New Zealand Books

I have the big name guides like Lonely Planet, and they are very informative, but they seem to be pointing me toward where to find every other American tourist in the country. This book is different- It tells me how to get around- breaks it down into method of travel: car rental, rail, fairy, public transportation and backpacking (tramping). This book has schedules and routs for excursions which I have confirmed are current, and even includes walking route tours around towns. I find lots of information in each of the guide books I have picked. I am feeling well prepared for my trip and once I get back I can tell you for sure which guide was most helpful, but based on the information I have gotten from this book I am sure it will be something I rely on to live out my dream for this trip to New Zealand! If not your ONLY guide, it's a great compliment to any guide.

This is a splendid book that I would love to use as the core text in a new course on the Indian Ocean. To paraphrase Alfred Doolittle, "I'm willing to use it, I'm wanting to use it, I'm waiting to use it." But I will not ask my students to pay $100 for it: in the absence of expensive color plates or other kinds of graphics, I have a hard time seeing why a 300-plus page book costs so much. I have been hoping for a paperback issue but see no indications that such might be forthcoming.

If you are concerned to understand Indigenous Peoples' Rights from a perpsective that distinguishes an historical, cultural and legal issues and developments, buy this book. It is a carefully edited and well organised collection in which the 20 contributors explore commonalities of experiences under colonialism and social and legal moves towards self-determination in countries with a similar legal and constitutional history. However the collection does not gloss over differences in indenous peoples' experiences within these jurisdictions, and this aspect not only provides stark and thoughtful contrasts, it exposes ongoing problems for governance and social relations.

Paul Havemann provides several chapters that comprise an historical and thematic framework for the close analysis in the six sections that cover: Public International Law; Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Coexistence; the impact of colonial settlement in the Anglo-Commonwealth; Indigenous Peoples' Rights Claims; the relationships between criminalisation of indigenous peoplss and colonisation; administering citizenship and self-determination and constitutional issues arising from indigenous rights claims. In each of these sections, well known writers including Ranginui Walker, Marcia Langton, Alan Ward and Paul Chartrand analyse the specificities of the experiences of indigenous peoples in their national contexts.

What is especially satisfying (and challenging) about this collection is its attention to detailed analysis, lack of generality and avoidance of stereotyping and puffery. Although there is not an exhaustive coverage of the heterogeneity of indigenous viewpoints, the collection avoids caricature of key differences and demands the reader pay attention to historical complexity in both indigenous narratives as well as the contested nature of law as it's developed in each context. The collection requires time and thought to fully digest, since its multi-dimensional methodology has the reader aware throughout of many further research possibilities opened up by the questions raised. It is an exciting and intelligent contribution to debates about 'rights', 'indigeniety', 'self-determination' and international law.

There's no denying that American educators are fascinated with many New Zealand education programs and results. But there is more to the story than simplistic answers, formulas to emulate, and curriculums to buy! This book is WONderful, in its' balanced comparison of our American and Kiwi systems. Mr. Cullen is an expert, and introduces us to the daily school life of children down under, the daily teacher routines, and philosphical differences. He is careful to share advantages of both, without criticism or preference. This book truly introduced me to the N.Z. education system. As a result, I and my family now live, and I teach, here in New Zealand ( a former lifetime resident and teacher in Washington state). So this book comes recommended from a first-hand source. If you can't come visit and see what's happening in education here, do read this book! Many of the little ideas and methods are easily put to use in your classrooms. There are great things about both education sytems; if New Zealand's successes interest you, here is where to start your personal journey!

I have read the book and I think it's a great training material for our teachers.

The Irish in Australia is a general history of the contribution of people of Irish birth to Australian national life and character first published in 1986 by New South Wales University professor of history, Patrick O'Farrell. The fifth paperback edition published in 1993 contains 362 pages with two prefaces, eight chapters - the eighth a new one on the "The New Irish - an updated bibliography, 21 useful pages of additional reading sources and an index.

