, including early-career scholars, First Nations voices and historians from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Six of the research articles in the issue focus on nineteenth and early twentieth-century topics, with papers on women’s roles in interwar international diplomacy, on Indian prostitution under British colonialism, on the relationship between interracial rape and white femininity on the Australian colonial frontier, on the role of gender in the NSW Shipwreck Society of the late nineteenth century, and on the struggle of women for public lavatories in 1912 Meanjin (Brisbane). Two of the research articles concern more recent histories, with papers on the role of Māori women in feminist movements of the 1970s, and the construction of sexual consent in Dolly Magazine of the late twentieth century. There is also a review essay about global histories of feminism and gender struggle which evaluates several recent such works, reflecting on their methodological innovations and concerns. The edition includes six short book reviews that span a wide range of international and local interests, covering topics such as the digital humanities, the global history of sexual violence, US queer history, Australian queer women’s history, gender in European colonial travel, and the history of the pram in Australia.
Several of the articles in the volume concern the international engagement of feminist struggles and intercultural questions in relation to gendered roles in history, while others gesture beyond the concerns of historical studies alone, addressing issues of rape culture, political activism, women’s spaces, and gendered emotions, making valuable contributions to the wider Australian humanities and social sciences. The volume exemplifies the value of balancing international trends in feminist history with the recognition of local episodes in the history of gender struggle, underscoring Lilith's commitment to advancing new forms of feminist historical writing and showcasing innovative research by scholars at diverse career stages.
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Grassroots Law in Papua New Guinea »
Edited by: Melissa Demian
Publication date: December 2023
The introduction of village courts in Papua New Guinea in 1975 was an ambitious experiment in providing semi-formal legal access to the country’s overwhelmingly rural population. Nearly 50 years later, the enthusiastic adoption of these courts has had a number of ramifications, some of them unanticipated. Arguably, the village courts have developed and are working exactly as they were supposed to do, adapted by local communities to modes and styles consistent with their own dispute management sensibilities. But with little in the way of state oversight or support, most village courts have become, of necessity, nearly autonomous.
Village courts have also become the blueprint for other modes of dispute management. They overlap with other sources of authority, so the line between what does and does not constitute a ‘court’ is now indistinct in many parts of the country. Rather than casting this issue as a problem for legal development, the contributors to Grassroots Law in Papua New Guinea ask how, under conditions of state withdrawal, people seek to retain an understanding of law that holds out some promise of either keeping the attention of the state or reproducing the state’s authority.
After the Coup »
Myanmar’s Political and Humanitarian Crises
Edited by: Anthony Ware, Monique Skidmore
Publication date: December 2023
The coup in Myanmar on 1 February 2021 abruptly reversed a decade-long flirtation with economic and political freedoms. The country has since descended into civil war, the people have been plunged back into conflict and poverty, and the state is again characterised by fragility and human insecurity. As the Myanmar people oppose the regime and fight for their rights, the international community must find ways to act in solidarity. There is an urgent need for new policy settings and for practical engagement with local partners and recipient groups.
The contributors to After the Coup offer timely insights into ways international actors can try to reduce the suffering of millions of citizens who are again being held hostage by a brutal and self-serving regime. Chapters analyse topics including coercive statecraft, international justice, Rakhine State (Rohingya) dynamics, pandemic weaponisation, higher education, non-state welfare and aid delivery, activism from exile, self-determination and power sharing in the National Unity Government’s alternative constitution, and the roles of China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
China between Peace and War »
Mao, Chiang and the Americans, 1945–1947
Authored by: Victor Cheng
Publication date: November 2023
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.
ANU Historical Journal II: Number 4 »
Publication date: November 2023
In the fourth issue of the ANU Historical Journal II, broad and urgent historical questions about memorialisation, environmental change, and violence are elucidated by detailed and thoughtfully contextualised studies of local places and communities in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. The six peer-reviewed articles span topics including frontier sexual violence, the categorisations of child patients in mental hospitals, the politics of war memorialisation, the long history of flooding in Queensland, and changing practices in community cemeteries. Complementing these articles are five book reviews which cast a critical eye on a wide range of new work, encompassing Australian, global, military, political, colonial, and disciplinary history. This issue also features the inaugural Robin-Griffiths Lecture in Environmental History, reflecting on Libby Robin and Tom Griffiths’ path-breaking work and changing sensibilities around national parks, as well as a conversation-style review of ‘Marking Country: Mapping Deep History’, presented by the Research Centre for Deep History. Together these pieces speak to the contributions of the research centres in the School of History, and to the rich range of ways in which history can be meaningfully created and communicated.
