This chapter considers the empire- and nation-building capacities of the long poem in the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries, including epics by R. H. Horne, Will X. Redman and Rex Ingamells. It then analyses revisions of the epic in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including examples that undo settler monumentality, explore other cultural narratives or make use of other media such as film. It discusses the popularity of the verse novel, observing its beginnings in the World War I writing of C. J. Dennis. It considers the renaissance of the verse novel in the late twentieth century, examining how its cross-genre form was often able to accommodate transgressive desires. The rising popularity of young adult verse novels is also detailed. The chapter traces the emergence of non-fiction long poetry, viewing it through the sub-categories of documentary, history and biography. It then discusses Indigenous long poems and recent experimental long poems, including ones that explore visual, conceptual and digital possibilities.

This chapter examines specifically oriented poetry anthologies of the twenty-first century, observing their interstitial and multivalent nature. It argues that they fall into two kinds. one is deployed towards institutional consolidation; the other, which is the principal focus of the chapter, is a strategic gathering around a cultural identity, or a thematic, aesthetic, formal or dialogical imperative. The chapter discerns that many such anthologies extend recuperative, topical or other discursive trajectories established in the late twentieth century. Many exceed national-historical formations, track evolving conceptual frames of literary and cultural studies, and map material changes in, and significant structures of feeling around, social, political, intellectual and artistic life. It also includes a discussion of the challenges and significance of translation.

This chapter considers the fraught and complex history of religion and poetry in Australia, given the context of settler – colonialism, Aboriginal understandings of Country, and Australia’s growing cultural diversity. Discerning that anti-religious sentiment has emerged through a perception of Christianity as too close to settler – colonialism, it argues for a broad understanding of religion to include major world faiths and Aboriginal spirituality. It considers how nineteenth-century poets responded to the crises of faith brought about by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and then how poets grappled with meaning-making and value-making following the two world wars. At the same time, it recognises that many poets; including Francis Webb, James McAuley, Vincent Buckley; and Les Murray; still shared an institutional understanding of religion. The chapter considers how recent poets have meditated on the relationship between the secular and the sacred. It analyses the mosaic quality of Fay Zwicky’s reflections on her Jewish ancestry, as well as the navigation of Buddhism in poets like Harold Stewart, Robert Gray; and Judith Beveridge; Christianity in the work of Kevin Hart and Lachlan Brown; and Islam in the work of Omar Sakr.

This chapter considers the profound physical co-presence and ritual language in First Nations culture, the role of poetry readings at formal occasions, folk ballads in early settler culture, and the continuing popularity of bush poetry today. It traces the emergence of performance poetry, as it is most well known, in the 1970s, discussing how it became a way for many to articulate lived experiences that were otherwise silenced in written form. Links to community and a curious general public are detailed. The chapter discusses the establishment of the Australian Poets Union and the relation of live poetry to little magazines. It considers the expansion and diversification of live poetry in the 1980s, and the fostering of vernacular and everyday experience as street poetry. It then discusses growing institutional recognition, including the creation of state poetry festivals and the increasing recognition of sound poetry. The chapter analyses the alignment of performance poetry with DIY aesthetics, disruptions of the global, branching into music and the rise of poetry slams. It concludes by reflecting on how performance poetry has been powerfully shaped by First Nations and culturally diverse poets.

This chapter discusses poets of the South West Asian and North African diasporas who have experienced exile and loss, some as refugees. It describes a translingual pluriverse of diasporic poets from a region that has come to have many names and terminologies assigned to it. The chapter reflects on the political and cultural conditions in which diasporic writers produce poetry in Australia, in both spoken and written forms. Themes of witness, protest and identity, often interwoven, are analysed. The chapter considers the presence of poets from Arabic-, Kurdish-, Dari- and Farsi-speaking backgrounds, some of whom write in English while others have translingual practices and experiment with hybrid modes. It assesses the impact of settler monolingualism in Australia and argues for the importance of multilingual poetry in articulating cultural diversity and challenging delimiting discursive systems. The significance of literary journals is also detailed, and the value of poetry in the face of violence, displacement and prejudice is asserted.

This chapter identifies Symbolism’s influence on Australian poetry as taking two trajectories. The first, more dominant trajectory traces the Symbolism as emerging from A. G. Stephens’s editorial work and Christopher Brennan’s adaptation of Mallarmé’s doctrine into a metaphysical tradition. The chapter follows its continuation in the poetry of A. R. Chisholm, Randolph Hughes, Nettie Palmer, Zora Cross, the Vision circle, Douglas Stewart, Francis Webb, Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, A. D. Hope and James McAuley. The chapter argues that a second, more adventurous and feral trajectory includes Brennan’s most experimental writing, the work of Ern Malley, Patrick White’s Voss, and more recent poetry by Robert Adamson, John Tranter and Chris Edwards.

This chapter is an overview of the life and work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker), whose poetry collection We Are Going (1964) was not only the first ever book of poetry by an Aboriginal person but also one of the fastest-selling books in Australian history. It traces her early involvement in civil rights in Queensland, her ongoing activism in Aboriginal struggles, and the power of her poetry to articulate the feelings and lived experiences of the Aboriginal people. It discusses Oodgeroo’s friendship with Judith Wright and her founding of Moongalba, an Aboriginal cultural and education centre on Noonuccal country. The chapter outlines her role in various national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts organisations and her international connections with Indigenous writers. Lastly, it emphasises Oodgeroo’s lifelong work in foregrounding Aboriginal cultural and political perspectives.

Justin Reynolds narrates how Christians argued for religious freedom in rights terms at a moment of transatlantic hegemony in the 1940s, divorcing protection for religious practice from that for religious belief. That required abandonment of older models of Christian politics, but the results have been fateful for the regulation since of non-Christians around the world.

