A Short History of New Guinea, Kiki. Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime: A New Guinea Autobiography, Search for New Guinea's Boundaries: From Torres Strait to the Pacific and Documents and Correspondence on New Guinea's Boundaries

1969 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 572-573
Author(s):  
Anthony Forge
Keyword(s):  
New Guinea ◽  
Short History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Torres Strait

'It is not so!' Otto Finsch, Expectations and Encounters in the Pacific, 1865 - 85

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary S. Howes
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Field Observations ◽  
Human Interface ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Torres Strait

This article focuses on the Pacific experiences of the German ornithologist and ethnologist Otto Finsch (1839?1917). Between 1879 and 1882, Finsch voyaged extensively in the Pacific, visiting Hawai?i, parts of Micronesia and island Melanesia, New Zealand, New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands. In 1884, he returned to New Guinea and was instrumental in the acquisition of Kaiser-Wilhelmsland and the Bismarck Archipelago as German protectorates.While his numerous publications on the indigenous inhabitants of these areas naturally reflect the prevailing scientific and colonial discourses of the late nineteenth century, I argue that they were also significantly shaped by his personal encounters with Pacific peoples. Through close comparisons of texts produced before, during and after his Pacific voyages, I discuss the ways in which these encounters challenged Finsch's pre-voyage assumptions about ?race' and human difference: the breadth of individual variation within supposedly homogeneous races, the extent of overlap between such races, and the reliability of particular cultural practices as diagnostics of savagery or civilization. I also emphasize links between Finsch's story and broader issues in the history of science, including the influence of observers' trajectories of travel on the constitution of regional topographies of difference, the standardization and mobilization of travellers' observations for metropolitan audiences, the human interface between discovery and communication, and the policing of scientific knowledge and interpretation of field observations by metropolitan authorities.

A Failed Experiment: Okinawan Indents and the Postwar Torres Strait Pearlshelling Industry, 1958–1963

2021 ◽  
Vol 99 ◽  
pp. 122-146
Author(s):  
Anna Shnukal
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Labor Policy ◽  
Social Characteristics ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
Immigration Restriction ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Significant Locus ◽  
Torres Strait

AbstractThroughout its European history, Australia has solved recurrent labor shortages by importing workers from overseas. Situated on shipping lanes between the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the northern Australian pearlshelling industry became a significant locus of second-wave transnational labor flows (1870–1940) and by the 1880s was dependent on indentured workers from the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Exempted from the racially discriminatory Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, indentured Asian seamen, principally Japanese, maintained the industry until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. The Torres Strait pearlshelling industry, centered on Thursday Island in Far North Queensland, resumed in 1946 amid general agreement that the Japanese must not return. Nevertheless, in 1958, 162 Okinawan pearling indents arrived on Thursday Island in a controversial attempt to restore the industry's declining fortunes. This article is intended as a contribution to the history of transnational labor movements. It consults a range of sources to document this “Okinawan experiment,” the last large-scale importation of indentured Asian labor into Australia. It examines Australian Commonwealth-state tensions in formulating and adopting national labor policy; disputes among Queensland policy makers; the social characteristics of the Okinawan cohort; and local Indigenous reactions. Also discussed are the economics of labor in the final years of the Torres Strait pearling industry. This study thus extends our knowledge of transnational labor movements and the intersection of early postwar Australian-Asian relations with Queensland Indigenous labor policy. It also foreshadows contemporary Indigenous demands for control of local marine resources.

scholarly journals The Origin and Evolution of Pacific Island Biotas, New Guinea to Eastern Polynesia: Patterns and Processes

1997 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 408
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Majer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Hot Spot ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Origin And Evolution ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Number Of Publications ◽  
Patterns And Processes ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Tropical Pacific

A number of publications have considered the biogeography of various subsets of the Pacific Region, including the earlier works by J. L. Gressitt (Pacific Basin Biogeography) and by F. J. Radovsky and others (Biogeography of the Tropical Pacific). In addition to these, substantial edited volumes have been produced on the Biogeography and Ecology of New Guinea (by J. L. Gressitt), on Biogeography and Ecology in Australia (by A. Keast), on the relationship between these two regions in Bridge and Barrier: The Natural and Cultural History of the Torres Strait (by D. Walker) and on Hawaiian Biogeography: Evolution of a Hot Spot Archipelago (by W. L. Wagner and V. A. Funk). A substantial list of papers, reviews and symposia also pertain to the biogeography of this region.

