|
Books > History > Australasian & Pacific history
This book is an ethnohistorical reconstruction of the establishment
in New Zealand of a rare case of Maori home-rule over their
traditional domain, backed by a special statute and investigated by
a Crown commission the majority of whom were Tuhoe leaders.
However, by 1913 Tuhoe home-rule over this vast domain was being
subverted by the Crown, which by 1926 had obtained three-quarters
of their reserve. By the 1950s this vast area had become the rugged
Urewera National Park, isolating over 200 small blocks retained by
stubborn Tuhoe "non-sellers". After a century of resistance, in
2014 the Tuhoe finally regained statutory control over their
ancestral domain and a detailed apology from the Crown.
In 1997 Nancy de Vries accepted the Apology from the Parliament of
New South Wales on behalf of all the Indigenous children who had
been taken from their families and communities throughout the
state's history. It was an honour that recognised she had the
courage to speak about a life of pain and loneliness. Nancy tells
her story in an unusual and challenging collaboration with Dr
Gaynor Macdonald (Anthropology) of the University of Sydney,
Associate Professor Jane Mears (Social Policy) of the University of
Western Sydney and Dr Anna Nettheim (Anthropology) of the
University of Sydney.
A good historian, it has been said, is a prophet in reverse. The
perceptive historian has the ability to look back at the past,
identify issues overlooked by others, all the while stimulating the
reader to search for the implications in the present of what has
been discovered. Jan Snijders is such a prophet in reverse. He
brings his shrewd intuitions and scholarly reflections to the
material of this book as no previous writer on Colins leadership in
18351841 has so far been able to achieve. This is a landmark book
for historians, but more than that as well. It is the first
in-depth scholarly publication on Father Jean-Claude Colin as the
French founder of the Marist Missions in the South Pacific. It is
an enthralling read for anyone who wonders how French countrymen
coped when trying to open a Catholic mission in the New Zealand and
in the Polynesian Islands of the 1830s and 1840s. And anyone
interested in cross-cultural processes will get a very close look
at the culture contacts between French Catholics, Polynesian people
and British settlers, all pursuing their own objectives.
The natural resources of New Guinea and nearby islands have
attracted outsiders for at least 5000 years: spices, aromatic woods
and barks, resins, plumes, sea slugs, shells and pearls all brought
traders from distant markets. Among the most sought-after was the
bird of paradise. Their magnificent plumes bedecked the hats of
fashion-conscious women in Europe and America, provided regalia for
the Kings of Nepal, and decorated the headdresses of Janissaries of
the Ottoman Empire. Plumes from Paradise tells the story of this
interaction, and of the economic, political, social and cultural
consequence for the island's inhabitants. It traces 400 years of
economic and political history, culminating in the plume boom of
the early part of the 20th century, when an unprecedented number of
outsiders flocked to the islands coasts and hinterlands. The story
teems with the variety of people involved: New Guineans,
Indonesians, Chinese, Europeans, hunters, traders, natural
historians and their collectors, officials, missionaries, planters,
miners, adventurers of every kind. In the wings were the
conservationists, whose efforts brought the slaughter of the plume
boom to an end and ushered in an era of comparative isolation for
the island that lasted until World War II.
When journalists, developers, surf tourists, and conservation NGOs
cast Papua New Guineans as living in a prior nature and prior
culture, they devalue their knowledge and practice, facilitating
their dispossession. Paige West's searing study reveals how a range
of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today's globalized
world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie
all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust
understanding of the ideological work that capital requires for
constant regeneration.
Suburban Empire takes readers to the US missile base at Kwajalein
Atoll in the Marshall Islands, at the matrix of postwar US imperial
expansion, the Cold War nuclear arms race, and the tide of
anti-colonial struggles rippling across the world. Hirshberg shows
that the displacement of indigenous Marshallese within Kwajalein
Atoll mirrors the segregation and spatial politics of the mainland
US as local and global iterations of US empire took hold. Tracing
how Marshall Islanders navigated US military control over their
lands, Suburban Empire reveals that Cold War-era suburbanization
was perfectly congruent with US colonization, military testing, and
nuclear fallout. The structures of suburban segregation cloaked the
destructive history of control and militarism under a veil of
small-town innocence.
This book illuminates Australian soldiers' voices, feelings and
thoughts, through exploration of the words and language used during
the Great War. It is mostly concerned with slang, but there were
also new words that came into Standard English during the war with
which Australians became familiar. The book defines and explains
these words and terms, provides examples of their usage by
Australian soldiers and on the home front that provides insight
into the experiences and attitudes of soldiers and civilians, and
it draws out some of the themes and features of this language to
provide insight into the social and cultural worlds of Australian
soldiers and civilians.
James Fenton (1820-1901) was born in Ireland and emigrated to
Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land) with his family in 1833.
He became a pioneer settler in an area on the Forth River and
published this history of the island in 1884. The book begins with
the discovery of the island in 1642 and concludes with the deaths
of some significant public figures in the colony in 1884. The
establishment of the colony on the island, and the involvement of
convicts in its building, is documented. A chapter on the native
aborigines gives a fascinating insight into the attitudes of the
colonising people, and a detailed account of the removal of the
native Tasmanians to Flinders Island, in an effort to separate them
from the colonists. The book also contains portraits of some
aboriginal people, as well as a glossary of their language.
This captivating work charts the history of Tasmania from the
arrival of European maritime expeditions in the late eighteenth
century, through to the modern day. By presenting the perspectives
of both Indigenous Tasmanians and British settlers, author Henry
Reynolds provides an original and engaging exploration of these
first fraught encounters. Utilising key themes to bind his
narrative, Reynolds explores how geography created a unique
economic and migratory history for Tasmania, quite separate from
the mainland experience. He offers an astute analysis of the
island's economic and demographic reality, by noting that this
facilitated the survival of a rich heritage of colonial
architecture unique in Australia, and allowed the resident
population to foster a powerful web of kinship. Reynolds'
remarkable capacity to empathise with the characters of his
chronicle makes this a powerful, engaging and moving account of
Tasmania's unique position within Australian history.
"Asia, the Pacific Islands and the coasts of the Americas have long
been studied separately. This essential single-volume history of
the Pacific traces the global interactions and remarkable peoples
that have connected these regions with each other and with Europe
and the Indian Ocean, for millennia. From ancient canoe navigators,
monumental civilisations, pirates and seaborne empires, to the rise
of nuclear testing and global warming, Matt Matsuda ranges across
the frontiers of colonial history, anthropology and Pacific Rim
economics and politics, piecing together a history of the region.
The book identifies and draws together the defining threads and
extraordinary personal narratives which have contributed to this
history, showing how localised contacts and contests have often
blossomed into global struggles over colonialism, tourism and the
rise of Asian economies. Drawing on Asian, Oceanian, European,
American, ancient and modern narratives, the author assembles a
fascinating Pacific region from a truly global perspective"--
|
|