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Intro -- Editor's Note -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Conventions -- Note on Sources -- Part One -- The Pacific Island Labor Trade and New Caledonia -- The Colony Established -- Entrepreneurial Recruiting in the 1870s -- The Kidnapping Inquiries and the Suspension of the Labor Trade, 1880-1882 -- Settlers Triumphant: The Labor Trade Revived -- The New Century -- Part Two -- Men and Motives -- The Women -- The Children -- Part Three -- Work in New Caledonia -- Living and Working in New Caledonia: By Law or Custom? -- Perpetual Theft -- Sickness and Death -- Hebrideans in Colonial Society -- Life after Indenture -- Nothing More Convenient -- Appendix: Tables -- Notes -- References -- Index.
Texts and Contexts is concerned with the development of Pacific Islands history as a specialization in its own right. Specifically, this volume examines the foundational texts that pioneered and consolidated the new subdiscipline and served as the building blocks and stepping stone for further developments in the field. Thirty-five texts, all of which represent defining points in the development of Pacific Islands historiography, are examined. Much more than retrospective appraisals of the foundational texts, the individual chapters consider a text or complimentary texts within the context of the time of writing and gauge what ongoing influence they exerted. In some cases they suggest how a ...
There is a tradition of “participant history” among historians of the Pacific Islands, unafraid to show their hands on issues of public importance and risking controversy to make their voices heard. This book explores the theme of the participant historian by delving into the lives of J.C. Beaglehole, J.W. Davidson, Richard Gilson, Harry Maude and Brij V. Lal. They lived at the interface of scholarship and practical engagement in such capacities as constitutional advisers, defenders of civil liberties, or upholders of the principles of academic freedom. As well as writing history, they “made” history, and their excursions beyond the ivory tower informed their scholarship. Doug Munro’s sympathetic engagement with these five historians is likewise informed by his own long-term involvement with the sub-discipline of Pacific History.
This book addresses the contending views of the uses of Solomon Island forest. Ranging from an examination of the interaction between the first settlers and their forest, the book goes on to analyse the attitudes of the British administrators, planters, and missionaries. The colonial government sought to protect the resource, but neglected to consider the wishes of the forest’s inhabitants in planning for its future economic use. The independent governments failed to protect the dwindling forest on customary land in the face of accelerating demands from their own people and of Asian-based logging companies, while non-governmental organisations and aid-donors have tried to invoke a more conservative regime of forest use.
This book explores the history, practice, and possibilities of writing about the lives of First Nations’ peoples in Australia as well as Aotearoa New Zealand, North America, and the Pacific. This interdisciplinary collection recognises the limitations of Western biographical conventions for writing Indigenous long‐ and short‐form biographies. Through a series of diverse life stories of both historical and contemporary First Nations figures, this book investigates innovative ways to ameliorate the challenges we face in recovering the stories of Indigenous people and reimagining their lives in productive new ways. Many of the chapters in this collection are deeply reflective, aiming not just to relate the life story of an individual but also to reflect on the archival, intellectual, and emotional journeys that biographers undertake in researching Indigenous biography. This volume will be of value to scholars and students interested in Indigenous Studies, biography, history, literature, creative writing, archaeology, and colonial and postcolonial studies.
The Coombs Building at The Australian National University is a Canberra icon. Named after one of Australia’s greatest administrators and public intellectuals—‘Nugget’ Herbert Cole Coombs—for more than forty years the building has housed two of the University’s four foundational Schools: the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies and the Research School of Social Sciences. This volume of recollections is about the former. It looks at life in the building through the prism of personal experience and happenstance. Part memoir, part biography, and part celebration, this book is about the people of Coombs, past and present. Through evocative and lucid reflections, present and former denizens of the building share their passions and predilections, quietly savour their accomplishments and recall the failings and foibles of the past with a kindly tolerance.
This volume investigates Pacific collections held in Australian museums, art galleries and archives, and the diverse group of 19th and 20th century collectors responsible for their acquisition. The nineteen essays reveal varied personal and institutional motivations that eventually led to the conservation, preservation and exhibition in Australia of a remarkable archive of Pacific Island material objects, art and crafts, photographs and documents. Hunting the Collectors benchmarks the importance of Pacific Collections in Australia and is a timely contribution to the worldwide renaissance of interest in Oceanic arts and cultures. The essays suggest that the custodial role is not fixed and imm...
The South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu simultaneously experienced the two major types of colonialism of the modern era (British and French), the only instance in which these colonial powers jointly ruled the same people in the same territory over an extended period of time. This, in addition to its small size and recent independence (1980), makes Vanuatu an ideal case study of the clash of contemporary colonialism and its enduring legacies. At the same time, the uniqueness of Melanesian society highlights the singular role of indigenous culture in shaping both colonial and postcolonial political reality. With its close attention to global processes, Bridging Mental Boundaries in a Postcolo...
“[A] magisterial history of twentieth-century Fiji.... The historical research is thorough and scrupulous, and the presentation is lucid. Lal brings together a wealth of information, much of it previously unavailable and the earlier available materials often reframed in thought-provoking ways.... Perhaps its greatest strength is that is presents the history of modern Fiji as very complicated and multifaceted.” —The Contemporary Pacific Pacific Islands Monograph Series No.11 Published in association with the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i
The Other Side is the first major ethnographic and historical study of the Sia Raga people of north Pentecost Island, a region that was home to the late Father Walter Lini, Vanuatu’s first prime minister. Exploring Raga social, spatial, and historical consciousness, this richly poetic account provides important theoretical contributions to ongoing debates in Pacific anthropology about the relation between structure and history, and place and time. It reveals important insights into the convergence of indigenous and exogenous cosmologies and hegemonies historically, and shows how these are implicated in contemporary social, ritual, and material cultural expressions. These analyses engage wi...