Koburger argues that the many battles that constituted the campaign for the Solomons were the key to victory in the Pacific for the U.S. Navy--not the battle of the Coral Sea or the Battle of Midway. Segments of the campaign--Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and Bougainville--have been written about extensively. But never before has the entire campaign been put together so lucidly and interpreted so well. The descriptions of the naval battles make for compelling reading. Even in World War II, Koburger argues, the important naval struggles took place in the narrow seas.

An immigrant's tale of an untamed country
Alexander Gibson, my father, was a young Englishman who with his brother settled in Australia in the 1920s. The brothers each married one of the Solomon sisters just prior to the Great Depression. The Taciturn Man begins just after the Second World War when Alexander took up a rough bush sheep-grazing block in isolation among the tall trees of New England (New South Wales).
I was born in 1937, and so I was just three years old when my father went to war, and age eight when he returned. Fortunately, by then I was old enough to absorb much of the material for this collection which I hope you will now enjoy.
Praise for "The Taciturn Man"
"A delightful memoir with all the emotions of life itself-seriousness, humor, joy and sadness and more. The author's observations of people and lively writing style make it a great bedside book to be savored, rather than hurried through."
--Deborah K. Frontiera, author of Fighting CPS: Guilty Until Proven Innocent of Child Protective Services Charges
"The Taciturn Man is a trip through Australia's countryside that feels like a nostalgic summer breeze as Gibson's personal narrative reveals its beauty, culture, and history through his own experiences and unique voice."
--Susan Violante, author of "Innocent War: Behind an Immigrant's Past"
About the Author
Geoffrey Gibson grew up in rural Australia in the 1940s, earned his keep as a jackeroo (farmhand), had a brief stint in the Army, followed by thirty years as a suburban real estate agent in Sydney. He has dabbled in politics, and in retirement now spends his time writing, surfing and mucking about with friends on the state's South coast.
From the World Voices Series www.ModernHistoryPress.com
Available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook Editions
BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography: Personal Memoirs
LCO005000 Literary Collections: Australian & Oceanian
HIS004510 History: Australia & New Zealand - Australia

Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon. This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, the authors identify the moments of radicalization and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the Indigenous populations, while carefully distinguishing between local massacres, cultural genocide, and genocide itself. These essays reflect a growing concern with the nature of settler society in Australia and in particular with the fate of the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal families by state agencies. Long considered a relatively peaceful settlement, Australian society contained many of the pathologies that led to the exterminatory and eugenic policies of twentieth century Europe.

The British cultural history of the Gallipoli campaign has been overlooked until now - this is a significant book as it offers the first real opportunity for this important campaign to be included in undergraduate courses on WWI. The commemoration of war is a particularly vibrant area of study - Anzac Day, commemorating the landings that began the Gallipoli campaign, is central to Australian national consciousness and this book examines why. A crucial argument in the cultural history of the First World War was sparked by Paul Fussell's contention that the war signified a profound cultural rupture; in widening the debate from the Western Front, this book supports the counter argument that romantic modes of expression retained resonance and utility. In Australia, the renewal of the story of Gallipoli by historians and film-makers (notably Peter Weir's 1981 film starring Mel Gibson) has profoundly altered the national sense of identity and society's perceptions of the armed forces; the authors explains how the writing of this particular event has developed and achieved this central position. An essential volume for those interested in British military and Australian history, postcolonialism and nation building, from academics and students through to the general reader. -- .

An exploration of the little-known yet historically important emigration of British army officers to the Australian colonies in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The book looks at the significant impact they made at a time of great colonial expansion, particularly in new south Wales with its transition from a convict colony to a free society.

Preserving much rare and disintegrating information, this comprehensive chronology and fact book provides day-to-day records covering a third of the Pacific war for the first time. Recounts events in the North Pacific between August 1943 and September 1945, revealing the activities of the Allies, including the Soviet Union and the Japanese. It identifies the location and activities of the various units, their landings, and battles. Short biographies make participants "come alive." Appendices provide a glossary, and give key information about prisoners of war, American internees, Army Air Forces, U.S. Navy, Japanese North Pacific Forces forces, Soviet Forces, U.S. units and bases, and American and Japanese personnel. This account shows how events in the North Pacific had an impact in the South and Central theater of the war. The record shows how Admiral Chester Nimitz's offensive actions before major operations, his bombings and bombardments and false radio broadcasts helped bring about later victories and how his destruction of the Japanese fishing fleet set out to shorten the war. A bibliography, index, maps, charts, and photographs further enrich this little-known history for all interested in understanding this now forgotten conflict.

