The Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures series offers stimulating and accessible introductions to definitive topics and key genres and regions within the rapidly diversifying field of postcolonial literary studies in English. In a provocative contribution to the series, Graham Huggan presents fresh readings of an outstanding, sometimes deeply unsettling national literature whose writers and readers just as unmistakably belong to the wider world. Australian literature is not the unique province of Australian readers and critics; nor is its exclusive task to provide an internal commentary on changing national concerns. Huggan's book adopts a transnational approach, motivated by postcolonial interests, in which contemporary ideas taken from postcolonial criticism and critical race theory are productively combined and imaginatively transformed. Rejecting the fashionable view that Australia is not, and never will be, postcolonial, Huggan argues on the contrary that Australian literature, like other settler literatures, requires close attention to postcolonial methods and concerns. A postcolonial approach to Australian literature, he suggests, is more than just a case for a more inclusive nationalism; it also involves a general acknowledgement of the nation's changed relationship to an increasingly globalized world. As such, the book helps to deprovincialize Australian literary studies. Australian Literature also contributes to debates about the continuing history of racism in Australia-a history in which the nation's literature has played a constitutive role, as both product and producer of racial tensions and anxieties, nowhere more visible than in the discourse it has produced about race, both within and beyond the national context.

The early arrival of the missionaries in Aotearoa set the scene for a new 'moral colony' that would be founded on religious precepts and modern Christian beliefs. It did not take long for a combination of circumstances to confound the aspirations of the Church Missionary Society, the Church in Rome and all those who followed. Historian Peter Lineham examines Christianity in New Zealand through the lens of cultural development, and asks: If the various denominations and faiths set out to shape New Zealand, how did the very fluid fact of New Zealand change those faiths? From the Presbyterian south to the enclaves of Catholicism, who shaped whom? And what is the legacy of that influence? Why do we have afternoon tea? And what were debutante balls? Religion had a hand in the societal habits and milestones we all take for granted.

This book examines how convicts played a key role in the development of capitalism in Australia and how their active resistance shaped both workplace relations and institutions. It highlights the contribution of convicts to worker mobilization and political descent, forcing a rethink of Australia's foundational story. It is a book that will appeal to an international audience, as well as the many hundreds of thousands of Australians who can trace descent from convicts. It will enable the latter to make sense of the experience of their ancestors, equipping them with the necessary tools to understand convict and court records. It will also provide a valuable undergraduate and postgraduate teaching tool and reference for those studying unfree labour and worker history, social history, colonization and global migration in a digital age.

This groundbreaking study understands the 'long history' of human rights in Australia from the moment of their supposed invention in the 1940s to official incorporation into the Australian government bureaucracy in the 1980s. To do so, a wide cast of individuals, institutions and publics from across the political spectrum are surveyed, who translated global ideas into local settings and made meaning of a foreign discourse to suit local concerns and predilections. These individuals created new organisations to spread the message of human rights or found older institutions amenable to their newfound concerns, adopting rights language with a mixture of enthusiasm and opportunism. Governments, on the other hand, engaged with or ignored human rights as its shifting meanings, international currency and domestic reception ebbed and flowed. Finally, individuals understood and (re)translated human rights ideas throughout this period: writing letters, books or poems and sympathising in new, global ways.

From the 1950s, tens of thousands of well-meaning Westerners left their homes to volunteer in distant corners of the globe. Aflame with optimism, they set out to save the world, but their actions were invariably intertwined with decolonization, globalization and the Cold War. Closely exploring British, American and Australian programs, Agnieszka Sobocinska situates Western volunteers at the heart of the 'humanitarian-development complex'. This nexus of governments, NGOs, private corporations and public opinion encouraged continuous and accelerating intervention in the Global South from the 1950s. Volunteers attracted a great deal of support in their home countries. But critics across the Global South protested that volunteers put an attractive face on neocolonial power, and extended the logic of intervention embedded in the global system of international development. Saving the World? brings together a wide range of sources to construct a rich narrative of the meeting between Global North and Global South.