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 15, Number 4, 2023 »
Publication date: November 2023
It’s back: the past decade has seen a remarkable resurgence of industrial policy in the developed world. Geopolitical fragmentation and resultant suspicions of international trade, the politically induced adoption of second-best industrial policies to address carbon emissions, and the use of manufacturing incentives sparked by fears of deindustrialisation and widening inequality risk tit-for-tat protectionism and further splintering of the global economy. This issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly examines what the new enthusiasm for industrial policy activism means for the global system and Asian economies: exploring its effects on the ability of emerging Asian economies’ to break into manufacturing in global value chains; investigating how measures aimed at encouraging domestic processing of raw materials affect the stability of policy environments and green industrialisation; detailing and comparing the experiences of major regional economies with policy developments in semiconductor and electric vehicle manufacturing and renewable energy; and appraising industrial policy’s effects on smaller economies and the rules-based trading system from a global perspective.
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Memory in Place »
Locating colonial histories and commemoration
Edited by: Cameo Dalley, Ashley Barnwell
Publication date: November 2023
Memory in Place brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners grappling with the continued potency of memories and experiences of colonialism. While many of these conversations have taken place on a national stage, this collection returns to the rich intimacy of the local. From Queensland’s sweeping Gulf Country, along the shelly beaches of south Sydney, Melbourne’s city gardens and the rugged hills of South Australia, through Central Australia’s dusty heart and up to the majestic Kimberley, the collection charts how interactions between Indigenous people, settlers and their descendants are both remembered and forgotten in social, political, and cultural spaces. It offers uniquely diverse perspectives from a range of disciplines including history, anthropology, memory studies, archaeology, and linguistics from both established and emerging scholars; from Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors; and from academics as well as museum and cultural heritage practitioners. The collection locates some of the nation’s most pressing political issues with attention to the local, and the ethics of commemoration and relationships needed at this scale. It will be of interest to those who see the past as intimately connected to the future.
Made in China Journal: Volume 8, Issue 1, 2023 »
Edited by: Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere
Publication date: November 2023
The year 2023 began with a series of jolts in China, as the government abruptly rolled back its notoriously strict pandemic measures following countrywide protests in late 2022. While external popular perceptions saw China as being uniformly locked down for the first years of the pandemic, the reality was that the country’s pandemic governance was unevenly applied and varied substantially from place to place. The result was mixed—and often even contradictory—attempts to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2, with vastly differentiated experiences on the ground. While heterogeneous and fragmented governance in China is nothing new—and indeed is the basis of how most scholars understand policy implementation in the country—the pandemic nevertheless produced patterns of governance that were at times surprising, while also reinforcing previous trends. This issue of the Made in China Journal examines patterns of pandemic governance and the subjectivities associated with living through lockdown and the ever-present possibility of quarantine.
Visions and Revisions in Sanskrit Narrative »
Studies in the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas
Edited by: Raj Balkaran, McComas Taylor
Publication date: November 2023
Sanskrit narrative is the lifeblood of Indian culture, encapsulating and perpetuating insights and values central to Indian thought and practice. This volume brings together eighteen of the foremost scholars across the globe, who, in an unprecedented collaboration, accord these texts the integrity and dignity they deserve. The last time this was attempted, on a much smaller scale, was a generation ago, with Purāṇa Perennis (1993). The pre-eminent contributors to this landmark collection use novel methods and theory to meaningfully engage Sanskrit narrative texts, showcasing the state of contemporary scholarship on the Sanskrit epics and purāṇas.
The Road to Batemans Bay »
Speculating on the South Coast During the 1840s Depression
Authored by: Alastair Greig
Publication date: November 2023
The Road to Batemans Bay is the story of competing ventures to create ‘the Great Southern Township’ on the South Coast of New South Wales in the early 1840s. The idea of developing the furthest reaches of settlement was linked to the hopes of southern woolgrowers for a road from their properties to the coast, over the Great Dividing Range. The township proponents dreamed that having a quicker and cheaper connection to Sydney would allow them to open a port second only to Port Jackson.
