|
|
Books > Humanities > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
The first Europeans to settle on the Aboriginal land that would
become known as Australia arrived in 1788. From the first these
colonists were accused of ineptitude when it came to feeding
themselves: as legend has it they nearly starved to death because
they were hopeless agriculturists and ignored indigenous foods. As
the colony developed Australians developed a reputation as dreadful
cooks and uncouth eaters who gorged themselves on meat and
disdained vegetables. By the end of the nineteenth century the
Australian diet was routinely described as one of poorly cooked
mutton, damper, cabbage, potatoes and leaden puddings all washed
down with an ocean of saccharine sweet tea: These stereotypes have
been allowed to stand as representing Australia's colonial food
history. Contemporary Australians have embraced 'exotic' European
and Asian cuisines and blended elements of these to begin to shape
a distinctive "Australian" style of cookery but they have tended to
ignore, or ridicule, what they believe to be the terrible English
cuisine of their colonial ancestors largely because of these
prevailing negative stereotypes. The Colonial Kitchen: Australia
1788- 1901 challenges the notion that colonial Australians were all
diabolical cooks and ill-mannered eaters through a rich and nuanced
exploration of their kitchens, gardens and dining rooms; who was
writing about food and what their purpose might have been; and the
social and cultural factors at play on shaping what, how and when
they at ate and how this was represented.
Covering the life of Josephus Henry Barsden from his birth in 1799
through his childhood to 16 years of age, the Barsden memoirs
describe events from a Sussex smugglers' inn, a convict ship to the
colony of New South Wales, sealing and whaling expeditions to Van
Diemen's Land, and Barsden's participation in a Tahitian civil war.
The author assesses the value of memoirs, and of these memoirs in
particular to students of history in respect to the transnational
paradigm. He tests the historicity and veracity of their contents,
and provides an engaging exegesis and graphical supplement of its
contents. Of central importance is Barsden's account of the Battle
of Fe'i Pi, which was in many respects the Pacific's equivalent to
the contemporaneous Battle of Waterloo, such was its lasting impact
on Pacific geopolitics. This was no ordinary childhood, and poses
many questions about a transnational adolescent's impact on major
events. A fascinating read for scholars and students of Australian,
Pacific, and British Colonial History, written with academic rigour
but accessible to non-specialists.
As the concluding volume in the series, this book is structurally and qualitatively different from those preceding. Eight leading social scientists have written major essays on key elements of Australian institutional life. Each chapter contributes significantly by providing an overview of regional and international scholarly interest.
Music and World-Building in the Colonial City investigates how
nineteenth-century migrants to Australia used music as a resource
for world-building, focusing on coalmining regions of New South
Wales. It explores how music-making helped British migrants to
create communities in unfamiliar country, often with little to no
infrastructure. Its key themes are as follows: people's
relationships to music within specific contexts; how music-making
intersects with class, gender and ethnic background; identity
through music. Situated within a wider discourse on music and
identity, music and well-being and music and emotions, this is an
authoritative study of historical communities and their
relationship with music. It will be of particular interest to
scholars and researchers working in the fields of sociomusicology,
colonial studies and cultural studies.
Roads and road tourism loom large in the Australian imagination as
distance and mobility have shaped the nation's history and culture,
but roads are more than simply transport routes; they embody
multiple layers of history, mythology and symbolism. Drawing on
Australian travel writing, diaries and manuscripts, tourism
literature, fiction, poetry and feature films, this book explores
how Australians have experienced and imagined roads and road
touring beyond urban settings: from Aboriginal 'songlines' to
modern-day road trips. It also tells the stories of iconic roads,
including the Birdsville Track, Stuart Highway and Great Ocean
Road, and suggests alternative approaches to heritage and tourism
interpretation of these important routes. The ongoing impact of the
colonial past on Indigenous peoples and contemporary Australian
society and culture - including representations of the road and
road travel - is explored throughout the book. The volume offers a
new way of thinking about roads and road tourism as important
strands in a nation's cultural fabric.
Commemoration of war is done through sport on Anzac Day to remember
Australia's war dead. War, Sport and the Anzac Tradition traces the
creation of this sporting tradition at Gallipoli in 1915, and how
it has evolved from late Victorian and Edwardian ideas of
masculinity extolling prowess on the sports field as fostering
prowess on the battlefield.
The strategic, political, and moral threats posed by the rise of
fascist regimes in Germany and Italy were so severe that all the
democratic governments faced a myriad of challenges during the
1930s. Australia, as part of the British Empire, was no exception.
