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Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
How, asks John Terrell in this richly illustrated and original
book, can we best account for the remarkable diversity of the
Pacific Islanders in biology, language, and custom? Traditionally
scholars have recognized a simple racial division between
Polynesians, Micronesians, Melanesians, Australians, and South-east
Asians: peoples allegedly differing in physical appearance,
temperament, achievements, and perhaps even intelligence. Terrell
shows that such simple divisions do not fit the known facts and
provide little more than a crude, static picture of human
diversity.
This book seeks to awaken the public to the dangers of the Hawaiian
sovereignty movement. A gathering storm of racial separatism and
ethnic nationalism threatens not only the people of Hawaii but the
entire United States. The Hawaiian Government Reorganization bill,
also known as the "Akaka bill" (currently S.310 and H.R.505),
threatens to set a precedent for ethnic balkanization throughout
America. It seeks to create a racially exclusionary government
using federal and state land and money. Hawaii's independence
activists want to rip the 50th star off the flag, either by
international efforts or through the economic and political power
the Akaka bill would give ethnic Hawaiians as a group. This book
begins with an in-depth description and analysis of racial
separatism and ethnic nationalism in today's Hawaiian sovereignty
movement. Then it analyzes historical grievances, and the junk
science of current victimhood claims, fueling the Hawaiian
grievance industry. The book analyzes anti-military and
anti-American activity. It describes the dangers of claims to
indigenous rights, and why those claims are bogus in Hawaii. The
book analyzes some Hawaiian sovereignty frauds including a billion
dollars in Hawaiian Kingdom government bonds, the "Perfect Title"
land title scam, and the "World Court" scam. The closing chapter
offers hope for the future, describing an action agenda. Ken
Conklin, author, has a Ph.D. in Philosophy. He has lived in Hawaii
since 1992. He has devoted full time for 15 years to studying
Hawaiian history, culture, and language, and the Hawaiian
sovereignty movement; and speaks Hawaiian with moderate fluency. He
is a scholar and civil rights activist working to protectunity,
equality, and aloha for all. He has published numerous essays in
newspapers, appeared on television and radio, taught a course on
Hawaiian sovereignty at the University of Hawaii, and maintains a
large website.
Hoarding New Guinea provides a new cultural history of colonialism
that pays close attention to the millions of Indigenous artifacts
that serve as witnesses to Europe's colonial past in ethnographic
museums. Rainer F. Buschmann investigates the roughly two hundred
thousand artifacts extracted from the colony of German New Guinea
from 1870 to 1920. Reversing the typical trajectories that place
ethnographic museums at the center of the analysis, he concludes
that museum interests in material culture alone cannot account for
the large quantities of extracted artifacts. Buschmann moves beyond
the easy definition of artifacts as trophies of colonial defeat or
religious conversion, instead employing the term hoarding to
describe the irrational amassing of Indigenous artifacts by
European colonial residents. Buschmann also highlights Indigenous
material culture as a bargaining chip for its producers to engage
with the imposed colonial regime. In addition, by centering an area
of collection rather than an institution, he opens new areas of
investigation that include non-professional ethnographic collectors
and a sustained rather than superficial consideration of Indigenous
peoples as producers behind the material culture. Hoarding New
Guinea answers the call for a more significant historical focus on
colonial ethnographic collections in European museums.
Pitcairn, a tiny Pacific island that was refuge to the mutineers of
HMAV Bounty and home to their descendants, later became the stage
on which one imposter played out his influential vision for British
control over the nineteenth-century Pacific Ocean. Joshua W. Hill
arrived on Pitcairn in 1832 and began his fraudulent half-decade
rule that has, until now, been swept aside as an idiosyncratic
moment in the larger saga of Fletcher Christian's mutiny against
Captain Bligh, and the mutineers' unlikely settlement of Pitcairn.
Here, Hill is shown instead as someone alert to the full scope and
power of the British Empire, to the geopolitics of international
imperial competition, to the ins and outs of naval command, the
vicissitudes of court politics, and, as such, to Pitcairn's
symbolic power for the British Empire more broadly.
Daniel A. Kelin II preserves the qualities of oral storytelling in
fifty stories recorded from eighteen storytellers on eight islands
and atolls. This lively collection includes something for everyone:
origin stories, tales of mejenkwaad and other demons, tricksters,
disobedient children, wronged husbands, foolish suitors, and
reunited families - all relaying the importance of traditional
Marshallese values and customs. Profiles of the storytellers, a
glossary, and a pronunciation guide enrich the collection.
On 2 September 1845, the convict ship Tasmania left Kingstown
Harbour for Van Diemen's Land with 138 female convicts and their 35
children. On 3 December, the ship arrived into Hobart Town. While
this book looks at the lives of all the women aboard, it focuses on
two women in particular: Eliza Davis, who was transported from
Wicklow Gaol for life for infanticide, having had her sentence
commuted from death, and Margaret Butler, sentenced to seven years'
transportation for stealing potatoes in Carlow. Using original
records, this study reveals the reality of transportation, together
with the legacy left by these women in Tasmania and beyond, and
shows that perhaps, for some, this Draconian punishment was, in
fact, a life-saving measure.
Tautai is the story of a man who came from the edge of a mighty
empire and then challenged it at its very heart. This biography of
Ta'isi O. F. Nelson chronicles the life of a man described as the
"archenemy" of New Zealand and its greater whole, the British
Empire. He was Samoa's richest man who used his wealth and unique
international access to further the Samoan cause and was
financially ruined in the process. In the aftermath of the
hyper-violence of the First World War, Ta'isi embraced nonviolent
resistance as a means to combat a colonial surge in the Pacific
that gripped his country for nearly two decades. This surge was
manned by heroes of New Zealand's war campaign, who attempted to
hold the line against the groundswell of challenges to the imperial
order in the former German colony of Samoa that became a League of
Nations mandate in 1921. Stillborn Samoan hopes for greater
freedoms under this system precipitated a crisis of empire. It led
Ta'isi on global journeys in search of justice taking him to
Geneva, the League of Nations headquarters, and into courtrooms in
Samoa, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Ta'isi ran a global
campaign of letter writing, petitions, and a newspaper to get his
people's plight heard. For his efforts he was imprisoned and exiled
not once but twice from his homeland of Samoa. Using private papers
and interviews, O'Brien tells a deeply compelling account of
Ta'isi's life lived through turbulent decades. By following
Ta'isi's story readers also learn a history of Samoa's Mau movement
that attracted international attention. The author's care for
detail provides a nuanced interpretation of its history and
Ta'isi's role in the broader context of world history. The first
biography of Ta'isi O. F. Nelson, Tautai is a powerful and
passionate story that is both personal and one that encircles the
globe. It touches on shared histories and causes that have animated
and enraged populations across the world throughout the twentieth
century to the present day.
The revelatory story of the Bible in Australia, from the convict
era to the Mabo land rights campaign, Nick Cave, the Bra Boys and
beyond. Thought to be everything from the word of God to a resented
imposition, the Bible has been debated, painted, rejected,
translated, read, gossiped about, preached, and tattooed. At a time
when public discussion of religion is deeply polarised, Meredith
Lake reveals the Bible's dynamic influence in Australia and offers
an innovative new perspective on Christianity and its changing role
in our society. In the hands of writers, artists, wowsers,
Biblebashers, immigrants, suffragists, evangelists, unionists,
Indigenous activists and many more - the Bible has played a
defining and contested role in Australia. A must-read for sceptics,
the curious, the lapsed, the devout, the believer and non-believer.
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.
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.
When English naturalist Joseph Banks (1743-1820) accompanied
Captain James Cook (1728-1779) on his historic mission into the
Pacific, the Endeavour voyage of 1768-1771, he took with him a team
of collectors and illustrators. They returned with unprecedented
collections of artifacts and specimens of stunning birds, fish, and
other animals, as well as thousands of plants, most seen for the
first time in Europe. They produced, too, remarkable landscape and
figure drawings of the peoples encountered on the voyage along with
detailed journals and descriptions of the places visited, which,
with the first detailed maps of these lands (Tahiti, New Zealand,
and the east coast of Australia), were later used to create
lavishly illustrated accounts of the mission. These caused a storm
of interest in Europe where plays, poems, and satirical caricatures
were later produced to celebrate and examine the voyage, its
personnel, and many "new" discoveries. Along with contemporary
portraits of key personalities aboard the ship, scale models and
plans of the ship itself, scientific instruments taken on the
voyage, commemorative medals and sketches, the objects (over 140)
featured in this book tell the story of the Endeavour voyage and
its impact ahead of the 250th anniversary in 2018 of the launch of
this seminal mission. Artwork made both during and after the voyage
will be seen alongside actual specimens. By comparing the voyage
originals with the often stylized engravings later produced in
London for the official account, Endeavouring Banks investigates
how knowledge gained on the mission was gathered, revised, and
later received in Europe. Items that had been separated in some
cases for more than two centuries are brought together to reveal
their fascinating history not only during but since that mission.
