Pacific

"Disturbing History focuses on Fiji's people and their agency in responding to and engaging the multifarious forms of authority and power that were manifest in the colony from 1874 to 1914. By concentrating on the lives of ordinary Fijians, the book presents alternate ways of reconstructing the island's past. Couched in the traditions of social, subaltern, and people's histories, the study is an excavation of a large mass of material that tells the often moving stories of lives that have largely been overlooked by historians. These challenge conventional historical accounts that tend to celebrate the nation, represent Fiji's colonial experience as ordered and peaceful, or British tutelage as benevolent. In its contribution to postcolonial theory, Disturbing History reveals resistance as a constant but partial and untidy mix of other constituents such as collaboration, consent, appropriation, and opportunism, which together form the colonial landscape

In 1962, a Sāmoan family journeyed to New Zealand - a country immigrants once called 'the land of milk and honey' - in search of a better life. Instead, their eldest son, Vitale, arrived in an era of dawn raids by police and immigration officials, and endless racism and bullying at school. Yet he endured and, against the odds, grew up to become one of a select few civilians to pass New Zealand's elite SAS selection process. After seven years in the army, Vitale scaled impressive heights to become tactical commander of the police special tactics group, commander of the armed offenders squad, head of dignitary and witness protection, and one of New Zealand's most decorated policemen

Offering a fresh look at Oceania that incorporates new scholarship and perspectives from Indigenous voices, this book uses art to explore histories of expression and aesthetic innovation that epitomize this vast and expansive region.   The visual arts of Oceania tell a wealth of dynamic stories about origins, ancestral power, performance, and initiation. This publication explores the deeply rooted connections between Austronesian-speaking peoples, whose ancestral homelands span Island Southeast Asia, Australia, Papua New Guinea, and the island archipelagoes of the northern and eastern Pacific

This epic story begins 5000 years ago, when the ancestors of Polynesians discovered ways to 'see' over the horizon to find and settle new islands. As their landfinding skills grew, these people took ever bigger strides across the vast Pacific until they reached South America. It was not until almost every habitable island scattered across the world's largest ocean was discovered and settled, that others would gain the skills and courage to head far from shore, allowing two great voyaging traditions to meet

Delving into Pacific spaces from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interpretations, this book looks at how the anthropological and architectural can be connected. The contributors to this book – architectural practitioners, architectural and spatial design theorists, anthropologists and historians – show not only how new theoretical perspectives can arise out of comparing aspects specific to one discipline with their equivalents of another, but also demonstrate how a space of emergence is created for something that goes beyond both, enhancing both fields of potentialities

This book offers a state-of-the-art and fully detailed chronological narrative of how Pacific Oceania came to be inhabited over a long time scale, posing fundamental questions both for Pacific Oceania and for global archaeology. asks how and why did this vast sea of islands come to be inhabited over the last several millennia, transcending significant change in ecology, demography, and society?

In 2019, Solomon Islands made international headlines when the country severed its decades-old alliance with Taiwan in exchange for a partnership with Beijing. The decision prompted international condemnation and terrified Australian security experts, who feared Australia's historical Pacific advantage would come unstuck. This development is often framed as another example of China's inevitable capture of the region -- but this misrepresents how and why the decision was made, and how Solomon Islanders have skilfully leveraged global angst over China to their own ends. Edward Cavanough explains how the switch played out on the ground and its extraordinary potential consequences

"Histories of our Pacific world are richly rendered in these essays by Damon Salesa. From the first Indigenous civilisations that flourished in Oceania to the colonial encounters of the nineteenth century, and on to the complex contemporary relationships between New Zealand and the Pacific, Salesa offers new perspectives on this vast ocean – its people, its cultures, its pasts and its future. Spanning a wide range of topics, from race and migration to Pacific studies and empire, these essays demonstrate Salesa’s remarkable scholarship

Robert Norton's Race and Politics in Fiji, first published in 1977, drew upon the author's fieldwork in Fiji to develop the first serious and sustained study of politics in Fiji