Christopher Waters here examines Australia's role in Britain's
policy of appeasement from the time Hitler came to power in 1933
through to the declaration of war on September 3, 1939. Focusing on
five leading figures in the Australian governments of the 1930s, it
examines their responses to the rise of Hitler and the growing
threat of fascism in Europe. Australian governments accepted the
principle that the Empire must speak with one voice on foreign
policy and Australian political leaders were therefore intimately
involved in the decisions taken by successive governments in
London. As such, this book not only describes the Australian role
in these events, but also provides new insights into the
Chamberlain government's reactions to the developments in Europe.
"Australia and Appeasement" provides an important and original
study of the making of imperial foreign policy in the inter-war era
and will be invaluable reading for researchers of Australian and
imperial history and for anyone interested in the origins of World
War II.
An interdisciplinary approach, integrating a rich body of
scholarship and drawing upon a range of resources including maps,
novels, poetry, art, diaries and reports, giving the book a
comprehensive nature. Targets the emerging Australian Studies
market, whilst also feeding into Indigenous Studies. Goes beyond
general histories or specific aspects of the national story, to
introduce the history and geography along with politics, cultures,
and key socio-political shifts. A fresh engagement with Australia's
history and geography, with a focus on mid to late twentieth
century, including the impact of social movement and globalisation,
environmental issues, gender, race, sexuality and ethnicity, whilst
also engaging with broader socio-political issues.
This is an invitation to readers to ponder universal questions
about human relations with rivers and water for the precarious
times of the Anthropocene. The book asks how humans can learn
through sensory embodied encounters with local waterways that shape
the architecture of cities and make global connections with
environments everywhere. The book considers human becomings with
urban waterways to address some of the major conceptual challenges
of the Anthropocene, through stories of trauma and healing,
environmental activism, and encounters with the living beings that
inhabit waterways. Its unique contribution is to bring together
Australian Aboriginal knowledges with contemporary western, new
materialist, posthuman and Deleuzean philosophies, foregrounding
how visual, creative and artistic forms can assist us in thinking
beyond the constraints of western thought to enable other modes of
being and knowing the world for an unpredictable future. Riverlands
of the Anthropocene will be of particular interest to those
studying the Anthropocene through the lenses of environmental
humanities, environmental education, philosophy, ecofeminism and
cultural studies.
Powerful labor movements played a critical role in shaping modern
Hawaii, beginning in the 1930s, when International Longshore and
Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) representatives were dispatched to the
islands to organize plantation and dock laborers. They were stunned
by the feudal conditions they found in Hawaii, where the majority
of workers-Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino in origin-were
routinely subjected to repression and racism at the hands of white
bosses. The wartime civil liberties crackdown brought union
organizing to a halt; but as the war wound down, Hawaii workers'
frustrations boiled over, leading to an explosive success in the
forming of unions. During the 1950s, just as the ILWU began a
series of successful strikes and organizing drives, the union came
under McCarthyite attacks and persecution. In the midst of these
allegations, Hawaii's bid for statehood was being challenged by
powerful voices in Washington who claimed that admitting Hawaii to
the union would be tantamount to giving the Kremlin two votes in
the U.S. Senate, while Jim Crow advocates worried that Hawaii's
representatives would be enthusiastic supporters of pro-civil
rights legislation. Hawaii's extensive social welfare system and
the continuing power of unions to shape the state politically are a
direct result of those troubled times. Based on exhaustive archival
research in Hawaii, California, Washington, and elsewhere, Gerald
Horne's gripping story of Hawaii workers' struggle to unionize
reads like a suspense novel as it details for the first time how
radicalism and racism helped shape Hawaii in the twentieth century.
This book examines Anglo-Australian naval relations between
1945-75, a period of great change for both Australia and Great
Britain and their respective navies. It explores the cultural and
historical ties between the Royal Navy and the Royal Australian
Navy (RAN), the efficacy of communications between the services,
and the importance of personal relations to the overall
inter-service relationship. The author assesses the dilemmas faced
by Great Britain associated with that nation's declining power, and
the impact of the retreat from 'East of Suez' on the strategic
relationship between the United Kingdom and Australia. The book
also considers operational co-operation between the Royal Navy and
the RAN including conflicts such as the Korean War, the Malayan
Emergency, and confrontation with Indonesia, as well as peacetime
pursuits such as port visits and the testing of atomic weapons in
the 1950s. Co-operation in matters of personnel and training are
also dealt with in great detail, along with the co-operation
between the Royal Navy and the RAN in equipment procurement and
design and the increased ability of the RAN to look to non-British
sources for equipment procurement. The book considers the impact of
stronger Australian-American ties on the RAN and appraises the role
it played in the conflict in Vietnam.
