Books published by Monash University Publishing

Tarenootairer (c.1806-58) was still a child when a band of white sealers bound her and forced her onto a boat. From there unfolded a life of immense cruelty inflicted by her colonial captors. As with so many Indigenous women of her time, even today the historical record of her life remains a scant thread embroidered with half-truths and pro-colonial propaganda. But Joel Stephen Birnie grew up hearing the true stories about Tarenootairer, his earliest known ancestral grandmother, and he was keen to tell his family's history without the colonial lens. Tarenootairer had a fierce determination to survive that had a profound effect on the course of Tasmanian history. Her daughters, Mary Ann Arthur (c.1820-71) and Fanny Cochrane Smith (c.1832-1905), shared her activism: Mary Ann's fight for autonomy influenced contemporary Indigenous politics, while Fanny famously challenged the false declaration of Indigenous Tasmanian extinction. Together, these three extraordinary women fought for the Indigenous communities they founded and sparked a tradition of social justice that continues in Birnie's family today. From the early Bass Strait sealing industries to George Augustus Robinson's 'conciliation' missions, to Aboriginal internment on Flinders Island and at Oyster Cove, My People's Songs is both a constellation of the damage wrought by colonisation and a testament to the power of family. Revelatory, intimate and illuminating, it does more than assert these women's place in our nation's story - it restores to them a voice and a cultural context.

The Supplement to the Bibliography of Australian Literature (BAL) completes the most comprehensive reference to Australian creative writing ever published. The four volumes of BAL recorded details of all separately published creative literature by Australian writers from 1788 to 2000. Core genres covered were poetry, fiction, drama, and children's writing. This Supplement includes some 2700 new Australian authors and over 7000 titles by them. It also provides new and updated information on many of the authors listed in the original four volumes. BAL and the Supplement have no canon. All books and pamphlets in the core genres published by Australian authors are included, regardless of perceived or accepted literary merit. To BAL, the self-published book of verse is as important as the prize-winning novel by an established author. This Supplement, like its predecessors, is an essential source for the study of Australian literature to the end of the twentieth century.

Disregard the critics. Australia's ABC, at ninety years of age, is demonstrably more valuable to Australians now than it has ever been. The ABC's home-grown Managing Director, David Anderson, gives us a rare insight into the ABC he knows intimately: a cultural powerhouse where Australian identity is celebrated, democracy is defended, and a very Australian brand of creativity is encouraged to flourish. This is a challenging era for many public broadcasters, with news media consolidation, globalised entertainment streams, and unreliable social media. Yet the ABC has never faltered or lost its relevance: on the contrary. This book sets out why Australians turn to their ABC now more than ever for information and news, solace and entertainment, pride and patriotism. Anderson lays out how the ABC will continue to innovate and develop as our essential and beloved national institution over the years leading to its centenary in 2032, and beyond.

Australia's prosperity relies on the continent's extraordinary natural--primarily mineral--riches and good fortune. But economic, financial, environmental, geopolitical, and societal pressures now threaten the nation's high living standards. The COVID-19 pandemic is the first of many trials to come. Lacklustre reform proposals are mired in ideological necrophilia: ideas which have been tried and failed. Politics is trading insults and slogans. Institutions lack the quality, skills, organisational memory, and courage to deliver the required solutions. A disengaged citizenry are focused on preserving their entitled way of life, refusing to accept that the well of plenty is approaching exhaustion. Written in accessible, acerbic prose, Fortune's Fool cuts through these issues to expose Australia's current dilemmas and choices. It dissects the pandemic, global trends, Australia's narrow 'house and holes' economy and its dependency on China, spotlighting a political paralysis that must be overcome and the changes that are urgently needed. For Australians remotely concerned about their own future and their children's, as well as the country's, Fortune's Fool is essential reading.