The book is a rich chronicle based on primary and archival material noteworthy for its geographic scope as well as its leverage of study the author has done for other work he has published on Irish migration. He describes his sources as small, no doubt one of the reasons he pursued his research on a global basis at several points in Australia and at others in Belfast, Dublin and Rome.

Caution is recommended to readers who might infer too broad a meaning to the book's title, assuming it suggests the Irish in Australia were a homogenous community. On the contrary, O'Farrell weaves a complicated saga of people from Gaelic-Catholic, Anglo-Irish and Ulster Protestant traditions - seasoned with a few Irish Jews and Quakers - engaged in three areas of almost constant conflict.

* Conflict between distinct, separate and essentially poor Irish-Australian cultural factions;
* Conflict, "often bitter, sometimes violent," between Australians of Irish birth and the Australian establishment;
* Conflict, "often hostile and sometimes most indignant in its refusal to accept the Irish as true and proper Australians" between the Australian Irish and non-Irish communities.

The parameters of Australia's early foundation were marked by English and Irish extremes. Of the two national ancestral groups, O'Farrell claims the Irish have been the more dynamic force in the evolution of Australian national character.

O'Farrell uses extensive data to explain Australia's foundation as a British penal colony. He reports just over 40,000 mostly Catholic convicts were sent to Australia directly from Ireland by 1853, 26 percent of them women. Of the convicts sent from England, he cites estimates suggesting perhaps 8,000 were Irish-born and a similar number were of Irish ancestries. Irish social rebels, those convicted of crimes of protest against poverty and landlordism, were about 20 percent of the total. The rest can be described properly as ordinary criminals, mostly thieves. O'Farrell undoubtedly offends select conventional wisdom that upholds Irish convicts as honorable victims of gross injustice, social oppression and national persecution, or as heroic rebels. "The facts," he writes, "seem otherwise."

One of the strongest personalities in the formation of the Australian-Irish community was Cardinal Patrick Francis Moran, Archbishop of Sydney from 1884 to 1911. Known for his discipline, dignity and pride in Irish identity, Moran advocated inclusion of the Australian-Irish into the British-run colonial society as themselves, not as imitation Anglo-Saxons. Careful to avoid any appearance of Irish nationalism, Moran stood for the richness of Irish culture, making no apologies for what was Irish. Polished and refined, Moran made it clear, "Australia must swallow the Irish potion neat." Moran's stance framed one side of the continuously simmering conflict between the English colonial administration and the new Australian-Irish population. On the other, the establishment insisted de facto membership in society was dependent on the Irish abandoning their identity. The Australian-Irish would have none of it.

Along with Cardinal Moran, about 2,000 mostly Irish Catholic priests arrived in Australia in the 19th Century and waged a holy war to capture the Australian wilderness of indifference, neglect, heresy and sin. Precisely because the Australian-Irish Catholic laity was so dominated by their exuberant, sometimes belligerent clergy, they were saved from the political tribalism and clannishness into which the American Irish fell. The immigrant priests established Irish Catholic symbols everywhere by building hundreds of churches, schools and convents throughout the country. Their presence and impact was ubiquitous.

Perhaps because of the strong emotion in much Irish poetry and song as well as the long economic and political struggle against Britain, there are several theories for the genesis of free Irish emigration to Australia. O'Farrell acknowledges many, but cuts to the chase with a thesis of common sense. He says the best left Ireland for Australia, not the worst. "It took initiative, resourcefulness, capacity and also, obviously, money."

The first free Irish in Australia built their image in the outback. Many experienced farmers arrived from Ireland between 1860 and 1880, finding immediate opportunity in affordable, plentiful land. Many originally non-farming Irish immigrants gravitated to these quickly successful Australian-Irish agrarian communities, investing their wages from first jobs as common laborers and miners into farms of their own. This combination of real and nouveau Irish immigrant farmers built sizeable Irish communities around the major cities in New South Wales, Victoria and the other colonies.

