New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies artwork

New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies

194 episodes - English - Latest episode: 14 days ago - ★★★★★ - 1 rating

Interviews with Authors writing about Australia and New Zealand
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Episodes

Annaliese Jacobs Claydon, "Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

April 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour

In 1845 an expedition led by Sir John Franklin vanished in the Canadian Arctic. The enduring obsession with the Franklin mystery, and in particular Inuit information about its fate, is partly due to the ways in which information was circulated in these imperial spaces. Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Dr. Annaliese Jacobs Claydon examines how the Franklins and other explorer families engaged ...

Kieran File, "How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team" (Bloomsbury, 2022)

April 05, 2024 08:00 - 53 minutes

While the topic of relationships in professional sports teams is gaining greater attention from researchers and practitioners, the role that coach and athlete language plays in shaping these relationships remains largely unexplored. How Language Shapes Relationships in Professional Sports Teams: Power and Solidarity Dynamics in a New Zealand Rugby Team (Bloomsbury, 2022) by Dr. Kieran File addresses this gap by examining how every day, authentic language patterns used by coaches, captains and...

Atakohu Middleton, "Kia Hiwa Rā!: Māori Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand" (Huia Publishers, 2023)

April 01, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour

Māori journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand has become a vibrant industry, reporting through print, radio, television and the internet. Kia Hiwa Rā!: Māori Journalism in Aotearoa New Zealand (Huia Publishers, 2023) looks at the history of Māori journalism and the elements that make it what it is today. The author examines the way that news values common in English-speaking countries are reinterpreted for a Māori worldview and analyses news stories to show how Māori perspectives are expressed. Sh...

Cristina Rocha, "Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities" (Oxford UP, 2024)

March 24, 2024 08:00 - 1 hour

When did Christianity become cool? How did an Australian church conquer the world and expand into Brazil, a country with its own crop of powerful megachurches?  In her exciting new book, Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities (Oxford UP, 2023), anthropologist Cristina Rocha analyses the creation of a transnational Pentecostal field between Brazil and Australia, two countries that have been peripheral in the history of Pentecostalism but which more recently h...

Jacqueline Kennelly, "Burnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

March 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Burnt by Democracy: Youth, Inequality, and the Erosion of Civic Life (University of Toronto Press, 2023) by Dr. Jacqueline Kennelly traces the political ascendance of neoliberalism and its effects on youth. The book explores democracy and citizenship as described in interviews with over forty young people – ages 16 to 30 – who have either experienced homelessness or identify as an activist, living in five liberal democracies: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the United K...

Angela Wanhalla, "Of Love and War: Pacific Brides of World War II" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)

February 25, 2024 09:00 - 1 hour

Between 1942 and 1945 more than two million servicemen occupied the southern Pacific theater, the majority of whom were Americans in service with the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. During the occupation, American servicemen married approximately 1,800 women from New Zealand and the island Pacific, creating legal bonds through marriage and through children. Additionally, American servicemen fathered an estimated four thousand nonmarital children with Indigenous women in the South Pac...

What Can Australian Message Sticks Teach Us About Literacy?

February 21, 2024 09:00 - 48 minutes

Ingrid Piller speaks with Piers Kelly about a fascinating form of visual communication, Australian message sticks. What does a message stick look like? What is its purpose, and how has the use of message sticks changed over time from the precolonial period via the late 19th/early 20th century and into the present? Why do we know so little about message sticks, and how has colonialism shaped our knowledge about message sticks? How did message sticks fit into the multilingual communication ecol...

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, "Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World" (U California Press, 2022)

February 16, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutes

Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre is a bold, rigorous and award-winning history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Dr. Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine indust...

Use of Bacteriophages as Natural Antimicrobials to Manage Bacterial Pathogens in Aquaculture in Vietnam and Australia

February 02, 2024 09:00 - 24 minutes

Aquaculture is the fastest-growing protein production industry globally, with Vietnam one of the top producers and exporters of seafood products. In Vietnam, aquaculture is seen as a means of protecting rural livelihoods threatened by the consequences of climate change on agriculture. But climate change also drives the emergence of marine bacterial pathogens, causing considerable losses to aquaculture production. Traditionally, pathogen blooms have been treated with antimicrobials – but this ...

Marcia Stephenson, "Llamas beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World" (U Texas Press, 2023)

January 27, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutes

Camelids are vital to the cultures and economies of the Andes. The animals have also been at the heart of ecological and social catastrophe: Europeans overhunted wild vicuña and guanaco and imposed husbandry and breeding practices that decimated llama and alpaca flocks that had been successfully tended by Indigenous peoples for generations. Yet the colonial encounter with these animals was not limited to the New World. Llamas Beyond the Andes: The Untold History of Camelids in the Modern Worl...

