ABOUT THE BOOK

Re-Imagining Australia and India: Culture and Identitybrings together key themesfrom the fourth international conference of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA).Chief among them is the proposition that the maturing relationship between India and Australia now encompasses far more than bilateral economic exchanges, and can therefore be usefully explored in order better to understand the evolving cultural identities of both nations from the nineteenth century to the present day. India and Australia were both fundamentally shaped by British colonialism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and were reshaped by globalisation during the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Both belong to the `global South`. However, Australia has a complicated and ambivalent association with the legacies of both processes, and with their outcomes in the Asian region of which it is a part. Indian perspectives upon these transformations, and their effects upon Australian culture and identity, are fresh and insightful. This book`s chapters range from analysis of contemporary strategic relationships, trade, and immigration, and discussion of cross-national social and cultural issues, to historical perspectives upon overlooked aspects of Indo-Australian convergence such as cricket, and the role of cameleers in Outback Australia.

ABOUT Author

Professor D. Gopal, a political scientist, is Director of the School of Social Sciences at Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU),Head of its Centre for Gandhi and Peace Studies, and coordinator of Australian Studies. He received a Ph.D. from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, trained in Distance Education at the University of London, and was a Visiting Fellow at the UK Open University. He is currently Vice President of IASA.His recent publications include Australia in the Emerging Global Order; India -Australia: Issues and Opportunities; Politics of Globalization; Australia and India Relations: Convergences and Divergences; Cultural Diversity: Governance and Policy; Globalization and Regional Security: India and Australia; and Governance, Development and Conflict and World Peace and Global Order: Gandhian Perspectives.

Alan Mayne holds a ResearchSA Chair at the University of South Australia, where he is Professor of Social History in the Hawke Research Institute. He holds a PhD (1980) from the Australian National University and worked until 2005 at the University of Melbourne. He has also been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Washington D.C., a Senior Fulbright scholar at Boston and Berkeley, and a visiting Professorial Fellow at Jawaharlal Nehru University. His publications include The Imagined Slum; The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes (with Tim Murray);Hill End: An Historic Australian Goldfields Landscape;Eureka: Reappraising an Australian Legend; Beyond the Black Stump: Histories of Outback Australia; Building the Village: A History of Bendigo Bank; and Outside Country: Histories of Inland Australia (with Stephen Atkinson).