Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

18 results

Decolonisation and the Pacific
  • Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire
  • Tracey Banivanua Mar
  • Published online:
    05 June 2016
    Print publication:
    26 April 2016
  • This book charts the previously untold story of decolonisation in the oceanic world of the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, presenting it both as an indigenous and an international phenomenon. Tracey Banivanua Mar reveals how the inherent limits of decolonisation were laid bare by the historical peculiarities of colonialism in the region, and demonstrates the way imperial powers conceived of decolonisation as a new form of imperialism. She shows how Indigenous peoples responded to these limits by developing rich intellectual, political and cultural networks transcending colonial and national borders, with localised traditions of protest and dialogue connected to the global ferment of the twentieth century. The individual stories told here shed new light on the forces that shaped twentieth-century global history, and reconfigure the history of decolonisation, presenting it not as an historic event, but as a fragile, contingent and ongoing process continuing well into the postcolonial era.

  • 1 - Borders

  • Tracey Banivanua Mar, La Trobe University, Victoria
  • Book:
    Decolonisation and the Pacific
    Published online:
    05 June 2016
    Print publication:
    26 April 2016, pp 22-47
    • Chapter
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation

  • 14 - Indigenous and settler relations

  • from PART II
  • Edited by Alison Bashford, University of Sydney, Stuart Macintyre, University of Melbourne
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Australia
    Published online:
    05 November 2013
    Print publication:
    02 August 2013, pp 342-366

  • Summary

    At the close of the eighteenth century, contact between Aboriginal people and Europeans was localised along coastal regions of the continent. Penal settlements at Port Jackson and in Van Diemen's Land sat at the edge of vast Aboriginal worlds. The crown's Instructions to Governor Phillip were to ‘endeavour by every possible means to open an Intercourse with the Natives and to conciliate their affections’, ‘to live in amity and kindness with them’, and to ‘punish’ those who would ‘wantonly destroy them’. But small British military garrisons and coastal settlements were unstable contact zones in which rituals of diplomacy could mix easily with aggression. Contact, conciliation and conflict would always be closely intertwined.

    Newcomers often depended on Indigenous knowledge for their survival. Acts of curiosity, accord and handshakes could be performed by British and Aboriginal people and then followed swiftly by ritualised acts of judicial violence: a highly choreographed British hanging, for example, or a closely sequenced Aboriginal spearing. In the early years, when debates over the reach of British sovereignty were in flux, the British responded to conflict with Aboriginal people in localised and disparate ways, and it was nearly half a century before the authority claimed by the British crown was settled legal doctrine.

    Aboriginal people experienced the arrival of British colonists as an invasion. First contact was accompanied by the transmission of new diseases, which travelled ahead of the physical frontier along Indigenous trading and cultural networks. In 1789 smallpox devastated Aboriginal populations in the Port Jackson, Botany Bay and Broken Bay regions. Some scholars estimate that up to 80 per cent of the population died in the Sydney region, causing massive social and cultural disruption. Smallpox spread inland and later moved along river systems, decimating networks of people on the Murray and Darling rivers.

  • Cannibalism and Colonialism: Charting Colonies and Frontiers in Nineteenth-Century Fiji

  • Tracey Banivanua-Mar
  • Journal:
    Comparative Studies in Society and History / Volume 52 / Issue 2 / April 2010
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    22 April 2010, pp. 255-281

  • In my family, stories of our Fijian ancestors' cannibalism have been irreverently recycled in tale-telling moments laced with both solemnity and the absurd. I never seriously questioned the reality of the stories, accepting instead their mythical quality and their underlying social allegory. With almost a wink and a nudge these tales of past cannibalism come to life as fables that nearly always taper off into the redemption of being civilized. As I explore in this article, for us as for many who engage cannibal stories, cannibalism refers to more than the cultural practice of anthropophagy. In the wake of William Arens' provocative critique of this meta-myth, it has become more difficult in recent years to uncritically accept and repeat claims of other peoples' cannibalism. Studies by a generation of scholars of history and culture have ensured that the study of cannibalism now is as likely to interrogate those that view and seek it, as it is to examine those reputed to practice it. Anthropologies of tourism and cultural critiques too have cemented its conceptualization as an enduring discourse of savagery.