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The Colombo Plan: Development Internationalism in Cold War Asia

‘This is a stimulating story of a newly formed Commonwealth-based development organization, the Colombo Plan, and its enduring impacts on the emerging ‘Indo-Pacific’ region in the long 1950s. We can identify the dynamic interactions between decolonization, the Cold War and economic development in Asia in the context of global history’ – Shigeru Akita – Osaka University, Japan.

Conceived in 1950, the Colombo Plan for Co-operative Development in South and Southeast Asia was a unique experiment in foreign relations. Meeting annually across what we now know as the ‘Indo-Pacific’, talented administrators facilitated foreign aid provision, and promoted development fuelled state-making, internationalism and experimental regionalism across postwar Asia. David Lowe argues that this new setting and dynamic international cast created an unusually productive diplomatic environment of development internationalism. The Colombo Plan did not escape power politics or Cold War divisions. However, it did run according to its own rhythm, and, unlike other experiments, it endured, continuing today in much reduced form.

 David Lowe Cambridge University Press Read more
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Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis

Winner: Prime Minister’s Literary Awards 2025, Australian History.

HIV and AIDS devastated communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. In the midst of this profound health crisis, nurses provided crucial care to those living with and dying from the virus. They negotiated homophobia and complex family dynamics as well as defending the rights of their patients.

Bringing together stories from across the country, historian Geraldine Fela documents the extraordinary care, compassion and solidarity shown by HIV and AIDS nurses. Critical Care unearths the important and unexamined history of nurses and nursing unions as caregivers and political agents who helped shape Australia’s response to HIV and AIDS.

Geraldine Fela

NewSouth

Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke government

‘A thoughtful, readable collection on the ambitions, arguments, achievements and political courage of Australia’s best post-war government’ – Judith Brett

Was the Hawke government ‘the gold standard’ for federal government in Australia? A stellar line-up of historians, social scientists, politicians and journalists sheds valuable new light on the policies, politics and personalities of the Hawke government and asks: What lessons can it offer in the art of reformist government? How do its legacies continue to shape Australian society?

Troy Bramston and Andrew Podger explain how Hawke masterfully managed the work of government and administration; Michelle Grattan and Meghan Hopper analyse how the government and prime minister dealt with the media; Frank Bongiorno shows how the Labor Party won four elections on the trot; while Marija Taflaga looks at how unprepared Hawke’s opponents were for their period in the wilderness. Bruce Chapman and Liam Byrne discuss the competing legacies of the Labor–Union Accords of the 1980s; Meredith Edwards and Carolyn Holbrook demonstrate that social justice and health reform were still possible in the context of fiscal restraint; Marian Sawer shows how women’s policy mattered; while Peter Yu recalls the major disappointments of the era for First Nations Australians. Gareth Evans and Ian Macphee offer their perspectives on the Hawke government’s legacies and impact; Barrie Cassidy and Craig Emerson share their recollections of the Hawke office; and Joshua Black shows that memories of the Hawke era were not so rosy in its immediate aftermath.

Edited by Frank Bongiorno, Carolyn Holbrook, and Joshua Black

NewSouth

The Social Survey in Global Perspective, 1900-2020s

‘An immensely readable and interesting discussion of the history of social surveys across the globe, with different questions and populations in mind. The editors have done an excellent job selecting Contributors who speak to surveys in different contexts with skill’ – Matt Dawson.

The Social Survey in Global Perspective traces the evolution of social surveys beyond celebrated metropolitan examples, exploring their worldwide impact across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors examine surveys in diverse contexts—from colonial territories to grassroots women’s organizations—to reveal methodological challenges and profound social influence. The collection illuminates how surveys shaped state power, social movements, and individual identity while often reproducing existing hierarchies. By exploring the double-sided legacy of social surveying—as an engine of both progressive reform and state surveillance—this book offers a critical reassessment of empirical practices that continue to determine how we understand ourselves, our societies and our world.

Edited by Charlotte Greenhalgh, Clare Corbould, and Warwick Anderson

Berghahn Books

Challenging Anzac: Stories that don’t fit the legend

The Anzac legend has shaped Australia’s national identity for more than a century. Yet many experiences of war do not fit comfortably within this.

