Professor Andrew Markus

Andrew Markus is Emeritus Professor in Monash University’s School of International, Historical and Philosophical Studies. Since 2004 he has been a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His research specialisation is in the field of racial and ethnic relations, ethnic communities, and immigration policy. He is the author or co-author of more than one hundred academic articles, book chapters, reference works, and reports, and of fourteen books, including Fear and Hatred: Purifying Australia and California, 1850-1901 (1979); Australian Race Relations 1788 – 1993 (1994); The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights (with Bain Attwood, 1999); Building a New Community: Immigration and the Victorian Economy (2001); Australia’s Immigration Revolution (with Peter McDonald and James Jupp, 2009); and Second Chance: A History of Yiddish Melbourne (with Margaret Taft, 2018).

Professor Markus has extensive experience researching Australian public opinion. In 1988 he was commissioned to prepare a report on ‘How Australians see each other’ for the Fitzgerald Committee which advised the Hawke government on immigration policy. His first survey of Australian attitudes towards immigrants was conducted in south-east Melbourne in the 1990s. He has led two national surveys on attitudes within the Jewish community; the first, which included some 200 questions, was conducted in 2007-08 and was completed by 4,100 respondents, the second in 2017 was completed by 8,600.  

In an Australian first, Professor Markus is tracking changes in Australian attitudes in the Scanlon Foundation national social cohesion survey, which was first conducted in 2007. In addition to the annual Scanlon Foundation surveys, research has explored attitudes within segments of the community, including neighbourhoods and regions, third generation Australians, and recent immigrant arrivals. The Australia@2015 project included a survey conducted in 20 languages, completed by more than 10,000 respondents, and more than fifty focus groups conducted in four states.

Surveys have also been undertaken for federal and state government departments. His commissioned report for the Victorian Research Institute on Social Cohesion on protests in Bendigo to the proposed building of a mosque, ‘Division in Bendigo: Mainstream public opinion and responses to public protest in Bendigo, 2014-2016’, was completed in 2018.

In 2019 Professor Markus with Associate Professor Dharmalingam Arunachalam and Dr Helen Forbes-Mewett was the recipient of an ARC Discovery Grant to deepen understanding of cross-cultural and cross-religious marriages and partnerships in Australia.