Oceania Books

A great way to experience Hawaii!

This is a truly amazing book. By its contents, its style, and ... its price. The author affects a convoluted, turgid style where archaisms abound (erstwhile outnumbers former by two to one), where few words will not do when many can (in March 1865 becomes at the very end of the American Civil War in March 1865), where speculations and misrepresentations are handed down as God's Truth. Three pages on Father Sebastian Englert, who spent most of his life on Easter Island, would alone justify buying this book if it were not so expensive. They are a torrent of venomous, defamatory abuse opening with a mild Sebastian Englert (1888-1969) was perhaps personally the most remarkable-and academically the most overrated-figure, soon waxing to the German Capuchin father distilled a yarn as far removed from the historical truth of rongorongo's erstwhile use as one can imagine. For if Englert genuflected to any dogma it was to that of the almighty Oral Tradition... His claim that the inscriptions were read alternately left to right and right to left, without mentioning boustrophedon or the need to rotate the artefact while reading, shows in fact just how limited his knowledge of the subject was...Even in his posthumously published Island at the Centre of the World - New Light on Easter Island (Englert, 1970: 73-81)- regarded today on the island, in the Spanish edition, as "Scripture"-Padre Sebastian only reiterated the superannuated posture toward rongorongo of the 1930s and confused its scientific discussion with sophomoric inaccuracies... ignoring in later years all scientific advances made by Thomas Barthel or the Russians... and concluded with Unscientific but remarkably well-read, Padre Sebastian was long on words-but short on substance. The fascinating thing there is that those claims are never substantiated by, say, a direct quote, or a precise reference. Even more fascinating is that any reader who bothers to look up pages 73-81 of Englert "Island at the Center of the World" will discover that Fischer's claims are all outright misrepresentations. There Englert wrote: According to the tradition, Hotu Matua brought with him from Hiva sixty- seven of these inscribed tablets...The sequence of the writing is a rare and curious one called reversed boustrophedon that is, each line of script when it reaches the edge of the board turns back upside down to form the next line. This means that to read the script one must turn the board around at the end of each line...The most complete work dealing with the problem up to the present time is Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift (Foundations for the Decipherment of the Easter Island Script) by Thomas Barthel... A group of Russian scholars... have spent some years studying the problem. Englert having died in 1969, the editorial board of Clarendon Press must have felt it was safe to publish this libellous material. Fischer's aim becomes clear when he mistranslates Thomas Barthel's Grundlagen zur Entzifferung der Osterinselschrift as Rudiments Toward the Decipherment of the Easter Island Script (p. vii). The message is clear: Barthel's work was rudimentary, only awaiting the coming of Fischer's. The mistranslation is systematically repeated to ensure that the reader gets the point. What then, of Fischer's offering? The corpus of inscriptions is given as free- hand line reproductions of the hieroglyphic texts, falsely claimed to be computer- drawn (p.404). Those drawings are vastly inferior to Barthel's and contain glaring errors. Where Barthel had further provided alphanumerical transliterations to help analyze the texts, Fischer gives none. There are photographs, but so reduced that the signs, already tiny (10 to 15mm tall), become quite microscopic. A truly amazing book, hailed as the first study of rongorongo in any of the world's languages that comprehensively addresses the classical Rapanui scripts full history, traditions, and texts by its author, who has himself modestly described elsewhere as the greatest decipherer to have ever lived.

This is a great map of New Zealand. Its unfortunate that it is becoming hard to find.

The map was printed a few years ago, so some things have changed, but for 95% of the areas you would be traveling to it is very accurate. Most of the changes are not the addition or changing of streets but rather the condition of the roads. Many roads that are said to be unsealed are now sealed, especially in the North Island.

The map is also made out of a plastic type material that is waterproof. You could dump a bucket of water on the map and it would still be fine, maybe just cleaner! Wish they made all maps out of this material.

Great map if you can find it, and its worth the hunt!

This book details the history of Australian Mining, but don't be put off by the seemingly dry subject-it is anything but dry. Stories are told of the romantic gold rushes, the lucky, the unlucky, the schemes, plots, the deceptions, the clouded histories, the despair of the many, and the fortune of the few. For students of both human nature and history it has interesting insights, such as how plain luck plays a significant part in human events, and how apparently small innocuous irrelevancies can lead to profound outcomes.

An interesting example is that of the Mount Morgan Mine in Queensland. Black boulders, which cattle shied from, formed a low hill in the ranges. There was a gold rush a few miles away, but nobody thought to test the black hill, as the rocks were all wrong. Farmers sold the useless land the cattle didn't like. A lazy miner was sacked from his job, his wife pleaded for his re-employment, in return for the locale of a "silver mine" in the hills. A few savvy mine managers wandered into a black innocuous hill. They chipped away, took out leases over the whole hill (a wise move), kept it very quiet (another wise move). When samples were broken, there was more gold than black earth-it was assumed it wasn't gold but something else. They began to mine quietly away until a local newspaper noticed there was a phenomenal amount of gold leaving a nearby town. The word was out. Mount Morgan -the "freak lode" as described by geologists at the time-became one of the richest and mightiest gold mines on earth. It defied virtually everything known about gold mines at the time. Geologists were perplexed, but as long as shares repaid 413,000% of their value, the owners didn't care. The copper that got "in the way" of gold processing eventually amounted to about 250,000t of copper. It was mined for around 100 years, and money that came from the mine was used to find oil in the Middle East, which eventually formed the company BP. Mine owners declared in World War 1, that Mount Morgan money was used to fight the Germans. In the 1950s over half of Great Britain's revenue came from oil discoveries that were originally financed by one small black hill in the outback of Australia.