Brandon Presser, "The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania and Mutiny in the South Pacific" (Icon Books, 2022)

January 10, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutes

In 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era: the whereabouts of a band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian companions. Seven generations later, the island is still inhabited by descendants of the original mutineers, marooned like modern castaways. In 2018, Brandon Presser went to live among its families; two clans bound by ci...

James Keating, "Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880-1914" (Manchester UP, 2020)

December 31, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour

In the 1890s Australian and New Zealand women became the first in the world to win the vote. Buoyed by their victories, they promised to lead a global struggle for the expansion of women’s electoral rights. Charting the common trajectory of the colonial suffrage campaigns, James Keating's book Distant Sisters: Australasian Women and the International Struggle for the Vote, 1880-1914 (Manchester UP, 2020) uncovers the personal and material networks that transformed feminist organising. Conside...

Stephanie Convery, "After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne" (Penguin Australia, 2020)

November 27, 2023 09:00 - 58 minutes

Today we are joined by Stephanie Convery, inequality editor at Guardian Australia, and author of After the Count: The Death of Davey Browne (Penguin Australia, 2020). In our conversation, we discussed the history of boxing in Australia, the failures that explain Davey Browne’s death in Sydney in 2015, the nature of violence in sport, and the future of boxing. In After the Count, Convery blends the genres of history, reportage, and memoir to explore the death of Davey Browne and shows how this...

Wm. Matthew Kennedy, "The Imperial Commonwealth: Australia and the Project of Empire, 1867-1914" (Manchester UP, 2023)

November 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hour

The Imperial Commonwealth: Australia and the Project of Empire, 1867-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Wm. Matthew Kennedy tells the story of how from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Australian settler colonists mobilised their unique settler experiences to develop their own vision of what 'empire' was and could be. Reinterpreting their histories and attempting to divine their futures with a much heavier concentration on racialized visions of humanity, white Australian settle...

Boyd Cothran and Adrian Shubert, "The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850-1914" (UNC Press, 2024)

October 02, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

It began as a small, slow, and unadorned sailing vessel—in a word, ordinary. Later, it was a weary workhorse in the age of steam. But the story of the Edwin Fox reveals how an everyday merchant ship drew together a changing world and its people in an extraordinary age of rising empires, sweeping economic transformation, and social change. The Edwin Fox: How an Ordinary Sailing Ship Connected the World in the Age of Globalization, 1850–1914 (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) by Dr. Boy...

Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of the Pacific: The Great Ocean" (Robinson, 2023)

October 02, 2023 08:00 - 46 minutes

Jeremy Black's A Brief History of the Pacific: The Great Ocean (Robinson, 2023) succeeds in examining both the indigenous presence on ocean's islands and Western control or influence over the its islands and shores. There is a particular focus on the period from the 1530s to 1890 with its greater Western coastal and oceanic presence in the Pacific, beginning with the Spanish takeover of the coasts of modern Central America, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and continuing with the Spaniards in the ...

Jared Davidson, "Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand" (Bridget Williams Books, 2023)

September 28, 2023 08:00 - 58 minutes

Picture, for a minute, every artwork of colonial New Zealand you can think of. Now add a chain gang. Hard-labour men guarded by other men with guns. Men moving heavy metal. Men picking at the earth. Over and over again. This was the reality of nineteenth-century New Zealand. Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped New Zealand's urban centres and rural landscapes, and Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa – the Pacific – in profo...

Megan MacKenzie, "Good Soldiers Don't Rape: The Stories We Tell About Military Sexual Violence" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

September 24, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutes

Sexual violence is a significant problem within many Western militaries. Despite international attention to the issue and global #MeToo and #TimesUp movements highlighting the impact of sexual violence, rates of sexual violence are going up in many militaries. Good Soldiers Don't Rape: The Stories We Tell About Military Sexual Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. Megan MacKenzie uses feminist theories of 'rape culture' and institutional gaslighting to identify the key stories, m...

A Better Way to Buy Books

September 12, 2023 08:00 - 34 minutes

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communiti...

