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Yonggom Wambon, a Dumut language of West Papua »
Annotated Texts with Grammar and Vocabulary
Authored by: Wilco van den Heuvel
Publication date: 2025
In this book, the author, Wilco van den Heuvel, intends to make Drabbe’s 1959 description of (Yonggom) Wambon available to a wider scientific public. As such, the book is in line with an earlier reanalysis by the same author of Drabbe’s description of Aghu (1957), which was published in 2016.
In only 45 pages (!), Drabbe managed to present an incredible amount of Yonggom Wambon language data. The current work takes over 400 pages for their re-re-presentation and reanalysis, and includes a 500-items wordlist that Drabbe had written a few years earlier. It attempts both to increase our understanding of the peculiarities of this individual language, and to contribute to our understanding of the past and present of this still very under-documented part of our globe. An area where—as Drabbe foresaw—minority languages are disappearing, giving way to a common (national) language.
The author expresses his gratefulness to Drabbe, for having unravelled some of the complexities of the languages in this area, which, in Drabbe’s words, form ‘an eldorado for the practitioners of general linguistics’, ‘a labyrinth without escape for missionaries’, and—in the author’s words— ‘offer a unique and highly valuable perspective on specific communities in a specific space and time’.
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‘I buy this piece of ground here’ »
An Italian market-gardener community in Adelaide, 1920s–1970s
Authored by: Madeleine Regan
Publication date: 2025
‘I buy this piece of ground here’ is a group biography that examines the lives and work of a cohort of Italian migrant families from the Veneto region who arrived in Australia in the 1920s and formed a new community and identity as market gardeners in outer suburban Adelaide.
This book investigates the settlement processes in a period of Australian migration history often overlooked in favour of post-Second World War studies of mass migration and multiculturalism. It considers the impacts of the Depression, fascism, the Second World War, the White Australia environment that excluded southern Europeans, and ultimately, the suburbanisation that overtook their community.
Drawing on 65 oral histories with sons and daughters of the first generation, archival and published records, the narrative reveals what it felt like to work market gardens that became economic and emotional anchors for a new community. The first generation raised families, worked and bought the land, planted vegetables, bartered for glasshouses, sold produce at market, celebrated in packing sheds and established a stable, resilient community between the wars.
The Veneto families developed successful commercial market gardens and created a self-contained village or paese in a small area west of Adelaide. Withstanding marginalisation, the market gardeners lived and worked together in a small community, prospered and created an economy, a sense of belonging and a future for their children.
“A formidably detailed piece of research and the product of a most fruitful community collaboration.”
— Frank Bongiorno AM, Professor of History, ANU.
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‘We are a farming class’ »
Dubbo’s hinterland, 1870–1950
Authored by: Peter Woodley
Publication date: 2025
Notions of an arcadian farming life permeate settler-Australian understandings of themselves and their nation. Qualities of hard work, perseverance, resourcefulness, and a steady devotion to family and community—the historian John Hirst’s Pioneer Legend—are idealised in this nation. But the people from whom the legend is derived have rarely been studied in depth. They are more the stuff of myth and fond imagining than of concerted examination. To what extent is the legend built on lived experience? How have farming people thought of themselves and their contribution to a wider national mythos? ‘We are a farming class’ examines the lives of people in the farmlands surrounding Dubbo in the New South Wales central west between the 1870s and the 1950s, from free selection and the establishment of agriculture to the dawning of postwar prosperity and change. What emerges is a closely documented, ethnographically rich portrait of a way of life and culture at once distinctive and surprising, recognisable and unknown.
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International Review of Environmental History: Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024 »
Edited by: James Beattie, Ruth Morgan
Publication date: October 2024
This latest issue of the International Review of Environmental History takes readers from tiger hunts in sixteenth-century India to the rise of organic foods across the Anglosphere by the late 1970s. Along the way, readers will encounter the ways that Cantonese migrants interpreted the environments of Aotearoa New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, and the influence of environmentalism in the US trade union movement during the 1960s. This issue also features a forum on a growing area of interest for environmental historians and allied practitioners, the history of emotions in response to environmental change. Here, scholars outline an historiography of ecological anxiety and reflect on the role of emotions in their historical practice at a time of planetary crisis. Despite the diverse settings and topics of the papers herein, together the collection reveals the enduring impacts of how different societies have understood and shaped the more-than-human world.
