Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45 explores the queer dynamics of war across Australia and forward bases in the south seas. It examines relationships involving Allied servicemen, civilians and between the legal and medical fraternities that sought to regulate and contain expressions of homosex in and out of the forces.

Alarming levels of fear and suspicion developed in Australia following the German victories in Europe of 1940. It was believed the Nazis had prepared an army of subversives a Fifth Column to undermine the war effort. These suspicions plagued the Australian home front for much of the war.

In late January 1944 a force of New Zealand soldiers and Allied specialists undertook a daring, behind the lines reconnaissance of the Japanese-held Green Islands of Papua New Guinea. The Japanese contested the invasion with air power and inflicted heavy damage on the American cruiser USS St. Louis. After a successful landing, the New Zealanders pushed inland and encountered fanatical Japanese defenders entrenched in thick jungle. After the island was secured, Allied engineers - including the famed Seabees - built airfields, roads and shipping facilities. The seizure of the Green Islands completed the encirclement of the main Japanese base in the South Pacific at Rabaul. A memorable but overlooked action of the Pacific War, ""Operation Squarepeg"" involved a diverse force of Allied sailors, soldiers and airmen that included Charles Lindbergh and future president of the United States Richard Milhouse Nixon.

Fantastic Dreaming explores how whites have measured Australian Aboriginal people through their material culture and domestic practices, aspects of culture intimately linked to Enlightenment notions of progress and social institutions such as marriage and property. Archaeological investigation reveals that the Moravian missionaries' attempts to 'civilize' the Wergaia-speaking people of northwestern Victoria centered on spatial practices, housing, and the consumption of material goods. After the mission closed in 1904, white observers saw the camp settlements that formed nearby as evidence of Aboriginal incapacity and immorality, rather than as symptoms of exclusion and poverty. Conceptions of transformation as acculturation survived in assimilation policies that envisioned Aboriginal people becoming the same as whites through living in European housing. These ideas persist in archaeological analysis that insists on Aboriginality as otherness and difference, and equates objects with identity. However Wergaia tradition was place-based, and, often invisibly, Indigenous people maintained traditional relationships to kin and country, resisting white authority through strategies of evasion and mobility. This study examines the complex role of material culture and spatial politics in shaping colonial identities and offers a critique of essentialism in archaeological interpretation.

This book engages a complex subject that mainline theologies avoid, Indigenous Australia. The heritages, wisdoms and dreams of Indigenous Australians are tormented by the discriminating mindsets and colonialist practices of non-Indigenous peoples. This book gives special attention to the torments due to the arrival and development of the church.

This study treats the Victorian Antipodes as a compelling site of romance and satire for middle-class writers who went to New Zealand between 1840 and 1872. Blythe's research fits with the rising study of settler colonialism and highlights the intersection of late-Victorian ideas and post-colonial theories.

'Luca Antara is a book-lover's book, a graceful and mesmerizing blend of history, autobiography, travel and romance.' - JM Coetzee Part memoir, travelogue, history and part detective story, Luca Antara is a rich tapestry of history and the present. It parallels the life of the author, an emigre to Sydney, and the life of an historical figure, Antonio da Nova, the servant of a Portuguese explorer who in the 1600s sends him to find out more about Luca Antara (now Australia). New to Sydney, Martin Edmond finds himself impoverished and displaced. He earns money as a taxi driver but spends his spare time frequenting second hand bookshops trying to learn more about the history of Australia and the wider region. The people Edmond encounters in his taxi and in his search for rare books are varied and strange, offering the reader a voyeuristic glimpse into Sydney's sub-culture. Sent to discover more about Luca Antara, Antonio da Nova's crew mutiny and dump him on the West Australian coast. He is found by Aborigines, who take him on an epic walk across northern Australia. Eventually he manages to return to his master in Portugal who awaits news of his explorations. Edmond's reading centres upon da Nova, but each book he reads leads to another and the subject becomes broader and increasingly fascinating. The lives of the two men and the strange customs and unique social mores of each man's culture and time intertwine throughout the book, ending with Edmond literally walking in the footsteps of da Nova across northern Australia.

This book, the first long-range history of the voluntary sector in Australia and the first internationally to compare philanthropy for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in a settler society, explores how the race and gender ideologies embedded in philanthropy contributed to the construction of Australia's welfare state.

Sir Edmund Hillary described Douglas Mawson's epic and punishing journey across 600 miles of unknown Antarctic wasteland as 'the greatest story of lone survival in polar exploration'.This Accursed Land tells that story; how Mawson declined to join Captain Robert Scott's ill-fated British expedition and instead lead a three-man husky team to explore the far eastern coastline of the Antarctic continent. But the loss of one member and most of the supplies soon turned the hazardous trek into a nightmare. Mawson was trapped 320 miles from base with barely nine days' food and nothing for the dogs. Eating poisoned meat, watching his body fall apart, crawling over chasms and crevices of deadly ice, his ultimate and lone struggle for survival, starving, poisoned, exhausted and indescribably cold, is an unforgettable story of human endurance. Grippingly told by Lennard Bickel, this is the most extraordinary journey from the brutal golden age of Antarctic exploration. Perfect for fans of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air or Michael Palin's Erebus.