As time passed, Irish migrants gravitated more to Australia's cities, grouping together beneath the structures of neighborhood, parish church and school, workplace / work role, political party and sports. However, O'Farrell makes it clear the urban Irish in Australia did not retreat into ghettos like many of their emigrant countrymen in the U.S. and England. They maintained their communities, but considered themselves Australian-Irish, not just Irish, and strove to function as fully bona fide members of Australian society.

Useful data are plentiful in this book. We read that 342,842 Irish "free" immigrants arrived in Australia and New Zealand between 1851 and 1921, with 101,000 landing in the Victorian gold rush decade of 1851-60. This compares to nearly four million Irish who left the Old Sod for North America. Very few Famine refugees went to Australia, mainly because of the distance and greater expense of the journey. O'Farrell maintains the Irish people who went to Australia and New Zealand were "a much more accomplished, venturesome and happy lot than those the Famine had dumped on America." It is also true, however, that the Irish arrived relatively late in America, a country already settled and an environment more closed to them than was the case in Australia. Ironically, Australia was seen by many Irish as offering greater opportunity than America, where the urban ghetto - much like what they knew at home - awaited them.

O'Farrell refers to the celebration of St. Patrick's Day in Australia several times, explaining its various forms as a religious saint's feast day, a political statement, a social holiday and a boozy down-market street party. Occasionally it was all four, but most often it balanced precariously between an excuse for a drink-up and a lightning rod of both general public and Irish-Australian disapproval for its divisive, irrelevant rowdiness. Cardinal Moran took control of St. Patrick's Day observances during his tenure, trying to bring a sense of balance, sobriety and respectful Australian-Irish character to it. Sadly the celebration remains most famous for excessive drinking, brawling and otherwise objectionable behavior of many participants.

Several lay individuals played prominent roles in sustaining the Australian-Irish community. J.G. O'Connor, who had arrived in Australia from Ireland in 1841 at the age of two, became Sydney's premier Irish social chairman for over 40 years in the last half of the century. He acted under the mantle of the Hibernian Australasian Catholic Benefit Society, founded in Victoria in 1871 and spread rapidly throughout Australia and New Zealand in the 1880s. Neither a nationalist radical nor a man of great means, O'Connor was the quintessential hale hearty, well met Irishman, always promoting an Australian-Irish cause to raise money. The Hibernians continue their preservation of Irish heritage, loyal support of the Catholic Church and good works for the less fortunate today.

The Australian Irish, then and now, take great pride in their sporting life. Sport allowed them to create instant heroes to help fill their needs for self-esteem. One of the most famous was Australian-born boxer Les Darcy who came to fame in Sydney in 1914. O'Farrell describes Darcy as "a pure and simple hero, a good boy who loved and looked after his mother, went to daily Mass, said the rosary - and won: the power in his fists came straight from God." At his death in 1917 at age 21, Darcy was discussed by some as a potential nominee for canonization as Australia's first saint.

O'Farrell explains how single Irish women immigrants often outnumbered Irish men in Australian cities. Bachelor Irish men in the cities tended to work at inferior jobs with low status and realized their inability to offer a woman much more than a life of drudgery and poverty. Their alternatives were to defer marriage until they accumulated sufficient wealth or not marry at all. As a result, many Irish female immigrants as well as first generation Irish-Australian women never wed.

This resulted in substantial age differentials between husbands and wives in the early Australian-Irish community. It also meant Irish-Australian widows of means as well as spinsters were not uncommon in Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Irish immigrants didn't carry nearly as much of their homeland to Australia as one might assume. The Catholic school system where many Australian Irish sent their children competed with public schools in examinations. The priests and nuns who ran the schools were thus forced to load their syllabi with state-mandated classes on top of religious instruction, attendance at Mass and various other church events. "There was no room in the school day for Irish culture," O'Farrell writes. In addition, Irish Catholic Australians didn't want their children studying and embracing Irish culture. Most regarded the study of Ireland as irrelevant in their new situation as Australians.