In Challenging Anzac, leading historians explore some of these stories: Aboriginal activists, deserters on the Western Front, veterans who took their own lives and soldiers who became radicalized by their service. They reveal how episodes in Australia’s war history that unsettled the Anzac legend – from the relief of Tobruk, nuclear testing on Australian soil and feminist protests against war, to alleged atrocities in Afghanistan – have been elided or adapted to ‘fit’ the legend.

Edited by award-winning historians Mia Martin Hobbs, Carolyn Holbrook, and Joan Beaumont, Challenging Anzac examines how the reality of warfare has always been at odds with mythic representation and considers why, despite this, the Anzac legend has survived.

Edited by Mia Martin Hobbs, Carolyn Holbrook, and Joan Beaumont

NewSouth

Return to Vietnam: An Oral History of American and Australian Veterans’ Journeys

‘Original, thought-provoking, and multi-dimensional, Return to Vietnam offers readers a comparative perspective on American and Australian veteran travels to Vietnam since 1975. Mia Martin Hobbs grounds this book in rich, and sometime searing, oral histories. She succeeds in achieving an impressive balance between presenting veterans’ personal accounts and offering her own powerful analysis of memory, national commemoration, personal trauma, and war’ – Jana K. Lipman.

Between 1981 and 2016, thousands of American and Australian Vietnam War veterans returned to Việt Nam. This comparative, transnational oral history offers the first historical study of these return journeys. It shows how veterans returned in search of resolution, or peace, manifesting in shifting nostalgic visions of ‘Vietnam.’ Different national war narratives shaped their returns: Australians followed the ‘Anzac’ pilgrimage tradition, whereas for Americans the return was an anti-war act. Veterans met former enemies, visited battlefields, mourned friends, found new relationships, and addressed enduring legacies of war. Many found their memories of war eased by witnessing Việt Nam at peace. Yet this peacetime reality also challenged veterans’ wartime connection to Vietnamese spaces. The place they were nostalgic for was Vietnam, a space in war memory, not Việt Nam, the country. Veterans drew from wartime narratives to negotiate this displacement, performing nostalgic practices to reclaim their sense of belonging.

Mia Martin Hobbs

Cambridge University Press

The Colombo Plan: Development Internationalism in Cold War Asia

‘This is a stimulating story of a newly formed Commonwealth-based development organization, the Colombo Plan, and its enduring impacts on the emerging ‘Indo-Pacific’ region in the long 1950s. We can identify the dynamic interactions between decolonization, the Cold War and economic development in Asia in the context of global history’ – Shigeru Akita – Osaka University, Japan.

Conceived in 1950, the Colombo Plan for Co-operative Development in South and Southeast Asia was a unique experiment in foreign relations. Meeting annually across what we now know as the ‘Indo-Pacific’, talented administrators facilitated foreign aid provision, and promoted development fuelled state-making, internationalism and experimental regionalism across postwar Asia. David Lowe argues that this new setting and dynamic international cast created an unusually productive diplomatic environment of development internationalism. The Colombo Plan did not escape power politics or Cold War divisions. However, it did run according to its own rhythm, and, unlike other experiments, it endured, continuing today in much reduced form.

David Lowe

Cambridge University Press

Old North Melbourne

‘Like Janet McCalman’s Struggletown this book is destined to become a classic in the genre of Australian urban social history’ – Associate Professor Seamus O’Hanlon.

This is the story of the first fifty years of today’s much-loved suburb of North Melbourne. When the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung were first developed by European settlers in 1852, there were many barriers to its success. A great expanse of barren land lay between it and Melbourne, a swamp on the west, open sewerage to the east and undeveloped bushland to the south. But of the thousands of immigrants who flocked to Victoria during the gold rush, some settled in North Melbourne, determined to develop an urban town to be proud of. From 1859 to 1887, it was called Hotham. The town’s businessmen had a booming stake in Melbourne’s meat market, metal manufacturing and tanneries. It also harboured an unusually high number of Irish immigrants and some of Melbourne’s most downtrodden residents. This book details the triumphs and struggles of the people of nineteenth-century North Melbourne, revealing fascinating individuals and the collective story of the emergence of this determined working-class community.

