Australasian universities are tied to Southeast Asia in a number of ways. The most obvious is through their teaching. Since the second world war, but more particularly in the past ten or fifteen years, this has paid more attention to Southeast Asia, its peoples, their history and their languages, than at any time since the first university institutions were founded in Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century. There are other, perhaps less obvious, ties. The teaching has been primarily at undergraduate level, but the staff members involved have, of course, been involved in research in the area. Possibly the majority would have been trained overseas, if not themselves of overseas origin; but quite recently, and especially at one or two centres, the number of graduate research students has become significant, at least in Australia. Some of the research has been published in book or monograph form by existing Australasian or overseas publishers, or by the university presses, whose numbers have augmented over the past decade.