Every Assistance and Protection is the first book presenting an in-depth history of the Australian passport. In charting the development of the passport from its early beginnings to its present form, the book traverses changes in government policy and social history from the early 19th century to the modern era. It shows how the Australian passport evolved from a signifier of British nationality into a badge of membership of one of the most multicultural countries in the world. The book is based on an exhaustive examination of hitherto unexamined primary sources of many government departments, including the Departments of External Affairs, the Prime Minister’s, the Attorney-General’s, Defence, Home and Territories, Immigration and Foreign Affairs.

Summary Table of Contents
Introduction,
An Obnoxious Inconvenience: Passports, the Australian Colonies and the Era of Free Movement,
‘The Exigencies of War’: World War One and the ‘temporary’ passport,
‘A difficult business’: Change, resistance and the Australian Passport during the 1920s,
‘Who is inside and who is out’: the Australian Passport System in the 1930s,
‘A precedent for similar action’: discretionary power, the Cold War and passports,
‘That precious document’: Wilfred Burchett’s battle for an Australian passport Citizenship,
Immigration and Globalisation,
Problems of Identity: the Stewart Royal Commission,
the Biometric Passport and the Australian Passports Act 2005,
Bibliography