Mongolia Institute Newsletter: Looking back at 2025

Mini-Naadam Event

A highlight for the year was a mini-Naadam: a two-day mini festival featuring Mongolian cultural and sporting events (held between 12-13 September, 2025). The mini-Naadam was organised as part of Immersia, a flagship cultural festival held by the School of Culture, History and Language within the College of Asia and the Pacific.

Pre-festival workshop: installation of the Mongolian ger on campus was organised by the Mongolian Students Association, a newly revitalised students association in 2025. Guidance on ger construction was provided by staff from the Embassy of Mongolia in Canberra. See here.

Image 1: Constructing the Mongolian ger, photo by Natasha Fijn

Mini-Naadam: events organised near the Mongolian ger by Mongolian Institute Director Natasha Fijn and current Mongolian Students Association President Tuguldur Tumerbaatar. Events were accompanied by delicious Mongolian food tasting and catering by The Naadam Restaurant.

Day 1: Live music, traditional dance, calligraphy, and food tastings (horhog/lamb bbq and beef brisket). Three talented musicians travelled from Sydney to perform.

Image 2: Mongolian ger on campus during Immersia, photo by Gouri Banerji

Day 2: Sport and games, including: wrestling, archery, and knucklebone (shagai) shooting. We held an animated wrestling competition, while a family of archers travelled from Sydney to demonstrate their skills.

Image 3: Mongolian wrestling, photo by Natasha Fijn

Image 4: Audience watching the wrestling, photo by Natasha Fijn

Cultural Workshop: Rhythms of Mongolia (Sept 18, 2025):
A dance workshop demonstrated by Maralgoo Chinguunjav exploring the movements of the steppe.

You can view images from the Immersia festival for 2024 and 2025.

Interdisciplinary Collaborations Across the University

This year the ANU became part of a new US$150 million partnership with Rio Tinto to come up with sustainable mineral solutions, as part of research toward a global energy transition. Members of the Mongolia Institute are part of a Future Minerals Network at the ANU. Read more here.

Professor Yu Sheng, Crawford Chair in Agricultural Economics, and researchers based at the Crawford School of Public Policy organised a one-day international workshop Bridging Experience: Agricultural Policy Development in Mongolia and Australia on 6 June 2025. The event was organised in conjunction with the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and the Embassy of Mongolia in Canberra. Mongolia Institute Director, Natasha Fijn provided opening remarks. The workshop concluded with a roundtable discussing future directions for collaborative agricultural research between the two countries. Read more here.

The Mongolia Institute hosted a panel on geopolitical and international ‘Connections between Mongolia and Australia’. Li Narangoa introduced the panel, while Natasha Fijn moderated the panel and discussion. The three featured panellists were the Mongolian Ambassador Davaasuren Damdinsuren; former Australian Ambassador to Mongolia, Katie Smith; and Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the ANU, Joseph Mackay. After the event there was a catered lunch for participants. More information here.

Members of the Mongolia Institute and the South Asia Research Institute (SARI) were involved in the organisation of an international, interdisciplinary research methods conference, hosted at the ANU. Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods (MEAM) conference: The conference included an accompanying exhibition at the Centre for China and the World Gallery, Sensorial Entanglements, featuring creative forms of research output.

Modern Mongolia Field Course

Li Narangoa and Natasha Fijn took 16 students, funded by New Colombo Plan scholarships, to Mongolia for an intensive in-country course ASIA3084 Modern Mongolia: Challenges to the Environment, Economy and Empire. The students were blessed with fine weather and an action packed 14 days with 8 days in the capital of Ulaanbaatar and 6 days traveling in the Mongolian countryside.

Image 5: Class circling three times at Gandan Monastery, photo by Batjav Bayartuul

Image 6: On a rooftop in Ulaanbaatar, photo by Natasha Fijn

They stayed at a ger camp at the base of a mountain leading to sacred Tövkhön Monastery. They visited a herding family amongst grazing yak and horse herds in a beautiful valley with a wide diversity of wild flowers blooming. Unfortunately, while traveling to the destination of Kharkhorin to attend a Naadam festival, the rented bus broke down in a wide river valley. Luckily it happened to be the Orkhon River Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Area, so while waiting for the drivers to source parts from a nearby township, the students visited Turkic era burial mounds and were warmly welcomed by two herding families, who offered fermented mare’s milk and dairy products, a child entertained by singing to the class and they observed the milking of mares outside. Not a bad experience when broken down in the remote Mongolian countryside! Students later indicated that the trip to the mountain monastery and the breakdown in the Orkhon Valley was their favourite part of the field course.

