The 3,000-year-old Ambum Stone, from Papua New Guinea, is the focus of several archaeological stories. The stone itself is an interesting artifact, an important piece of art history that tells us something about the ancient Papuans. The stone is also at the center of controversies over the provenance and ownership of ancient artifacts, as it was excavated on the island of New Guinea, transferred out of the country, and sold on the antiquities market. In telling the story of the Ambum Stone, Brian Egloff raises questions about what can be learned from ancient works of art, about cultural property and the ownership of the past, about the complex and at times shadowy world of art dealers and collectors, and about the role ancient artifacts can play in forming the identities of modern peoples.

Why did half the people on New Hanover, a small island north of New Guinea, vote for Lyndon Baines Johnson to be their ruler in 1964? Dorothy K. Billings believes that this sort of action_seen in New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia_is part of the 'cargo cult' phenomenon, or micronationalist movements which are principally regarded as responses to European colonialism. Based on thirty-five years of fieldwork and observation, Cargo Cult as Theater demonstrates how the 'Johnson Cult, ' originally mocked and ridiculed by the outside world, should be seen as an ongoing political performance meant to consolidate local power and advance economic development. This fascinating study follows the changes in this community ritual, from the time of the white 'master' to post-colonial self-determination, and reveals the history of this people's attempt to gain intellectual, moral, economic, and political control over their own lives

War on Corruption: An Indonesian Experience is a courageous, informed, and sober insider's account of the challenge for democracy and the rule of law within the fourth most populous nation.Corruption is a huge problem in Indonesia. Some reasons are easy to identify and flow on from the authoritarianism of the Soeharto New Order. Other factors are less apparent. As Todung Mulya Lubis, one of Indonesia's leading human rights lawyers and most influential legal thinkers, explains, 'Now corruptors come from the legislature, government, judiciary, and business communities, and they are not simply thieves but rent-seekers, benefiting from rapid economic development and weak law enforcement'. In his telling, the best efforts of the most unswerving and talented corruption fighters in Indonesia have been frustrated since the Soeharto regime was overthrown a generation ago. But as Todung also shows, there have recently been many successful prosecutions of corrupt officials, from the lowest levels to the very upper echelons of government and society. The creation of the Indonesian Corruption Eradication Commission, the KPK, in 2003, was an inspired move. For all its problems, arising from both internal dynamics and the often hostile social and institutional environments in which it has operated, the legal independence and dogged idealism of the KPK have made it a genuine force for renewal.

Through a literary lens, Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984-2008: Market Fictions examines the ways in which the reprise of market-based economics has impacted the forms of social exchange and cultural life in a settler-colonial context. Jennifer Lawn proposes that postcolonial literary studies needs to take more account of the way in which the new configuration of dominance-increasingly gathered under the umbrella term of neoliberalism-works in concert with, rather than against, assertions of cultural identity on the part of historically subordinated groups. The pre-eminence of new right economics over the past three decades has raised a conundrum for writers on the left: while neoliberalism has tended to undermine collective social action, it has also fostered expressions of identity in the form of "cultural capital" which minority communities can exploit for economic gain. Neoliberalism and Cultural Transition in New Zealand Literature, 1984-2008 advocates for reading practices that balance the appeals of culture against the structuring forces of social class and the commodification of identity, while not losing sight of the specific aesthetic qualities of literary fiction. Jennifer Lawn demonstrates the value of this approach in a wide-ranging account of New Zealand literature. Movements towards decolonization in a bicultural society are read within the context of a marginal post-industrial economy that was, in many ways, a test case for radical free market reforms. Through a study of politically-engaged writing across a range of genres by both Maori and non-Maori authors, the New Zealand experience shows in high relief the twinned dynamics of a decline in the ideal of social egalitarianism and the corresponding rise of the idea of culture as a transformative force in economic and civic life, tending ultimately to blur the distinction between these spheres altogether. This work includes well-recognized authors such as Alan Duff, Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Eleanor Catton and Maurice Gee, but also introduces a number of non-canonical or emergent writers whose work is discussed in detail for the first time in this volume. The result is a distinctive literary history of a turbulent period of social and economic change.

The publication of ""The Other Side of the Frontier"" in 1981 profoundly changed the way in which we understand the history of relations between indigenous Australians and European settlers. It has since become a classic of Australian history. Drawing from documentary and oral evidence, the book describes in meticulous and compelling detail the ways in which Aborigines responded to the arrival of Europeans. Henry Reynolds' argument that the Aborigines resisted fiercely was highly original when it was first published and is no less challenging today.

