New Books in 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

Owning property. Being property. Becoming propertyless. These are three themes of white possession that structure Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s brilliant new inquiry into the dynamics of race and Indigeneity in “postcolonizing” societies like Australia.The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) collects and expands over a decade of work that speaks to key dynamics both at the heart, and sometimes obscured, within critical Indigenous studies. A Goenpul scholar from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island), Quandamooka First Nation (Moreton Bay) in Queensland, Australia, Aileen Moreton-Robinson is the author of numerous previous books and articles in the fields of law and sovereignty, whiteness, race and feminism, and is a Council Member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. 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 almost 100 years, it seemed like a good, even wholesome and optimistic idea to take young, working-class and poor British children and resettle them, quite on their own and apart from their families, in Canada, Australia, and southern Rhodesia. The impulse behind this program was philanthropic: to bring disadvantaged children living in crowded cities a better future by settling them in pristine, wide-open spaces, introducing them to nature, and letting them feel the sun on their backs. Yet the program was shot through with eugenic ideas and the racism of the age. British children were emissaries of the “kith and kin” empire, sent to “whiten” its outposts. But they could also be subject to repatriation–sometimes years after having been sent away in the first place–if their “racial fitness” was called into question. Race, nation, and identity form one of many themes Ellen Boucher examines in her fascinating, and sometimes painful, book Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869-1967 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Others include the rise and evolution of child psychology, changing ideas about the meaning of family, and the politics of empire. One kind of big picture in Empire’s Children is the shift from a unified British imperial identity to the rise of independent nationalisms throughout the empire. Another kind of big picture, though, comes from the stories told by those who grew up as child migrants and how they later came to perceive those experiences as they reflected back. When you study history you are perennially confronted with the fact that a thing that seemed wonderful not too long ago can later come to appear deplorable. Tracing the influences that produce shifts in moral conscience–whether psychological, social, economic, political, or emotional–is one of history’s chief tasks, and it is a task that Boucher accomplishes with great sensitivity and narrative elegance in Empire’s Children. 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 2012, a young Cherokee girl named Veronica became famous. The widespread and often coercive adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by non-Native families has long been known, discussed, and challenged in Indian Country. Now, because of an interview on Dr. Phil with the white South Carolina couple seeking to adopt Veronica, the issue went national. Veronica’s mother had agreed to the adoption, but her father, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wanted to raise her. And according to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 (ICWA), Indian children should grow up in Indian families whenever possible. The Supreme Court disagreed. In a 5-4 decision in June 2013, they remanded the case to the South Carolina Supreme Court, who promptly placed Veronica with the white couple. This story opens Margaret D. Jacobs’ new book, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). But instead of trading in the shallow myths that characterized mainstream media coverage of the “Baby Veronica” case, Jacobs offers a nuanced and often troubling history that puts such incidents in context, documenting the mid-century explosion of adoption and fostering of Indigenous children by white families, not only in the United States but other settler colonial countries like Australia and Canada. Jacobs’ book is one of trauma and violence, but also of courage and resistance, as Indigenous families struggled to reclaim the care of their children, leading to the ICWA in the United States and to national investigations, landmark apologies, and redress in Australia and Canada. 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

Mark Standen was a hero to drug enforcement police. Not only was he a great guy but he was an extremely effective police officer. Unfortunately, he also became a partner in the illicit drug industry. Deception is a book that tells the story of how Standen turned to the dark side and how the Australian Federal Police were able to catch him. In his new book Deception: The True Story of the International Drug Plot that Brought Down Australia’s Top Law Enforcer Mark Standen (Allen and Urwin, 2012), Charles Miranda provides us with a very detailed story of greed and its consequences. Standen uses his knowledge of policing and techniques of investigation to put together a system that should have defeated the efforts of the police. However, he was also protecting his partners and left clues that exposed his operations. This is not just a cop who goes rogue but a professional who builds a sophisticated process of communication. Unfortunately for Standen, the underground world is inefficient and, ultimately, corrupt. He discovered that when you play there you cannot trust anyone and eventually you can be a victim. I recommend this book for anyone interested in the field of organized crime. It is a sobering story for police and gives academics an insight into the details of the industry that we rarely see. But above all that it is a great read! 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