"The Irish in Australia" by Patrick O'Farrell is a well-researched, comprehensive work written in a pleasant style describing the conflicts faced by people of Irish birth who emigrated to Australia. It bridges the great distance between Ireland and Australia with well-documented demographics as well as numerous stories of colorful Australian-Irish personalities from all corners of society. It includes numerous comparisons of the Australian-Irish immigrant experience with that of the much larger group of Irish emigrants to the United States. It provides entertaining and informative insight into Australia's rich Irish character and must be considered a premier source on Irish migration.

"The Irish in Australia" has been honored with the New South Wales Premier's Award for non-fiction and the Ernest Scott Prize for Australian history.

This book is by far the most comprehensive Irish - Australian historical book I have ever come across. If you can get your hands on one of these books you will not be disappointed. It covers every aspect of Irish history in Australia. Patrick O'Farrell has done a great job in researching and compiling this book.

Irish Women in Colonial Australia is a historical anthology of nine essays covering Irish women's migration to Australia from the days of the penal colony to the late 19th century. Edited by Trevor McClaughlin, a senior lecturer in history at Macquarie University in Sydney, the book claims to be the only one published to date (1998) devoted exclusively to the experiences of Irish women migrants to Australia. The essays are presented to the reader in an inexact chronological order, thereby providing useful context for these independently produced works. All nine contributions are written from research of public records in Australia and Ireland and to a lesser degree, from input of family historians. The 229-page book includes brief profiles of each contributor, an introduction explaining his/her research method, a list of figures and tables, a section of notes supporting each essay and an index.

The essays in Irish Women in Colonial Australia begin by exploring the plight of Irish women convicts sentenced to "transportation" to Australia's penal colonies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The story of Ellen Curly, one of 17 Irish women murderers sent to Van Diemen's Land - the original name for Tasmania, so called by the British in honor of Anthony van Diemen, a governor-general of the Dutch East India Company - describes the destiny awaiting most of these women. Curly was a 21-year-old married laundress living in County Cork in the 1850s when she became pregnant in an extramarital liaison with soldier Amos Brooks. Author Richard Davis in "Irish Murderesses as Colonists" says Curly delivered a baby girl, then was arrested and confessed to murder after burying her alive.

Curly's death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. She arrived at Van Diemen's Land aboard the Martin Luther on Sept. 1, 1852. Instead of a dreadful existence in a cell behind bars, the partially literate Curly found herself assigned to work for a local doctor. A year later, colonial authorities deemed her divorced by distance, permitting her to marry William Harris, a prisoner from Bristol who had been transported for a stabbing. Ellen was granted her release in 1856 and received a conditional pardon in 1863. She and William had several children and apparently lived peaceful, productive lives until he died in 1900; Ellen died in 1913. They leave many descendents in modern day Tasmania.

This pattern of new beginnings rather than stark endings for convicts sent to the penal colonies of Australia was more often the rule than the exception. It seems confinement on the ship during the long ocean journey to Australia was considered adequate jail time for them. It's true some were convicted of new crimes in Australia, but common outcomes featured prisoners' placements as servants or menial workers who were later released and occasionally pardoned to live respectable lives, usually in poverty. Portia Robinson in her essay, "An Irish-Australian Identity," admits these criminal Irish women were considered the refuse of Irish society. But in Australia, most overcame their poor education and lack of occupational and social skills to lead honest, industrious lives. Ironically, their sentence to Australia's penal colonies permitted many of them to create for themselves lives that were impossible for women of their class to achieve in Ireland.

Robin Haines in her essay, "Bound for Colonial Australia" echoes Robinson's comments on successful Irish women convict emigrants as she tells us about free immigrant Irish women in Australia. Haines uses New South Wales shipping records and parliamentary papers to show how large these groups of free Irish women immigrants to Australia were. Among all government-assisted arrivals in Australia from the U.K. between 1848 and 1860, 63 percent arriving in New South Wales, 51 percent arriving in Victoria and 59 percent arriving in South Australia were single women. A one colony, one year focus reveals 2,440 or 77 percent of 3,151 government-assisted arrivals in Victoria in 1859 were female. Many were remarkably successful in terms of their material, economic and emotional lives.