The scene begins with the proposed coastal township of St Vincent, in an age of optimism: settlement is expanding, exports are growing and land prices are soaring, generating Australia’s first land boom. Before long, however, the colony experiences a catastrophic economic depression whose ‘pestilential breath’ infects those with a stake in the coastal townships. Alastair Greig follows the fate of these individuals, while also speculating on the broader fate of South Coast development during the mid-nineteenth century.
Greig gives a unique insight into many aspects of colonial life—including the worlds of Sydney’s merchants, auctioneers, land speculators, surveyors, map-makers and lawyers—as well as its maritime challenges. The Road to Batemans Bay is a chronicle of how Australia first developed its land-gambling habit and how land speculation led to the road to ruin.
The Compleat Busoni, Volume 3 »
Ending to Dr. Faust and the definitive realisations of the Fantasia Contrappuntistica
Authored by: Larry Sitsky
Publication date: November 2023
VOLUME 3: I. Ending to Dr. Faust II. Definitive version of the Fantasia Contrappuntistica for two pianos III. Concerto for Orchestra: Completion and orchestration of the Fantasia Contrappuntistica.
Larry Sitsky, professor emeritus at The Australian National University, is an internationally known composer, pianist, scholar, and teacher. His books are fundamental reference works on subjects such as Australian piano music, the 20th-century avant-garde, the piano music of Anton Rubinstein, the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde, and the classical reproducing piano roll.
The Compleat Busoni is the result of Sitsky’s lifelong focus on the composer Ferruccio Busoni. Over three volumes, Sitsky surveys Busoni’s vast output, provides an ending to the unfinished opera Dr. Faust, and presents definitive realisations of the Fantasia Contrappuntistica in two-piano and orchestral versions. New insights into Busoni’s style and aesthetics are an integral aspect of this work.
Format: Hardback
The Compleat Busoni, Volume 2 »
Busoni’s other music: A complete survey
Authored by: Larry Sitsky
Publication date: November 2023
VOLUME 2: Busoni’s other music: A complete survey.
Larry Sitsky, professor emeritus at The Australian National University, is an internationally known composer, pianist, scholar, and teacher. His books are fundamental reference works on subjects such as Australian piano music, the 20th-century avant-garde, the piano music of Anton Rubinstein, the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde, and the classical reproducing piano roll.
The Compleat Busoni is the result of Sitsky’s lifelong focus on the composer Ferruccio Busoni. Over three volumes, Sitsky surveys Busoni’s vast output, provides an ending to the unfinished opera Dr. Faust, and presents definitive realisations of the Fantasia Contrappuntistica in two-piano and orchestral versions. New insights into Busoni’s style and aesthetics are an integral aspect of this work.
Format: Hardback
Sisters in Peace »
The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Australia, 1915–2015
Authored by: Kate Laing
Publication date: November 2023
Is preparing for war the best means of preserving peace? In Sisters in Peace, Kate Laing contends that this question has never been solely the concern of politicians and strategists. She maps successive generations of twentieth-century women who were eager to engage in political debate even though legislative and cultural barriers worked to exclude their voices.
In 1915, during the First World War, the Women’s International Congress at The Hague was convened after alarmed and bereaved women from both sides of the conflict insisted that their opinions on war and the pathway to peace be heard. From this gathering emerged the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which to this day campaigns against militarism and nuclear weapons. In Australia, the formation of a section of WILPF connected political women to a worldwide network that sustained their anti-war activism throughout the last century.
In examining the rise of WILPF in Australia, Sisters in Peace provides a gendered history of this country’s engagement with the politics of internationalism. This is a history of WILPF women who committed to peace activism even as Australia’s national identity and military allegiances shifted over time—a history that has until now been an overlooked part of the Australian peace movement.
Adapting for Inertia »
Delivering Large Government ICT Projects in Australia and New Zealand
Authored by: Grant Douglas
Publication date: October 2023
Despite much learning and research over many decades, large ICT software projects have continued to experience poor outcomes or fallen short of original expectations—some spectacularly so. This is the case in the Australian and New Zealand public sectors, even though these projects operate within historically developed institutional frameworks that provide the rules, guidelines and controls, and aim to consistently improve outcomes.
Something is amiss. In Adapting for Inertia, Grant Douglas questions the effectiveness of these institutional frameworks in governing large ICT software projects in the Australian and New Zealand public sectors. He also gauges the perspectives of a large number of actors in projects in both sectors and examines two case studies in detail.
