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Books > History > Australasian & Pacific history > General
Honourable Intentions? compares the significance and strategic use
of 'honour' in two colonial societies, the Cape Colony and the
early British settlements in Australia, between 1750 and 1850. The
mobile populations of emigrants and sojourners, sailors and
soldiers, merchants and traders, slaves and convicts who surged
into and through these regions are not usually associated with
ideas of honour. But in both societies, competing and contradictory
notions of honour proved integral to the ways in which colonisers
and colonised, free and unfree, defended their status and insisted
on their right to be treated with respect. During these times of
flux, concepts of honour and status were radically reconstructed.
Each of the thirteen chapters considers honour in a particular
sphere - legal, political, religious or personal - and in different
contexts determined by the distinctive and changing matrix of race,
gender and class, as well as the distinctions of free and unfree
status in each colony. Early chapters in the volume show how and
why the political, ideological and moral stakes of the concept of
honour were particularly important in colonial societies; later
chapters look more closely at the social behaviour and the purchase
of honour among specific groups. Collectively, the chapters show
that there was no clear distinction between political and social
life, and that honour crossed between the public and private
spheres. This exciting new collection brings together new and
established historians of Australia and South Africa to highlight
thought-provoking parallels and contrasts between the Cape and
Australian colonies that will be of interest to all scholars of
colonial societies and the concept of honour.
INSIDE THE FORBIDDING STONE WALLS OF NEW ZEALANDS MOST INFAMOUS
GAOL. Grim, Victorian, notorious, for 150 years Mount Eden Prison
held both New Zealand's political prisoners and its most notorious
criminals. Te Kooti, Rua Kenana, John A. Lee, George Wilder, Tim
Shadbolt and Sandra Coney all spent time in its dank cells. Its
interior has been the scene of mass riots, daring escapes and
hangings. Highly regarded historian Mark Derby tells the prison's
inside story with verve and compassion. .
The volume is Robert Cushman Murphy's "celebration of the
magnificent environment and history of Long Island that ispired
him; a chronicle of mankind's destructive tendencies as they found
focus on this sandy strand; and a gentle warning to change our
ways."
Sport and war have been closely linked in Australian and New
Zealand society since the nineteenth century. Sport has, variously,
been advocated as appropriate training for war, lambasted as a
distraction from the war effort, and resorted to as an escape from
wartime trials and tribulations. War has limited the fortunes of
some sporting codes - and some individuals - while others have
blossomed in the changed circumstances. The chapters in this book
range widely over the broad subject of Australian and New Zealand
sport and their relation to the cataclysmic world wars of the first
half of the twentieth century. They examine the mythology of the
links between sport and war, sporting codes, groups of sporting
individuals, and individual sportspeople. Revealing complex and
often unpredictable effects of total wars upon individuals and
social groups which as always, created chaos, and the sporting
field offered no exception. This book was originally published as a
special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.
This book discusses various aspects of World War I. It focuses on
topics proposed by contributors resulting from their own research
interests. Nevertheless, as a result of common efforts, re-visiting
those chosen aspects of the Great War of 1914-1918 enables the
presentation of a volume that shows the multidimensional nature and
consequences of this turning point in the history of particular
nations, if not all mankind. This book, if treated as an
intellectual journey through several continents, shows that World
War I was not exclusively Europe's war, and that it touched - in
different ways - more parts of the globe than usually considered
Honourable Intentions? compares the significance and strategic use
of 'honour' in two colonial societies, the Cape Colony and the
early British settlements in Australia, between 1750 and 1850. The
mobile populations of emigrants and sojourners, sailors and
soldiers, merchants and traders, slaves and convicts who surged
into and through these regions are not usually associated with
ideas of honour. But in both societies, competing and contradictory
notions of honour proved integral to the ways in which colonisers
and colonised, free and unfree, defended their status and insisted
on their right to be treated with respect. During these times of
flux, concepts of honour and status were radically reconstructed.
Each of the thirteen chapters considers honour in a particular
sphere - legal, political, religious or personal - and in different
contexts determined by the distinctive and changing matrix of race,
gender and class, as well as the distinctions of free and unfree
status in each colony. Early chapters in the volume show how and
why the political, ideological and moral stakes of the concept of
honour were particularly important in colonial societies; later
chapters look more closely at the social behaviour and the purchase
of honour among specific groups. Collectively, the chapters show
that there was no clear distinction between political and social
life, and that honour crossed between the public and private
spheres. This exciting new collection brings together new and
established historians of Australia and South Africa to highlight
thought-provoking parallels and contrasts between the Cape and
Australian colonies that will be of interest to all scholars of
colonial societies and the concept of honour.
