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Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
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.
There has been little written about Tenison Woods who as a
significant figure in Australian Catholic Church life at the time
of St Mary Mackillop, Australia's first Catholic Saint. This is a
story about the work of the Sisters of St Joseph, an Australian
Catholic Religious Order of women, founded by St Mary Mackillop, in
Tasmania. An intriguing story of a group of women who were not part
of the Centralised Josephite Sisters under Mary Mackillop, who for
a variety of reasons were under the diocesan Catholic Bishop in
Tasmania. The books documents their 125 year history from
foundation right through to Vatican approval of the being brought
under the Federation of Josephite Sisters in Australia.
A uniquely collaborative analysis of human adaptation to the
Polynesian islands, told through oral histories, biophysical
evidence, and historical records Humans began to settle the area we
know as Polynesia between 3,000 and 800 years ago, bringing with
them material culture, including plants and animals, and ideas
about societal organization, and then adapting to the specific
biophysical features of the islands they discovered. The authors of
this book analyze the formation of their human-environment systems
using oral histories, biophysical evidence, and historical records,
arguing that the Polynesian islands can serve as useful models for
how human societies in general interact with their environments.
The islands' clearly defined (and relatively isolated)
environments, comparatively recent discovery by humans, and
innovative and dynamic societies allow for insights not available
when studying other cultures. Kamana Beamer, Te Maire Tau, and
Peter Vitousek have collaborated with a dozen other scholars, many
of them Polynesian, to show how these cultures adapted to novel
environments in the past and how we can draw insights for global
sustainability today.
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.
Britannia's Shield: Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton and the
Late-Victorian Imperial Defence presents an in-depth, international
study of imperial land defence prior to 1914. The book makes sense
of the failures, false starts and successes that eventually led to
more than 850,000 men being despatched from the Dominions to
buttress Britain's Great War effort - an enormous achievement for
intra-empire military cooperation. Craig Stockings presents a vivid
portrayal of this complex process as it unfolded throughout the
late-Victorian Empire through a biographical study of
Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton. As a true soldier of the
Empire, the difficulties and dramas that followed Hutton's career
at every step - from Cairo to Sydney, Aldershot to Ottawa, and
Pretoria to Melbourne - provide key insights into imperial defence
and security planning between 1880 and 1914. Richly illustrated,
Britannia's Shield is an engaging and entertaining work of rigorous
scholarship that will appeal to both general readers and academic
researchers.
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.
Reissued for the 40th anniversary of the Falklands conflict The
most in-depth and powerful account yet published of the first
crucial clash of the Falklands war - told from both sides.
'Thorough and exhaustive' Daily Telegraph 'An excellent and fast
paced narrative' Michael McCarthy, historical battlefield guide
Goose Green was the first land battle of the Falklands War. It was
also the longest, the hardest-fought, the most controversial and
the most important to win. What began as a raid became a vicious,
14-hour infantry struggle, in which 2 Para - outnumbered,
exhausted, forced to attack across open ground in full daylight,
and with inadequate fire support - lost their commanding officer,
and almost lost the action. This is the only full-length, detailed
account of this crucial battle. Drawing on the eye-witness accounts
of both British and Argentinian soldiers who fought at Goose Green,
and their commanders' narratives, it has become the definitive
account of most important and controversial land battle of the
Falklands War. A compelling story of men engaged in a battle that
hung in the balance for hours, in which Colonel 'H' Jones' solo
charge against an entrenched enemy won him a posthumous V.C., and
which for both sides was a gruelling and often terrifying
encounter.
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.
The natural resources of New Guinea and nearby islands have
attracted outsiders for at least 5000 years: spices, aromatic woods
and barks, resins, plumes, sea slugs, shells and pearls all brought
traders from distant markets. Among the most sought-after was the
bird of paradise. Their magnificent plumes bedecked the hats of
fashion-conscious women in Europe and America, provided regalia for
the Kings of Nepal, and decorated the headdresses of Janissaries of
the Ottoman Empire. Plumes from Paradise tells the story of this
interaction, and of the economic, political, social and cultural
consequence for the island's inhabitants. It traces 400 years of
economic and political history, culminating in the plume boom of
the early part of the 20th century, when an unprecedented number of
outsiders flocked to the islands coasts and hinterlands. The story
teems with the variety of people involved: New Guineans,
Indonesians, Chinese, Europeans, hunters, traders, natural
historians and their collectors, officials, missionaries, planters,
miners, adventurers of every kind. In the wings were the
conservationists, whose efforts brought the slaughter of the plume
boom to an end and ushered in an era of comparative isolation for
the island that lasted until World War II.
This account of Sir Earle Page's eight-month mission to London
provides insights into Anglo-Australian, Anglo-Dominion and United
States-Australian wartime relations during a crucial phase of the
Second World War. It offers an understanding into the man himself:
his thoughts about Australia during the war; his hopes for its
future after the war; and the relations Page had with leading
political figures, military officials, and policy-makers of the
day. The diary revolves around interrelated themes: the battles to
represent Australia in the British War Cabinet and to secure a
larger share of lucrative wartime food contracts; and the future of
Anglo-Australian relations in the Pacific as the United States
asserted its dominance over its British ally. The ill-fated defence
of Malaya/Singapore and the collapse of British prestige at the
hands of the Japanese between December 1941 and May 1942 serves as
a backcloth to Page's mission and its significance.
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.
Shark attacks and sewage slicks, lifesavers and surfers, amusement
parks and beach camps - the beach is Sydney's most iconic landscape
feature. From Palm Beach in the north to Cronulla in the south,
Sydney's coastline teems with life. People from around the city
escape to the beaches to swim, surf, play, and lie in the sun.
Sydney Beaches tells the story of how Sydneysiders developed their
love of the beach, from 19th-century picnickers to the surfing and
sun-baking pioneers a century later. But Sydney's beaches have
another lesser-known, intriguing history. Our world-famous beach
culture only exists because the first beachgoers demanded important
rights. This book is also the story of these battles for the beach.
Accompanied by vibrant images of Sydney's seashore, this expansive
and delightful book is the story of how a city developed a
relationship with its ocean coast, and how a nation created a
culture.
The convict women who built a continent..."A moving and
fascinating story." -Adam Hochschild, author of "King Leopold's
Ghost"
"The Tin Ticket" takes readers to the dawn of the nineteenth
century and into the lives of three women arrested and sent into
suffering and slavery in Australia and Tasmania-where they overcame
their fates unlike any women in the world. It also tells the tale
of Elizabeth Gurney Fry, a Quaker reformer who touched all their
lives. Ultimately, this is a story of women who, by sheer force of
will, became the heart and soul of a new nation.
During the Second World War, Indigenous people in the United
States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada mobilised en masse to
support the war effort, despite withstanding centuries of
colonialism. Their roles ranged from ordinary soldiers fighting on
distant shores, to soldiers capturing Japanese prisoners on their
own territory, to women working in munitions plants on the home
front. R. Scott Sheffield and Noah Riseman examine Indigenous
experiences of the Second World War across these four settler
societies. Informed by theories of settler colonialism, martial
race theory and military sociology, they show how Indigenous people
and their communities both shaped and were shaped by the Second
World War. Particular attention is paid to the policies in place
before, during and after the war, highlighting the ways that
Indigenous people negotiated their own roles within the war effort
at home and abroad.
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