New Zealand Books

The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding

Robert Hughes

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 56 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Cultural Amnesia 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding


By Robert Hughes

Australia is one of those faraway places you read about in National Geographic or watch on Discovery. Remote, exotic, modern yet solidly based in its history, it's a chamber of commerce promotion writer's dream. T he only country to occupy an entire continent... spanning from the Pacific to the Indian Oceans; sophisticated and modern along the coast with Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane; forbidding and undeveloped in The Outback; boasting symphonies, opera, and architecture; an outdoorsman's paradise.
Robert Hughes, the Art Critic for TIME magazine, has done an outstanding service in chronicling the rich history of his homeland.
The Australian writer has delved deeply into primary sources including diaries of those unfortunates who fell victim to the System of Transportation: the official euphemism for the forced removal of mostly minor criminals from England and (particularly) Ireland to the distant and fatal shores of the new continent.
In researching "diasporas," I've discovered artificial "homelands" for Esquimos in Canada, "Little Cubas' in Miami; the relocated Acadian ("Cajun") culture of the Mississippi delta, and new asian cultures in the American Midwest.

But Australia really qualifies: the indigenous population, the Aboriginals, like our Native Americans were run off their land, deprived of their rights, and forced to give up their culture. The rest came in rusty "Hellships" -overcrowded, prone to disease, starvation, physical and sexual abuse, it's amazing so many arrived alive.
And when they did get there they found the horrendous penal colonies of Norfolk Island and Van Diemen's Land, where they worked as indentured servants until winning freedom.
For years, Hughes tells us, Australia underwent a collective cultural amnesia about its past, sweeping the darker side of The System under the rug. But gradually they came to terms with "The convict Stain," accepting their beginnings, and in the process developing a great nation. Those who have seen the Mel Gibson movie "Gallipoli" will understand how Australia's sense of identity was forged on the hellish trenches and beaches of the First World War. As I write, Australia is celebrating "Australia Day"...not colonial day, or Queensland Day, or something else from Europe.
The Fatal Shore is first-rate history and first-rate writing. (We're lucky to have Hughes still among us: he was seriously injured and almost died after a car accident in Australia)

*****

Editorial Review:

An extraordinary volume--even a masterpiece--about the early history of Australia that reads like the finest of novels. Hughes captures everything in this complex tableau with narrative finesse that drives the reader ever-deeper into specific facts and greater understanding. He presents compassionate understanding of the plights of colonists--both freemen and convicts--and the Aboriginal peoples they displaced. One of the very best works of history I have ever read.

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story

Christina Thompson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

An extraordinary love story between a Maori man and an American woman, that inspires a graceful, revelatory search for understanding about the centuries-old collision of two wildly different cultures.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson’s marriage to a Maori man. As an American graduate student studying literature in Australia, Thompson traveled on vacation to New Zealand, where she met a Maori known as “Seven.” Their relationship was one of opposites: he was a tradesman, she an intellectual; he came from a background of rural poverty, she from one of middle-class privilege; he was a “native,” she descended directly from “colonizers.” Nevertheless, they shared a similar sense of adventure and a willingness to depart from the customs of their families and forge a life together on their own.
In this extraordinary book, which grows out of decades of research, Thompson explores the meaning of cross-cultural contact and the fascinating history of Europeans in the South Pacific, beginning with Abel Tasman’s discovery of New Zealand in 1642 and James Cook’s famous circumnavigations of 1769–79. Transporting us back and forth in time and around the world, from Australia to Hawaii to tribal NewZealand and finally to a house in New England that has ghosts of its own, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All brings to life a lush variety of characters and settings. Yet at its core, it is the story of two
people who, in making a life and a family together, bridge the gap between two worlds.

Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World

Joan Druett

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.

In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave—rather than succumb to this dismal fate—inspires his men to take action. With barely more than their bare hands, they build a cabin and, remarkably, a forge, where they manufacture their tools. Under Musgrave's leadership, they band together and remain civilized through even the darkest and most terrifying days.

Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island—twenty miles of impassable cliffs and chasms away—the Invercauld wrecks during a horrible storm. Nineteen men stagger ashore. Unlike Captain Musgrave, the captain of the Invercauld falls apart given the same dismal circumstances. His men fight and split up; some die of starvation, others turn to cannibalism. Only three survive. Musgrave and all of his men not only endure for nearly two years, they also plan their own astonishing escape, setting off on one of the most courageous sea voyages in history.