This book explains how and why, Australian governments shifted from
their historical relationship with Britain to the beginning of a
primary reliance on the United States between 1942 and 1957. It
shows that, while the Curtin and Chifley ALP governments sought to
maintain and strengthen Australia's links with Britain, the Menzies
administration took decisive steps towards this realignment. There
is broad acceptance that the end of British Australia only occurred
in the 1960s and that the initiative for change came from Britain
rather than Australia. This book rejects this consensus, which
fundamentally rests on the idea of Australia remaining part of a
British World until the UK attempts to join the European Community
in the 1960s. Instead, it demonstrates that critical steps ending
British Australia occurred in the 1950s and were initiated by
Australia. These Australian actions were especially pronounced in
the economic sphere, which has been largely overlooked in the
current consensus. Australia's understanding of its national
self-interest outweighed its sense of Britishness.
This book takes the Dust Bowl story beyond Depression America to
describe the 'dust bowl' concept as a transnational phenomenon,
where during World War Two, US and Australian national mythologies
converged. Dust Bowl begins with Depression America, the New Deal
and the US Dust Bowl where massive dust storms darkened the skies
of the Great Plains and triggered a major national and
international media event and generated imagery describing a failed
yeoman dream, Dust Bowl refugees, and the coming of a new American
Desert. Dust Bowl traces the evolution of this imagery to
Australia, World War Two and New Deal-inspired stories of
conservation-mindedness, soil erosion and enemies, sheep-farmers
and traitors, creeping deserts and human extinction, super-human
housewives and natural disaster and finally, grand visions of a
nation-building post-war scheme for Australia's iconic Snowy
River-that vision became the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, family history is the
place where two great oceans of research are meeting: family
historians outside the academy, with traditionally trained, often
university-employed historians. This collection is both a testament
to dialogue and an analysis of the dynamics of recent family
history that derives from the confluence of professional historians
with family historians, their common causes and conversations. It
brings together leading and emerging Australian and New Zealand
scholars to consider the relationship between family history and
the discipline of history, and the potential of family history to
extend the scope of historical inquiry, even to revitalise the
discipline. In Anglo-Western culture, the roots of the discipline's
professionalisation lay in efforts to reconstruct history as
objective knowledge, to extend its subject matter and to enlarge
the scale of historical enquiry. Family history, almost by
definition, is often inescapably personal and localised. How, then,
have historians responded to this resurgence of interest in the
personal and the local, and how has it influenced the thought and
practice of historical enquiry?
This book challenges traditional perceptions of Australian Aboriginal prehistory: that environment is the major determinant of hunter-gatherers; that Aborigines were egalitarian and culturally homogeneous; that they experienced few economic and demographic changes. Lourandos argues that their social and economic processes were complex and that the prehistory period was dynamic. Lourandos considers colonization, Tasmanian Aborigines, the role of fire, the intensification debate, plant exploitation and other prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies.
The term Polynesia refers to a cultural and geographical area in
the Pacific Ocean, bound by what is commonly referred to as the
Polynesian Triangle, which consists of Hawai'i in the north, New
Zealand in the southwest, and Easter Island in the southeast.
Thousands of islands are scattered throughout this area, most of
which are currently included in one of the modern island states of
American Samoa, Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Hawai'i, New
Zealand, Samoa, Tonga, Tokelau, Tuvalu, and Wallis and Futuna. The
third edition of the Historical Dictionary of Polynesia greatly
expands on the previous editions through a chronology, an
introductory essay, an expansive bibliography, and over 400
cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events,
places, organizations, and other aspects of Polynesian history from
the earliest times to the present. Appendixes of the major islands
and atolls within Polynesia, the rulers and administrators of the
13 major island states, and basic demographic information of those
states are also included.
Although considered by MacArthur as his number one fighting
general, Eichelberger is one of the least known of the World War II
commanders. Professor Chwialkowski examines General Eichelberger's
background, rise through the ranks, and wartime experiences. In the
end, he concludes that Eichelberger failed to achieve a widely
perceived special competence among his peers, that he had the bad
luck to lead in secondary theaters of operations in both world
wars, and, most importantly, that his personality undermined his
standing among superiors and subordinates alike. As the only
in-depth biography of Eichelberger, the volume provides new
material on the campaigns at Buna, Biak, and the Philippines, as
well as fresh insights on MacArthur's handling of the Pacific
theater of operations. As such, the volume will be of considerable
value to students of World War II and American twentieth-century
military history.
