Oceania Books

With so many ficticious accounts of battle out there, it is truly refreshing to read such a realistic insight into a soldier's life during war. Bravo, and thank you for sharing your experience, wisdom, and bravery with the world.

I wrote this review in 2006, and it was published in Pacific Affairs, Summer 2006: volume 79, No. 2.



This is an important volume that belongs in the library of anyone seriously interested in Bougainville before - and after - the conflict. Like all volumes that derive from conferences, it contains a variety of viewpoints and professional orientations - so many that it might be subtitled "Ways of Seeing Bougainville." Although the first two sections of the book's five sections are written by "the usual suspects," the next three sections include work by authors new to me. It is a fine thing to see new names associated with Bougainville research and commentary, and even finer that among the 23 authors (of 30 chapters) 6 are Bougainvilleans. (Disclaimer: I am a Bougainville anthropologist and know many of the authors; I was asked to contribute a chapter, but was unable to do so in time for the publication.)

Contributors to the first section ("The Place and the People") represent archaeology, geology, linguistics, and anthropology. All make the point that Bougainville language and culture is impressively diverse and complex. For example, there are perhaps 25 languages among some 175,000 people. Numeric caution is required here, as elsewhere in the book: the authors have as many ways of counting and classifying as ways of seeing. This is a virtue, not a defect, because Bougainville has been in state of flux for many decades. These, and other, chapters offer no support for those who might prefer to characterize Bougainvilleans as homogenous.

The second section ("The Colonial Period to World War II") is the work of historians. The chapters are of uneven quality, and overlap considerably. There is ritual flogging of Eurocentric observers: Elder accuses Thurnwald, Blackwood, Chinnery, and Oliver of "extracting intellectual property in the form of sociological and ethnographic data..." (164); I cannot think how what they did differs from what a modern fieldworker does. Helga Griffin, in a chapter dominated by praise for Thurnwald, attempts to locate "hidden values" (205) among fieldworkers of the 60s and 70s, but the connections seem superficial.

I found the third section ("Economic and Social Change Post-World War II") the most interesting. The contributors - economist, agricultural researcher (Buin), miner, historian, politicians (Buin; Torau), teacher (Buin) are a varied lot, and ironies abound. For example, Lummani wonders whether Francis Ona and the BRA's attempt to "restore egalitarian fairness by trying to suppress developmental change" may actually have "contributed to an ever-widening situation of inequality" because Bougainvilleans "are even more dependent on cash-crop income than before the conflict" (252). The other chapters give examples of unintended and unforeseen consequences, perhaps nowhere more than in Vernon's contribution - a forthright statement from a CRA/BCL miner's perspective. I found his many "had we only known..." statements unconvincing. The information Vernon regrets not having could not have been difficult to obtain; the search for "hidden values" would be fruitful here.

The fourth section ("Persepectives [sic] on Particular Bougainville Societies") comprises competent journeyman descriptions of Buin, Haku, Nasioi, and Nagovisi. The writers - all anthropologists, one a Bougainvillean - also provide short, impressionistic post-conflict portraits.
The final section ("Towards Understanding the Origins of the Conflict") is especially useful because both writers were importantly involved with the crisis and its aftermath: Regan as an outside advisor, and Tanis (Nagovisi) as a BRA functionary, a peace process worker, and BIPG Minister. Tanis' piece moves effectively between detailed descriptions of village life and the broad sweep of the Crisis.

One final comment. Most of the authors take pains to cite multiple causes of socioeconomic change and the conflict. The list is not surprising: missionization, plantations, WW II, cash cropping, the copper mine, unwelcome migrants, and others. However, I was astonished to find only one (passing) reference to the taro blight that fundamentally altered subsistence and forced dramatic socioeconomic change in many areas in the post-WWII period. If this volume has a systemic defect, it is that the authors commonly explain change exclusively in terms of human behavior. None of the authors (except Lummani) consider ecological factors except as asides or when assessing mine-related environmental disasters. It is sad that a volume representing multiple points of view lacks this important perspective.