The main narrative to emerge is that the institutional frameworks are in a state of inertia: they are failing to adapt, owing to various institutional factors—all of which have public policy implications. Sadly, Douglas finds, this inertia is likely to continue. If there is difficulty in changing the capacity to govern, he proposes, policymakers should look to change the nature of what is to be governed.
Return to Volcano Town »
Reassessing the 1937–1943 Volcanic Eruptions at Rabaul
Authored by: R. Wally Johnson, Neville A. Threlfall
Publication date: October 2023
Wally Johnson and Neville Threlfall re-examine the explosive volcanic eruptions that in 1937–43 killed more than 500 people in the Rabaul area of East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. They reassess this disaster in light of the prodigious amount of new scientific and disaster-management work that has been undertaken there since about 1971, when strong tectonic earthquakes shook the area. Comparisons are made in particular with volcanic eruptions in 1994–2014, when half of Rabaul town was destroyed and then abandoned.
A striking feature of historical eruptive periods at Rabaul is the near‑simultaneous activity at Vulcan and Tavurvur volcanoes, on either side of Rabaul Harbour. Such rare ‘twin’ eruptions are interpreted to be the result of a common magma reservoir beneath the harbour. This interpretation has implications for ongoing hazard and risk assessments and for volcano monitoring in the area.
A Young Englishman in Victorian Hong Kong »
The Diaries of Chaloner Alabaster, 1855–1856
Authored by: Benjamin Penny
Publication date: October 2023
In August 1855, 16-year-old Chaloner Alabaster left England for Hong Kong, to take up a position as a student interpreter in the China Consular Service. He would stay for almost 40 years, climbing the rungs of the service and eventually becoming consul-general of Canton. When he retired he returned to England and received a knighthood. He died in 1898. Throughout his adult life, Alabaster kept diaries.
In the first four volumes of these diaries, collected here by Benjamin Penny, the teenage Alabaster recorded his thoughts and observations, told himself anecdotes, and exploded in outbursts of anger and frustration. He was young and enthusiastic, and the everyday sights, sounds and smells of Hong Kong were novel to him. He describes how the Chinese people around him ironed clothes, dried flour and threshed rice; how they gambled, prepared their food and made bean curd; and what opera, new year festivities and the birthday of the Heavenly Empress were like. Like many a young Victorian, he was also a keen observer of natural history, fascinated by fireflies and ants, corals and sea slugs, and the volcanic origins of the landscape.
Alabaster’s diaries are a unique, vibrant and riveting record of life in the young British colony on the cusp of the Second Opium War. With A Young Englishman in Victorian Hong Kong, Penny sheds new light on the history of the region.
Southern Limestones under Western Eyes »
The Modern World Evolving in Southern Australia
Authored by: Brian McGowran
Publication date: September 2023
Science, the growth of reliable knowledge, became a major triumph of the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, under the guise of ‘natural philosophy’: investigating what the earth and universe are made of and how things work. It took another century for the parallel subject ‘natural history’ to glimpse how the earth, its geography and its richly diverse life came to be. Later, geology and biology became intertwined as biogeohistory—an ever-changing environmental theatre hosting an ever-changing evolutionary play.
This environmental theatre has shifted with the making and breaking of supercontinents, the birth and death of global oceans, and the rise and fall of global hothouses and ice ages. The evolutionary play begins with biostratigraphy, wherein fossils revealed deep time and ancient environments and built the first meaningful geological timescale, and ends with the still young science of palaeoceanography—central to which are microfossils, rich in information about the oceans and climates of the past.
In Southern Limestones under Western Eyes, Brian McGowran recounts the history of biogeohistory itself: the ever-changing perceptions of rocks, fossils and landscapes, from the late 1600s to the present. McGowran’s focus is southern Australia, the north shore of the dying Australo-Antarctic Gulf, in an era bracketed by two catastrophes: the extinction of dinosaurs and the emergence of humans.
