David Walker’s Book Launch Stranded Nation
Professor David Walker has written extensively on the history of Australian responses to Asia. His prize-winning history Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850 to 1939 (UQP, 1999) has been translated into Chinese and Hindi. An Indian edition appeared in 2009. David Walker is an Honorary Prefessorial Fellow in Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, and an Emeritus Professor at Deakin University. From 2013 – 2016 he was the inaugural BHP Chair of Australian studies at Peking University, Beijing. He holds visiting professorships at Beijing Foreign Studies University and Renmin University of China. David Walker is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is a Member of the Order of Australia.
Professor David Walker’s Stranded Nation draws on a wide scope of sources – from chronicled records in Australia, the US, the UK, India and New Zealand to the individual accounts of Asian visitors. It presents an opinion of a lot of important personnel with feelings on Australia’s place in Asia. Basically it is a book that takes us into the tensions of the country’s relationship with Asia between the 1930s and 1970s
The launch at NSW Parliament House on 12th of August was sponsored by the Sydney Institute for Public and International Affairs. The first NSW Muslim MP Mr Shaoquett Moslemane opened the event by welcoming the perhaps 100 Australia-Asia aficionados in the Room and made special mention of the distinguished Chinese and other diplomats among them. Before Walker’s own engaging talk on Stranded Nation, Professor Stephen Garton, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University, described it as ‘a book of our times’.
