This is the first book to focus on the role of Southern Asia and Australia in our understanding of modern human origins and the expansion of Homo sapiens between East Africa and Australia before 30,000 years ago. With contributions from leading experts that take into account the latest archaeological evidence from India and Southeast Asia, this volume critically reviews current models of the timing and character of the spread of modern humans out of Africa. It also demonstrates that the evidence from Australasia should receive much wider and more serious consideration in its own right if we want to understand how our species achieved its global distribution. Critically examining the 'Out of Africa' model, this book emphasises the context and variability of the global evidence in the search for human origins.

Southeast Asia has become a battleground of power-politics today where even the so-called “Middle Powers” have their vital stakes. Australia’s participation in the Southeast Asian drama has naturally aroused the interest of commentators and policy-makers in Asia and abroad. Australia is Asia’s nearest “white” neighbour and 70% of its diplomatic activity is concerned with Asian affairs. Dr. Ravindra Varma’s analysis of Australia’s involvement in Southeast Asia since the Second World War forms the first full-length study by an Asian writer of Australia’s Asian policies. The book has grown out of the author’s research in India, Australia and a number of Southeast Asian countries, such as, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, South Vietnam, The Philippines and Indonesia. His discussions with officials, politicians, diplomats and statesmen of various nations in the area have helped the book to achieve a perspective which is intimate and detached at the same time. The book is indispensable to students of international politics in general and specialists on South and Southeast Asia in particular.

The Honourable Paul Keating, then Prime Minister of Australia, delivered the 1996 Singapore Lecture.

This book considers the changing nature of Australia’s identity and role in the Asia-Pacific, and the forces behind these developments, with particular attention towards security alignments and alliance relationships.

Australia's place in the global economy is linked to South East Asia. Recent conflicts highlight a clash between countries that do not share common values about individuals' political and civil rights as the legitimate basis for their sovereignty.

This book sets out to discuss what kind of ‘middle power’ Australia is, and whether its identity as a middle power negatively influences its relationship with Asia. It looks at the history of the middle power concept, develops three concepts of middle power status and examines Australia’s relationships with China, Japan and Indonesia as a focus. It argues that Australia is an ‘awkward partner’ in its relations with Asia due to both its historical colonial and discriminatory past, as well its current dependence upon the United States for a security alliance. It argues this should be changed by adopting a new middle power concept in Australian foreign policy.

This book examines Australia’s sporting relationships with the Asian region during the interwar period. Until now, Australia’s sporting relationships with the Asian region have been neglected by scholars of Australian and Asian sports history, and the broader field of Australia’s Asian context. Concentrating on the period of the 1920s and 1930s – when sporting relationships between Australia and a number of Asian nations emerged in a variety of sports – this book demonstrates the depth of these previously under-examined connections. The book challenges, and complicates, the broader historiography of Australia’s Asian context – a historiography that has been strongly influenced by the White Australia Policy and the Pacific War. Why, for example, did white Australia so warmly welcome visiting Japanese sportsmen at a time when the Pacific region appeared to be inexorably sliding into a war that was informed by racial antagonisms? This book examines sporting relations between Australia and seven Asian countries (China, Japan, India, Netherlands East Indies, Philippines, Malaya and Singapore) and a range of sports including rugby, football, swimming, hockey, boxing, cricket and tennis. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

In this collection of essays, we reflect on what it means to practise the social sciences in the twenty-first century. The book brings together leading social scientists from the Asia-Pacific region. We argue for the benefit of dialogue between the diverse theories and methods of social sciences in the region, the role of the social sciences in addressing real-world problems, the need to transcend national boundaries in addressing regional problems, and the challenges for an increasingly globalised higher education sector in the twenty-first century. The chapters are a combination of theoretical reflections and locally focused case studies of processes that are embedded in global dynamics and the changing geopolitics of knowledge. In an increasingly connected world, these reflections will be of global relevance