West New Guinea »
Social, Biological, and Material Histories
Edited by: Dylan Gaffney, Marlin Tolla
Publication date: 2024
This book explores the human past in West New Guinea (otherwise known as Indonesian Papua, West Papua, or Irian Jaya). The western part of New Guinea and its surrounding islands were critical for the early peopling of the Pacific region over 50,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens moved out of Africa and into Asia, seafaring through the islands of Wallacea as far as New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands. After arriving on the shores of West New Guinea, people adapted to diverse environments including coral reefs, tropical rainforests, swamps, montane cloud forests, and savannah grasslands. Over millennia, people transformed these habitats by burning and cutting the forests, translocating plants and animals, and managing access to resources. Food production later emerged in the region as the global climate warmed up around 10,000 years ago. Between 4000–3000 years ago, the Austronesian languages began to enter West New Guinea, with its speakers settling around the coasts and offshore islands. New forms of exchange connected people and, particularly within the last 2000 years, drew West New Guinea into global networks. The objects produced and traded at ethnographic contact—like pottery, stone axes, string bags, shell ornaments, and wooden carvings—can be informative about these networks, but they are increasingly changing as people navigate and transform their material worlds in the present. The examination of these objects in museums not only casts light on their makers, traders, and collectors, but also highlights the ongoing connections that Papuans have with their material culture in the twenty-first century.
The 22 chapters in this book contribute novel perspectives and critical data on each of these themes. The authors come from archaeology, social anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistics, museology, palaeoecology, and beyond. They write about a wide array of West New Guinea’s regions, including the highlands, north and south coasts, Bird’s Head Peninsula, Cenderawasih Bay, and the Raja Ampat Islands.
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‘My own sort of heaven’ »
A life of Rosalie Gascoigne
Authored by: Nicola Francis
Publication date: October 2024
Widely regarded as a major Australian artist, Rosalie Gascoigne first exhibited in 1974 at the age of fifty-seven. She rapidly achieved critical acclaim for her assemblages which were her response to the Monaro landscape surrounding Canberra. The great blonde paddocks, vast skies and big raucous birds contrasted with the familiar lush green harbour city of Auckland she had left behind. Her medium: weathered discards from the landscape. By her death in 1999, her work had been purchased for major public art collections in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and New York, and had been exhibited across Europe and Asia.
Gascoigne’s story is often cast in simple terms—an inspirational tale of an older woman ‘finding herself’ later in life and gaining artistic acclaim. But the reality is much more complex and contingent. This biography explores Gascoigne’s achievement of her ‘own sort of heaven’ through the frame of the narrative she told once she had gained fame, using a series of interviews she gave from 1980 to 1998. It revolves around her frequently stated sense of feeling an outsider, her belief that artists are born not made, and other factors central to the development and impact of her work. Migrating to Australia from New Zealand in 1943, Gascoigne experienced the dramatic social changes of the 1960s and 1970s and benefited from the growth of cultural life in Canberra, a developing Australian art industry, and changing conceptions of aesthetic beauty.
Human Ecology Review: Volume 28, Number 1 »
Publication date: September 2024
Human Ecology Review 28(1) features a Special Section from a collection of researchers in Nigeria, reflecting on the political and cultural influences on, and responses to, the unique social and environmental devastation of the oil-producing Niger Delta region. Across five articles and the introductory piece, the scholars address social and environmental justice and policy (Eni et al.); and examine the attempts to restore and clean up the landscape (I. Nwoma and Anyika). The focus then turns to ecoaesthetic responses in literary forms to the Nigerian landscape and cultures, with an ecocritical analysis of postcolonial ecology in Isidore Okpewho’s novel Tides (C. Nwoma); of traditionalism, modernity, and nature in Joe Ushie’s collection of poems, A Reign of Locusts (Kehinde and Egya); and concludes with an examination of the trauma of alienation from nature and homeland in Amaechi Akwanya’s collection of poems Pilgrim Foot (Onyemachi).
