Nathan Hollier
Nathan Hollier is Manager of Australian National University Press and is a past CEO and Publisher of Melbourne University Press, Director of Monash University Publishing, Chair of the OL Society, publishers of Overland, Editor of that journal, and was founding Chair of the Small Press Network. He has a PhD in Australian cultural history and writes on society, culture and economics in Australia and its region. He is the author of many articles and, as editor, two books.
Thirty years before the Australian career criminal Gregory David Roberts travelled to Bombay and sought to make for himself, in the words of critic Peter Pierce, ‘a good Asian life’, another socially alienated Australian pursued such a life, in Indonesia, one which in its own way was as remarkable as that novelised by Roberts in Shantaram (2003).
Clive Williams went to Java in 1951, at the ag ... (read more)
What was the best decision Brian Johns ever made?
In 2005, Johns – legendary leader of Penguin Books Australia, publisher of Elizabeth Jolley, Thea Astley, Frank Moorhouse, and so many others, and later managing director of the ABC and SBS – nominated his publication of the Buru Quartet, by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Johns was speaking at an event for Pramoedya’s Indonesian ... (read more)
Most of us know something about John Anderson (1893–1962). He is remembered as a libertarian philosopher who, during his time at the University of Sydney, influenced various individuals and groups, most notably the Sydney ‘Push’. Writers on Sydney’s intellectual tradition tend to locate the Scottish-born Anderson at the epicentre of this universe. Anderson is someone, however, of whom it i ... (read more)
In Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis wrestles with questions which are giddying in their significance. Do the profound changes we see taking place around us now, in our digital age, amount to a fundamentally new form of society? If so, what kind of society is it? And what, if anything, should we do about it?
As the title of his work suggests, Varoufakis writes within a Mar ... (read more)
In November, Melbourne University Publishing will release the two-hundredth title in the second numbered series of its Miegunyah Press imprint. This is Doing Feminism: Women’s art and feminist criticism in Australia, compiled and edited by Anne Marsh, art historian and Professorial Research Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Doing Feminism is a highly appropriate work to mark this pub ... (read more)
Some time before the sun set on the British empire, ‘British justice’ took on an ironic meaning. In the colonies, we knew it was a charade, like that doled out to ‘Breaker’ Morant during the Boer War. The dice are loaded in favour of a prosecution that nevertheless insists on carrying out its cold-blooded retribution in an apparently value-free legalese, thus preserving the self-righteousn ... (read more)
Dear Chancellor French, I write this open letter to you to make certain points about the environment of university press publishing, in support of UWA Publishing and its Director, Professor Terri-ann White, and her team.
According to reports, the memorandum proclaiming the closure of UWA Publishing spoke of a resurrection of the press as an open-access publisher of works within the University’s ... (read more)
Like many of us, I think of the book as the great vehicle for the sophisticated expression of our humanity. The world needs the book more than ever. To thrive and indeed survive as humans we need to develop our capacity to make rational decisions based on evidence, logic, and an open, imaginative, empathetic engagement with each other, a capacity best facilitated, as we grow, by reading.
With Mel ... (read more)
On 8 September 2010, in the foyer of the Robert Blackwood Hall at Monash University, beneath the beautiful ‘Alpha and Omega’ stained-glass window created by Leonard French and connoting humankind’s endless striving for achievement, Monash University ePress became Monash University Publishing. It was very appropriate that the press should be launched by Barry Jones, author of Sleepers W ... (read more)