Dr Fiona Gatt

Australian Scholarly Publishing

Debating the Nation – Papua New Guinea’s Independence Speeches

Debating the Nation, a new volume that brings together a selection of key speeches from Papua New Guinea’s House of Assembly in the years leading up to independence (1972–1975). These speeches — many never before published in full — capture the fierce debates, competing visions, and grounded aspirations of Papua New Guinean leaders as they shaped the nation’s path to sovereignty.

Rather than framing independence as a gift from Australia, this curated and annotated collection highlights the agency, insight, and political acumen of PNG parliamentarians. The volume introduces readers to the diversity of voices and ideas that informed the drafting of the constitution and the negotiation of independence — from concerns about land, unity, and development to deeper questions of identity, autonomy, and modernity.

The book is a collaboration between Deakin University and the University of Papua New Guinea. It was jointly supported by funding from the Australian High Commission to Papua New Guinea, the Deakin University Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), and the Deakin Centre for Contemporary Histories.

Edited by Dr Brad Underhill, Associate Professor Helen Gardner, and Keimelo Gima

Let the Dead Speak – Spiritualism in Australia

This book explores the historical and social dynamics of Spiritualism – a religious movement associated in the popular imagination with nineteenth-century parlour séances and ghost photography. It continues to be practised actively today in Australia, the UK, and USA. The authors draw on their deep fieldwork, interviews, and archival research to analyse Spiritualism’s resilience and the enduring popular appeal of mediumship.

There are three key contributions of the book: the first is that the scholarly study of “belief” should be rehabilitated. The authors propose a model of belief as a dialogue between claims to truth and commitments to institutions supporting those claims. The second is women’s agency in Spiritualism. From the movement’s beginnings, strong female leaders have decisively shaped its religious and political profile. The third is the need to analyse Australian Spiritualism as a distinct variant of a transnational Anglophone family of ritual practice.

Andrew Singleton and Matt Tomlinson

Manchester University Press

The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals

Since the publication of the first children’s periodical in the 1750s, magazines have been an affordable and accessible way for children to read and form virtual communities. Despite the range of children’s periodicals that exist, they have not been studied to the same extent as children’s literature. The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals marks the first major history of magazines for young people from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Bringing together periodicals from Britain, Ireland, North America, Australia, New Zealand and India, this book explores the roles of gender, race and national identity in the construction of children as readers and writers. It provides new insights both into how child readers shaped the magazines they read and how magazines have encouraged children to view themselves as political and world subjects.

Kristine Moruzi, Beth Rodgers, and Michelle J. Smith

Edinburgh University Press

Philanthropy in Children’s Periodicals, 1840-1930: The Charitable Child

Drawing on a wealth of material from children’s periodicals from the Victorian era to the early twentieth century, Kristine Moruzi examines how the concept of the charitable child has been defined through the press. Charitable ideals became increasingly prevalent at a time of burgeoning social inequities and cultural change, shaping expectations that children were capable of and responsible for charitable giving. While the child as the object of charity has received considerable attention, less focus has been paid to how and why children have been encouraged to help others. Yet the ways in which children were positioned to see themselves as people who could and should help – in whatever forms that assistance might take – are crucial to understanding how children and childhood were conceptualised in the past. This book uses children’s print culture to examine the relationship between children and charitable institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to foreground children’s active roles.

Kristine Moruzi

Edinburgh University Press

Preparing a Nation? The New Deal in the Villages of Papua New Guinea

Preparing a Nation?, based on extensive archival research, addresses perennial questions of Australian colonialism in Papua New Guinea. To what extent did Australia prepare Papua New Guinea for independence? And what were the policies and the ideologies behind colonial development, implemented after World War II? A key innovation of this book is to take these questions from policy desks in Canberra and Port Moresby to the villages of four administrative areas: Chimbu, Milne Bay, Sepik and New Hanover. How successful were Australian colonial planners in designing and implementing programs that could ameliorate the potential harm of market capitalism and develop ‘new’ socioeconomic structures that would combine a disparate people into an ‘imagined community’, capable of becoming an independent nation-state in the far distant future? Colonial intention is contrasted with Indigenous experience. Bradley Underhill explores an Australian governmental tendency to prioritise colonial control over Indigenous autonomy in circumstances where subjugated people do not necessarily fit within an expected narrative of compliant or westernised ‘native’.

‘I expect it will become the standard reference for its subject, which covers a pivotal aspect of Australia’s colonial administration.’
—Bill Gammage

Brad Underhill

ANU Press

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