Australia’s deep past and its modern history are intrinsically linked to the Pacific. In Australia & the Pacific, Ian Hoskins — award-winning author of Sydney Harbour and Coast — expands his gaze to examine Australia’s relationship with the Pacific region; from our ties with Papua New Guinea and New Zealand to our complex connections with China, Japan and the United States. This revealing, sweeping narrative history begins with the shifting of the continents to the coming of the first Australians and, thousands of years later, the Europeans who dispossessed them. Hoskins explores colonists’ attempts to exploit the riches of the region while keeping ‘white Australia’ separate from neighbouring Asians, Melanesians and Polynesians. He examines how the advent of modern human rights and the creation of the United Nations after World War Two changed Australia and investigates our increasing regional engagement following the rise of China and the growing unpredictability of US foreign policy. Concluding with the offshore detention of asylum seekers and current debates over climate change, Hoskins questions Australia’s responsibilities towards our increasingly imperilled neighbours. ‘A captivating general history of Australia viewed in a Pacific context … Hoskins’s meticulously researched and well-crafted account of Australia’s place in the Pacific certainly deserves a wide readership.’ — Ross Fitzgerald ‘Ian Hoskins has written a major book. It is a fundamentally important subject, and is timely, original, fair-minded and accessible…a fascinating history that shows how Australia’s relationships with the Pacific have shaped and informed each of our worlds. He reveals the major underlying historiographical and political disputes with subtlety, clarity and power, while always displaying a remarkable fairness of judgement.’ — Iain McCalman ‘It is possibly no secret that I have been a passionate campaigner for Australia – and especially the Australian media – to pay more attention to the island nations to Australia’s North and East. Therefore, I am more than happy to see the publication of Ian Hoskins’s Australia & the Pacific. I spent the majority of my career as a journalist visiting and reporting on these island nations and I believe that today it is even more crucial for us to understand exactly what is going on in our region.’ — Sean Dorney

This book provides an arresting interpretation of the history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific from the earliest settlements to the present. Usually viewed in isolation, these societies are covered here in a single account, in which the authors show how the peoples of the region constructed their own identities and influenced those of their neighbours. By broadening the focus to the regional level, this volume develops analyses - of economic, social and political history - which transcend national boundaries. The result is a compelling work which both describes the aspirations of European settlers and reveals how the dispossessed and marginalized indigenous peoples negotiated their own lives as best they could. The authors demonstrate that these stories are not separate but rather strands of a single history.

As the many nations of the Pacific deal with the threat of climate change, including rising sea levels and lessening access to fresh water, they are also suffering from some of the slowest rates of development of any region on earth. Now more than ever, the Pacific needs a champion, and that champion needs to be Australia. The Pacific is where our foreign policy starts, yet for too long we have failed to take the lead. Our country has a long and significant history in the Pacific, but our attention has wandered over the last decade, both through lacklustre foreign policy and cuts to foreign aid, and this has left our role in the region poorly defined. We need to have a greater sense of purpose and a greater sense of intent when it comes to supporting our Pacific neighbours. This is the part of the world in which we have the clearest voice, and we simply cannot allow it to languish. In Tides that Bind: Australia in the Pacific, ALP Deputy Leader Richard Marles implores us to step up our support for and commit to building better relationships with our friends in the Pacific, assisting their development and securing peace in the region.

Australia is much larger and has significantly more military and economic power than its Pacific Island neighbours. As a result, it is frequently described as having a natural right to lead in the region. Yet, Australia has found it difficult to effectively influence Pacific Island states in pursuit of its strategic interests. It provides the definitive account of how, and how effectively, Australia has sought to influence Pacific Island states in pursuit of its strategic interests since 1975, the year that Papua New Guinea, Australia’s former colonial territory, gained independence. Informed by interviews with key decision makers, Pacific Power? analyses why Australia has had difficulty exercising influence in the Pacific Islands and identifies how Australia can more effectively influence Pacific Island states in pursuit of its strategic interests, and how Australia can present itself more as a Pacific partner than power.

During the post-abolition period a trade in cheap and often cost-neutral labor flourished in the western Pacific. For more than forty years, it supplied tens of thousands of indentured laborers to the sugar industry of northeastern Australia. Violence and Colonial Dialogue tells the story of its impact on the people who were traded. From the beaches and shallows of the Pacific’s frontiers to the plantations and settlements of Queensland and beyond, a collective tale of the pioneers of today’s Australian South Sea Island community is told through an abundant and effective use of materials that characterize the colonial record, including police registers, court records, prison censuses, administrative reports, legislative debates, and oral histories. With a thematic focus on the physical violence that was central to the experience of people who were voluntarily or involuntarily recruited, the history that emerges is a powerful tale that is at once both tragic and triumphant. Violence and Colonial Dialogue also tells a more universal story of colonization. Set mostly in the British settler-colony of Queensland during the last forty years of the nineteenth century, it explores the brutality embedded in the structures of a colonial state, while attempting to recover the stories that such processes obscured.

Describes the societies and cultures that evolved in the South Pacific and the changes brought by European contact

This book offers a wide-ranging survey of Australian engagement with the Pacific Islands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through over 100 hitherto largely unexplored accounts of travel, the author explores how representations of the Pacific Islands in letters, diaries, reminiscences, books, newspapers and magazines contributed to popular ideas of the Pacific Islands in Australia. It offers a range of valuable insights into continuities and changes in Australian regional perspectives, showing that ordinary Australians were more closely connected to the Pacific Islands than has previously been acknowledged. Addressing the theme of travel as a historical, literary and imaginative process, this cultural history probes issues of nation and empire, race and science, commerce and tourism by focusing on significant episodes and encounters in history. This is a foundational text for future studies of Australia’s relations with the Pacific, and histories of travel generally.