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Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history
Until the latter decades of the twentieth century historical works
on Australian education tended, almost without exception, to not
foreground gender. The revitalisation of feminism in both the
social and academic worlds in the 1970s nurtured scholarship whose
primary purpose was to place gender at the centre of policy and
research. One strand of this project was to map the careers and
structural positioning of women teachers. However, while this
important advance brought an analytical lens to bear on what had
been a significant lacuna in the history of education the emphasis
on the overt structural and cultural exclusions faced by women who
taught tended to perpetuate stereotypes of teaching and
professionalism. Thus, women teachers were understood as victims of
patriarchal bureaucratic systems. The possibility that women
teachers had more complex and agentic lives was largely unexplored.
More recent scholarship has called for the need to investigate the
subjective experiences of becoming and being a woman teacher thus
creating a greater set of bounded studies which pay close attention
to ethnic, class and regional differences as well as instances
where women teachers exercised autonomy and resistance. A further
significant development has been the insistence on the inclusion of
'stories from below' gathered through the biographical and
autobiographical writings of women teachers as well as oral history
testaments. This book is part of that ongoing historical
exploration of women teachers' lives and makes a unique
contribution. This is partly due to the location, Western
Australia, and also in the focus on the process of becoming a woman
teacher. Oral testimonies from twenty-four womenteachers who
graduated from the only Western Australian teachers' college in the
early twentieth century provide the personal perspective, while
secondary sources, policy texts and institutional records are used
to create the historical context. This book challenges the
assumption that families and schools unproblematically reproduced
prevailing gender regimes. By becoming teachers, these women had
been exposed to traditional expectations that they would accept
masculine authority and eventually leave teaching to become wives
and mothers. On the other hand they were also educated, encouraged
to enter the teaching profession, and rewarded for their
achievements. They learned to invest themselves in developing their
rational and critical capacities. If they stayed in the profession
they would have to remain spinsters, an apparently unacceptable
social position. It might have seemed like an impossible choice but
in the final chapter of the book Janina Trotman details the nature
of these choices and the rich and varied lives of the women who
made them. Girls Becoming Teachers will appeal to a wide range of
groups. Scholars engaged in researching gender, education and
professionalism would find much of interest, as will those who
investigate the construction of subjectivities. Since much of the
book is based on oral testimonies it would be an important addition
to an Oral History Collection. Finally, since stories are a source
of pleasure and fascination, many teachers, both retired and in
service would find the book a pleasure to read.
This book draws on archival, oral history and public policy sources
to tell a history of foster care in Australia from the nineteenth
century to the present day. It is, primarily, a social history
which places the voices of people directly touched by foster care
at the centre of the story, but also within the wider social and
political debates which have shaped foster care across more than a
century. The book confronts foster care's difficult past-death and
abuse of foster children, family separation, and a general public
apathy towards these issues-but it also acknowledges the resilience
of people who have survived a childhood in foster care, and the
challenges faced by those who have worked hard to provide good
foster homes and to make child welfare systems better. These are
themes which the book examines from an Australian perspective, but
which often resonate with foster care globally.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of capital punishment
in the Australian colonies for the very first time. The author
illuminates all aspects of the penalty, from shortcomings in
execution technique, to the behaviour of the dying criminal, and
the antics of the scaffold crowd. Mercy rates, execution numbers,
and capital crimes are explored alongside the transition from
public to private executions and the push to abolish the death
penalty completely. Notions of culture and communication freely
pollinate within a conceptual framework of penal change that
explains the many transformations the death penalty underwent. A
vast array of sources are assembled into one compelling argument
that shows how the 'lesson' of the gallows was to be safeguarded,
refined, and improved at all costs. This concise and engaging work
will be a lasting resource for students, scholars, and general
readers who want an in-depth understanding of a long feared
punishment. Dr. Steven Anderson is a Visiting Research Fellow in
the History Department at The University of Adelaide, Australia.
His academic research explores the role of capital punishment in
the Australian colonies by situating developments in these
jurisdictions within global contexts and conceptual debates.
The Jerilderie and Cameron Letters are Ned Kelly's only extant
writings.
