Australia was born with its eyes wide open. Although politicians spoke publicly of loyalty to Britain and the empire, in secret they immediately set about protecting Australia's interests from the Germans, the Japanese - and from Britain itself. As an experienced intelligence officer, John Fahey knows how the security services disguise their activities within government files. He has combed the archives to compile the first account of Australia's intelligence operations in the years from Federation to World War II. He tells the stories of dedicated patriots who undertook dangerous operations to protect their new nation, despite a lack of training and support. He shows how the early adoption of advanced radio technology by Australia contributed to the war effort in Europe. He also exposes the bureaucratic mismanagement in World War II that cost many lives, and the leaks that compromised Australia's standing with its wartime allies so badly that Australia was nearly expelled from the Anglo-Saxon intelligence network. Australia's First Spies shows Australia always has been a far savvier operator in international affairs than much of the historical record suggests, and it offers a glimpse into the secret history of the nation.

New Zealand was the last major landmass, other than Antarctica, to be settled by humans. The story of this rugged and dynamic land is beautifully narrated, from its origins in Gondwana some 80 million years ago to the twenty-first century. Philippa Mein Smith highlights the effects of the country's smallness and isolation, from its late settlement by Polynesian voyagers and colonisation by Europeans - and the exchanges that made these people Maori and Pakeha - to the dramatic struggles over land and recent efforts to manage global forces. A Concise History of New Zealand places New Zealand in its global and regional context. It unravels key moments - the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the Anzac landing at Gallipoli, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior - showing their role as nation-building myths and connecting them with the less dramatic forces, economic and social, that have shaped contemporary New Zealand.

Why are we speaking English? Replenishing the Earth gives a new answer to that question, uncovering a 'settler revolution' that took place from the early nineteenth century that led to the explosive settlement of the American West and its forgotten twin, the British West, comprising the settler dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Between 1780 and 1930 the number of English-speakers rocketed from 12 million in 1780 to 200 million, and their wealth and power grew to match. Their secret was not racial, or cultural, or institutional superiority but a resonant intersection of historical changes, including the sudden rise of mass transfer across oceans and mountains, a revolutionary upward shift in attitudes to emigration, the emergence of a settler 'boom mentality', and a late flowering of non-industrial technologies -wind, water, wood, and work animals - especially on settler frontiers. This revolution combined with the Industrial Revolution to transform settlement into something explosive - capable of creating great cities like Chicago and Melbourne and large socio-economies in a single generation.
When the great settler booms busted, as they always did, a second pattern set in. Links between the Anglo-wests and their metropolises, London and New York, actually tightened as rising tides of staple products flowed one way and ideas the other. This 're-colonization' re-integrated Greater America and Greater Britain, bulking them out to become the superpowers of their day. The 'Settler Revolution' was not exclusive to the Anglophone countries - Argentina, Siberia, and Manchuria also experienced it. But it was the Anglophone settlers who managed to integrate frontier and metropolis most successfully, and it was this that gave them the impetus and the material power to provide the world's leading super-powers for the last 200 years.
This book will reshape understandings of American, British, and British dominion histories in the long 19th century. It is a story that has such crucial implications for the histories of settler societies, the homelands that spawned them, and the indigenous peoples who resisted them, that their full histories cannot be written without it.

The first 'bushrangers' or frontier outlaws were escaped or time-expired convicts, who took to the wilderness – 'the bush' – in New South Wales and on the island of Tasmania. Initially, the only Crown forces available were redcoats from the small, scattered garrisons, but by 1825 the problem of outlawry led to the formation of the first Mounted Police from these soldiers.

The gold strikes of the 1860s attracted a new group of men who preferred to get rich by the gun rather than the shovel. The roads, and later railways, that linked the mines with the cities offered many tempting targets and were preyed upon by the bushrangers.

This 1860s generation boasted many famous outlaws who passed into legend for their boldness. The last outbreak came in Victoria in 1880, when the notorious Kelly Gang staged several hold-ups and deliberately ambushed the pursuing police. Their last stand at Glenrowan has become a legendary episode in Australian history. Fully illustrated with some rare period photographs, this is the fascinating story of Australia's most infamous outlaws and the men tasked with tracking them down.

