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In this award-winning work Carlson explores the complexities surrounding Aboriginal identity today. Drawing on a range of sources including interviews and surveys, The politics of identity explores Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal understandings of Aboriginality and the way these are produced and reproduced across a range of sites and contexts. Carlson explores both the community and external tensions around appropriate measures of identity and the pressures and effects of identification. An analysis of online Indigenous communities on social media that have emerged as sites of contestation adds to the growing knowledge in this area, both nationally and globally.

In 1830, at the age of forty, Jean-Claude Colin accepted the call of his colleagues to take charge of the Society of Mary (Marists). He had joined this project as a seminarian in Lyons, France, in 1816, along with Marcellin Champagnat, future founder of the Marist teaching brothers. Since ordination, he had been an assistant priest at Cerdon (photo below), preached revival missions in rural districts and been principal of a high school-seminary. Colin always insisted that he was only a temporary superior until someone more capable could take over. Yet, by the time he resigned in 1854, he had obtained papal approval of the priests' branch, established the Society firmly in France, especially in education, and sent fifteen expeditions of missionary priests and brothers to the remote and scattered islands of the southwest Pacific. There they planted the Catholic Church in New Zealand, Wallis and Futuna, Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia. Between his resignation and his death in 1875, Colin wrote Constitutions for the priests and brothers of the Society of Mary and for the Marist sisters. He also left a rich spiritual teaching. For this achievement, the Society regards him, despite his reluctance, as its Founder.

'A cloth spread under an apple tree can catch only apples', wrote Antoine de Saint Exupery in Terre des hommes (Land of Men), (English title: Wind, Sand and Stars), 'and a cloth spread under stars can catch only stardust ... What was most marvellous was that, there, standing on the planet's rounded back, between this magnetic cloth and those stars, was a man's consciousness in which that star-fall could be reflected as in a mirror.' And a few pages further on he writes: 'I was but a mere mortal lost between sand and stars, aware simply of the sweet pleasure of breathing.' From the author of those lines to the writer of the first well known verses of the Bible: 'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth ...', stretch centuries of time and an intellectual and cultural abyss as well. What could there be in common between the pilot of the first air route from Toulouse to Dakar and the direct descendants of Semitic nomads? Certainly not much, but for those star-pierced nights that deserts alone can offer for contemplation, combined with the tormenting question: what a thing is man, confronted by the cosmos, magnificent and terrible at the same time? This question has been haunting humanity from the beginning and gnaws at each of us: 'Who am I? Where did I come from? Where does my destiny lie?' To these questions, the desert dwellers, and the aviator lost like all their brothers in humanity, have given the same response. Certainly we are mortal beings, lost in the middle of the cosmos as in a desert, crushed by the weight of reality as by the immense celestial vault. And yet, we are unique, singular, irreplaceable; we are not less than the consciousness of the world, and, believers among them will say, we are even created in the image of God. Is that courage or lack of awareness, pretentiousness or faith?

In these reflections on leadership in Church and State, Frank Brennan states ideals and proposes practical challenges in addresses ranging from his non-partisan 'Light on the Hill' address to the Australian Labor Party after the 2013 federal election to his address to the representatives of the world's Jesuit universities. He reflects on the leadership of past prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser. He offers insights into tested leadership with his ANZAC Centenary Address in the Harvard Memorial Chapel. He challenges church leaders to be more transparent and compassionate in their responses before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. He draws inspiration from leaders like Pope Francis, El Salvador's Archbishop Oscar Romero and Redfern's Fr Ted Kennedy. Frank writes with the conviction that we the people are seeking spiritual and political leaders who can inspire us to dedicate ourselves to taking up the burdens of the fallen in the Great War and, with the same high courage and steadfastness with which they went into battle, to setting our hands to the tasks they left unfinished (some of which they could not possibly have imagined a century ago), and giving our utmost to make the world a better and happier place for all people, through whatever means are open to us. As well as being bloodied and tested, our new leaders need to be nurtured, encouraged, and espoused. They need strong moral contours to navigate the modern demands of leadership when taking on the big issues like climate change and entrenched inequality.