Professor Joy Damousi was the ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Melbourne between 2014 and 2019. The ARC Fellowship made possible the scale of the now published book, enabling research not only in Australia but also the United States, Britain, and Europe. The book evidences the potential of richly funded historical research.

Damousi’s work is a major contribution to the expanding field of humanitarianism, presented as an Australian case study focused on child war refugees. Through a historical lens, it explores complex, multilayered, and shifting meanings. It brings into focus the intersection of humanitarian concerns and broader political questions related to immigration, race, ethnicity, and gender in the era of White Australia.

The chapters are structured around four overlapping concepts: saving, evacuating, assimilating, and adopting. They encompass a range of activities including fundraising, aid and development schemes, child sponsorship, the establishment of orphanages, and inter-country adoption. The study is theoretically positioned within Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’, in which individuals and their collectives define the valuable and the harmful, ‘the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate and deplore’.

Spanning six decades, Damousi’s study traverses the two world wars, the Armenian genocide, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The transnational positioning follows the humanitarians on their travels to sites of conflict, the bringing to Australia of new ideas, languages, and causes, and the taking of Australian perspectives to the global community.