Following the Special Section, Schooneveldt describes a methodology for reframing how we perceive the agency of other organisms; Warner refines and develops governance principles for assisted species migration; and Zhang and Guo explore informal institutions in China and their role in mediating pro-environmental behaviours.
Dick Watkins »
Reshaping Art and Life
Authored by: Mary Eagle
Publication date: September 2024
Dick Watkins belongs to the generation of artists whose careers were launched at the high-flying end of American-based Abstraction. Almost immediately he faced up to the abrupt end of the Modern era. Culture was no longer to be framed by ‘progress’. In 1970, taking stock of the situation, he announced that he was a copyist, there being no such thing as a new creation in art, shaped as it was by visual languages. Nor did he intend to limit his curiosity about the relation of art to life by restricting himself to a ‘personal’ style. There followed a long and passionately adventurous exploration into many subjects and styles, during which Watkins was often the first to signal changes taking place in Western culture. The result is that for half a century he has been a major, if controversial figure in Australian art.
Format: Hardback
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 47 »
Edited by: Crystal McKinnon, Ben Silverstein
Publication date: September 2024
This volume opens with Joakim Goldhahn, Sally May, and Jeffrey Lee’s study of renowned Badmardi artist Nayombolmi, best known for his rock art but here considered as an artist who produced a number of bark paintings for collectors in the 1950s and 1960s. They show us how his representation of public stories of Spirit or Ancestral Beings emerges from a negotiation between the artist, collectors, and dealers, shaping the forms in which he shared Badmardi story.
The following two articles take up the theme of negotiation in contexts of segregation. Sam Furphy describes Yorta Yorta memory activism relating to Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Yorta Yorta Country in 1954, considering memories of the fence that was erected to place Yorta Yorta people beyond the Queen’s view and prevent any direct relationship between peoples. Cameron Raynes continues to study segregation by considering the disastrous health impacts of the colour bar that excluded Aboriginal people of the Point Pearce Station from the nearby Wallaroo and Maitland Hospitals in the early-mid twentieth century.
The next articles turn to relationships between Aboriginal people and colonists in Queensland. In a collaboratively written article, Alice Buhrich, Lewis Richards, Brian Bing, Jimmy Richards, Sharon Prior, Jenny Lacey, Tania Casey and Megan Mosquito narrate a history of past and ongoing Ewamian resistance to European invasion that stands in stark contrast to myths of Ewamian disappearance. Rebeka Manning and Sally Babidge read archives of Queensland pastoral stations for traces of Aboriginal women’s and girls’ domestic service, taking these hints as occasions for Aboriginal storytelling.
The final article, co-authored by members of the Aboriginal History Archive Will Bracks, Coen Brown, Clare Land, Gary Foley, John Hawkes, Kim Kruger, Rochelle le Pere, Natasha Ritchie and Shannon Woodcock, describes the work of that archive to produce a historical understanding that can provide the basis for describing and enacting Aboriginal self-determination.
The volume also includes a series of book reviews, as well as reflections on the life and work of Niel Gunson and Gordon Briscoe, two key figures in Aboriginal History whose influence is evident throughout these pages.
Ritual Voices of Revelation »
The Origin Narratives of the Rotenese of Eastern Indonesia
Authored by: James J. Fox
Publication date: 2024
This is a study of a collection of oral compositions of the Rotenese of eastern Indonesia. Recited in semantic parallelism, these compositions require a strict pairing of all words to produce correspondingly ordered verses. These narrative verses create an elevated discourse—a ‘scriptural voice’—intended to reveal the origins of Rotenese cultural life. The translations and exegeses of these origin narratives offer a work of world-class poetic imagination that recounts a dynastic contest between the Sun and Moon and Lords of the Ocean Sea and its epic consequences.
As background to the presentation of these narratives, this study provides a description of Rotenese life expressed in the complementary pairs that the Rotenese themselves use to categorise their world. A concluding chapter examines the Rotenese acquisition of Christianity and the subsequent retelling of the Biblical Genesis in Rotenese parallel verse, thus continuing the general examination of the use of parallelism as elevated ritual discourse. Gathered from poets from two domains on the island, most of these compositions date from fieldwork in 1965–66 and in 1973. The publication of these materials represents the summation of more than fifty years of research.
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