Traditionally, the "history" of Micronesia has been dominated by
outside European interpretations and standards. More recently, both
European and indigenous historians have begun to examine historical
interpretations from the perspectives, values, and actions of
Micronesians themselves, thereby rendering contextually richer and
more realistic interpretations of the past. A core title for
individuals interested in Pacific history and historiography, this
bibliography provides a critical summary and analysis of the
scholarship on Micronesian history, as it has been constructed
through both standardized European approaches and the more recent
integration of indigenous viewpoints. Beginning with introductions
which review the issues of Micronesian historiography and Pacific
historiography in general, this book challenges current thinking
and perceptions of bibliography as it relates to the Pacific. As
suggested by the plural "histories" in the title, the approaches to
Pacific history are multifaceted. Focusing on scholarly works that
are intentionally historical in nature, the authors provide readers
with an opportunity to explore the specifics of Micronesian
histories as they have evolved through four separate European
periods of governance.
'The thing that haunts me most to this day is that blokes were
dying and I could do bugger all about it - do you look after the
bloke who you know is going to die or the bloke who's got a
chance?' - Australian ex-POW doctor, 1999 During World War II, 22
000 Australian military personnel became prisoners of war under the
Japanese military. Over three and a half years, 8000 died in
captivity, in desperate conditions of forced labour, disease and
starvation. Many of those who returned home after the war
attributed their survival to the 106 Australian medical officers
imprisoned alongside them. These doctors varied in age, background
and experience, but they were united in their unfailing dedication
to keeping as many of the men alive as possible. This is the story
of those 106 doctors - their compassion, bravery and ingenuity -
and their efforts in bringing back the 14 000 survivors. 'You are
unfortunate in being prisoners of a country whose living standards
are much lower than yours. You will often consider yourselves
mistreated, while we think of you as being treated well.' -
Japanese officer to Australian POWs, 1943
Ma'i Lepera attempts to recover Hawaiian voices at a significant
moment in Hawai'i's history. It takes an unprecedented look at the
Hansen's disease outbreak (1865-1900) almost exclusively from the
perspective of "patients," ninety percent of whom were Kanaka Maoli
(Native Hawaiian). Using traditional and non-traditional sources,
published and unpublished, it tells the story of a disease, a
society's reaction to it, and the consequences of the experience
for Hawai'i and its people. Over a span of thirty-four years more
than five thousand people were sent to a leprosy settlement on the
remote peninsula in north Moloka'i traditionally known as
Makanalua. Their story has seldom been told despite the hundreds of
letters they wrote to families, friends, and the Board of Health,
as well as to Hawaiian-language newspapers, detailing their
concerns at the settlement as they struggled to retain their
humanity in the face of ma'i lepera. Many remained politically
active and, at times, defiant, resisting authority and challenging
policies. As much as they suffered, the Kanaka Maoli of Makanalua
established new bonds and cared for one another in ways that have
been largely overlooked in popular histories describing leprosy in
Hawai'i. Although Ma'i Lepera is primarily a social history of
disease and medicine, it offers compelling evidence of how leprosy
and its treatment altered Hawaiian perceptions and identities. It
changed how Kanaka Maoli viewed themselves: By the end of the
nineteenth century, the "diseased" had become a cultural "other" to
the healthy Hawaiian. Moreover, it reinforced colonial ideology and
furthered the use of both biomedical practices and disease as tools
of colonisation. Ma'i Lepera will be of significant interest to
students and scholars of Hawai'i and medical history and historical
and medical anthropology. Given its accessible style, this book
will also appeal to general readers who wish to know more about the
Kanaka Maoli who contracted leprosy-their connectedness to each
another, their families, their islands, and their nation-and how
leprosy came to affect those connections and their lives.
In this fascinating study of the Dhan-Gadi Aboriginal people of New
South Wales, Australia, the author combines the skills of a social
historian with the detailed observation of a social anthropologist.
In so doing he brings alive the contours of crude racism, as well
as the more subtle expressions of paternalism, bureaucratic social
control and educational and economic marginalization.
This book examines Australian colonial and foreign aid policy
towards Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia in the age of
international development (1945-1975). During this period, the
academic and political understandings of development consolidated
and informed Australian attempts to provide economic assistance to
the poorer regions to its north. Development was central to the
Australian colonial administration of PNG, as well as its Colombo
Plan aid in Asia. In addition to examining Australia's perception
of international development, this book also demonstrates how these
debates and policies informed Australia's understanding of its own
development. This manifested itself most clearly in Australia's
behavior at the 1964 United Nations Conference on Trade and
Development (UNCTAD). The book concludes with a discussion of
development and Australian foreign aid in the decade leading up to
Papua New Guinea's independence, achieved in 1975.
|
|