The Chinese Hsinhai Revolution explores and explains for the first time the important role of G. E. Morrison in great power diplomacy in China from the end of the Russo-Japanese War to the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty. The work is based on a wide range of multinational scholarly sources and in order to develop the context in which Morrison carried out his personal diplomacy and to delineate the many-sided story into which Morrison has to be placed, Woodhouse has in addition to mining the very rich Morrison collection, drawn upon British, Japanese and American personal and official materials.

A dashing young orator during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony for life. But two years later he was "back from the dead" and in New York, instantly the most famous Irishman in America. Meagher's rebirth included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War. Afterward, he tried to build a new Ireland in the wild west of Montana - a quixotic adventure that ended in the great mystery of his disappearance, which Egan resolves convincingly at last.

Baby booms have a long history. In 1870, colonial Melbourne was 'perspiring juvenile humanity' with an astonishing 42 per cent of the city's inhabitants aged 14 and under - a demographic anomaly resulting from the gold rushes of the 1850s. Within this context, Simon Sleight enters the heated debate concerning the future prospects of 'Young Australia' and the place of the colonial child within the incipient Australian nation. Looking beyond those institutional sites so often assessed by historians of childhood, he ranges across the outdoor city to chart the relationship between a discourse about youth, youthful experience and the shaping of new urban spaces. Play, street work, consumerism, courtship, gang-related activities and public parades are examined using a plethora of historical sources to reveal a hitherto hidden layer of city life. Capturing the voices of young people as well as those of their parents, Sleight alerts us to the ways in which young people shaped the emergent metropolis by appropriating space and attempting to impress upon the city their own desires. Here a dynamic youth culture flourished well before the discovery of the 'teenager' in the mid-twentieth century; here young people and the city grew up together.

The Napoleonic era was a period of major transition. During this time, the explorer Nicolas Baudin made a voyage to Australia and made an unscheduled stop in Sydney where he restructured the expedition. Starbuck examines Baudin's captainship, life on board the ship, the details of the stop in Port Jackson, and the 'new voyage' that followed.

This book considers how Samoans embraced and reshaped the English game of cricket, recasting it as a distinctively Samoan pastime, kirikiti. Starting with cricket's introduction to the islands in 1879, it uses both cricket and kirikiti to trace six decades of contest between and within the categories of 'colonisers' and 'colonised.' How and why did Samoans adapt and appropriate the imperial game? How did officials, missionaries, colonists, soldiers and those with mixed foreign and Samoan heritage understand and respond to the real and symbolic challenges kirikiti presented? And how did Samoans use both games to navigate foreign colonialism(s)? By investigating these questions, Benjamin Sacks suggests alternative frameworks for conceptualising sporting transfer and adoption, and advances understandings of how power, politics and identity were manifested through sport, in Samoa and across the globe.

History, heritage, and colonialism explores the politics of history-making and interest in preserving the material remnants of the past in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century colonial society, looking at both indigenous pasts and those of European origin. Focusing on New Zealand, but also covering the Australian and Canadian experiences, it explores how different groups and political interests have sought to harness historical narrative in support of competing visions of identity and memory. Considering this within the frames of the local and national as well as of empire, the book offers a valuable critique of the study of colonial identity-making and cultures of colonisation. This book offers important insights for societies negotiating the legacy of a colonial past in a global present, and will be of particular value to all those concerned with museum, heritage, and tourism studies, as well as imperial history. -- .

A History of New Zealand Literature traces the genealogy of New Zealand literature from its first imaginings by Europeans in the eighteenth century. Beginning with a comprehensive introduction that charts the growth of, and challenges to, a nationalist literary tradition, the essays in this History illuminate the cultural and political intricacies of New Zealand literature, surveying the multilayered verse, fiction and drama of such diverse writers as Katherine Mansfield, Allen Curnow, Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History devotes special attention to the lasting significance of colonialism, biculturalism and multiculturalism in New Zealand literature. A History of New Zealand Literature is of pivotal importance to the development of New Zealand writing and will serve as an invaluable reference for specialists and students alike.

