F.E. Maning was one of those Englismen who arrived in New Zealand before its being integrated in the British Empire. He became a Pakeha Maori, the personal « property » of a Maori chief, trading with his tribe in many articles particularly muskets and gunpowder. The book is interesting because it describes the Maori civlization before its being completely destroyed by colonialization. But it is of great interest in its showing the direct influence of European culture, particularly of the musket, on the fate of the Maoris from the very start of the European presence. Before, this warlike people was living in forts positioned on hilltops and on cliffs, that is to say in dry and healthy places. Only their agriculture was concerned by the low lands that were cultivated. This location of the forts and villages was perfectly well adapted to the use of the spear to defend them. With the musket everything changed. It was necessary, for it being used in best conditions, for the Maoris to move their forts and villages to the lowlands. This made them live in swamps, in very unhealthy territories. Their wars were changed, some of their customs were also changed and their habitat was changed. This last element caused the propagation of serious diseases among the population, causing its reduction over a few decades. This book is thus a perfect testimony about the changes colonialization brought to those populations, those people who some like to describe as primitive.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

A delightfully written and human account of the establishment of a Military Hospital in the Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg in the 1940s and the people who worked and were treated there. It addresses interesting accounts about the daily routines and lives of patients, nursing staff, other health professionals and volunters and the development of flap surgery in Australia during World War Two. Particularly fascinating is the account of the six Australian nurses who were evacuated from Singapore in 1942 only to find themselves dumped in the next available port because the British medical staff did not appreciate the nurses' professional devotion and demands related to the care of their patients. Without money or food, they managed to make their way back to Autralia and the Military Hospital across land and sea only to be severely reprimanded by the Matron for turning up "regimentally undressed". The book is illustrated with wonderful black and white images of the era.

At last the Pacific islands are beginning to take their rightful place in the annals of world history. It is this book that takes a major step to establish that historical perspective.

The Pacific islands are dispersed across one-third of the Earth's surface. All the major island groups have been inhabited for the last two thousand years, some for more than six thousand years, yet a detailed prehistory of the region has been lacking until now. This book, written by a noted Pacific anthropologist and archaeologist who has studied the area for more than thirty years, takes a tour of the diverse islands of the Pacific, beginning in the west in Melanesia, then across the many small islands of Micronesia. The tour concludes in the sprawling area covered by the islands of Polynesia, which extend from New Zealand to Hawai'i and eastward as far as Easter Island. Along the way, the author conveys the personal drama that he experienced in uncovering artifacts that reach back into a deep time. At one place he unearthed a small piece of carved white bone. When he turned it over, he saw the two eyes and the subtle nose of a stylized human face. On another island, while enjoying a beach picnic with his host family, spearing octopus and gathering mollusks, the author took a walk along the beach and discovered, a short distance from where they were camped, a distinct rock layer filled with pottery fragments. Those fragments would prove to be a record of people who had lived on the island more than two thousand years earlier. This book is both a personal narrative of modern-day exploration of the Pacific and an account of the rich prehistory of the region.

The book draws generously from the detailed archaeological work conducted by the author and by others in the Pacific region--most of it done since the Second World War--as well as from studies of language and biology that answer such fundamental questions as where did the Pacific islanders come from and when and how did they settle the thousands of islands at least two millenia before any Europeans entered the Pacific? To most people, the Pacific islands are no more than a place of idyllic scenery and the people of the Pacific are the willing subjects of fanciful tales. Now, through the enlightening text of this book and the many striking photographs that it contains, the Pacific islands take on a fuller meaning. And the many cultures of the Pacific take their proper place in the remarkable story of the development of civilization.

The Other Side of the Family is the best book I have read for over 25 years. A must for any person over 12

This book provides introductions to a wide variety of topics in Australian history. It has been edited by three of the most eminent Australian academic historians and many of the entries have been written by experts in their respective fields. The entries themselves deal with events, people, noted historians and current issues in Australian historiography.

This book is a compedium of several dozen UFO sightings and incidents in Australia from 1788 to the 1990s. Each case is given 1-3 pages.

"Any news of M. de la Perouse?", Louis XVI is said to have asked before his execution. Jean Francois de Galloupe de La Perouse, who famously visited Botany Bay (modern Sydney, Australia) in January 1788, precisely the same time the founding First Fleet arrived - only to vanish thereafter - was the greatest and most romantic of the French Pacific explorers. He served with distinction in the Seven Years' War and the Wars of the American Revolution, famously raiding the British commercial bases in Hudson Bay in the early 1780s. He also plied the trade routes between Mauritius (then Isle De France) and India. Based on his talent, and the then government's desire to best the exploits of James Cook, he was selected for a great Voyage of Discovery. Among his many achievements was finding La Perouse Strait (between the Japanese and Russian islands of the North-West Pacific). Tragically, after visiting the British colony in New South Wales, his ships disappeared somewhere off Samoa - and his fate remained an enigma for the French people until the 1960s. Dunmore's narrative brings us both the splendor and the tragedy of La Perouse's career.

