Writers & Ideas: A NewSouth Publishing Podcast

Challenging Anzac: Stories that don’t fit the legend Edited by Mia Martin Hobbs, Carolyn Holbrook, and Joan Beaumont 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. Mia Martin Hobbs is an oral historian of war and conflict, with a research focus on the Vietnam War, War on Terror, gender, peace, security and postwar reconciliation. Her first book, Return to Vietnam: An Oral History of American and Australian Veterans’ Journeys, won the Oral History Australia Book Award in 2022 and was highly commended for the Memory Studies First Book Award in 2023. She has written widely on anti-war veteran activism, war crimes and the impact of the Anzac revival on Australian veterans’ war memory. She is presently an ARC DECRA fellow at Deakin University. Carolyn Holbrook is a historian at Deakin University. Her latest books are Challenging Anzac: Stories that Don’t Fit the Legend, co-edited with Mia Martin Hobbs and Joan Beaumont (2026), Australia Fair? Democracy, Bureaucracy and the Making of Modern Australia, co-authored with James Walter (2026), and Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke Government, co-edited with Frank Bongiorno and Joshua Black (2026). She is the director of the Australian Policy and History network and the Australian Health and History digital archive. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by two guests: Dr. Fiona Crawford, a writer, editor, and researcher whose work engages with social, environmental, and sports. Dr. Crawford writes for a range of publications including Four Four Two and works frequently Football Australia. We are also joined by Dr. Lee McGowan, a researcher, writer and teacher working at the University of Sunshine Coast. Dr McGowan works on the intersections of sport, culture and community engagement. Together, they are the authors of Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women’s Football (University of New South Wales Press, 2019). In our conversation, we discussed the booms and busts of women’s football in Australia, “sliding door” moments that offered alternative possibilities for women’s football, and the obstacles facing the contemporary women’s game around the world. In Never Say Die, Crawford and McGowan both trace the history of women’s football in Australia and offer a commentary on the state of the women’s game today. The first three chapters chart the development of women’s football, emerging earliest in Queensland before being hobbled by the actions of men in state federations. In this way, the rise and fall of the early Australian game mirrored history of the famous English FA ban of women’s football. An Australian women’s led football league re-emerged in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, when creative and hardworking people such as Pat O’Connor, Elaine Watson, and Heather Reid opened the way for an Australia wide women’s competition. In 1974, female administrators and players organized the Australian Women’s Soccer Association, which under the leadership of “quiet achieving ground breakers” built the foundations for women’s football today. The following year they competed in the Asian Women’s Championship, but never with the same financial support as the men’s side. Of course, success brought new challenges and the Crawford Report (no relation) helped to subordinate women’s football again under the national federation: Football Australia. The latter chapters of Never Say Die deal with contemporary challenges to the women’s game including: the organization of the W-League, pay disputes between the women’s national team and the federation, injury issues among women’s footballers resulting from inadequate medical facilities and improper training, a dearth of female coaches, particularly at the top level, and the trajectory of the current Matildas. Crawford and McGowan’s comments in these chapters are vital for understanding the issues in women’s football today and have helped to shape public debate over issues such as pay disparities, an issue that has subsequently been addressed by Football Australia. In their work, Crawford and McGowan offer a compelling and rich account of women’s football in Australia. Their work is informed not only by a deep dive into the archival resources, especially the popular press, but also by interviews with many former women’s players, referees, coaches and administrators. Crawford and McGowan’s very readable and timely book will be of interest to people broadly interested in sport, especially those with a focus on women’s sport, but also to a public audience interested in the history of the Matildas before the 2023 Australian Women’s World Cup. Keith Rathbone is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches twentieth-century French social and cultural history. His book, entitled Sport and physical culture in Occupied France: Authoritarianism, agency, and everyday life, (Manchester University Press, 2022) examines physical education and sports in order to better understand civic life under the dual authoritarian systems of the German Occupation and the Vichy Regime. If you have a title to suggest for this podcast, please contact him at keith.rathbone@mq.edu.au and follow him at @keithrathbone on twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Eda Gunaydin joins us today to talk about Root and Branch: Essays on Inheritance (NewSouth, 2022). Lots of themes: Turkey, Australia, Sydney, family, friends, media, food, essays. That there is no easy translation for ‘awkward’ in other languages suggests that I’m only myself in English. This feels like a loss, because I’d like to think of myself as Turkish, too. There is a Turkish saying that one’s home is not where one is born, but where one grows full – dogdugun yer degil, doydugun yer. Mixing the personal and political, Eda Gunaydin’s bold and innovative writing explores race, class, gender and violence, and Turkish diaspora. Equal parts piercing, tender and funny, this book takes us from an overworked and underpaid café job in Western Sydney, the mother-daughter tradition of sharing a meal in the local kebab shop, to the legacies of family migration, and intergenerational trauma. Root & Branch seeks to unsettle neat descriptions of belonging and place. What are the legacies of migration, apart from loss? And how do we find comfort in where we are? Eda Gunaydin is a Sydney-based write and teaches at the University of Sydney. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matthew Ricketson joins to discuss how newsrooms, the engine rooms of reporting, have shrunk. A generation of journalists has borne witness to seismic changes in the media and this book shares their stories as essays and narrative interviews. Names include from more than 50 Australian journalists – including Amanda Meade, David Marr and Flip Prior – Upheaval: The Great Digital Disruption in Journalism and Its Aftermath (NewSouth, 2021) reveals the highs and the lows of those who were there to see it all. Matthew takes us inside frenetic and vibrant newsrooms at the peak of their influence, and the difficulties of adapting to ever-accelerating news cycles with fewer resources. Some left journalism altogether while others stayed in the media — or sought to reinvent it. Normally the ones telling other people’s stories, in Upheaval journalists share the rawness of losing their own job or watching others lose theirs. They reveal their anxieties and hopes for the industry’s future and their commitment to reporting news that matters. Matthew Ricketson is presently the professor of communication at Deakin University, previously inaugural journalism professor at the University of Canberra between 2009 and 2017. He ran the journalism program at RMIT for 11 years, and worked on staff at The Australian and Time Australia magazine. His last news media role was Media and Communications Editor at The Age. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I've had 18 years of formal education - why is writing so hard? Today's guests Dr Katherine Firth explains the disease's cure. The book Level Up Your Essays guides the reader through university essay writing, running through stages including essay plans, developing research strategies, writing with distinction, finishing strongly with editing, and getting your referencing right. Katherine Firth manages learning programs for undergraduates and graduates in university settings, and has been developing students as writers for more than a decade. She runs writing workshops for doctoral students and currently runs the academic program at International House, a college of the University of Melbourne. She is co-author of Your PhD Survival Guide and gives writing advice on her blog Research Degree Insiders. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Commonwealth, curry and cricket: now that explains India and Australia! Not really, and not according to today's guest. Kama Maclean discusses her book British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, Intercolonial Relations and the Empire, 1901-1947 (NewSouth, 2020). In contemporary bilateral relations, great emphasis has been placed on India and Australia’s historical connection with the Commonwealth. The stress laid on a shared past is deeply misleading, however, for each colony was tied to Britain in the early twentieth century under very different conditions. Both, it is true, strained against the imperial embrace, but the respective forms of colonisation, collaboration with, and resistance against the empire diverge widely. At the beginning of the twentieth century, each colony pulled in a different direction. As a settler society geographically isolated from Britain, newly self-governing and freshly assertive, in 1901 Australia adopted the White Australia policy, effectively preventing the further migration of nonwhite settlers. This, much to Britain’s frustration, included those from British India, undermining an attempt to project a sense of unity within the empire. Prior to 1901, however, a substantial population of Indians had come to Australia and were granted limited rights of residency. British India, White Australia charts the lives of some of these settlers, charting a social history of their struggles against Australian legislation, which prevented them from voting and working in many industries. Kama Maclean - Professor of South Asian History and department head at the University of Heidelberg's South Asia Institutes. Kama is a historian of South Asia, specialising in the experience of colonialism in north India, with an interest in political communication in colonial India. She was trained in the School of Politics at La Trobe University in the 1990s and completed a PhD on the history and politics of the Kumbh Mela in 2003. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The bible and Australian society! Meredith Lake's published a new 2020 edition of The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History (NewSouth Books, 2020). It's history and sociology and reflections on religion's role on the 'Great Southern Land'. Meredith Lake gets under the skin of a text that’s been read, wrestled with, preached and tattooed, and believed to be everything from a resented imposition to the very Word of God. The Bible in Australia explores how in the hands of Bible-bashers, immigrants, suffragists, evangelists, unionists, writers, artists and Indigenous Australians, the Bible has played a contested but defining role in this country. Meredith Lake is an historian, broadcaster and award-winning writer interested in how Australians understand the big questions of faith and meaning. She currently hosts Soul Search on ABC Radio National - a weekly show about the lived experience of religion and spirituality. She has also guest presented ABC TV's Compass. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joy McCann discusses the great circumpolar ocean that surrounds Antarctica. McCann is the author of Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean (University of New South Wales Press, 2018). She is a historian at the Centre for Environmental History at Australian National University. Flowing completely around the Earth and unimpeded by any landmass, the wild and elusive Southern Ocean reaches from the seasonally-shifting icy continent of Antarctica to the southern coastlines and islands of Australia, New Zealand, South America and South Africa. In Wild Sea, Joy McCann interweaves the fascinating environmental and cultural histories of the Southern Ocean—long neglected by writers and historians—drawing from sea captains’ journals, whalers’ log books, explorers’ letters, scientific reports, ancient beliefs, and her own voyage of discovery. In a hybrid space where science, technology, culture, imagination and myth converge, Wild Sea explores a little-known ocean and its emerging importance as a barometer of planetary climate change. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean (NewSouth Publishing, 2018), historian Joy McCann explores the history of the vast Southern Ocean, from icy Antarctica to the southern coastlines of Australia, South America, and South Africa. From the journals of navigators centuries ago to scientific instruments today, the ocean has been more than just a scientific lab or food source, but a place where the environmental and cultural converge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Disposable Leaders: Media and Leadership Coups from Menzies to Abbott (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), Rodney Tiffen, Emeritus Professor in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, explores the historical and recent leadership coups in Australian politics, and the role of media in them. As leadership in Australia has become more precarious in recent years, political instability has taken its toll on the parties and the democratic system more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), historian Paul Irish debunks the myth that local Aboriginal people disappeared from Sydney within decades of the arrival of Europeans in 1788. Instead, Irish argues, Aboriginal Australians adapted and maintained a strong bond with the Sydney and tried to live on their own terms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, Asylum by Boat: Origins of Australia’s Refugee Policy (New South Press, 2017), Claire Higgins, a Senior Research Associate at the Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales Law School, explores the origins of Australia’s refugee policy. She investigates the Australian government’s response to the arrival by boat, in the late 1970s, of thousands of Vietnamese refugees. Unlike today, however, while boat turn-backs and detention were considered, these policies were rejected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices