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Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and the Origins of World War II

On 3 September 1939, Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, broadcast to the Australian people the news that their country was at war with Germany. He outlined how every effort had been made to maintain the peace by keeping the door open to a negotiated settlement. However, as these efforts had failed, the British Empire was now ‘involved in a struggle which we must at all costs win, and which we believe in our hearts we will win’. Christopher Waters here examines Australia’s role in Britain’s policy of appeasement from the time Hitler came to power in 1933 through to the declaration of war in September 1939. Focusing on the five leading figures in the Australian governments of the 1930s – Joe Lyons, Stanley Bruce, Robert Menzies, Billy Hughes and Richard Casey – Waters examines their responses to the rise of Hitler and the growing threat of fascism in Europe. Australian governments accepted the principle that the Empire must speak with one voice on foreign policy and were therefore intimately involved in the decisions taken by successive governments in London. As such, this book provides new insights into the making of imperial foreign policy in the inter-war era, imperial history, the origins of World War II and Australian history.

Trace

This collection of prose poetry creates a naturally intimate world while, at the same time, fluidly examining complex connections between popular and high culture.

Rising Power and Changing People. : The Australian High Commission in India

Beginning in 1943–44, Australia’s relationship with India is its oldest continuous formal diplomatic relationship with any Asian country. The early diplomatic exchanges between Australia and India have teased for their suggestions of potential unrealised, for opportunities missed, especially when compared with the very recent excitement about the future of Australia–India relations. How did Australia’s representatives and their staff in New Delhi negotiate the many dimensions of Australia–India relations? This book brings together expert analyses of the work of the Australian High Commission, its key people and the challenges they faced in New Delhi. The important India Economic Strategy to 2035 report handed to the Australian Government in mid-2018 begins with the comment: ‘Timing has always been a challenge in Australia’s relationship with India.’ As the Australian Government works to implement some of the ambitious recommendations in the report, this book adds to our understanding of why timing has been a challenge, and how those at the coalface of the relationship have grappled with it.

Who Needs the ABC?: Why taking it for granted is no longer an option.

For the past nine years, the ABC has been besieged. Its funding has been slashed. It has been assailed by complaints from ministers and prime ministers. Its board has been stacked with political appointees. It has been relentlessly attacked by commercial media outlets. And it has endured crisis after crisis. Who Needs the ABC? charts how, in its 90th year, the best-trusted news organisation in Australia arrived at its current plight: doing the most it ever has, with less than it needs, under a barrage of constant criticism. This book examines the profound changes that have swept through the Australian media, technology, and political landscapes in the past decade, and explores the tense relationship between the ABC and governments of both stripes over the last 40 years. It dispels any complacency about the ABC’s future by charting the very real threat now posed by the Liberal– National Party coalition, and the damage that it has done to the ABC while in office.

In So Many Words: Interviews with Writers, Scholars and Intellectuals

In So Many Words features interviews with eleven of the most influential intellectuals, scholars and writers in the United States. Atherton engages with her subjects, and responds to arguments that the public intellectual is endangered, dead or in decline. Interviewees include: Noam Chomsky, Camille Paglia, Todd Gitlin, Harold Bloom, Howard Zinn, Stephen Greenblatt, Paul Kane, Jim Cullen, Dana Gioia and Kenneth T. Jackson.

Remembering the First World War

Remembering the First World War brings together a group of international scholars to understand how and why the past quarter of a century has witnessed such an extraordinary increase in global popular and academic interest in the First World War, both as an event and in the ways it is remembered. The book discusses this phenomenon across three key areas. The first section looks at family history, genealogy and the First World War, seeking to understand the power of family history in shaping and reshaping remembrance of the War at the smallest levels, as well as popular media and the continuing role of the state and its agencies. The second part discusses practices of remembering and the more public forms of representation and negotiation through film, literature, museums, monuments and heritage sites, focusing on agency in representing and remembering war. The third section covers the return of the War and the increasing determination among individuals to acknowledge and participate in public rituals of remembrance with their own contemporary politics. What, for instance, does it mean to wear a poppy on armistice/remembrance day? How do symbols like this operate today? These chapters will investigate these aspects through a series of case studies. Placing remembrance of the First World War in its longer historical and broader transnational context and including illustrations and an afterword by Professor David Reynolds, this is the ideal book for all those interested in the history of the Great War and its aftermath.