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

Establishing business enterprise in a tiny, remote penal settlement appears to defy the principles of sustainable demand and supply. Yet early Sydney attracted a number of business entrepreneurs, including Campbell, Riley and Walker. If the development of private enterprise in early colonial Australia is counterintuitive, an understanding of its rationale, nature and risk strategies is the more imperative. This book traces the development of private enterprise in Australia through a study of the antecedents, connections and commercial activities of early Sydney merchants.

A beautiful and sweeping historical novel that takes the reader from the west coast of New Zealand, to Scotland and Melbourne in the 1870s 'Its portrayal of life in a gold-rush town is vivid, and Rose's story is absorbing' The Times 'Worth reading for its occasional streaks of brilliance and insight' Telegraph India 'A epic read . . . a beautifully written, evocative novel that I anticipate you reading and re-reading for years to come' Woman's Way 'A gripping page-turner' Woman 1866. Will Stewart is one of many who have left their old lives behind to seek their fortunes in New Zealand's last great gold rush. The conditions are hostile and the outlook bleak, but he must push on in his uncertain search for the elusive buried treasure. Rose is about to arrive on the shores of South Island when a storm hits and her ship is wrecked. Just when all seems lost she is snatched from the jaws of death by Will, who risks his life to save her. Drawn together by circumstance, they stay together by choice and for a while it seems that their stars have finally aligned. But after a terrible misunderstanding they are cruelly separated, and their new-found happiness is shattered. As Will chases Rose across oceans and continents, he must come to terms with the possibility that he might never see her again. And if he does, he will have to face the man who took her . . . Readers love Alchemy and Rose: 'A real rollercoaster of emotions' 5* reader review 'One of her best yet' 5* reader review 'Both gripping and romantic (quite a combination!) and keeps you hooked right up to the end' 5* reader review 'One of those books that you need to find out what happened, but at the same time you don't want it to finish' 5* reader review 'Couldn't put it down, a real page turner' 5* reader review

INSIDE THE FORBIDDING STONE WALLS OF NEW ZEALANDS MOST INFAMOUS GAOL. Grim, Victorian, notorious, for 150 years Mount Eden Prison held both New Zealand's political prisoners and its most notorious criminals. Te Kooti, Rua Kenana, John A. Lee, George Wilder, Tim Shadbolt and Sandra Coney all spent time in its dank cells. Its interior has been the scene of mass riots, daring escapes and hangings. Highly regarded historian Mark Derby tells the prison's inside story with verve and compassion. .

A grandson's photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived during Japan's empire. These objects, along with oral histories and visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of Japan's colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding the complexities of their lives. Lost Histories provides a geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects-the Ainu, Taiwan's indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans-are the centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life histories and following these people as they crossed colonial borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals navigated the vagaries of imperial life.

Illicit Love is a history of love, sex, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and settler citizens at the heart of two settler colonial nations, the United States and Australia. Award-winning historian Ann McGrath illuminates interracial relationships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through stories of romance, courtship, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and colonizers in times of nation formation. Illicit Love reveals how marriage itself was used by disparate parties for both empowerment and disempowerment and how it came to embody the contradictions of imperialism. A tour de force of settler colonial history, McGrath's study demonstrates vividly how interracial relationships between Indigenous and colonizing peoples were more frequent and threatening to nation-states in the Atlantic and the Pacific worlds than historians have previously acknowledged.

Following the devastating raids on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, lightning advances by Japanese forces throughout the Pacific and the Far East, and a desperate battle by the Allied command in the Dutch East Indies, it became evident that an attack on Australia was more a matter of 'when' and not 'if'. On 19 February, just eleven weeks after the attacks on Pearl Harbor and two weeks after the fall of Singapore, the same Japanese battle group that had attacked Hawaii was ordered to attack the ill-prepared and under-defended Australian port of Darwin. Publishing 75 years after this little-known yet devastating attack, this fully illustrated study details what happened on that dramatic day in 1942 with the help of contemporary photographs, maps, and profiles of the commanders and machines involved in the assault.

