AustLit

The dissertation 'traced the development of the cross-cultural world of New South Wales to 1835 by exploring key cross-cultural actions, rituals and material exchanges'.

Source: Abstract.

In 1960, those interested in the study of Australian literature were served by a number of literary magazines, including Southerly, Overland, Quadrant and Meanjin. Australian literature was not widely accepted as a valid field of academic study at this time, but this view was frequently challenged by contributors to these magazines. James McAuley, poet and teacher at the University of Tasmania saw the need for an academic periodical to professionalise the study of Australian literature and recruited Laurie Hergenhan, newly arrived at the university, to be founding editor of Australian Literary Studies.

The first issue was launched in August 1963. Aimed at teachers and students of Australian literature, the issues produced in the 1960s printed foundation research on the colonial period, and criticism of more recent literature, in an attempt to define the field of study. Articles on the works of Henry Kingsley, Marcus Clarke, Rolf Boldrewood(T), Henry Lawson, Henry Kendall and John Shaw Neilson regularly featured during the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, criticism on contemporary writers such as Patrick White]m), Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Francis Webb and Thomas Keneally also appeared. During the 1980s and 1990s interest in the colonial period continued and the work of more contemporary writers was discussed, the most frequent subjects including Peter CareyC)), David Malouf, Les Murray and Brian Castro.

Since 1963, the 'Annual Bibliography of Studies in Australian Literature' has been printed in the May issue. For many years it has been the most comprehensive and up-to-date printed guide on criticism on Australian literature. Special issues of Australian Literary Studies have also been produced, concentrating on subjects such as the contemporary Australian short story, Australian suburbia, and the works of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Henry Handel Richardson and Les Murray. The Penguin New Literary History of Australia was released as a special issue in 1988.

Australian Literary Studies is often identified with its long-time editor, Laurie Hergenhan. The journal was produced at the University of Tasmania until 1975 when it was relocated to the University of Queensland where Hergenhan had moved four years earlier. Unlike other literary magazines such as Southerly and Meanjin, Australian Literary Studies publishes no creative writing, concentrating solely on the criticism of historical and contemporary Australian literature. While this concentration was at first seen as a positive element in literary grant applications, it became increasingly negative in the 1990s. With a consistent circulation of around one thousand, Australian Literary Studies was assisted by regular grants from Australian government arts agencies until 1996 when all funding was withdrawn. Since that time it has been produced with the assistance of the University of Queensland Press.

Leigh Dale became the editor in 2002. The journal was produced at the University of Wollongong. Dale continued in that role until 2015 when Julieanne Lamond became editor and the journal moved to an online only publication format. The new format journal was launched in February 2016 at the Australian National University, its new institutional home.

'Colonial exploration continues, all too often, to be rendered as heroic narratives of solitary, intrepid explorers and adventurers. This edited collection contributes to scholarship that is challenging that persistent mythology. With a focus on Indigenous brokers, such as guides, assistants and mediators, it highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century exploration in Australia and New Guinea was a collective and socially complex enterprise. Many of the authors provide biographically rich studies that carefully examine and speculate about Indigenous brokers' motivations, commitments and desires. All of the chapters in the collection are attentive to the specific local circumstances as well as broader colonial contexts in which exploration and encounters occurred.' (Source: TROVE)

'This book offers a fresh perspective in the debate on settler perceptions of Indigenous Australians. It draws together a suite of little known colonial women (apart from Eliza Fraser) and investigates their writings for what they reveal about their attitudes to, views on and beliefs about Aboriginal people, as presented in their published works. The way that reader expectations and publishers’ requirements slanted their representations forms part of this analysis.'

'All six women write of their first-hand experiences on Australian frontiers of settlement. The division into ‘adventurers’ (Eliza Fraser, Eliza Davies and Emily Cowl) and longer-term ‘settlers’ (Katherine Kirkland, Mary McConnel and Rose Scott Cowen) allows interrogation into the differing representations between those with a transitory knowledge of Indigenous people and those who had a close and more permanent relationship with Indigenous women, even encompassing individual friendship. More pertinently, the book strives to reveal the aspects, largely overlooked in colonial narratives, of Indigenous agency, authority and individuality.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'Circulating Cultures is an edited book about the transformation of cultural materials through the Australian landscape. The book explores cultural circulation, exchange and transit, through events such as the geographical movement of song series across the Kimberley and Arnhem Land; the transformation of Australian Aboriginal dance in the hands of an American choreographer; and the indigenisation of symbolic meanings in heavy metal music. Circulating Cultures crosses disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from historians, musicologists, linguists and dance historians, to depict shifts of cultural materials through time, place and interventions from people. It looks at the way Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts have changed through intercultural influence and collaboration.'(Publication summary)

'Hank Nelson was an academic, film-maker, teacher, graduate supervisor and university administrator. His career at The Australian National University (ANU) spanned almost 40 years of notable accomplishment in expanding and deepening our understanding of the history and politics of Papua New Guinea, the experience of Australian soldiers at war, bush schools and much else. This book is a highly readable tribute to him, written by those who knew him well, including his students, and also contains wide-ranging works by Hank himself. – Professor Stewart Firth, ANU.' (Publication summary)

'This book presents inter-disciplinary perspectives on the maritime journeys of the Macassan trepangers who sailed in fleets of wooden sailing vessels known as praus from the port city of Makassar in southern Sulawesi to the northern Australian coastline. These voyages date back to at least the 1700s and there is new evidence to suggest that the Macassan praus were visiting northern Australia even earlier. This book examines the Macassan journeys to and from Australia, their encounters with Indigenous communities in the north, as well as the ongoing social and cultural impact of these connections, both in Indonesia and Australia.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'The German missionary Carl Strehlow (1871–1922) had a deep ethnographic interest in Aboriginal Australian cosmology and social life, which he documented in his 7-volume work Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien that remains unpublished in English. In 1913, Marcel Mauss called his collection of sacred songs and myths an Australian Rig Veda. This immensely rich corpus, based on a lifetime on the central Australian frontier, is barely known in the English-speaking world and is the last great body of early Australian ethnography that has not yet been built into the world of Australian anthropology and its intellectual history.'

