*Includes pictures *Includes contemporary accounts A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained almost entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. From there, however, the subjugation of Australia would take place rapidly. Within 20 years of the first British settlements being established, the British presence in Terra Australis was secure, and no other major power was likely to mount a challenge. In 1815, Napoleon would be defeated at Waterloo, and soon afterwards would be standing on the barren cliffs of Saint Helena, staring across the limitless Atlantic. The French, without a fleet, were out of the picture, the Germans were yet to establish a unified state, let alone an overseas empire of any significance, and the Dutch were no longer counted among the top tier of European powers. In 1769, Captain James Cook's historic expedition in the region would lead to an English claim on Australia, but before he reached Australia, he sailed near New Zealand and spent weeks mapping part of New Zealand's coast. Thus, he was also one of the first to observe and take note of the indigenous peoples of the two islands. His instructions from the Admiralty were to endeavor at all costs to cultivate friendly relations with tribes and peoples he might encounter, and to regard any native people as the natural and legal possessors of any land they were found to occupy. Cook, of course, was not engaged on an expedition of colonization, so when he encountered for the first time a war party of Maori, he certainly had no intention of challenging their overlordship of Aotearoa, although he certainly was interested in discovering more about them. Taking into account similarities of appearance, customs and languages spread across a vast region of scattered islands, it was obvious that the Polynesian race emerged from a single origin, and that origin Cook speculated was somewhere in the Malay Peninsula or the "East Indies." In this regard, he was not too far from the truth. The origins of the Polynesian race have been fiercely debated since then, and it was only relatively recently, through genetic and linguistic research, that it can now be stated with certainty that the Polynesian race originated on the Chinese mainland and the islands of Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. Oceania was, indeed, the last major region of the Earth to be penetrated and settled by people, and Polynesia was the last region of Oceania to be inhabited. The vehicle of this expansion was the outrigger canoe, and aided by tides and wind patterns, a migration along the Malay Archipelago, and across the wide expanses of the South Pacific, began sometime between 3000 and 1000 BCE, reaching the western Polynesian Islands in about 900 BCE. That said, the 19th century certainly wasn't exciting for the people who already lived in Australia. The history of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, known in contemporary anthropology as the "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of Australia," is a complex and continually evolving field of study, and it has been colored by politics. For generations after the arrival of whites in Australia, the Aboriginal people were disregarded and marginalized, largely because they offered little in the way of a labor resource, and they occupied land required for European settlement. At the same time, it is a misconception that indigenous Australians meekly accepted the invasion of their country by the British, for they did not. They certainly resisted, but as far as colonial wars during that era went, the frontier conflicts of Australia did not warrant a great deal of attention.

The aboriginal people of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand became minorities in their own countries in the nineteenth century. The expanding British Empire had its own vision for the future of these peoples, which was expressed in 1837 by the Select Committee on Aborigines of the House of Commons. It was a vision of the steps necessary for them to become civilized, Christian, and citizens -- in a word, assimilated. This book provides the first systematic and comparative treatment of the social policy of assimilation that was followed in these three countries. The recommendations of the 1837 committee were broadly followed by each of the three countries, but there were major differences in the means that were used. Australia began with a denial of the aboriginal presence, Canada began establishing a register of all 'status' Indians, and New Zealand began by giving all Maori British citizenship.

Revealing the forgotten stories of Aboriginal convicts, this book describes how they lived, labored, were punished, and died. Profiling several of the 130 Aboriginal convicts who were transported to and within the Australian penal colonies, this collection features the journeys of Aboriginal warriors Bulldog and Musquito, Maori warrior Hohepa Te Umuroa, and Khoisan soldier Booy Piet.

In this collection of Patricia Grace's stories we meet the sky people, those under the guardianship of Ranginui and Sky Parent, who are the unwanted, the dispossessed, the wounded in love. But shining through even the darkest human condition is the light to which sky people everywhere aspire. To love and in turn be loved; to create and to belong; even, perhaps, to fly. Also available as an eBook

How did those responsible for creating Britain's nineteenth-century settler empire render colonization compatible with humanitarianism? Avoiding a cynical or celebratory response, this book takes seriously the humane disposition of colonial officials, examining the relationship between humanitarian governance and empire. The story of 'humane' colonial governance connects projects of emancipation, amelioration, conciliation, protection and development in sites ranging from British Honduras through Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales, New Zealand and Canada to India. It is seen in the lives of governors like George Arthur and George Grey, whose careers saw the violent and destructive colonization of indigenous peoples at the hands of British emigrants. The story challenges the exclusion of officials' humanitarian sensibilities from colonial history and places the settler colonies within the larger historical context of Western humanitarianism.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.

This book details the interactions between the Seeds of Rangiatea, New Zealand’s Maori people of Polynesian origin, and Europe from 1769 to 1900. It provides a case-study of the way Imperial era contact and colonization negatively affected naturally evolving demographic/epidemiologic transitions and imposed economic conditions that thwarted development by precursor peoples, wherever European expansion occurred. In doing so, it questions the applicability of conventional models for analyses of colonial histories of population/health and of development. The book focuses on, and synthesizes, the most critical parts of the story, the health and population trends, and the economic and social development of Maori. It adopts demographic methodologies, most typically used in developing countries, which allow the mapping of broad changes in Maori society, particularly their survival as a people. The book raises general theoretical questions about how populations react to the introduction of diseases to which they have no natural immunity. Another more general theoretical issue is what happens when one society’s development processes are superseded by those of some more powerful force, whether an imperial power or a modern-day agency, which has ingrained ideas about objectives and strategies for development. Finally, it explores how health and development interact. The Maori experience of contact and colonization, lasting from 1769 to circa 1900, narrated here, is an all too familiar story for many other territories and populations, Natives and former colonists. This book provides a case-study with wider ramifications for theory in colonial history, development studies, demography, anthropology and other fields.