Practical Visionaries: A Study of Community Aid Abroad

by Susan Blackburn

Practical Visionaries is the first full-length account of an Australian aid organization. It tells the story of Community Aid Abroad, from its origins in the Australia of the 1950s until the present day. Drawing on her own long association with the organization, as well as on research conducted in Australia, Asia, and Africa, Susan Blackburn analyses the efforts of CAA and its Third World partners to create a world without poverty and injustice.

Almost from the start, Community Aid Abroad has been unusually ambitious in its aims of promoting development through aid and trade, of educating Australians about their relations with the Third World, and of attempting to influence public policy. Finding effective means of pursuing these goals has involved conflict and frustration as well as hard-won successes, testing the limits of what a voluntary organization can achieve. Now that it has become a well-known national institution, a major challenge facing CAA is to live up to its own self-image as part of a global social movement.

390 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Susan Blackburn (formerly Susan Abeyasekere) is a researcher and academic with a focus on Indonesian history and politics, the Indonesian women's movement, and foreign aid. She has taught at a number of universities, including Victoria University of Technology, Griffith University, and—since 1991—Monash University, on topics such as development politics, gender in Asian politics, Southeast Asian politics, and foreign aid and non-governmental organizations. Some of the titles of books she has written or edited are Women and the State in Modern Indonesia (2004), Indonesian Islam in a New Era: How Women Negotiate their Muslim Identities (2007), and The First Indonesian Women's Congress of 1928 (2007).

Reviews

[Ros Lewis]

Not sure when I read it