From the Swan River to the Hawkesbury, and from the sticky Arnhem Land mangrove to the soft green hills of Tasmania, this book describes the major conflicts fought on the Australian frontier to 1838. Based on extensive research and using overseas frontier wars to add perspective to the Australian experience, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-1838 will change our view of Australian history forever. Over the last thirty years, Australians have become increasingly aware that violence accompanied the colonisation of their continent. Historians have shown that the armed conflicts between Aborigines and British settlers and soldiers, though small in scale and sporadic in nature, can truly be described as 'wars'. However, a gap remains at the heart of our understanding of the Australian frontier: the actual warfare, and the weapons and tactics used to fight it, remain poorly understood. The Australian Frontier Wars is the first book-length military history of frontier conflict in Australia. Covering the first fifty years of British occupation in Australia, this book examines in detail how both sides fought on the frontier. It shows how Aborigines developed a new form of warfare that diffe

During World War II the Solomon Islands became the scene of a titanic struggle between Allied and Japanese forces. After their victory on Guadalcanal, American forces advanced into the New Georgia Group and suffered horrendous casualties. Admiral Halsey then implemented an "island hopping" strategy, by-passing Japanese strongpoints. The first occasion he used this was on an obscure island called "Vella Lavella". This book is the first detailed examination of the struggle for Vella Lavella covering the ground, air and sea battles and the involvement of American and New Zealand soldiers, the coast watchers, South Pacific Scouts and the Islanders.

World War II laid the groundwork for much of the international system that exists today, especially in the Pacific Rim. This brief but comprehensive survey of the War in the Pacific incorporates both United States and Japanese perspectives, providing a global approach to the Asian theater of the conflict. Drawing on decades of new scholarship and written in an engaging, narrative style, this book traces United States-Japanese relations from the late nineteenth century to the war's end in 1945. It covers every aspect of the war, and gives special attention to ongoing historical debates over key issues. The book also provides new details of many facets of the conflict, including expansionism during the 1930s, events and policies leading up to the war, the importance of air power and ground warfare, military planning and strategic goals, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the U.S., Allied plans and disputes over Russian participation, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, and conditions for surrender.

In 1937, the Nationalists under Chiang Kaishek were leading the Chinese war effort against Japan and were lauded in the West for their efforts to transform China into an independent and modern nation; yet this image was quickly tarnished. The Nationalists were soon denounced as militarily incompetent, corrupt, and antidemocratic and Chiang Kaishek, the same.
In this book, van de Ven investigates the myths and truths of Nationalist resistance including issues such as:
* The role of the US in East Asia during the Second World War
* The achievements of Chiang Kaishek as Nationalist leader
* The respective contributions of the Nationalists and the Communists to the defeat of Japan
* The consequences of the Europe First strategy for Asia
War and Nationalism in China offers a major new interpretation of the Chinese Nationalists, placing their war of resistance against Japan in the context of their prolonged efforts to establish control over their own country and providing a critical reassessment of Allied Warfare in the region. This groundbreaking volume will interest students and researchers of Chinese History and Warfare.

eBook available with sample pages: 020344020X

The Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation was formally established in 1997 under the leadership of South Africa, India and Australia. The demise of Apartheid, the fall of the Soviet empire, and the rapid advance of globalization altered the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean region in the early 1990s and served as a catalyst in the creation of the IOR. This book contextualizes the founding of the IOR by outlining the historical aspects of economic ties across the Indian Ocean and previous attempts to promote regional cooperation.
The contributors to this volume analyse the post-colonial ideological legacy, the political and economic constraints caused by Apartheid and communism, the end of protectionism and the problem of globalization. These major themes in the history of the IOR are applied to what the future holds for Southern Africa within this economic grouping, and whether or not regional cooperation will manage to compete with globalization.
This volume will be of interest to scholars of development studies, international relations, Third World studies, and regional development.

World War II laid the groundwork for much of the international system that exists today, especially in the Pacific Rim. This brief but comprehensive survey of the War in the Pacific incorporates both United States and Japanese perspectives, providing a global approach to the Asian theater of the conflict. Drawing on decades of new scholarship and written in an engaging, narrative style, this book traces United States-Japanese relations from the late nineteenth century to the war's end in 1945. It covers every aspect of the war, and gives special attention to ongoing historical debates over key issues. The book also provides new details of many facets of the conflict, including expansionism during the 1930s, events and policies leading up to the war, the importance of air power and ground warfare, military planning and strategic goals, the internment of Japanese-Americans in the U.S., Allied plans and disputes over Russian participation, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, and conditions for surrender.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the contemporary Russian Far East (RFE) and offers an argument about federal relations and power in the state. It is the only easily available, single volume book to examine the RFE in such depth.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203218396

