New Zealand Books

The Indonesian Confrontation against Malaysia represents a challenging case study for scholars, historians and political scientists because it takes place at a time when the conduct of international relations was influenced by ideas and interests which may seem alien today. It is hard, for instance, to separate Sukarno's genuine fears of neocolonial encirclement from his desire to exaggerate external threats in order to justify his "Crush Malaysia" campaign, and to separate the internal dynamics of a regional conflict from the broader antagonisms of the Cold War. This book fills in an important gap in the literature by chronicling the conflict from the standpoint of the Western countries, who are the "Nekolim" so feared by Sukarno. It offers important historical lessons about the potential and limits of overlapping multilateral security arrangements (Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement, ANZUS agreements, Commonwealth, SEATO etc) in guaranteeing peace and security. The extensive network of alliances could act as a deterrent to aggressors, yet once deterrence fails (which it has and very well might again), the next development is always one of two evils: conflicts become escalated and involve many players, or someone must renege on a security obligation. The U.S., for instance, had distanced itself from its SEATO and ANZUS commitments for fear of being embroiled in the Konfrontasi crisis. This book describes diplomatic developments between the Western countries in useful detail. J.A.C. Mackie's "Konfrontasi" is still the best book on the subject from the M'sian and Indonesian angle. Djiwandono's "Konfrontasi Revisited" offers a view from the other side of the fence i.e. relations between Indonesia and the Soviet Union (as well as China).

This is a really thorough review of recent work in the two countries... with some familiar names and some lesser known artists. It's a nice change of pace from american and european jewelry.

Interesting snippets and factoids about all sorts of natural and human phenomena in Australia. Want to know the deepest gorge in each State/Territory? Height of some well-known waterfalls? Longest road ascents? All the answers are here.

Nothing terribly profound, and it is not hard to imaging how much of a crashing dinner-party bore you could become if you start to recite 'interesting snippets. On the other hand, if you are a Quiz night afficianado, or compiler of questions, this is one of the tomes to have at hand! It could also be a useful addition to the primary or high school reference library.

This is a work of quantitative depth that redresses a series of alleged misconceptions about female convicts sent to Australia. Deborah Oxley argues that to understand Australia's socio-economic development one must first understand the nature of a large portion of its first settlers that has gone overlooked. She makes a convincing case. Her research engages a historiography that previously saw all convicts as part of a `criminal class', and it argues that female convicts were in fact heterogeneous and diverse in origins, and only marginally criminal, for the most part. This, she feels, helps to account for the fact that within a few decades after mass transportation began

convicts were successful in establishing a socio-economic
system which quickly replicated aspects of the Anglo-Celtic
culture that spawned the settlement. Moving rapidly to the
status of a "free society" in which female convicts laboured
as workers, wives, lovers and mothers. (12)

Her first item of business is to describe accurately what type of female convicts arrived to advance Australia fair. Generally speaking, these were not career criminals, but people guilty of petty crimes - usually theft - and convicted of crimes that in less merciful days would have carried a sentence of hanging or, in the case of the lucky and clergied, flogging. In any event, they were not members of a well established and at times romanticised `criminal class' of mythical fame. Accurate statistical data bear this out. And, unlike the formerly obedient American colonies where such criminals were sold as indentured servants, Australian transportees had to be integrated into a society in which they were expected to play more than an auxiliary role. It was a role for which they were surprisingly well suited.

After a somewhat tangential review of female convicts in literature, Oxley returns to quantitative analysis of the convicts themselves. Though they spanned a wide age range, most were in their twenties and not all were incapable of working in skilled professions - the English more than the Irish transportees. The majority was not completely illiterate. In fact, they closely resembled the working class comrades they left behind. They were valuable if not indispensable in light of the fact that the vast majority of British emigrants chose North America ahead of Australia to start a new life, and some four fifths of transportees were male. In time, forced Australian immigration was supplement with the aggressive recruiting of suitable free women; however, these were only slightly more skilled on the whole than their un-free sisters in the prison holds of Australia-bound ships.

That convict women have been so unfairly maligned is, in Oxley's opinion, the product of nineteenth-century literature about criminals. Though not a particularly profound point, Oxley spends a chapter elaborating upon this. At the very least it helps to fill out the book. But all's well that ends well, and Britain's loss of a pseudo-criminal `class' that also filled a literary need to decry female baseness and excess turn out to be Australia's gain.

