![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history
This book relates the development of Anglo-Australian-New Zealand relations during and immediately after World War II to the role of the US in the Southwest Pacific. Based on the results of comprehensive multi-archival research, the book highlights the extent of American-Commonwealth rivalry in the region and following the crisis of late 1941 and early 1942 demonstrates how the reforging of imperial links was shaped by the expansion of American power in Pacific areas south of the equator. It provides an important and timely reassessment of the economic, political, and strategic factors that led Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to conclude that the postwar affairs of the Southwest Pacific should be dominated by the British Empire.
When the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany partitioned Poland in September of 1939, thousands of Jews fled Poland into Lithuania and fled across the USSR to Japan. With the help of Jan Zwartendijk, acting Dutch consul, and Chiune Sugihara, Japan's vice consul in Lithuania, the refugees obtained documents for their perilous escape from Nazi persecution. From Japan, many refugees moved on to Dutch-controlled Curacao or other final destinations. Decades after the war, and one year before his death in 1986, Sugihara was finally honored by Israel with the "Righteous Among the Nations" Award for the help he gave to the Jews in 1940. He also received the Raoul Wallenburg Award posthumously in 1990. However, in Japan little was known about Sugihara's heroic actions for more than five decades. The author, Seishiro Sugihara (no relation to Chiune), reveals a pattern of deception and obfuscation by Japan's foreign ministry to obstruct recognition of Sugihara's philanthropy. The Sugihara episode, the author contends, is only one in a long line of scandalous cover-ups which have plagued the Ministry, including its ill-fated Twenty-One Demands upon Nationalist China in 1915; and more infamously the failure of its Washington Embassy to follow orders and deliver the "declaration of war" on December 7, 1941 which resulted in the Pearl Harbor operation being stigmatized as a "sneak attack." His book is the first to demonstrate that, while Japan's military was abolished during the Occupation, the Foreign Ministry secured its own future at the expense of Japan and the Japanese people, and deliberately and systematically placed Sugihara's act of kindness beyond public scrutiny.
This book is about Australian aircrew in Europe during World War II and draws on extensive field research, including over two hundred interviews with survivors. The fact that the Australians were spread so widely across so many squadrons has contributed to substantial oversights, both in the official histories and in the literature on the field. Flyers Far Away redresses this imbalance and accords those largely forgotten Australian airmen a rightful place in the history of the European air war. Flyers Far Away describes how so many Australian airmen ended up in Western Europe fighting an Allied cause, in one of the bloodiest and most unforgiving campaigns of the Second World War. Using first-hand accounts from the surviving airmen, it traces their path from recruitment in Australia to operations over the Third Reich and Axis territories. For the first time, the exploits of all Australian aircrew, in Fighter, Bomber, Coastal and Tactical Air Force Commands are brought together in one volume.
Bonegilla was a point of reception and temporary accommodation for approximately 320,000 post-war refugees and assisted migrants to Australia from 1947 to 1971. Its function was integral to the post-war immigration scheme, something officially lauded as an economic and cultural success. However, there were considerable hardships endured at Bonegilla, particularly during times of economic and political insecurity. Enforced family separation, poor standards of care, child malnutrition, and organised migrant protest need to be recognised as part of the Bonegilla story. Histories of Controversy: The Bonegilla Migrant Centre gives this alternative picture, revealing the centre's history to be one of containment, control, deprivation and political discontent. It tells a more complex tale than a harmonious making of modern Australia to include stories of migrant resistance and their demands on a society and its systems.
After successfully agitating for the vote for women from the 1890s, Protestant women's organisations in Australia began to educate women at a grassroots level on effective ways of applying political pressure on a wide range of topics and social concerns. Positioning their organisations as non-party-political and separate from more overtly feminist groups, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU); the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) and the Mothers' Union attracted women who were keen to work for change, and who were seeking to 'save' the individual as well as the greater society. These three organisations sought to agitate on a wide range of issues related to girls and women, connecting with public anxieties and highlighting particular vulnerabilities of girls and young women who lived alone in the city and had the potential to be exploited in the workforce. By the 1920s and 1930s these women's groups noted with concern the easier access to divorce and birth control in the Soviet Union and the growing influence of both Communism and 'Hitlerism' in galvanising young people. Agitate, Educate, Organise, Legislate explores the colourful debates and anxieties that were prevalent from the 1890s to the 1930s and the responses of the key women's organisations whose leadership and campaigns acknowledged that;outside of parliament and party politicsa "women's connection to political matters could be both innovative and socially influential.