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.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203221877

This is a collection of essays by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, Patricia Buckley. In the essays she has selected for this fascinating volume, Professor Ebrey explores features of the Chinese family, gender and kinship systems as practices and ideas intimately connected to history and therefore subject to change over time. The essays cover topics ranging from dowries and the sale of women into forced concubinary, to the excesses of the imperial harem, excruciating pain of footbinding, and Confucian ideas of womanly virtue.
Patricia Ebrey places these sociological analyses of women within the family in an historical context, analysing the development of the wider kinship system. Her work provides an overview of the early modern period, with a specific focus on the Song period (920-1276), a time of marked social and cultural change, and considered to be the beginning of the modern period in Chinese history.
With its wide-ranging examination of issues relating to women and the family, this book will be essential reading to scholars of Chinese history and gender studies.

This is a collection of essays by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, Patricia Buckley. In the essays she has selected for this fascinating volume, Professor Ebrey explores features of the Chinese family, gender and kinship systems as practices and ideas intimately connected to history and therefore subject to change over time. The essays cover topics ranging from dowries and the sale of women into forced concubinary, to the excesses of the imperial harem, excruciating pain of footbinding, and Confucian ideas of womanly virtue.
Patricia Ebrey places these sociological analyses of women within the family in an historical context, analysing the development of the wider kinship system. Her work provides an overview of the early modern period, with a specific focus on the Song period (920-1276), a time of marked social and cultural change, and considered to be the beginning of the modern period in Chinese history.
With its wide-ranging examination of issues relating to women and the family, this book will be essential reading to scholars of Chinese history and gender studies.

The audience-producer boundary has collapsed in indigenous and ethnic community broadcasting, and this is the first comprehensive study globally to chart the rise of its new relationship. Based on studies of radio and television audiences in Australia, the authors argue that community radio and television worldwide represents an essential service for indigenous and ethnic audiences, empowering them at various levels, fostering 'active citizenry' and enhancing the processes of democracy. The authors, former journalists, spent months on the road, travelling tens of thousands of kilometers from urban centres to the most remote regions of the Central Desert to ask why they engage with and adapt local broadcast media. They draw on two decades of primary research material taken from face-to-face interviews and focus-group discussions with audiences. Consequently, Developing Dialogues offers international researchers a new social, cultural and historical perspective on the emergence of the unique Australian community broadcasting sector within the context of other global trends. It will appeal to scholars of media and cultural studies, as well as to industry practitioners and policy makers.

This wide-ranging volume captures the diverse range of societies and experiences that form what has come to be known as Melanesia. It covers prehistoric, historic and contemporary issues, and includes work by art historians, political scientists, geographers and anthropologists. The chapters range from studies of subsistence, ritual and ceremonial exchange to accounts of state violence, new media and climate change. The 'Melanesian world' assembled here raises questions that cut to the heart of debates in the human sciences today, with profound implications for the ways in which scholars across disciplines can describe and understand human difference. This impressive collection of essays represents a valuable resource for scholars and students alike.

A book about the past and present Pacific Islands, wide-ranging in time and space spanning the centuries from the first settlement of the islands until the present day.

The last continent to be claimed by Europeans, Australia began to be settled by the British in 1788 in the form of a jail for its convicts. While British culture has had the largest influence on the country and its presence can be seen everywhere, the British were not Australia's original populace. The first inhabitants of Australia, the Aborigines, are believed to have migrated from Southeast Asia into northern Australia as early as 60,000 years ago. This distinctive blend of vastly different cultures contributed to the ease with which Australia has become one of the world's most successful immigrant nations. The A to Z of Australia relates the history of this unique and beautiful land, which is home to an amazing range of flora and fauna, a climate that ranges from tropical forests to arid deserts, and the largest single collection of coral reefs and islands in the world. Through a detailed chronology, an introduction, appendixes, a bibliography, and cross-referenced dictionary entries on some of the more significant persons, places, and events; institutions and organizations; and political, economic, social, cultural, and religious facets, author James Docherty provides a much needed single volume reference on Australia, from its most unpromising of beginnings as a British jail to the liberal, tolerant, democracy it is today.

A Rape of the Soul So Profound began when a young researcher accidentally came upon restricted files in an archives collection. What he read overturned all his assumptions about an important part of Aboriginal experience and Australia's past. The book ends in the present, 20 years later, in the aftermath of the Royal Commission on the Stolen Generations. Along the way Peter Read investigates how good intentions masked policies with inhuman results. He tells the poignant stories of many individuals, some of whom were forever broken and some who went on to achieve great things. This is a book about much sorrow and occasional madness, about governments who pretended things didn't happen, and about the opportunities offered to right a great wrong.