Original voyage specimens are featured together with illustrations
and descriptions of them, showing a rich diversity of newly
discovered species and how Banks organized this material, planning
but ultimately failing to publish it. In fact, many of the objects
in the book have never been published before. Focusing on the
contribution of Banks's often neglected artists--Sydney Parkinson,
Herman Diedrich Sporing, and Alexander Buchan, as well as the
priest Tupaia, who joined Endeavour in the Society Islands--none of
whom survived the mission, the surviving Endeavour voyage
illustrations are the most important body of images produced since
Europeans entered this region, matching the truly historic value of
the plant specimens and artifacts that will be seen alongside them.
Visions of Nature revives the work of late nineteenth-century
landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of
settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California.
Despite having little association with one another, these
photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They
rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures
that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums,
projected in theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the
American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into
settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory
and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a
generation of photographers came to associate "nature" with
remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised
the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial
fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of
these photographers out of their provincial contexts and
repositions it within a new comparative frame.
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.
The moment of contact between two peoples, two alien societies,
marks the opening of an epoch and the joining of histories. What if
it had happened differently? The stories that indigenous peoples
and Europeans tell about their first encounters with one another
are enormously valuable historical records, but their relevance
extends beyond the past. Settler populations and indigenous peoples
the world over are engaged in negotiations over legitimacy, power,
and rights. These struggles cannot be dissociated from written and
oral accounts of "contact" moments, which not only shape our
collective sense of history but also guide our understanding of
current events. For all their importance, contact stories have not
been systematically or critically evaluated as a genre. Myth and
Memory explores the narratives of indigenous and newcomer
populations from New Zealand and across North America, from the
Lost Colony of Roanoke on the Atlantic seaboard of the United
States to the Pacific Northwest and as far as Sitka, Alaska. It
illustrates how indigenous and explorer accounts of the same
meetings reflect fundamentally different systems of thought, and
focuses on the cultural misunderstandings embedded in these
stories. The contributors discuss the contemporary relevance,
production, and performance of Aboriginal and European contact
narratives, and introduce new tools for interpreting the genre.
They argue that we are still in the contact zone, striving to
understand the meaning of contact and the relationship between
indigenous and settler populations.
For 100 years, Australians have sought their reflection in the
Great War. This book tells the story of what we saw. Raise a glass
for an Anzac. Run for an Anzac. Camp under the stars for an Anzac.
Is there anything Australians won't do to keep the Anzac legend at
the centre of our national story? Standing firm on the other side
of the enthusiasts is a chorus of critics claiming that the
appetite for Anzac is militarising our history and indoctrinating
our children. So how are we to make sense of this struggle over how
we remember the Great War? Anzac, the Unauthorised Biography cuts
through the clamour and traces how, since 1915, Australia's memory
of the Great War has declined and surged, reflecting the varied and
complex history of the Australian nation itself. Most importantly,
it asks why so many Australians persist with the fiction that the
nation was born on 25 April 1915.
Only one American state was formally a sovereign monarchy. In this
compelling narrative, the award-winning journalist Julia Flynn
Siler chronicles how this Pacific kingdom, creation of a proud
Polynesian people, was encountered, annexed, and absorbed. --Kevin
Starr, historian, University of Southern California Around 200
A.D., intrepid Polynesians paddled thousands of miles across the
Pacific and arrived at an undisturbed archipelago. For centuries,
their descendants lived with almost no contact from the Western
world but in 1778 their profound isolation was shattered with the
arrival of Captain Cook. Deftly weaving together a memorable cast
of characters, Lost Kingdom brings to life the ensuing clash
between the vulnerable Polynesian people and the relentlessly
expanding capitalist powers. Portraits of royalty, rogues, sugar
barons, and missionaries combine into a sweeping tale of the
Hawaiian kingdom's rise and fall. At the center of the story is
Lili'uokalani, the last queen of Hawaii. Born in 1838, she lived
through the nearly complete economic transformation of the islands.
Lucrative sugar plantations owned almost exclusively by white
planters, dubbed the Sugar Kings, gradually subsumed the majority
of the land. Hawaii became a prize in the contest between America,
Britain, and France, each of whom were seeking to expand their
military and commercial influence in the Pacific. Lost Kingdom is
the tragic story of Lili'uokalani's family and their fortunes. The
monarchy had become a figurehead, victim to manipulation from the
wealthy sugar-plantation owners. Upon ascending to the throne,
Lili'uokalani was determined to enact a constitution reinstating
the monarchy's power but she was outmaneuvered and, in January
1893, U.S. Marines from the USS Boston marched through the streets
of Honolulu to the palace. The annexation of Hawaii had begun,
ushering in a new century of American imperialism.
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