Bøger udgivet af MELBOURNE UNIV PR

Losing the Blanket shows how Australia's foreign policy during the 1950s and 1960s was affected by the end of empire.When Britain's sprawling empire wound down with unexpected speed in the 1960s, Australia lost a comforting 'security blanket'. We had to struggle to re-establish and protect ourselves in a volatile and threatening world. Australia's interests in empire had taken many forms-strategic, economic, cultural and psychological. Indeed Australia had used British experience as a template for its own 'mini-imperialism', in Papua and New Guinea for example. The most important connnections between Britain's imperial interests and Australia's regional ones were in Southeast Asia, but they extended to the Indian and Pacific oceans and even to Africa. The effects of the end of empire upon Australia's external relations have tended to be eclipsed by historians' emphasis on Cold War imperatives and Australia's consequent alignment with the United States. Losing the Blanket rights the balance by showing how Australia's foreign policy during the 1950s and 1960s was affected by the end of empire. Under the thirty-year rule, vital primary sources in both Britain and Australia are now accessible. They reveal the effects of post-imperialism upon Australian policies in key areas such as defence planning in Southeast Asia, the politics of the Commonwealth, European union, Australia's own colonial policy, and relations with Britain itself. David Goldsworthy's account is both clear and thorough. As first Menzies and then Holt looked to protect Australia's interests, the groundwork was laid for our involvement in Vietnam and for the pattern of Australia's foreign relations today.

In Invisible Invaders, Judy Campbell argues that epidemics of smallpox among Australian Aboriginals preceded European settlement.An epidemic of smallpox among Aboriginal people around the infant colony of Sydney in 1789 puzzled the British, for there had been no cases on the ships of the First Fleet. Where, then, did the epidemic come from?As explorers moved further inland, they witnessed other epidemics of smallpox, notably in the late 1820s and early 1830s and again in the 1860s and 1870s. They also encountered many pockmarked survivors of early epidemics.In Invisible Invaders, Judy Campbell argues that epidemics of smallpox among Australian Aboriginals preceded European settlement. She believes they originated in regular visits to the northern coast of Australia by Macassan fishermen from southern Sulawesi and nearby islands. They were searching for trepang, for which there was a profitable market in China.The Macassan fishermen usually visited during the monsoon season, and the local Indigenous people traded with them. Once the monsoon was over, these Aboriginals resumed their travels into the interior for food, social contact and ritual events, carrying small pox with them. Smallpox thus slowly moved across the continent, eventually reaching the south-east, where it was first recorded by Europeans.Judith Campbell's research on the incidence of smallpox and other diseases among Aboriginal people has extended over more than twenty years. Accumulating evidence from other disciplines supports her findings.