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The Mariana Islands »
People, History and Archaeology
Edited by: Jolie Liston, Geoffrey Clark
Publication date: 2026
The Mariana Islands: People, History and Archaeology brings together new research about the history of the Mariana Islands through community perspectives, archaeological investigations, and anthropological and historical studies. The colonisation and growth of societies in the Mariana Islands, and of those elsewhere in Micronesia, are often seen as peripheral compared with those of Melanesia and Polynesia that tend to dominate scholarly and public views of Pacific history. The Marianas were the first remote archipelago to be recorded by Europeans with the arrival of Magellan in 1521, and the islands have a long and complicated history with colonial ‘great powers’, which during World War II involved the establishment of the remote Pacific’s sole concentration camp. Initial colonisation over 3,000 years ago was by migrants from East Asia who were related to, but genetically different from, Lapita groups who extended human occupation as far east as Tonga and Samoa. Later population movements to the Marianas, some involving Papuan people, point to a mobile Pacific that was connected to insular Asia, New Guinea and other parts of Oceania. Migration and local development contributed to the formation of a unique and vibrant CHamoru culture. The volume is dedicated to two pioneer archaeologists, Darlene Moore and Roz Hunter-Anderson, who established modern archaeological practice in the Marianas through projects involving community members and elders in the preservation of cultural heritage sites and the creation of new land use histories.
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Believing on Upside Down Country »
The Changing Faith-scape of Bendigo
Publication date: April 2026
The city of Bendigo and surrounds, in central Victoria, Australia, is described today by its Traditional Owners, the Djaara people, as ‘upside down country’, because since 1851 the sacred earth has been rotated and removed by mining, changing its spiritual ‘faith-scape’. Since the arrival of settlers and sojourners of European and Chinese descent, relations between peoples in this region have been powerfully shaped not only by the quest for gold and subsequent bases of material wealth, but also by developments in this religious and spiritual faith-scape. In this innovative study, the authors examine a range of historically distinctive Bendigo customs, rituals, activities and events, from the famous Easter Fair, saved for posterity by the intervention of a Chinese community figure in the 1870s, and now led each year by Djaara people, to demonstrations associated with the Bendigo mosque controversy of 2014. They find that an understanding of spirituality and belief has often been a strong basis for connecting with and showing humanity towards others. Drawing on both oral sources and the objects and spaces of the material culture of religion and belief, the authors provide a fascinating elucidation of past and present meanings of faith, in and around Bendigo, as a lived dimension of experience.
Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 11, 2026 »
Special Issue: Writing Tasmanian Lives
Publication date: April 2026
This special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History explores what it means to write lives connected to Lutruwita/Tasmania, an island shaped by both isolation and connection. For most of its more than 40 thousand years of human history, Tasmania was a peninsula. Later, it became a node in global networks of Indigenous voyaging, colonial expansion, commerce and incarceration. Writing Tasmanian lives, therefore, requires us to think about islands, archipelagos, and how connections between people and place are rendered in the historical record. This is not only a biographical, but also a geographical, methodological and formal problem.
The articles in this issue challenge conventional biographical methods and invite approaches that foreground mobility, relationality and imaginative reconstruction. The authors examine lives that are often fragmentary or eclipsed by dominant narratives. They employ diverse methodologies, including deep mapping, eco-biography, legal life writing, and creative engagements with art and literature, to illuminate the lived experiences of individuals across time and place. They interrogate archives, re-story familiar figures and experiment with interdisciplinary techniques to ask what counts as evidence and how imagination can coexist with rigour.
Collectively, these contributions demonstrate that writing Tasmanian lives is not an insular project but an archipelagic one, connecting places, people and ideas across multiple scales. They demonstrate how biography can be a dynamic, relational practice, capable of revealing patterns and possibilities that transcend boundaries of nation, empire and discipline.
Vā Moana »
Space and Relationality in Pacific Thought and Identity
Edited by: Albert L. Refiti, A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul, Lana Lopesi, Billie Lythberg, Arielle Walker, Emily Parr
Publication date: April 2026
Vā may be a small word, but it carries expansive meaning. Rooted in Indigenous Pacific knowledges—Samoan vā, Tongan tā-vā, Māori and Hawaiian wā—this concept of relational space binds people, ancestors and cosmologies across time and place. Since the late 1990s, vā has become a powerful framework in academic and cultural contexts, energising conversations across Oceania and beyond.