East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 15, Number 3, 2023 »
Publication date: September 2023
As ASEAN and Japan celebrate the 50th anniversary of their official relationship, the challenge to redefine the goals and purpose of this relationship is now pressing. Great power rivalry, regional power relativities, and sweeping political and economic disruption have injected new dynamics and exposed serious vulnerabilities. With ASEAN member states and Japan each facing their own domestic challenges, the opportunity presents itself for a more 'equal' partnership that is able to 'co-create' a regional economy and society, from paternalistic origins. This issue of East Asia Forum Quarterly addresses these challenges for the ASEAN–Japan relationship and offers ideas, vision and initiatives that might guide its future: exploring the policy options for a relationship challenged by regional economic fragmentation; detailing the lessons available for policymakers beginning to act on sustainability and digital and green transformation; and examining the opportunities taken and thus far unrealised for the fashioning of new soft diplomacy and investment in intra-ASEAN infrastructure.
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ANU Press Journals
Aboriginal History Journal »
Since 1977, the journal Aboriginal History has pioneered interdisciplinary historical studies of Australian Aboriginal people’s and Torres Strait Islander’s interactions with non-Indigenous peoples. It has promoted publication of Indigenous oral traditions, biographies, languages, archival and bibliographic guides, previously unpublished manuscript accounts, critiques of current events, and research and reviews in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, sociology, linguistics, demography, law, geography and cultural, political and economic history.
Aboriginal History Inc. is a publishing organisation based in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, Canberra.
For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.
Submission details
Please send article submissions to aboriginal.history@anu.edu.au.
Articles of about 7,000 words in length (including footnotes and references) are preferred, but submissions up to 9,000 words will be considered. Please submit an electronic version of the paper (text only without embedded images or scans) in Microsoft Word or RTF format, along with a short abstract and author biography as a separate document.
ANU Historical Journal II »
The ANU Historical Journal II (ANUHJ II) is an open-access, peer-reviewed academic history journal of the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences and the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. It is a revival of the ANU Historical Journal, which was published between 1964 and 1987. Contributors to the first journal included academics such as Ken Inglis, Manning Clark, John Ritchie and Oliver MacDonagh along with then-emerging scholars Iain McCalman, Michael McKernan, Margaret George, Coral Bell, John Iremonger, Alastair Davidson, Susan Magarey and Rosemary Auchmuty. As well as upholding the Journal’s commitment to the work of students and early career researchers, the ANUHJ II has expanded its focus to include memoirs, short articles and long-form book reviews.
The ANUHJ II invites submissions from students, graduates and academics of any Australian university.
For more information about the ANUHJ II, please visit anuhj.com.au
Australian Journal of Biography and History »
The Australian Journal of Biography and History is an initiative of the National Centre of Biography (NCB) in the Research School of Social Sciences at The Australian National University. The NCB was established in 2008 to extend the work of the Australian Dictionary of Biography and to serve as a focus for the study of life writing in Australia, supporting innovative research and writing to the highest standards in the field, nationally and internationally. The Australian Journal of Biography and History seeks to promote the study of biography in Australia. Articles that appear in the journal are lively, engaging and provocative, and are intended to appeal to the current popular and scholarly interest in biography, memoir and autobiography. They recount interesting and telling life stories and engage critically with issues and problems in historiography and life writing.
The journal publishes peer-reviewed articles on Australian historical biography, including biographical studies, studies relating to theory and methodology, and the associated genres of autobiography, life writing, memoir, collective biography and prosopography. We are especially interested in articles that explore the way in which biography and its associated genres can illuminate themes in Australian history, including women in Australian society, family history, transnational networks and mobilities, and Indigenous history.
Submission Details
Please send article submissions or abstracts to the Editor, Dr Malcolm Allbrook, National Centre of Biography, The Australian National University. Email: Malcolm.Allbrook@anu.edu.au. Articles should be in the range of 5,000 to 8,000 words (excluding footnotes), although longer submissions may be considered after consultation with the Editor. Style and referencing: please use footnotes in Chicago style, and follow British spelling.
East Asia Forum Quarterly »
East Asia Forum Quarterly grew out of East Asia Forum (EAF) online, which has developed a reputation for providing a platform for the best in Asian analysis, research and policy comment on the Asia Pacific region in world affairs. EAFQ aims to provide a further window onto research in the leading research institutes in Asia and to provide expert comment on current developments within the region. The East Asia Forum Quarterly, like East Asia Forum online, is an initiative of the East Asia Forum (EAF) and its host organisation, the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research (EABER) in the Crawford School of Public Policy in the ANU College of Asia & the Pacific at The Australian National University.
