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Watershed »
The 2022 Australian Federal Election
Publication date: 2023
Australia’s 2022 federal election played out in ways that few could have expected. Not only did it bring a change of government; it also saw the lowest number of primary votes for the major parties and the election of the greatest number of Independents to the lower house since the formation of the Australian party system. The success of the Teal Independents and the Greens, along with the appetite voters showed for ‘doing politics differently’, suggested that the dominant model of electoral competition might no longer be the two-party system of Labor versus Liberal. At the very least, the continued usefulness of the two-party-preferred vote as a way of conceptualising and predicting Australians’ voting behaviour has been cast into serious doubt.
In Watershed, leading scholars analyse the election from the ground up—focusing on the campaign issues, the actors involved, and the successes and failures of campaign strategy—and show how digital media, visual politics and fake news are changing the way politics is done. Other topics include the impact of COVID-19 and the salience of climate, gender and integrity issues, as well as voting patterns and polling accuracy. This authoritative book is indispensable for understanding the disenchantment with the major parties, the rise of Community Independents, and the role of the Australian Greens and third parties.
Watershed is the 18th in the ANU Press federal election series and the tenth sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
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‘Order, Order!’ »
A Biographical Dictionary of Speakers, Deputy Speakers and Clerks of the Australian House of Representatives
Edited by: Stephen Wilks
Publication date: May 2023
‘Order, Order!’: A Biographical Dictionary of Speakers, Deputy Speakers and Clerks of the Australian House of Representatives shines a first-ever historical light on the remarkable men and women who have served in these national offices since Federation.
The Speakers include Frederick Holder, whose campaign to embed a Westminster-style Speakership died with him when he collapsed dramatically in the parliament; the much-loved Joan Child, Australia’s first female Speaker, whose struggles as a widow with five children fostered her commitment to social justice and made her, in the words of another Speaker, Anna Burke, ‘pretty fierce’; and Ian Sinclair, a warhorse of a parliamentarian who seemed to prove the poacher-turned-gamekeeper principle. The Deputy Speakers, a particularly eclectic assortment, include the strange and bleakly serious James Fowler, who once hopefully mailed a film synopsis to the American director Cecil B. DeMille and who ended his days warning of the perils of democracy. Amongst the Clerks are Frank Green, who, at the height of the Cold War, indiscreetly befriended members of the Communist Party, and the popular Jack Pettifer—a true child of parliament—who grew up in an apartment in the building.
This book includes analysis of what sorts of individuals typically filled these vital parliamentary positions, and the appearance of an Australian model of the Speakership based on pragmatic compromise. All three offices are typically more than just creatures of political parties—something that Australians should be prepared to defend against the remorseless encroachment of political partisanship.
Dilemmas in Public Management in Greater China and Australia »
Rising Tensions but Common Challenges
Publication date: 2023
This book draws on more than a decade of workshops organised by the Greater China Australia Dialogue on Public Administration, involving scholars and practitioners from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia. Although these workshops recognised the major differences in the institutional frameworks of these jurisdictions, until recently they focused largely on the shared challenges and the diffusion of ideas and approaches.
As rising international tensions inevitably draw attention to areas where interests and philosophies diverge, it is the differences that must now be highlighted. Yet, despite the tensions, this book reveals that these jurisdictions continue to address shared challenges in public administration.
The book’s contributors focus in detail on these four areas:
intergovernmental relations, including the shifting balance between centralisation and decentralisation
budgeting and financial management, including during and after the COVID-19 pandemic
the civil service, its capability, and its relationship with government and the public
service delivery, particularly in health and aged care.
This book is aimed at a wide readership, not only at those within the jurisdictions it explores. It emphasises the importance of continued engagement to understanding different approaches to public administration—confirming fundamental philosophical differences where necessary but also looking for common ground and opportunities for shared learning.
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Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 46 »
Edited by: Crystal McKinnon, Ben Silverstein
Publication date: 2023
The articles in Volume 46 each take provocative and generative approaches to the challenge of historical truth-telling. Examining the public memory of massacres in Gippsland, Victoria, Aunty Doris Paton, Beth Marsden and Jessica Horton trace a history of contestation between, on the one hand, forms of frontier memorialisation articulated to secure colonial possession and, on the other, the sovereign counter-narratives of Gunai Kurnai communities. Heidi Norman and Anne Maree Payne describe Aboriginal campaigns to repatriate Ancestors’ stolen remains over the past fifty years, showing how these campaigns have proceeded along with and as part of nation-building movements towards land rights and self-determination. Their call for Aboriginal relationships with Ancestors to be represented in a National Resting Place aligns their research with these movements. We return to Gunai Kurnai Country in a piece authored by Rob Hudson and Shannon Woodcock, who show how the Krowathunkooloong Keeping Place has formed an important site and tool of community work towards cultural resurgence; the article itself demonstrates the value and importance of collaborative and co-designed research methods. The volume then includes a conversation between Laura McBride and Mariko Smith about their curation of the Australian Museum’s Unsettled exhibition, through which they responded to the 250th anniversary of Cook’s Endeavour voyage along Australia’s east coast by telling true stories that put Cook in his place.