Historians have long claimed that a tradition of fear of Japan dominated Australian thinking about foreign affairs and defense after Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 and that this fear remained widespread throughout the Australian population until the Pacific War. This study of Australian reporting on Japan challenges that claim by exposing a culture of state censorship, intimidation of the media, and neglect of official public discussion of foreign affairs in the years 1931-1941 which resulted in newspapers, radio, and news reels projecting a collective national consciousness of Japan as a nation of little import despite very real fears in senior political ranks about Japanese designs on Australia. Jacqui Murray's argument for the Australian media's underestimation of Japan's threat is sustained by close examination of media practices, publications, and broadcasts which clearly show misleading representations of Japan before the Pacific War. Watching the Sun Rise details not only government peace-time media censorship but also war-time propaganda flows from Australian, British, and Japanese sources into the Australian media and examples of cooperation and/or espionage among media personnel."
Consent of the People: Human Dignity through Freedom and Equality 1966-2021 explores how Australia's founding Enlightenment ideals were embodied in democratic institutions and shared values, and shaped into a unique national liberalism. Despite intense partisan loyalties, a politics of unequal power, and conservative and radical resistance, inequality was addressed and personal freedom strengthened. This final book in David Kemp's landmark five-volume Australian Liberalism series examines the role of liberal ideals in the legacies of prime ministers from Harold Holt to Malcolm Turnbull and the significance of challenges to the liberal project arising in response to the pandemic of 2020-21.It shows how reform urgency led to the nation's greatest political crisis in 1975, how prime ministers Fraser and Hawke struggled to manage an economy dominated by powerful union, business and global interests, how during seventeen crucial years Keating and Howard led one of the nation's greatest reform eras, and how social reform continued despite the leadership instability of the post-Howard era. In Consent of the People Kemp assesses political parties as the instruments of reform, highlighting the dangers of factionalism and loss of purpose. He examines how an international revival of liberal thought and rising levels of education revolutionised Australian society and politics, creating a moral-and moralistic-ruling class. In a remarkable half-century, Australian political parties and their leaders contested the impacts of government policies on personal freedom, on the distribution of political influence and power, and on wealth and opportunity. Throughout this period, Australians strove, with growing success, to achieve their dreams.
Australia's Prime Minister and premier diplomat in the 1930/1940s, this new biography presents him as a consistent internationalist and places him in a global context. Stanley Melbourne Bruce was at the centre of Imperial politics for more than two decades from the early 1920s until the end of the Second World War. This new biography presents Bruce as a consistent internationalist. Educated in Melbourne and Cambridge, Bruce, as a businessman, was alive to the importance of international commerce, and particularly Anglo-Australian trade. This lay at the core of his internationalism, which took the form in the 1920s of encouraging the political and economic integration of the British Empire. Bruce's punitive treatment of militant Australian trade unionists and his upholding of constitutionalism and law and order in the 1920s was part of an effort to defend one form of internationalism, commitment to the British Empire, against the competing international ideology of communism. While continuing to support a unified British Empire acting as a progressive force in world affairs, Bruce championed stronger international collaboration through the League of Nations and the United Nations and through cooperation between the Empire and the United States.
Outback Stories - Tracks Further Out explores the lives of outback Australians who shaped the cultural, political and artistic landscape. From Burke and Wills disastrous expedition across the continent to Eddie Mabo's historic land rights claim; from John Bradley Murdoch's chilling murders to horrific croc attacks in far North Queensland; from the studios Pro Hart and Sidney Nolan to the singing careers of Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter.Ian Ferguson has compiled a comprehensive and enlivening collection of stories about Australia and some of its most interesting inhabitants. A great insight into Australia's history past and present, in an easy to read, snappy format.
Honeysuckle Creek reveals the pivotal role that the tracking station at Honeysuckle Creek, near Canberra, played in the first moon landing. Andrew Tink gives a gripping account of the role of its director Tom Reid and his colleagues in transmitting some of the most-watched images in human history as Neil Armstrong took his first step. Part biography and part personal history, this book makes a significant contribution to Australia's role in space exploration and reveals a story little known until now. As Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr, the director of flight operations for Apollo 11, acknowledged: 'The name Honeysuckle Creek and the excellence which is implied by that name will always be remembered and recorded in the annals of manned space flight'.
From 2011 to 2014, the Australian Generations Oral History Project recorded 300 interviews with Australians born between 1920 and 1989. The contributions to this book, a result of this project, reflect on the practice of oral history and how interviews can illuminate Australian social and cultural history. Three of the chapters consider oral history innovations: focusing on the potential for oral history in a digital age, the pioneering technologies that underpinned Australian Generations and the ethical issues posed by online digital oral history, and the challenges and opportunities for radio oral history. In addition, four chapters demonstrate how oral history interviews can be used as rich evidence for historical research: examining the interconnections between class, social equity, and higher education in post-war Australia; how life histories can transform understandings of mental ill-health; considering how oral history interviews with Australians of all ages confound stereotypical notions about generations; and investigating the ways in which family relationships mediate identities and how remembered places and objects provide points of anchor in a rapidly changing world. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Historical Studies.