Using the survivors' journals and historical records, award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett brings this extraordinary untold story to life, a story about leadership and the fine line between order and chaos.

The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban

Sarah Chayes

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Interesting but poorly written 1 out of 5 stars.
5 of 9 people found this review helpful.

An utterly confusing account of the war in Afghanistan. Its merit is that it gives the reader a probably realistic impression of the complexity and intransparency of Afghan politics and history...nothing is what it seems. Its flaws are chronological disorder, personal grudges and reporter-centrism...("look at me getting the real dope against all odds" and "look at me, the only sensitive observer").

Editorial Review:

As a former star reporter for NPR, Sarah Chayes developed a devoted listenership for her on-site reports on conflicts around the world. In The Punishment of Virtue, she reveals the misguided U.S. policy in Afghanistan in the wake of the defeat of the Taliban, which has severely undermined the effort to build democracy and allowed corrupt tribal warlords back into positions of power and the Taliban to re-infiltrate the country. This is an eyeopening chronicle that highlights the often infuriating realities of a vital front in the war on terror, exposing deeper, fundamental problems with current U.S. strategy.

A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

Thomas Keneally

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Most interesting "history lesson" 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The author of Schindler's List brings us his 37th book, a history of the four years during which white Australia was born. Thomas Keneally competes with Robert Hughes' epic history of Australia's origin that covers a span of 80 years, chronicling the white settlers as oppressive. But Keneally's fresh, novelistic history has found its own place in Australian historiography; it scrutinizes a short time period, providing a multifaceted and profound study of the historical characters that birthed Australia.

Midwife to this birth was Great Britain, who sent a captain of her royal navy, Arthur Phillip, to oversee as governor a penal-colony experiment with 759 thieves, prostitutes, and criminal children. The poorly planned experiment could have easily become a disaster, had Phillip not been both authoritative and compassionate. Ultimately, Keneally admits bewilderment as to the true nature of Phillip, the narrative's potential hero, given his "nature so complex and hidden behind official formality."

Keneally illuminates the white settlement against the backdrop of the then virtually unknown Aborigines, whose contact with the criminal settlers kept tension high. The useful historiographical theme of dichotomy between two cultures takes shape here, with Keneally's description of the Aboriginal worldview, and his admission of its impossible incongruence with the intent of the Empire to colonize and cultivate.

Keneally tactfully narrates the clashes between the two discordant populations without romanticizing either, portraying with equal emphasis the contrasting barbarity and decency both groups exhibited. For example, Phillip's would-be-hero counterpart, Woolaware Bennelong, captured as an Aboriginal translator, assisted the white settlers after his escape, to the point that he was finally disowned by his own people.

Keneally's tactful tone has its own purpose. Where Hughes' history did not hesitate to weigh in against the colonial invaders, Keneally sustains his narrative along the middle ground, allowing Australians to realize their heritage as less melodramatic, and oppressive.

With Phillip's return to England after his term, Australians were left without a founding father-figure. Keneally's history fills in that gap, with assurances from Keneally that he can make out a positive resemblance between the first governor's pragmatism and thoroughness, and that of the country today.

Armchair Interviews says: Very well-done history.

Editorial Review:

In this spirited history of the remarkable first four years of the convict settlement of Australia, Thomas Keneally offers us a human view of a fascinating piece of history.

Combining the authority of a renowned historian with a brilliant narrative flair, Keneally gives us an inside view of this unprecedented experiment from the perspective of the new colony’s governor, Arthur Phillips. Using personal journals and documents, Keneally re-creates the hellish overseas voyage and the challenges Phillips faced upon arrival: unruly convicts, disgruntled officers, bewildered and hostile natives, food shortages, and disease. He also offers captivating portrayals of Aborigines and of convict settlers who were determined to begin their lives anew. A Commonwealth of Thieves immerses us in the fledgling penal colony and conjures up the thrills and hardships of those first four improbable years.

In a Sunburned Country

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 409 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Bill Bryson follows his Appalachian amble, A Walk in the Woods, with the story of his exploits in Australia, where A-bombs go off unnoticed, prime ministers disappear into the surf, and cheery citizens coexist with the world's deadliest creatures: toxic caterpillars, aggressive seashells, crocodiles, sharks, snakes, and the deadliest of them all, the dreaded box jellyfish. And that's just the beginning, as Bryson treks through sunbaked deserts and up endless coastlines, crisscrossing the "under-discovered" Down Under in search of all things interesting.