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The Australian Constitution and National Identity »
Edited by: Anna Olijnyk, Alexander Reilly
Publication date: May 2023
What does Australia’s Constitution say about national identity? A conventional answer might be ‘not much’. Yet recent constitutional controversies raise issues about the recognition of First Peoples, the place of migrants and dual citizens, the right to free speech, the nature of our democracy, and our continuing connection to the British monarchy. These are constitutional questions, but they are also questions about who we are as a nation.
This edited collection brings together legal, historical, and political science scholarship. These diverse perspectives reveal a wealth of connections between the Australian Constitution and Australia’s national identity.
More Than Fiscal »
The Intergenerational Report, Sustainability and Public Policy in Australia
Publication date: May 2023
Every five years, the Australian treasurer is required to publish an intergenerational report (IGR), which examines the long-term sustainability of current government policies and seeks to determine how demographic, technological and other structural trends might affect the economy and the budget in coming decades. Despite these lofty objectives, the five IGRs produced from 2002 have received only muted applause. Critics say that they are too mechanical, too narrow and too subject to the views of the government of the day and that they don’t provide the intended wake-up call for public understanding of looming economic, social and environmental issues.
This analysis of the most recent IGR (2021) is based on a workshop hosted by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. While finding that the 2021 IGR is an improvement on the previous report (2015), the authors identify several fiscal and broader policy issues that deserve greater attention, including Australia’s structural deficit, rising inequality and the impacts of climate change. They argue that the report fails to discuss the policies required to support greater resilience against future shocks, including the case for earlier budget repair. They propose that future IGRs be prepared with greater independence, cover all levels of government, have more transparent analysis and draw upon a wider ‘wellbeing’ approach to long-term sustainability.
This book aims to attract close attention from public officials and politicians and generate constructive debate in the community.
Law and the Quest for Gender Equality »
Authored by: Margaret Thornton
Publication date: April 2023
For centuries, law was used to subordinate women and exclude them from the public sphere, so it cannot be expected to become a source of equality instantaneously or without resistance from benchmark men—that is, those who are white, heterosexual, able-bodied and middle class. Equality, furthermore, was attainable only in the public sphere, whereas the private sphere was marked as a site of inequality; a wife, children and servants could never be the equals of the master. Despite their ambivalence about the role of law and its contradictions, women and Others felt that they had no alternative but to look to it as a means of liberation.
This skewed patriarchal heritage, the subtext of this collection of essays, has continued to impede the quest for equality by women and Others. It informs not only gender relations in the private sphere, as illustrated by domestic violence and sexual assault, but also the status of women in the public sphere. Despite the fact that women have entered the paid workforce—including the professions—in large numbers, they are still expected to assume responsibility for the preponderance of society’s caring. The essays show how maternal and caring roles, which are still largely viewed as belonging to an unregulated private sphere, continue to be invoked to detract from the authority of the feminine in the public sphere. The promise of antidiscrimination legislation in overcoming the heritage of the past is also shown to be somewhat hollow.
Something's Gotta Change »
Redefining Collaborative Linguistic Research
Authored by: Lesley Woods
Publication date: March 2023
Indigenous people are pushing back against more than 200 years of colonisation and rejecting being seen by the academy as ‘subjects’ of research.
A quiet revolution is taking place among many Indigenous communities across Australia, a revolution insisting that we have control over our languages and our cultural knowledge – for our languages to be a part of our future, not our past. We are reclaiming our right to determine how linguistic research takes place in our communities and how we want to engage with the academy in the future.
This book is an essential guide for non-Indigenous linguists wanting to engage more deeply with Indigenous communities and form genuinely collaborative research partnerships. It fleshes out and redefines ethical linguistic research and work with Indigenous people and communities, with application beyond linguistics.
By reassessing, from an Indigenous point of view, what it means to ‘save’ an endangered language, Something’s Gotta Change shows how linguistic research can play a positive role in keeping (maintaining) or putting (reclaiming) endangered languages on our tongues.
Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 7, 2023 »
Special Issue: Convict Lives
Publication date: 2023
This special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History explores the lives of convicts transported to Australia and asks how they can be investigated through various forms of biography. Given the ever-increasing range of methodologies for researching convict lives, this issue offers a timely reflection on their varying strengths, limitations and functions as well as on the future of convict history research. Nine refereed articles and two research notes provide new insights into various aspects of convict lives and experiences, combined with broad discussions on methodology.
In their introductory article, Matthew Cunneen and Malcolm Allbrook delve into the history of convict biography and the ways previous historians have attempted to explore and understand such lives. To overcome the gaps and silences in the archives, they argue, historians of convict Australia should employ a range of methodologies that each have their own particular domains of enquiry. In her research note, Janet McCalman reflects on the historiographical discoveries that have been made possible by the digitising, indexing and linking of convict records. She calls for future researchers to continue the work behind large datasets so that one day a fully comprehensive database of convicts can be created. Adopting a more fine-grained approach, Jennifer Bird reconstructs in detail from the archives the penal life of the convict Robert Edward Knox. Her analysis of Knox demonstrates an alternative to big-data approaches for understanding convict agency.
With a similarly refined scope—though one that looks at the convict system from the outside in—Jennifer Brookes examines the struggles of Lydia Anne to join her transported husband, Laurence Hynes Halloran, in Australia. Brookes’s article suggests that historians might consider how contemporary understandings of convicts can be enhanced by studying the lives of non-convicts associated with transportation. Matthew Cunneen reconstructs the lives of three convicts to further inform the experiences of people of colour under transportation. He argues for collective biography as a way of bridging the methodological shortcomings of purely biographical and prosopographical approaches. In the first large-scale study of the subject, Patricia Downes examines the social and legal conditions that saw freely arrived British soldiers sentenced to transportation within the Australian colonies. Complicating old narratives of the soldiers as contaminated by the convicts around them, she explores how military crimes resulting in transportation were sometimes driven by desires for freedom from military life and to protest service conditions.
Christine Fernon reports in her research note on the progress made in the National Centre of Biography’s First Three Fleets and Their Families project, an ambitious intergenerational study of Australia’s early colonial history. The preliminary findings give a sense of the insights that the project will provide into how convict lives formed the fabric of Australian colonial history. Kristyn Harman and Anthony Ray explore the intergenerational effects of the convict system through the experiences of three convicts of colour. In analysing these lives, they contribute to our understanding of interracial marriage, family formation and recidivism in Van Diemen’s Land. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, David Andrew Roberts and Mark McLean draw on a wealth of convict records to show the potential of using big data to analyse thousands of convict lives in parallel. Doing so would allow the individual to be contextualised within the greater population and would present opportunities for temporal and spatial analysis, thereby deepening understandings of British criminal management.
Visually illustrating the potential of big data in studies of convict protest and collective biography, Monika Schwarz examines collective resistance networks in female factories in Van Diemen’s Land. She draws together the stories of previously unconnected women and uncovers episodes of resistance. Returning convict history to its material origins, Richard Tuffin, Martin Gibbs, David Roe and Sylvana Szydzik draw on archaeological methods of digital technology to recontextualise convict lives. By mapping sites of convict labour and quantifying the outputs from them, the authors collectively argue that adopting multi-scalar and multidisciplinary approaches to studying convict environments can deeply enhance the histories of those who were involved with them. This issue deepens understandings of Australia’s convicts, the lives they led and the ways historians can best study them.
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Ebenezer Mission Station, 1863–1873 »
The Diary of Missionaries Adolf and Polly Hartmann
Edited by: Felicity Jensz
Publication date: 2023
This book contains the annotated diary of Adolf and Mary (Polly) Hartmann, missionaries of the Moravian Church who worked at the Ebenezer Mission Station on Wotjobaluk country, in the north-west of the Colony of Victoria, Australia. The diary begins in 1863, as the Hartmanns are preparing to travel from Europe to take up their post, and ends in 1873, by which time they are working in Canada as missionaries to the Lenni Lenape people.
Recording the Hartmann’s eight years at the Ebenezer Mission, the diary presents richly detailed insights into the daily interactions between Aboriginal people and their colonisers. The inhabitants of the mission are overwhelmingly described in the diary as agents in their lives, moving in and out of the missionaries’ sphere of influence, yet restricted at times by the boundaries of the mission. The diary reveals moments of laughter, shared grief, community, advocacy and reciprocal learning, alongside the mundane everyday chores of mission life.
Through the personal writings of a missionary couple, this diary brings to light the regular, routine and extraordinary events on a mission station in Australia in the third quarter of the nineteenth century—a period just prior to British high imperialism, and a period before increasingly restrictive legislation was enforced on Indigenous people in the Colony of Victoria.
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