Oceania Books

Here is an excellent documentation of the continuing stories regarding the plight and fight of Australian indigenous peoples that have seen the light of publication since the 1970s. This, like so many, highlights the resilience, flexibilty and pragmatism of a band of Martu desert dwellers who have adapted to survive the settler society. Their stories historic importance is relative to the development of the atomic testings in their homelands immediately after the Second World War. Readers might well extend their understanding by referring to Yami Lester's account which was published by IAD Press nearly a decade ago. The book is attractively presented with ample photographs, which amongst other things, demonstrates that the material well-being of the surviving Martu has changed little since the 1950s. Melbourne museum's Philip Batty has curated a poignant exhibition, currently touring Australia, which also touches on some of this book's themes.

for me, but with my gf's help, this should be a really great resource for planning our trip.

This first hand account comprised of journal entries with commentary is a fascinating read and provides tremendous detail of Capt. Cook's voyages. I think that for the general reader with an interest in Cook I would recommend Hough's biography as a primary source with this volume as a supplementary text. The two together will provide an excellent view of the accomplishments and adventures of Cook and his crews.

A well written and easy to read tale of the first packhorse trip down the Bicentennial Trail - the spidery path that runs along the spine of Australia. No mean feat, a journey equivalent to Seattle to Mexico City through some of the most remote of Downunder's extensive wilderness. Told with humour and an eye on frailties both equine and human it details the courage and perseverance of a young Sharon Roberts and husband Ken as they confront everything from crocodile infested rainforests to baking waterless plains, while managing a sometimes reluctant but always bold group of horses. But more than a horse story it's a dashing good read, which the armchair traveller and the non-horse enthusiast can enjoy alike. For horse lovers it is a how-to guide to modern packhorse travel. Highly recommended.

In the Foreword, English anthropologist Peter Worsley says that `critical evaluation of Margaret Mead's work is long overdue, particularly in the United States, where I have frequently found it difficult to engage in discussion about Mead, since the slightest breath of criticism commonly evokes a passionate-and to my mind quite uncritical-defense of the entire corpus of her very uneven writings and of her life-career'. Worsley should know, for he wrote a review of Mead's `anthropology' of the Manus, published as _New Lives for Old_, that deemed it shoddy enough to be styled `science fiction'. _New Lives for Old_ was a typical Meadean message of hope. It's about the people of Manus who, she says, have formed a mass movement (the Paliau movement) to transform their culture from its pre-war primitiveness to integration with modern life-government, economic, educational, cultural. According to Worsley, endorsed by Lenora Foerstel in her contribution, Mead got the Paliau movement exactly back to front: it was an indigenous movement AGAINST entanglement in western (or asian for that matter) owned plantations and business. Mead was furious about Worsley's review. She would be furious about this book too. Why? Because it gives those `natives' a platform to talk back to the anthropologist(s).

One indigenous contributor, Nahau Rooney from Manus, notes that anthropologists set up shop without any local consultation whatever. The subjects of `research' were not told what information was being gathered, to what ends, and what use would be made of it. From the anthropologists' point of view, this wasn't relevant because, well, savages are illiterate, aren't they? But the published depictions had a way of getting back to the natives, and when they did, some got angry. One angry soul is Warilea Iamo, the first Papuan to be awarded an anthropology PhD. In his contribution he blisters Mead for turning his and other Pacific cultures into consumer items for western readers keen to know about the exotics in the imperial domain. This `objectification' (description without any native input or right of correction) is yet another manifestation of racist condescension, in his view. A number of contributors fault anthropologists as the main source of racist western ideas of the primitive. Mead in particular is roasted for her consistent identification with American imperialism in the Pacific. She never protested nuclear testing in the Pacific and the removal of peoples from their islands to make way for tests. She never participated in anti-war protests (to the puzzlement and consternation of her colleagues). She even denounced US labor unions and others who opposed testing.

Worsley's contribution is an example of the low opinion that some anthropologists had of Mead's slap-dash anthropology, but this collection wants an essay expressly devoted to that theme. Alas, it isn't. Here's an example. Douglas Oliver, a leader in Pacific anthropology and professor at Harvard, wrote in 1991 that `when I took courses in anthropology at Harvard, in the early Thirties, the only use made of Coming of Age [in Samoa] was as an example of how not to do field work, and how not to leap to universal conclusion about human behavior'. He goes on to mention that John Whiting, who was once a Mead fan, `has come to express something like contempt for Mead (within my hearing, that is)'. Mead's long term collaborator and friend, Lola Romanucci-Ross said in 1985, `It might be worth making the point that many, if not all, of Margaret's recent public defenders, attacked her brutally and gave her credit for nothing for many years. For many years I was accosted by some of these same defenders who ... wanted me to give up some terrible secrets about her 'incompetence', or 'dishonesty', etc.' Westin LaBarre, a leading anthropologist, stated in 1983: "When I was a graduate student in anthropology at Yale in the late '30's, Mead's Sex and Temperament came out. Puzzled that even a big island like New Guinea should have had three tribes waiting to be discovered to prove her point about the non-biological nature of gender, I went to Edward Sapir with my puzzlement. He said laconically, "She's a pathological liar." I was startled as much by what he said, as by the fact that an eminent anthropologist and chairman of a department should say this to a mere graduate student. But over the years, I have come to believe that this is literally the case."

Given such negativity in high places, you might think that anthropologists would have jumped for joy when Derek Freeman published his refutation of Mead's Samoan ethnography. The opposite happened, as everyone knows. Eleanor Leacock takes up this theme in the first chapter of the book. Basically she repeats what others have said, and in the process ignores the comprehensive assembly of pro and contra critical opinion published in _The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock_.

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 modern reprint of 11 gay stories by Stoddard, originally published in South Sea Idyls, 1892 and island of Tranquil Delights 1904. The stories are based on Stoddard's early experiences in Polynesia with very friendly, bisexual/ homosexual young men of his acquaintance. A few of the stories are very frank, but involve nothing more (in public) than affectionate caresses and kissing, etc. Truth to tell, they are rather boring, but do convey a dreamy atmosphere of south seas paradisiacal delight and hunky, affectionate Polynesian young men, made all the more poignant when one remembers that within a generation or two Europeans would slaughter most of the natives, or confiscate their land, resulting in the death of 90% or more of them, and their enforced christianization in religion and morals, etc.

After you finish the stories, you may enjoy Stoddard's novel For the Pleasure of his Company, also available in a cheap modern reprint.

This book was invaluable to me on my tours of Tazmania, South Australia and Victoria. In addition to excellent directions, the author provides you with recommended budget accomadations. Insights into Aussie culture and even a list of helpful Aussie phrases. Fair dinkum mate!