Braided Waters sheds new light on the relationship between environment and society by charting the history of Hawaii's Molokai island over a thousand-year period of repeated settlement. From the arrival of the first Polynesians to contact with eighteenth-century European explorers and traders to our present era, this study shows how the control of resources-especially water-in a fragile, highly variable environment has had profound effects on the history of Hawaii. Wade Graham examines the ways environmental variation repeatedly shapes human social and economic structures and how, in turn, man-made environmental degradation influences and reshapes societies. A key finding of this study is how deep structures of place interact with distinct cultural patterns across different societies to produce similar social and environmental outcomes, in both the Polynesian and modern eras-a case of historical isomorphism with profound implications for global environmental history.

The centre of Melbourne is filled with stories about the city's pasts. Like all of Australia's cities, it is a place that is dominated by markers of the settler-colonial past. Yet when it comes to its Indigenous pasts, the city is mostly a place of silence. Since the 1990s, however, Indigenous histories have been brought into central Melbourne's commemorative landscapes. Monuments, memorials, namings and artworks have all been used to mark the city's Indigenous pasts. These historical markers can be found in the everyday places of parks, roads, bridges and thoroughfares. Taken together, they are an incursion into the city's commemorative landscapes. Places of Reconciliation tells the story of the introduction of official commemorations of Indigenous peoples and histories into the heart of Melbourne since 2000. It explains how they came to be part of the city, and the ways in which they have challenged the erasure of its Indigenous histories. In telling this story, the book also examines the kind of places that have been made and unmade by these commemorations, and how we might understand them as public historical projects in the early decades of the twenty-first century.

On 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day-shortened to "V.E. Day"-brought with it the demise of Nazi Germany. But for the Allies, the war was only half-won. Exhausted but exuberant American soldiers, ready to return home, were sent to join the fighting in the Pacific, which by the spring and summer of 1945 had turned into a gruelling campaign of bloody attrition against an enemy determined to fight to the last man. Germany had surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese would clearly make the conditions of victory extraordinarily high. In the United States, Americans clamored for their troops to come home and for a return to a peacetime economy. Politics intruded upon military policy while a new and untested president struggled to strategize among a military command that was often mired in rivalry. The task of defeating the Japanese seemed nearly unsurmountable, even while plans to invade the home islands were being drawn. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warned of the toll that "the agony of enduring battle" would likely take. General Douglas MacArthur clashed with Marshall and Admiral Nimitz over the most effective way to defeat the increasingly resilient Japanese combatants. In the midst of this division, the Army began a program of partial demobilization of troops in Europe, which depleted units at a time when they most needed experienced soldiers. In this context of military emergency, the fearsome projections of the human cost of invading the Japanese homeland, and weakening social and political will, victory was salvaged by means of a horrific new weapon. As one Army staff officer admitted, "The capitulation of Hirohito saved our necks." In Implacable Foes, award-winning historians Waldo Heinrichs (a veteran of both theatres of war in World War II) and Marc Gallicchio bring to life the final year of World War II in the Pacific right up to the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, evoking not only Japanese policies of desperate defense, but the sometimes rancorous debates on the home front. They deliver a gripping and provocative narrative that challenges the decision-making of U.S. leaders and delineates the consequences of prioritizing the European front. The result is a masterly work of military history that evaluates the nearly insurmountable trials associated with waging global war and the sacrifices necessary to succeed.

A new history of globalization and empire at the crossroads of the Pacific. Located halfway between Hawai'i and Australia, the islands of Samoa have long been a center of Oceanian cultural and economic exchange. Accustomed to exercising agency in trade and diplomacy, Samoans found themselves enmeshed in a new form of globalization after missionaries and traders arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the great powers of Europe and America competed to bring Samoa into their orbits, Germany and the United States eventually agreed to divide the islands for their burgeoning colonial holdings. In Coconut Colonialism, Holger Droessler examines the Samoan response through the lives of its workers. Ordinary Samoans-some on large plantations, others on their own small holdings-picked and processed coconuts and cocoa, tapped rubber trees, and built roads and ports that brought cash crops to Europe and North America. At the same time, Samoans redefined their own way of being in the world-what Droessler terms "Oceanian globality"-to challenge German and American visions of a global economy that in fact served only the needs of Western capitalism. Through cooperative farming, Samoans contested the exploitative wage-labor system introduced by colonial powers. The islanders also participated in ethnographic shows around the world, turning them into diplomatic missions and making friends with fellow colonized peoples. Samoans thereby found ways to press their own agendas and regain a degree of independence. Based on research in multiple languages and countries, Coconut Colonialism offers new insights into the global history of labor and empire at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Based around the Pacific Islands Regiment, the Australian Army's units in Papua New Guinea had a dual identity: integral to Australia's defence, but also part of its largest colony, and viewed as a foreign people. The Australian Army in PNG defended Australia from threats to its north and west, while also managing the force's place within Australian colonial rule in PNG, occasionally resulting in a tense relationship with the Australian colonial government during a period of significant change. In Guarding the Periphery: The Australian Army in Papua New Guinea, 1951-75, Tristan Moss explores the operational, social and racial aspects of this unique force during the height of the colonial era in PNG and during the progression to independence. Combining the rich detail of both archival material and oral histories, Guarding the Periphery recounts a part of Australian military history that is often overlooked by studies of Australia's military past.