Why should we in Australia, or any country, care about poverty, human rights atrocities, health epidemics, environmental catastrophes, weapons proliferation, or any other problems afflicting faraway countries, when they don't, as is often the case, have any direct or immediate impact on our own safety or prosperity? Gareth Evans' answer is the approach he adopted when Australia's foreign minister. He argues that to be, and be seen to be, a good international citizen--a state that cares about other people's suffering, and does everything reasonably possible to alleviate it--is both a moral imperative and a matter of hard-headed national interest. The case for decency in conducting our international relations is based both on the reality of our common humanity, and a national interest just as compelling as the traditional duo of security and prosperity. Four key benchmarks matter most in assessing any country's record as a good international citizen: its foreign aid generosity; its response to human rights violations; its reaction to conflict, mass atrocities, and the refugee flows that are so often their aftermath; and its contribution to addressing global existential threats.

The post-digital publishing paradigm offers authors, readers, publishers, and scholars the opportunity to engage with the production and circulation of the book (in all its forms) beyond the conventional boundaries and binaries of the pre-digital and digital eras. Post-Digital Book Cultures: Australian Perspectives is a collection of scholarly writing that examines these opportunities, from a range of disciplinary and methodological approaches, with the aim of engaging with the questions that define post-digital book cultures beyond the role of e-books. Examinations of digital publishing in the literary field can often be characterised as either narratives of decline or narratives of revolution. As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, what has become clear is that neither of these approaches accurately encapsulate the role of 'the digital' on contemporary publishing practice. Rather than upending book publishing culture, the emergence of digital technologies and platforms in the field has complicated and recontextualised the production, circulation, and consumption of books.

At the height of the Victorian gold rush, between July 1852 and June 1853, hundreds of government-assisted migrants from Lancashire, England made their way to Australia and disembarked in Victoria. They were part of a huge flood of such migrants who were poured into the new-born colony as the colonial administration scrabbled to cope with the gold rush. The scheme was an unprecedented achievement in government-organised migration. Yet most historians have tended to dismiss these assisted migrants as the unskilled poorest-of-the-poor, and not of the same calibre as the working-class and middle-class unassisted migrants also arriving at the colony in great numbers. Made in Lancashire is a collective biography that explores in detail who the Lancashire assisted migrants were, their origins, why they migrated, where they went on arrival in Victoria, and what they made of their lives. Far from being the dross of England, these migrants were intelligent, highly motivated risktakers, many of whom went on to experience success as gold diggers, selectors, tradespeople, and entrepreneurs.

Autobiography or fiction? This question has shadowed the work of enigmatic Australian author Eve Langley since her death in 1974. Was her writing the truth, or false, or somewhere in between? What did it mean when she described her father as 'evil' and 'perverted' in her first published novel The Pea Pickers (1942) and a kindly figure in later, unpublished work? Did she really believe herself to be Oscar Wilde? Was she gender fluid? Eve and her sister (and co-conspirator) June held onto family secrets as if their very lives depended on it. Eve Langley has been in the news since the 1920s and reviewed on both sides of the globe. She was an author, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter and a long-term psychiatric inmate. But June, who traversed the Australian countryside dressed as a boy, a willing lifelong companion to her beloved sister, is a lonely anonymous figure. Drawing on contemporary evidence, Eve Langley and the Pea Pickers gives the key players in the author's life a voice, and the result is a fascinating but ultimately poignant tale of love and loss.

Nature creates viruses. But people and politics create pandemics. And pandemics create new politics. In the 1980s, the toxic politics of the response to HIV/AIDS turned a serious but manageable viral threat into a global pandemic that took the lives of 32 million people and brought illness and suffering to millions more. In 2020, COVID-19 emerged into a world where many governments had failed to heed the lessons of the past, and so they were unprepared and unable to stop its global spread. But some countries had learned the harsh lessons of HIV/AIDS, and had contained SARS1, Ebola, Zika and MERS. When coronavirus hit, they knew what to do to save their people from avoidable infections and deaths. In Unmasked: the Politics of Pandemics, Bill Bowtell draws on his four decades of experience in the global and local politics of public health to examine why some countries got it right with coronavirus while others collapsed into misery and chaos. He looks closely at the critical weeks when poor planning brought Australia to the brink of disaster, until the Australian people forced their governments to put public health before politics. Unmasked reveals how and why our politicians failed us during the greatest public health crisis of this century to date.