Image7: Modern Mongolia class of 2025 in the countryside, photo by Natasha Fijn

Image 8: The class at the ancient capital of Kharkhorin, photo by Batjav Bayartuul

As a change from previous years, in 2026 Natasha Fijn and Li Narangoa will be running an intensive course on campus: https://programsandcourses.anu.edu.au/course/asia3084.

If you know of any ANU students that would be interested in participating in this course, please pass on the word.

Key Presentations in 2025

In 2025 a number of high-profile presentations were given both domestically and internationally:

Keynotes by Professor Li Narangoa:

‘Land, Literature, Livelihood: Interdisciplinary Pathways in Mongolian Studies’ at the International Mongolian Studies Symposium (Hohhot, August 2025);
‘Western Perspectives on Mongolian Medicine: From Early Records to Contemporary Scholarship’ at the International Symposium on Traditional Medicine (September 2025);
‘Legends in Stone and Story: The Mongol Invasions in Japan’s Memoryscape’ as the Richard Davis Memorial Lecture at the University of Sydney (November 2025). At the Mongolian Studies Conference, she met several of our MI visiting alumni.
During Asia-Pacific Week, Li Narangoa was invited to give a public lecture on Mongolian language and in June conducted an on-campus workshop on classic Mongolian script.

Image 9: Li Narangoa with previous Visiting Fellows at a conference in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China

Natasha Fijn presented on:

‘Tools as Animistic Extensions of the Body’ at an International Symposium on ‘Dances with All: on animals and anima’, Research Institute for Humanities and Nature (Kyoto, January 30);
‘The Re-wilding of the Takhi’ at the Mongolia Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU) at the University of Cambridge (Cambridge, 22 May);
In Mongolia Natasha presented on ‘Bloodletting: an ancient nomadic practice for contemporary diseases’ at the American Centre for Mongolian Studies (ACMS) (Ulaanbaatar, 28 June); See the ACMS presentation on bloodletting as a form of medicinal treatment on YouTube here.
Keynote within the International Symposium on Traditional Integrative Medicine (Ulaanbaatar, 12 November). Her presentation on equine influenza was subtitled, then shown on national television in Mongolia.

Visitors to the ANU

From September 2025 to January 2026, the Mongolia Institute hosted a postgraduate Visiting Fellow from Inner Mongolia University, Mongkjia, who was collecting materials for his thesis on steppe ecology and the rural economy of pastoral Inner Mongolia. During his visit, he actively participated in Mongolia Institute activities, including the setup of the ger on campus.
At the end of October, Visiting Fellow Shimon Sakai from Ritsumeiken University in Japan, presented on ‘Mongolia as an Observational Post in Northeast Asia’ as part of the Mongolia Institute Seminar Series. He was also involved in Mongolia Institute events during his Visiting Fellowship.

Image 10: Tsogtbaatar Damdin with Julie Bishop in the graduation ceremony

Li Narangoa nominated Tsogtbaatar Damdin for an honorary doctorate for his distinguished public service and leadership in diplomacy, human rights and environmental reform.

Tsogtbaatar Damdin was awarded the prestigious ANU Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters, conferred by the ANU Chancellor the Honorable Julie Bishop, during a graduation ceremony on 4 February 2026. An alumnus of the ANU School of Law from 1998, Dr Tsogbaatar is currently Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, a member of the Great Khural Parliament. He was formerly the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister for the Environment in Mongolia, has been active in promoting the Mongolia-Australia Society (known as Mozzies) and has generously contributed to Mongolia Institute events over many years.

Former Ambassador to Mongolia, Katie Smith, hosted a DFAT lunch for Dr Tsogtbaatar Damdin in celebration of his honorary doctorate.