As the world grapples with the rise of hyper-individualism, vā offers an urgent and restorative alternative: one that centres connection, responsibility and collective belonging. This rich collection of individually and collaboratively authored chapters explores how vā, wā, and related Indigenous concepts are lived, theorised and practised today. Drawing from diverse disciplines and grounded in specific cultural contexts, these contributions deepen our understanding of relationality, space and place across the Moana.
The AUT Vā Moana Research Centre is dedicated to exploring spatial concepts through Moananui (Pacific) thought. Established in 2012 by Albert L. Refiti and A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul at Auckland University of Technology’s School of Art and Design, Vā Moana brings together a vibrant international network of scholars. Their work reimagines how space is understood and experienced, both in contemporary and customary Pacific contexts.
Format: Hardback
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 49 »
Edited by: Crystal McKinnon, Ben Silverstein
Publication date: 2026
In this volume, Nicholas Pitt and Heidi Norman trace Wiradjuri, Gomeroi and Wailwan histories of smallpox in the 1830s, emphasising Aboriginal understandings, responses to and treatments for the disease they called either Boulol or Thunna Thunna. This work reveals the networks of knowledge and experience that secured the survival of people in Country. Gary Foley, Clare Land and Shannon Woodcock then document a Community Organisation Course offered at Swinburne College of Technology, 1975–1977. The importance of this course can be seen in the sovereign futures it enabled; participants went on in the following years to organise Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations and other Black Power movements across the southeast of the continent. The following article, by Will Bracks, takes up this theme in describing the networks involved in organising Rock Against Racism concerts in Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney throughout the 1980s. Organised in a manner characteristic of Black Power, this series of concerts raised political consciousness and generated resources to support Aboriginal communities.
Turning to the West, Sean Winter considers Noongar practices of cultural burning in the mid-nineteenth century, a period of government suppression through legislation that limited the way Noongar people could care for Country; Winter shows us how an insistence on displacing Noongar knowledges has caused cultural and ecological harm. Lastly, Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui brings to the fore the valuable writing of John Naish, a Welsh author based in the Queensland cane fields in the mid-twentieth century. Naish’s realist novels and autobiography, she shows us, offer us insight into the position and resistance of Aboriginal people in tropical north Queensland.
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Lilith: A Feminist History Journal: Number 31 »
Publication date: March 2026
The 2025 Lilith presents four research articles focused on gender-based issues and experiences in twentieth-century Australia and Britain. The Australian-focused articles examine Lillie Beirne’s maternal feminism and related campaigns for social credit in the 1930s and 1940s, and how the ‘Citrus Queen’ beauty pageants of South Australia’s Riverina region articulated ideals of Anglo-Australian womanhood while also creating space for migrant women to participate in civic life and assert regional belonging. The third of these articles offers a mother’s intimate oral history of the tensions between the expectations and realities of motherhood when her child struggles with mental health. Turning to 1960s Britain, one article examines arguments for legalising abortion and identifies that while women’s rights and circumstances were important considerations, arguments for maternal health were most successful in achieving abortion rights.
The issue also features ten book reviews spanning diverse thematic terrain. These include a memoir of the Australian Women's Liberation movement, Shauna Bostock's white and Aboriginal family history, and biographies of the nineteenth-century novelist Madame Dudevant (George Sand) and of Doris Punshon's life as a queer woman. Reviewed books also cover the role of women in the intellectual history of international relations, the Women's Weekly's influence on Australian food culture, sexism and harassment in the Westminster parliamentary system, Geraldine Fela's oral histories of HIV and AIDS nurses, the roles of sexuality and gender in remaking Australian citizenship, and trans-misogyny as a project of colonial violence. At a time when studies of gender and feminism are under siege, this issue testifies to the continuing vitality of feminist historical scholarship.
