Coming soon
Browse the range of exciting titles ANU Press is currently working on. If you wish to receive an alert when a new title is published, click the ‘Notify me’ button next to the relevant title and register your details.
A Quiet Revolution in Indigenous Service Delivery »
New Public Management and its Effects on First Nations Organisations
Edited by: Deirdre Howard-Wagner
The government Indigenous service market that is now well entrenched in the public administration system has operated to marginalise First Nations people and First Nations organisations, who have had very little say, if any, over the last 20 years, about how government services are designed to meet their needs.
The chapters in this volume comprehensively describe and illustrate how the government Indigenous market, and the Indigenous service delivery system created around that market, have failed and why system change is needed, drawing on the firsthand experiences of community-controlled First Nations organisations through organisational case studies in urban settings in New South Wales (NSW).
This volume offers the expertise of individual community-controlled First Nations organisations operating in urban settings in NSW, which variously operate as social enterprises, businesses, community development organisations, social service providers, representatives, and advocacy organisations.
Concentrating on the experiences of individual First Nations organisations allows us to examine the complex, layered Indigenous service system as a multi-jurisdictional phenomenon on the ground in an urban context.
Coming soon
Notify me
Yonggom Wambon, a Dumut language of West Papua »
Annotated Texts with Grammar and Vocabulary
Authored by: Wilco van den Heuvel
In this book, the author, Wilco van den Heuvel, intends to make Drabbe’s 1959 description of (Yonggom) Wambon available to a wider scientific public. As such, the book is in line with an earlier reanalysis by the same author of Drabbe’s description of Aghu (1957), which was published in 2016.
In only 45 pages (!), Drabbe managed to present an incredible amount of Yonggom Wambon language data. The current work takes over 400 pages for their re-re-presentation and reanalysis, and includes a 500-items wordlist that Drabbe had written a few years earlier. It attempts both to increase our understanding of the peculiarities of this individual language, and to contribute to our understanding of the past and present of this still very under-documented part of our globe. An area where—as Drabbe foresaw—minority languages are disappearing, giving way to a common (national) language.
The author expresses his gratefulness to Drabbe, for having unravelled some of the complexities of the languages in this area, which, in Drabbe’s words, form ‘an eldorado for the practitioners of general linguistics’, ‘a labyrinth without escape for missionaries’, and—in the author’s words— ‘offer a unique and highly valuable perspective on specific communities in a specific space and time’.
Coming soon
Notify me
‘I buy this piece of ground here’ »
An Italian market-gardener community in Adelaide, 1920s–1970s
Authored by: Madeleine Regan
‘I buy this piece of ground here’ is a group biography that examines the lives and work of a cohort of Italian migrant families from the Veneto region who arrived in Australia in the 1920s and formed a new community and identity as market gardeners in outer suburban Adelaide.
This book investigates the settlement processes in a period of Australian migration history often overlooked in favour of post-Second World War studies of mass migration and multiculturalism. It considers the impacts of the Depression, fascism, the Second World War, the White Australia environment that excluded southern Europeans, and ultimately, the suburbanisation that overtook their community.
Drawing on 65 oral histories with sons and daughters of the first generation, archival and published records, the narrative reveals what it felt like to work market gardens that became economic and emotional anchors for a new community. The first generation raised families, worked and bought the land, planted vegetables, bartered for glasshouses, sold produce at market, celebrated in packing sheds and established a stable, resilient community between the wars.
The Veneto families developed successful commercial market gardens and created a self-contained village or paese in a small area west of Adelaide. Withstanding marginalisation, the market gardeners lived and worked together in a small community, prospered and created an economy, a sense of belonging and a future for their children.
“A formidably detailed piece of research and the product of a most fruitful community collaboration.”
— Frank Bongiorno AM, Professor of History, ANU.
Coming soon
Notify me
‘We are a farming class’ »
Dubbo’s hinterland, 1870–1950
Authored by: Peter Woodley
Notions of an arcadian farming life permeate settler-Australian understandings of themselves and their nation. Qualities of hard work, perseverance, resourcefulness, and a steady devotion to family and community—the historian John Hirst’s Pioneer Legend—are idealised in this nation. But the people from whom the legend is derived have rarely been studied in depth. They are more the stuff of myth and fond imagining than of concerted examination. To what extent is the legend built on lived experience? How have farming people thought of themselves and their contribution to a wider national mythos? ‘We are a farming class’ examines the lives of people in the farmlands surrounding Dubbo in the New South Wales central west between the 1870s and the 1950s, from free selection and the establishment of agriculture to the dawning of postwar prosperity and change. What emerges is a closely documented, ethnographically rich portrait of a way of life and culture at once distinctive and surprising, recognisable and unknown.
