New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies

After Australia (Affirm Press with the Sweatshop Literacy Movement 2021). No, Australia has not ended - it's a book edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad.Climate catastrophe, police brutality, white genocide, totalitarian rule and the erasure of black history provide the backdrop for stories of love, courage and hope. An anthology, twelve of Australia’s most daring Indigenous writers and writers of colour provide a glimpse of Australia as we head toward the year 2050.Unique voices and a great editor - whose input is apparent, but he's humbly kept in the background to let the writers shine, and we all benefit. Featuring Ambelin Kwaymullina, Claire G. Coleman, Omar Sakr, Future D. Fidel, Karen Wyld, Khalid Warsame, Kaya Ortiz, Roanna Gonsalves, Sarah Ross, Zoya Patel, Michelle Law and Hannah Donnelly. Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. Original concept by Lena Nahlous.Michael Mohammed Ahmad is the founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and editor of the critically acclaimed anthology, After Australia (Affirm Press, 2021). Mohammed's debut novel, The Tribe (Giramondo, 2014), won the 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelists of the Year Award. His second novel, The Lebs (Hachette Australia, 2018) won the 2019 NSW Premier's Multicultural Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Mohammed received his Doctorate of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University in 2017Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. 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

For the next five weeks, SSEAC Stories will be hosting a mini-series of podcasts on research partnerships in Southeast Asia. In the context of COVID-19, it has become clear that working in partnership is a critical part of being able to do research in Southeast Asia. Through interviews with University of Sydney academics working across all disciplines and at all stages in their careers, this mini-series will highlight strategies that our members have used to build and sustain partnerships with collaborators in Southeast Asia.In our first episode, Dr Thushara Dibley speaks with Associate Professor Jenny-Ann Toribio about a ten-year long research collaboration that she’s developed with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in Timor-Leste to combat animal diseases.Jenny-Ann is Associate Professor in Epidemiology at the University of Sydney. Jenny-Ann has conducted extensive applied research focused on biosecurity, emergency animal diseases and zoonoses in Australia, Indonesia, Philippines and Timor-Leste. Recent research of note in Australia includes evaluation of avian influenza risk for commercial chicken farms in New South Wales and risk awareness and risk mitigation practices among horse owners in relation to Hendra virus. Further afield, she has led collaborative research in eastern Indonesia on the evaluation of the risk for highly pathogenic avian influenza and classical swine fever with poultry and pig movement respectively; in Timor Leste on smallholder pig production and health; and in Fiji on evaluation of zoonotic tuberculosis risk for dairy farmers.For more information or to browse additional resources, visit the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre’s website: www.sydney.edu.au/sseac. 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

On June 4, Federal Police raided the home of Walkley award-winning journalist Annika Smethurst, changing her life forever. The police claimed they were investigating the publication of classified information, her employer called it a 'dangerous act of intimidation'. Annika believes she was simply doing her job.Ms Smethurst became the accidental poster woman for press freedom. Politicians even debated the merits of police searching through her underwear drawer. On Secrets (Hachette, 2020) considers the impact this invasion has had on her life, and examines press freedom.Annika Smethurst is a Walkley award-winning journalist. She is the Daily Telegraph's and Sunday Herald Sun's political editor.Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. 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

Wow! Food, family, memory, insight, body, mind - worth the effort this one.Eating with My Mouth Open (NewSouth, 2021) is food writing like you’ve never seen before: honest, brave, and exceptionally tasty. Lyrically written, Sam van Zweden offers a millennial response to classic food writers, revelling in body positivity on Instagram, remembering how Tupperware piled high with sweets can be a symptom of spiralling mental health, dissecting wellness culture and all its flaws, sharing the joys of living in a family of chefs and seeing a history of migration on her dinner plate.Recalling the writing of Lindy West and Roxane Gay, as well as classic food writers M.F.K. Fisher and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Eating with My Mouth Open considers embodiment and the meaning of true nourishment within the broken food system we live in. Not holding back from the struggles of mental illness and difficult conversations about weight and wellbeing, Sam Van Zweden advocates for a body politics that is empowering, productive and meaningful.Sam van Zweden is a Melbourne-based freelance writer interested in experimental nonfiction, essays, mental health, body writing, food, and memory. Sam’s writing has appeared in the Saturday Paper, Meanjin, The Big Issue, The Lifted Brow, Cordite, The Sydney Review of Books, The Wheeler Centre and others.Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. 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

Located amid tropical rainforest in the heart of Papua New Guinea, the Frieda River area is home to one of the biggest undeveloped gold and copper deposits in the Pacific. For decades, mining companies have prospected in this area in anticipation of a large-scale mine which may (or may not) open in the future. In Emilia E. Skrzypek, Revealing the Invisible Mine: Social Complexities of an Undeveloped Mining Project (Berghahn, 2020). Emilia 'Emilka' Skrzypek tells the story of Paiyamo people on whose land a potential mine may be located. Paiyamo people hope that the mine will lead to the development of their remote rural area, and in this book Skrzypek show the unique cultural logic they use to make the potential mine a reality, or -- to use Paiyamo terms -- to 'reveal' a mine whose existence has already affected their lives, but which has not yet emerged and become visible.In this episode of the podcast host Alex Golub speaks to Emilka about the potential Frieda mine, Paiyamo people, and the way they grapple with the existence of an anticipated mine. What does it mean to view knowledge in terms of its effect rather than its accuracy? How are relationships created and transformed as people realize older understandings and secrets had a meaning which is only now being understood in the present context? How might we use this analytic lens to think about the work of ethnography and fieldwork itself? These are just some of the questions which Alex and Emilka discuss in this interviewEmilia Skrzypek is a senior research fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Her most recent article, "Extractive entanglements and regimes of accountability at an undeveloped mining project" appears in the December 2020 number of Resources Policy. Alex Golub is an associate professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in Honolulu. His most recent publication is a biographical interview with Martha Macintyre, an anthropologist of mining, in the edited volume Unequal Lives: Gender, Race, and Class in The Western Pacific.  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

