New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
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Interviews with Authors writing about Australia and New Zealand
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
1w ago
Max Weber once remarked that bureaucracy’s power comes from its massing of expert and factual knowledges. It amasses this power, in part, by keeping much of its expertise and factual knowledge from public view. Only occasionally does someone with access reveal more of what’s going on behind the scenes, and how it might matter for our thinking about how facts are produced and contested, and what kinds of facts matter to policy makers and why. Sarah Ball is one such person. In Behavioural Public Policy in Australia: How an Idea Became Practice (Routledge, 2024), th ..read more
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
2w ago
Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land? (Routledge, 2021) explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical changes demanded by industrialization and rapid social change in Britain. Abo ..read more
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
2w ago
Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lachlan McNamee traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer ..read more
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
2M ago
Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up (New SouthPress, 2023) is a groundbreaking work of history that spans from Deep Time to the present. Applying a range of historical methodologies, it centres Tiwi oral histories and visits key episodes that include the creation stories of the islands, trade relationships with Macassans and Japanese, the failed British colonisation attempt of the 1820s, Tiwi experiences of World War II, and the enduring influence of the mission founded by Catholic priest Francis Xavier Gsell. The Tiwi Islands are situated north of Darwin at the outer reaches of ..read more
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
2M ago
Since the mid-nineteenth century, public officials, reformers, journalists, and other elites have referred to “the labour question.” The labour question was rooted in the system of wage labour that spread throughout much of Europe and its colonies and produced contending classes as industrialization unfolded. Answers to the Labour Question explores how the liberal state responded to workers’ demands that employers recognize trade unions as their legitimate representatives in their struggle for compensation and control over the workplace. In Answers to the Labour Question: Indust ..read more
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
2M ago
How can we diversify the creative industries? In Craft as a Creative Industry (Routledge, 2024), Karen Patel, an Associate Professor in Media and Director of the Centre for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts (CEDIA) at Birmingham City University, examines the craft industries of Australia and the UK to show new ways of organising these crucial parts of the economy. The book uses case studies and lived experience from women makers of colour, situated within the history of context of both countries’ craft sectors, to demonstrate the scale o ..read more
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
2M ago
Nguzunguzu is the traditional figurehead which was formerly affixed to canoes in the Solomon Islands. In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at the University of Helsinki about his book project on the dragon and the nguzunguzu, namely the relationship between China and the Soloman Islands. The dragon and the nguzunguzu are taken as symbols of, respectively, Chinese and Solomon Islands identity. This essentializing maneuver is complicated by the appreciation of the two faces of both the dragon and the nguzunguzu. Nguzun ..read more
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
2M ago
The Tiwi people have more than their fair share of stories that turn ideas of Australian history upside down. The Tiwi claim the honour of defeating a global superpower. When the world’s most powerful navy invaded and attempted to settle the Tiwi Islands in 1824, Tiwi warriors fought the British and won. The Tiwi remember the fight, and oral histories reveal their tactical brilliance. Later, in 1911, Catholic priest Francis Xavier Gsell decided to ‘purchase’ Tiwi women and ‘free’ them from traditional marriage, so girls would grow up into devoted Catholics. But Tiwi women had more power in mar ..read more
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
3M ago
Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West (Bloomsbury, 2023) by Dr. Ebony Nilsson explores the lives of left-wing Soviet refugees who fled the Cold War to settle in Australia, and uncovers how they adjusted to life under surveillance in the West. As Cold War tensions built in the postwar years, many of these refugees happily resettled in the West as model refugees, proof of capitalist countries' superiority. But for a few, this was not the case. Displaced Comrades provides an account of these Cold War misfits, those refugees who fled East fo ..read more
New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies
4M ago
In Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Alfred Peredo Flores argues that the US occupation of the island of Guåhan (Guam), one of the most heavily militarised islands in the western Pacific Ocean, was enabled by a process of settler militarism. During World War II and the Cold War, Guåhan was a launching site for both covert and open US military operations in the region, a strategically significant role that turned Guåhan into a crucible of US overseas empire. In 1962, the US Navy lost the authority to reg ..read more