Australia & the Pacific

Australia & the Pacific
Author: Ian Hoskins
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Total Pages: 597
Release: 2021-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1742245315

Australia’s deep past and its modern history are intrinsically linked to the Pacific. In Australia & the Pacific, Ian Hoskins — award-winning author of Sydney Harbour and Coast — expands his gaze to examine Australia’s relationship with the Pacific region; from our ties with Papua New Guinea and New Zealand to our complex connections with China, Japan and the United States. This revealing, sweeping narrative history begins with the shifting of the continents to the coming of the first Australians and, thousands of years later, the Europeans who dispossessed them. Hoskins explores colonists’ attempts to exploit the riches of the region while keeping ‘white Australia’ separate from neighbouring Asians, Melanesians and Polynesians. He examines how the advent of modern human rights and the creation of the United Nations after World War Two changed Australia and investigates our increasing regional engagement following the rise of China and the growing unpredictability of US foreign policy. Concluding with the offshore detention of asylum seekers and current debates over climate change, Hoskins questions Australia’s responsibilities towards our increasingly imperilled neighbours. ‘A captivating general history of Australia viewed in a Pacific context … Hoskins’s meticulously researched and well-crafted account of Australia’s place in the Pacific certainly deserves a wide readership.’ — Ross Fitzgerald ‘Ian Hoskins has written a major book. It is a fundamentally important subject, and is timely, original, fair-minded and accessible…a fascinating history that shows how Australia’s relationships with the Pacific have shaped and informed each of our worlds. He reveals the major underlying historiographical and political disputes with subtlety, clarity and power, while always displaying a remarkable fairness of judgement.’ — Iain McCalman ‘It is possibly no secret that I have been a passionate campaigner for Australia – and especially the Australian media – to pay more attention to the island nations to Australia’s North and East. Therefore, I am more than happy to see the publication of Ian Hoskins’s Australia & the Pacific. I spent the majority of my career as a journalist visiting and reporting on these island nations and I believe that today it is even more crucial for us to understand exactly what is going on in our region.’ — Sean Dorney

History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific

History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific
Author: Donald Denoon
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2000-11-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780631179627

This book provides an arresting interpretation of the history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific from the earliest settlements to the present. Usually viewed in isolation, these societies are covered here in a single account, in which the authors show how the peoples of the region constructed their own identities and influenced those of their neighbours. By broadening the focus to the regional level, this volume develops analyses - of economic, social and political history - which transcend national boundaries. The result is a compelling work which both describes the aspirations of European settlers and reveals how the dispossessed and marginalized indigenous peoples negotiated their own lives as best they could. The authors demonstrate that these stories are not separate but rather strands of a single history.

Tides That Bind

Tides That Bind
Author: Richard Marles
Publisher: In the National Interest
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2021-08
Genre: Australia
ISBN: 9781922464590

As the many nations of the Pacific deal with the threat of climate change, including rising sea levels and lessening access to fresh water, they are also suffering from some of the slowest rates of development of any region on earth. Now more than ever, the Pacific needs a champion, and that champion needs to be Australia. The Pacific is where our foreign policy starts, yet for too long we have failed to take the lead. Our country has a long and significant history in the Pacific, but our attention has wandered over the last decade, both through lacklustre foreign policy and cuts to foreign aid, and this has left our role in the region poorly defined. We need to have a greater sense of purpose and a greater sense of intent when it comes to supporting our Pacific neighbours. This is the part of the world in which we have the clearest voice, and we simply cannot allow it to languish. In Tides that Bind: Australia in the Pacific, ALP Deputy Leader Richard Marles implores us to step up our support for and commit to building better relationships with our friends in the Pacific, assisting their development and securing peace in the region.

Pacific Power?

Pacific Power?
Author: Joanne Wallis
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2017-07-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0522868231

Australia is much larger and has significantly more military and economic power than its Pacific Island neighbours. As a result, it is frequently described as having a natural right to lead in the region. Yet, Australia has found it difficult to effectively influence Pacific Island states in pursuit of its strategic interests. It provides the definitive account of how, and how effectively, Australia has sought to influence Pacific Island states in pursuit of its strategic interests since 1975, the year that Papua New Guinea, Australia’s former colonial territory, gained independence. Informed by interviews with key decision makers, Pacific Power? analyses why Australia has had difficulty exercising influence in the Pacific Islands and identifies how Australia can more effectively influence Pacific Island states in pursuit of its strategic interests, and how Australia can present itself more as a Pacific partner than power.