The bible and Australian society! Meredith Lake's published a new 2020 edition of The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History (NewSouth Books, 2020). It's history and sociology and reflections on religion's role on the 'Great Southern Land'. Meredith Lake gets under the skin of a text that’s been read, wrestled with, preached and tattooed, and believed to be everything from a resented imposition to the very Word of God.The Bible in Australia explores how in the hands of Bible-bashers, immigrants, suffragists, evangelists, unionists, writers, artists and Indigenous Australians, the Bible has played a contested but defining role in this country.Meredith Lake is an historian, broadcaster and award-winning writer interested in how Australians understand the big questions of faith and meaning. She currently hosts Soul Search on ABC Radio National - a weekly show about the lived experience of religion and spirituality. She has also guest presented ABC TV's Compass.Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. 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

Katharine Massam's A Bridge Between: Spanish Benedictine Missionary Women in Australia (ANU Press, 2020) is the first book detailing the Benedictine women who worked at New Norcia, examining their life in the Western Australian mission town. From the founding of a grand school intended for ‘nativas’, through to their house in the Kimberley-region, and the recruiting via a network of villages near Burgos in the north of Spain, this is a complex international history. A Bridge Between gathers a powerful, fragmented story from the margins of the archive, recalling the Aboriginal women who joined the community in the 1950s and the compelling reunion of missionaries and former students in 2001. By tracing the all-but-forgotten story of the community of Benedictine women who were central to the experience of the mission for many Aboriginal families in the twentieth century, this book lays a foundation for further work. 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

Nuns, inmates, community vs corporation, Australia, oasis in a metropolis.The Abbotsford Convent left to languish for years after the last of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd had gone. In its prime it had been a school, a refuge, a retreat, a workhouse and a prison-the single largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere.In the late 1990s a proposed high-density development threatened the idyllic riverside location, sparking outrage in the local community and further afield. Years of protesting, negotiating and fundraising followed and the convent, now on Australia's National Heritage List, has started a new life as a vibrant centre for art and culture.The Convent: A City Finds Its Heart (Miegunyah Press, 2020) tells the story of the site's rich history and the efforts to preserve it. It is an uplifting tale of community activism-a tangible reminder that the magic of the past can endure and what people-power can achieve.Stuart Kells, Adjunct Professor, La Trobe Business School, La Trobe University in Melbourne. His other roles include Research Fellow at Melbourne University’s Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, member of Monash University’s Centre for Regulatory Studies, roles in the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet, the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, and as an economist at accountancy firms PPB Advisory and KPMG. In addition, and maybe most pleasingly for us readers, Stuart is an accomplished and prized author of several genres: social history; science; literary history; economic and business history, and recently fiction.Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com 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

One of the most well-told episodes of the First World War, the 1915 Gallipoli expedition, also has its own long-ignored aspects - specifically, the story of how the Allied force successfully evacuated in the middle of winter under the guns of the Turkish defenders. Our guest for this episode of New Books in Military History is an expert on the Gallipoli campaign, retired chief oral historian of the Imperial War Museum in London, U.K., Peter Hart. In a rollicking and engaging interview with host Bobby WIntermute, Peter discusses his most recent book, The Gallipoli Evacuation (Living History, 2020), the oral historian's craft, and the overall conditions faced by British, ANZAC, French, and Turkish troops in the waning months of the campaign.  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

Today I talked to Melissa Harper about her book The Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia (University of Washington Press, 2020). Australians have always loved to step out in nature, whether off-track or along a marked route. Bushwalking – an organised long-distance walk in rugged terrain that requires maps and camping equipment, or a family day out – is one of our most popular pastimes. This landmark book, now updated, was the first to delve into its rich and sometimes quirky history.From the earliest days of European settlement, colonists found pleasure in leisurely strolls through the bush, collecting flowers, sketching, bird watching and picnicking. Yet over time, walking for the sake of walking became the dominant motive. Walking clubs proliferated, railways organised mystery hikes attended by thousands, and Paddy Pallin established his equipment business. Bushwalking – serious walking – was invented.Whether you are inclined to put on your walking boots and pack your sleeping bag, or would rather stay in a luxury hut, this surefooted and witty book reveals how the ordinary act of walking can become extraordinary.Melissa Harper is a senior lecturer in communications and arts at the University of Queensland. She has published widely on the history of walking in Australia, including the acclaimed first edition of Ways of the Bushwalker. She wrote the chapter about the billy in Symbols of Australia and is currently working on a history of fine dining.Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. 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