Society & Social Sciences Books

Individual contributors, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, demonstrate how local music and dance genres have been subjected to missionary, institutional, popular and global influences. They provide a cultural background and history of Torres Strait...

ASP's best-selling publication. An attractive educational tool which aims to represent all the language groups of Australia's Indigenous people.

Dhuuluu-Yala is a Wiradjuri phrase meaning 'to talk straight' and this book is straight talk about publishing Indigenous literature in Australia. It also includes broader issues that writers need to consider: engaging with readers and reviewers.The book...

How many Aboriginal languages are there? Where are they spoken? How are they learned by children? Are there dictionaries of Aboriginal languages? What is the connection between the land, people and language in Aboriginal Australia? This book answers...

What is the place of Australia's colonial memorials in today's society? Do we remove, destroy or amend? Monumental Disruptions investigates how these memorials have been viewed, and are viewed, by First Nations people to find a way forward.In June 2020,...

**Shortlisted, Prime Minister's Literary Awards 2024, Non-fiction**This book is a collected works of one of Australia's most accomplished media personalities. Chronicling his career since 2007, Close to the Subject presents a selection of pieces...

' This is my knowledge. It has been handed down to me from my grandmothers and grandfathers, my mothers and my fathers. I am sharing it with you because I want people to know about my life.'Ninu Grandmothers' Law is a definitive account of a traditional...

An exemplar of Indigenous Studies writing, epistemologically, theoretically and methodologicallyA collection of writings on women and Aboriginal identity from 14 senior Indigenous academics and community leaders. The collection engages with questions...

Aboriginal Elder David Mowaljarlai and photographer Jutta Malnic rekindle a story that constitutes the oldest collective memory of humankind. Yorro Yorro tells of Wandjina creation spirits and their 'crossing over' into ancestral beings...

** Shortlisted for WA Premier's Prize for Book of the Year 2023 **'... you need an organisation like the KLC to be your shield and spear, to be able to cut through the bureaucracy to make change. To be able to protect things that are important to...

'Nanna was an imposing woman. She was large and dark, with strong arms and silver hair that fell to her waist ... Her scars bore testament to her physical adventures...yet she remained the epitome of femininity and strength.' - Gail Hunt, youngest...

Age range 7+'These stories form part of our collective history, the way we speak of and live culture still today, and the importance of passing on such stories to younger generations.' - Dr. Anita Heiss, Ed.Growing up Wiradjuri is a...

'It has been over 100 years since our father was born, 80 years since Father enlisted in the AIF, and over 60 years since he died. How do we go beyond what we knew from our Mother's stories of him? The past, present and future need to be spoken about and...

Traditional Healers of the Central Desertcontains unique stories and imagery and primary source material: the ngangkari speak directly to the reader. Ngangkari are senior Aboriginal people authorised to speak publicly about Anangu (Western Desert...

The first draft of this book was written under a tree on the slope of a sandhill where, for several years, Englishwoman Pat Lowe shared a desert camp with her lifetime partner, Walmajarri man Jimmy Pike. While spending time in the red heart of country...

Lorraine McGee-Sippel was just a small girl when she asked her parents what a half-caste was. It was the 1950s and the first step on a journey that would span decades and lead her to search for her birth family. In the historic climate of the Rudd...

This is the autobiography of Ambrose Mungala Chalarimeri, a Kwini man from the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. Ambrose speaks out honestly, without malice or accusation, on a number of subjects including the appropriation of rock art, the...

Chi Vu takes the central figure in a traditional Buddhist folktale, a deranged killer who wears his victims' fingers in a garland around his neck, and turns him into a menacing abbatoir worker who carries bloody chunks of meat home to his lodgings in...

Wild & Woolley: A Publishing Memoir is Wilding's rollicking account of those heady bohemian years in the 1970s and 80s, charting the growth, the experiments, and the development of this innovative small press against a background of social upheaval...

The three long essays that make up The Bone House are an extended meditation on the life of the body and the life of the mind, each based on a single theme and woven out of the same few elemental symbols of earth, and water, fire and...

Making Australia Slightly Better Than Average Again(TM) is Mark Swivel's soundbite manifesto as he embarks on a bid for the senate in 2019. Swivel argues our political class detached from the rest of us a long time ago and has no real purpose beyond...

Holocene Pointbreaks presents a triptych of long poems that veer physically, temporally, and textually across the lands of the Dharawal and Eora Nations. From morning reflections on Australia's most polluted urban waterway, the 'Cooks River', to a...

Books one to four in this carefully researched series cover the development of the necessary grammatical knowledge, from the early years to the end of junior school in a practical and readily accessible form. These contain write-in activities.The Growing...

