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Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
'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.
Australia and the World celebrates the pioneering role of Neville
Meaney in the formation and development of foreign relations
history in Australia and his profound influence on its study,
teaching and application.The contributors to the volume -
historians, practitioners of foreign relations and political
commentators, many of whom were taught by Meaney at the University
of Sydney over the years - focus especially on the interaction
between geopolitics, culture and ideology in shaping Australian and
American approaches to the world.Individual chapters examine a
number of major themes informing Neville Meaney's work, including
the sources and nature of Australia's British identity; the
hapless, if dedicated, efforts of Australian politicians, public
servants and intellectuals to reconcile this intense cultural
identity with Australia's strategic anxieties in the Asia-Pacific
region; and the sense of trauma created when the myth of
'Britishness' collapsed under the weight of new historical
circumstances in the 1960s. They survey relations between Australia
and the United States in the years after World War Two. Finally,
they assess the US perceptions of itself as an 'exceptional' nation
with a mission to spread democracy and liberty to the wider world
and the way in which this self-perception has influenced its
behaviour in international affairs.
A Primer for Teaching Pacific Histories is a guide for college and
high school teachers who are teaching Pacific histories for the
first time or for experienced teachers who want to reinvigorate
their courses. It can also serve those who are training future
teachers to prepare their own syllabi, as well as teachers who want
to incorporate Pacific histories into their world history courses.
Matt K. Matsuda offers design principles for creating syllabi that
will help students navigate a wide range of topics, from settler
colonialism, national liberation, and warfare to tourism, popular
culture, and identity. He also discusses practical pedagogical
techniques and tips, project-based assignments, digital resources,
and how Pacific approaches to teaching history differ from
customary Western practices. Placing the Pacific Islands at the
center of analysis, Matsuda draws readers into the process of
strategically designing courses that will challenge students to
think critically about the interconnected histories of East Asia,
Southeast Asia, Australia, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas
within a global framework.
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.
Whenever society produces a depraved criminal, we wonder: is it
nature or is it nurture? When the charlatan Alicks Sly murdered his
wife, Ellie, and killed himself with a cut-throat razor in a house
in Sydney's Newtown in early 1904, he set off a chain of events
that could answer that question. He also left behind mysteries that
might never be solved. Sociologist Dr Tanya Bretherton traces the
brutal story of Ellie, one of many suicide brides in
turn-of-the-century Sydney; of her husband, Alicks, and his family;
and their three orphaned sons, adrift in the world. From the author
of the acclaimed THE SUITCASE BABY - shortlisted for the 2018 Ned
Kelly Award, Danger Prize and Waverley Library 'Nib' Award - comes
another riveting true-crime case from Australia's dark past. THE
SUICIDE BRIDE is a masterful exploration of criminality, insanity,
violence and bloody family ties in bleak, post-Victorian Sydney.
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.
The paradox of progressivism continues to fascinate more than one
hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but
coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined
by its contradictions. In a bold new argument, Marilyn Lake points
to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges
between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial
sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social
order. Progressive New World demonstrates that race and reform were
mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of
settler colonialism. White settlers in the United States, who saw
themselves as path-breakers and pioneers, were inspired by the
state experiments of Australia and New Zealand that helped shape
their commitment to an active state, women's and workers' rights,
mothers' pensions, and child welfare. Both settler societies
defined themselves as New World, against Old World feudal and
aristocratic societies and Indigenous peoples deemed backward and
primitive. In conversations, conferences, correspondence, and
collaboration, transpacific networks were animated by a sense of
racial kinship and investment in social justice. While "Asiatics"
and "Blacks" would be excluded, segregated, or deported, Indians
and Aborigines would be assimilated or absorbed. The political
mobilizations of Indigenous progressives-in the Society of American
Indians and the Australian Aborigines' Progressive
Association-testified to the power of Progressive thought but also
to its repressive underpinnings. Burdened by the legacies of
dispossession and displacement, Indigenous reformers sought
recognition and redress in differently imagined new worlds and thus
redefined the meaning of Progressivism itself.
The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is a comprehensive
collection that considers Australia's distinctive politics- both
ancient and modern- at all levels and across many themes. It
examines the factors that make Australian politics unique and
interesting, while firmly placing these in the context of the
nation's Indigenous and imported heritage and global engagement.
The book presents an account of Australian politics that recognizes
and celebrates its inherent diversity by taking a thematic approach
in six parts. The first theme addresses Australia's unique
inheritances, examining the development of its political culture in
relation to the arrival of British colonists and their conflicts
with First Nations peoples, as well as the resulting geopolitics.