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Peter Marralwanga »
Painter of the Djang of western Arnhem Land
Authored by: Luke Taylor, Ivan Namirrkki
Publication date: March 2026
Peter Marralwanga (1916–1987) was a leading figure in one of the great art practices of the world. He grew up in western Arnhem Land surrounded by artists painting in rock shelters and he learned to paint this way himself. The subjects of his paintings were the Djang who made his country and placed the spirits of people within it. Marralwanga’s story highlights the way bark painting became important as a way of evading assimilation policies rife within Northern Territory towns. Marralwanga established an outstation at Marrkolidjban where he could teach his children how to properly care for Ancestral lands, with part of this care involving a knowledge of how to paint. As a senior person who had travelled widely in his youth, and gained extensive ceremonial knowledge, Marralwanga was highly influential among a broad group of painters. Ivan Namirrkki, a painter of note and Peter Marralwanga’s son, has provided here his own account of his father’s life.
This book tracks Marralwanga’s life of learning about country and conveys the religious meaning of numerous major works, offering outsiders a richer understanding and appreciation of Arnhem Land art. It also shows the crucial role of individuals working for the community arts cooperative Maningrida Arts and Culture in facilitating Marralwanga’s rise to recognition as a major Australian and world artist.
Extensively illustrated, Peter Marralwanga: Painter of the Djang of western Arnhem Land is a study of unique knowledge and beauty.
‘There are only a handful of studies that give such brilliant, in-depth, serious analysis of an individual Aboriginal Australian artist’s life and work. The combination of genealogical, cultural and thematic analysis is superb.’
—Dr Henry Skerritt, University of Virginia
‘Australia’s foremost expert on the bark art of West Arnhem Land provides an exceptional biography of the complex cultural life and oeuvre of the late Peter Marralwanga. This is at once highly accessible, superbly illustrated, well researched and highly collaborative. It is an important resource for art historians, anthropologists and most importantly regional audiences of Aboriginal (Bininj) people determined to maintain the bark painting tradition that is so central to their livelihood and identity.’
—Emeritus Professor Jon Altman, The Australian National University
Format: Hardback
Made in China Journal: Volume 10, Issue 2, 2025 »
Publication date: February 2026
Across the world, questions of gender, sexuality, and intimacy have become central to struggles over belonging, citizenship, and moral order. In China, these questions have acquired a particular urgency as the state seeks to stabilise social life through an increasingly narrow vision of family, reproduction, and normative personhood, even as people continue to forge relationships, identities, and communities that exceed those boundaries. Global LGBTQIA+ discourses, meanwhile, circulate widely but often unevenly, translating local experiences into familiar scripts of rights, visibility, and repression that do not always fit. It is within this dense and contested terrain that this issue of Made in China Journal, ‘Queer China’, intervenes, treating queerness as a critical lens for understanding contemporary Chinese politics, culture, and everyday life.
Law in the New Democracy »
Authored by: Paula Jane Byrne
Publication date: January 2026
In the 1850s, opposition to the Crown in New South Wales made for unsteady ground for the administration of criminal law. This study of skirmishes between magistrates, constables and the metropolis reveals just how far understandings of law could be stretched and warped by recalcitrant local populations. At Carcoar, the local population entirely controlled how law worked; on the South Coast, ‘the people’ influenced how law intervened in their lives; in the north west of the colony, publicans dominated; on the north coast, violence against First Nations/Aboriginal people was forcibly meshed into the day to day working of the courts. This study shows a ‘frontier’ centred on the coasts and in the minds of legal officials of the metropolis, but elsewhere, some recognition of the Aboriginal polity and an early understanding of Aboriginal rights.
With right of reply by First Nations/Aboriginal people
ANU Historical Journal II: Number 5 »
Publication date: January 2026
Published amid rising student fees, shrinking university departments and increasing political scrutiny of research, this fifth issue of ANU Historical Journal II brings together eight peer-reviewed articles examining how histories of place, memory and violence are made and contested. Articles explore community collaboration in the Mount Ainslie Labyrinth, grassroots memorialisation of the Spanish Civil War in Canberra, Australian tourism to 1930s Stalinist Russia and the national legacy of Victor Hugo. Other contributions examine slave resistance in colonial Haiti, the political power of documentary film in shaping narratives of Guantanamo Bay, the Vietnam-era historiography of Australia’s role in the Boer War and scholarly memory of the Watergate scandal. Five book reviews round out the issue, engaging with recent publications in Australian, political and global history.