Little has been written about when, how and why the British Government changed its mind about giving independance to the Pacific Islands. Using recently opened archives, Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands gives the first detailed account of this event. As Britain began to dissolve the Empire in Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War, it announced that there were some countries that were so small, remote, and lacking in resources that they could never become independent states. However, between 1970 and 1980 there was a rapid about-turn. Accelerated decolonization suddenly became the order of the day. Here was the death warrant of the Empire, and hastily-arranged independence ceremonies were performed for six new states - Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Vanuatu. The rise of anti-imperialist pressures in the United Nations had a major role in this change in policy, as did the pioneering examples marked by the release of Western Samoa by New Zealand in 1962 and Nauru by Australia in 1968. The tenacity of Pacific Islanders in maintaining their cultures was in contrast to more strident Afro-Asia nationalisms. The closing of the Colonial Office, by merger with the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1966, followed by the joining of the Commonwealth and Foreign Offices in 1968, became a major turning point in Britain's relations with the Islands. In place of long-nurtured traditions of trusteeship for indigenous populations that had evolved in the Colonial Office, the new Foreign & Commonwealth Office concentrated on fostering British interests, which came to mean reducing distant commitments and focussing on the Atlantic world and Europe.

In 1823, as the first American missionaries arrived in Hawai'i, the archipelago was experiencing a profound transformation in its rule, as oral law that had been maintained for hundreds of years was in the process of becoming codified anew through the medium of writing. The arrival of sailors in pursuit of the lucrative sandalwood trade obliged the ali'i (chiefs) of the islands to pronounce legal restrictions on foreigners' access to Hawaiian women. Assuming the new missionaries were the source of these rules, sailors attacked two mission stations, fracturing relations between merchants, missionaries, and sailors, while native rulers remained firmly in charge. In The Kingdom and the Republic, Noelani Arista (Kanaka Maoli) uncovers a trove of previously unused Hawaiian language documents to chronicle the story of Hawaiians' experience of encounter and colonialism in the nineteenth century. Through this research, she explores the political deliberations between ali'i over the sale of a Hawaiian woman to a British ship captain in 1825 and the consequences of the attacks on the mission stations. The result is a heretofore untold story of native political formation, the creation of indigenous law, and the extension of chiefly rule over natives and foreigners alike. Relying on what is perhaps the largest archive of written indigenous language materials in North America, Arista argues that Hawaiian deliberations and actions in this period cannot be understood unless one takes into account Hawaiian understandings of the past-and the ways this knowledge of history was mobilized as a means to influence the present and secure a better future. In pursuing this history, The Kingdom and the Republic reconfigures familiar colonial histories of trade, proselytization, and negotiations over law and governance in Hawai'i.