This book focuses on historical and current data to examine racism in Australia. Making use of the latest state and federal data sets, it critically synthesises contemporary research on race relations with a focus on racism and anti-racism initiatives. Employing innovative analytical methods, the book provides students and researchers with a current and up-to-date analytical framework, and benchmark empirical evidence on race relations. In addition, the book also analyses research data from other countries in order to generate some comparative insights and draw possible lessons and policy implications for Australia.

This is the story of Operation Jericho, the spectacular prison break staged by an elite group of British, Australian and New Zealand bomber pilots, who flew a daring low-level mission to blow holes in the walls of Amiens jail and free French Resistance prisoners under the sentence of death during World War II. With D-Day looming, early 1944 was a time of massive intelligence activity across northern France, and many resistants were being captured and imprisoned by the Germans. Among the jails full of French agents was Amiens, where hundreds awaited likely execution for their activities. To repay their debt of honour, MI6 requested an air raid with a seemingly impossible brief: to simultaneously blow holes in the prison walls, free as many men and women as possible while minimizing casualties, and kill German guards in their quarters. The crews would have to fly their bomb-run at an altitude of just 20ft. Despite the huge difficulties, the RAF decided that the low-level specialists of No. 140 Wing had a chance of success. With the aid of first-hand accounts, explanatory 3D diagrams and dramatic original artwork, the eminent historian Robert Lyman explains how one of the most difficult and spectacular air raids of World War II was pulled off, and debunks some of the myths over why the raid was ordered in the first place.

From its rise in the 1830s to its pinnacle in the 1930s, the opium trade was a guiding force in the Chinese political economy. Opium money was inextricably bound up in local, national, and imperial finances, and the people who piloted the trade were integral to the fabric of Chinese society. In this book, Peter Thilly narrates the dangerous lives and shrewd business operations of opium traffickers in southeast China, situating them within a global history of capitalism. By tracing the evolution of the opium trade from clandestine offshore agreements in the 1830s, to multi-million dollar prohibition bureau contracts in the 1930s, Thilly demonstrates how the modernizing Chinese state was infiltrated, manipulated, and profoundly transformed by opium profiteers. Opium merchants carried the drug by sea, over mountains, and up rivers, with leading traders establishing monopolies over trade routes and territories and assembling "opium armies" to protect their businesses. Over time, and as their ranks grew, these organizations became more bureaucratized and militarized, mimicking-and then eventually influencing, infiltrating, or supplanting-the state. Through the chaos of revolution, warlordism, and foreign invasion, opium traders diligently expanded their power through corruption, bribery, and direct collaboration with the state. Drug traders mattered-not only in the seedy ways in which they have been caricatured but also crucially as shadowy architects of statecraft and China's evolution on the world stage.

This book seeks to highlight the influence of the Enlightenment idea of social progress on the character of the "civilising mission" in early Australia by tracing its presence in the various "civilising" attempts undertaken between 1788 and 1850. It also represents an attempt to marry the history of the British Enlightenment and the history of settler-Aboriginal interactions. The chronological structure of the book, as well as the breadth of its content, will facilitate the readers' understanding of the evolution of "civilising attempts" and their epistemological underpinnings, while throwing additional light on the influence of the Enlightenment on Australian history as a whole.

Mata Austronesia is a collection of illustrated stories told by Austronesians past and present-an (ethno)graphic novel. Mata, the word for "eye" in numerous Austronesian languages, represents the common origin of the many distinctive Austronesian peoples spread throughout their vast oceanic realm. The tales in this book immerse us in the beauty of this shared heritage, ancestral memory, and cultural legacy. Millennia before the first Europeans ventured into the Pacific, Austronesian explorers sailing aboard their outrigger and double-hulled voyaging canoes had already found, settled, and succeeded in thriving on thousands of islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. From Madagascar to Rapa Nui, Austronesia is a diverse, complex, and extensive ethnolinguistic region stretching across more than half of the Earth's saltwater expanse. This work showcases the abundance of unique identities, histories, ethnicities, cultures, languages, and storytelling traditions among people of Austronesian descent. Modern-day storytellers weave the past and present into a tapestry of tales passed down orally through generations and contextualize the staggering immensity of the cosmos, imparting meaning to visible and invisible realms. Formed over thousands of years, the wisdom of Indigenous Austronesians teaches us vital and contemporarily applicable lessons on living in harmony with each other and our planet. Mata Austronesia opens fresh avenues of connection and conversation between Austronesian peoples who live on their native islands and in diaspora, who are both unified and long-separated by oceans of time, space, and Western colonial and cartographic impositions. It includes stories from Ka Pae 'Aina o Hawai'i, Rapa Nui, Tahiti, Taha'a, Kanaky (New Caledonia), Guahan (Guam), Aotearoa (New Zealand), Viti (Fiji), Bali, Sulawesi (Celebes), Bohol (Visayas), Tutuila (American Samoa), Kiritimati (Christmas Island), Banaba (Ocean Island), and Madagasikara (Madagascar). With each hand-painted watercolor brushstroke, Tuki Drake invites friends and family of all heritages to fall in love with our shared ocean world.

