Contributors

John Arnold has worked as a librarian, bookseller and academic. He has a longstanding interest in the history of the book in Australia and Australian expatriate publishing in England. He is the author of The Fanfrolico Press: Fauns, Satyrs and Fine Books (2009), co-editor of the second volume of A History of the Book in Australia: A National Culture in a Colonised Market, 1891–1945 (2001), co-general editor of the Monash Biographical Dictionary of C20th Australia (1994) and co-editor of the multi-volume Bibliography of Australian Literature, 1788–2000 (2001–11). His most recent book is Eric Partridge and the Scholartis Press: A History and Bibliography (2025).

Bianka Vidonja Balanzategui is an adjunct lecturer in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University, Townsville. She researches and publishes on the sugar industry and migration history of tropical north Queensland within an international context, in both colonial and postcolonial timeframes. Her current research focuses on the historical role of women in the sugar industry, and fictional sugar industry literature as a plausible alternative to conventional methods of examining sugar world histories.

David Carment, AM, is emeritus professor of history at Charles Darwin University. As an academic historian in central Queensland between 1977 and 1981, he researched and wrote about the region’s past. His most recent book is, with Eureka Henrich, An ‘Important and Necessary Institution’: A History of the Australian Historical Association (2023).

Stephen Chavura is senior lecturer in history at Campion College, Sydney. He is co-author (with Gregory Melleuish) of The Forgotten Menzies: The World-Picture of Australia’s Longest-Serving Prime Minister (2021).

James Cotton is emeritus professor, humanities and social sciences, University of New South Wales, ADFA, Canberra. His Australia and the World 1920–1930 and Australia and the World 1931–1936 were published in 2019 and 2021. His most recent book is The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist Diplomacy in the Interwar Years (2022).

Kerrie Doyle is associate dean, Indigenous health, at Western Sydney University’s School of Medicine. A Winninninni/Cadigal/Irish woman, Professor Doyle was one of the first Indigenous women to graduate from the University of Oxford. She is also the chair and research lead of the Aboriginal Health and Wellbeing Clinical Academic Group at Maridulu Budyari Gumal, the Sydney Partnership for Health, Education, Research and Enterprise; a member of the Council of Elders for the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives; and a board member for Ngaramura Aboriginal, Maori and Pacific Islander Corporation. She has spent her career dedicated to improving outcomes for Australia’s Indigenous population. Her research interests include education, promoting applied cultural proficiency research, social determinants of health and Indigenous health.

Derek Drinkwater, formerly a long-serving officer of the Department of the Senate, holds a PhD (political science and international relations) from The Australian National University (ANU). His publications include Sir Harold Nicolson and International Relations: The Practitioner as Theorist (2005) and The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate, Vol. 1: 1901–1929 (2000) (assistant editor). He is a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and ‘Order, Order!’ A Biographical Dictionary of Speakers, Deputy Speakers and Clerks of the Australian House of Representatives. Derek has also published in the fields of parliamentary history and biography, public administration, and United Nations – World Bank governance building.

Geoffrey Edwards is a freelance curator, lecturer and writer. Since retiring in 2016 as director of the Geelong Art Gallery, he has been curatorial adviser to the prominent Melbourne-based philanthropists John and Pauline Gandel, chiefly in respect of the family’s Pt Leo Estate Sculpture Park on the Mornington Peninsula. Prior to his time at Geelong, he held various curatorial positions at the National Gallery of Victoria, concluding his time there as senior curator of international and Australian sculpture. He has published widely on historical and contemporary sculpture, Australian painting and the decorative arts.

Ruby Ekkel is a PhD candidate at ANU and a visiting student at the University of Oxford. Her current research focuses on changing interactions with Australian native animals, especially as mediated by women. She has published and presented on topics spanning animal history, environmental history and women’s history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has served as an HDR representative for the Australian Historical Association Executive and was a co-editor of the ANU Historical Journal II no. 4.

Georgina Fitzpatrick, formerly a research fellow in the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law, Melbourne Law School, was lead author of Fitzpatrick, Narrelle Morris and Tim McCormack, Australia’s War Crimes Trials 1945–51 (2016), to which she contributed 11 chapters of historical context. It was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Australian History Award in 2017. She has since published book chapters on aspects of the trials, the most recent being, ‘David Sissons and the History of Australia’s War Crimes Trials: A Spectral Interaction in the Archives’, in Keiko Tamura and Arthur Stockwin, eds, Bridging Australia and Japan, Vol. 2 (2020).

Karen Fox is a senior academic research editor for the Australian Dictionary of Biography at the National Centre of Biography in the School of History at ANU. Karen specialises in Australian and New Zealand history, focusing on the nature of historical reputations; the history of fame and celebrity; women’s, gender and feminist histories; imperial and colonial history; and biography and life writing. She is the author of Māori and Aboriginal Women in the Public Eye: Representing Difference, 1950–2000 (2011) and Honouring a Nation: A History of Australia’s Honours System (2022).