Christianity, Conflict, and Renewal in Australia and the Pacific

Christianity, Conflict, and Renewal in Australia and the Pacific
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2016-06-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004311459

Cultural expressions of Christianity show great diversity around the globe. While scholarship has tended to consider charismatic practices in distinct geographical contexts, this volume advances the anthropology of Christianity through ethnographically rich, comparative insights from across the Australia-Pacific region. Christianity, Conflict, and Renewal in Australia and the Pacific presents new perspectives on the performative dynamics of Christian belief, conflict, and renewal. Addressing experiences of cultural and spiritual renewal, contributors reveal how tensions can arise between spiritual and political expressions of culture and identity, opening up alternative spaces for spiritual realization and religious change. These local processes further mobilize responses of individuals and groups to state forces and political reforms, in turn, influencing the shape of translocal and transnational Christian practices. Contributors are: Diane Austin-Broos, John Barker, Alison Dundon, Yannick Fer, Kirsty Gillespie, Jessica Hardin, Rodolfo Maggio, Fiona Magowan, Gwendoline Malogne-Fer, Debra McDougall, Joel Robbins, Carolyn Schwarz, and John Taylor.

The Future of the United States-Australia Alliance

The Future of the United States-Australia Alliance
Author: Scott McDonald
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000326616

The United States-Australia alliance has been an important component of the US-led system of alliances that has underpinned regional security in the Indo-Pacific since 1945. However, recent geostrategic developments, in particular the rise of the People’s Republic of China, have posed significant challenges to this US-led regional order. In turn, the growing strategic competition between these two great powers has generated challenges to the longstanding US-Australia alliance. Both the US and Australia are confronting a changing strategic environment, and, as a result, the alliance needs to respond to the challenges that they face. The US needs to understand the challenges and risks to this vital relationship, which is growing in importance, and take steps to manage it. On its part, Australia must clearly identify its core common interests with the US and start exploring what more it needs to do to attain its stated policy preferences. This book consists of chapters exploring US and Australian perspectives of the Indo-Pacific, the evolution of Australia-US strategic and defence cooperation, and the future of the relationship. Written by a joint US-Australia team, the volume is aimed at academics, analysts, students, and the security and business communities.

Possessing the Pacific

Possessing the Pacific
Author: Stuart Banner
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674020529

During the nineteenth century, British and American settlers acquired a vast amount of land from indigenous people throughout the Pacific, but in no two places did they acquire it the same way. Stuart Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Today, indigenous people own much more land in some of these places than in others. And certain indigenous peoples benefit from treaty rights, while others do not. These variations are traceable to choices made more than a century ago--choices about whether indigenous people were the owners of their land and how that land was to be transferred to whites. Banner argues that these differences were not due to any deliberate land policy created in London or Washington. Rather, the decisions were made locally by settlers and colonial officials and were based on factors peculiar to each colony, such as whether the local indigenous people were agriculturalists and what level of political organization they had attained. These differences loom very large now, perhaps even larger than they did in the nineteenth century, because they continue to influence the course of litigation and political struggle between indigenous people and whites over claims to land and other resources. "Possessing the Pacific" is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.

Violence and Colonial Dialogue

Violence and Colonial Dialogue
Author: Tracey Banivanua Mar
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2006-12-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824830253

During the post-abolition period a trade in cheap and often cost-neutral labor flourished in the western Pacific. For more than forty years, it supplied tens of thousands of indentured laborers to the sugar industry of northeastern Australia. Violence and Colonial Dialogue tells the story of its impact on the people who were traded. From the beaches and shallows of the Pacific’s frontiers to the plantations and settlements of Queensland and beyond, a collective tale of the pioneers of today’s Australian South Sea Island community is told through an abundant and effective use of materials that characterize the colonial record, including police registers, court records, prison censuses, administrative reports, legislative debates, and oral histories. With a thematic focus on the physical violence that was central to the experience of people who were voluntarily or involuntarily recruited, the history that emerges is a powerful tale that is at once both tragic and triumphant. Violence and Colonial Dialogue also tells a more universal story of colonization. Set mostly in the British settler-colony of Queensland during the last forty years of the nineteenth century, it explores the brutality embedded in the structures of a colonial state, while attempting to recover the stories that such processes obscured.

The Geography of Australia and the Pacific Realm

The Geography of Australia and the Pacific Realm
Author: Shannon H. Harts
Publisher: 'The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc'
Total Pages: 34
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1725322234

Australia and the Pacific Realm is a region unlike any other in the world. Made up of thousands of islands, from tiny atolls to the continent of Australia, this region is defined by the mighty ocean flowing between neighboring islands and countries. How did people come to inhabit the islands of this region? How do the islands differ from one another? Readers will have the full Oceania tour with this exciting book, which uses photographs, maps, and fact-filled text to paint an inspiring picture of Australia and the Pacific Realm.