The level of public frustration and disengagement with political leaders has never been higher. At the same time, the problems we need them to deal with, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis in aged care, and accelerating climate change, are immediate and urgent. Based on his experience working closely with a large number of ministers and their private offices, both at the federal and state level, and his time in the United States, Don Russell reflects on politicians, the political process, and the role of government, and explains why our political leaders are as they are. Drawing on his experience, including his involvement in the golden age of public policy of the Hawke/Keating years and his observations on Australia's early success responding to the pandemic, he suggests that there is a pathway that can lead to dramatically better outcomes for the country and more satisfying and longer careers for our politicians. People want their elected officials to be informed, to be capable and creative, to be able to devise solutions that work, and then to be able to explain those solutions and bring the community with them. They want their elected officials to lead.

In A Secret Australia, eighteen independent and prominent Australians discuss what Australia has learned about itself from the WikiLeaks revelations. This is an Australia that officials do not want us to see. However Australians may perceive our place in the world, whether as dependable ally or good international citizen, WikiLeaks has shown us a startlingly different story. This is an Australia that officials do not want us to see, where the Australian Defence Force's 'information operations' are deployed to maintain public support for our foreign war contributions, where media-wide super injunctions are issued by the government to keep politicians' and major corporations' corruption scandals secret, where the US Embassy prepares profiles of Australian politicians to fine-tune its lobbying and ensure support for the 'right' policies. The revelations flowing from the releases of millions of secret and confidential official documents by WikiLeaks have helped Australians to better understand why the world is not at peace, why corruption continues to flourish, and why democracy is faltering. This greatest ever leaking of hidden government documents in world history yields knowledge that is essential if Australia, and the rest of the world, is to grapple with the consequences of covert, unaccountable and unfettered power. Contributors include author Scott Ludlam, former defence secretary Paul Barratt, lawyers Julian Burnside and Jennifer Robinson, academics Richard Tanter, Benedetta Brevini, John Keane, Suelette Dreyfus, Gerard Goggin and Clinton Fernandes, psychologist Lissa Johnson, as well as writers and journalists Andrew Fowler, Quentin Dempster, Antony Loewenstein, Guy Rundle, George Gittoes, Helen Razer and Julian Assange.

Whenever anyone tells you that only the big parties or star candidates have a chance of winning a seat in federal parliament, just say 'Cathy McGowan'. Running as a community-backed independent candidate, Cathy won the previously safe Liberal seat of Indi in 2013 and again in 2016 and passed Indi on to another independent in 2019 - a first in Australian history. Cathy tells how thousands of ordinary men and women in north-eastern Victoria got together, organised themselves and made their voices heard in Canberra. An inspiring tale and a primer for other communities looking to create change.--

Injustice. Survival. Memory. These are the stories of civilians arrested, deported, and incarcerated in camps at Hay, Orange and Tatura during the Second World War. Over 2500 men came from Britain to Australia on the Dunera, disembarking in Melbourne and Sydney in September 1940. Over 250 men, women and children came from Singapore on the Queen Mary three weeks later. Volume 2 of Dunera Lives follows the paths of a selection of these people, from their early lives before and during the Nazi years, through their arrival in Britain or the Straits Settlements in search of a safe haven, to their arrest as enemy aliens and subsequent deportation and incarceration in camps in Australia. Then, as free men, they start new lives in many parts of the world. What they made of their freedom is striking. This book is a chronicle of injury, endurance, courage, and transcendence.

Ken Inglis was one of Australia's most creative, wide-ranging and admired historians. During a scholarly career spanning nearly seven decades, his humane, questioning approach - summed up by the recurring query, 'I wonder...' - won him a large and appreciative audience. Whether he was writing about religion, the media, nationalism, the 'civil religion' of Anzac, a subject he made his own, or collaborating on monumental histories of Australia or the remarkable men aboard the Dunera, he brought wit, erudition and originality to the study of history. Alongside his history writing, he pioneered press criticism in Australia, contributed journalism to magazines and newspapers, and served as vice-chancellor of the fledgling University of Papua New Guinea. This collection of essays traces the life and work of this much-loved historian and observer of Australia life.

Winner of the Mollie Holman Doctoral Medal for Excellence, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, 2019.