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Yonggom Wambon, a Dumut language of West Papua »
Annotated Texts with Grammar and Vocabulary
Authored by: Wilco van den Heuvel
Publication date: 2025
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’.
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Politics, Pride and Perversion »
The Rise and Fall of Frank Arkell
Authored by: Erik Eklund
Publication date: 2025
Frank Arkell (1929–1998) was the most successful politician of his generation; an Independent who served as Wollongong’s Lord Mayor (1974–1991) and state member (1984–1991). Arkell dominated Wollongong public life with unstoppable energy, eccentric flair, and a single-minded determination to support the city through economic restructuring. Despite his popularity, at the edges of public consciousness there was growing disquiet over Arkell’s private life …
‘A compelling biography … Eklund provides a nuanced exploration of Arkell’s relentless efforts to transform Wollongong from a ‘steel city’ to the ‘Leisure Coast’, as well as his connections to an extensive paedophile network exposed during the 1997 Wood Royal Commission …’
— Associate Professor Jayne Persian, University of Southern Queensland
‘Eklund discloses the tragic consequences of unbridled male lust, deep social inequality and unaccountable class power … we have here a shocking story of sexual abuse and official corruption that brought untold suffering, political disgrace and, in the end, a brutal murder.’
— Professor Frank Bongiorno AM, author of Dreamers and Schemers: the political history of Australia
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‘I buy this piece of ground here’ »
An Italian market-gardener community in Adelaide, 1920s–1970s
Authored by: Madeleine Regan
Publication date: 2025
‘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.
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Lilith: A Feminist History Journal: Number 30 »
Publication date: 2025
The 2024 issue of Lilith benefited from some unusual contributions from international scholars from South Africa, Finland, the US and the UK, and from Australian-based researchers at the University of NSW, The Australian National University, Western Sydney University, the University of Melbourne, the University of New England, James Cook University, the Australian Catholic University, Charles Darwin University and the University of Wollongong. Many of these researchers participated in our 2023 Lilith Symposium at ACU Melbourne on ‘Gender & Joy’ in feminist history, which benefitted from inspirational keynote addresses by Professor Katie Barclay (Macquarie University) and Dr Yves Rees (La Trobe University). This issue contains articles on historical themes as diverse as African pottery, theology, poetry and Black women’s joy, Paris trans identity and cabaret theatre, First World Wartime cross-dressing, British Enlightenment women’s writing, early twentieth-century domestic servants in South Australia, and working girls’ clubs in Chicago. Our eight book reviewers evaluated works on visual cultures of pregnancy, Japanese biopolitics of reproduction, international women peace advocates, women in the Whitlam government, the wife of George Orwell, the global history of courtship, and both Pakistani and Australian histories of motherhood.
As in other issues of Lilith in recent years, 2024 saw a balance of local Australian histories which uncovered new aspects of gendered concepts and identities of the past, along with comparative intercultural inquiries, highlighting the importance of internationalisation in movements beginning on one context but later influencing several others. This volume also showcases the engagement in history of scholars from other disciplines who share our desire to honour and celebrate the joy, laughter, struggle, resilience and survival of women and gender-diverse people of different races and cultures, past and present, across the world.
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Dictionary of World Biography »
Tenth edition
Authored by: Barry Jones
Publication date: January 2025
Jones, Barry Owen (1932– ). Australian politician, writer and lawyer, born in Geelong. Educated at Melbourne High School and Melbourne University, he was a public servant, high school teacher, television and radio performer, university lecturer and lawyer before serving as a Labor MP in the Victorian Parliament 1972–77 and the Australian House of Representatives 1977–98. He took a leading role in reviving the Australian film industry and abolishing the death penalty in Australia, and was the first politician to raise public awareness of global warming, the ‘post‑industrial’ society, the IT revolution, biotechnology, the rise of ‘the Third Age’ and the need to preserve Antarctica as a wilderness. In the Hawke Government, he was Minister for Science 1983–90, Prices and Consumer Affairs 1987, Small Business 1987–90 and Customs 1988–90. He became a member of the Executive Board of UNESCO, Paris 1991–95 and National President of the Australian Labor Party 1992–2000, 2005–06. He was Deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Convention 1998. His books include Decades of Decision 1860– (1965), Joseph II (1968), Age of Apocalypse (1975) and Knowledge Courage Leadership: Insights & Reflections (2016), and he edited The Penalty Is Death (1968, revised and expanded 2022). His bestseller, Sleepers, Wake! Technology and the Future of Work (1982, Fourth edition published in 1995) has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Swedish and braille.