Haines refers to the work of David Fitzgerald, editor of Oceans of Consolation and a contributor to this anthology as the author of "Reading the Letters of Emigrant Irish Women" to give readers a sense of what life was like for these free Irish women immigrants from their points of view. Haines cites letters written in the early 1880s by Biddy Burke in Brisbane to her family in County Galway in which Biddy wrote (sic), "I am sorrow that I hadent come 5 years before I did come I would have a lot of money now...I am sending you three pounds for to drink my health and once more." Lamenting the separation from her parents, Biddy nonetheless closed the door on her return to Ireland: "But I don't supose I could live there now."

Haines admits the psychic, physical and socio-economic costs of emigration for many Irish women emigrants were far greater than the compensations. However, she refers to colonial records that testify to the resilience shown by many who fought for their rights, won divorces from dead-end marriages, sought and received licenses for businesses on their own account. She shows how courageous Irish women emigrants to Australia - certainly not all, but many fell in this category - traded the dramatic costs of migration for adventure, excitement and a life free of starvation, misery and lack of opportunity. In other words, many Irish women found hope in Australia.

Richard Reid interprets census data to discuss the demographic scope of Irish women immigrants to Australia in his essay, "Irish Female Assisted Immigration." Reid reports that 31,018 women were among the 62,943 persons of Irish birth in New South Wales' total population of 503,981 residents in 1871. The majority of these Irish arrived between 1848 and 1870 as government-assisted immigrants. Reid enlivens his subject by drilling into the profiles of the emigrants who arrived in Sydney aboard the good ship Caroline in October, 1854. Of the 258 immigrants on board, 254 were Irish and 188 were female. Eighty-six of the women - 47 percent - were from two counties in Ireland: Claire and Tipperary. Reid says nearly a third of all Irish arriving in Sydney between 1848 and 1870 hailed from there. My great grandparents were two of them.

Mary Rynn, my great grandmother, arrived in Sydney in 1869 at age 17 from Ennis in County Clare. She joined her sister, Margaret, who had arrived two years earlier. The Rynn sisters shared an identical reason for leaving Ireland. Their parents had arranged a marriage for Margaret to a local lad in whom she had not the slightest interest, no doubt upsetting her parents by choosing to emigrate rather than tie the knot. Obviously enamored of the young man, the parents tried the same match again with Mary, but with the same result. Not only did Mary say no, she said her goodbyes, traveled to Cork and boarded a ship for Australia with her brother, John, to join Margaret in Sydney.

The Rynn sisters found work together as domestics in a Catholic parish rectory until 1882 when Mary wed my great grandfather, Philip Patrick Hassett. The same age as Mary, both born in 1852, Philip Patrick had emigrated from his family's farm outside Nenagh in County Tipperary about the same time Mary Rynn left Ennis. He chose Australia after a friend who had recently returned from America told him in no uncertain terms to avoid the United States and head for Australia. Mary and Phil Hassett raised five children with Margaret's help; she was one of many Irish women immigrants to Australia who never married. Great grandfather Philip Patrick died in 1910; Auntie Maggie Rynn died in 1932; and my great grandmother Mary Hassett died in 1935.

Reid focuses on Caroline passenger 19-year-old Dora MacDonagh from Limerick to turn his essay from a dry statistical analysis into an interesting story. Dora was fully literate, able both to read and write; one-third of her female shipmates were illiterate. She signed an indenture binding her to seek employment in New South Wales and repay within two years the £13 the colony paid for her ticket of passage. Seventy-three percent of the women on the Caroline sailed to Australia under the provisions of the Assisted Immigration Act. Dora was a Catholic, as were 79 percent of the other 187 women immigrants on the ship. She listed her occupation as milliner, a maker of hats. She married Patrick McMahon from County Clare at St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney on Sept 26, 1857. Dora and Patrick had nine children together before Dora died on Feb. 24, 1908, two years before Patrick. Reid says qualitative research now under way should give clearer pictures of these lives that began in poor, dark Irish rooms and cabins and lived out their days under the bright Australian sun.