The second theme, improvization, focuses on Australia's political
institutions and how they have evolved. Place-making is then
considered to assess how geography, distance, Indigenous presence,
and migration shape Australian politics. Recurrent dilemmas centres
on a range of complex, political problems and their influence on
contemporary political practice. Politics, policy, and public
administration covers how Australia has been a world leader in some
respects, and a laggard in others, when dealing with important
policy challenges. The final theme, studying Australian politics,
introduces some key areas in the study of Australian politics and
identifies the strengths and shortcomings of the discipline. The
Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is an opportunity for others
to consider the nation's unique politics from the perspective of
leading and emerging scholars, and to gain a strong sense of its
imperfections, its enduring challenges, and its strengths.
This book fills an important gap in the history and intelligence
canvas of Singapore and Malaya immediately after the surrender of
the Japanese in August 1945. It deals with the establishment of the
domestic intelligence service known as the Malayan Security Service
(MSS), which was pan-Malayan covering both Singapore and Malaya,
and the colourful and controversial career of Lieutenant Colonel
John Dalley, the Commander of Dalforce in the WWII battle for
Singapore and the post-war Director of MSS. It also documents the
little-known rivalry between MI5 in London and MSS in Singapore,
which led to the demise of the MSS and Dalley's retirement.
In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonize Australia… An epic description of the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin of Australia. The Fatal Shore is the prize-winning, scholarly, brilliantly entertaining narrative that has given its true history to Australia.
This book tells of one of the most expansive and rapid phases of
human migration in prehistory, a period during which Polynesians
reached and settled nearly every archipelago scattered across some
28 million square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean, an area now
known as East Polynesia. Through an engaging narrative and over 400
maps, diagrams, photographs, and illustrations, Crowe conveys some
of the skills, innovation, resourcefulness, and courage of the
people that drove this extraordinary feat of maritime expansion. In
this masterful work, Andrew Crowe integrates a diversity of
research and viewpoints in a format that is both accessible to the
lay reader and required reading for any serious scholar of this
fascinating region.
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.
On a long stretch of green coast in the South Pacific, hundreds of
enormous, impassive stone heads stand guard against the ravages of
time, war, and disease that have attempted over the centuries to
conquer Easter Island. Steven Roger Fischer offers the first
English-language history of Easter Island in "Island at the End of
the World," a fascinating chronicle of adversity, triumph, and the
enduring monumentality of the island's stone guards.
A small canoe with Polynesians brought the first humans to Easter
Island in 700 CE, and when boat travel in the South Pacific
drastically decreased around 1500, the Easter Islanders were forced
to adapt in order to survive their isolation. Adaptation, Fischer
asserts, was a continuous thread in the life of Easter Island: the
first European visitors, who viewed the awe-inspiring monolithic
busts in 1722, set off hundreds of years of violent warfare, trade,
and disease--from the smallpox, wars, and Great Death that
decimated the island to the late nineteenth-century Catholic
missionaries who tried to "save" it to a despotic Frenchman who
declared sole claim of the island and was soon killed by the
remaining 111 islanders. The rituals, leaders, and religions of the
Easter Islanders evolved with all of these events, and Fischer is
just as attentive to the island's cultural developments as he is to
its foreign invasions.
Bringing his history into the modern era, Fischer examines the
colonization and annexation of Easter Island by Chile, including
the Rapanui people's push for civil rights in 1964 and 1965, by
which they gained full citizenship and freedom of movement on the
island. As travel to and interest in the island rapidly expand,
"Islandat the End of the World" is an essential history of this
mysterious site.
Shortlised for the Saltire Society Non Fiction Book of the Year
Award Almost every adult and child is familiar with his Treasure
Island, but few know that Robert Louis Stevenson lived out his last
years on an equally remote island, which was squabbled over by
colonial powers much as Captain Flint's treasure was contested by
the mongrel crew of the Hispaniola. In 1890 Stevenson settled in
Upolu, an island in Samoa, after two years sailing round the South
Pacific. He was given a Samoan name and became a fierce critic of
the interference of Germany, Britain and the U.S.A. in Samoan
affairs - a stance that earned him Oscar Wilde's sneers, and
brought him into conflict with the Colonial Office, who regarded
him as a menace and even threatened him with expulsion from the
island. Joseph Farrell's pioneering study of Stevenson's twilight
years stands apart from previous biographies by giving as much
weight to the Samoa and the Samoans - their culture, their manners,
their history - as to the life and work of the man himself. For it
is only by examining the full complexity of Samoa and the political
situation it faced as the nineteenth century gave way to the
twentieth, that Stevenson's lasting and generous contribution to
its cause can be appreciated.
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