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Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
The Origins of Australia's Capital Cities is a comprehensive
survey, well illustrated with maps and plans, which aims to answer
two questions. First, why Australia's eight capital cities are
situated where they are, and second, how they were established.
Pairs of chapters on each of the State capitals - Sydney, Hobart,
Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Brisbane - are accompanied by
studies of Canberra as the federal capital and Darwin as a
territorial capital. A capital is the administrative centre of a
political entity, and in Australia, unlike many overseas countries,
a uniquely high proportion of the population resides in the
capitals. Companion chapters examine the causes of initial European
settlement in each area, and reasons for the actual establishment
of each capital city. Attention is given to such topics as planning
and layout, the basis of growth, potential rivals, the social
nature of the cities and the nature of their spread. While there
have been no other volume covering all the capitals to seek answers
to the same basic questions. This will therefore be an invaluable
source book, and provide a stimulus to further enquiry in the
social history of Australia. An introduction by the editor pulls
together the general strands which link the chapters, and
highlights the ways in which the Australian experience contrasts
with the urban experience overseas.
An examination of France's presence in the South Pacific after the
takeover of Tahiti. It places the South Pacific in the context of
overall French expansion and current theories of colonialism and
imperialism and evaluates the French impact on Oceania.
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.
Fiji is a country whose recent political instability can be
directly traced to its distinctive colonial and post-colonial
experience. For one particular region of Fiji the authors examine
the environmental, social and economic aspects of this experience,
at scales ranging from national and regional to island, village and
household. Discussions in Third World geography, regional economics
and development planning have been full of rhetoric about
'underdevelopment', 'centre-periphery relations' and 'dependency',
but seldom are the actual processes which give rise to these
phenomena examined in detail. In this book the authors explore in
depth the interrelations between the island landscape, the cultural
geography of the islanders and the intrusive values and
opportunities of the market economy. Some important lessons are to
be learnt from the gap between what might be predicted from
abstract theories of development and what is actually happening in
the real world of politicians, planners, farmers and fishermen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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