Clive Moore, "Making Mala: Malaita in Solomon Islands, 1870s–1930s" (Australia National UP, 2017)

September 07, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Malaita is one of the major islands in the Solomons Archipelago and has the largest population in the Solomon Islands nation. Its people have an undeserved reputation for conservatism and aggression. Clive Moore's book Making Mala: Malaita in Solomon Islands, 1870s–1930s (Australia National UP, 2017) argues that in essence Malaitans are no different from other Solomon Islanders, and that their dominance, both in numbers and their place in the modern nation, can be explained through their rece...

Alexandra Roginski, "Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

September 04, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

The contentious science of phrenology once promised insight into character and intellect through external ‘reading’ of the head. In the transforming settler-colonial landscapes of nineteenth-century Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, popular phrenologists — figures who often hailed from the margins — performed their science of touch and cranial jargon everywhere from mechanics’ institutions to public houses.  In Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in ...

Tanya Evans, "Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History" (Bloomsbury, 2021)

August 20, 2023 08:00 - 44 minutes

Family history is one of the most widely practiced forms of public history around the globe, especially in settler migrant nations like Australia and Canada. It empowers millions of researchers, linking the past to the present in powerful ways, transforming individuals' understandings of themselves and the world. Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History (Bloomsbury, 2021) by Dr. Tanya Evans examines the practice, meanings and impact of undertaking family ...

Chris Fleming, "On Drugs" (Giramondo Publishing, 2019)

August 14, 2023 18:55 - 1 hour

"After I’d finished my rapid-fire history of self-justification he paused and then said, deadpan and rural-Australian-slow: 'Right. Ok. So how is that all working out for you?'" On Drugs (Giramondo Publishing, 2019) explores Australian philosopher Chris Fleming’s experience of addiction, which begins when he is a student at the University of Sydney and escalates into a life-threatening compulsion. In a memoir by turns insightful and outlandish, Fleming combines meticulous observation with a k...

Elizabeth Humphrys, "How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia's Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project" (Haymarket, 2019)

August 09, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Why do we always assume it was the New Right that was at the centre of constructing neoliberalism? How might corporatism have advanced neoliberalism? And, more controversially, were the trade unions only victims of neoliberal change, or did they play a more contradictory role? In How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project (Haymarket 2019), Elizabeth Humphrys examines the role of the Labour Party and trade unions in constructing neolibera...

Michael Roper, "Afterlives of War: A Descendants' History" (Manchester UP, 2023)

August 09, 2023 08:00 - 55 minutes

Afterlives of War: A Descendants' History (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Michael Roper documents the lives and historical pursuits of the generations who grew up in Australia, Britain and Germany after the First World War. Although they were not direct witnesses to the conflict, they experienced its effects from their earliest years. Based on ninety oral history interviews and observation during the First World War Centenary, this pioneering study reveals the contribution of desce...

Simon Ville and David Merrett, "International Business in Australia before World Shaping a Multinational Economy" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

May 31, 2023 08:00 - 49 minutes

This episode features Professor Simon Ville talking about his latest book with David Merrett International Business in Australia Before World War One: Shaping a Multinational Economy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022). This book challenges conventional wisdom by revealing an extensive and heterogeneous community of foreign businesses in Australia before 1914. Multinational enterprise arrived predominantly from Britain, but other sender nations included the USA, France, Germany, New Zealand, and Japan...

Christina Gerhardt, "Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean" (U California Press, 2023)

May 23, 2023 08:00 - 48 minutes

Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does an island see when the sea rises? Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean (U California Press, 2023) weaves together essays, maps, art, and poetry to show us—and make us see—island nations in a warming world. Low-lying islands are least responsible for global warming, but they are suffering the brunt of it. This transportive atlas reorients our vantage point to place islands at the center of the story, highlighting Ind...

Elizabeth Elbourne, "Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842" (Cambridge UP., 2022)

April 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Elizabeth Elbourne traces the history of three linked imperial families in Britain and across contested colonial borderlands from 1770 to 1842. Dr. Elbourne tracks the Haudenosaunee Brants of northeastern North America from the American Revolution to exile in Canada; the Bannisters, a British family of colonial administrators, whistleblow...

Lachlan McNamee, "Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop" (Princeton UP, 2023)

April 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less: Why States Colonize and Why They Stop (Princeton University Press, 2023) by Dr. Lachlan McNamee t...

Peter Meihana, "Privilege in Perpetuity: Exploding a Pākehā Myth" (Bridget Williams Books, 2022)

April 08, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

'The idea of Māori privilege continues to be deployed in order to constrain Māori aspirations and maintain the power imbalance that colonisation achieved in the nineteenth century.' The ‘idea of Māori privilege’, as Peter Meihana describes it, is deeply embedded in New Zealand culture. Many New Zealanders hold firm to the belief that Māori have been treated better than other indigenous peoples, and that they receive benefits that other New Zealanders do not. Some argue that the supposed privi...