On the Far East - 1.Chi Tsui: A Short History of Chinese Civilization. (New York: Putnam, 1943. Pp. xix. 388. $4.00). - 2.Luther Carrington Goodrich: A Short History of China. (New York: Harper, 1944. Pp. xv, 260. $2.50). - 3.Owen and Eleanor Lattimore: The Maying of Modern China. (New York: Norton, 1944. Pp. 212. $2.50). - 4.Sydney Greenbie: Asia Unbound. (New York: Appleton Century, 1943. Pp. xix, 393. $3.00). - 5.Joseph Clark Grew: Ten Years in Japan. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944. Pp. xii, 554. $3.75). - 6.Otto D. Tolischus: Tokyo Record. (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1943. Pp. vi, 462. $3.00). - 7.Hillis Lory: Japan's Military Masters. (New York: Viking, 1943. Pp. vii, 256. $2.50). - 8.Leland M. Goodrich and Marie J. Carroll: Documents on American Foreign Relations. Vol. V. 1942–1943. (Boston: World Peace Foundation. Pp. 770. $3.75). - 9.War and Peace in the Pacific. (Institute of Pacific Relations, 1944. Pp. x, 164. $1.75). - 10.Owen Lattimore: America and Asia. (Claremont, California: Claremont College, 1943. Pp. vi. 52. $1.75). - ll.Eldon Griffin: Clinching the Victory. (Seattle, Washington: Wiberhilla, 1943. P. 365. $2.00).

1945 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 248-255
Author(s):  
Harley Farnsworth MacNair
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Far East ◽  
Modern China ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Short History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Institute Of Pacific Relations ◽  
American Foreign Relations

Recording Kastom

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Sound Recordings ◽  
Important Resource ◽  
Annotated Edition ◽  
Vital Interest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Torres Strait

Recording Kastom brings readers into the heart of colonial Torres Strait and New Guinea through the personal journals of Cambridge zoologist and anthropologist Alfred Haddon, who visited the region in 1888 and 1898. Haddon's published reports of these trips were hugely influential on the nascent discipline of anthropology, but his private journals and sketches have never been published in full. The journals record in vivid detail Haddon's observations and relationships. They highlight his preoccupation with documentation, and the central role played by the Islanders who worked with him to record kastom. This collaboration resulted in an enormous body of materials that remain of vital interest to Torres Strait Islanders and the communities where he worked. Haddon's Journals provide unique and intimate insights into the colonial history of the region will be an important resource for scholars in history, anthropology, linguistics and musicology. This comprehensively annotated edition assembles a rich array of photographs, drawings, artefacts, film and sound recordings. An introductory essay provides historical and cultural context. The preface and epilogue provide Islander perspectives on the historical context of Haddon’s work and its significance for the future.

scholarly journals Literature of the Pacific, Mainly Australian

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Pierce
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Pacific Ocean ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Pacific War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Australian Literature

This lecture is in some ways the ‘lost’ chapter of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009), one eventually not written because the projected author could find not enough literary material even in that vast Pacific Ocean, or perhaps found – as mariners have – only far separated specks in that ocean. Yet Australian literature about the nation’s Pacific littoral and the islands within the ocean and the ocean itself is varied, considerable, and often eccentric. Our greatest drinking song is Barry Humphries’s ‘The Old Pacific Sea’. The Japs and the jungle are the hallmarks of fiction, poetry and reportage of the Pacific War of 1942-5. New Guinea has attracted such writers as James McAuley, Peter Ryan, Trevor Shearston, Randolph Stow and Drusilla Modjeska. The short stories of Louis Becke are the most extensive and iconoclastic writing about the Pacific by any Australian. Yet the literature of the Pacific littoral seems thinner than that of the Indian Ocean. The map on the title page of Rolf Boldrewood’s A Modern Buccaneer (1894) shows those afore-mentioned specks in a vast expanse of water. What aesthetic challenges have Pacific writing posed and how have they been met? Have the waters of the Pacific satisfied Australians as a near offshore playground but defeated wider efforts of the imagination?

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document