What happened when people went mad in the fledgling colony of New
South Wales? In this important new history of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, we find out through the
correspondence of tireless colonial secretaries, the brazen
language of lawyers and judges and firebrand politicians, and
heartbreaking letters from siblings, parents and friends. We also
hear from the mad themselves. Class, gender and race became
irrelevant as illness, chaos and delusion afflicted convicts exiled
from their homes and living under the weight of imperial justice;
ex-convicts and small settlers as they grappled with the country
they had taken from its Indigenous inhabitants, as well as
officers, officials and wealthy colonists who sought to guide the
course of European history in Australia. This not a history of the
miserable institutions built for the mentally ill, or those living
within them, or the people in charge of the asylums. These stories
of madness are woven together into a narrative about freedom and
possibilities, and collapse and unravelling. The book looks at
people at the edge of the world finding themselves at the edge of
sanity, and is about their strategies for survival. This is a new
story of colonial Australia, cast as neither a grim and fatal shore
nor an antipodean paradise, but a place where the full range of
humanity wrestled with the challenges of colonisation. The first
book-length history of madness at the beginning ofEuropean
Australia Original and evocative, it grapples seriously with the
place ofmadness in Australia's convict history The book's intimate
descriptions of madness and the response to itgive a unique picture
of life in the early colony through the lens ofmental illness
Awareness of mental health continues to rise globally. This
bookexplores efforts to understand and to treat madness before
asylums,hospitals and doctors made madness a medical problem.
Meticulously researched by James Dunk, a young emerginghistorian of
medicine and colonialism
In the planned colony of South Australia, Aboriginal people were to
be British subjects, held accountable for their actions by English
law and fully entitled to its protection. The reality, however,
failed to meet the high expectations of London's reformers as
British law struggled to protect the settlers' interests and failed
to protect Aboriginal lives and birthrights. Revealing the efforts
made by the judiciary to apply the legal equality policy as well as
the frustrations of the Aborigines as they coped with the invasion
of their lands, this account paints a clear picture of the South
Australian frontier.
In the first two years of the Pacific War of World War II, air
forces from Japan, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand
engaged in a ruthless struggle for superiority in the skies over
the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. Despite operating under
primitive conditions in a largely unknown and malignant physical
environment, both sides employed the most sophisticated technology
available at the time in a strategically crucial war of aerial
attrition. In one of the largest aerial campaigns in history, the
skies of the South Pacific were dominated first by the dreaded
Japanese Zeros, then by Allied bombers, which launched massed raids
at altitudes under fifty feet, and finally by a ferocious Allied
fighter onslaught led by a cadre of the greatest aces in American
military history.Utilizing primary sources and scores of interviews
with surviving veterans of all ranks and duties, Eric Bergerud
recreates the fabric of the air war as it was fought in the South
Pacific. He explores the technology and tactics, the
three-dimensional battlefield, and the leadership, living
conditions, medical challenges, and morale of the combatants. The
reader will be rewarded with a thorough understanding of how air
power functioned in World War II from the level of command to the
point of fire in air-to-air combat.
This book examines the role of the international financial system
in the development of Pacific Asia and, conversely, the region's
growing influence on North America and the world economy. It looks
at the distant future, being devoted primarily to understanding the
emergence of modern Pacific Asia.
Australia was born with its eyes wide open. Although politicians
spoke publicly of loyalty to Britain and the empire, in secret they
immediately set about protecting Australia's interests from the
Germans, the Japanese - and from Britain itself. As an experienced
intelligence officer, John Fahey knows how the security services
disguise their activities within government files. He has combed
the archives to compile the first account of Australia's
intelligence operations in the years from Federation to World War
II. He tells the stories of dedicated patriots who undertook
dangerous operations to protect their new nation, despite a lack of
training and support. He shows how the early adoption of advanced
radio technology by Australia contributed to the war effort in
Europe. He also exposes the bureaucratic mismanagement in World War
II that cost many lives, and the leaks that compromised Australia's
standing with its wartime allies so badly that Australia was nearly
expelled from the Anglo-Saxon intelligence network. Australia's
First Spies shows Australia always has been a far savvier operator
in international affairs than much of the historical record
suggests, and it offers a glimpse into the secret history of the
nation.
