Oceania Books

I read this book before deciding to emigrate to Australia. I found both extremely helpful and factual, as well as being entertaining. I am trying to procure a copy of it for myself - the one that I read was borrowed from a library

Philip Weigall is a long time fly fisher from the New South Wales/ Victorian border area in Australia. His book focuses upon his experiences in fly fishing in this area, and irrespective of whether or not you know the area, the book will quickly bring you under its spell.

The book describes to the reader in a series of stories, how Philip feels about flyfishing - not a sport but a part of life.

The stories are beautifully accompanied by pictures taken by Philip and his partner and add immeasurably to the experience of the book.

Dangerous to leave on the coffee table, this book will be worn out within 12 months. A great book as a gift (My father got a copy last Christmas!) but buy two and keep one on your own bookcase. I did.

I have read this book with the very exciting feelings ,as reading a good scientific novel. The story bigins with the history of scientific novels as well as the history of the observation on Mars. The central portion of the book would de the argument of the experiments about the possibility of life on Mars. This argument is too deatiled to read the book with patience, but may be of considerable scientific importance. After leaving the story of Mars, this book also refers to the future endevour for searching life in the outer space beyond earth. This book may be best dedecating for amature astronomers or students interested in science.

Sometimes I need to stop reading a book for the night but decide to read one more chapter. Then I find myself sliding into the next chapter, and the next, etc. This is one of those books. The Rock is well written and it covers the subject. On occasion it does wax purple as though the author prefers poetry to prose and the theme of the apologetic white man who tries to defend and bond with the aboriginal has become hackneyed, especially given the attitudes of the aboriginals themselves toward other cultures and toward wild animals. Yet this attitude and no other seems to satisfy the demands of today's marketplace.

Mr. Salecker has done a major service to the history of US Army armor by providing us with a complete history of the Army tank units involved in the Pacific campaigns from 1941 thru victory in 1945. This is an area that has been ignored by other publications that cover the history of American tank units. Here we see the desperate battles by under-trained tank crews in the fall of the Phillipines, the use of tanks in the jungles of New Guinea, the landing of tanks on island invasions, the large use of tanks in the recapture of the Phillipines and the final actions on Okinawa. The author looks at the machines used, but the real focus of the book is on the units and the men who actually fought in the tanks. Many veterans contributed stories about combat in places where heat, insects and disease were as deadly as the determined enemy. Well written and easy reading. This volume belongs on the shelf of anybody interested in the Pacific campaigns or the history of American armored units.

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.