'Of all the books about the ground war in the Pacific, (With the Old Breed) is the closest to a masterpiece.' - The New York Review of Books 'One of the most arresting documents in war literature.' - John Keegan, in The Second World War E.B. Sledge's memoir of his experience fighting in the South Pacific during World War II is powerful because of its honesty and compassion. With the Old Breed presents a stirring, personal account of the bravery of the Marines in the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa. Eugene Bondurant Sledge 'Sledgehammer' joined the Marines the year after the bombing of Pearl Harbour and from 1943 to 1946 endured the events recorded in this book. Sledge enlisted out of patriotism and youthful courage but once he landed on the beach at Peleliu, it was purely a struggle for survival. Based on the notes he kept on slips of paper tucked secretly away in his New Testament, he simply and directly recalls those long months, mincing no words and sparing no pain. The reality of battle meant unbearable heat, deafening gunfire, unimaginable brutality and, above all, constant fear. Sledge still has nightmares about 'the bloody, muddy month of May on Okinawa.' He also tellingly reveals the bonds of friendship formed that will never be severed. Sledge's account of other marines, even complete strangers, sets him apart as a memoirist of war. Read as sobering history or as high adventure, this is a moving chronicle of action and courage. About the Author E. B. Sledge was born and grew up in Mobile, Alabama. His father, a physician, taught him to hunt and to describe his surroundings. Sledge enlisted in the US Marine Corps and was sent to the Pacific Theatre. He fought at Peleliu and Okinawa where some of the fiercest battles of WWII took place. Although he survived it took him years to recover from the psychological wounds from that experience. He has since pursued his studies in all manner of subjects, earning a PhD in Zoology at the University of Florida.

This book traces the history of working people who helped established the foundation of the American empire in the Pacific from its origins after the American Revolution to its coming of age in the 1840s and 1850s. Beginning with the expeditions of the Columbia and the Lady Washington, Lampe argues that the early American Pacific can best be considered through the interaction of four major locations, connected through the networks of trade: the merchant ship, the Northwest Coast, Honolulu, and Canton (Guangzhou). In each of these locations, the labors of a diverse population of working people was harnessed in the critical labors of empire building, including the transportation of goods. The central question that the consideration of working people in the Pacific economy during this period is, Lampe argues, the role of power applied on these laborers by an international capitalist class, emerging alongside the Pacific commercial empires. Lampe also finds that this power was not uncontested and emerged in response to the activities of labor. Working people, on the ship and in the port cities, found ways to secure their piece of the profitable trade, often through illicit means.

On the 25th August 1895, Ernest Alfred Hall was born into a pioneering Australian family that lived on a 313-acre property called 'Cloverdale' near the hamlet of Beech Forest, south of the Otway Ranges, some 200 kilometres south west of Melbourne, Victoria. As a child, it seemed he would be destined for the life of a farmer in a country that was just realising its independence through Federation, yet his path was to be diverted by the cataclysmic events that befell Europe and the British Empire. So it was, that one month short of his 20th birthday, Ernest caught the train to Melbourne and enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. At only 5' 3" he was never going to be the biggest soldier in the army, but as his father said to him, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, son, but the size of the fight in the dog." Like so many, Ernest Hall embarked for the war to end all wars. Unlike so many, his letters and records survived. This is his story.

High Lean Country captures the rich history and haunting character of the New England region of northern New South Wales. The authors explore how memory - of land, of family, of patterns of life on the other side of the world - has influenced the identity of New England. They also consider how the high country itself has shaped its people and their sense of regional uniqueness. In doing so, this book sets a new direction for understanding Australia as a whole. Weaving together the histories of human settlement, economic, social and cultural development, as well as interactions with the environment, High Lean Country shows how colonial settlers strived for decades to literally create a new England. It traces the story of the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge who turned their hands to sheep husbandry and developed a squattocracy, the establishment of schools and other institutions, and the cultivation of traditional arts. It also examines the early colonial bushranging period, and a history of not always friendly relations between white settlers and the local Aboriginal population. A project of the Heritage Futures Research Centre at the University of New England, High Lean Country is a fascinating study of this distinctive Australian high country.

A Decent Provision is a narrative history of how and why Australia built a distinctive welfare regime in the period from the 1870s to 1949. At the beginning of this period, the Australian colonies were belligerently insisting they must not have a Poor Law, yet had reproduced many of the systems of charitable provision in Britain. By the start of the twentieth century, a combination of extended suffrage, basic wage regulation and the aged pension had led to a reputation as a 'social laboratory'. And yet half a century later, Australia was a 'welfare laggard' and the Labor Party's welfare state of the mid-1940s was a relatively modest and parsimonious construction. Models of welfare based on social insurance had been vigorously rejected, and the Australian system continued on a path of highly residual, targeted welfare payments. The book explains this curious and halting trajectory, showing how choices made in earlier decades constrained what could be done, and what could be imagined. Based on extensive new research from a variety of primary sources it makes a significant contribution to general historical debates, as well as to the field of comparative social policy.