Why are we speaking English? Replenishing the Earth gives a new
answer to that question, uncovering a 'settler revolution' that
took place from the early nineteenth century that led to the
explosive settlement of the American West and its forgotten twin,
the British West, comprising the settler dominions of Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Between 1780 and 1930 the number of English-speakers rocketed from
12 million in 1780 to 200 million, and their wealth and power grew
to match. Their secret was not racial, or cultural, or
institutional superiority but a resonant intersection of historical
changes, including the sudden rise of mass transfer across oceans
and mountains, a revolutionary upward shift in attitudes to
emigration, the emergence of a settler 'boom mentality', and a late
flowering of non-industrial technologies -wind, water, wood, and
work animals - especially on settler frontiers. This revolution
combined with the Industrial Revolution to transform settlement
into something explosive - capable of creating great cities like
Chicago and Melbourne and large socio-economies in a single
generation.
When the great settler booms busted, as they always did, a second
pattern set in. Links between the Anglo-wests and their
metropolises, London and New York, actually tightened as rising
tides of staple products flowed one way and ideas the other. This
're-colonization' re-integrated Greater America and Greater
Britain, bulking them out to become the superpowers of their day.
The 'Settler Revolution' was not exclusive to the Anglophone
countries - Argentina, Siberia, and Manchuria also experienced it.
But it was the Anglophone settlers who managed to integrate
frontier and metropolis most successfully, and it was this that
gave them the impetus and the material power to provide the world's
leading super-powers for the last 200 years.
This book will reshape understandings of American, British, and
British dominion histories in the long 19th century. It is a story
that has such crucial implications for the histories of settler
societies, the homelands that spawned them, and the indigenous
peoples who resisted them, that their full histories cannot be
written without it.
Establishing business enterprise in a tiny, remote penal
settlement appears to defy the principles of sustainable demand and
supply. Yet early Sydney attracted a number of business
entrepreneurs, including Campbell, Riley and Walker. If the
development of private enterprise in early colonial Australia is
counterintuitive, an understanding of its rationale, nature and
risk strategies is the more imperative. This book traces the
development of private enterprise in Australia through a study of
the antecedents, connections and commercial activities of early
Sydney merchants.
From the author of Pacific Payback, the true story of how a
patchwork band of aviators saved Guadalcanal during WWII. November
1942: Japanese and American forces fight for control of
Guadalcanal, a small but pivotal island in the South Pacific. The
Japanese call it Jigoku no Shima--Hell's Island. Amid a seeming
stalemate, a small group of U.S. Navy dive-bombers is called upon
to help determine the island's fate. When their carriers are lost,
they are forced to operate from Henderson Field, a small
dirt-and-gravel airstrip on Guadalcanal. They help form the Cactus
Air Force, tasked with making dangerous flights from their jungle
airfield while holding the line against Japanese air assaults,
warship bombardments, and sniper attacks from the jungle. When the
Japanese launch a final offensive to take the island, these
dive-bomber jocks answer the call of duty--turning back an enemy
warship armada, fighter planes, and a convoy of troop transports.
The Battle for Hell's Island reveals how command of the South
Pacific, and the outcome of the Pacific War, depended on control of
a single dirt airstrip--and the small group of battle-weary
aviators sent to protect it with their lives. INCLUDES PHOTOS
Every year, at the Wa Huang Gong temple in Hebei Province, China,
people gather to worship the great mother, Nuwa, the oldest deity
in Chinese myth, praising her for bringing them a happy life. It is
a vivid demonstration of both the ancient reach and the continuing
relevance of mythology in the lives of the Chinese people.
Compiled from ancient and scattered texts and based on
groundbreaking new research, Handbook of Chinese Mythology is the
most comprehensive English-language work on the subject ever
written from an exclusively Chinese perspective. This work focuses
on the Han Chinese people but ranges across the full spectrum of
ancient and modern China, showing how key myths endured and evolved
over time. A quick reference section covers all major deities,
spirits, and demigods, as well as important places (Kunlun
Mountain), mythical animals and plants (the crow with three feet;
Fusang tree), and related items (Xirang-a kind of mythical soil; Bu
Si Yao-mythical medicine for long life). No other work captures so
well what Chinese mythology means to the people who lived and
continue to live their lives by it.
