Oceania Books

This book gives you an easy intrduction about Australian Policy. It is very nice structured and easy to read and understand!
Higly recommended for people who wants to know how the Australian Policy works.

I found this a fascinating look at colonial life, with much excellent firsthand information. A valuable and interesting work!

I had the priviledge of reading this book while being taught by the author. Prof. Terrill was my Australian Society and Politics Professor in 2003 at the University of Texas @ Austin. He was a very dry lecturer yet I could never turn away. The depth of his knowledge was never-ending. The subject was made great by him. The book is even more exciting than the stories and events he told in class. I hope to see and hear more from him in the future. Now I'm planning to go to Autralia in the future. All I can say after reading this book and taking Terrill's class is Australia Rocks!

This book is not only visually stunning but is great for those who are looking for, among other things, the top hotels, restuarants, and spas in Bali. Unlike other guide books, this one presents only the most important aspects of the island and its amenities so that you can decide whether to go, when to go, and where to go. If you are looking for a guide to the most luxurious Bali experience, this book seems to be the best!

There is a shelf-load of books extant about the exploits of the coastwatchers, the Allied (mostly Australian) men who, along with their Melanesian allies, hid out in the jungles of the Solomon Islands and reported on Japanese convoy and aircraft movements during World War II. But this book is one of the most important of them -- not only because, first published in 1946, it was pretty much the first -- but because its author, Commander Eric A. Felt, R.A.N., was the man in overall charge of the coastwatcher operation. So while this title may lack some of the first-person narrative power, the coastwatchers' stories in their own words, of books like Walter Lord's "Lonely Vigil," it's still hard to beat for its strategic insights and true measure of the coastwatchers' operations and importance.

A man who from civilian life was familiar with the Solomons and their residents, Feldt is generous with praise for the civilians and natives involved with the coastwatcher operation. He is also a skilled writer and storyteller. The coastwatchers played a critical, if now largely forgotten (if it was ever really even known) role in the fight for control of the South Pacific. Nearly 60 years after it was first published, Cdr. Feldt's book is still an exciting and revealing contribution to their memory.

This book covers basic but interesting issues of Australian studies. At the same time, this is a good introduction of Aus society. This book is insightful not only researchers but also general readers.
Her way of writing is quite simple but adequate. Although my English is second language, I did not face any difficulty in reading this.
Good companion for studies, commuting etc...

I simply cannot believe no one has reviewed this remarkable book here yet. Where would anyone start....? perhaps that was the problem. Well, to start, this is a book has the aura of a work written in a time when you marked your intellectual territory and explored it thoroughly like a lost continent, gave it the most of your life. The travel, the endless note-taking, the sifting of sources, the drawings.... Yet it was a never a lost world, it was old, it had its technologies and accomplishments to stand alongside a trip to Mars. In this book find the "space ships" at the end of an evolution of a thousand or two thousand years or more. The European explorers stumbled upon islands and found people whose canoes could sail closer to the wind than their own, without the aid of metal tools, metal fastners, rope walks. Give the Pacific people some vegetable fiber, a log, a weavable tree-leaf, a shell, and the gathered know-how of hard voyaging, desperation, lost-at-seas, and joyous landfalls, and they express the material thinking of the human combining the solution of technical problems with the ritual and aesthetic. Where they could, they produced outrigger canoes of beauty that will seem strange and stunning to the Western reader. Where they could not, as on the resource-depleted Easter Island, they still nearly came up with something from nearly nothing. There now, I did what I could. If you call yourself a sailor, you need to see this book. You may read some straight through, but mostly I prophesize you'll sometimes pick it up, flip randomly to some page, and fall into engrossed study. --wt

Australian birder Sean Dooley describes his Big Year, an effort to break the record for the most birds seen in Australia (and environs) in a year.

I loved this birding memoir. Dooley is a lively, humorous, engaging writer, and his Australian slang makes his voice particularly come alive, at least for this American reader. He conveys a passion for his pursuit and a concern for wildlife and the environment without sanctimony.

Clearly, there are scads of awesome birds in Australia, and undoubtedly they have the best common names of any birds anywhere. The species list at the back of the book is an entertainment in itself.

I am at a loss, however, to explain Mr. Dooley's difficulty in finding women who bird. Maybe it's a cultural thing?

Definitely recommended, especially for American readers to whom the language and most of the species will be engagingly exotic.

This is a terrific book. Read in conjunction with John Birmingham's 'Leviathan: an unauthorised biography of Sydney', you will get more than a working knowledge of how and why Sydney is like it is.

Flannery has written an introductory essay 'The andstone City', which gives a good overview. The bulk of the book is an anthology of voices from the earliest days to late 19th century -from Captain James Cook to Mark Twain, Aboriginal women, and British governors.

2000 saw a plethora of books on Sydney, as it hosted the Olympic Games. This is one of the best.

There are few books available to gain an understanding of modern (prior to 1989) Bougainvillian history.

The author is an anthropologist who spent time in mainly the South west (Siwai) in the 1930's and episodically since.

His review of the island's history, geography and culture is good and thorough. He presents interesting insights into the reasons for the crisis and some of the different groups and players, but not in great detail.

He could be regarded as biased because he worked for Bougainville Copper in the 70's and ? 1980's. However the book seems quite independant in its stance and it is likely that his prior association with the mining company is mainly responsible for him not expanding a bit more in this area.

It is not really dated and this is an indication of how useful a book it is.

Overall this is a must to read before visiting Bougainville, which is a very pleasant place as are the people.