Fiji by the year 1900 after a generation as a British Crown Colony was a multi-racial nation with a combined indentured and free Indian component, which was about to expand on a large scale, and contest political predominance with indigenous Fijians and a small but dominant European minority among other ethnic groups. Drawn from primary sources, and packed with original quotations and statistics, "Fiji and the Franchise" illuminates the history of the struggle that followed. This book introduces modern readers to life in the Fiji islands from 1900 to 1937, when the ultimate question for its inhabitants was how political representation should be achieved, and on what basis. "Fiji and the Franchise" was Dr. Ali's eminently readable and well-grounded Australian National University doctoral thesis. It was presented in 1973 but still remained unpublished when he suddenly became ill on a visit to India and, as bravely as he had always lived, passed away in 2005. Now, Dr. Ali's work lives on as a tribute to and record of this amazing island nation.

In the early postwar era, Britain enjoyed a very close relationship with Australia and New Zealand, through their common membership of the Sterling Area and the Commonwealth Preference Area. This book examines the breakdown of this relationship in the 1950s and 60s, and the various economic factors involved. Special emphasis is given to the implications for Australia and New Zealand of Britain's proposal for a European free trade area, and of Harold Macmillan's unsuccessful bid to join the EEC in 1961-3.

"Stirring Australian Speeches" is the definitive collection of speeches and public addresses from Australian public life. Politicians, scientists, judges, explorers, artists, the famous and the infamous, comment on the great issues and figures of their day. The speakers range from Governor Arthur Phillip to Sir William Deane, Louisa Lawson to Germaine Greer, Peter Lalor to Pauline Hanson. The subjects stretch from white settlement to the Mabo decision, Eureka to Gallipoli, the banning of the Communist Party to the 2002 bombing in Bali, the art of Sheffield Shield cricket in the nineteenth century to the state of arts funding in recent times.

First published in 2006. A traveller's tale set in the islands of Samoa with the legendary traveller Robert Louis Stevenson as guide, this book is valuable not only for its enjoyment as a tale of adventure, but also for its record of Stevenson himself - a literacy figure more commonly seen as author and not subject.

Kragur village lies on the rugged north shore of Kairiru, a steep volcanic island just off the north coast of Papua New Guinea. In 1998 the village looked much as it had some twenty-two years earlier when author Michael French Smith first visited. But he soon found that changing circumstances were shaking things up. Village on the Edge weaves together the story of Kragur villagers' struggle to find their own path toward the future with the story of Papua New Guinea's travails in the post-independence era. Smith writes of his own experiences as well, living and working in Papua New Guinea and trying to understand the complexities of an unfamiliar way of life. To tell all these stories, he delves into ghosts, magic, myths, ancestors, bookkeeping, tourism, the World Bank, the Holy Spirits, and the meaning of progress and development. Village on the Edge draws on the insights of cultural anthropology but is written for anyone interested in Papua New Guinea.

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonised by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of `Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonised by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonised. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonised geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonised tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

A new interpretation of imperialism and environmental change, and the anxieties imperialism generated through environmental transformation and interaction with unknown landscapes. Tying together South Asia and Australasia, this book demonstrates how environmental anxieties led to increasing state resource management, conservation, and urban reform.

Becoming a mother charts the diverse and complex history of Australian mothering for the first time, exposing the ways it has been both connected to and distinct from parallel developments in other industrialised societies. In many respects, the historical context in which Australian women come to motherhood has changed dramatically since 1945. And yet examination of the memories of multiple maternal generations reveals surprising continuities in the emotions and experiences of first-time motherhood. Drawing upon interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, history, psychology and sociology, Carla Pascoe Leahy unpacks this multifaceted rite of passage through more than 60 oral history interviews, demonstrating how maternal memories continue to influence motherhood today. Despite radical shifts in understandings of gender, care and subjectivity, becoming a mother remains one of the most personally and culturally significant moments in a woman's life. -- .

Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45 explores the queer dynamics of war across Australia and forward bases in the south seas. It examines relationships involving Allied servicemen, civilians and between the legal and medical fraternities that sought to regulate and contain expressions of homosex in and out of the forces.

The Institute of Pacific Relations was a pioneering intellectual-political organization that shaped public knowledge and both elite and popular discourse throughout the Asia-Pacific region and beyond during the inter-war years. Inspired by Wilsonian internationalism after the 1919 formation of the League of Nations, it grew to become an international and national non-governmental think-tank providing expertise on Asia and the Pacific. This book investigates post-League Wilsonian internationalism with respect to two critical issues: the nation state and the conception of the Asia-Pacific region; both issues broach a range of contentious subjects including colonialism, orientalism, racism and war. Akami's study of the Institute of Pacific Relations offers insight into the formation of the dominant ideologies and institutions of regional and international politics in the Pacific during the inter-war years, and provides an interesting perspective on Japan's relations with countries including the USA and Australia.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203165535