The Second World War was a dominant experience in Australian history. For the first time the country faced the threat of invasion. The economy and society were mobilised to an unprecedented degree, with 550 000 men and women, or one in twelve of a population of over 7 million, serving in the armed forces overseas. Social patterns and family life were disrupted. Politically, the war gave a new legitimacy to the Australian Labor Party which had been confined to the wilderness of the Opposition at the Federal level for most of the inter-war years. The powers of the Federal government increased and a new momentum for social reform was generated at the popular and governmental level. In the international sphere, the war fundamentally shook Australian confidence in the power on which it had relied for generations, Great Britain. It generated a sense of independence in Australian foreign policy and initiated a new, if halting and problematic, realignment towards the United States. In this accessible book Joan Beaumont, Kate Darian-Smith, David Lee, David Lowe, Marnie Haig-Muir, Roy Hay and David Walker consider the range of Australia's experience of this conflict. In a single volume they draw together the many aspects of the war and distil the current state of historical scholarship. Australia's War 1939-45 will be invaluable to tertiary students and of enormous interest to the reader concerned with the social, political and military history of Australia. A companion volume on the First World War is also available.

First full-length exploration of the role of the Anglican church in the development of colonial Australia. Anglican clergymen in Britain's Australian colonies in their earliest years faced very particular challenges. Lacking relevant training, experience or pastoral theology, these pioneer religious professionals not only ministered toa convict population unique in the empire, but had also to engage with indigenous peoples and a free-settler population struggling with an often inhospitable environment. This was in the context of a settler empire that was beingreshaped by mass migration, rapid expansion and a widespread decline in the political authority of religion and the confessional state, especially after the American Revolution. Previous accounts have caricatured such clerics as lackeys of the imperial authorities: "moral policemen", "flogging parsons". Yet, while the clergy did make important contributions to colonial and imperial projects, this book offers a more wide-ranging picture. It reveals them at times vigorously asserting their independence in relation both to their religious duties and to humanitarian concern, and shows them playing an important part in the new colonies' social and economic development, making a vital contribution to the emergence of civil society and intellectual and cultural institutions and traditions within Australia. It is only possible to understand the distinctive role that the clergy played in the light of their social origins, intellectual formation and professional networks in an expanding British World, a subject explored systematically here for the first time. Michael Gladwin is Lecturer in History at St Mark's National Theological Centre, Charles Sturt University, Canberra.

A study of nation-building processes in the young state of Papua New Guinea, and of opposition against these in one of the country's peripheral provinces, Manus. Intense resistance is offered there by a movement called Wind Nation. Wind Nation is nothing less than the old Paliau Movement, made famous by the two American anthropologists Margaret Mead and Theodore Schwartz. Paliau Maloat, Wind Nation's late founder and leader, has introduced a quasi-biblical ideology which labels the state as "Lucifer", and his movement fights Lucifer by means of riots, demonstrations and court-cases. Throughout Papua New Guinea movements with similar objectives make up a policentric process, of some bearing for the identity of the young state and its citizens.

Little more than seventy years after the British settled Van Diemen's Land (later Tasmania) in 1803, the indigenous community had been virtually wiped out. Yet this genocide at the hands of the British is virtually forgotten today. The Last Man is the first book specifically to explore the role of the British government and wider British society in this genocide. It positions the destruction as a consequence of British policy, and ideology in the region. Tom Lawson shows how Britain practised cultural destruction and then came to terms with and evaded its genocidal imperial past. Although the introduction of European diseases undoubtedly contributed to the decline in the indigenous population, Lawson shows that the British government supported what was effectively the ethnic cleansing of Tasmania - particularly in the period of martial law in 1828-1832. By 1835 the vast majority of the surviving indigenous community had been deported to Flinders Island, where the British government took a keen interest in the attempt to transform them into Christians and Englishmen in a campaign of cultural genocide. Lawson also illustrates the ways in which the destruction of indigenous Tasmanians was reflected in British culture - both at the time and since - and how it came to play a key part in forging particular versions of British imperial identity. Laments for the lost Tasmanians were a common theme in literary and museum culture, and the mistaken assumption that Tasmanians were doomed to complete extinction was an important part of the emerging science of human origins. By exploring the memory of destruction, The Last Man provides the first comprehensive picture of the British role in the destruction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population.