New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies

In his new book, The Search for a New National Identity: The Rise of Multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s (Peter Lang Publishing, 2016), Jatinder Mann, an assistant professor of history at Hong Kong Baptist University, offers a comparative look at the policies and politics of multiculturalism in Canada and Australia. He explores how the two countries navigated the transition from Britishness as the defining idea of community to multiculturalism as the defining idea of the nation. 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 his book, A Powerful Influence on Australian Affairs: A New History of the AWU (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), Nick Dyrenfurth, Executive Director of the John Curtin Research Centre, explores the history of the nation’s oldest and most influential trade union, the AWU. Over 131 years, the Australian Workers Union has had a significant impact on Australia’s national identity and its center-left politics. 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 his book, Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2017), Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia, explores the work of 11 writers who lived in the wheatbelt of southwestern Australia. Delving into the creative writing of authors like Albert Facey, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, and Jack Davis, he helps us understand the human effects of this massive-scale agriculture. 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 her book, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earthed and Sacred (Sydney University Press, 2017), Lyn McCredden, Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University, explores the sacred and secular themes in the writings of Western Australian author Tim Winton. By tracing ideas of class, gender, place, landscape, and belonging in Winton’s numerous works, she demonstrates how his writing eludes easy classification. 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 Animal Welfare in Australia: Politics and Policy (Sydney University Press, 2016), Peter John Chen, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Sydney, explores the issue of animal welfare in Australia through the lens of political science. He examines how the media, interest groups, government officials, and the Australian public engage in debate and construct policy. 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 her book, Smile, Particularly in Bad Weather: The Era of the Australian Airline Hostess (University of Western Australia Press, 2017), Prudence Black, a Research Associate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, explores the history of the airline hostess profession. From the early days of the 1930s until the 1980s, when airline hostesses became “flight attendants,” the issues of work, gender, and identity have been at the heart of the profession. 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 Australia’s Defence Strategy: Evaluating Alternatives for a Contested Asia (Melbourne University Press, 2017), Adam Lockyer, a Senior Lecturer in Security Studies at Macquarie University, explores how to use theory to evaluate defense strategies. He applies his analytical framework to several options facing Australia’s defense strategists. 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 her book, Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search For Human Antiquity (Melbourne University Press, 2017), Rebe Taylor, the Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, explores the life of Ernest Westlake, whose fascination with remnants and antiquity led him in the early 20th century to Tasmania, the southernmost Australian state, where he collected over 13,000 Aboriginal stone tools. But Westlake was surprised to find not an extinct race, but living Indigenous communities. 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 2017 Six Nations rugby tournament concluded this weekend. England successfully defended its championship, despite losing the last match against a strong Ireland side in Dublin–England’s only loss of the competition. Meanwhile, the new Super Rugby season just began, with clubs traveling between Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and now Argentina and Japan. Later this year, women’s sides from twelve countries, including Spain, Canada, and Hong Kong, will compete in the Women’s Rugby World Cup. Meanwhile, here in the US, rugby for women and girls has boomed in recent years, with more than 400,000 participants on club, high school, and university teams. And of course, that is all rugby union. Theres also the separate code of rugby league, which is most popular in northern England, New Zealand, and areas of Australia. As historian Tony Collins explains in The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby (Bloomsbury, 2015), rugby not only has a worldwide reach, it has been influential in the development of other sports. American, Canadian, and Australian football all developed from rugby in the 19th century. Even ice hockey can trace its roots to the sport. Tonys award-winning book offers a raucous and readable account of how this game that began among students at Rugby School in the 1840s has become the global, commercialized sport of today. 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 an activist application of her scholarly discipline, Dr Liz Conor’s Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (UWA Publishing, 2016) acknowledges its dual potential to disturb and to incite a reckoning – giving life to Audre Lorde’s famous quote that the learning process is something to be incited, like a riot. Using travelogues, cartoon strips, missionary diaries, paintings and lithographs, just to name a few, Dr. Conor’s consultation of a vast colonial archive challenges the amnesia in our national record and, accordingly, the racism and misogyny of our cultural imaginary. Recreating the settler-colonial imaginary and the tropes and stereotypes it projected in the imperial enterprise of knowledge production about Aboriginal women, Skin Deep exposes the interlocking oppressions of gender and race that manifested in the 18th, 19th and 20th century. From the innocent native-belle, to the beaten captive bride, the cannibalistic mother to the bare-footed domestic worker, the sexualised metonym of the virginal land to the unsightly, malevolent matriarch, the Aboriginal women was reduced by the settler to a canvas – recklessly painted with the ideologies, expectations and ambitions of the empire – making the Aboriginal women devastatingly skin-deep. Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture. 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