Max Kaiser, "Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)

March 21, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour

Max Kaiser's book Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) takes a timely look at histories of radical Jewish movements, their modes of Holocaust memorialisation, and their relationships with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. Its primary focus is Australia, where Jewish antifascism was a major political and cultural force in Jewish communities in the 1940s and early 1950s. This cultural and intellectual history of Jewish antifas...

Ronald L. Trosper, "Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands" (U Arizona Press, 2022)

March 01, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutes

What does “development” mean for Indigenous peoples? Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands (U Arizona Press, 2022) lays out an alternative path showing that conscious attention to relationships among humans and the natural world creates flourishing social-ecological economies.  Economist Ronald L. Trosper draws on examples from North and South America, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and Australia to argue that Indigenous worldviews centering care and good relationships provide criti...

Anatoly Liberman, "Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

December 25, 2022 09:00 - 48 minutes

Three centuries of English idioms—their unusual origins and unexpected interpretations. To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook. Curry favor. Drink like a fish. Eat crow. We hear such phrases every day, but this book is the first truly all-encompassing etymological guide to both their meanings and origins. Spanning more than three centuries, Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (U Minnesota Press, 2023) is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind window into the...

The Future of Global Trade: A Discussion with Shannon K. O'Neil

December 22, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutes

Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil.  Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A f...

Quito J. Swan, "Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World" (NYU Press, 2022)

December 20, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour

Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World (NYU Press, 2022) is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation. Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New ...

Elaine Pearson, "Chasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

December 16, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour

Chasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World (Simon & Schuster, 2022) by Elaine Pearson, the Asia Director at Human Rights Watch, is an intimate account of her journey fighting for human rights across the world. Part personal journey, part insider’s peek into the work of international human rights organizations, Chasing Wrongs and Rights is also a primer on advocacy with governments, an indictment of Australia’s human rights record and foreign policy, a car...

Anna Pendergrast and Kelly Pendergrast, "More Zeros and Ones: Digital Technology, Maintenance and Equity in Aotearoa New Zealand" (Bridget Williams Books, 2022)

November 21, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutes

Many of today’s digital technologies inadvertently amplify the power structures and prejudices of wider society. By examining the way digital tools and platforms are designed, built, and maintained, this BWB Text aims to identify how we can do better for everyone in Aotearoa. Following on from the success of Shouting Zeros and Ones (BWB Texts), More Zeros and Ones: Digital Technology, Maintenance and Equity in Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2022) includes writers with specific e...

Arcia Tecun et al., "Towards a Grammar of Race in Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2022)

October 18, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutes

A search for new ways to talk about race in Aotearoa New Zealand brought together this powerful group of scholars, writers, and activists. For these authors, attempts to confront racism and racial violence often stall against a failure to see how power works through race, across our modern social worlds. The result is a country where racism is all too often left unnamed and unchecked, voices are erased, the colonial past ignored and silence passes for understanding. By 'bringing what is unspo...

Ethics, Utopia and Materiality: Glimpses of Everyday Creativity and Hope in Indonesian Papua

October 13, 2022 08:00 - 23 minutes

The Asmat are an indigenous people of Indonesian Papua and are renowned for their artistic carving flair and complex life-cycle rituals. They also have big ambitions that reach as far as the Vatican. Over the past five decades, pressures from the state, religious authorities, and the global art market, have led to profound cultural changes and a widespread sense of predicament, dysphoria and disempowerment among the Asmat. In this episode of SSEAC Stories, Dr Natali Pearson is joined by Dr Ro...

Robin Derricourt, "Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions" ( Manchester UP, 2021)

September 28, 2022 17:23 - 57 minutes

What do we really know about how and where religions began, and how they spread?  Robin Derricourt considers the birth and growth of several major religions, using history and archaeology to recreate the times, places and societies that witnessed the rise of significant monotheistic faiths. Beginning with Mormonism and working backwards through Islam, Christianity and Judaism to Zoroastrianism, Creating God: The Birth and Growth of Major Religions ( Manchester UP, 2021) opens up the condition...

