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Peter Marralwanga »
Painter of the Djang of western Arnhem Land
Authored by: Luke Taylor, Ivan Namirrkki
Publication date: 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 Maralwanga’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.
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ANU Historical Journal II: Number 5 »
Publication date: 2025
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.
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Disrupting, Decentring and Diversifying Languages and Cultures in Australian Universities »
Publication date: November 2025
How can languages and cultures in Australian higher education be disrupted, decentred and diversified? Contributors to this volume advance theoretical, critical (self-)reflections and position papers, pedagogical explorations of classroom practice as well as data-driven empirical investigations to challenge, resist and stretch how languages and cultures are both taught and imagined in research.
From metaphorical conceptualisations of knowledge production, discussions of virtual reality, and innovation and creativity viewed through the lens of Indigenous epistemologies, to language learning curricula designed to challenge heteronormativity and cisgenderism, and a reconceptualisation of the role of language educators as designers, each chapter emphasises the vital role of innovation as the driving force of positive disruption.
What emerges here is the resilience and adaptability demanded of languages and cultures researchers and educators as they navigate an ever-shifting educational landscape. Taken as a whole, this volume serves as a testament to these scholars’ collective capacity to adapt, evolve, embrace and actively drive change, fostering a more diverse, equitable and inclusive future for their field.
Australian Journal of Biography and History: No. 10, 2025 »
Publication date: 2025
The articles in the Australian Journal of Biography and History No. 10 cover a diverse range of people, most of them little known in the annals of Australian history. Each lived on the edges of societal expectations and norms and so raise questions about Australian identity. These articles utilise biographical methods to illuminate lives full of risk, excitement, uncertainty and unconventionality.
Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui relates the complex and conflicted story of the writer John Naish (1923–1963). Born and raised in Wales, he came to North Queensland in his twenties and produced a significant body of literature on life in the sugar cane industry and the tropical north. Uncertainty and conflict also feature in James Cotton’s article on the two years (1921–23) Edward Selby Little spent as Australian trade commissioner in Shanghai. In a brief and unhappy but still portentous career, Little was in part a victim of the ad hoc and personal nature of the policy experiments of Prime Minister W. M. Hughes, while also a victim of the machinations of his countrymen. Georgina Fitzpatrick’s portrait of Eric Shimada (Shimada Masakazu) considers an individual whose bicultural identity brought a seemingly fluent transformation from Japanese soldier to interpreter for the Australian and British occupation forces and then the International Military Tribunal in Japan.
In his article ‘A Cat with Two Tales’, Andrew Marshall examines the conflict between the Australian-born cartoonist and entrepreneur Patrick Sullivan and the American illustrator Otto Messmer over who was the rightful creator of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat. James McDonald uses collective biographical methods to discuss the way the largely forgotten racist term ‘King Billy’ was deployed in colonial Australia to diminish and mock the status of senior Aboriginal men. Similarly, Toby Raeburn, Paul Sanders and Kerry Doyle, in their article ‘Boorong of the Burramattagal’, elevate the status of a young woman from indentured servant to important cultural and linguistic intermediary. Kate White’s article ‘Creating the Mirage’ considers the private, along with the public, lives of the 1980s business couple Christopher and Pixie Skase. This private world is also the focus of Kay Whitehead and Belinda MacGill in their article on Annie Sharpley, a teacher at Naracoorte. While Sharpley’s career seems extraordinary in length, the selfless woman teacher in a country school is a typical personification of rural education in settler countries such as Australia.
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Law in the New Democracy »
Authored by: Paula Jane Byrne
Publication date: September 2025
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
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International Review of Environmental History: Volume 11, Issue 1, 2025 »
Edited by: James Beattie, Ruth Morgan
Publication date: 2025
This latest issue of the International Review of Environmental History takes readers from the settler landscapes of nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand to the post-1945 rise of herbicides in Northern Europe. Lingering in Aotearoa, readers will be immersed in geological debates about the causes of past glaciation and trace the early twentieth-century appeal of the Phoenix palm. This issue also features a personal reflection on the campaign to protect K’gari-Fraser Island in the mid-1970s and its lasting influence on Australian environmental law. Together, these contributions reveal the spread and influence of transnational ideas on local understandings of environmental change and conservation.
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Indigenous Songs of Victoria »
Publication date: 2025
Indigenous Songs of Victoria seeks to do justice to the songsters, the clever men and women of traditional Indigenous societies who made these artistic treasures, as well as to the many people who have valued, written down or otherwise recorded these songs, so that they can be heard, read and delighted in today.
