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The text discusses the significance of opening Australia's multilingual archive, exploring the interplay between power, knowledge, and collective memory in the national archive. It delves into the impact of language and translation on Australian history-making, highlighting the challenges faced by migrants in the Anglophone West and the dominance of the English language. The article emphasizes the importance of multilingualism in reshaping historical narratives, challenging traditional structures, and enriching Australia's complex place in the world. [Extracted from the article]

Where are Chinese Australians in Australian history? Australia's Chinese past is persistently framed as 'forgotten' in public debate, a perpetual newness which ignores forty years of scholarship in the field. Contemporary works on Sino-Australian relations proliferate, resurrecting Cold War mentalities but avoiding Australia's colonial history of Chinese migration and settlement. This article accounts for this forgetfulness while also drawing attention to a spate of recently unearthed Chinese-language sources written by Chinese Australians. These sources, newly translated, invite us to see Australia's past in a Chinese context, revealing a propensity in Australia to organise historical time along European lines, obscuring ties of causality between events in Asia and Australia. Multilingual archives challenge the primacy of English-language sources in the narration of Australia's past, humanising Chinese Australians and destabilising China as the proxy for Australian security fears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the historical connections between Australia and Asia, using the personal story of a Hungarian refugee who traveled through Asia on his way to Australia in 1957 as a lens. The article highlights the significance of a photo album given to the refugee in Saigon, Vietnam, which documented an anti-Communist festival. The authors argue that Australia's focus on nationalism has often overshadowed its historical ties to Asia, and they call for a more inclusive and nuanced approach to history. The article also introduces a special issue of History Australia that explores the interconnections between Australia, China, and Japan. It discusses how the processes of deimperialization and decolonization in both Australia and Asia have shaped Australian histories and knowledge production of Asia, and emphasizes the importance of understanding the emotional aspects of historical geographies and fostering productive dialogue among scholars. [Extracted from the article]

Beijing's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has exacerbated a longstanding concern about the power shift from the West to China. The existing debate, however, is both motivated by, and fixated on, the strategic concerns of and about great powers (and to a lesser extent, middle powers). What is often overlooked is the concerns and voices of smaller countries and contested regions where some of the power-shift symptoms allegedly unfold, such as the South Pacific. To traditional donors such as Australia, the power dynamism in the South Pacific is largely a linear, two-way model of power shift from Western donors to Beijing. Challenging this model, this article proposes a complex, three-way model to bring small and seemingly passive actors into the power shift equation. To illustrate, the article uses Papua New Guinea's (PNG) perceptions of China's aid vis-à-vis Australia's aid as a case study. Relying mostly on primary (interview) sources, this study not only reveals some nuanced attitudes of local actors toward the great-power interactions, but also highlights the hitherto neglected role and agency of Pacific Island nations and their domestic politics in the inherently complex power shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour and economics are traditional strengths of Australian history, though in recent decades cultural history has instead dominated historical practice. This article discusses the relationship between the economic and cultural in Australian history, utilising our own research as case studies that explore reasons to combine the structural and discursive. Inspired by settler colonial studies and other developments internationally, we propose a new historical materialism for Australian history. In particular, we argue for an increased attention to economic questions and data in combination with cultural history sources and analysis; for the greater historicisation of capitalism as itself a specific and contingent phenomenon; and for the application of Marxist tools, without discarding the lessons of the cultural turn and their specific value to Australian history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews the books "Unlocking the History of the Australasian Kuo Min Tang 1911-2013" by Me-Fen Kuo and Judith Brett, "Making Chinese Australians: Urban Elites, Newspapers & the Formation of Chinese-Australian Identity 1892-1912" by Mei-Fen Kuo, and the article "Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement, Activism" edited by Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall published in 2013 in issue 9, volume 2 of "Journal of Chinese Overseas."

Urban modernity in Australia has been largely associated with white Australians and with British and American cultural influences. This article shifts the focus by turning to the activities of Chinese shopkeepers and shop workers. It argues that commercial development in Australian rural towns was interwoven with Chinese retail empires. Examining the history of Australia's Chinese shop-life brings this community of Chinese traders, shopkeepers and shop workers into view. The shop-life they created, preserved in archives across Asia and Australia, allows us to see how commercial exchanges between Chinese shopkeepers, shop workers and their customers were also cultural exchanges that could lead to the interchange of cross-cultural knowledge. These economic exchanges arguably also contributed to the manufacture of racial categories and cultural difference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines how the presence of Australians in Shanghai, China during the early 20th century affected Chinese anti-colonial policies. The author looks at the files of the Shanghai Municipal Police along with Chinese newspapers to determine how the Chinese viewed the Australians. It also looks at reasons why Australians moved to Shanghai, and the efforts of British and Australian officials to stop Australians from moving to Shanghai.

The article reveals the links between the Chinese-Australian and Anglo-Australian communities through tracing historical actors in peanuts and their publicists in Sydney, New South Wales. It offers a case study of the way peanuts were used as symbols of racial inclusion or exclusion and investigates a publicity campaign launched by Sydney Chinese businessman William J. Liu and other Chinese-Australian merchants. Publicist John Harvey Crothers Sleeman was the editor and writer for journals such as "Beckett's Budget" and "The Sino-Australasian Times" which were all circulating as part of a publicity campaign to promote Chinese-Australian commercial interests. Strategies used by Chinese merchants to influence the dominant public culture are discussed.