In the first half of the twentieth century, a diverse community of Australians settled in Shanghai. There they forged a 'China trade', circulating goods, people and ideas across the South China Sea, from Shanghai and Hong Kong to Sydney and Melbourne. This trade has been largely forgotten in contemporary Australia, where future economic ties trump historical memory when it comes to popular perceptions of China. After the First World War, Australians turned to Chinese treaty ports, fleeing poverty and unemployment, while others sought to 'save' China through missionary work and socialist ideas. Chinese Australians, disillusioned by Australian racism under the White Australia Policy, arrived to participate in Chinese nation building and ended up forging business empires which survive to this day. This book follows the life trajectories of these Australians, providing a means by which we can address one of the pervading tensions of race, empire and nation in the twentieth century: the relationship between working-class aspirations for social mobility and the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of white settler societies.
The Philippines belong to one of the most rapidly developing parts of the world, and it is impossible to understand Asia without it. This second edition, a greatly expanded and updated version of the first, is essential reading for those interested in Asia, as well as the millions of Filipinos who have made their homes abroad. The A to Z of the Philippines provides more than 400 hundred entries on important persons, places, events, and institutions, as well as salient economic, social and cultural aspects. The more than four centuries of the Philippines history covered by Guillermo, including the periods of Spanish and American dominance over the country, is neatly wrapped up in an introduction, clearly laid out in a chronology, complemented with statistical data in the appendix, and concluded with a bibliography allowing further research and study.
This is the first international study of maternal care and maternal mortality. Over the last two hundred years, different countries developed quite different systems of maternal care. Death in Childbirth is a meticulously researched analysis, firmly grounded in the available statistics, of the evolution of those systems between 1800 and 1950 in Britain, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and on the continent of Europe. Irvine Loudon examines the effectiveness of various forms of maternal care by means of the measurement of maternal mortality - the number of women who died as a result of childbirth. His scholarly and comprehensive study sets out to answer a number of important questions. What was the relative risk of a home or hospital delivery, or a delivery by a midwife as opposed to a doctor? What was the safest country in which to have a baby, and what were the factors which accounted for enormous international differences? Why, against all expectations, did maternal mortality fail to decline significantly until the late 1930s? Death in Childbirth makes an invaluable contribution to medical and social history.
The dreaming paths of Aboriginal nations across Australia formed major ceremonial routes along which goods and knowledge flowed. These became the trade routes that criss-crossed Australia and transported religion and cultural values. This book highlights the valuable contribution Aboriginal people made in assisting European explorers, surveyors and stockmen to open the country for colonisation, and explores the interface between Aboriginal possession of the Australian continent and European colonisation and appropriation. Instead of positing a radical disjunction between cultural competencies, Dale Kerwin considers how European colonisation of Australia appropriated Aboriginal competence in terms of the landscape: by tapping into culinary and medicinal knowledge, water and resource knowledge, hunting, food collecting and path-finding. As a consequence of this assistance, Aboriginal dreaming paths and trading routes also became the routes and roads of colonisers. Indeed, the European colonisation of Australia owes much of its success to the deliberate process of Aboriginal land management practices. Dale Kerwin provides a social science context for the broader study of Aboriginal trading routes by setting out an historic interpretation of the Aboriginal/European contact period. His book scrutinises arguments about nomadic and primitive societies, as well as Romantic views of culture and affluence. These circumstances and outcomes are juxtaposed with evidence that indicates that Aboriginal societies are substantially sedentary and highly developed, capable of functional differentiation and foresight -- attributes previously only granted to the European settlers. The hunter-gatherer image of Aboriginal society is rejected by providing evidence of crop cultivation and land management, as well as social arrangements that made best use of a hostile environment. This book is essential reading for all those who seek to have a better knowledge of Australia and its first people: it inscribes Aboriginal people firmly in the body of Australian history.
This book provides a rigorous and cross-disciplinary analysis of this Melanesian nation at a critical juncture in its post-colonial and post-conflict history, with contributions from leading scholars of Solomon Islands. The notion of 'transition' as used to describe the recent drawdown of the decade-long Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) provides a departure point for considering other transformations - social, political and economic -under way in the archipelagic nation. Organised around a central tension between change and continuity, two of the book's key themes are the contested narratives of changing state-society relations and the changing social relations around land and natural resources engendered by ongoing processes of globalisation and urbanisation. Drawing heuristically on RAMSI's genesis in the 'state- building moment' that dominated international relations during the first decade of this century, the book also examines the critical distinction between 'state-building' and 'state formation' in the Solomon Islands context. It engages with global scholarly and policy debates on issues such as peacebuilding, state-building, legal pluralism, hybrid governance, globalisation, urbanisation and the governance of natural resources. These themes resonate well beyond Solomon Islands and Melanesia, and the book will be of interest to a wide range of students, scholars and development practitioners. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Pacific History.
