Society and culture: general Books

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...

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...

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...

*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,...

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...

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...

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...

In March 2020, schools and childcare centres across Australia were forced to close to control the spread of the recently arrived novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Families and carers suddenly had to adjust to long periods of home-schooling, disparities in...

In 1946 Aboriginal people walked off pastoral stations in Western Australia's Pilbara region, withdrawing their labour from the economically important wool industry to demand improvements in wages and conditions. Their strike lasted three years. On Red...

What does reconciliation and truth-telling look like, and how do we as a nation find justice for Indigenous people?In this deeply personal work, Inala Cooper shares stories of her family to show the impact of colonisation on the lives of Aboriginal...

Rarely is the public taken deep into the inner sanctum of major news organisations. In this extraordinary book, award-winning journalist John Lyons goes to the heart of how the media reports - or does not report - one of the biggest stories of our time:...

One in five Australian women has been the victim of a sexual assault. For these women, there is less than a 1 per cent chance that their rapist has been arrested, prosecuted and convicted of the crime. These are the bare numerical facts of system failure...

The exposs in early 2021 of sexism and sexual violence in Parliament House prompted women (and some men) across the country to take to stages, lecterns and social media to express their rage and demand action. However, while these events highlighted that...

The recent revelations and allegations of sexual harassment and assault in the Australian Parliament have prompted furious responses. Political leaders have attempted to limit the damage by referring to the lack of criminal charges, resisting a...

Fatal Contact explores the devastating infectious diseases introduced into the Indigenous populations of Australia after the arrival of the British colonists in 1788. Epidemics of smallpox, tuberculosis, influenza, measles and sexually transmitted...

*Victorian Community History Awards : History Publication Commendation*At the height of the Victorian gold rush, between July 1852 and June 1853, hundreds of government-assisted migrants from Lancashire, England, made their way to Australia and...

The post-digital publishing paradigm offers authors, readers, publishers and scholars the opportunity to engage with the production and circulation of the book (in all its forms) beyond the conventional boundaries and binaries of the pre-digital and...

The scandal involving Dyson Heydon, former justice of the High Court, confirmed that the scourge of sexual harassment in Australian workplaces was also to be found in the chambers of one of the seven most senior judges in the country. An unquestioning...

The essays in this collection explore transcultural events to reveal deeper understandings of the dynamic nature, power and effect of performance as it is created and witnessed across national and cultural boundaries. Focusing on historical and...

Australian archaeology has been involved in a great enterprise over the last sixty years, uncovering the deep past of a desert continent and the history of its first people. This book is a guide to the catchphrases of the discipline. It is a meditation...

1860. An Aboriginal labourer named Jim Crow is led to the scaffold of the Maitland Gaol in colonial New South Wales. Among the onlookers is the Scotsman AS Hamilton, who will take bizarre steps in the aftermath of the execution to exhume this young man's...

This book tells the history of adoption in Australia from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to its decline at the beginning of the twenty-first. The authors find that a market in babies has long existed. In the early years supply outstripped...

Everyone knows what intoxication and drunkenness are, what they look like, how to define and measure them and what their consequences are. At least we might assume so given the ways these words are used by the media, by politicians and policy makers and...

In the late 1990s, Carolyn Landon collaborated with Daryl Tonkin to write his memoir of life at Jackson's Track. It was the story of a White man and his Aboriginal family, of family ties, hard work, happiness, betrayal, racial prejudice and ultimately,...

The lives of non-human animals, their ways of being and seeing, their experiences and knowledge, and their relationships with each other, continue to be ignored, discounted, written over and destroyed by anthropocentric practices and endeavours. Within...

In the face of escalating water scarcity, effective water management has become a central concern globally. The MurrayDarling Basin, spanning over a million square kilometres across four states and one territory, is a lifeline for Australian agriculture...

Animal Activism On and Off Screen examines the relationship between animal advocacy and the film and television industries. Leading scholars, activists, and film industry professionals critically analyse the ways in which animal activism has been...

Natural history television on the ABC has been one of the public broadcaster's most popular formats. For many viewers, TV has been an important contact zone for engaging with animals they would never encounter in everyday life. These animals have also...

The Climate Crisis and Other Animals is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of our planet and the animals who live on it. Twine examines the impact of the climate crisis on non-human animals and argues for the importance of a climate and...

This book analyses the stories of white fathers, men who were positioned as key players in the plans to assimilate Aboriginal people by 'breeding out the colour' and attempts to put textual flesh on the bodies of these white fathers, and in doing so,...

Aboriginal people of New South Wales carved trees as a form of visual communication for thousands of years. These elaborate designs carved into the sapwood and heartwood of trees once a section of external bark was removed - were meant to last. Sadly,...

This Chinese edition of the Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, edited by Lily Xiao Hong Lee and assisted by Ms Yuk Ping Chan, is published in full Chinese characters.This volume provides biographical information on the lives, work and...

This book approaches the study of animal law topics through the lens of the legal and regulatory framework governing the interaction between humans and animals. The key characteristics of the framework are identified and explored throughout, starting...

The animal agriculture industry, like other profit-driven industries, aggressively seeks to shield itself from public scrutiny and uses a distinct set of rhetorical strategies to deflect criticism. These tactics are fundamental to modern animal...

Animal death is a complex, uncomfortable, depressing, motivating and sensitive topic. For those scholars participating in human-animal studies, it is accompanied by the concept of 'life' the ground upon which their studies commence, whether those studies...

Though there exist many biographical dictionaries of the achievements of Chinese people throughout history, few women feature. Since the mid-1980s, researchers from the University of Sydney's Department of Chinese Studies have been collecting the life...