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The Yellow Lady is the first major critique of Australian impressions of Asia. Alison Broinowski argues that Australians have been backward in developing an appropriate image of themselves because of their ignorance of and ambivalence towards Asians. She traces the history of Australian ideas about Asia and the Pacific from pre-colonial time to the present, and concludes that some of these perceptions, no matter how irrational or archaic, continue to underlie the political and economic decisions Australians make about the Asia-Pacific region. No one has ever looked so exhaustively at Australian images of Asia. Alison Broinowski, a longtime diplomat and writer about Asian issues, identifies t...
In Australia's rush to commemorate all things Anzac, have we lost our ability to look beyond war as the central pillar of Australia's history and identity? The passionate historians of the Honest History group argue that while war has been important to Australia - mostly for its impact on our citizens and our ideas of nationhood - we must question the stories we tell ourselves about our history. We must separate myth from reality - and to do that we need to reassess the historical evidence surrounding military myths. In this lively collection, renowned writers including Paul Daley, Mark McKenna, Peter Stanley, Carolyn Holbrook, Mark Dapin, Carmen Lawrence, Stuart Macintyre, Frank Bongiorno and Larissa Behrendt explore not only the militarisation of our history but the alternative narratives swamped under the khaki-wash - Indigenous history, frontier conflict, multiculturalism, the myth of egalitarianism, economics and the environment.
This study explores how Australia appears to people from to Asian societies with the most significant interactions with Australia. The surveys concentrate on people whose views are on the public record in various media, who significantly reflect opinion in their society, and who can therefore be taken to be both influential and to some extent representative. The results of this comprehensive survey, which suggest Australia has an image problem in the region, are detailed.
An updated and authoritative account of Australia’s involvement with nuclear power, including the AUKUS nuclear submarine pact. Based on previously classified files and interviews with some of Australia’s prominent politicians and diplomats, the first edition of Fact or Fission? revealed that the nation’s nuclear policies had a chequered history. We sold, and continue to sell, uranium abroad, but rejected plans to build nuclear reactors in Australia. We switched from wanting our own nuclear weapons during the Cold War to giving strong support for a sane international non-proliferation regime. But now the narrative needs updating. Since the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, an i...
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‘Australian governments find it easy to go to war. Their leaders seem to be able to withdraw with a calm conscience, answerable neither to God nor humanity.’ Australia lost 600 men in the Boer War, a three-year conflict fought in the heart of Africa that had ostensibly nothing to do with Australia. Coinciding with Federation, the war kickstarted Australia’s commitment to fighting in Britain’s wars overseas, and forged a national identity around it. By 1902, when the Boer War ended, a mythology about our colonial soldiers had already been crafted, and a dangerous precedent established. This is Henry Reynolds at his searing best, as he shows how the Boer War left a dark and dangerous legacy, demonstrating how those beliefs have propelled us into too many unnecessary wars – without ever counting the cost.
This is a fresh and surprising account of Japan's culture from the 'opening up' of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychological fall-out of breakneck modernization. These people all sprang from the soil of modern Japan, but their personalities and projects failed to fit. They were 'dark blossoms': both East-West hybrids and home-grown varieties that wreathed, probed and sometimes penetrated the new structures of mainstream Japan.
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This anthology celebrates 10 years of the Byron Bay Writers' Festival, with contributions from twenty-four leading Australian writers who have also appeared at the Festival. Writers include Kate Grenville, Peter Goldsworthy, Christopher Kremmer, Anita Heiss, Roger McDonald, Nick Earls and Thea Astley, and topics addressed range from the deeply personal to the powerfully political. At a time when discussion can be read as sedition and free expression is increasingly muted, writers' festivals are important forums for independent intelligent discussion, something the Byron Bay Writers Festival has provided from its inception. Writers address the things that matter to them, as writers and as Australians, and contributions range from essays to short stories and a poem. Like the Festival itself, the anthology is by turns (and sometimes all at once) passionate, considered, witty and intellectual and provides a fascinating overview of Australian writers today.
Women novelists of the Sri Lankan diaspora make a significant contribution to the field of South Asian postcolonial studies. Their writing is critical and subversive, particularly concerned as it is with the problematic of identity. This book engages in insightful readings of nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora: Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003); Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991), The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006); Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Turtle Nest (2003); Karen Roberts’s July (2001); Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007); and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008). These text...