Australia and the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was Australia’s longest and most controversial military commitment of the twentieth century, ending in humiliation for the United States and its allies with the downfall of South Vietnam. The war provoked deep divisions in Australian society and politics, particularly since for the first time young men were conscripted for overseas service in a highly contentious ballot system. The Vietnam era is still identified with diplomatic, military and political failure. Was Vietnam a case of Australia fighting ‘other people’s wars’? Were we really ‘all the way’ with the United States? How valid was the ‘domino theory’? Did the Australian forces develop new tactical methods in earlier Southeast Asian conflicts, and just how successful were they against the unyielding enemy in Vietnam? In this landmark book, award-winning historian Peter Edwards skilfully unravels the complexities of the global Cold War, decolonisation in Southeast Asia and Australian domestic politics to provide new, often surprising, answers to these questions.

Travelling Without Gods: A Chris Wallace-Crabbe Companion

Wide-ranging in theme and context, Travelling Without Gods explores the imaginative effects of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s writing and in many ways suggests an alternative cultural history of Australia since the 1950s. Containing biographical and critical pieces, poems (including new work by Chris) and essays that respond to his career Travelling without Gods takes account of the decades in which he has written. It illuminates, celebrates and critiques his work in its various contexts. This book contains one of Seamus Heaney’s last poems and poetry and articles by David Malouf, Sir Andrew Motion, Peter Goldsworthy and many more.

Dream Animals

Dream Animals is a collection of prose poems which explores the strange and unsettling; those moments of chaos in the otherwise silence of the night; the violence and horror of the everyday. Based on “real world” events – such as curious deaths and accidents, small instances of tragedy, and the haunting beauty of the mundane – Dream Animals is a creative examination of the ways in which we define both self and other, especially in terms of the relationship between the human and the animal.

Pegs

This chapbook encourages the defamiliarisation of the quotidian by taking the common, household peg and presenting it in a range of new guises in prose poetry. Ultimately, this focus on the peg and ‘peg prose poetry’ aims to demonstrate beauty in the unremarkable. The peg also works as a lynchpin in the way it links, and is linked to, the quotidian in the other chapbooks in this collection. This is part of a practice-led research project that focuses on the way in which poetry can lend wonder to the mundane.

Exhumed

Unpredictable and boisterously entertaining, Cassandra Atherton’s Exhumed is a collection of interconnected prose poems exploring the reanimation of canonical texts against a backdrop of popular culture references. Atherton’ s appeals to humour noir and the politicisation of the poet’s private spaces make for an exhilarating and intoxicating read.

The Sweetland Project: Remembering Gallipoli in the Shire of Nunawading

A chance discovery made on a tour of Anzac Cove provided an immediate link between Gallipoli and Melbourne’s Eastern Suburbs. In the lead up to the Centenary of Anzac, ‘The Sweetland Project’ (named after a Box Hill man, Stephen Sweetland) became a broader search for the connections between Gallipoli and the former Shire of Nunawading, revealing 27 men from the former shire who died during the Gallipoli campaign. This book traces their stories and the reaction to the Great War of the local community, and shows how personal and collective memories of their experiences still resonate today.

The Interior of Our Memories: A History of Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre

The Jewish Holocaust Centre in Melbourne, Australia, is an internationally recognised museum and research centre dedicated to the memory of the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945.

