Gao Xingjian is a Chinese émigré and later French naturalized novelist, playwright, critic, painter, photographer, film director, and translator who in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for an oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity." He is also a noted translator, screenwriter, stage director, and a celebrated painter.
Mabel Lee is a translator of the works of Nobel Prize-winning author Gao Xingjian. She has taught Asian studies at the University of Sydney and is one of Australia's leading authorities on Chinese cultural affairs. Lee was a professor of South-East Asian Studies at Sydney University and had already begun translation of the poems of Chinese writer, Yang Lian when she met Gao Xingjian, in Paris in 1991. After that meeting, Lee offered to translate Soul Mountain, a project which took seven years, and an additional two to find a publisher for the book in Australia. Following publication, Gao Xingjian became the first Chinese to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Arthur Lindsay Sadler (1882–1970) was Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney.
Soul Mountain is a novel by Gao Xingjian. The novel is loosely based on the author's own journey into rural China, which was inspired by a false diagnosis of lung cancer. The novel is a part autobiographical, part fictional account of a man's journey to find the fabled mountain Lingshan. It is a combination of story fragments, travel accounts, unnamed characters, and folk poetry and legends. An English version translated by Mabel Lee was published in the United States on December 5, 2000.
Melissa Chiu is an Australian museum director, curator and author, and the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.
Andrew Moore is an Australian historian and academic, a specialist in Australian right-wing politics. He has taught at the University of Sydney, The University of New South Wales, England's University of Lincoln and the University of Western Sydney. His areas of expertise include Twentieth Century Australian History, Irish-Australian history and social history of sport, especially rugby league football. Moore is a leading expert on both the New Guard and the Old Guard.
Australian Western, also known as meat pie Western or kangaroo Western, is a genre of Western-style films or TV series set in the Australian outback or "the bush". Films about bushrangers are included in this genre. Some films categorised as meat-pie or Australian Westerns also fulfil the criteria for other genres, such as drama, revisionist Western, crime or thriller. A sub-genre of the Australian Western, the Northern, has been coined by the makers of High Ground (2020), to describe a film set in the Northern Territory that accurately depicts historical events in a fictionalised form, that has aspects of a thriller.
One Man's Bible is a novel by Gao Xingjian published in 1999 and in English translation in 2003. Set during the Cultural Revolution, the novel stars an alter-ego of Gao who reflects on his previous experiences around the world. Throughout the book, the chapters alternate between the narrator describing his life during and after his time in China during the Cultural Revolution. He describes how he looks for freedom and how to retain that freedom.
Jian Youwen was a Chinese historian, public official, and sometime Methodist pastor, known in particular for his writings on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. He taught at Yenching University, the University of Hong Kong, and Yale University.
The Bus Stop is a Chinese absurdist play written in 1981 by Gao Xingjian. Though originally completed in 1981, a second draft wasn't completed until 1982, and the play was not performed on stage until 1983. The play premiered at the Beijing People's Art Theatre and was directed by Lin Zhaohua, the Deputy Director of the People's Art Theatre. Though appreciated by many audiences, the original run was shut down by the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign after only 13 performances. Now banned from performance in mainland China, The Bus Stop remains an influential text in Chinese absurdist drama.
Michelle Law is an Australian writer. She is known for the web series Homecoming Queens, and the book Sh*t Asian Mothers Say, co-authored by her brother Benjamin Law, and her 2017 play Single Asian Female. She is of Chinese descent.
Liu Zaifu is a Chinese author, poet, and professor in literature and the liberal arts. Liu is particularly well known for his work "Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber", which analyzes the Chinese classic "Dream of the Red Chamber", but with Liu's personal viewpoints and philosophy. He has lectured at the University of Chicago, University of Colorado, University of Stockholm, and the City University of Hong Kong, where he served as an honorary professor in 2004.
Professor Albert Richard ('Bertie') Davis (1924-1983) was born in Dorking and died in Sydney. The Chair of Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney for over a quarter-century, he was a major figure in the development of Asian Studies in Australia.
Liu Wei-ping 劉渭平 was a key figure in the development of Chinese studies in Australia. Of a scholarly family from Nantong and attended Xiamen University. Becoming a Republic of China diplomat, he became Vice-Consul at Sydney in 1945. In that role, he was involved in the repatriation of Formosans to Taiwan from Australia, including on the crowded Yoizuki. When the People's Republic of China was established, he remained in Australia, obtaining a master's degree in history from the University of Sydney in 1948 and in 1956 began teaching Chinese at the same institution alongside A. R. Davis. He retired in 1980. He published articles on Taoism and late Qing Poetry in the Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia as well as two books on Chinese Australians and an autobiography, Drifting Clouds: Between China and Australia, was published by Sydney-based Wild Peony Press in 2002.
Wild Peony Press was a Sydney-based independent press, dedicated to fostering the better understanding of Asian cultures in English-speaking countries. Co-founded by Mabel Lee, Wild Peony Press was active between 1984 and 2009 and their work was hailed as " an important move against cultural parochialism" in Australia. From 1991, University of Hawai'i Press undertook international distribution. Initially publishing language textbooks, Wild Peony later focused on literature and culture, including the University of Sydney East Asian Series and World Literature Series. Wild Peony published literary anthologies, the autobiographies of Mitsuharu Kaneko, Liu Wei-ping and Stanley Hunt, a study of artist Wang Lan, poetry by Ouyang Yu, Zijie Pan and Subhash Jaireth, translations of Arakawa Toyozo, Junko Takamizawa, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Nishiwaki Junzaburo, Yi Chung-hwan, Kyunyeo, Xu Xing (writer), Yang Lian, Hong Ying and Zhai Yongming and papers from the conferences of the International Comparative Literature Association. Lee, a translator and friend of Gao Xingjian, used his ink paintings for several of the Wild Peony covers.
The Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs was an Australia-based scholarly journal that ran from 1967 to 2014, dealing with "political, economic, social and cultural aspects of Indonesia and Malaysia." It is indexed in the Bibliography of Asian Studies and included in Informit (database) as well as Scimago and in Scopus.
The Australian Society for Asian Humanities is the oldest academic society in Australasia dedicated to the study of Asia and to the promotion of "the knowledge of Asia in Australia by providing a meeting-place where scholars could present their work to their peers and to the community at large." Founded in 1956 by A.R. Davis as the Oriental Society of Australia, in its early years it was "open to subscribers across the country but the bulk of its members were in Sydney." It acquired its present name in 2021. The focus on Sydney ultimately resulted in the establishment of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (1975) and the New Zealand Asian Studies Society (1974) rather than a geographic expansion of OSA membership. The society also hosts regular seminars, the annual A.R. Davis Memorial Lecture as well as an Emerging Scholars Award.
East Asian History is a biannual peer-reviewed open-access academic journal published by the Australian National University. It was established in 1970 as Papers on Far Eastern History, obtaining its current title in 1991. Published by ANU's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, it was part of a growth in publication on Asian studies in Australia in the 1970s. Originally "founded as a forum for the publication of papers written by the faculty and students of Australian National University" affiliates of ANU continued to "represent the large majority of its contributors, although over the years there have been increasing contributions from scholars from other universities in Australia and abroad." Chinese History: A Manual included the journal as one of the main Western-language journals for research on Chinese history.
Otto Pierre Nicolas Berkelbach van der Sprenkel was a Dutch bibliographer, political scientist, and historian of China.
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is an Indian historian and a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. Bandyopadhyay is known for his research on the Dalit caste of Bengal.