The rich diversity of Indigenous songs collected in this book is a cultural treasure of Victoria and Australia. The authors bring together here well over 100 different song texts with musical transcriptions and analysis, cultural context and, for many, translations.
This volume brings the rich knowledge and artistic skill of the song-makers of Indigenous Victoria to a wider audience and makes the sources of these songs, in manuscripts, old journals and sound recordings, accessible, often for the first time.
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Rethinking Histories of Indonesia »
Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality
Edited by: Sadiah Boonstra, Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones, Katharine McGregor, Ken M.P. Setiawan, Abdul Wahid
Publication date: August 2025
Rethinking Histories of Indonesia: Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality provides a critical evaluation of histories of Indonesia from the formal period of colonisation to the present day. The volume approaches Indonesian history through the lens of coloniality, or the structures of power and control that underpin colonisation and which persist into the present. Bringing together seventeen authors from across the world, the volume offers an alternative conceptualisation of Indonesian history and lays bare the enduring legacies of and processes that reproduce coloniality.
‘This is a significant and exciting volume in terms of its scale, the range of disciplines, approaches and topics included and, ultimately, for its contribution to the field of Indonesian history and historiography, and Indonesian studies and decolonial studies more broadly … The contributors to this book do [a great service to] students of Indonesian history, its cultures, society and politics, offering new sources, voices, approaches and perspectives. Overall, they provide a fresh and vital critique of not only Indonesia’s colonial history but its continuing lived influences on present day Indonesia and beyond.’
—Jemma Purdey, Australia-Indonesia Centre, Monash University
Aboriginal History Journal: Volume 48 »
Edited by: Crystal McKinnon, Ben Silverstein
Publication date: August 2025
In this volume, Christopher Morton carefully traces the provenance of a Wiradjuri or Gamilaroi marara (tree carving) currently resting at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, considering its unfinished journey and the way it has been framed and recontextualised, as well as the ways it may experience a future return to good relation with and in Country. Julia Mortensen draws on oral histories of life and mobility in and around the Yumba – a ‘fringe camp’ at Cunnamulla – to narrate generations of autonomy from formal state control, reconsidering the Yumba as a centre of Aboriginal action and community strength: the centre, not the fringe. And on the 35th anniversary of the publication of Henrietta Fourmile’s landmark article ‘Who Owns the Past?’, Kirsten Thorpe returns to this work, centring the archival sovereignty that Fourmile sought and towards which First Nations archivists work today. This sovereignty is reflected in the following conversation between Gundungurra woman Kazan Brown and non-Indigenous historians Emily O’Gorman and Grace Karskens, transcribed by Natalie Osborne, which represents Gundungurra Country as storied, enduring and under threat.
The volume includes two memorial sections, remembering Frances Peters-Little and Lyndall Ryan and reflecting on their vital contributions to this journal and to the wider field of Aboriginal history. Alongside several book reviews, we present a review forum responding to Shannyn Palmer’s Prime Ministers’ Literary Award-winning Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station.
Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust »
An Economic History of Papua New Guinea since Independence
Authored by: Stephen Howes, Martin Davies, Rohan Fox, Maholopa Laveil, Manoj K. Pandey, Kelly Samof, Dek Joe Sum
Publication date: July 2025
Since Papua New Guinea’s independence in 1975, economic growth has been slow but volatile, with major changes in economic structure and policies, as well as in politics and governance.
This economic history, written to commemorate the fiftieth year of independence and the first to be produced in some 15 years, divides the half century since independence into four periods: the relative stability but also early struggles of the seventies and eighties; the crises and reforms of the nineties; the boom of the 2000s; and the quiet bust of the 2010s. Two chapters cover each period’s major economic, policy, institutional and political developments. The final three chapters provide an overall assessment of economic performance and policies since independence and link them with its politics and institutions.
The book combines painstaking documentation with original analysis to reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the PNG economy, and theorises that the country’s hyper-politics and insecurity have combined to produce, and are reinforced by, a weak but stable state, and low and increasingly resource-dependent growth.
Data-driven, frank, insightful and engaging, Struggle, Reform, Boom and Bust is written by an expert team of economists from the University of Papua New Guinea and The Australian National University under the leadership of Professor Stephen Howes, Director of the ANU Development Policy Centre. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in the economy of Papua New Guinea, as well as an important contribution to the literature on the challenges and institutional determinants of post-colonial development.