Belinda MacGill is a senior lecturer at the University of South Australia Education Futures and a member of the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion. Her research interests include arts education, postcolonial theory, visual methodologies and critical race theory. Much of her work is focused on decolonisation through arts-based pedagogies and creative methodologies.

Andrew Marshall is an Australian- and US-qualified entertainment lawyer and writer based in Singapore. He holds degrees in arts and law from the University of Adelaide and a Japan-focused executive MBA from the University of Hawaii. Specialising in intellectual property and character licensing, Andrew has held prominent roles at leading media organisations, including ESPN STAR Sports and The Walt Disney Company. His tenure as a commercial director at Universal Pictures, overseeing commercial aspects of various iconic character franchises, demanded an intimate understanding of Felix the Cat, igniting his enduring fascination with the character and the contentious claims between Australian and American animators over its creation. Leveraging his extensive experience in media, licensing and intellectual property, along with a passion for storytelling and creative non-fiction, Andrew undertook exhaustive research into Felix’s origins, aiming to resolve, once and for all, the ongoing debate surrounding the creation of this trailblazing animated character.

James McDonald released the first two volumes of his five-volume history of Canberra in 2023. The third will be out in early 2025. His interests have varied over the years. He wrote libretti for Nigel Butterley and other composers in the 1980s. He was trained as a Greek classicist and continues to edit Doug Kelly’s posthumous three-volume manuscript on Xenophon’s Hellenika. The first volume was published in 2019, and the second will be released in early 2025. He convened Greek history briefly at the University of Sydney and lectured at ANU in the 1990s. He has been the speech writer and executive director with the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation since 2017.

Doug Munro is an adjunct professor of history at the University of Queensland and a visiting scholar at the Stout Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington. His last book (co-authored with Geoffrey Gray and Christine Winter) is Chicanery: Senior Academic Appointments in Antipodean Anthropology, 1920–1960 (2023). He was also guest editor (with Jon Frankel) of ‘From Broken Waves to the Levelling Wind: Brij V. Lal and the Contemporary Politics of Fiji’, published in the Journal of Pacific History (2024).

Toby Raeburn is an associate professor and nurse practitioner in mental health nursing at the Australian Catholic University. Prior to entering academia, he spent two decades working in community mental healthcare. In 2005, he founded Australia’s first nurse practitioner–led mental health charity, ROAM Communities (Recovery through Ownership Action and Management), which he led from 2005 to 2015. He has provided consultancy and training to organisations such as Housing NSW, Juvenile Justice NSW, Sydney City Council and the Salvation Army. Toby is a Churchill fellow and a fellow of the Australian College of Mental Health Nurses. His research interests include the history of mental healthcare, Indigenous health, recovery oriented mental healthcare and homelessness healthcare.

Paul Saunders is a proud Biripi man and a senior lecturer at the University of Wollongong. He has experience in clinical medicine, medical devices and Indigenous health teaching and research, including research project management. His research interests include the structural and social determinants of Indigenous health, medical education, and care coordination pathways and culturally safe models of care for Indigenous communities. He is a past Yarramundi and Lowitja scholarship recipient, a member of the Golden Key International Honour Society, a board member of Ngaramura Indigenous Corporation and an Aboriginal representative on the Australian Medical Council’s Medical School Accreditation Committee.

Kate White is an associate professor in the Institute of Education, Arts and Community at Federation University Australia. She was director of the 14-country Women in Higher Education Management Network from 2007 to 2022. She has published 18 books. The most recent is Gender, Power and Higher Education in a Globalised World (2021), co-edited with Pat O’Connor. Her current research focuses on gender and leadership in higher education, women’s academic careers, women in regional universities, women in science and Australian biography.

Kay Whitehead is an adjunct professor at the University of South Australia Education Futures. She has published widely on the lives, work and transnational travel of Australian, British and Canadian women educators from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. She is currently writing a history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers.

Stephen Wilks is an academic research editor in the National Centre of Biography within the School of History at ANU. He studied economic history at Monash University before embarking on a career in government based in Canberra and overseas. This was leavened by a shadow career writing reviews and articles on Australian history and biography prior to returning to doctoral study at ANU. He is the author of ‘Now Is the Psychological Moment’: Earle Page and the Imagining of Australia (2020) and the editor of ‘Order, Order!’: A Biographical Dictionary of Speakers, Deputy Speakers and Clerks of the Australian House of Representatives (2023). His main professional interest is political biography and memoir, and he is currently researching Victoria’s most famous and longest-serving premier, Henry Bolte.

Josh Woodward is a historian of twentieth-century Australia whose current research explores representations of nature in tourist advertising. He has published several articles on the tourist promotion of Australian national parks and their emergence as important sites of the settler nation. He completed a master of arts at the University of Western Australia, where he was the 2019 recipient of the Frank Broeze scholarship for academic achievement. Josh will complete his PhD, a history of public sector Australian tourist advertising, at ANU in 2025.