British Imperial Air Power examines the air defense of Australia and New Zealand during the interwar period. It also demonstrates the difficulty of applying new military aviation technology to the defense of the global Empire and provides insight into the nature of the political relationship between the Pacific Dominions and Britain. Following World War I, both Dominions sought greater independence in defense and foreign policy. Public aversion to military matters and the economic dislocation resulting from the war and later the Depression left little money that could be provided for their respective air forces. As a result, the Empire's air services spent the entire interwar period attempting to create a strategy in the face of these handicaps. In order to survive, the British Empire's military air forces offered themselves as a practical and economical third option in the defense of Britain's global Empire, intending to replace the Royal Navy and British Army as the traditional pillars of imperial defense.

'The Earth is a Common Treasury', proclaimed the English Revolutionaries in the 1640s. Does the principle of the commons offer us ways to respond now to the increasingly destructive effects of neoliberalism? With insight, passion and an eye on history, Jane Goodall argues that as the ravages of neo-liberalism tear ever more deeply into the social fabric, the principle of the commons should be restored to the heart of our politics. She looks in particular at land and public institutions in Australia and elsewhere. Many ordinary citizens seem prepared to support governments that increase national debt while selling off publicly owned assets and cutting back on services. In developed countries, extreme poverty is becoming widespread yet we are told we have never been so prosperous. This important book calls for a radically different kind of economy, one that will truly serve the common good. Topical and constructive - this book argues for the restoration of the principle of the commons as a way of reclaiming the social fabric from the ravages of neo-liberalism Questions why so many citizens support governments that increase national debt while selling off publicly owned assets Asks how and why our political culture and economic policies have become so hostile to communal resources and public ownership Has an eye on the history of the commons as well as those who advocate for it in a modern form: Bill Shorten and Sally McManus for example in Australia; Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US.

Davida Malo's Mo'olelo Hawai'i is the single most important description of pre-Christian Hawaiian culture. Malo, born in 1795, twenty-five years before the coming of Christianity to Hawai'i, wrote about everything from traditional cosmology and accounts of ancestral chiefs to religion and government to traditional amusements. The heart of this two-volume work is a new, critically edited text of Malo's original Hawaiian, including the manuscript known as the "Carter copy," handwritten by him and two helpers in the decade before his death in 1853. Volume 1 provides images of the original text, side by side with the new edited text. Volume 2 presents the edited Hawaiian text side by side with a new annotated English translation. Malo's text has been edited at two levels. First, the Hawaiian has been edited through a careful comparison of all the extant manuscripts, attempting to restore Malo's original text, with explanations of the editing choices given in the footnotes. Second, the orthography of the Hawaiian text has been modernized to help today's readers of Hawaiian by adding diacritical marks ('okina and kahako, or glottal stop and macron, respectively) and the punctuation has been revised to signal the end of clauses and sentences. The new English translation attempts to remain faithful to the edited Hawaiian text while avoiding awkwardness in the English. Both volumes contain substantial introductions. The introduction to Volume 1 (in Hawaiian) discusses the manuscripts of Malo's text and their history. The introduction to Volume 2 contains two essays that provide context to help the reader understand Malo's Moolelo Hawaii. "Understanding Malo's Moolelo Hawaii" describes the nature of Malo's work, showing that it is the result of his dual Hawaiian and Western education. "The Writing of the Moolelo Hawaii" discusses how the Carter copy was written and preserved, its relationship to other versions of the text, and Malo's plan for the work as a whole. The introduction is followed by a new biography of Malo by Kanaka Maoli historian Noelani Arista, "Davida Malo, a Hawaiian Life," describing his life as a chiefly counselor and Hawaiian intellectual.