Submission details
Unsolicited submissions to EAF are welcome. An analytic op-ed piece that is accessible to a general audience and written in crisp language is required. The preferred length of submissions is around 800 words. Submissions will be double-blind reviewed and, if accepted for publication, edited for English fluency and house style before returned for clearance by the author. EAFQ does not use footnotes but would be extremely appreciative if hyperlinks to internet sources are included wherever possible. EAFQ reserves the right to determine the title for any piece, but will not publish a piece or a title without permission. A suggested title is appreciated. If you have any further queries, or would like to submit, please contact shiro.armstrong@anu.edu.au.
Human Ecology Review »
Human Ecology Review is a semi-annual journal that publishes peer-reviewed interdisciplinary research on all aspects of human–environment interactions (Research in Human Ecology). The journal also publishes essays, discussion papers, dialogue, and commentary on special topics relevant to human ecology (Human Ecology Forum), book reviews (Contemporary Human Ecology), and letters, announcements, and other items of interest (Human Ecology Bulletin). Human Ecology Review also publishes an occasional paper series in the Philosophy of Human Ecology and Social–Environmental Sustainability.
Submission details
For information on preparing your manuscript for submission, please visit www.humanecologyreview.org. To submit a manuscript to Human Ecology Review, please visit mstracker.com/submit1.php?jc=her, or email humanecologyreviewjournal@gmail.com.
Humanities Research »
Humanities Research is a peer-reviewed, open access, annual journal that promotes outstanding innovative, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship to advance critical knowledge about the human world and society.
The journal is co-published by the Humanities Research Centre, The Australian National University, Canberra. It was launched in 1997 and went into hiatus in 2013. In 2022, the journal is resuming publication, reflecting the continuing strength of the humanities at The Australian National University, the rapid development of the interdisciplinary, environmental and public humanities over the last decade, and the opportunities for international collaboration reflected in the resumption of international travel in 2022.
Issues are thematic with guest editors and address important and timely topics across all branches of the humanities.
International Review of Environmental History »
International Review of Environmental History takes an interdisciplinary and global approach to environmental history. It encourages scholars to think big and to tackle the challenges of writing environmental histories across different methodologies, nations, and time-scales. The journal embraces interdisciplinary, comparative and transnational methods, while still recognising the importance of locality in understanding these global processes.
The journal’s goal is to be read across disciplines, not just within history. It publishes on all thematic and geographic topics of environmental history, but especially encourage articles with perspectives focused on or developed from the southern hemisphere and the ‘global south’.
Submission details
Please send article submissions or abstracts to the Editor, Associate Professor James Beattie, Science in Society, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6142, New Zealand. Email: james.beattie@vuw.ac.nz.
Abstracts should be no more than 200 words, and include a list of keywords. Articles should be in the range 5,000 to 8,000 words (including footnotes), although longer submissions may be considered after consultation with the editor. Style and referencing: please use footnotes in Chicago Style, follow British spelling, and use single quotation marks only. Find out more details about Chicago Style.
Lilith: A Feminist History Journal »
Lilith: A Feminist History Journal is an annual journal that publishes articles, essays and reviews in all areas of feminist and gender history (not limited to any particular region or time period). In addition to publishing research articles on diverse aspects of gender history, Lilith is also interested in publishing feminist historiographical and methodological essays (which may be shorter in length than typical research articles). Submissions from Australian and international early career researchers and postgraduate students are particularly encouraged.
The journal first began publication in Melbourne in 1984. It is the official journal of the Australian Women’s History Network, an organisation dedicated to promoting research and writing in all fields of women’s, feminist and gender history.
For more information about Lilith, please visit www.auswhn.org.au/lilith/.
Made in China Journal »
The Made in China Journal (MIC) is a publication focusing on labour, civil society and human rights in China. It is founded on the belief that spreading awareness of the complexities and nuances underpinning socioeconomic change in contemporary Chinese society is important, especially considering how in today’s globalised world Chinese labour issues have reverberations that go well beyond national borders. MIC rests on two pillars: the conviction that today, more than ever, it is necessary to bridge the gap between the scholarly community and the general public, and the related belief that open-access publishing is necessary to ethically reappropriate academic research from commercial publishers who restrict the free circulation of ideas.
Discontinued ANU Press Journals
Agenda - A Journal of Policy Analysis and Reform »
Please note: This journal ceased publishing in 2021.
