According to Across the Seas, by Swinburne University professor Klaus Neumann, Australia's policy on refugees and asylum seekers has long been a contentious and controversial issue. Across the Seas, by Swinburne University professor Klaus Neumann, investigates how Australia's response to refugees has evolved from Federation until 1977.

It’s time to fundamentally rethink Australia’s approach to asylum seekers, free of narrow assumptions about what’s politically feasible.

How do Australian institutions and political leaders draw on history to tell us who we are? How do they make sense of Australia’s past as a country of immigration and a nation that has accommodated hundreds of thousands of refugees? In federal parliament, Teresa Gambaro recently said:

This article tries to test the assumption that asylum seeker policy is guided by public opinion. It analyses events in November and December 1977 during the final stages of the federal election campaign.

The essay revists the 1994 eruption of the Rabaul volcano, which led to the destruction of the town of Rabaul and of numerous villages on the Gazelle Peninsula, East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. The 1994 catastrophe was significant on account of its sheer size. But it was also remarkable because it caused relatively few...