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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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Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 11, 2026 »
Special Issue: Writing Tasmanian Lives
Publication date: 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.
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Lilith: A Feminist History Journal: Number 31 »
Publication date: 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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Believing on Upside Down Country »
The Changing Faith-scape of Bendigo
Publication date: 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.
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Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 10, 2025 »
Publication date: 2025
The articles in the Australian Journal of Biography and History No. 10 cover a diverse range of people, most of them little known in the annals of Australian history. Each lived on the edges of societal expectations and norms and so raise questions about Australian identity. These articles utilise biographical methods to illuminate lives full of risk, excitement, uncertainty and unconventionality.
Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui relates the complex and conflicted story of the writer John Naish (1923–1963). Born and raised in Wales, he came to North Queensland in his twenties and produced a significant body of literature on life in the sugar cane industry and the tropical north. Uncertainty and conflict also feature in James Cotton’s article on the two years (1921–23) Edward Selby Little spent as Australian trade commissioner in Shanghai. In a brief and unhappy but still portentous career, Little was in part a victim of the ad hoc and personal nature of the policy experiments of Prime Minister W. M. Hughes, while also a victim of the machinations of his countrymen. Georgina Fitzpatrick’s portrait of Eric Shimada (Shimada Masakazu) considers an individual whose bicultural identity brought a seemingly fluent transformation from Japanese soldier to interpreter for the Australian and British occupation forces and then the International Military Tribunal in Japan.
In his article ‘A Cat with Two Tales’, Andrew Marshall examines the conflict between the Australian-born cartoonist and entrepreneur Patrick Sullivan and the American illustrator Otto Messmer over who was the rightful creator of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat. James McDonald uses collective biographical methods to discuss the way the largely forgotten racist term ‘King Billy’ was deployed in colonial Australia to diminish and mock the status of senior Aboriginal men. Similarly, Toby Raeburn, Paul Sanders and Kerry Doyle, in their article ‘Boorong of the Burramattagai’, elevate the status of a young woman from indentured servant to important cultural and linguistic intermediary. Kate White’s article ‘Creating the Mirage’ considers the private, along with the public, lives of the 1980s business couple Christopher and Pixie Skase. This private world is also the focus of Kay Whitehead and Belinda MacGill in their article on Annie Sharpley, a teacher at Naracoorte. While Sharpley’s career seems extraordinary in length, the selfless woman teacher in a country school is a typical personification of rural education in settler countries such as Australia.
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Law in the New Democracy »
Authored by: Paula Jane Byrne
Publication date: September 2025
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
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International Review of Environmental History: Volume 11, Issue 1, 2025 »
Edited by: James Beattie, Ruth Morgan
Publication date: 2025
This latest issue of the International Review of Environmental History takes readers from the settler landscapes of nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand to the post-1945 rise of herbicides in Northern Europe. Lingering in Aotearoa, readers will be immersed in geological debates about the causes of past glaciation and trace the early twentieth-century appeal of the Phoenix palm. This issue also features a personal reflection on the campaign to protect K’gari-Fraser Island in the mid-1970s and its lasting influence on Australian environmental law. Together, these contributions reveal the spread and influence of transnational ideas on local understandings of environmental change and conservation.
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Rethinking Histories of Indonesia »
Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality
Edited by: Sadiah Boonstra, Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones, Katharine McGregor, Ken M.P. Setiawan, Abdul Wahid
Publication date: August 2025
Rethinking Histories of Indonesia: Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality provides a critical evaluation of histories of Indonesia from the formal period of colonisation to the present day. The volume approaches Indonesian history through the lens of coloniality, or the structures of power and control that underpin colonisation and which persist into the present. Bringing together seventeen authors from across the world, the volume offers an alternative conceptualisation of Indonesian history and lays bare the enduring legacies of and processes that reproduce coloniality.
‘This is a significant and exciting volume in terms of its scale, the range of disciplines, approaches and topics included and, ultimately, for its contribution to the field of Indonesian history and historiography, and Indonesian studies and decolonial studies more broadly … The contributors to this book do [a great service to] students of Indonesian history, its cultures, society and politics, offering new sources, voices, approaches and perspectives. Overall, they provide a fresh and vital critique of not only Indonesia’s colonial history but its continuing lived influences on present day Indonesia and beyond.’
—Jemma Purdey, Australia-Indonesia Centre, Monash University
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 48 »
Edited by: Crystal McKinnon, Ben Silverstein
Publication date: August 2025
In this volume, Christopher Morton carefully traces the provenance of a Wiradjuri or Gamilaroi marara (tree carving) currently resting at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, considering its unfinished journey and the way it has been framed and recontextualised, as well as the ways it may experience a future return to good relation with and in Country. Julia Mortensen draws on oral histories of life and mobility in and around the Yumba – a ‘fringe camp’ at Cunnamulla – to narrate generations of autonomy from formal state control, reconsidering the Yumba as a centre of Aboriginal action and community strength: the centre, not the fringe. And on the 35th anniversary of the publication of Henrietta Fourmile’s landmark article ‘Who Owns the Past?’, Kirsten Thorpe returns to this work, centring the archival sovereignty that Fourmile sought and towards which First Nations archivists work today. This sovereignty is reflected in the following conversation between Gundungurra woman Kazan Brown and non-Indigenous historians Emily O’Gorman and Grace Karskens, transcribed by Natalie Osborne, which represents Gundungurra Country as storied, enduring and under threat.
The volume includes two memorial sections, remembering Frances Peters-Little and Lyndall Ryan and reflecting on their vital contributions to this journal and to the wider field of Aboriginal history. Alongside several book reviews, we present a review forum responding to Shannyn Palmer’s Prime Ministers’ Literary Award-winning Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station.
Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust »
An Economic History of Papua New Guinea since Independence
Authored by: Stephen Howes, Martin Davies, Rohan Fox, Maholopa Laveil, Manoj K. Pandey, Kelly Samof, Dek Joe Sum
Publication date: July 2025
Since Papua New Guinea’s independence in 1975, economic growth has been slow but volatile, with major changes in economic structure and policies, as well as in politics and governance.
This economic history, written to commemorate the fiftieth year of independence and the first to be produced in some 15 years, divides the half century since independence into four periods: the relative stability but also early struggles of the seventies and eighties; the crises and reforms of the nineties; the boom of the 2000s; and the quiet bust of the 2010s. Two chapters cover each period’s major economic, policy, institutional and political developments. The final three chapters provide an overall assessment of economic performance and policies since independence and link them with its politics and institutions.
The book combines painstaking documentation with original analysis to reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the PNG economy, and theorises that the country’s hyper-politics and insecurity have combined to produce, and are reinforced by, a weak but stable state, and low and increasingly resource-dependent growth.
Data-driven, frank, insightful and engaging, Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust is written by an expert team of economists from the University of Papua New Guinea and The Australian National University under the leadership of Professor Stephen Howes, Director of the ANU Development Policy Centre. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in the economy of Papua New Guinea, as well as an important contribution to the literature on the challenges and institutional determinants of post-colonial development.