This volume is the most detailed case study of land tenure in
Hawai'i. Focusing on kuleana (homestead land) in Kahana, O'ahu,
from 1846 to 1920, the author challenges commonly held views
concerning the Great Mahele (Division) of 1846-1855 and its
aftermath. There can be no argument that in the fifty years prior
to the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, ninety percent of
all land in the Islands passed into the control or ownership of
non-Hawaiians. This land grab is often thought to have begun with
the Great Mahele and to have been quicky accomplished because of
Hawaiians' ignorance of Western law and the sharp practices of
Haole (White) capitalists. What the Great Mahele did create were
separate land titles for two types of land (kuleana and ahupua'a)
that were traditionally thought of as indivisible and
interconnected, thus undermining an entire social system. With the
introduction of land titles and ownership, Hawaiian land could now
be bought, sold, mortgaged, and foreclosed. Using land-tenure
documents recently made available in the Hawai'i State Archives'
Foster Collection, the author presents the most complete picture of
land transfer to date. The Kahana database reveals that after the
1846 division, large-scale losses did not occur until a hitherto
forgotten mortgage and foreclosure law was passed in 1874.
Hawaiians fought to keep their land and livelihoods, using legal
and other, more innovative, means, including the creation of hui
shares. Contrary to popular belief, many of the investors and
speculators who benefitted from the sale of absenteeowned lands
awarded to ali'i (rulers) were not Haole but Pake (Chinese).
Kahana: How the Land Was Lost explains how Hawaiians of a century
ago were divested of their land - and how the past continues to
shape the Island's present as Hawaiians today debate the structure
of land-claim settlements.
People and Change in Australia arose from a conviction that more
needs to be done in anthropology to give a fuller sense of the
changing lives and circumstances of Australian indigenous
communities and people. Much anthropological and public discussion
remains embedded in traditionalizing views of indigenous people,
and in accounts that seem to underline essential and apparently
timeless difference. In this volume the editors and contributors
assume that "the person" is socially defined and reconfigured as
contexts change, both immediate and historical. Essays in this
collection are grounded in Australian locales commonly termed
"remote." These indigenous communities were largely established as
residential concentrations by Australian governments, some first as
missions, most in areas that many of the indigenous people involved
consider their homelands. A number of these settlements were
located in proximity to settler industries including pastoralism,
market-gardening, and mining. These are the locales that many
non-indigenous Australians think of as the homes of the most
traditional indigenous communities and people. The contributors
discuss the changing circumstances of indigenous people who
originate from such places. Some remain, while others travel far
afield. The accounts reveal a diversity of experiences and
histories that involve major dynamics of disembedding from country
and home locales, and re-embedding in new contexts, and
reconfigurations of relatedness. The essays explore dimensions of
change and continuity in childhood experience and socialization in
a desert community; the influence of Christianity in fostering both
individuation and relatedness in northeast Arnhem Land; the
diaspora of Central Australian Warlpiri people to cities and the
forms of life and livelihood they make there; adolescent
experiences of schooling away from home communities; youth in
kin-based heavy metal gangs configuring new identities, and
indigenous people of southeast Australia reflecting on whether an
"Aboriginal way" can be sustained. The volume takes a step toward
understanding the relation between changing circumstances and
changing lives of indigenous Australians today and provides a sense
of the quality and the feel of those lives.
Using archival materials from all three nations, this first
comparative study of French and Italian relations with the United
States during the early Cold War shows that French and Italian
ambitions of status, or prestige, crucially affected the formation
of the Western Alliance. While attention to outside appearances had
a long historic tradition for both European nations, the notion was
compounded by their humiliation in World War II and their
consequent fear of further demotion. Only by promoting an American
hegemony over Europe could France and Italy aspire respectively to
attain continental leadership and equality with the other great
European powers. For its part, Washington carefully calibrated
concessions of mere status with the more substantial issues of
international roles.
A recent trend in both U.S. and European historiography of the
Cold War has emphasized the role that America's allies had in
shaping the post-World War II international system. Combining
diplomatic, strategic, economic, and cultural insights, and
reassessing the main events from post-war reconstruction to the
Middle Eastern crises of the late 1950s, Brogi reaches two major
conclusions: that the United States helped the two allies to
recover enough self-esteem to cope with their own decline; and that
both the French and the Italian leaders, with constant pressure
from Washington, progressively adapted to a notion of prestige no
longer based solely on nationalism, but also on their capacity to
promote, or even master, continental integration. With this focus
on image, Brogi finally suggests a background to today's changing
patterns of international relations, as civilizational values
become increasingly important at the expense of more familiar
indices of economic and military power.
