David Walker (historian)

Happy Together: Bridging the Australia China Divide (Melbourne University Press) jointly written by Walker and Li Yao with the assistance of Karen Walker will be published in June 2022. The book tells the story of Li Yao, the foremost translator of Australian writing into Chinese. In the late nineteenth century, the Li family left famine-stricken Shanxi province in northern China to begin a new life on the remote grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Li Yao grew up in Mao’s China and dreamed of becoming a writer. His dreams were torn apart by the Cultural Revolution. Li Yao’s story is interwoven with that of his friend David Walker. Both men were born at the same time (they are both Roosters by the Chinese zodiac) but grew up in very different worlds. This book illuminates not only personal histories but also China’s relations with Australia and the wider world.

The Story of Australia (2021) written with Louise C. Johnson and Tanja Lukins provides a fresh, engaging and comprehensive introduction to Australia’s history and geography. This new history integrates a rich body of scholarship from many disciplines and uses a great variety of sources from government reports and newspaper accounts to diaries, novels and art. It places emphasis on First Australians, women, the environment and urban Australia along with Australia’s history as an Asia Pacific nation.

Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region is the sequel to "Anxious Nation" published by UWAP in 2019. Drawing on a wide variety of resources including archival records, literature and personal stories,this volume covers the evolution of Australia's engagement with Asia in the period of World War II and into the 1970s. This period saw Australia as a ‘white’ nation, with deep anxieties about Asia, seeking to convince both itself and its neighbours that it belonged within the Asian region. As Britain’s withdrew to Europe, Australia found an urgent need to come to an accommodation with Asia resulting in a desire for a greater understanding of the "Asian Psyche" and a gradual breaking down of the White Australia Policy.

Walker was awarded Membership of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2018 Queen's Birthday honours.

Professor Walker retired from the Chair in 2016 but has continued to support Australian Studies Centres throughout China.

Walker has co-edited Australia’s Asia: from Yellow Peril to Asian Century a selection of essays on the Australian engagement with Asia which was released in late 2012. In January 2013, Walker also published a collection of essays entitled Encountering Turbulence: Asia in the Australian Imaginary.

In November 2012, Walker was appointed as the inaugural BHP Billiton Professor in Australian Studies at Peking University. The chair was an initiative of the Australia-China Council, the Foundation for Australian Studies in China, BHP Billiton, Peking University and the Australian Department of Industry and was the first high-profile, privately funded Australian professorial position in China.

In April 2012, Walker became the Alfred Deakin Professor of Australian Studies, the highest honour that Deakin University can bestow on its academic staff.

In late 2004, David Walker, suffered a sudden and severe loss of sight that rendered him legally blind and limited his ability to continue archival research. He subsequently changed his research methods and drew on his family history as a tool to investigate the development of Australia’s national character and culture. This led to the publication of Not Dark Yet: A personal history which has been described by Phillip Adams as "an evocative portrait of 20th century Australia …the attitudes, idiosyncrasies and prejudices of the era."

The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia elected Walker a fellow in 2001 and the Australian Academy of the Humanities bestowed the same honor in 2005. He received the Ernest Scott prize following the publication of Anxious Nation.

David Robert Walker (born 12 November 1945) is an Australian academic historian who has been the professor of Australian studies at Deakin University since 1991. He is a leading authority in the study of Australian perceptions of Asia.

Walker was born in Adelaide in 1945 and received his early education in rural South Australian schools where his father was a teacher. The family settled in Adelaide in 1958 and Walker graduated from the University of Adelaide with a first class honours degree in Arts in 1967. Post-graduate studies were undertaken at the Australian National University (ANU) where he was awarded a doctorate in 1972. His thesis, which explored Vance Palmer, Louis Esson and other twentieth-century Australian authors' hopes for the development of an Australian culture, was subsequently published as Dream and Disillusion: A Search for Australian Cultural Identity.

The results of his research on Asia were published as Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 in 1999. This landmark work explores the anxiety that Australians felt towards the people of Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While Australian images of Asia were overwhelmingly negative during this period, Walker makes the point that some Australians including Prime Minister Alfred Deakin saw much to admire in Asian cultures. Al Grassby, former Minister for Immigration who dismantled the White Australia Policy, described the book as "evocative and compelling prose …which shows how bigotry and myth making shaped the question of race which dominated the public and private discourse." Anxious Nation has been reprinted in an India edition and translated into Chinese.