New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies

Between 1840 and 1860 the British Empire expanded rapidly in scale, with rampant annexation of territory and ruthless suppression of rebellion. These decades also witnessed an unprecedented movement of people across the Empire and around the world, with over 2.6 million emigrants leaving Britain in the 1850s alone. Managing Mobility: The British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Philip Harling examines how the British imperial state facilitated the mass migration of its impoverished subjects as labor assets, shipped across vast expanses of ocean to contribute to the economy of the Empire. Dr. Harling analyzes the ideological framework which underpinned these interventions and discusses the journeys taken by emigrants across four continents, considering the varied outcomes of these significant projects of social engineering. In doing so, this study demonstrates how the British imperial state harnessed migration to ensure and maintain a racialised global economic order in the decades after Emancipation.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Brynn Quick speaks with Dr Agi Bodis and Dr Jing Fang about international tertiary students in Australia. They discuss how these students can make connections between their university experiences, their curriculum, and the professional industries they hope to one day be a part of. They also discuss how international students bring rich linguistic, cultural and intellectual experiences to their university and wider Australian communities.Dr Bodis is a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University as well as the Course Director of the Applied Linguistics and TESOL program. Dr Fang is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie as well as a NAATI-certified translator and interpreter between English and Chinese. She also serves as a panel interpreter/translator for Multicultural NSW and as a NAATI examiner.For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies

People make sense of the world through stories, and stories about places inevitably shape how we treat, live on, and use those places. In Outback and Out West: The Settler Colonial Environmental Imaginary (U Nebraska Press, 2022), emeritus professor of English at the University of Nebraska Thomas Lynch takes those stories from two places - Australia and the arid American West - to compare how colonial stories have impacted land use practices. By placing Australian and American texts side by side, Lynch tracks the similar ways that settler colonialism played out across two deserts, while also highlighting important differences given the important ecological and social divergences between the two continents. Outback and Out West is also a book about material use. Rather than remaining in the realm of theory, Lynch places himself in the places he writes about, seeing first hand how settler colonial narratives have changed the land, and imploring readers to take concrete, identifiable, actions to nudge arid ecologies back toward health. Settlers found the West and the Outback strange upon first arrival - Lynch shows how recognizing that everyplace is not just normative, but is a home to somebody is the first step toward saving an ailing planet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies

Bringing concepts from critical transitional justice and peacebuilding into dialogue with education, Schooling, Conflict and Peace in the Southwestern Pacific: Becoming Enemy Friends (Bristol University Press, 2024) by Dr. David Oakeshott examines the challenges youth and their teachers face in the post-conflict settings of Bougainville and Solomon Islands.Youth in these places must reconcile with the violent past of their parents’ generation while also learning how to live with people once on opposing ‘sides'. This book traces how students and their teachers form connections to the past and each other that cut through the forces that might divide them. The findings illustrate novel ways to think about the potential for education to assist post-conflict recovery.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s episodes on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies

A riveting expose of the global oil industry' s multi-decade conspiracy to muddy the waters around the science of climate change and use the Australian government to undermine worldwide efforts to address environmental devastation. Researched and written by one of Australia' s most fearless investigative journalists, Slick: Australia's Toxic Relationship with Big Oil (U Queensland Press, 2024) reveals how the US petroleum industry was warned about its environmental impacts back in the 1950s and yet went on to build the Australian oil industry, which in turn tried to drill the Great Barrier Reef, sought to strongarm governments, and joined a global effort to bury the science of climate change and delay action despite knowing the harms it would cause. Slick also tells the stories of fire and flood survivors, as well as of the activists engaged in a high-risk fight for the future of Australia and of the efforts being made to save ourselves from catastrophe. In this superb, in-depth work of journalism, Royce Kurmelovs provides an on-the-ground examination of how the fossil fuel industry captured Australia, and outlines what' s at stake for the survival of the planet and our democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies

Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell, a postdoctoral fellow at Goethe University, Frankfurt, shares insights from her upcoming book on contemporary Australian literature and the Anthropocene. She explores how literature can challenge colonial narratives and illuminate Indigenous perspectives on environmental justice. Discussions include the interplay between agriculture and colonial legacies, and how storytelling serves as a tool for cultural resilience and activism. Bartha-Mitchell argues for the arts as vital in reimagining our relationship with the planet amid crisis.

In Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965 (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. David R. Saunders demonstrates that the withdrawal of the British imperial state from Sabah did not result in the decolonization of the territory. From the late 1940s to the 1960s, international anti-colonialism interacted with regional competition over Sabah to result in a paradoxical increase of British power and influence on the ground. Meanwhile, ethnic, social, and political heterogeneity in Sabah contributed to fragmentation and disunity, undermining the development of a local anti-colonial movement. Instead, a class of influential local elites seized power as competing attempts by the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaya to incorporate the territory into their respective archipelagic spheres grew in strength.Due to these local and international rivalries, Dr. Saunders argues, Sabah's eventual merger with the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 prompted an extension of colonial-style rule, resource extraction, the suppression of local autonomy, and the imposition of an externally-configured national identity.Chasing Archipelagic Dreams underscores the significance of regional rivalries in the South China Sea and highlights the fate of subaltern communities bisected by (post)colonial borders.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies

Taking readers to the farms and factories, the marae and churches where Māori lived, worked and raised their families, Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Home Front during the Second World War (Auckland University Press, 2024) by Dr. Angela Wanhalla, Dr. Sarah Christie, Dr. Lachy Paterson, Dr. Ross Webb and Dr. Erica Newman tells the story of the profound transformation in Māori life during the Second World War.While the Māori Battalion fought overseas, the Māori War Effort Organisation and its tribal committees engaged Māori men and women throughout Aotearoa in the home guard, the women’s auxiliary forces, and national agricultural and industrial production. Māori mobilisation was an exercise of rangatiratanga and it changed how Māori engaged with the state. And, as Māori men and women took up new roles, the war was to become a watershed event for Māori society that set the stage for post-war urbanisation.From ammunition factories to kūmara fields, from Te Puea Hērangi to Te Paipera Tapu, Te Hau Kāinga provides the first substantial account of how hapori Māori were shaped by the wartime experience at home. It is a story of sacrifice and remarkable resilience among whānau, hapū and iwi Māori.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies

A celebrity decorator with blue hair. A single mother who advised JFK in the Oval Office. A Christian nudist with a passion for almond milk.As explored by Dr. Yves Rees in Travelling to Tomorrow: The Modern Women Who Sparked Australia’s Romance with America (New South, 2024), a century ago, ten Australian women did something remarkable. Throwing convention to the wind, they headed across the Pacific to make their fortune. In doing so, they reoriented Australia towards the United States years before politicians began to lumber down the same path.For the artist Mary Cecil Allen, this meant spreading the word about American abstract expressionism. For the naturopath Alice Caporn, it meant evangelising fruit juices and salads. For the swimmer Isabel Letham, it was teaching synchronised swimming. Others imported the latest thinking in dentistry, fashion, design, economics, law, music, medicine and more. They were rebels, they were trailblazers, they were disruptors. Individually, they have extraordinary stories; together, they change the narrative of Australian history.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies

Over the two decades since the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, peacebuilding interventions around the globe have increasingly incorporated gender perspectives. These initiatives have used both development programs and gender mainstreaming to advance women's empowerment, with the aim of making peacebuilding more effective as well as building more stable societies and efficient economies. This goal has been manifested in a wide range of programs and projects-or "gender interventions"—including economic empowerment measures, gender quotas, gender-responsive budgeting, and legal reforms. Yet, the results have been uneven, provoking a sizable debate among scholars and practitioners seeking to explain the shortcomings and improve the outcomes.In Building Peace, Rebuilding Patriarchy: The Failure of Gender Interventions in Timor-Leste (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dr. Melissa Johnston explains why gender interventions often fail to help those who most need them, using the case of Timor-Leste, a country subjected to high levels of peacebuilding and gender interventions between 1999 and 2017. Looking at three types of gender interventions—gender-responsive budgeting, the law against domestic violence, and microfinance initiatives—Dr. Johnston argues that these reforms have produced mixed results because they reinscribe entrenched class and gender hierarchies in their implementation.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/australian-and-new-zealand-studies