The idea for this book came about while Professor Vin D'Cruz was Adjunct Professor in Alternative Future Studies in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University between 2006 and 2008. The most inspiring and collegial of scholars, D'Cruz, with his usual acuity and enabling tactics, assembled a team of us in the School to collaborate and write a book on the urgent challenge of how Australian society would meet its future in an honest, frank and critically reflective way. He saw this book as part of a series of important scholarly works that summed up his most germane concerns, which cohered around the way in which Australia, as a multicultural society in Oceania, would come to terms culturally and intellectually with its proximity and future in Asia, and secondly, how it would ultimately engage substantively with the presence of the indigenous heart and mind belonging to the world's longest living civilisation.

As an innovative and illuminating way to respond to these concerns, D'Cruz looked to the ideas of Ashis Nandy, ‘one of the foremost critical intellectuals on the globe’, as Raewyn Connell has noted. Nandy would be used as a lens through which to help us get inside Australian culture, so to speak. Testament to his energy, commitment and tenacity, D'Cruz did in fact manage to publish two books that tackled these concerns before he died in 2008.