Three essays in the book delve deeper in a geographic sense into stories of Irish immigrant women in the colonies of South Australia, Queensland and Victoria. "Irish Women in Colonial South Australia" by Eric Richards and Ann Herraman reveals demand for labor of all sorts was required in and around Adelaide and how the Colonial Secretary reported back to London, domestics "cannot be introduced too plentifully." In "Resistance, Respectability and Ruin," Libby Connors and Bernadette Turner tell us about 4,000-plus Irish Famine orphan girls sent from the workhouses of Ireland to Queensland between 1848 and 1850. One marvels at stories like Mary Moriarity's who arrived in Australia from an Irish workhouse in 1850 at the age of 16. She married ex-convict and illiterate Samuel Brassington two years later and by 1870, the two owned several businesses and had become one of the largest landowners Queensland. Pauline Rule writes of "Irish Women's Experiences in Colonial Victoria" but admits her task was difficult due to limited immigration and demographic data. However, her portraits of Irish women from letters and newspaper articles suggest the majority of Irish women immigrants to Victoria survived reasonably well, echoing other contributors when she says they made their own welcome through courage and jauntiness.

Editor McClaughlin contributes "Casualties of Colonisation" in which he analyses records of Australian women immigrants in prisons and mental asylums. He says Irish women were consistently over-represented among offenders, lunatics and paupers in Australia, but reports this was no different from the situation in Britain, Canada and the United States. Further, he says focusing on Irish female immigrant casualties produces only a limited view of Irish women's settlement in Australia. No doubt the majority of Irish women emigrants to colonial Australia made good choices.

Irish Women in Colonial Australia is a valuable contribution to the study of Irish migration and Australian history as well as one of the better historical anthologies on the shelf. Whether by luck, a following wind or the skill of an astute editor, its contributors create a strong chain of valuable information. In fact, there is no weak link. The major reason is they all depend on well-researched data and deliver clearly expressed interpretation. Editor McClaughlin is to be commended and his contributors thanked; their work is good.

This is a well-conceived and interesting book that provides the research to support Snouck Hurgronje's assertion (in "Mekka") that the Jawah -- pilgrims from the Malay world -- *were* forming a new archipelagic identity in the Middle East. Laffan counters Benedict Anderson's claim in "Imagined Communities" that the pre-national religious pilgrimages didn't set folks on new journeys but merely returned them to their old lives with elevated status. He charts the creation of a new identity that was politicized but not nationalist in the conventional sense.

Now if only I could afford to own the thing...

Overall I found Islands of the Dawn to be a good introduction to some of the mainstream (and lesser known) Alternative Spiritualities in New Zealand.

There is a great deal of information on Spiritualism, Theosophy and a whole chapter dedicated to The Golden Dawn. If you are interested in any of these three 'paths' - especially with respect to New Zealand - then as far as overviews go, you will not be disappointed. There is plenty more in this book though for people interested in reading about alternative spiritualities in New Zealand. Other groups and paths mentioned include Order of the Table Round, Builders of the Adytum, Anthroposophy, the Culdean Trust, Beeville, the OTO, and various Eastern Spiritualities.

The author has done a great job of presenting background information on various groups and philosophies to give context to the New Zealand branches. This makes the book a good starting point for New Zealander's who want to learn more about alternative religious and esoteric groups without any prior background knowledge.

Those interested in paganism, wicca or satanism are the only paths likely to be disappointed with this book as there is little written on them. Perhaps neo-pagan groups had hardly surfaced at this stage in time, and were harder to find. However, around the time of the authors travels in New Zealand and prior to the published date of the book there was the magazine "Magic Pentacle" being published listing various pagan groups, and at least 2 groups identifying themselves as Satanists were around (Order of the Left Hand Path, and Order of the Sword of Damocles). However some information on these groups may be available in a thesis written by a student at Victoria University who interviewed former members of the OLHP. I don't know if the thesis is publicly available however.