The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights is the first book of its kind. Not only does it tell the history of the political struggle for Aboriginal rights in all parts of Australia; it does so almost entirely through a selection of historical documents created by the Aboriginal campaigners themselves, many of which have never been published. It presents Aboriginal perspectives of their dispossession and their long and continuing fight to overcome this. In charting the story of Aboriginal political activity from its beginnings on Flinders Island in the 1830s to the fight over native title today, this book aims to help Australians better understand both the continuities and the changes in Aboriginal politics over the last 150 years: in the leadership of the Aboriginal political struggle, the objectives of these campaigners for rights for Aborigines, their aspirations, the sources of their programmes for change, their methods of protest, and the outcomes of their protest. Through the words of Aboriginal activists, across 150 years, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights charts the relationship between political involvement and Aboriginal identity.

Celebrating the Nation offers the first major critical retrospective on Australia's Bicentenary. The editors have collected a series of essays focusing on the different ways in which 1988 was celebrated. From the soccer Gold Cup to literary commissions, from Expo 88 to the Travelling Exhibition and the Stockman's Hall of Fame, it examines the cultural and ideological frameworks which shaped the discourses and rhetoric of those celebrations. The contributors also put the Australian Bicentenary of 1988 in historical and international perspective, comparing the celebrations of 1988 with earlier Australian anniversary celebrations, and with recent national celebrations in France, Canada and the United States. Drawing on the findings of a major research project organised by the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies at Griffith University, Celebrating the Nation provides a provocative and insightful analysis of the cultural and political processes through which modern nations organise and symbolise their histories and identities.

Papua New Guinea has experienced a remarkably rapid transition from scattered primitive societies to a modern unified nation. The dictionary covers major economic, social, political, and cultural developments, basic geographic information and biographies. With maps.

From an eminent and provocative historian, a wrenching parable of the ravages of colonialism in the South Pacific. Countless museums in the West have been criticized for their looted treasures, but few as trenchantly as the Humboldt Forum, which displays predominantly non-Western art and artifacts in a modern reconstruction of the former Royal Palace in Berlin. The Forum's premier attraction, an ornately decorated fifteen-meter boat from the island of Luf in modern-day Papua New Guinea, was acquired under the most dubious circumstances by Max Thiel, a German trader, in 1902 after two decades of bloody German colonial expeditions in Oceania. Goetz Aly tells the story of the German pillaging of Luf and surrounding islands, a campaign of violence in which Berlin ethnologists were brazenly complicit. In the aftermath, the majestic vessel was sold to the Ethnological Museum in the imperial capital, where it has remained ever since. In Aly's vivid telling, the looted boat is a portal to a forgotten chapter in the history of empire-the conquest of the Bismarck Archipelago. One of these islands was even called Aly, in honor of the author's great-granduncle, Gottlob Johannes Aly, a naval chaplain who served aboard ships that helped subjugate the South Sea islands Germany colonized. While acknowledging the complexity of cultural ownership debates, Goetz Aly boldly questions the legitimacy of allowing so many treasures from faraway, conquered places to remain located in the West. Through the story of one emblematic object, The Magnificent Boat artfully illuminates a sphere of colonial brutality of which too few are aware today.

This work turns our assumption that the convicts who came to Australia were all white upside down. It is a great read - Cassandra Pybus is a wonderful storyteller. It picks up on an area of great and growing interest, as seen through the success of Inga Clendinnen's ""Dancing With Strangers"", Kate Grenville's ""The Secret River"", and Tom Keneally's ""Commonwealth of Thieves"". In this compelling new book, distinguished historian and writer, Cassandra Pybus, reveals that black convicts were among our first fleet settlers - a fact which profoundly complicates our understanding of race relations in early colonial Australia. Most of these black founders were originally slaves from America who had sought freedom with the British during the American Revolution only to find themselves abandoned and unemployed in England when the war was over. Pybus' stories include the notorious runaway ""Black Caesar"", who became our first bushranger, and the wonderfully subversive Billie Blue, who was the first ferryman on Sydney Harbour, after whom Blues Point is named.

In Linguistic Landscaping and the Pacific Region: Colonization, Indigenous Identities, and Critical Discourse Theory, Diane Elizabeth Johnson provides four case studies, each exploring the use of language in public spaces in an area of the Pacific in which colonization has played a major role: Hawai'i, Aotearoa/ New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Tahiti. Each of these studies is informed by critical discourse theory, a theory which highlights the ways in which hegemonic structures may be established, reinforced, and- particularly in times of crisis-contested and overturned. The book introduces the case studies in the context of a parallel introduction to the Pacific region, critical discourse theory, and research on linguistic landscapes. The critical discussion is accessible to students and others who are approaching these contexts and theories for the first time, while also providing locating the author's work in relation to existing scholarship. Johnson urges readers to listen carefully to the voices of indigenous peoples at a time when the danger of Western certainties has been fully exposed.