This spring sees the publication of not one but two new books whose origins lie in PhD theses completed at the National Centre of Biography: Performance Politics: Australian politicians and the stories they tell(NewSouth) by Joshua Black (PhD 2023), and Asbestos Nation: The story of the most dangerous dust in Australia (Monash University Publishing) by James Watson (PhD 2024).

Of his book and the thesis with which it began, Joshua Black (now a lecturer at the Centre for Public Ideas at the University of Canberra) says:

'Performance Politics is a book that has deep roots in the ANU School of History and National Centre of Biography. It began as a doctoral thesis supervised by NCB Director Professor Melanie Nolan, and it benefited enormously from the breadth of activities—scholarship and publications, feedback sessions and biography seminars—that take place within this Centre. In studying the history and development of Australian political life writing, I had the privilege of working with a supervisor who was writing her own field-defining work on theories of biography. I also had the opportunity to work with Stephen Wilks and others on a special issue of our own Australian Journal of Biography and History, testing and workshopping some of the ideas that ultimately shaped my book. 

The basic argument of Performance Politics is that political life writing, and televised docudramas, have played an outsized role in making the more personal, emotional and self-referential political culture of our times. Australian politicians were not frequent memoirists, diarists or longform storytellers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These days, local political memoirs are often conspicuous on the shelves of our bookstores and public libraries. Performance Politics shows that the rise of this genre has accelerated and intensified wider trends toward a public sphere where emotions and performativity reign supreme. Inspired by the broader work of the NCB, Performance Politics sets out to show how the stories of political lives, woven by the subjects themselves, have been made to matter in our public culture.'

And of his book, Asbestos Nation, James Watson (a postdoctoral fellow at The Australia Institute) says:

'When I first met with my doctoral supervisor, Melanie Nolan, to discuss my thesis, I told her I was interested in writing a history of asbestos labour and legal compensation in twentieth-century Australia, informed by my experience as a paralegal for asbestos cases. Over time, that seed of an idea grew into a broader project as I realised Australians had had a much more complicated experience with asbestos than I had anticipated. On the one hand, asbestos (and its associated cancer, mesothelioma) was the expression of an unsympathetic mode of capitalism that chewed up and spat out migrant, Indigenous, and working-class Australians in the name of wealth, development, and modernity; on the other hand, asbestos fibre (fibro) cement housing had offered many of those same Australians, who were dying from asbestos, new opportunities for home-ownership and citizenship. Much of Australians’ relationship with asbestos over the last 150 years was a matter of balancing these two contradictions, and trying to negotiate its benefits and costs.

Asbestos Nation, the book that was the product of my doctoral thesis, traces Australians’ relationship with asbestos over the last 150 years. It is a social and cultural history that begins with asbestos’ origins as a post-gold-rush mining industry in the colonial days, to early ideas about its modern possibilities (from constructing entire Australian cities out of asbestos, to using it to design heat-resistant summer dresses), to its peak use for fibro house construction after World War II, and concludes with recent disputes over compensation for Mr Fluffy homeowners in Canberra. I hope the book is useful for anyone who has come into contact  with asbestos—whether as a worker, a sufferer of an asbestos-related disease, a carer, or a tenant or owner of a fibro house—and wishes to understand how asbestos became so ubiquitous in Australian life.'

We are so pleased to see both these works published and on bookshop shelves around the country. Congratulations to Joshua and James on their wonderful achievements!