Imperial spaces takes two of the most influential minority groups of white settlers in the British Empire - the Irish and the Scots - and explores how they imagined themselves within the landscapes of its farthest reaches, the Australian colonies of Victoria and New South Wales. Using letters and diaries as well as records of collective activities such as committee meetings, parades and dinners, the book examines how the Irish and Scots built new identities as settlers in the unknown spaces of Empire. Utilizing critical geographical theories of 'place' as the site of memory and agency, it considers how Irish and Scots settlers grounded their sense of belonging in the imagined landscapes of south-east Australia. Imperial spaces is relevant to academics and students interested in the history and geography of the British Empire, Australia, Ireland and Scotland. -- .
In Alchemy in the Rain Forest Jerry K. Jacka explores how the indigenous population of Papua New Guinea's highlands struggle to create meaningful lives in the midst of extreme social conflict and environmental degradation. Drawing on theories of political ecology, place, and ontology and using ethnographic, environmental, and historical data, Jacka presents a multilayered examination of the impacts large-scale commercial gold mining in the region has had on ecology and social relations. Despite the deadly interclan violence and widespread pollution brought on by mining, the uneven distribution of its financial benefits has led many Porgerans to call for further development. This desire for increased mining, Jacka points out, counters popular portrayals of indigenous people as innate conservationists who defend the environment from international neoliberal development. Jacka's examination of the ways Porgerans search for common ground between capitalist and indigenous ways of knowing and being points to the complexity and interconnectedness of land, indigenous knowledge, and the global economy in Porgera and beyond.
This book examines the role of the international community in the handover of the Dutch colony of West Papua/Irian Jaya to Indonesia in the 1960s and questions whether or not the West Papuan people ever genuinely exercised the right to self-determination guaranteed to them in the UN-brokered Dutch/Indonesian agreement of 1962. Indonesian, Dutch, US, Soviet, Australian and British involvement is discussed, but particular emphasis is given to the central part played by the United Nations in the implementation of this agreement. As guarantor, the UN temporarily took over the territory's administration from the Dutch before transferring control to Indonesia in 1963. After five years of Indonesian rule, a UN team returned to West Papua to monitor and endorse a controversial act of self-determination that resulted in a unanimous vote by 1022 Papuan 'representatives' to reject independence. Despite this, the issue is still very much alive today as a crisis-hit Indonesia faces continued armed rebellion and growing calls for freedom in West Papua.
In 1938, the anthropologist Norman Tindale gave a classroom of young Aboriginal children a set of crayons and asked them to draw. The children, residents of the government-run Aboriginal station Cummeragunja, mostly drew pictures of aspects of white civilization boats, houses and flowers. What now to make of their artwork? Were the children encouraged or pressured to draw non-Aboriginal scenes, or did they draw freely, appropriating the white culture they now lived within? Did their Aboriginality change the meaning of their art, as they sketched out this ubiquitous colonial imagery? Australian Settler Colonialism and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station traces Cummeragunja's history from its establishment in the 1880s to its mass walk-off in 1939 and finally, to the 1960s, when its residents regained greater control over the land. Taking in oral history traditions, the author reveals the competing interests of settler governments, scientific and religious organizations, and nearby settler communities. The nature of these interests has broad and important implications for understanding settler colonial history. This history shows white people set boundaries on Aboriginal behaviour and movement, through direct legislation and the provision of opportunities and acceptance. But Aboriginal people had agency within and, at times, beyond these limits. Aboriginal people appropriated aspects of white culture including the houses, the flowers and the boats that their children drew for Tindale - reshaping them into new tools for Aboriginal society, tools with which to build lives and futures in a changed environment.
The book presents the first comprehensive history of Swiss settlement in New Zealand. It describes Swiss settlement in New Zealand from the time of the gold rushes in the 1860s to the present day in a very accessible way. The focus is on the Swiss-born migrants: who they were, why they came, how they have adapted to life in New Zealand, and their ongoing links with their homeland and the Swiss community in New Zealand. The migrants' stories are set in the historical and social context of the period in which they arrived. The book is a mixture of archival and other research of primary and secondary resources, and life history interviews. It will appeal to academics interested in the New World and migration studies and to Swiss living in New Zealand and elsewhere. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Ambivalent - Photography And Visibility…
Patricia Hayes, Gary Minkley
Paperback
The BRICS In Africa - Promoting…
Funeka Y. April, Modimowabarwa Kanyane, …
Paperback
The Unresolved National Question - Left…
Edward Webster, Karin Pampallis
Paperback
![]()
1 Recce: Volume 3 - Onsigbaarheid Is Ons…
Alexander Strachan
Paperback
|