Books

Collecting the West offers a fascinating new approach to the history of Western Australia and asks what our museum, library, and gallery collections can tell us about the past, present, and future of WA and its place in the world.

Our collections embody diverse knowledges and ways of understanding the world from the moment they are made, giving us insight into the past while also informing our understanding of the present day. From Aboriginal artefacts to books, plants, artworks, fossils, and even an Irish stone cross, this book unearths the surprising diversity of what was collected and by whom, why collections mattered, and how they shaped the institutions that hold Western Australia’s cultural memory. Importantly it identifies and unravels colonial, imperial and global networks of collectors, and documents previously unknown or misunderstood involvement of Indigenous people in the making of collections. Seamlessly weaving collectors, global and local collections, and the evolution of public institutions, Collecting the West is the first book to tell Western Australia’s story through its collected treasures and offers a fresh perspective on its collective identity and history.

Alistair Paterson, Andrea Witcomb, Gaye Sculthorpe, Tiffany Shellam, and Baige Zylstra

Who advises politicians about the issues that impact our daily lives, and how has their advice changed over time? In Australia Fair? authors James Walter and Carolyn Holbrook explore the world of departmental officials and political advisers who wield significant influence in shaping our society and assess how policy advice has changed since World War II. How has the relationship between our elected representatives and bureaucrats evolved? Have they delivered what the people want? What has been learned, and what forgotten? Focusing on three foundational policy domains – immigration, Indigenous affairs and housing – Australia Fair? reveals how social change, ideological differences and power dynamics have transformed Australia’s political landscape and society. Provocative and important, Australia Fair? challenges us to reckon with a new era of policy innovation, to debate how we want to be governed and to choose what kind of society we want to be.

James Walter and Carolyn Holbrook

Max Quanchi

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

‘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

‘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

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

‘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

‘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

Dr Fiona Gatt