Coming soon
Notify me
West New Guinea »
Social, Biological, and Material Histories
Edited by: Dylan Gaffney, Marlin Tolla
This book explores the human past in West New Guinea (otherwise known as Indonesian Papua, West Papua, or Irian Jaya). The western part of New Guinea and its surrounding islands were critical for the early peopling of the Pacific region over 50,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens moved out of Africa and into Asia, seafaring through the islands of Wallacea as far as New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands. After arriving on the shores of West New Guinea, people adapted to diverse environments including coral reefs, tropical rainforests, swamps, montane cloud forests, and savannah grasslands. Over millennia, people transformed these habitats by burning and cutting the forests, translocating plants and animals, and managing access to resources. Food production later emerged in the region as the global climate warmed up around 10,000 years ago. Between 4000–3000 years ago, the Austronesian languages began to enter West New Guinea, with its speakers settling around the coasts and offshore islands. New forms of exchange connected people and, particularly within the last 2000 years, drew West New Guinea into global networks. The objects produced and traded at ethnographic contact—like pottery, stone axes, string bags, shell ornaments, and wooden carvings—can be informative about these networks, but they are increasingly changing as people navigate and transform their material worlds in the present. The examination of these objects in museums not only casts light on their makers, traders, and collectors, but also highlights the ongoing connections that Papuans have with their material culture in the twenty-first century.
The 22 chapters in this book contribute novel perspectives and critical data on each of these themes. The authors come from archaeology, social anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistics, museology, palaeoecology, and beyond. They write about a wide array of West New Guinea’s regions, including the highlands, north and south coasts, Bird’s Head Peninsula, Cenderawasih Bay, and the Raja Ampat Islands.
Coming soon
Notify me
China: Regaining Growth Momentum after the Pandemic »
Edited by: Ligang Song, Yixiao Zhou
The slower growth of the Chinese economy in the aftermath of the pandemic has prompted the Chinese Government to adopt measures to boost domestic consumption and deepen structural reform, with the effectiveness of such policies beginning to be felt. However, China still faces challenges that will affect its growth dynamics down the track. These include the slowdown of its real estate sector, the complex internal and external environments for macroeconomic policy, the high level of income inequality, weak growth in investment by the private sector, negative population growth, high levels of debt, deglobalisation, weakness in the financial sector and equity markets, the inadequacy of its fiscal system and the imperative to decarbonise the economy. China must confront these challenges to maintain growth momentum and achieve higher levels of income and living standards.
The theme of the 2024 China Update book is China: Regaining Growth Momentum after the Pandemic. It discusses some of the challenges and policy issues that are being watched with keen interest by decision-makers and markets alike, including: What are the obstacles to economic growth in the aftermath of the pandemic and how can these be overcome? What are the key challenges and opportunities for China to move to the next level of development against the backdrop of negative population growth? Is it time for a Tax-Sharing System Reform 2.0 to consolidate China’s fiscal position? What are the challenges facing China’s small and medium enterprises? How is China’s business environment faring, and what are the implications for investment? How does China’s urban housing affordability impact its low fertility rate? How will the trade conflict between China and the United States play out regarding semiconductors and other high-tech products? How does China–Africa bilateral agricultural trade impact on African rural transformation?
Coming soon
Notify me
Enabling Learning »
Language Teaching for Australian Universities
Enabling Learning: Language Teaching for Australian Universities illuminates efforts by tertiary language educators to facilitate the learning of languages at the university level. The educators’ endeavours recounted in this volume address a range of specific aspects of the language learning experience or language teaching within tertiary education institutions. The chapters offer an overview of learning approaches and experiences, from the beginner to the advanced level, of different learning environments, from the traditional to online and hybrid, and of different languages, from Indigenous to European to East Asian. This work foregrounds the relevance of improved accessibility to language learning in the university context, presents innovative educational solutions informed by the examination of specific contexts, and asserts the importance of developing intercultural competence.
Coming soon
Notify me
Dregs »
Love and Monsters in Small Town New Zealand
Authored by: Laura McLauchlan
Girls who join dog packs, boys who gain strength from trees, men who love bodies with nobody in them: Dregs is a collection of tenderly-monstrous love stories, set in a shadowy small town of the same name. Based in South Canterbury, New Zealand, these lovingly disturbing fictions welcome the strange and other-wordly, while keeping an ethnographic eye trained on the classed, religious, gendered, racialised and species-based forces shaping this rural region of New Zealand’s South Island.
While at times grotesque, these darkly loving, richly-illustrated tales offer new avenues for ethnographic research and shed new light on the region, giving voice and form to unspoken aspects of this antipodean rural idyll. Shaped by a deep respect for the monstrous feminine, regardless of the gender of the bodies in which such forces appear, Dregs: Love and Monsters in Small Town New Zealand is a product of both an anthropological sensibility and a trust that naming and finding ways to live well with our monsters is a vital aspect of living well in our times.
Coming soon
Notify me