An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press) was launched in Canberra by Professors Francesca Merlan and Mick Dodson, and then again at the ASA/AAS/ASAANZ conference in Auckland by Professor Marilyn Strathern.

The book arises out of a conference celebrating the centenary of Stanner’s birth organised by the editors in 2005. It brings together leading scholars working in Aboriginal Australia to consider Stanner’s legacy in the present and to provide contextual understandings of his contributions to anthropological scholarship, Australian public culture and policy making.

Themes explored include the rich complexity of Aboriginal religion, the development dilemmas of Aboriginal Australia and those of post-war Africa and the Pacific; contestation over land rights and the place of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation, and the creative concerns of life writing.

Launching the book Marilyn Strathern described An Appreciation of Difference as a ‘fascinating and important collection’.

Reviewing the collection in The Monthly, Inga Clendinnen reflected that it ‘raises in poignant form the question of how we can best grasp an individual life history… It offers a magnificent array of information, insights, analyses, evaluations: multiple takes on a multiple man. But be warned. If you pick it up it will eat at least a month of your life’.