|
|
Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
This historical study of the development of social welfare systems
in divergent countries draws on a variety of essays to examine the
work of each country in turn, followed by a comparison of all three
and an examination of social experiments in regions of recent
settlement.
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.
In 1826, partly as a means of curbing disorder and brutality in
bush living, Governor Darling established the area known as the
'limits of location' within which colonists could see land grants,
but beyond which they could not. The line on the map, however,
presented no real restraint. The contributors to this book reveal
different approaches to creating a colony. Using the rich
collections of the Mitchell Library, the authors go beyond the
traditional sources of history, highlighting the personal stories
revealed through family letters, and creative interaction with the
landscape through poetry and drawings. The roles of Aborigines,
missionaries, women and migrant workers are explored, and all
stories return to the way the newcomers created a sense of place as
they settled in this new world. This publication is supported by
the NSW Chapter of the Independent Scholars Association of
Australia.
During World War II Australia was under threat of invasion. Could
Australia be invaded by the Japanese? Even with the heavy
censorship by the government many certainly thought so and the
nation was gripped by fear that the danger would soon be on their
doorstep. The Japanese appeared to be looming closer; there were
submarines in Sydney Harbour, Japanese planes flying overhead and
harassment on our coastline. Australians were fearful for their
safety. Anxious parents made decisions to protect their children,
with or without government sanction. Small children were sent away,
often unaccompanied, by concerned parents to friends, relatives, or
even strangers living in `safer' parts of the country. Some had
little comprehension of what was happening and thought they were
going on holiday to the country. The history of these child
evacuees in Australia remains largely hidden and their experiences
untold. Author Ann Howard, who was evacuated with her mother from
the UK during World War II, has set the records straight. A
combination of extensive research and the first-hand stories of the
evacuees captures the mood of the time and the social and political
environment that they lived in. Unlike the sometimes sad and
horrible experiences of their UK counterparts, for many Australian
child evacuees there enforced `holiday' was a surprisingly happy
time. A Carefree War tells the story of the largest upheaval in
Australia since white settlement using oral memoirs and box camera
photos, all placed within the frameworks of history. The voices of
over one hundred contributors join together to paint a vivid
picture of wartime Australia; the fear, the chaos and civilians
floundering under the impact of a war that would change their way
of life forever.
On October 23, 1956, a popular uprising against Soviet rule
swept through Hungary like a force of nature, only to be
mercilessly crushed by Soviet tanks twelve days later. Only now,
fifty years after those harrowing events, can the full story be
told. This book is a powerful eyewitness account and a gripping
history of the uprising in Hungary that heralded the future
liberation of Eastern Europe.
Paul Lendvai was a young journalist covering politics in Hungary
when the uprising broke out. He knew the government officials and
revolutionaries involved. He was on the front lines of the student
protests and the bloody street fights and he saw the revolutionary
government smashed by the Red Army. In this riveting, deeply
personal, and often irreverent book, Lendvai weaves his own
experiences with in-depth reportage to unravel the complex chain of
events leading up to and including the uprising, its brutal
suppression, and its far-reaching political repercussions in
Hungary and neighboring Eastern Bloc countries. He draws upon
exclusive interviews with Russian and former KGB officials,
survivors of the Soviet backlash, and relatives of those executed.
He reveals new evidence from closed tribunals and documents kept
secret in Soviet and Hungarian archives. Lendvai's breathtaking
narrative shows how the uprising, while tragic, delivered a
stunning blow to Communism that helped to ultimately bring about
its demise.
"One Day That Shook the Communist World" is the best account of
these unprecedented events.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Was there once a continent in the Pacific called Lemuria or
Pacifica by ecologists, and Mu or Pan by the mystics? There is now
ample mythological, geological and archaeological evidence to
'prove' that an advanced and ancient civilisation once lived in the
central Pacific. Childress combs the Indian Ocean, Australia and
the Pacific in search of the astonishing truth about mankind's
past. Contains photos of the underwater city on Pompeii, explains
how statues were levitated around Easter Island in a clockwise
vortex movement; disappearing islands; Egyptians in Australia; and
more.