This study draws upon a wide array of primary sources, the richest of which are the `indents' of the convict ships, containing detailed demographic and even anatomical data on the ships' human cargoes. She compares this to nineteenth century (mis)conceptions about convicts and invariably proves them wrong, along with the twentieth-century historiography that fell for such appraisals.

Oxley weighs her various evidence judiciously, but still seems inclined to accept most of her data as reliable in spite of some cause for potential inaccuracies. Her analysis, however, is chronologically weak. It initially stresses the importance of the merciful reforms of the criminal justice system of the 1820s without providing much information about how this may have changed the demographic or social nature of transportation, apart from accelerating it. Oxley also does not say a great deal about what happened to the convicts, or how they actually made early Australian society, once they arrived. She seems to assume that clarifying who these women were is enough to demonstrate that they must have largely underlay the successful society they helped to engender. This book's argument and foci also become rather repetitive, as Oxley frequently reiterates the historiographical significance of what she is doing and displays her evidence in ways that essentially rephrase her thesis - one, she notes, that is a continuation of an existing historiographical revisionism. Nevertheless, she does meaningfully enhance the some of the points this revision has been attempting to make.

Oxley's prose is vivid and replete with short, pithy sentences that engage the reader in her arduous task. However, it also emanates an annoyingly patriotic type of proselytising about a (more politically?) correct understanding of `our history', `our social origins', and `this country' typically becoming only of Canadian and, to a lesser extent, insular American left-wing nationalism. Her structure, as noted, is very comprehensive, although her engagement of a literary dialogue with quantitative analysis leaves the reader a bit unsatisfied at times. In the end, however, the evidence she presents speaks for itself and clearly demonstrates that however they served the new colony's needs after their arrival, Australia's female convicts were well suited to the task of forging a functional society.

Every Aussie knows that the first European settlers were involuntary. But in our history books, convicts are often a nameless bunch. What was life really like for them? The contributors to this book attempt to reach back into musty archives and reconstruct a bicentennial past.

Various aspects of convict life are treated. Including how female convicts fared in a society with far more men than women. For most convicts, conditions were often hard, especially in the early years, when starvation was a real threat.

However, in total, it was still better to be a convict than an African slave brought to the Americas. Convicts who served their sentences were freed and often prospered.

This is a crime story with a twist. Maurice Gee has presented this novel in a style I had not experienced before. The story is conveyed through his development of characters, their actions and the coincidental connections between them all. An interesting and easy to read novel from one of New Zealand's greatest writers, Maurice Gee.

Design City Melbourne

Leon Van Schaik
Photography by John Gollings

Wiley Academy, 2006
ISBN-13 978 470 01640 4 (HB)


With a light touch `Design City Melbourne' tells the wonderful story of Melbourne's late 20th century architectural renaissance as an incubator of local design culture. And who better to tell that story than Leon van Schaik AO, Professor of Architecture (Innovation Chair) at RMIT where for 20 years he has been a passionate teacher, curator, administrator and advocate of innovation across the arts. And who better to photograph that story than John Gollings.

The development of Melbourne as a Design City - a city Van Schaik defines as one which is temporarily "hot" with a catalytic mix of curators and creators - has been held in orbit by RMIT during his tenure and dominated by its vociferous architecture programs. Most of the book is taken up with brief biographies of the established and incipient Melbourne architectural glitterati, nearly all of whom are tethered to RMIT in some capacity. Most have been part of its graduate design school, a forum where the theory-practice nexus that Van Schaik insists upon, has been crystallized as nowhere else in this country and for that matter in only a few places around the world.

Descriptions of these people and their practices are framed by a main essay regarding the curatorial methods and agendas Van Schaik developed since his arrival in Melbourne in 1986. Other shorter essays map the links between architecture and the academy, between architecture and other disciplines, and most importantly, between architecture and the city itself.

In short, the story of Melbourne becoming a Design City in the course of the last 20 years is one of how, through this network of interconnections that Van Schaik in no small part engineered, a generation of designers has converted the crippling cringe that generally affects settler societies, in to the source of their liberation. As opposed to recoiling from the global so as to romanticize and essentialise the local, Van Schiak the immigrant, saw the cringe from all sides and exposed Melbourne to a consistent stream of international influences, trusting the locals to make their own, local sense of it.