Agenda is a refereed, ECONLIT-indexed and RePEc-listed journal of the College of Business and Economics, The Australian National University. Launched in 1994, Agenda provides a forum for debate on public policy, mainly (but not exclusively) in Australia and New Zealand. It deals largely with economic issues but gives space to social and legal policy and also to the moral and philosophical foundations and implications of policy.
Submission details
Authors are invited to submit articles, notes or book reviews, but are encouraged to discuss their ideas with the Editor beforehand. All manuscripts are subject to a refereeing process. Manuscripts and editorial correspondence should be emailed to: william.coleman@anu.edu.au.
Subscribe to the Agenda Alerting service if you wish to be advised on forthcoming or new issues.
Australian Humanities Review »
Please note: This journal ceased publishing with ANU Press in 2012. Current issues are available at australianhumanitiesreview.org.
Australian Humanities Review is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal featuring articles, essays and reviews focusing on a wide array of topics related to literature, culture, history and politics.
craft + design enquiry »
Please note: This journal ceased publishing in 2015.
craft + design enquiry is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal promoting and disseminating research excellence generated by and about the craft and design sector. craft + design enquiry investigates the contribution that contemporary craft and design makes to society, establishing a dialogue between craft and design practice and cultural, social and environmental concerns. It includes submissions from across the field of craft and design from artists and practitioners, curators, historians, art and cultural theorists, educationalists, museum professionals, philosophers, scientists and others with a stake in the future developments of craft and design.
ANU Student Journals
ANU Undergraduate Research Journal »
Please note: This journal is now published via the ANU Student Journals platform; the latest issues can be found here: studentjournals.anu.edu.au/index.php/aurj
The ANU Undergraduate Research Journal presents outstanding essays taken from ANU undergraduate essay submissions. The breadth and depth of the articles chosen for publication by the editorial team and reviewed by leading ANU academics demonstrates the quality and research potential of the undergraduate talent being nurtured at ANU across a diverse range of fields.
Established in 2008, AURJ was designed to give students a unique opportunity to publish their undergraduate work; it is a peer-reviewed journal managed by a team of postgraduate student editors, with guidance from the staff of the Office of the Dean of Students.
Burgmann Journal - Research Debate Opinion »
Please note: This journal is now published via the ANU Student Journals platform; the latest issues can be found here: studentjournals.anu.edu.au/index.php/burgmann
Burgmann Journal is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed publication of collected works of research, debate and opinion from residents and alumni of Burgmann College designed to engage and stimulate the wider community.
Cross-sections, The Bruce Hall Academic Journal »
Please note: This journal is now published via the ANU Student Journals platform; the latest issues can be found here: studentjournals.anu.edu.au/index.php/cs
Representing the combined energies of a large group of authors, editors, artists and researchers associated with Bruce Hall at the ANU, Cross-sections collects a range of works (from academic articles and essays to photography, digital art and installation artwork) that represents the disciplinary breadth and artistic vitality of the ANU.
Presenting a challenging and absorbing way for students to hone vital research skills, in the process, Cross-sections nurtures a fruitful environment of collaborative interaction between academics and students.
Medical Student Journal of Australia »
Please note: This journal ceased publishing in 2015.
The Medical Student Journal of Australia provides the medical school of The Australian National University with a platform for medical students to publish their work in a peer-reviewed journal, communicating the results of medical and health research information clearly, accurately and with appropriate discussion of any limitations or potential bias.
Merici - Ursula Hall Academic Journal »
Please note: This journal is currently not publishing any new issues.
Merici is the combined works of undergraduate authors at Ursula Hall. Merici contains research and analysis from a range of disciplines and is thoroughly reviewed by ANU academics to ensure the showcasing of the best Ursula Hall has to offer.
The Human Voyage: Undergraduate Research in Biological Anthropology »
Please note: This journal is now published via the ANU Student Journals platform; the latest issues can be found here: studentjournals.anu.edu.au/index.php/hv
The Human Voyage: Undergraduate Research in Biological Anthropology is a journal that publishes outstanding student articles in all areas of biological anthropology, including primatology, palaeoanthropology, bioarchaeology and human behavioural ecology.
While the primary goal of this journal is to publish work of the highest quality authored by undergraduate students, it will also educate students in regards to publishing in academia. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and edited by ANU academic staff.