'The German psychological and hermeneutic traditions of anthropology that developed outside of a British–Australian intellectual world were alternatives to 19th-century British scientism. The intellectual roots of early German anthropology reached back to Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), the founder of German historical particularism, who rejected the concept of race as well as the French dogma of the uniform development of civilisation. Instead, he recognised unique sets of values transmitted through history and maintained that cultures had to be viewed in terms of their own development and purpose. Thus, humanity was made up of a great diversity of ways of life, language being one of its main manifestations. It is this tradition that led to a concept of cultures in the plural.' (Source: Publisher's website)

'This thesis examines the role of children's picture books in constructing cultural ideologies. It aims to analyse the dominant cultural ideologies inscribed in Thai and Australian children's picture books, with specific emphasis on how such identities are constructed through verbal and visual language. The analysis focuses on the changes, if any, in the construction of cultural ideologies in Thai and Australian children's picture books that won national awards from 1987 to 2006, and how the changes correspond to the impact of social change. The corpus chosen for analysis consists of 60 children's books, comprising 30 from Thailand and 30 from Australia. The picture books have either won the Thai National Book Development Committee Award or the Picture Book of the Year Award given by Children's Book Council of Australia (CBCA). The thesis is structured around three themes based on the ideological construction of power in the books, including the construction of age relations, gender relations and community relations. Despite the fact that Thai society has undergone enormous change over the last two decades, the analysis shows that award-winning Thai children's books have been written mainly from a conservative point of view. They work by providing the foundations for social harmony and respect of order in a patriarchal and hierarchical society where all members are expected to know their proper place and live their lives in ways that contribute to the benefit of the whole community. Some slight changes can be detected in the way perspectives on those cultural ideologies have shifted at certain periods. These include the way of giving more emphasis to a child's self discovery over adult authority, the attempt to create non sexist picture books, and changes in the meaning and implication of unity and cohesion. Yet the analysis reveals that an ethos of conservative discourse still informs the books. It highlights the use of representation to control the overall appearance of idealised discourse in Thai society. In contrast, there is much variety and range in the way cultural ideologies have been constructed in award winning Australian children's books. While an ethos of conservative discourse can still be detected in the corpus, a number of books show that such ways of seeing the world can be challenged, questioned and even proved to be inadequate. Unlike the Thai books, the representation of patriarchal and hierarchical society can be overturned by giving more prominence to children's sense of agency and imagination and by portraying male and female characters in a more symmetrical way. In contrast to the depiction of the smooth and harmonious relationship between people of the same cultural and community groups in the Thai books, some recent Australian picture books emphasise the conflicts and disputes between different social groups. These changes are analysed in the context of the impact of social change. Social and political topics, such as the emancipation of women through the feminist movement and issues relating to contemporary politics including refugees, border control and cultural difference are taken into account.'

Source: Abstract.

'From 1950, increasing numbers of Aboriginal and Māori women became nationally or internationally renowned. Few reached the heights of international fame accorded Evonne Goolagong or Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and few remained household names for any length of time. But their growing numbers and visibility reflected the dramatic social, cultural and political changes taking place in Australia and New Zealand in the second half of the twentieth century.

'This book is the first in-depth study of media portrayals of well-known Indigenous women in Australia and New Zealand, including Goolagong, Te Kanawa, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Dame Whina Cooper. The power of the media in shaping the lives of individuals and communities, for good or ill, is widely acknowledged. In these pages, Karen Fox examines an especially fascinating and revealing aspect of the media and its history — how prominent Māori and Aboriginal women were depicted for the readers of popular media in the past.' (Publication summary)

'For almost 40 years, Michael Walsh has been working alongside Indigenous people: documenting language, music and other traditional knowledge, acting on behalf of claimants to land in the Northern Territory, and making crucial contributions to the revitalisation of Aboriginal languages in NSW. This volume, with contributions from his colleagues and students, celebrates his abiding interest in and commitment to Indigenous society with papers in two broad themes. ‘Language, identity and country’ addresses the often complex relations between Aboriginal social groups and countries, and linguistic identity. In ‘Language, identity and social action’ authors discuss the role that language plays in maintaining social identities in the realms of conversation, story-telling, music, language games, and in education. ‘Language and Social Identity in Australian Indigenous Communities’ will be of interest to students of linguistics, Indigenous studies, anthropology, and sociology.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This dissertation forms one part of the sub-thesis requirement for a Masters in Science Communication with the National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University. The remaining part is an 'artefact', a children's book entitled Hang On Handstand (see Appendix 1). Designed to be a combined story/information book for primary school aged children, Hang On Handstand describes the plight of Australia's first marine fish (Brachionichthys hirsutus, the spotted handfish) to be listed as 'endangered' and shows how science came to the rescue. Specifically, this particular children's book aims to communicate aspects of marine science and promote awareness of the marine environment and related conservation issues, not just to children but also to their parents, carers and teachers (ie. via reading with, or to, the children). The dissertation explores the importance of communicating science and the value of children's literature and the 'story' as an effective science communication tool (Part I) . It also provides contextual information regarding the science and legislation behind threatened species and their conservation, including the 'real' spotted handfish story (Part II). Hopefully it may also highlight the value of the children's book as a potentially important means of assisting the remediation and recovery process for threatened species.'

Source: Abstract.