They were steeled for this by Peter Corrigian and his partner Maggie Edmond who had already pioneered a gritty Melbournian brand of critical regionalism in several small suburban riots. But it was their high risk gymnastics across the front of RMIT's Building 8, a building Van Schaik championed, that came to headline Swanston Street as a new axis of innovation cutting across establishment lines. With this project the conversations inside both RMIT and the local journal `Transition' (RIP), literally started spilling out onto the streets and muscled their way in to the otherwise dull Melbourne grid.

Of course, many bright Melbourne architects, not least of all Howard Raggatt who nailed his own thesis on the cringe to RMIT's door in 1990 would have found their voices in the wilderness, and Van Schaik is not claiming credit for all, rather, as this book attests, the Design City is one of multiple synergies.

From Edmond and Corrigan the baton was handed to Ashton Raggatt McDougall whose Storey Hall next door to Building 8 was thought so radical that they kept a bag over its head until opening day. Completely misunderstanding its brilliance, many wanted the bag put back on - Ralph Neale, the former editor of this journal included. ARM have since reinforced their importance in Melbourne's inner city renaissance by digging in to the Shrine at one end of Swanston and opening Pandora's box with the Melbourne Central Shopping Centre at the other. Federation Square by LAB architects replete with Paul Carter's footnotes to an-other history of colonization and the new QV complex by Lyons, Kerstin Thompson, John Wardle and Rob McBride all consolidate Van Schaik's thesis of a Design City. The temporal and spatial linkages between these works and Van Schaik's role in the cultural life of Melbourne are no coincidence, although a finer grained history of these breakthroughs would reveal more.

As a somewhat overt homage to Libeskind, Federation Square is however more difficult to package as radically and originally local. Nonetheless, Van Schaik recoups it as a part of geometric arguments being waged in Melbourne, arguments between the platonic and the fractal to which he errs on the side of the latter. Whilst at this level he takes sides, this book makes clear that he never set out to form one school of thought and certainly not a style: quite the opposite. Just as it is the crucial factor in the biological world, diversity is the key to the cultural. But this is not to say that anything goes; the curator has to tie it all together and find commonalities without compromising the differences.

Although it provides a poetic, political and geographic structure, there is much more in this book than an appreciation of Swantson Street's well known trophies. The whole kaleidoscope of designers who have inspired or helped Van Schaik in his quest to create a Design City are all showcased. Risking the perils of writing his own story through theirs, Van Schaik's tone is humble and indeed humbled by the creative work of his colleagues. He played his role and they played theirs, both fulfilling the Design City contract.

Although he connects the dots from the efflorescence of his time back into Melbourne's deeper architectural history, this book is not about dispassionate historical analysis; rather it is about recognizing that there is a latent ecology of creative intelligence in any city and that if you nourish it, things happen. Neither does Van Schaik tell us what to think about this outpouring of work and nor, as he so easily could have done, does he admonish other Australian cities for doing so little in the time that Melbourne has done so much. And although this book seems designed for a broad audience and is to an extent promotional for all included, Van Schaik doesn't tell us why the Design City is good nor amass data about its benefits - those arguments have been won and now the work speaks for itself. Those who define themselves by their distance from RMIT would be hard pressed to deny the remarkable achievement of this group of people.

By announcing what has been, however, books like this tend to also announce that which is about to pass and whilst Van Schaik worries for a future that could so easily acquiesce back into stylistic echoes, this is an uplifting book for anyone involved in the daily struggle to create serious cultural production.

Given the theme of innovation, the design of this book is surprisingly conventional and some essays are too short and too cool for such a hot topic. The conclusion, a proposal to erect a copper sheath over the Arts Centre seems unnecessarily heroic. As opposed to vertical triumphs over the inner city symbolic order, perhaps the future of this Design City, like most in the 21st century has to be about horizontality, about landscape.

In this book, Landscape architecture as a discipline and a profession, despite being there throughout it all, gets very short shrift. Van Schaik doffs his hat to VicRoads and RMIT landscape graduates, Cath Stutterheim, Patrick Franklyn and Leanne O'Shea are noted. Their works suggest that some of the rich conversations held in RMIT's landscape program are starting to find form but perhaps landscape is yet to be curated in the manner that Van Schaik has done for architecture. If that is so, then, the creators need to rise to the occasion and give the curator something inspirational to work with.

