Japan in Australia is a work of cultural history that focuses on context and connection between two nations. It examines how Japan has been imagined, represented and experienced in the Australian context through a variety of settings, historical periods and circumstances. Beginning with the first recorded contacts between Australians and Japanese in the nineteenth century, the chapters focus on 'people-to people' narratives and the myriad multi-dimensional ways in which the two countries are interconnected: from sporting diplomacy to woodblock printing, from artistic metaphors to iconic pop imagery, from the tragedy of war to engagement in peace movements, from technology transfer to community arts. Tracing the trajectory of this 150-year relationship provides an example of how history can turn from fear, enmity and misunderstanding through war, foreign encroachment and the legacy of conflict, to close and intimate connections that result in cultural enrichment and diversification. This book explores notions of Australia and 'Australianness' and Japan and 'Japaneseness', to better reflect on the cultural fusion that is contemporary Australia and build the narrative of the Japan-Australia relationship. It will be of interest to academics in the field of Asian, Japanese and Japanese-Pacific studies.

In this new volume, Alan Rix examines the renewal of post-war contacts between Australia and Japan and the resolution of wartime issues in the 1950s. He shows how some major bilateral negotiations highlight the tensions involved in forging a strong relationship, while extensive analysis of the machinery of diplomacy (the administrative, political and legal framework) indicates the depth of bilateral ties. Also covered are the close consultation and diplomatic dealings over the decades and the personal connections between leaders.

Set in Western Australia in the first decades of the nineteenth century, That Deadman Dance is a vast, gorgeous novel about the first contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people and the new European settlers. Bobby Wabalanginy is a young Noongar man, smart, resourceful, and eager to please. He befriends the European arrivals, joining them as they hunt whales, till the land, and establish their new colony. He is welcomed into a prosperous white family, and eventually finds himself falling in love with the daughter, Christine. But slowly-by design and by hazard-things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the colony is progressing. Livestock mysteriously start to disappear, crops are destroyed, there are "accidents" and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever-stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind, and Bobby is forced to take sides, inexorably drawn into a series of events that will forever change the future of his country. That Deadman Dance is inevitably tragic, as most stories of European and native contact are. But through Bobby's life, Kim Scott exuberantly explores a moment in time when things could have been different, when black and white lived together in amazement rather than fear of the other, and when the world seemed suddenly twice as large and twice as promising. At once celebratory and heartbreaking, this novel is a unique and important contribution to the literature of native experience.

This book explores the impact of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Japan and Australia, where it has heralded change in the rights of Indigenous Peoples to have their histories, cultures, and lifeways taught in culturally appropriate and respectful ways in mainstream education systems. The book examines the impact of imposed education on Indigenous Peoples’ pre-existing education values and systems, considers emergent approaches towards Indigenous education in the post-imperial context of migration, and critiques certain professional development, assessment, pedagogical approaches and curriculum developments. This book will be of great interest to researchers and lecturers of education specialising in Indigenous Education, as well as postgraduate students of education and teachers specialising in Indigenous Education.

A novel from Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks, author of the Richard and Judy bestseller ‘March’, ‘Year of Wonders’ and ‘People of the Book’.

Following the devastating raids on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, lightning advances by Japanese forces throughout the Pacific and the Far East, and a desperate battle by the Allied command in the Dutch East Indies, it became evident that an attack on Australia was more a matter of 'when' and not 'if'. On 19 February, just eleven weeks after the attacks on Pearl Harbor and two weeks after the fall of Singapore, the same Japanese battle group that had attacked Hawaii was ordered to attack the ill-prepared and under-defended Australian port of Darwin. Publishing 75 years after this little-known yet devastating attack, this fully illustrated study details what happened on that dramatic day in 1942 with the help of contemporary photographs, maps, and profiles of the commanders and machines involved in the assault.

The threats to security in Southeast Asia have been serious and constant since the end of the Second World War. This book provides an absorbing account of the evolution of Australia-Japan defence contacts from the early post-war period to the present.