I stumbled across this book by accident in my father's bookshelf, and started reading it on a rather uneventful Sunday afternoon. I have always been interested in sailing, but this book really lit a fire under me to go cruising. I've since re-read this book and am still planning my dream cruise to the south pacific. The book talks about the Cornell family (parents and 2 young kids) spending 3 years sailing in the pacific. their story of visiting Pitcairn's Island forced me to reread Mutiny on the Bounty. It is a delightful read, and makes me wish my parents had taken me on a long sailing journey as a child. By the way, Gwenda is married to Jimmy Cornell, who has written a number of cruising books. Pacific Odyssey is a great read, but beware, you may not be able to get rid of the cruising bug. I know I haven't.

I first read PACIFIC RISING in 1991, the year of publication and felt it was the absolute best overview of the Pacific I'd ever read. I'm not sure I've changed my mind, despite the intervening years. Mr Winchester, who lived in Hong Kong, connects Peru with Indonesia; Korea with Seattle; Guam with Panama. The book is filled with anecdotes and factoids, all of them interesting and worth knowing, but he never loses an academic focus. This is an absolute must for anyone who wants to understand what "the Pacific" is all about.

In the 1970s, an Anglo-Australian advisor to the Pintupi Aboriginal people of the remote Western Desert of Australia suggested that they transfer some of their traditional designs to modern European painting media (notably acrylic). The result was astonishing: a seemingly endless stream of brilliant, intense, moving paintings emerging from one of the most remote and impoverished places on earth. By incredible good fortune, Fred Myers, one of the most sensitive and wide-ranging ethnographers in anthropology, was there almost from the birth of the movement, recording what happened. This is his authoritative book on the meteoric rise of an art style that has achieved world reknown.
The art is enmeshed in Aboriginal religion, which in turn is enmeshed in the land. Most of the paintings are of religious landscapes. Myers is at his best in explaining the differences between Aboriginal views of the paintings (basically, as religious art connected with land and land rights) and westerners' views (basically, as beautiful pictures). Myers does not make the comparison, but it is rather like looking at Italian Renaissance religious scenes. You can't fully appreciate what's going on (however much you may enjoy the color scheme) if you have no idea who Jesus, Mary, and Mary Magdalene were.
Other books have focused on the art and its makers (not only Pintupi; other groups had their own artistic triumphs, and now I am told that most of the artists in Australia belong to the tiny percentage who are of Aboriginal background). Myers thus concerns himself more with the reception that the paintings had in the wider world, and the whole process of winning recognition as "art" for what was once dismissed as mere "aboriginal craft" items--a racist dismissal. Myers is incredibly fair-minded (more than I would have been) to all parties, in the face of this, but sometimes anger inevitably breaks through; for example, after reporting one particularly dismissive review, he says "Here, then, were outsiders who knew more than the participants but did not bother to talk with them, outsiders whose representational practices directly thwarted the representations of Aboriginal painters" (p. 292).
Racism took several tactics. First and most odious was attacking the marketing of the paintings as "commodification" or "commoditization"--translation: it's fine for elite white artists to sell their stuff, but Immoral and Sinful for poor and nonwhite folks to make an honest dollar the same way. Related were attacks on the lack of "authenticity" of the art because old-time Aboriginals didn't have acrylic; again, no one attacks elite white artists for using media that Leonardo da Vinci didn't use. Then there was the early consignment of the art to "natural history" museums! (This had changed by the early 1990s.) Another tactic was glib talk of Aboriginals as "the Other," to be "situated in a discourse of alterity" or of "cultural construction" instead of treated as humans. (Not only do some perform the "othering," but also those who criticize it, can bury the whole matter in floods of jargon--not much help, in the event.) The last word on the subject of "the Other" was said long ago by Rimbaud: "je est en autre" ("I is another"); after that, we need no more on the issue. Add in patronizing bureaucrats, crooked dealers, and well-meaning but uncomprehending viewers, and the mix is such that one wonders how the Aboriginals keep going.
There is much more in the book (over 400 dense pages). Many less dramatic points are of more interest to the theorist. They defy summary here. Defying summary, too, is Myers' wonderful account of his own experiences in the Western Desert and in the urban art world.
The only problem with the book is that much of it is (necessarily, I fear) couched in the lingo of the art-criticism and culture-studies world--a lingo noted more for preciosite' than for comprehensibility.
Myers demolishes the simplistic rhetoric of "resistance" and "accommodation." What emerges is something far more powerful. Humans sometimes confront the most horrible oppression, racism, and brutality by transcending it--by marshalling all their resources in a cascade of concentrated brilliance that "outshines the sun." Delta blues is one example (and the source of my phrase). Roma music is another. In art, we have the explosion of Northwest Coast carving, painting and printmaking over the last 30 years. These and many other similar cases may be the best plea we have for redeeming the human species in spite of our countless sins.