RW

First: If you are looking for information on how to play the Didgeridoo, don't buy this book.

However, if you are looking into the culture and history of the Yolngu and other Indigenous peoples of Australia that developed this musical instrument, look no further.

Very informative with interviews of many of the current key people in the Didgeridoo world.

In these times of racial tension, I sometimes find myself imagining the kind of book our current Prime Minister should read to begin escaping from his myopia about the present and amnesia about the past. I am referring, of course, to his stubbornly maintained innocence about the intrinsic nature of Australian race relations; his touching faith that somehow white mateship conquers all and his peculiar conclusion that those who expose racism in their research are somehow its instigators.

The kind of book which might conceivably begin to turn his head away from such quaint notions should not be too abrasive or confrontational. It should hint at rather than plunge him with too much brutal immediacy into the full horror of the situation. It should additionally be reader-friendly, judiciously weighted, lavishly illustrated and not too long.

As I was reading Timothy Bottoms' `Aboriginal history of North Queensland', Djabugay Country, it hit me that this might be just the book. Bottoms has worked diligently to produce a study of the Djabugay people of the Cairns hinterland (pronounced JAB-oo-GEYE) which covers their pre-contact history, their frontier and post-frontier relations with the European land-takers, their experience of segregation and institutionalisation and their contemporary struggles and triumphs in around just 100 pages of text and still manages to fit 74 thoughtfully chosen and sensitively captioned illustrations into the analysis. Sure, there is talk here of frontier battles, massacres, forced removals and a swag of sundry other brutalities, but they are not laid on too thickly. There is just enough for even the most obdurate of intellects to be stirred by the suspicion that it may not have been all `beer and skittles' under the tropical Queensland sun in those long bygone days.

Certainly, Mr Howard has admitted that "in the past wrongs were done" - "blemishes" he has also called them; but he has gone on to argue that dwelling too fulsomely on such matters may reflect "insidious" academic behaviour or - to borrow his words once more - "ideologically driven intellectual thuggery". As early as 1975, Howard, as Member for Bennelong, was arguing against legislation to curb racial vilification and defamation on the grounds that it threatened "freedom to disseminate ideas" and in 1988, as Leader of the Opposition, he peevishly told a Bulletin interviewer that "past wrongs ... weren't done by me. They weren't done by my parents. They weren't done by my generation ..." Since that time, the Prime Minister has been nothing if not consistent.

Yet, as Bottoms' careful research shows, well within the life span of Howard's and his parents' generations, Djabugay and Bama people were being forcibly removed in handcuffs from Kuranda and other places to Mona Mona mission. Others were snatched from such centres as Mossman, Ravenshoe and Normanton. As late as 1948, "inmates", for minor infractions, were subjected to canings and public floggings under the aegis of Superintendent L. A. Borgas: Family members were often forced to implement this corporal punishment. In the '60s, when John Howard was shaping up as a young politician, Queensland police were once more forcibly shifting Mona Mona inmates to Yarrabah. From the '60s to the '90s, living conditions for the Djabugay and Bama at Redlynch, Mantaka and Kowrowa remained intolerable, with appalling levels of shelter, sanitation and hygiene. As Bottoms records, between 1989 and 1992, Pastor Gory of the Seventh Day Adventists presided over 90 funerals of Bama people.

So, yes, that murky past where all the racial wrongs are conveniently minimised and segregated by our national leader was just about yesterday. And, as John Howard's trajectory towards the Prime Ministership advanced over these years, so too his moral responsibility for what was happening (and continues to happen) correspondingly grew. These wrongs were done by John Howard's generation, as they were by mine and Timothy Bottoms' too. The only difference is that Timothy and I have already realised this while Mr Howard still has a lot of catching up to do. This book is a persuasive antidote for the resistant mind and it just might help to set the Prime Minister on a path - or perhaps a bridge towards enlightenment which hundreds of thousands of his fellow Australians have already crossed.

The main countries considered here are Australia and New Zealand. Alley explores how external relations have impacted internal politics in those countries. Though attention is also given to Papua New Guinea vis-a-vis its Bourgainville conflict.

For Australia, climate change is used as a good case study. Revolving around the Kyoto Treaty and the fear of global warming. We see how domestic Australian companies in affected industries raised many objections. Leading to the government stalling for time regarding ratification. With perhaps a dimunition in Australia's international credibility.