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Reshaping the State »
Chinese Political Institutions under Xi Jinping
Authored by: Wen-Hsuan Tsai
Publication date: 2025
‘Based on extensive fieldwork and impressive analytic skills, Wen-Hsuan Tsai has produced the most detailed and informative account of the evolving political system in Xi Jinping’s China that I have ever read. It is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the management and deployment of political power in contemporary China. The book convincingly shows that even though Xi Jinping may have centralized power in his own hands, institutions still matter. Indeed, they are holding China together.’
—Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, Copenhagen Business School
‘This engaging and thought-provoking academic work reflects the scholar’s dedication to enhancing our understanding of Chinese governance. It blends institutional resonance with leadership dynamics, addressing the knowledge gap in the West about the complexities of the Chinese Communist Party’s resilience and institutions. By examining the idiosyncrasies, risks and challenges of contemporary China—both a major global influence and the world’s second-largest economy—it encourages readers to reflect deeply on its governance and implications.’
—Hon S. Chan, City University of Hong Kong
‘As a leading scholar on China’s elite politics, Dr Wen-Hsuan Tsai reveals how Xi Jinping reshaped the party-state to achieve institutional centralization and made and implemented domestic and foreign policy as the supreme leader of China. This book opens the “black box” of Chinese leadership politics, policymaking and implementation. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to gain deep knowledge about political dynamics in contemporary China.’
—Suisheng Zhao, University of Denver
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Wild Partners »
Indigenous Worlds and Industrial Giants in Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Patrick Guinness
Publication date: 2025
Wild Partners traces the history of the Maututu Nakanai of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. According to a Maututu ontology, or worldview, they are surrounded by a forest filled with threatening wild forces. It is believed that outstanding men and women pioneer ways to engage these forces to bring benefit to their village community. In recent times, the Maututu have had to engage with human outsiders, including government officers, church administrators, industrial managers and migrant settlers, who like their mythological counterparts have threatened to disrupt the established world.
This study captures Maututu approaches to the threats and challenges they have faced over the last hundred years—the proclamation of the Christian world, the dislocation of the Pacific war, the development programs of the colonial and independent governments and the industrial expansion of oil palm. The challenges have at times threatened the very essence of their being through the destruction of forests, loss of land, competition for schooling and health care, marginalisation within the oil palm industry and the emergence of ‘big shot’ individuals who ignore community obligations.
Maututu have adapted to these threats, becoming successful oil palm producers and prominent professionals throughout Papua New Guinea while seeking to rejuvenate Christianity, protect forest and marine environments and build partnerships that benefit their village communities. Central to these efforts has been partnership with outside forces.
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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 Burramattagal’, 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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Deeper, Strategic Collaboration in the Securities Sector »
India and Australia
Authored by: Sonia Khosa
Publication date: September 2025
In an era of globalised finance and increasing cross-border activity, regulatory cooperation has become essential for market integrity and development. This book examines the potential for strategic collaboration between India and Australia in the securities sector—two nations with distinct but complementary economic and legal frameworks. Through a comparative analysis of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), it evaluates alignment with International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) principles, focusing on supervisory powers, enforcement mechanisms and compliance effectiveness. The analysis identifies shared regulatory goals and governance principles, highlighting opportunities for bilateral cooperation.
Offering a roadmap for capital market integration and regulatory innovation, the book makes a timely contribution to international financial scholarship. It delivers practical insights for policymakers, legal scholars and regulators interested in forging resilient cross-border partnerships—both within the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
Winner of ANU Press ECR Prize in Legal Scholarship
Format: Hardback
Indigenous Songs of Victoria »
Publication date: 2025
Indigenous Songs of Victoria seeks to do justice to the songsters, the clever men and women of traditional Indigenous societies who made these artistic treasures, as well as to the many people who have valued, written down or otherwise recorded these songs, so that they can be heard, read and delighted in today.
The rich diversity of Indigenous songs collected in this book is a cultural treasure of Victoria and Australia. The authors bring together here well over 100 different song texts with musical transcriptions and analysis, cultural context and, for many, translations.
This volume brings the rich knowledge and artistic skill of the song-makers of Indigenous Victoria to a wider audience and makes the sources of these songs, in manuscripts, old journals and sound recordings, accessible, often for the first time.
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East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 17, Number 3, 2025 »
Publication date: August 2025
US protectionism is reshaping Asia’s trade politics. Rising tariffs and unpredictability from Washington are chilling investment, disrupting supply chains and driving governments towards transactional deals that corrode longstanding multilateral rules. This edition of East Asia Forum Quarterly maps the terrain on which Asia must choose between short-term accommodation and long-term growth and resilience. In an increasingly fragmented world, Asia’s best defence is to strengthen institutions to safeguard integration and hunker down behind the multilateral system—while preparing to take a leading role in rebuilding it.
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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
Ink and Land »
Documenting Factionalism around a Prospective Mine in Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Willem Church
Publication date: August 2025
Ink and Land is an ethnographic account of political and legal struggles over landownership in Papua New Guinea, in which competing factions seek recognition as customary landowners of Wafi-Golpu, a major prospective copper-gold mine. Drawing on extensive archival research, oral histories, court documents and fifteen months of fieldwork, the book examines how different groups attempt to harness resource extraction for their benefit and how, in doing so, they reshape their social worlds through the medium of affidavits, court declarations and incorporation certificates. To analyse this process, the book advances the concept of antagonistic documentality—a form of conflict in which parties engage in conflicting world-building projects through and about documents and, in doing so, create an order of paper that outlasts the disputes themselves. Through this detailed case study, Ink and Land reveals how legal and bureaucratic battles over resource extraction in Papua New Guinea formalise factionalism, consolidate elite control over new sources of wealth, and redefine the nature of groups and landownership. By focusing on conflict over documents as a process of social transformation, the book offers fresh insights into the politics of land, law and resource extraction in the contemporary Pacific.
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.