Charities play an outsize role in the social, cultural and economic life of the nation, delivering goods and services on which lives depend. To effectively serve their communities, charities also participate in politics: campaigning for changes to law...

In 1975, as Gough Whitlam's government hurtled towards its demise, a nineteen-year-old arts student at the University of Melbourne, Kim Carr, began a long march.Raised in an avowedly blue-collar household headed by his boilermaker father, Carr eschewed...

Violence against women and children is a national crisis. Nearly a decade has passed since family violence was first declared a national emergency in 2015, and yet communities are still taking to the streets to demand greater leadership and action, and...

An idealist as well as a pragmatist, and someone who believes passionately in equality, democracy and empowerment, Race Mathews has inspired and mentored many.Race was principal private secretary to Gough Whitlam in the lead-up to Whitlam's election as...

*Victorian Community History Awards : History Publication Commendation*Save Our Sons tells for the first time the full story of the Save Our Sons movement of Australian women who banded together to oppose conscription during the Vietnam War.In 1965,...

Whenever anyone tells you that only the big parties or star candidates have a chance of winning a seat in federal parliament, just say 'Cathy McGowan'. Running as a community-backed independent candidate, Cathy won the previously safe Liberal seat of...

Ken Inglis was one of Australia's most creative, wide-ranging and admired historians. During a scholarly career spanning nearly seven decades, his humane, questioning approach - summed up by the recurring query, 'I wonder...' - won him a large...

'My journey to this book is the culmination of a long-held fascination with the history and currency of Australia's domestic interior. Having been born in a remote, desert-bound Queensland town, I have felt its power as a solace; a retreat from the...

What is happening inside theworld's most militarised zone? This book is the result ofthe authors' visit to the Kashmir Valley, the northernmost region of the Indiansubcontinent, in December 2016, but it encapsulates the experiences andunderstanding of...

From the maelstrom of the Depression and World War II, fromCommunist Party membership in the 1930s-1950s, and early attachment to thefeminism and peace, Jean Blackburn emerged as a significant publicintellectual. Her life work was the attachment of...

Whatmakes one nation curious about another nation? Curious enough that the study ofthe other's culture and language becomes a natural commitment or something thatcould be described as a national project? This question lies behind much of thewriting in...

Jakartabased Andreas Harsono is one of the most knowledgeable, experienced,high-profile and courageous of reporters and commentators on contemporaryIndonesian society. Race, Islam and Power: Ethnic and ReligiousViolence in Post-Suharto...

Professor Lord Meghnad Desai is a world-renowned commentator on globalisation and de-globalisation. He is currently Chair of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) Advisory Board, which facilitates discussion between key...

What isthe purpose of an intelligence organisation? The short answer is to transformdisparate and ambiguous information into a product that clarifies nationalsecurity decision-making. Ideally, that process ought to be politically neutraland detached from...

In CreativityCrisis Robert Nelson argues that university education is systematicallyuncreative and suggests how this might be changed. Constructive alignment, thecentrepiece of today's university pedagogy, promotes mechanistic thinking andthe anxious...

In a world of fake news and populist politics, elections can seem like theatre. With growing rates of informal votes and a perceived narrowing of differences between the major parties, do Australian elections really matter? Taking ten examples, this book...

In 1969 car crashes killed over 1000 Victorians, making Victoria's roads some of the world's most deadly.By 2016, the fatality rate had been cut by 85% and Victorians are now taking seriously the goal of eliminating death on the roads altogether.This...

Manga Vision examines cultural and communicative aspects of Japanese comics, drawing together scholars from Japan, Australia and Europe working in areas as diverse as cultural studies, linguistics, education, music, art, anthropology, and...

What woman forgets the moment of discovering her first period?  The shock? Fear? Panic? Loathing? Embarrassment? Pride?  Happiness?First Blood examines the ways in which women from countries as diverse as India and Sri Lanka,...

This is the rollicking tale of Australia's first true adventure playground, when children were allowed to use a patch of public land as their own backyard, to play in freely as they wished, not as adults directed them. They chased their dreams and...

Technology is radically transforming society. From social media to artificial intelligence, our world is now governed by algorithms, powerful tools that not only predict human behaviour but affect how we look at each other, and ourselves. At the same...

In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision that overturned Roe v Wade, declaring that the American Constitution did not protect the right to abortion. Several US states immediately banned abortion, while others were quick to...

A new format of an acclaimed history - joint winner of the Northern Territory Chief Minister's History Book Award 2013.In 1883, pastoralists began to drive great herds of cattle into the Northern Territory's Victoria River District. They entered a vast...