This book sets out to navigate questions of the future of Australian poetry. Deliberately designed as a dialogue between poets, each of the four clusters presented here-"Indigeneities"; "Political Landscapes"; "Space, Place, Materiality"; "Revising an Australian Mythos"-models how poetic communities in Australia continue to grow in alliance toward certain constellated ideas. Exploring the ethics of creative production in a place that continues to position capital over culture, property over community, each of the twenty essays in this anthology takes the subject of Australian poetry definitively beyond Eurocentrism and white privilege. By pushing back against nationalizing mythologies that have, over the last 200 years since colonization, not only narrativized the logic of instrumentalization but rendered our lands precarious, this book asserts new possibilities of creative responsiveness within the Australian sensorium.

This edited collection invites the reader to enter the diverse worlds of Australia's migrant and minority communities through the latest research on the contemporary printed press, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to our current day. With a focus on the rare, radical and foreign-language print culture of multiple and frequently concurrent minority groups' newspaper ventures, this volume has two overarching aims: firstly to demonstrate how the local experiences and narratives of such communities are always forged and negotiated within a context of globalising forces - the global within the local; and secondly to enrich an understanding of the complexity of Australian 'voices' through this medium not only as a means for appreciating how the cultural heritage of such communities were sustained, but also for exploring their contributions to the wider society.

Freedom's Captives is a compelling exploration of the gradual abolition of slavery in the majority-black Pacific coast of Colombia, the largest area in the Americas inhabited primarily by people of African descent. From the autonomous rainforests and gold mines of the Colombian Black Pacific, Yesenia Barragan rethinks the nineteenth-century project of emancipation by arguing that the liberal freedom generated through gradual emancipation constituted a modern mode of racial governance that birthed new forms of social domination, while temporarily instituting de facto slavery. Although gradual emancipation was ostensibly designed to destroy slavery, she argues that slaveholders in Colombia came to have an even greater stake in it. Using narrative and storytelling to map the worlds of Free Womb children, enslaved women miners, free black boatmen, and white abolitionists in the Andean highlands, Freedom's Captives insightfully reveals how the Atlantic World processes of gradual emancipation and post-slavery rule unfolded in Colombia.

Emotions are not universal, but are experienced and expressed in diverse ways within different cultures and times. This overview of the history of emotions within nineteenth-century British imperialism focuses on the role of the compassionate emotions, or what today we refer to as empathy, and how they created relations across empire. Jane Lydon examines how empathy was produced, qualified and contested, including via the fear and anger aroused by frontier violence. She reveals the overlooked emotional dimensions of relationships constructed between Britain, her Australasian colonies, and Indigenous people, showing that ideas about who to care about were frequently drawn from the intimate domestic sphere, but were also developed through colonial experience. This history reveals the contingent and highly politicised nature of emotions in imperial deployment. Moving beyond arguments that emotions such as empathy are either 'good' or 'bad', this study evaluates their concrete political uses and effects.

This book provides a new approach to the historical treatment of indigenous peoples' sovereignty and property rights in Australia and New Zealand. By shifting attention from the original European claims of possession to a comparison of the ways in which British players treated these matters later, Bain Attwood not only reveals some startling similarities between the Australian and New Zealand cases but revises the long-held explanations of the differences. He argues that the treatment of the sovereignty and property rights of First Nations was seldom determined by the workings of moral principle, legal doctrine, political thought or government policy. Instead, it was the highly particular historical circumstances in which the first encounters between natives and Europeans occurred and colonisation began that largely dictated whether treaties of cession were negotiated, just as a bitter political struggle determined the significance of the Treaty of Waitangi and ensured that native title was made in New Zealand.