Southern Anthropology: A History of Fison and Howitt’s ‘Kamilaroi and Kurnai’

Southern Anthropology, the history of Fison and Howitt's Kamilaroi and Kurnai is the biography of Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880) written from both a historical and anthropological perspective. Southern Anthropology investigates the authors' work on Aboriginal and Pacific people and the reception of their book in metropolitan centres.

Remembering the Cold War: Global Contest and National Stories

Remembering the Cold War examines how, more than two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cold War legacies continue to play crucial roles in defining national identities and shaping international relations around the globe. Given the Cold War’s blurred definition – it has neither a widely accepted commencement date nor unanimous conclusion – what is to be remembered? This book illustrates that there is, in fact, a huge body of ‘remembrance,’ and that it is more pertinent to ask: what should be included and what can be overlooked? This richly illustrated volume considers case studies of Cold War remembering from around the world. It engages with growing theorisation in the field of memory studies, specifically in relation to war. David Lowe and Tony Joel afford careful consideration to agencies who identify with being ‘victims’ of the Cold War. In addition, the concept of arenas of articulation, which envelops the myriad spaces in which the remembering, commemorating, memorialising, and even revising of Cold War history takes place, is given prominence.

Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin

Among the greatest intellectual heroes of modern times, Raphael Lemkin lived an extraordinary life of struggle and hardship, yet altered international law and redefined the world’s understanding of group rights. He invented the concept and word “genocide” and propelled the idea into international legal status. An uncommonly creative pioneer in ethical thought, he twice was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Although Lemkin died alone and in poverty, he left behind a model for a life of activism, a legacy of major contributions to international law, and—not least—an unpublished autobiography. Presented here for the first time is his own account of his life, from his boyhood on a small farm in Poland with his Jewish parents, to his perilous escape from Nazi Europe, through his arrival in the United States and rise to influence as an academic, thinker, and revered lawyer of international criminal law.

Upheaval: Disrupted Lives in Journalism

Newsrooms, the engine rooms of reporting, have shrunk. A generation of journalists has borne witness to seismic changes in the media. Sharing stories from more than 50 Australian journalists – including Amanda Meade, David Marr and Flip Prior – Upheaval reveals the highs and the lows of those who were there to see it all. They show us life inside frenetic and vibrant newsrooms at the peak of their influence, and the difficulties of adapting to ever-accelerating news cycles with fewer resources. Some left journalism altogether while others stayed in the media — or sought to reinvent it. Normally the ones telling other people’s stories, in Upheaval journalists share the rawness of losing their own job or watching others lose theirs. They reveal their anxieties and hopes for the industry’s future and their commitment to reporting news that matters.

Book cover - The Wardian Case

The Wardian Case : How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World

The story of a nineteenth-century invention (essentially a tiny greenhouse) that allowed for the first time the movement of plants around the world, feeding new agricultural industries, the commercial nursery trade, botanic and private gardens, invasive species, imperialism, and more.

Places of Reconciliation : Commemorating Indigenous History in the Heart of Melbourne

Central Melbourne is filled with markers of the city's pasts. At its heart are the stories of exploration and settlement, of the so-called first to arrive, and of the building of a colony and nation. But when it comes to its Indigenous pasts, the centre of Melbourne has long been a place of silence. Over the last two decades, Indigenous histories and peoples have been brought into central Melbourne's commemorative landscapes. Memorials, commemorative markers, namings and public artworks have all been used to remember the city's Indigenous pasts. Places of Reconciliation shows how they came to be part of the city, and the ways in which they have challenged the erasures of its Indigenous histories. Sarah Pinto considers the kind of places that have been made and unmade by these commemorations, and concludes that the twenty-first century settler city does not give up its commemorative landscapes easily.

The Asia Literacy Dilemma – A Curriculum Perspective

The Asia literacy dilemma brings forward a novel approach to the long-standing global debates of Asia-related teaching and learning. By bringing into focus ‘Asia’ as a curriculum area, the book provides original commentary on the rationale and feasibility of ‘Asia literacy’ and its role and significance within and for twenty-first-century education.

Australian Policy
 and History

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