From agents and bearers of human rights, the volume turns to domains which some have seen as impervious to claimants of rights, but which have been refashioned thanks to their mobilization. Sara Silverstein explains how it was from the periphery – first small European states before World War II and later from the Global South after – that most work was done to elaborate entitlements to healthcare, whether at the local, national, or international level. Some of these impulses sprang from mechanisms of colonial rule, others from the biopolitical transformation of citizenship (including in the rise of mandatory insurance); and there is no doubt that the international standard-setting of the World Health Organization and other agencies played an important role.

Adam Etinson and Jiewuh Song chronicle how one academic profession reckoned with the concept at the core of human rights, as well as with some of its practices. Starting with a more global – if still largely transatlantic – moment of philosophical interpretation of rights at the time of the UDHR, Etinson and Song go on to show how Anglophone philosophers moved very recently to develop approaches to thinking about the international human rights movement.

During the period of Sasanian dominion (224–651 ce) the inhabitants of the Empire of Ērānšahr (“Realm of the Iranians”) were subject to a well-developed and efficient legal system, which was in force in all the provinces of the vast empire during the five centuries of this dynasty’s rule and remained relevant far into the Muslim era after the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century. In the age that the chapter deals with, Iranian law had already developed across many centuries from its simple beginnings in a pastoral society in the first millennium bce, during which the first Zoroastrian precepts were formulated and customs established, to its most sophisticated known form in the legal system of the Sasanian state. Within this timespan, jurisprudence evolved into an advanced and complex discipline, which remained firmly based on Zoroastrian tenets, but became largely detached from theology particularly in the legal practice of the state courts in the Sasanian era.

Drawing together emerging domestic and regional reform struggles with wider geopolitical developments, this chapter explores a new way to think about the unfolding of rights history. Starting in the later nineteenth century, the forces encouraging growing intergovernmental contact and cooperation through multilateral agreements and codified law – technological and industrial changes, including the spread of ever more deadly weapons, the easing of transport and communications, expanding educational opportunities, and a growing reading public – drew likeminded female and male reformers together in spaces beyond borders through new patterns of transnational mobilizations and formal international organizations. Many local advocates pushing against the limitations of the natural rights traditions of liberal citizenship increasingly drew strength in numbers by transcending existing political arrangements and combining national, regional, and international advocacy.

If we expect that the world culture with the first written laws should give us the earliest instances of legal “rights,” we would be looking at Mesopotamia. At the outset, this looks promising, because the senses of legal and moral right pertaining in the relevant Sumerian and Akkadian terms have the same semantic basis as the Indo-European root which builds the English word “right”: Sum. si sa2, “to make straight, fair”; Akk. ešēru, “to go/be straight,” causative šutēšuru, “to provide justice.” Like Latin rectus, “ruled,” and Germanic riht, “just, good,” these Mesopotamian verbs married senses of normativity and fairness (whether in terms of justice, ethical correctness, or moral principle) to concepts of straightness and linearity. Conversely, any deviation from si sa2/ešēru implied straying from a straight path or from justice. So, we begin with the semantics in good order.

A study of the notion of rights in classical Greek thought naturally focuses on Aristotle’s ethics and politics. Plato’s ethics shows a much greater concern with people’s interests than with their rights. In Plato, too, these interests are identified with reference to the community as a whole; that is, it is the good of the community that comes first in order of justification. As Julia Annas remarks in her Introduction to Plato’s Republic, in Plato’s ideal city “all classes are protected in freely having and doing what is necessary for them best to fill their social role.” At the same time, Plato believes that interests justified in this way (that is, identified and determined with reference to their contribution to the common good) are people’s true interests: his politics and ethics are therefore paternalistic and illiberal. As such, they do not allow for a theory of subjective rights as morally or legally sanctioned entitlements that are concerned with the individual qua individual, independently of the contribution that they might make to the common good. Plato’s predecessors, for their part, had mainly focused on the relation between morality and self-interest and the potential conflict between the two.

The notion of right(s) is ubiquitous in Roman Republican writings and its meaning often ambiguous and varied; it includes the idea of justice, normative rules, as well as a wider legal order. Following the work of Michel Villey, who argued that the Romans did not have a concept of subjective rights, as this would have required associating the ideas of right and power, historians of political thought and philosophers of law have all agreed that the Romans did not have much (or anything) to contribute to the idea of subjective rights and focused on identifying its first developments in subsequent periods, ranging from the twelfth century down to the late medieval period.

Roland Burke presents the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in June 1993 as showcasing human rights language as the “decisively triumphant discourse of the post-Cold War era.” Human rights champions gathered in Vienna after the end of the Cold War to inaugurate what they anticipated would be a new order for human rights, comprised of the minimalist state, formal democratization, and individual freedoms, with some cursory mention of welfare and inclusive development. Jensen’s contention that the delegitimization of socioeconomic rights in international politics coincided with a narrowing of human rights, rather than its successful expansion as an international movement, crucially challenges the triumphant narrative that Burke recovers.

In crosscurrents of the shift away from an imperial world order surfaced another contentious debate over changing hierarchies within human rights: Were universal human rights primarily about socioeconomic rights (requiring states to strengthen social welfare and economic opportunity), or were they about the right of individuals to exercise their civil and political rights? In underscoring a need for histories of socioeconomic rights that account for interactions between civil, economic, political, and social rights over a long timespan, Steven L. B. Jensen questions the historical accuracy of too stark of a distinction. At the crossroads of decolonization and Cold War geopolitics, however, leaders of liberal democracies insisted that the political and civil rights of the individual were the most important in the universal package, while socialist states emphasized socioeconomic rights (the right to education, the right to work, the right to development) that could benefit individuals as part of their collective belonging, thus furthering the cause of the socialist revolution.