Spanning six decades from the formation of the Save the Children Fund in 1919 to humanitarian interventions during the Vietnam War, The Humanitarians maps the national and international humanitarian efforts undertaken by Australians on behalf of child refugees. In this longitudinal study, Joy Damousi explores the shifting forms of humanitarian activity related to war refugee children over the twentieth century, from child sponsorship, the establishment of orphanages, fundraising, to aid and development schemes and campaigns for inter-country adoption. Framed by conceptualisations of the history of emotions, and the limits and possibilities afforded by empathy and compassion, she considers the vital role of women and includes studies of unknown, but significant, women humanitarian workers and their often-traumatic experience of international humanitarian work. Through an examination of the intersection between racial politics and war refugees, Damousi advances our understanding of humanitarianism over the twentieth century as a deeply racialised and multi-layered practice.

This essay deals with the missionary work of the Society of Jesus in today's Micronesia from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Although the Jesuit missionaries wanted to reach Japan and other Pacific islands, such as the Palau and Caroline archipelagos, the crown encouraged them to stay in the Marianas until 1769 (when the Society of Jesus was expelled from the Philippines) to evangelize the native Chamorros as well as to reinforce the Spanish presence on the fringes of the Pacific empire. In 1859, a group of Jesuit missionaries returned to the Philippines, but they never officially set foot on the Marianas during the nineteenth century. It was not until the twentieth century that they went back to Micronesia, taking charge of the mission on the Northern Marianas along with the Caroline and Marshall Islands, thus returning to one of the cradles of Jesuit martyrdom in Oceania.

This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading motherhood researchers explore how mothering has evolved across Australian history as well as the joys and challenges of being a mother today. The contributors cover pregnancy, birth, relationships, childcare, domestic violence, time use, work, welfare, policy and psychology, from a diverse range of maternal perspectives. Utilising a matricentric feminist framework, Australian Mothering foregrounds the experiences, emotions and perspectives of mothers to better understand how Australian motherhood has developed historically and contemporaneously. Drawing upon their combined sociological and historical expertise, Bueskens and Pascoe Leahy have carefully curated a collection that presents compelling research on past and present perspectives on maternity in Australia, which will be relevant to researchers, advocates and policy makers interested in the changing role of mothers in Australian society.

The increasing importance of the Pacific and Pacific Rim within the global economy places us on the brink of a Pacific Century. While many hold that the concept of a Pacific region has only emerged in the 20th century, this work demonstrates that such an economic region has existed for almost five hundred years. Starting with the 16th-century trade of Latin American silver for Chinese silk, researchers trace the economic, environmental and social history of the Pacific region. Chapters examine the trade of diverse commodities within the Pacific and analyze the ecological and social impacts of this increasing economic activity. The strong Chinese marketplace emerges as crucial to early Pacific development, and is compared with Japan's central role in the region's modern economy. This book contributes to the understanding of a dynamic economic region. The study also advances research into the economic histories of South and South East Asia, Australia and America, situating them within the wider Pacific context.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of capital punishment in the Australian colonies for the very first time. The author illuminates all aspects of the penalty, from shortcomings in execution technique, to the behaviour of the dying criminal, and the antics of the scaffold crowd. Mercy rates, execution numbers, and capital crimes are explored alongside the transition from public to private executions and the push to abolish the death penalty completely. Notions of culture and communication freely pollinate within a conceptual framework of penal change that explains the many transformations the death penalty underwent. A vast array of sources are assembled into one compelling argument that shows how the 'lesson' of the gallows was to be safeguarded, refined, and improved at all costs. This concise and engaging work will be a lasting resource for students, scholars, and general readers who want an in-depth understanding of a long feared punishment. Dr. Steven Anderson is a Visiting Research Fellow in the History Department at The University of Adelaide, Australia. His academic research explores the role of capital punishment in the Australian colonies by situating developments in these jurisdictions within global contexts and conceptual debates.

This book examines Australian colonial and foreign aid policy towards Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia in the age of international development (1945-1975). During this period, the academic and political understandings of development consolidated and informed Australian attempts to provide economic assistance to the poorer regions to its north. Development was central to the Australian colonial administration of PNG, as well as its Colombo Plan aid in Asia. In addition to examining Australia's perception of international development, this book also demonstrates how these debates and policies informed Australia's understanding of its own development. This manifested itself most clearly in Australia's behavior at the 1964 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The book concludes with a discussion of development and Australian foreign aid in the decade leading up to Papua New Guinea's independence, achieved in 1975.