He received a DSc in 1988 for his services to science and a DLitt in 1993 for his work on information theory. Elected FTSE (1992), FAHA (1993), FAA (1996) and FASSA (2003), he is the only person to have become a Fellow of four of Australia’s five learned Academies. Awarded an AO in 1993, named as one of Australia’s 100 ‘living national treasures’ in 1997, he was elected a Visiting Fellow Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1999. His autobiography, A Thinking Reed, was published in 2006 and The Shock of Recognition, about music and literature, in 2016. In 2014 he received an AC for services ‘as a leading intellectual in Australian public life’. What Is to Be Done was published in 2020.
Format: Hardback
‘We are a farming class’ »
Dubbo’s hinterland, 1870–1950
Authored by: Peter Woodley
Publication date: 2025
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.
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Enabling Learning »
Language Teaching for Australian Universities
Publication date: December 2024
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.
A Grammar of Warlmanpa »
Authored by: Mitchell Browne
Publication date: November 2024
As spoken by Bunny Naburula, Danny Cooper, Dick Foster, Donald Graham, Doris Kelly, Elizabeth Johnson, George Brown, Gladys Brown, Jack Walker, Jessie Cooper, Jimmy Newcastle, Julie Kelly, Lofty Japaljarri, Louie Martin, May Foster, Norah Graham, Penny Kelly, Penny Williams, Selina Grant, Susannah Nelson, Topsy Walker, Toprail Japaljarri and William Graham.
This volume is a descriptive analysis of Warlmanpa, a highly endangered language traditionally spoken northwest of the town of Tennant Creek, where most of the remaining speakers now live.
This grammatical description is based on language work carried out by community members and linguists since 1952, and is the first published reference grammar of the language.
The major areas of analysis include phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax. This volume also provides description of typologically notable features, including: a two-way stop contrast at each place of articulation; a complex second-position auxiliary system containing participant and tense/mood/aspect information; associated motion; and a lack of evidence for noun phrases.
This volume lays the foundation for future Warlmanpa language work.
Ritual Voices of Revelation »
The Origin Narratives of the Rotenese of Eastern Indonesia
Authored by: James J. Fox
Publication date: November 2024
This is a study of a collection of oral compositions of the Rotenese of eastern Indonesia. Recited in semantic parallelism, these compositions require a strict pairing of all words to produce correspondingly ordered verses. These narrative verses create an elevated discourse—a ‘scriptural voice’—intended to reveal the origins of Rotenese cultural life. The translations and exegeses of these origin narratives offer a work of world-class poetic imagination that recounts a dynastic contest between the Sun and Moon and Lords of the Ocean Sea and its epic consequences.
As background to the presentation of these narratives, this study provides a description of Rotenese life expressed in the complementary pairs that the Rotenese themselves use to categorise their world. A concluding chapter examines the Rotenese acquisition of Christianity and the subsequent retelling of the Biblical Genesis in Rotenese parallel verse, thus continuing the general examination of the use of parallelism as elevated ritual discourse. Gathered from poets from two domains on the island, most of these compositions date from fieldwork in 1965–66 and in 1973. The publication of these materials represents the summation of more than fifty years of research.
International Review of Environmental History: Volume 10, Issue 1, 2024 »
Edited by: James Beattie, Ruth Morgan
Publication date: October 2024
This latest issue of the International Review of Environmental History takes readers from tiger hunts in sixteenth-century India to the rise of organic foods across the Anglosphere by the late 1970s. Along the way, readers will encounter the ways that Cantonese migrants interpreted the environments of Aotearoa New Zealand at the turn of the twentieth century, and the influence of environmentalism in the US trade union movement during the 1960s. This issue also features a forum on a growing area of interest for environmental historians and allied practitioners, the history of emotions in response to environmental change. Here, scholars outline an historiography of ecological anxiety and reflect on the role of emotions in their historical practice at a time of planetary crisis. Despite the diverse settings and topics of the papers herein, together the collection reveals the enduring impacts of how different societies have understood and shaped the more-than-human world.