Mata Austronesia is a collection of illustrated stories told by
Austronesians past and present-an (ethno)graphic novel. Mata, the
word for "eye" in numerous Austronesian languages, represents the
common origin of the many distinctive Austronesian peoples spread
throughout their vast oceanic realm. The tales in this book immerse
us in the beauty of this shared heritage, ancestral memory, and
cultural legacy. Millennia before the first Europeans ventured into
the Pacific, Austronesian explorers sailing aboard their outrigger
and double-hulled voyaging canoes had already found, settled, and
succeeded in thriving on thousands of islands of the Pacific and
Indian Oceans. From Madagascar to Rapa Nui, Austronesia is a
diverse, complex, and extensive ethnolinguistic region stretching
across more than half of the Earth's saltwater expanse. This work
showcases the abundance of unique identities, histories,
ethnicities, cultures, languages, and storytelling traditions among
people of Austronesian descent. Modern-day storytellers weave the
past and present into a tapestry of tales passed down orally
through generations and contextualize the staggering immensity of
the cosmos, imparting meaning to visible and invisible realms.
Formed over thousands of years, the wisdom of Indigenous
Austronesians teaches us vital and contemporarily applicable
lessons on living in harmony with each other and our planet. Mata
Austronesia opens fresh avenues of connection and conversation
between Austronesian peoples who live on their native islands and
in diaspora, who are both unified and long-separated by oceans of
time, space, and Western colonial and cartographic impositions. It
includes stories from Ka Pae 'Aina o Hawai'i, Rapa Nui, Tahiti,
Taha'a, Kanaky (New Caledonia), Guahan (Guam), Aotearoa (New
Zealand), Viti (Fiji), Bali, Sulawesi (Celebes), Bohol (Visayas),
Tutuila (American Samoa), Kiritimati (Christmas Island), Banaba
(Ocean Island), and Madagasikara (Madagascar). With each
hand-painted watercolor brushstroke, Tuki Drake invites friends and
family of all heritages to fall in love with our shared ocean
world.
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.
Despite intense concern among academics and advocates, there is a
deeply felt absence of scholarship on the way media reporting
exacerbates rather than helps to resolve policy problems. This book
offers rich insights into the news media's role in the development
of policy in Australia, and explores the complex, dynamic and
interactive relationship between news media and Australian
Indigenous affairs. Spanning a twenty-year period from 1988 to
2008, Kerry McCallum and Lisa Waller critically examine how
Indigenous health, bilingual education and controversial
legislation were portrayed through public media. The Dynamics of
News and Indigenous Policy in Australia provides evidence of
Indigenous people being excluded from policy and media discussion,
as well as using the media to their advantage. To that end, the
book poses the question: just how far was the media manipulating
the national conversation? And how far was it, in turn, being
manipulated by those in power? A decade after the Australian
government introduced the controversial 2007 Northern Territory
Emergency Response Act, McCallum and Waller offer a ground-breaking
look at the media's role in Indigenous issues and asks: to what
extent did journalism exacerbate policy issues, and how far were
their effects felt in Indigenous communities?
That Indonesia's ongoing occupation of West Papua continues to be
largely ignored by world governments is one of the great moral and
political failures of our time. West Papuans have struggled for
more than fifty years to find a way through the long night of
Indonesian colonization. However, united in their pursuit of
merdeka (freedom) in its many forms, what holds West Papuans
together is greater than what divides them. Today, the Morning Star
glimmers on the horizon, the supreme symbol of merdeka and a
cherished sign of hope for the imminent arrival of peace and
justice to West Papua. Morning Star Rising: The Politics of
Decolonization in West Papua is an ethnographically framed account
of the long, bitter fight for freedom that challenges the dominant
international narrative that West Papuans' quest for political
independence is fractured and futile. Camellia Webb-Gannon's
extensive interviews with the decolonization movement's original
architects and its more recent champions shed light on complex
diasporic and intergenerational politics as well as social and
cultural resurgence. In foregrounding West Papuans' perspectives,
the author shows that it is the body politic's unflagging
determination and hope, rather than military might or influential
allies, that form the movement's most unifying and powerful force
for independence. This book examines the many intertwining strands
of decolonization in Melanesia. Differences in cultural performance
and political diversity throughout the region are generating new,
fruitful trajectories. Simultaneously, Black and Indigenous
solidarity and a shared Melanesian identity have forged a
transnational grassroots power-base from which the movement is
gaining momentum. Relevant beyond its West Papua focus, this book
is essential reading for those interested in Pacific studies,
Native and Indigenous studies, development studies, activism, and
decolonization.
|
|