This history presents an authoritative and comprehensive introduction to the experiences of Pacific islanders from their first settlement of the islands to the present day. It addresses the question of insularity and explores islanders' experiences thematically, covering such topics as early settlement, contact with Europeans, colonialism, politics, commerce, nuclear testing, tradition, ideology, and the role of women. It incorporates material on the Maori, the Irianese in western New Guinea, the settled immigrant communities in Fiji, New Caledonia and the Hawaiian monarchy and follows migrants to New Zealand, Australia and North America.

Pacific Forest explores the use of the forests of the Solomon Islands from the prehistoric period up to the end of 1997, when much of the indigenous commercial forest had been logged. It is the first study of the history of the forest in any Pacific Island; the first analysis of the indigenous and British colonial perceptions of the Melanesian forest; and the first critical analysis for this region, not only of colonial forest policies but of later policies and practices which made the governments of independence exploiters of their own people. Pacific Forest addresses a range of evidence drawn from several disciplines, and is a major contribution to environmental history.

Having grown up on the massive Killarney cattle station near Katherine, NT, Toni Tapp Coutts was well prepared when her husband, Shaun, took a job at McArthur River Station in the Gulf Country, 600 kilometres away near the Queensland border. Toni became cook, counsellor, housekeeper and nurse to the host of people who lived on McArthur River and the constant stream of visitors. She made firm friends, created the Heartbreak Bush Ball and started riding campdraft in rodeos all over the Territory, becoming one of the NT's top riders. In the midst of this busy life she raised three children and saw them through challenges; she dealt with snakes in her washing basket; she kept in touch with her large, sprawling Tapp family, and she fell deeply in love with the Gulf Country. Filled with the warmth and humour readers will remember from A SUNBURNT CHILDHOOD, this next chapter in Toni's life is both an adventure and a heartwarming memoir, and will introduce readers to a part of Australia few have experienced.

The convict women who built a continent..."A moving and fascinating story." -Adam Hochschild, author of "King Leopold's Ghost"

"The Tin Ticket" takes readers to the dawn of the nineteenth century and into the lives of three women arrested and sent into suffering and slavery in Australia and Tasmania-where they overcame their fates unlike any women in the world. It also tells the tale of Elizabeth Gurney Fry, a Quaker reformer who touched all their lives. Ultimately, this is a story of women who, by sheer force of will, became the heart and soul of a new nation.

Theatre in Dublin,1745-1820: A Calendar of Performances is the first comprehensive, daily compendium of more than 18,000 performances that took place in Dublin's many professional theatres, music halls, pleasure gardens, and circus amphitheatres between Thomas Sheridan's becoming the manager at Smock Alley Theatre in 1745 and the dissolution of the Crow Street Theatre in 1820. The daily performance calendar for each of the seventy-five seasons recorded here records and organizes all surviving documentary evidence pertinent to each evening's entertainments, derived from all known sources, but especially from playbills and newspaper advertisements. Each theatre's daily entry includes all preludes, mainpieces, interludes, and afterpieces with casts and assigned roles, followed by singing and singers, dancing and dancers, and specialty entertainments. Financial data, program changes, rehearsal notices, authorship and premiere information are included in each component's entry, as is the text of contemporary correspondence and editorial contextualization and commentary, followed by other additional commentary, such as the many hundreds of printed puffs, notices, and performance reviews. In the cases of the programs of music halls, pleasure gardens, and circuses, the playbills have generally been transcribed verbatim. The calendar for each season is preceded by an analytical headnote that presents several categories of information including, among other things, an alphabetical listing of all members of each company, whether actors, musicians, specialty artists, or house servants, who are known to have been employed at each venue. Limited biographical commentary is included, particularly about performers of Irish origin, who had significant stage careers but who did not perform in London. Each headnote presents the seasons's offerings of entertainments of each theatrical type (prelude, mainpiece, interlude, afterpiece) analyzed according to genre, including a list of the number of plays in each genre and according to period in which they were first performed. The headnote also notes the number of different plays by Shakespeare staged during each season and gives particular attention to entertainments of "special Irish interest." The various kinds of benefit performance and command performances are also noted. Finally, this Calendar of Performances contains an appendix that furnishes a season-by-season listing of the plays that were new to the London patent theatres, and, later, of the important "minors." This information is provided in order for us to understand the interrelatedness of the London and Dublin repertories.