The definitive history of American war reporting in the Pacific theater of World War II, from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After almost two years slogging with infantrymen through North Africa, Italy, and France, Ernie Pyle immediately realized he was ill prepared for covering the Pacific War. As Pyle and other war correspondents discovered, the climate, the logistics, and the sheer scope of the Pacific theater had no parallel in the war America was fighting in Europe. From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The War Beat, Pacific provides the first comprehensive account of how a group of highly courageous correspondents covered America's war against Japan, what they witnessed, what they were allowed to publish, and how their reports shaped the home front's perception of some of the most pivotal battles in American military history. In a dramatic and fast-paced narrative based on a wealth of previously untapped primary sources, Casey takes us from MacArthur's doomed defense on the Philippines and the navy's overly strict censorship policy at the time of Midway, through the bloody battles on Guadalcanal, New Guinea, Tarawa, Saipan, Leyte and Luzon, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, detailing the cooperation, as well as conflict, between the media and the military, as they grappled with the enduring problem of limiting a free press during a period of extreme crisis. The War Beat, Pacific shows how foreign correspondents ran up against practical challenges and risked their lives to get stories in a theater that was far more challenging than the war against Nazi Germany, while the US government blocked news of the war against Japan and tried to focus the home front on Hitler and his atrocities.

The 1820s to the 1860s were a foundational period in Australian history, arguably at least as important as Federation. Industrialization was transforming Britain, but the southern colonies were pre-industrial, with economies driven by pastoralism, agriculture, mining, whaling and sealing, commerce, and the construction trades. Convict transportation provided the labour on which the first settlements depended before it was brought to a staggered end, first in New South Wales in 1840 and last in Western Australia in 1868. The numbers of free settlers rose dramatically, surging from the 1820s and again during the 1850s gold rushes. The convict system increasingly included assignment to private masters and mistresses, thus offering settlers the inducement of unpaid labourers as well as the availability of land on a scale that both defied and excited the British imagination. By the 1830s schemes for new kinds of colonies, based on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's systematic colonization, gained attention and support. The pivotal development of the 1840s-1850s, and the political events which form the backbone of this story were the Australian colonies' gradual attainment of representative and then responsible government. Through political struggle and negotiation, in which Australians looked to Canada for their model of political progress, settlers slowly became self-governing. But these political developments were linked to the frontier violence that shaped settlers' lives and became accepted as part of respectable manhood. With narratives of individual lives, Settler Society shows that women's exclusion from political citizenship was vigorously debated, and that settlers were well aware of their place in an empire based on racial hierarchies and threatened by revolts. Angela Woollacott particularly focuses on settlers' dependence in these decades on intertwined categories of unfree labour, including poorly-compensated Aborigines and indentured Indian and Chinese labourers, alongside convicts.

Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands is the first detailed account, based on recently-opened archives, of when, how, and why the British Government changed its mind about giving independence to the Pacific Islands. As Britain began to dissolve the Empire in Asia in the aftermath of the Second World War, it announced that there were some countries that were so small, remote, and lacking in resources that they could never become independent states. However, between 1970 and 1980 there was a rapid about-turn. Accelerated decolonization suddenly became the order of the day. Here was the death warrant of the Empire, and hastily-arranged independence ceremonies were performed for six new states - Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Vanuatu. The rise of anti-imperialist pressures in the United Nations had a major role in this change in policy, as did the pioneering examples marked by the release of Western Samoa by New Zealand in 1962 and Nauru by Australia in 1968. The tenacity of Pacific Islanders in maintaining their cultures was in contrast to more strident Afro-Asia nationalisms. The closing of the Colonial Office, by merger with the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1966, followed by the joining of the Commonwealth and Foreign Offices in 1968, became a major turning point in Britain's relations with the Islands. In place of long-nurtured traditions of trusteeship for indigenous populations that had evolved in the Colonial Office, the new Foreign & Commonwealth Office concentrated on fostering British interests, which came to mean reducing distant commitments and focussing on the Atlantic world and Europe.

These volumes present a comprehensive survey of the history of the Pacific Ocean, an area making up around one third of the Earth's surface, from initial human colonization to the present day. Reflecting a wide range of cultural and disciplinary perspectives, this two-volume work details different ways of telling and viewing history in a Pacific world of exceptionally diverse cultural traditions, over time spans that require multidisciplinary and multicultural collaborative perspectives. The central importance of nations touched by the Pacific in contemporary world affairs cannot be understood without recourse to the deep history of interactions on and across the Pacific. In reflecting the diversity and dynamism of the societies of this blue hemisphere, these volumes seek to enhance world histories and broaden readers' perspectives on forms of historical knowledge and expression. Volume I explores the history of the Pacific Ocean pre-1800 and Volume II examines the period from 1800 to the present day.