So Far and Yet So Near? Community Psychology in Australia

Australian community psychology (CP) has a shared history as well as regional variations, resulting in an eclectic mix of ideas, methodologies, and practices. In this chapter, we review the emergence of CP in Australia from within the dominant paradigm to its official recognition as a subdiscipline of psychology and the development of postgraduate programs. CP’s formal history in Australia has links with the parallel, recent history of the subdiscipline elsewhere, particularly in the United States; informally, the climate in which it was born was distinctly Australian, resonating with the cultural pluralism and emergent debates around decolonisation and political realignment within the Asia-Pacific region that characterised the 1970s in this country. In this chapter, we critically examine a number of aspects of that history: the impact of the decision to locate the subdiscipline as a professional specialisation; the role of community psychologists in consciousness–raising around social justice within psychology and society; and the importance of geography in determining the nature of CP theorising and applications in this part of the world. We draw on the responses from a survey of 25 CP academics, practitioners, and students in order to personalise the emergence and subsequent development of CP in Australia.