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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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Enabling Learning »
Language Teaching for Australian Universities
Publication date: December 2024
Enabling Learning: Language Teaching for Australian Universities illuminates efforts by tertiary language educators to facilitate the learning of languages at the university level. The educators’ endeavours recounted in this volume address a range of specific aspects of the language learning experience or language teaching within tertiary education institutions. The chapters offer an overview of learning approaches and experiences, from the beginner to the advanced level, of different learning environments, from the traditional to online and hybrid, and of different languages, from Indigenous to European to East Asian. This work foregrounds the relevance of improved accessibility to language learning in the university context, presents innovative educational solutions informed by the examination of specific contexts, and asserts the importance of developing intercultural competence.
A Grammar of Warlmanpa »
Authored by: Mitchell Browne
Publication date: November 2024
As spoken by Bunny Naburula, Danny Cooper, Dick Foster, Donald Graham, Doris Kelly, Elizabeth Johnson, George Brown, Gladys Brown, Jack Walker, Jessie Cooper, Jimmy Newcastle, Julie Kelly, Lofty Japaljarri, Louie Martin, May Foster, Norah Graham, Penny Kelly, Penny Williams, Selina Grant, Susannah Nelson, Topsy Walker, Toprail Japaljarri and William Graham.
This volume is a descriptive analysis of Warlmanpa, a highly endangered language traditionally spoken northwest of the town of Tennant Creek, where most of the remaining speakers now live.
This grammatical description is based on language work carried out by community members and linguists since 1952, and is the first published reference grammar of the language.
The major areas of analysis include phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. This volume also provides description of typologically notable features, including: a two-way stop contrast at each place of articulation; a complex second-position auxiliary system containing participant and tense/mood/aspect information; associated motion; and a lack of evidence for noun phrases.
This volume lays the foundation for future Warlmanpa language work.
Ritual Voices of Revelation »
The Origin Narratives of the Rotenese of Eastern Indonesia
Authored by: James J. Fox
Publication date: November 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.
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.
‘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.
Preparing a Nation? »
The New Deal in the Villages of Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Brad Underhill
Publication date: August 2024
Preparing a Nation?, based on extensive archival research, addresses perennial questions of Australian colonialism in Papua New Guinea. To what extent did Australia prepare Papua New Guinea for independence? And what were the policies and the ideologies behind colonial development, implemented after World War II? A key innovation of this book is to take these questions from policy desks in Canberra and Port Moresby to the villages of four administrative areas: Chimbu, Milne Bay, Sepik and New Hanover. How successful were Australian colonial planners in designing and implementing programs that could ameliorate the potential harm of market capitalism and develop ‘new’ socioeconomic structures that would combine a disparate people into an ‘imagined community’, capable of becoming an independent nation-state in the far distant future? Colonial intention is contrasted with Indigenous experience. Bradley Underhill explores an Australian governmental tendency to prioritise colonial control over Indigenous autonomy in circumstances where subjugated people do not necessarily fit within an expected narrative of compliant or westernised ‘native’.
‘I expect it will become the standard reference for its subject, which covers a pivotal aspect of Australia’s colonial administration.’
—Bill Gammage