New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies

Today, someone in the wealthiest 1 per cent of adults – a club of some 40,000 people – has a net worth 68 times that of the average New Zealander. Too Much Money: How Wealth Disparities are Unbalancing Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2021) is the story of how wealth inequality is changing Aotearoa New Zealand. Possessing wealth opens up opportunities to live in certain areas, get cer...

The paradox of Progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Harvard UP, 2019), Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-ce...

Te Rauparaha is most well known today as the composer of the haka ‘Ka mate’, made famous the world over by the All Blacks. A major figure in nineteenth-century history, Te Rauparaha was responsible for rearranging the tribal landscape of a large part of the country after leading his tribe Ngāti Toa to migrate to Kapiti Island. He is venerated by his own descendants but reviled with equal passion b...

The Currowan fire – ignited by a lightning strike in a remote forest and growing to engulf the New South Wales South Coast – was one of the most terrifying episodes of Australia’s Black Summer. It burnt for seventy-four days, consuming nearly 5000 square kilometres of land, destroying well over 500 homes and leaving many people shattered. Bronwyn Adcock fled the inferno with her children. Her husb...

Matthew Ricketson joins to discuss how newsrooms, the engine rooms of reporting, have shrunk. A generation of journalists has borne witness to seismic changes in the media and this book shares their stories as essays and narrative interviews. Names include  from more than 50 Australian journalists – including Amanda Meade, David Marr and Flip Prior – Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journ...

Today I talk to Mark Beehre about his new book, A Queer Existence, published by Massey University Press New Zealand 2021. A Queer Existence is a major documentary project that uses photographic portraiture and oral history to record the life experiences of a group of twenty-seven gay men born since the passing of the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986. In New Zealand, discrimination in work was out...

Today I talk to Jared Davidson, the author of The History of a Riot: Class, Popular Protest and Violence in Early Colonial Nelson (Bridget Williams Books, 2021). In 1843, the New Zealand Company settlement of Nelson was rocked by the revolt of its emigrant labourers. Over 70 gang-men and their wives collectively resisted their poor working conditions through petitions, strikes and, ultimately, vio...

In Child Sexual Abuse Inquiries and the Catholic Church: Reassessing the Evidence (Firenze UP, 2021), Dr Miller analyses empirical findings, methodologies and conclusions of the three main national inquiries (Irish, US, Australian) into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Church responses. Contrasts are drawn with overall media reporting of the problem, such as when abuse peaked, and cu...

In the name of agriculture, urban growth, and disease control, humans have drained, filled, or otherwise destroyed nearly 87 percent of the world's wetlands over the past three centuries. Unintended consequences include biodiversity loss, poor water quality, and the erosion of cultural sites, and only in the past few decades have wetlands been widely recognized as worth preserving. Emily O'Gorman...

Nicholas, today's guest, explains Australia has no war hero more impressive than Tongerlongeter. Leader of the Oyster Bay nation of south-east Tasmania in the 1820s and ’30s, he and his allies led the most effective frontier resistance ever mounted on Australian soil. They killed or wounded some 354 – or 4 per cent – of the invaders of their country. Tongerlongeter’s brilliant campaign inspired te...

In this episode, Camilla T.N. Sørensen joins Andreas Bøje Forsby from NIAS for a conversation about the Indo-Pacific region as seen from a Danish and broader European perspective. Camilla was recently tasked by the Danish government to provide an assessment of current development trends in the Indo-Pacific ahead of a forthcoming new Danish foreign and security policy. Apart from discussing the sco...

In today’s global commerce and communication, linguistic diversity is in steady decline across the world as speakers of smaller languages adopt dominant forms. While this phenomenon, known as ‘language shift’, is usually regarded as a loss, this book adopts a different angle and addresses the following questions: What difference does using a new language make to the way speakers communicate in eve...

In Tautai: Sāmoa, World History, and the Life of Ta’isi O.F. Nelson (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), O’Brien chronicles the life of a man described as the “archenemy” of New Zealand and the British Empire. He was Sāmoa’s richest man who used his wealth and unique international access to further the Sāmoan cause and was financially ruined in the process. In the aftermath of the First World War,...

