Books
Browse or search ANU Press' range of books or find out more about the publications' authors and co-publishers. Download the book for free or buy a print-on-demand copy.
Displaying results 21 to 30 of 748.
Southern Limestones under Western Eyes »
The Modern World Evolving in Southern Australia
Authored by: Brian McGowran
Publication date: September 2023
Science, the growth of reliable knowledge, became a major triumph of the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, under the guise of ‘natural philosophy’: investigating what the earth and universe are made of and how things work. It took another century for the parallel subject ‘natural history’ to glimpse how the earth, its geography and its richly diverse life came to be. Later, geology and biology became intertwined as biogeohistory—an ever-changing environmental theatre hosting an ever-changing evolutionary play.
This environmental theatre has shifted with the making and breaking of supercontinents, the birth and death of global oceans, and the rise and fall of global hothouses and ice ages. The evolutionary play begins with biostratigraphy, wherein fossils revealed deep time and ancient environments and built the first meaningful geological timescale, and ends with the still young science of palaeoceanography—central to which are microfossils, rich in information about the oceans and climates of the past.
In Southern Limestones under Western Eyes, Brian McGowran recounts the history of biogeohistory itself: the ever-changing perceptions of rocks, fossils and landscapes, from the late 1600s to the present. McGowran’s focus is southern Australia, the north shore of the dying Australo-Antarctic Gulf, in an era bracketed by two catastrophes: the extinction of dinosaurs and the emergence of humans.
Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity »
Aceh’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Publication date: August 2023
Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity examines the role of Indonesia’s first truth and reconciliation commission—the Aceh Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or KKR Aceh—in investigating and redressing the extensive human rights violations committed during three decades of brutal separatist conflict (1976–2005) in the province of Aceh.
The KKR Aceh was founded in late 2016, as a product of the 2005 peace deal between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). It has since faced many challenges—not least from Indonesia’s security forces and former GAM leaders, who have joined together in their determination to maintain impunity for their respective roles in the conflict. Indeed, the commission would not have been established without the tireless work of civil society actors, including non-government organisations and other humanitarian groups.
In Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity, the editors set out to amplify the role of these civil society actors in the KKR Aceh and in transitional justice in Indonesia. Each chapter has been written by a team of authors, composed predominantly of commissioners and staff from the KKR Aceh itself, members of key civil society organisations, and academics. Further, the editors aim to scrutinise the KKR Aceh from the inside and analyse the establishment and operation of what is perhaps the only genuine state-sponsored attempt to implement transitional justice in Indonesia today.
Subjects and Aliens »
Histories of Nationality, Law and Belonging in Australia and New Zealand
Edited by: Kate Bagnall, Peter Prince
Publication date: August 2023
Subjects and Aliens confronts the problematic history of belonging in Australia and New Zealand. In both countries, race has often been more important than the law in determining who is considered ‘one of us’.
Each chapter in the collection highlights the lived experiences of people who negotiated laws and policies relating to nationality and citizenship rights in twentieth-century Australasia, including Chinese Australians enlisting during the First World War, Dalmatian gum-diggers turned farmers in New Zealand, Indians in 1920s Australia arguing for their citizenship rights, and Australian women who lost their nationality after marrying non-British subjects.
The book also considers how the legal belonging—and accompanying rights and protections—of First Nations people has been denied, despite the High Court of Australia’s recent assertion (in the landmark Love & Thoms case of 2020) that Aboriginal people have never been considered ‘aliens’ or ‘foreigners’ since 1788. The experiences of world-famous artist Albert Namatjira, and of those made to apply for ‘certificates of citizenship’ under Western Australian law, suggest otherwise.
Subjects and Aliens demonstrates how people who legally belonged were denied rights and protections as citizens through the actions of those who created, administered and interpreted the law across the twentieth century, and how the legal ramifications of those actions can still be felt today.
The Compleat Busoni, Volume 1 »
Busoni and the piano: The works, the writings, and the recordings
Authored by: Larry Sitsky
Publication date: August 2023
VOLUME 1: Busoni and the piano: The works, the writings, and the recordings.
Larry Sitsky, professor emeritus at The Australian National University, is an internationally known composer, pianist, scholar, and teacher. His books are fundamental reference works on subjects such as Australian piano music, the 20th-century avant-garde, the piano music of Anton Rubinstein, the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde, and the classical reproducing piano roll.
The Compleat Busoni is the result of Sitsky’s lifelong focus on the composer Ferruccio Busoni. Over three volumes, Sitsky surveys Busoni’s vast output, provides an ending to the unfinished opera Dr. Faust, and presents definitive realisations of the Fantasia Contrappuntistica in two-piano and orchestral versions. New insights into Busoni’s style and aesthetics are an integral aspect of this work.
A Grammar of Nese »
Authored by: Lana Grelyn Takau
Publication date: August 2023
Nese is a dying Oceanic language spoken on the island of Malekula, in northern Vanuatu. This book, based on first-hand fieldwork data, and without adhering to any particular syntactic framework, presents a synchronic grammatical description of Nese’s phonology and syntax. Despite being on the verge of extinction, with fewer than 20 living speakers, the language displays intriguing properties—including but not exclusive to the cross-linguistically rare apicolabial phonemes, interesting vowel-raising patterns in some word classes, and a discontinuous negation relationship that is obligatorily expressed with the irrealis mood marker. This book will probably be the last work published on Nese.
Watershed »
The 2022 Australian Federal Election
Publication date: August 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 eighteenth in the ANU Press federal election series and the tenth sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
‘The Australian election books have been appearing after each election since the 1987 election, and with ANU Press as publisher since 2010. As chair of the Social Sciences Editorial Committee, I am proud of this connection: it is a prestige publication … The rise of fact-free partisanship makes the kind of considered discussion being carried on here more significant than ever.’
– Frank Bongiorno, Launch speech for Watershed: The 2022 Australian Federal Election, 18 October 2023.
Dilemmas in Public Management in Greater China and Australia »
Rising Tensions but Common Challenges
Publication date: July 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 in understanding different approaches to public administration—confirming fundamental philosophical differences where necessary but also looking for common ground and opportunities for shared learning.
Chains »
Edited by: Linda Jaivin, Esther Sunkyung Klein, Annie Luman Ren
Publication date: July 2023
Speaking to the Twentieth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, in October 2022, President Xi Jinping reiterated his commitment to the ‘opening up’ policy of his predecessors — a policy that has burnished the party’s political legitimacy among its citizens by enabling four decades of economic development. Yet, for all the talk of openness, 2022 was a year of both literal and symbolic locks and chains — including, of course, the long, coercive, and often brutally enforced lockdowns of neighbourhoods and cities across China, most prominently Shanghai. Then there was a vlogger’s accidental discovery of the ‘woman in chains’, sparking an anguished, nationwide conversation about human trafficking. That was part of a broader (if frequently censored) conversation about gendered violence and women’s rights, in a year when women’s representation at the highest levels of power, which was already minimal, decreased even further. There was trouble with supply chains and, with the Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis, in August, island chains as well. Despite the tensions in the Asia-Pacific, the People’s Republic of China expanded its diplomatic initiatives among Pacific island nations and celebrated fifty years of diplomatic links with both Japan and Australia. As the year drew to a close, a tragic fire in a locked-down apartment building in Ürümqi triggered a series of popular protests that brought an end to three years of ‘zero COVID’. The China Story Yearbook: Chains provides informed perspectives on these and other important stories from 2022.
Ebenezer Mission Station, 1863–1873 »
The Diary of Missionaries Adolf and Polly Hartmann
Edited by: Felicity Jensz
Publication date: July 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.
‘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.