Fiona Crawford and Lee McGowan, "Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women's Football" (NewSouth Books, 2019)

September 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour

Today we are joined by two guests: Dr. Fiona Crawford, a writer, editor, and researcher whose work engages with social, environmental, and sports. Dr. Crawford writes for a range of publications including Four Four Two and works frequently Football Australia. We are also joined by Dr. Lee McGowan, a researcher, writer and teacher working at the University of Sunshine Coast. Dr McGowan works on the intersections of sport, culture and community engagement. Together, they are the authors of Neve...

John Richens, "Tik Merauke: An Epidemic Like No Other" (Melbourne UP, 2022)

September 21, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutes

A medical doctor with an inquisitive mind and a traveling spirit, John Richens thought he had hit upon an exemplary public health case study – the story of donovanosis among the Marind people of early-twentieth-century New Guinea. The rare, sexually transmitted disease, locally known as “tik Merauke,” rose to epidemic level after the ruling Dutch moved to quash the Marind practice of headhunting. The intensive treatment campaign that followed was successful, at least insofar as curing the inf...

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It

September 21, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour

Last episode we discussed films about how a nuclear war would start, particularly the insane logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). In this episode we explore how American, British, and Australian filmmakers imagined the unimaginable - Armageddon and the literal and figurative fallout. We look at On the Beach (1959), The Day After (1983), and Threads (1984). We challenge the conventional wisdom that the West only seriously worried about nuclear after the Cuban Missile Crisis, provide so...

Mohamed Adhikari, "Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples" (Hackett, 2022)

September 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour

Today I talked to Dr. Mohamed Adhikari about his book Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples (Hackett, 2022). "This book explores settler colonial genocides in a global perspective and over the long durée. It does so systematically and compellingly, as it investigates how settler colonial expansion at times created conditions for genocidal violence, and the ways in which genocide was at times perpetrated on settler colonial frontiers. This volume will prove invaluable ...

Anna Clark, "Making Australian History" (Random House Australia, 2022)

September 16, 2022 08:00 - 41 minutes

Australian history has been revised and reinterpreted by successive generations of historians, writers, governments and public commentators, yet there has been no account of the ways it has changed, who makes history, and how. Making Australian History (Random House Australia, 2022) responds to this critical gap in Australian historical research. A few years ago Anna Clark saw a series of paintings on a sandstone cliff face in the Northern Territory. There were characteristic crosshatched ima...

Alastair Paton, "Of Marsupials and Men" (Black Inc, 2022)

August 16, 2022 08:00 - 47 minutes

Alistair Paton joins today, writer of Of Marsupials and Men (Black Inc, 2022), a book recounting the fascinating and often hilarious history of the men and women who dedicated their lives to understanding Australia’s native animals. To the first European colonists, Australian wildlife was bewildering. Marsupials and gum trees seemed strange and hostile; rabbits, sheep and oak trees were familiar and safe. A bustling animal trade soon developed in both directions: foxes, starlings and other re...

Lisa Uperesa, "Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game" (Duke UP, 2022)

August 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour

Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Sāmoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the collegiate and professional levels. In Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural and social dynamics that have made football so central to Samoan communities. For Samoan athletes, football is not just an opportunity for upward mobility; it is a way to contribute to...

Jarrod Hore, "Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism" (U California Press, 2022)

August 10, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutes

During the early years of photography, settlers around the Pacific World were fascinated with the landscapes of the places they conquered. According to Dr. Jarrod Hore, a postdoctoral researcher and co-director of the New Earth Histories Research Program at the University of New South Wales, wilderness images helped Americans and Australians make sense of the places they were in the process of dispossessing. In Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism (U Califor...

Nicholas Ferns, "Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945–1975: Colonial and Foreign Aid Policy in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)

August 05, 2022 08:00 - 1 hour

In the voluminous literature on the history of modernisation theory and its associated concept of development since the end of World War II, much of the focus lies on the efforts undertaken by developed nations—most notably the United States and Soviet Union—to establish a model for developing countries to build not just their economies but their nations as well. Eschewing this paradigm, Dr Nicholas Ferns’ excellent monograph Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945-1975: Colon...

Eda Gunaydin, "Root and Branch: Essays on Inheritance" (NewSouth, 2022)

July 08, 2022 08:00 - 48 minutes

Eda Gunaydin joins us today to talk about Root and Branch: Essays on Inheritance (NewSouth, 2022). Lots of themes: Turkey, Australia, Sydney, family, friends, media, food, essays. That there is no easy translation for ‘awkward’ in other languages suggests that I’m only myself in English. This feels like a loss, because I’d like to think of myself as Turkish, too. There is a Turkish saying that one’s home is not where one is born, but where one grows full – dogdugun yer degil, doydugun yer. Mi...

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