From the editors

This editorial was penned during western New Year and the print version will probably appear during Lunar New Year. It is fitting that our special issue on ‘Ruptured Histories: Australia, China, Japan’ spans both festivities, incorporating the two poles that haunt this collection: (largely) white Australia and an ever-surging Asia.

Unlike most special issues, which are first shaped by the guest editors and then pitched to a journal, this collection was conceived by the journal editors and then pitched to two unsuspecting scholars. We are immensely grateful that Sophie Loy-Wilson and Andrew Levidis accepted our call and assembled for us a group of wonderful and complementary historians on this pertinent topic of Australia’s relationship with East Asia. Sophie and Andrew convened a workshop at the University of Sydney in mid-2023 for their contributors and some others, including one of our own journal editors, Ben Mountford. They have worked hard, ever since, to massage the short papers into fascinating articles under some exceptionally tough temporal and existential conditions.

We won’t go into detail here about our research articles, since they are discussed in the guest editors’ introduction. We remain grateful, however, to Nathan Gardner, Sarah May Comley, Tess Gardner, Fangcheng ‘Frank’ Yuan and Cindy Zhu for sharing their new research into Australia’s complex relationship with East Asia. Together, they take us from 1870s Melbourne to Taishō-era Tokyo, to pre-war Broome, to 1950s Beijing, and to twenty-first-century Sydney. Along the way, readers will uncover, as Levidis and Loy-Wilson explain, ‘obscured connections between Asian empires … and Australian politics, across a broad political spectrum’. This collection, as our guest editors also state, helps till ‘generative ground to stake out shared ambitions for deeper and thicker and more complex histories to connect scholars working on Australia with scholars trained in area studies expertise in East Asia’.

We are delighted to include in this issue our annual Landmark History feature. Every year now, History Australia presents an anniversary analysis of a landmark work in Australian historiography, written by a scholar from the next generation and addressed by the work’s author. In 2024, we could not ignore the twenty-fifth birthday of David Walker’s hugely influential Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 (1999). It is more than fitting that our analyst for this work is Agnieszka Sobocinska, a scholar both profoundly touched by Walker’s book and making waves of her own. We thank David Walker for graciously condoning this endeavour and providing a timely reflection.

As ever, we provide a slew of insightful reviews, collected and edited by our stalwart review editors Bernard Keo, Claire Lowrie and Mike Jones. This is our first edition assisted solely by Karen Downing, for which we give endless thanks – Karen’s initiative and skills have got us through the disruptive summer season with steady calmness.

May 2024 bring a more stable present to the world than we experienced in 2023, and yet ever more exciting histories to read, share and absorb.