This book reconstructs the history of a group of British Quaker
families and their involvement in the process of settler
colonialism in early nineteenth-century Australia. Their everyday
actions contributed to the multiplicity of practices that displaced
and annihilated Aboriginal communities. Simultaneously, early
nineteenth-century Friends were members of a translocal,
transatlantic community characterized by pacifism and an
involvement in transnational humanitarian efforts, such as the
abolitionist and the prison reform movements as well as the
Aborigines Protection Society. Considering these ideals, how did
Quakers negotiate the violence of the frontier? To answer this
question, the book looks at Tasmanian and South Australian Quakers'
lives and experiences, their journeys and their writings. Building
on recent scholarship on the entanglement between the local and the
global, each chapter adopts a different historical perspective in
terms of breadth and focused time period. The study combines these
different takes to capture the complexities of this topic and era.
The Gallipoli expedition was the bold and audacious plan of Winston
Churchill, amongst others, to force the Dardanelles narrows, by sea
and by land, to capture Constantinople from the Turks and to open
the Black Sea to ships taking supplies and arms for the Russians on
their immense German front. The campaign failed with catastrophic
loss of life on all sides, but again and again, unbeknown to the
Allies, they came close to achieving a goal that might have led to
victory overall. This book, first published in 1956, is still
regarded as the best and definitive account of the campaign. It won
the Sunday Times Best Book of the Year Award as well as the
inaugural Duff Cooper prize when the winner could choose who would
present the award. Appropriately enough, Moorehead chose Churchill
to make the presentation because the book demonstrated that the
faults were not in the conception of the plan. Indeed, long after
Churchill had resigned in disgrace, a new fleet was being assembled
to again attempt to force the Dardanelles in 1919, which was
cancelled when the war ceased and the Armistice was signed. Seen in
the new light that Moorehead revealed, the Gallipoli campaign was
no longer regarded as a blunder or a reckless gamble; it was the
most imaginative conception of the war, and its potentialities were
almost beyond reckoning. Certainly in its strictly military aspect
its influence was enormous. It was the greatest amphibious
operation which mankind had known up till then, and it took place
in circumstances in which nearly everything was experimental: in
the use of submarines and aircraft, in the trial of modern naval
guns against artillery on the shore, in the manoeuvre of landing
armies in small boats on a hostile coast, in the use of radio, or
the aerial bomb, the landmine, and many other novel devices. These
things lead on through Dunkirk and the Mediterranean landings to
the invasion of Normandy in the Second World War. In 1940 there was
very little the Allied commanders could learn from the long
struggle against the Kaiser's armies in the trenches in France. But
Gallipoli was a mine of information about the complexities of the
modern war of manoeuvre, of the combined operation by land and sea
and sky; and the correction of the errors made then was the basis
of the victory of 1945. "the story of one of the great military
tragedies of the twentieth century, which no writer has described
better than Alan Moorehead." Sir Max Hastings.
The stories of Kaua'i's ruling chiefs were passed from generation
to generation in songs and narratives recited by trained
storytellers either formally at the high chief's court or
informally at family gatherings. Their chronology was ordered by a
ruler's genealogy, which, in the case of the pua ali'i (flower of
royalty), was illustrious and far reaching and could be traced to
one of the four great gods of Polynesia - Kane, Ku, Lono, and
Kanaloa. In these legends, Hawaiians of old sought answers to the
questions "Who are we?" "Who are our ancestors and where do they
come from?" "What lessons can be learned from their conduct?" Na
Pua Ali'i o Kaua'i presents the stories of the men and women who
ruled the island of Kaua'i from its first settlement to the final
rebellion against Kamehameha I's forces in 1824. Only fragments
remain of the nearly two-thousand-year history of the people who
inhabited Kaua'i before the coming of James Cook in 1778. Now
scattered in public and private archives and libraries, these
pieces of Hawai'i's precontact past were recorded in the nineteenth
century by such determined individuals as David Malo, Samuel
Kamakau, and Abraham Fornander. All known genealogical references
to the Kaua'i ali'i nui (paramount chiefs) have been gathered here
and placed in chronological order and are interspersed with legends
of great voyages, bitter wars, courageous heroes, and passionate
romances that together form a rich and invaluable resource.