The essays in this volume examine United States-East Asian relations in the framework of global history, incorporating fresh insights that have been offered by scholars on such topics as globalization, human rights, historical memory, and trans-cultural relations.

In this work, Buschmann incorporates neglected Spanish visions into the European perceptions of the emerging Pacific world. The book argues that Spanish diplomats and intellectuals attempted to create an intellectual link between the Americas and the Pacific Ocean.

Anzac Labour explores the horror, frustration and exhaustion surrounding working life in the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War. Based on letters and diaries of Australian soldiers, it traces the history of work and workplace cultures through Australia, the shores of Gallipoli, the fields of France and Belgium, and the Near East.

Blending global scope with local depth, this book throws new light on important themes. Spanning four centuries and vast space, it combines the history of ideas with particular histories of encounters between European voyagers and Indigenous people in Oceania (Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands).

Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, this book explores how far imperial culture penetrated antipodean city institutions. It argues that far from imperial saturation, the city 'Down Under' was remarkably untouched by the Empire.

Offering new historical understandings of human responses to climate and climate change, this cutting-edge volume explores the dynamic relationship between settlement, climate, and colonization, covering everything from the physical impact of climate on agriculture and land development to the development of "folk" and government meteorologies.

Designed as an 'ideal city' and emblem of the nation, Canberra has long been a source of ambivalence for many Australians. In this charming and concise book, Nicholas Brown challenges these ideas and looks beyond the cliches to illuminate the unique, layered and often colourful history of Australia's capital. Brown covers Canberra's selection as the site of the national capital, the turbulent path of Walter Burley Griffin's plan for the city, and the many phases of its construction. He surveys citizens' diverse experiences of the city, the impact of the Second World War on Canberra's growth, and explores the city's political history with insight and wit. A History of Canberra is informed by the interplay of three themes central to Canberra's identity: government, community and environment. Canberra's distinctive social and cultural history as a centre for the public service and national institutions is vividly rendered."

Anzac Labour explores the horror, frustration and exhaustion surrounding working life in the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War. Based on letters and diaries of Australian soldiers, it traces the history of work and workplace cultures through Australia, the shores of Gallipoli, the fields of France and Belgium, and the Near East.

Robinson Crusoe's call to adventure and do-it-yourself settlement resonated with British explorers. In tracing the links in a discursive chain through which a particular male subjectivity was forged, Karen Downing reveals how such men took their tensions with them to Australia, so that the colonies never were a solution to restless men's anxieties.

In this work, Buschmann incorporates neglected Spanish visions into the European perceptions of the emerging Pacific world. The book argues that Spanish diplomats and intellectuals attempted to create an intellectual link between the Americas and the Pacific Ocean.

This book provides a lively study of the role that Australians and New Zealanders played in defining the British sporting concept of amateurism. In doing so, they contributed to understandings of wider British identity across the sporting world.

This publication provides a lively study of the role that Australians and New Zealanders played in defining the British sporting concept of amateurism. In doing so, they contributed to understandings of wider British identity across the sporting world.

Spanning four centuries and vast space, this book combines the global history of ideas with particular histories of encounters between European voyagers and Indigenous people in Oceania (Island Southeast Asia, New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands). Douglas shows how prevailing concepts of human difference, or race, influenced travellers' approaches to encounters. Yet their presuppositions were often challenged or transformed by the appearance, conduct, and lifestyle of local inhabitants. The book's original theory and method reveal traces of Indigenous agency in voyagers' representations which in turn provided key evidence for the natural history of man and the science of race. In keeping with recent trends in colonial historiography, Douglas diverts historical attention from imperial centres to so-called peripheries, discredits the outmoded stereotype that Europeans necessarily dominated non-Europeans, and takes local agency seriously.

Using the presence of the past as a point of departure, this books explores three critical themes in Southeast Asian oral history: the relationship between oral history and official histories produced by nation-states; the nature of memories of violence; and intersections between oral history, oral tradition, and heritage discourses.

The area claimed by the British Empire as Western Australia was primarily colonized through two major thrusts: the development of the Swan River Colony to the southwest in 1829, and the 1863 movement of Australian born settlers to colonize the northwest region. The Western Australian story is overwhelmingly the story of the spread of market capitalism, a narrative which is at the foundation of modern western world economy and culture. Due to the timing of settlement in Western Australia there was a lack of older infrastructure patterns based on industrial capitalism to evoke geographical inertia to modify and deform the newer system in many ways making the systemic patterns which grew out of market capitalist forces clearer and easier to delineate than in older settlement areas. However, the struggle between the forces of market capitalism, settlers and indigenous Australians over space, labor, physical and economic resources and power relationships are both unique to place and time and universal in allowing an understanding of how such complicated regional, interregional and global forces shape a settler society. Through an examination of historical records, town layout and architecture, landscape analysis, excavation data, and material culture analysis, the author created a nuanced understanding of the social, economic, and cultural developments that took place during this dynamic period in Australian history. In examining this complex settlement history, the author employed several different research methodologies in parallel, to create a comprehensive understanding of the area. Her research techniques will be invaluable to researchers struggling to understand similarly complex sociocultural evolutions throughout the globe.