The world's largest resource of lead and zinc-the Broken Hill Lode-is another case in point. For some years in the 1800s a large, jagged hill of black boulders more than a mile long and 500 feet wide was ignored by local prospectors at the nearby silver rushes at Silverton. A surveyor's fence was put across it. A trig station crowned the summit. Samples were chipped which came back high in uninteresting lead, but little else. It wasn't near any main thoroughfares. The owner of the land wasn't interested in prospectors. It was too big to be a lode. A good lode was said to be five feet wide, Broken Hill was over 500 feet wide. The rocks were wrong. So numerous hopefuls mined the molehills, whilst the mountain was ignored.

When people finally got around to examining it, a few speculators bought and sold shares, making a few bucks, as the hill guarded its riches. Finally, when a shaft was sunk on the wrong rock type-white kaolin-bonanza silver assays came back and the hill was born. The first 48 tons produced about 36,000oz of silver, which in the 1880s, was a lot of dough. The ensuing stock market mania and mining development transformed Australian history. Over $AUS 70 billion has been taken from the hill to the 1990s.

There are many other similar tales, twists and turns- the vagaries and tides of history. Curiously and well written, it is recommended for those interested in history, particularly Australian, or those simply interested in curious human anecdotes of life.

Inglis took 15 years to write this book. The book has been written in easy to read non-academic style that makes for easy access by the casual reader. I read this book with ease finding it full of useful and interesting facts. Inglis does not attempt to analyse the theory behind memory or memory representation but does allow enough material for the investigative reader to develop his or her own thesis.

In short it is a long book, but a good book and certainly one that helps to remind us that there are those that we should not forget.

Just like the book says it is full of photographic pictures. Outstanding scenery and beautiful people. Author & photographer did an excellent job in portraying the Samoan lifestyle, custom, family, etc.

This very un-PC book is an account of a 1920-21 circumnavigation of the world in a 99-foot power-yacht (state-of-art for the time) by a wealthy Chicago cement-magnate and his wife and crew.

Different cultures are encountered, bad weather, risky close-calls, hard conditions and ofcourse, exotic, faraway locales (many decades before Club Med and Hotel Chains spread worldwide)----All aptly and vividly described by Australian writer Dale Collins, who was onboard for the majority of the voyage.
The book is a window into another era. The reader can't help appreciate the changes that have swept the world since, some good, some bad.
This book comes from a time when there were still parts of the world that were relatively unexplored and mysterious.

If you like Sea-Tales, epsecially true ones, this is a volume
you shouldn't miss.

This collection of twelve original essays examines contemporary seafaring practices and the unique relationship of the islanders to the sea. The book adds a new dimension to present scholarship on the Pacific Islands by focusing on ordinary people and their attachment to the sea in the course of daily life rather than on the spectacular exploits of long-distance voyagers. Contributors to the volume examine islanders who depend on the sea for food and transportation, who paddle their canoes or fire up their outboard motors to transport copra to the local trader, whose songs and dances depict maritime themes, and for whom the sea provides a metaphor for all the vagaries of life. Geographical coverage of the book includes one Micronesian community (Enewetak), three Polynesian communities (Nukumanu, Sikaiana, and Rotuma), and four Melanesian ones (Marovo in the Western Solomons, Omarakana and Kaduwaga in the Trobriands, and Vanatinai in the Louisiade Archipelago). An essay on the Bugis of Indonesia points out the relevance of Island Southeast Asia to understanding seafaring in Oceania.--Book cover description

It is not often that a book, especially a work of non-fiction, moves and excites me enough to make me want to send its author fan mail. While reading Jennifer Deger's Shimmering Screens, I had to resist the urge to do so at the conclusion of each chapter; only the rush to discover what insights and delights awaited me in the next installment kept my fingers from the keyboard. Deger, who is a research fellow in anthropology at Macquarie University in Sydney, has written a brilliant book that offers an analysis of the ways in which one man, Bangana Wunungmurra, took up the challenge of making video from the community of Gapuwiyak in Arnhem Land in order to reinvigorate Yolngu rom (Law) and to pursue a personal redemption. It is a study of the impact of Western technology in (and not necessarily on) a remote community, a memoir of how fieldwork changes the anthropologist, and a meditation on the ways in which Yolngu and whitefellas can interpenetrate each other's worlds. If anthropology in recent years has questioned the possibility of continuing to write conventional ethnography along the lines of Lloyd Warner's classic study of the Yolngu,A Black Civilization: A Study of an Australian Tribe, then Deger's Shimmering Screens achieves a new model for ethnography in the 21st century.

The Ship brings to life Captain Cook's famous voyage of exploration to the South Pacific aboard the square-rigged ship Endeavour. Between August and October 2001 a volunteer crew, sailing an exact replica of Cook's ship, retraced the most perilous stretch of the original voyage from the Great Barrier Reef (off the east coast of Australia) to Indonesia. This book tells the story of Cook's journey through the experience of the modern crew. Featuring original drawings, maps, and artworks, plus spectacular new photographs. I promise you'll enjoy it!