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Experiencing Indonesia »
30 years of ACICIS
Publication date: 2026
This book examines the many and varied dimensions of the Australian Consortium for ‘In-Country’ Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) and celebrates its 30th anniversary. Charting the institutional history of ACICIS alongside the development, innovation and impact of its programs, this volume captures personal insights from ACICIS alumni as well as staff members and partners from Australia and Indonesia. Contributors bring diverse perspectives and insights to reflect on and analyse the significance of ACICIS programs.
This book highlights the pioneering structures that enabled in‑country, experiential learning for young Australians in Indonesia; the development of highly innovative programs created in collaboration with Indonesian partners; and the impact of ACICIS on participants, staff, partners and host communities as well as on broader Australia–Indonesia bilateral relations. This rich and varied account of ACICIS’ context, operations and impact can inform decision-making and program design for learning abroad programs in Indonesia and beyond.
A central theme of this book is ACICIS’ commitment to experiential learning and its transformative impact on lives and relationships for individuals, institutions and communities. There are indeed many human faces of ACICIS; this volume presents their voices.
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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.
Fragile Prosperity »
Australia’s gigantic monetary gamble
Authored by: Stuart Kells
Publication date: April 2026
Fragile Prosperity presents a new perspective on the past five decades of economic policy in Australia. This book shows that in important respects the basic pillars of this policy are misconceived, resting on fundamental misunderstandings of money, taxation and fiscal accounting.
Monetary and fiscal policy in Australia are reappraised, along with the nation’s program of financial deregulation: a gigantic experiment in modern money. A new understanding is presented of the causes of inflation in Australia and the drivers of house price growth, along with associated impacts on wealth distribution and inequality.
The implications are stark. While successive federal governments and Australia’s central bank have given up the means to directly control the principal cause of inflation, the current method of inflation control operates like a dead hand on the non-bank economy. Australia now faces a terrible conundrum in public policy and macroeconomic management, one with urgent implications for countries with similar regulatory settings, such as Canada and New Zealand. Further afield, the story of Australia’s experiment with modern money is a cautionary tale for all advanced economies.
‘Many younger Australians no longer feel that hard work brings a better life. In this timely book, Kells reveals the deeper, actual reasons Australia is no longer a land of economic opportunity.’
Thomas Walker, Think Forward
‘The thrust of this excellent work is that the process and consequences of the generation of money have been widely misunderstood by regulatory and government bodies, leading Australia unwittingly clinging to a “fragile prosperity”. Kells sets about offering practical solutions.’
David Merrett, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Melbourne
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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.
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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Landslide »
The 2025 Australian Federal Election
Publication date: March 2026
The 2025 Australian federal election saw an unexpected landslide victory for the Labor Party, the Liberal Party’s worst ever result and the continued rise of the non-major-party vote. In this book, Australia’s leading election analysts explore what contributed to this outcome, including the effectiveness of party and third-party campaigns, the changing demography of the electorate and external factors such as the ‘Trump effect’.
Baby boomers were outnumbered in 2025 by Gen Z and Millennials, who related to politics in a different way. Those pursuing their votes needed to do so through social media; influencers and podcasts became central to campaigning, as did humour appropriating popular culture with the help of AI. Increased cultural and linguistic diversity was also important, and there were new efforts to mobilise Muslim voters over the war in Gaza. Overshadowing it all was Trump. While populist themes seemed attractive at first, association with Trump quickly became a liability, and contributors here examine the difficulty of changing discourses mid-campaign.
This authoritative study is indispensable in understanding the new political landscape: polls and voting behaviour, misinformation, gender issues and competing leadership styles. Richly illustrated, the role of visual politics also receives close scrutiny.
Landslide is the nineteenth book in the ANU Press Australian Federal Election series. The series is sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
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
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.