Publications
Colonial Frontier Massacres Map
Led by the late Professor Lyndall Ryan, AO, a team created an online map documenting massacres during Australia's violent colonisation. The project was completed in 2024 and remains an important intervention into the process of truth telling in Australia.
Highlighted Publications
Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia
Investigating the history of vagrants in colonial Australia and New Zealand, this book provides insights into the histories and identities of marginalised peoples in the British Pacific Empire.
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Violence - A Very Short Introduction
This Very Short Introduction examines the more visible, physical acts of violence - interpersonal, gendered, collective, religious, sexual, criminal, and political - in the modern world.
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A History of Crime in Australia
This book provides a lively and accessible account of Australia’s most prominent crimes and criminals of the nineteenth and twentieth century and offers an informative background for those seeking to understand crimes committed today.
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Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre
The 1838 Myall Creek Massacre is remembered for the brutality of the crime committed by white settlers against innocent Aboriginal men, women and children, but also because eleven of the twelve assassins were arrested and brought to trial.
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Making Mental Health: A Critical History, Routledge, 2025
This book historicises mental health by examining the concept from the ‘madness’ of the late nineteenth century to the changing ideas about its contemporary concerns and status. It argues that psychiatry and mental health are intertwined clinical-political projects that evolved throughout the 20th century and continue to impact the present.
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Critical Mental Health in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Social and Historical Perspectives
This interdisciplinary volume examines the social production of mental health and illness in Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand). It draws together cutting-edge critical mental health scholarship from the region, to interrogate how personal, community, institutional and mediated relations, make and remake experiences of ‘mental health.’
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Further reading
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The University of Newcastle acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands within our footprint areas: Awabakal, Darkinjung, Biripai, Worimi, Wonnarua, and Eora Nations. We also pay respect to the wisdom of our Elders past and present.