This is a pathbreaking comparative and trans-national study of the neglected influences of nation, empire and race upon the development and electoral fortunes of the Labour Party in Britain and the Australian Labor Party from their formative years of the 1900s to the elections of 2010. Based upon extensive primary and secondary source-based research in Britain and Australia over several years, it makes a new and original contribution to the fields of labour, imperial and 'British world' history. The book offers the challenging conclusion that the forces of nation, empire and race exerted much greater influence upon Labour politics in both countries than suggested by 'traditionalists' and 'revisionists' alike. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates, scholars in history and politics and all those interested in and concerned with the past, present and future of Labour politics in Britain, Australia and more generally. -- .

This book reconstructs the history of a group of British Quaker families and their involvement in the process of settler colonialism in early nineteenth-century Australia. Their everyday actions contributed to the multiplicity of practices that displaced and annihilated Aboriginal communities. Simultaneously, early nineteenth-century Friends were members of a translocal, transatlantic community characterized by pacifism and an involvement in transnational humanitarian efforts, such as the abolitionist and the prison reform movements as well as the Aborigines Protection Society. Considering these ideals, how did Quakers negotiate the violence of the frontier? To answer this question, the book looks at Tasmanian and South Australian Quakers' lives and experiences, their journeys and their writings. Building on recent scholarship on the entanglement between the local and the global, each chapter adopts a different historical perspective in terms of breadth and focused time period. The study combines these different takes to capture the complexities of this topic and era.

As Australian cities face uncertain water futures, what insights can the history of Aboriginal and settler relationships with water yield? Residents have come to expect reliable, safe, and cheap water, but natural limits and the costs of maintaining and expanding water networks are at odds with forms and cultures of urban water use. Cities in a Sunburnt Country is the first comparative study of the provision, use, and social impact of water and water infrastructure in Australia's five largest cities. Drawing on environmental, urban, and economic history, this co-authored book challenges widely held assumptions, both in Australia and around the world, about water management, consumption, and sustainability. From the 'living water' of Aboriginal cultures to the rise of networked water infrastructure, the book invites us to take a long view of how water has shaped our cities, and how urban water systems and cultures might weather a warming world.

This book considers the law, policy and procedure for child witnesses in Australian criminal courts across the twentieth century. It uses the stories and experiences of over 200 children, in many cases using their own words from press reports, to highlight how the relevant law was - or was not - applied throughout this period. The law was sympathetic to the plight of child witnesses and exhibited a significant degree of pragmatism to receive the evidence of children but was equally fearful of innocent men being wrongly convicted. The book highlights the impact 'safeguards' like corroboration and closed court rules had on the outcome of many cases and the extent to which fear - of children, of lies (or the truth) and of reform - influenced the criminal justice process. Over a century of children giving evidence in court it is `clear that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same'.

Irish people have had a long and complex engagement with the lands and waters encompassing the Pacific world. As the European presence in the Pacific intensified from the late eighteenth century, the Irish entered this oceanic space as beachcombers, missionaries, traders, and colonizers. During the nineteenth century, economic distress in Ireland and rapid population growth on the Pacific Ocean's eastern and western shores set in motion large-scale migration that exerted a deep political, social, and economic impact across the Pacific. Malcolm Campbell examines the rich history of Irish experiences on land and at sea, offering new perspectives on migration and mobility in the Pacific world and of the Irish role in the establishment and maintenance of the British Empire. This volume investigates the extensive transnational connections that developed among Irish immigrants and their descendants across this vast and unique oceanic space, ties that illuminate how the Irish participated in the making of the Pacific world and how the Pacific world made them.