Australasian and Pacific history Books

This book analyzes the stance of international communism towards nationality, anti-colonialism, and racial equality as defined by the Communist International (Comintern) during the interwar period. Central to the volume is a comparative analysis of the...

Before 1788, the peoples of this continent did not consider themselves 'Aboriginal'. They only became 'Aborigines' in the wake of the British invasion. In this startling and original study, Bain Attwood reveals how relationships between black Australians...

Who stole the priceless Picasso from the NGV? Was Errol Flynn a Nazi spy? Did an Australian kill the infamous Red Baron? If you think Australia's history is straightforward, you're dead wrong. This is a land of the strange, the spooky and the unexplained...

This book is a collection of key legal decisions affecting Indigenous Australians, which have been re-imagined so as to be inclusive of Indigenous people's stories, historical experience, perspectives and worldviews.In this groundbreaking work,...

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, family history is the place where two great oceans of research are meeting: family historians outside the academy, with traditionally trained, often university-employed historians. This collection is both a...

While a plethora of studies have discussed why so many men decided to volunteer for the army during the Great War, the experiences of those who were called up under conscription have received relatively little scrutiny. Even when the implementation of...

The killers were Pevay and Timmy. In 1841 they slew two men and wounded others in an angry rampage through the Victorian countryside. As Tasmanian Aborigines, they had many reasons to be angry. When teenagers they'd been jailed for being black...

What have the French done for the cultural life of Australia, and more globally? That is the question addressed by the essays in this volume, penned by eminent experts in their fields. The notion that France is synonymous with 'culture' seems deeply...

Step back to a time where New Zealand is vast, exotic and undiscovered. The romance of becoming a ruler, possibly even a king in this unclaimed land seems easily achievable. At least this is what Baron Charles de Thierry must have felt when he named...

This 300 year family history covers the lives of John and Mary Ann WOODS and their 10 children in New Zealand from 1840 - beginning with the WOODS family of Norfolk, England … from John WOODS’ great-grandparents (1720), to John’s...

On the 28th of February 2020, New Zealand has its first confirmed case of Covid-19. By the 26th of March, the country had gone into one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. As other countries tried to keep their economies going alongside trying to...

This book explains the exceptional nature of the East Timor intervention of 1999, and deals with the background to the trusteeship role of the UN in building the new polity.

Manning Clark's six-volume series, A History of Australia, is one of the masterpieces of Australian writing. It is also one of the most passionately debated visions of Australian history, in which the struggle to realise an Australian nation is played...

From the beginning of time in Aotearoa spirituality has been the very foundation upon which Māori culture was built.Many stories have been passed down through the ages of great feats of spiritual divinity and the Mana possessed by the Rangatira and...

Title: Viaje de exploracion en la Patagonia austral.Publisher: British Library, Historical Print EditionsThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items...

Drawing on previously unavailable archival material, this book argues that Indonesian nationalism rested on Islamic ecumenism heightened by colonial rule and the pilgrimage. The award winning author Laffan contrasts the latter experience with...

As engrossing as a novel, this story of the death of childhood in the cradle of the world's mightiest empire, and the atmospheric tale of crime and punishment leading to a sensational murder trial is from another time but implicitly raises questions...

Collects the best examples of colonial Australian adventure fiction, with stories by Ernest Favenc, Louis Becke, Rosa Praed, and many others.Marauding bushrangers, lost explorers, mad shepherds, new chums and mounted troopers: these are some of the...

Graeme Davison explores the economic, political, social and cultural consequences of the meteoric rise, and calamitous fall, of the city dubbed 'Marvellous Melbourne'.In the 1880s, a generation after the gold rushes, Melbourne rose to become Australia's...

The experience of twenty-eight years of flying gave Patrick Harrington plenty to remember. Rather than 'disappearing in the ether' which, as he says, happens with many retired pilots, he explains how he began to be interested in flying, how he...

Self-proclaimed international treasure Gough Whitlam never shied away from a pun, a put-down or a witticism.His wife Margaret was his 'best appointment', he called Malcolm Fraser 'Kerr's cur' after the Dismissal and when Sir Winton Turnbull called out in...

Australia has 'The Great South Land', South Africa has 'Shaka Zulu', Argentina has the gaucho epic 'Martin Fierro', and Chile has 'La Araucana' as its national poem. Now New Zealand has Crete 1941, an epic poem about the New Zealand-led defence of Crete...