Buffalo State College, Buffalo, New York, USA DON MITCHELL

Originally published in 1911 under the pseudonym Floyd Akers, Hungry Tiger press makes this volume in The Boy Fortune Hunters Series by L. Frank Baum available again with a new Foreward by David Maxine and a new cover illustration by Eric Shanower. The author wrote various adventure series under pseudonyms, while publishing his more famous Oz novels under his own name.

In this volume the boy fortune hunters take a job running guns from Australia for wealthy Colombians who are planning a revolution. The guns come in handy when they end up run aground during a typhoon on a tropical island full of hostile natives who worship a Pearl God. They have the richest pearl beds in the world and keep them secret by killing anyone who lands there.

Fortunately the Columbians have a Louis Bleriot Antoinette biplane in crates below deck. Louis Bleriot was famous in Baum's time because in 1909 he was the first person to fly across the English Channel. Using the biplane to fly themselves in and out of trouble with the local islanders, the boys have life-threatening adventures and stuff their pockets with lovely pearls.

The book's leading characters are full of White supremacist attitudes that jar the sensibilities of modern readers. However Baum relates these with an innocence that would be difficult to recreate today. In addition to being an adventure tale for young white boys, the book provides an interesting look into how racial stereotypes were presented at the beginning of the 20th century.

In this fascinating account, we see that Australian republicanism keep recurring. Brought forth by new generations of activists. Often with grandiose claims of a promised land, if only we could rid ourselves of those benighted royalists and their foreign sovereign.

From the very inception of Sydney colony, there was a republican movement. Perhaps not unsurprising, if you recall that one reason for the colony's being was that Britain could no longer send convicts to the Carolinas, as the US had won its independence. Hence many in the early Sydney of convict origin or descent had little love of royal rule.

In later years, the book shows how other factors caused new republican movements to arise. Culminating in the recent kerfuffle about abolishing the Governor General's post and replacing him with an elected or appointed president. While republicanism has broad sentiment, it tends to fall apart on the details of the transitioning to a republic. Something that John Howard gleefully exploited to defeat the latest republican push. Though keep in mind that this latest event was after the book's timeframe.

What is also interesting is how in the post World War 2 period, waves of migrants arrived from outside Britain. This diminishing of a British cultural heritage might have been expected to drive a demand for a republic. Yet any such trend appears minimal, from book's discussion. Australians from other backgrounds tend to be content with the Crown and the current arrangement.

Kate Walsh, curator of the Migration Musuem in Adelaide, South Australia, has assembled a remarkable photgraphic record of Australian migration history over the last hundred years. Over five hundred photographs are accompanied by very informative narratives which convey the rich and varied history of migration to this land where four in ten persons today are either born overseas or from foreign born parents.

The highlights of an often chequered history of Australian immigration are vividly brought home by some very personal stories drawn from family albums, community organizations,and library archives. A group of Italian settlers from the Aeolian islands pose for the first annual picnic for Melbourne frutierrs in 1906. In another photo, six young Australians of German ancestry are photographed in a detention camp in Germany where they were held during the First World War together with British prsioners. There is the snapshot of one Australian solider from Darwin's Chinese commnity who was shot several times in New Guinea by fellow Australian soldiers during World War Two who mistook him for a Japanese. A photo from the 1960s shows the generational differences between adult members of a Spanish commnity in Whyalla singing and dancing to flamenco music and the younger Spanish girls who were kept in pants and never owned a flamenco dress. Photos of Malays and of Greeks show the diverse specialist skills which were attracted into Australia's pearling industry. The chronicle of the 1970s and 1980s reveal the changing composition of immigrants, with Asian and African faces increasingly showing up in the photos.

This book is a remarkable and informative piece of historical research judiciously combined with a rich portfolio of images of a nation which has become vastly transformed in a hundred years.

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_.