When Matthew Flinders set out in 1801 to carry out a 'complete
examination and survey' of the coast of New Holland, little did he
know that he would be away for over ten years. Although he did not
coin the term 'Australia' he keenly advocated its use, rather than
the clumsy 'Terra Australis', and will always be associated with
its adoption. As well as his meticulous surveys and maps, he made
many observations on ship-board life, flora and fauna, and the
appearance and customs of the native peoples he encountered. Volume
2 deals with the second half of his Australian survey, followed by
his incarceration on Mauritius for over 6 years by the French, and
his eventual release and return to England.
Until the mid 1950s, the Jews of Egypt lived in a multicultural and
diverse society, which constituted a model of conviviality and
tolerance, using French as its lingua franca. The Jews constituted
a respected and well-integrated urban community of about 80 to
100,000, and made an impressive contribution to the socioeconomic
modernization of the country. Together with the rise of Arab
nationalism and the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the
escalating Arab-Israeli conflict brought about the rapid demise of
Egyptian Jewry. Like the other Jewish communities of Arab lands,
these people were either expelled or forced into exile in the
aftermath of the 1948, 1956, and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars. As a
consequence, close to half of the Jewish population of Egypt found
refuge in Israel while the rest dispersed throughout the Western
world, mainly in France, Brazil, and the United States. This book
focuses on a group of about two thousand who settled in Australia,
the "Edge of the Diaspora." It also examines the migration
experience of Egyptian Jews who settled in France, in order to
compare and contrast their integration in a non Anglo-Celtic
environment. Although the Jews of Egypt, like most refugees,
suffered the trauma of dispossession, expulsion, and dislocation,
their particular experience did not attract the attention of
Australian sociologists or historians. Even within the context of
Australian Jewry, their story was largely unknown even though there
has been much discussion about the postwar migration of European
Jews. The author Racheline Barda believes that it is important to
give them a voice, to tell their stories, and delve into their past
history, thereby discovering the richness of their cultural
heritage which ultimately gave them the tools for a successful
integration in Australian society. One of the crucial concerns of
this work was the preservation and transmission of the rich and
dynamic history of this unique group to successive generations,
through the oral testimonies of first-hand witnesses of a vanished
world. This book makes an important contribution to the study of
contemporary Australian society as well as diaspora studies. It
deals with a topic that has rarely been reported on or studied in
Australia--the migration experience of a small and unique
ethnoreligious population such as the Jews of Egypt. It is the
first comprehensive research on their immigration and integration
into Australian society. Traditionally, sociohistorians have mostly
concentrated on the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe or on the long
established local Jewish community, which was historically of
British and German origin. The Jews of Egypt constitute one of the
largest Jewish communities to settle in Australia from outside
European societies, in response to the rise of Arab nationalism and
hostility to Israel. Based on a series of comprehensive interviews
conducted mainly in Australia and France, this study reconstructs
the history of a Jewish community and the circumstances of its
demise. It takes the innovative approach of systematically
analyzing the ethnic, religious, and cultural characteristics of
both sample groups, highlighting the diversity that is inherent to
the group as a whole. By specifically targeting the issue of
identity, it provides an insight into the dynamics of a
multilayered identity, which performs as a vehicle of integration
and acculturation for a migrant group in any host society. Apart
from individuals studying the particular history of Egyptian Jews
wherever they settled after their forced emigration from Egypt, the
book would be of interest to scholars specializing in diaspora
studies, ethnic and immigrant studies, and social history.
When Matthew Flinders set out in 1801 to carry out a 'complete
examination and survey' of the coast of New Holland, little did he
know that he would be away for over ten years. Although he did not
coin the term 'Australia' he keenly advocated its use, rather than
the clumsy 'Terra Australis' and will always be associated with its
adoption. As well as his meticulous surveys and maps, he made many
observations on ship-board life, flora and fauna, and the
appearance and customs of the native peoples he encountered. Volume
1 starts with a thorough review of previous exploratory voyages to
the great Southern continent, and then proceeds to describe the
first part of his journey, from Portsmouth to Port Jackson
(Sydney).
This volume provides a unique and critical perspective on how
Chinese, Japanese and Korean scholars engage and critique the West
in their historical thinking. It showcases the dialogue between
Asian experts and their Euro-American counterparts and offers
valuable insights on how to challenge and overcome Eurocentrism in
historical writing.
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