With more than 40 illustrations and photographs, fresh
translations of primary sources, and insight based on the authors'
own field research, Handbook of Chinese Mythology offers an
illuminating account of a fascinating corner of the world of myth.
A grandson's photo album. Old postcards. English porcelain. A
granite headstone. These are just a few of the material objects
that help reconstruct the histories of colonial people who lived
during Japan's empire. These objects, along with oral histories and
visual imagery, reveal aspects of lives that reliance on the
colonial archive alone cannot. They help answer the primary
question of Lost Histories: Is it possible to write the history of
Japan's colonial subjects? Kirsten Ziomek contends that it is
possible, and in the process she brings us closer to understanding
the complexities of their lives. Lost Histories provides a
geographically and temporally holistic view of the Japanese empire
from the early 1900s to the 1970s. The experiences of the four
least-examined groups of Japanese colonial subjects-the Ainu,
Taiwan's indigenous people, Micronesians, and Okinawans-are the
centerpiece of the book. By reconstructing individual life
histories and following these people as they crossed colonial
borders to the metropolis and beyond, Ziomek conveys the dynamic
nature of an empire in motion and explains how individuals
navigated the vagaries of imperial life.
"The Treaty of Waitangi" is the founding document of New Zealand, a
subject of endless discussion and controversy, and is at the centre
of many of this nations major events, including the annual Waitangi
Day celebrations and protests. Yet many New Zealanders lack the
basic information on the details about the Treaty.
Cal Flyn was very proud when she discovered that her ancestor,
Angus McMillan, had been a pioneer of colonial Australia. However,
when she dug deeper, she began to question her pride. McMillan had
not only cut tracks through the bush, but played a dark role in
Australia's bloody history. In 1837 Angus McMillan left the
Scottish Highlands for the other side of the world. Cutting paths
through the Australian frontier, he became a feted pioneer, to be
forever mythologised in status and landmarks. He was also Cal
Flyn's great-great-great-uncle. Inspired by his fame, Flyn followed
in his footsteps to Australia, where she would face horrifying
family secrets. Blending memoir, history and travel,Thicker Than
Water' evokes the startlingly beautiful wilderness of the
Highlands, the desolate bush of Victoria and the reverberations on
one from the other. A tale of blood and bloodlines, it is a
powerful, personal journey into dark family history, grief and
guilt.
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.
On 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day-shortened to "V.E.
Day"-brought with it the demise of Nazi Germany. But for the
Allies, the war was only half-won. Exhausted but exuberant American
soldiers, ready to return home, were sent to join the fighting in
the Pacific, which by the spring and summer of 1945 had turned into
a gruelling campaign of bloody attrition against an enemy
determined to fight to the last man. Germany had surrendered
unconditionally. The Japanese would clearly make the conditions of
victory extraordinarily high. In the United States, Americans
clamored for their troops to come home and for a return to a
peacetime economy. Politics intruded upon military policy while a
new and untested president struggled to strategize among a military
command that was often mired in rivalry. The task of defeating the
Japanese seemed nearly unsurmountable, even while plans to invade
the home islands were being drawn. Army Chief of Staff General
George C. Marshall warned of the toll that "the agony of enduring
battle" would likely take. General Douglas MacArthur clashed with
Marshall and Admiral Nimitz over the most effective way to defeat
the increasingly resilient Japanese combatants. In the midst of
this division, the Army began a program of partial demobilization
of troops in Europe, which depleted units at a time when they most
needed experienced soldiers. In this context of military emergency,
the fearsome projections of the human cost of invading the Japanese
homeland, and weakening social and political will, victory was
salvaged by means of a horrific new weapon. As one Army staff
officer admitted, "The capitulation of Hirohito saved our necks."
In Implacable Foes, award-winning historians Waldo Heinrichs (a
veteran of both theatres of war in World War II) and Marc
Gallicchio bring to life the final year of World War II in the
Pacific right up to the dropping of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, evoking not only Japanese policies of desperate
defense, but the sometimes rancorous debates on the home front.
They deliver a gripping and provocative narrative that challenges
the decision-making of U.S. leaders and delineates the consequences
of prioritizing the European front. The result is a masterly work
of military history that evaluates the nearly insurmountable trials
associated with waging global war and the sacrifices necessary to
succeed.
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