Cian T. McMahon is an associate professor of history at University of Nevada-Las Vegas. His research focuses on the history and identity of the Irish Diaspora. In this interview, he discusses his new book The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (NYU Press, 2021), a social history of migration during the Great Irish Famine (1845-55). Drawing primarily on migrants’ diari...

Today I talked to Mark McKenna about his new book Return to Uluru: A Killing, Hidden history, a Story that Toes to the Heart of the Nation (Black Inc, 2021) When McKenna set out to write a history of the centre of Australia, he had no idea what he would discover. One event in 1934 - the shooting at Uluru of Aboriginal man Yokunnuna by white policeman Bill McKinnon, and subsequent Commonwealth inqu...

Helen Sword, writing champion, brings us into the word gym. Or maybe kitchen. Either way, The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (U Chicago Press, 2016) is a short, sharp introduction to great writing based around 5 principles: --use active verbs whenever possible; --favour concrete language over vague abstractions; --avoid long strings of prepositional phrases; --employ adjectives and adverbs on...

I only ever asked you for one thing,' my father said, a quiver in his voice. 'Just this one thing.' It was as though I had smashed the Ten Commandments. 'Oh father,' I cried, grovelling at his ankles while my mother and siblings looked on. 'The one thing you asked of me - is everything.' Bani Adam has known all his life what was expected of him. To marry the right kind of girl. To make the House o...

In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the Pacific. In clear, accessible language Thomas shows us that most Pacific Islanders are in fact 'inter-islanders', or people defined by their movement across the ocean and between islands, rather than 'trapped' in islands in a far sea. Thomas also descri...

Today on New Books in Gender Studies Jana Byars talks with Lindy McDougall, of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia about her new book, The Perfect Vagina: Cosmetic Surgery in the Twenty-First Century, out this year, 2021, with Indiana University Press. In The Perfect Vagina, Lindy McDougall provides an ethnographic account of women who choose FGCS in Australia and the physicians who perform...

In Faith in Freedom: Muslim Immigrant Women’s Experiences of Domestic Violence (Melbourne University Press, 2019), Nafiseh Ghafournia explores questions of domestic violence in the context of Muslim immigrant women in Australia. Aiming to correct existing accounts of Muslim women’s lives and experiences particularly as immigrants, the study uses an intersectional framework to deepen our understand...

Australia and dingos - we have a past and future, and not without controversy.  Dingo Bold: The Life and Death of K'gari Dingoes (Sydney UP, 2021) examines this relationship, with Rowena Lennox's encounter with a dingo, 'Bold', on K'gari (Fraser Island). There are intense, polarised opinions over dingo conservation and control. How should we live with dingos? Native wildlife or feral dogs? Wild or...

Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state, its waters home to hundreds, if not thousands, of shipwrecks. As maritime neighbours with both a common boundary and a shared history, protecting and preserving this maritime heritage is an important element of the Australia-Indonesia relationship. In recent years, government agencies from both countries have cooperated to manage the wreck of HM...

Boy On Fire: The Young Nick Cave (HarperCollins, 2020) is the first volume of a long-awaited, near-mythical biography of Nick Cave by award-winning writer, Mark Mordue. A beautiful, profound and poetic biography of the formative years of the dark prince of Australian rock 'n' roll, Boy on Fire is Nick Cave's creation story. This is a portrait of the artist as, first, a boy, and then as a young man...

Children and youth are front and center in the context of global mass migration and the social discord around questions of multicultural inclusion that it often ignites. Imprecise portrayals of their inclination to either embrace diversity or to incite racism are used to exemplify both the success and failures of the multicultural project. In the context of young people’s heightened politicization...

Professor Wayne Hudson knows a lot - a whole lot - about religion and society. In Australian Jurists and Christianity (The Federation Press, 2021) Wayne, as co-editor, assembles a collection of biographical essays providing new perspectives on the relationship between law and religion in Australia. It claims that the relationship between law and religion was more significant in Australia than has...