Bryson, who could make a pile of dirt compelling--and yes, Australia is mostly dirt--finds no shortage of curiosities. When he isn't dodging Portuguese man-of-wars or considering the virtues of the remarkable platypus, he visits southwest Gippsland, home of the world's largest earthworms (up to 12 feet in length). He discovers that Australia, which began nationhood as a prison, contains the longest straight stretch of railroad track in the world (297 miles), as well as the world's largest monolith (the majestic Uluru) and largest living thing (the Great Barrier Reef). He finds ridiculous place names: "Mullumbimby Ewylamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong," and manages to catch a cricket game on the radio, which is like

listening to two men sitting in a rowboat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren't biting; it's like having a nap without losing consciousness. It actually helps not to know quite what's going on. In such a rarefied world of contentment and inactivity, comprehension would become a distraction.

"You see," Bryson observes, "Australia is an interesting place. It truly is. And that really is all I'm saying." Of course, Bryson--who is as much a travel writer here as a humorist, naturalist, and historian--says much more, and does so with generous amounts of wit and hilarity. Australia may be "mostly empty and a long way away," but it's a little closer now. --Rob McDonald

The Explorers: Stories of Discovery and Adventure from the Australian Frontier

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A mark on history 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 10 people found this review helpful.

Australia's small history makes a book like this diffifult to stay interested in. Of course, we are a lucky country fortunate enough to have prospered from these fine explorers and Flannery captures this brilliantly. But there is a time when the discoveries of a new animal or native remind the reader of how quickly one can lose their mind to something else as one can't help but take it for granted or compare their countries history with one far greater and more enlightening from a place such as Great Britain or America. However, Flannery is aiming to make Australian history sit right up there amongst the cream of the crop for a rich past - we as the reader know this isn't possible but feel a sense of pride in what these explorers did to help develop our free and thriving country. The author does not have much to contribute within the book. He writes a few brief footnotes or may stretch himself to an introduction of a small to mid paragraph for each. Yet, we must remind ourselves this is a history book so there is not much room for creativity. I suggest this book is worthwhile for someone passionate or interested in the Australian history, but if you are made to read this whether it be school or uni do it in sections. Otherwise, you will find it tedious. In the end you will find it rewarding - especially (as an Australian resident) when you next visit Botany Bay, Cape York or wherever it may be.......you will stop and think at just how lucky we are.

Editorial Review:

A lively collection of extraordinary stories of adventure and discovery Explorers tells the epic saga of the conquest and settlement of Australia. Editor Tim Flannery selects sixty-seven accounts that convey the sense of wonder and discovery, along with the human dimensions of struggle and deprivation, which occurred in the exploration of the last continent to be fully mapped by Europeans. Beginning with the story of Dutch captain Willem Janz's 1606 expedition at Cape York -- the bloody outcome of which would sadly foreshadow future relations between colonists and Aboriginal peoples -- and running through Robyn Davidson's 1977 camelback ride through the desolate Outback deserts Explorers bristles with the enterprise that Flannery explains as "heroic, for nowhere else did explorers face such an obdurate country."

Wise Women of the Dreamtime: Aboriginal Tales of the Ancestral Powers

K. Langloh Parker

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Aboriginal Stories 5 out of 5 stars.
97 of 98 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book with the hope of finding something more authentic than some of the more popular books on Australian Aboriginal culture I'd read. Though these stories have been collected, translated and compiled by Anglo Australians, my impression is that the authenticity of these stories has been retained. I do believe my authenticity-meter is pretty accurate. However, I have no authority on the subject, and would love to see a review here from someone who does. In absence of such, I hope my review is helpful to others.

Each story is followed by Johanna Lambert's commentary. Lambert draws parallels between concepts in these stories, and myths of other cultures. She also explains the contextual beliefs of Aboriginal people in a way that I found helpful and seems respectful to me. At times the psychoanalytical perspective seems a bit forced when applied to these stories and Aboriginal culture in general. I wonder if psychoanalysis is universal enough to be applicable to something so ancient and whole in and of itself. For the most part, though, I found the analysis helpful, and if you don't, you can just read the stories and skip the analysis which follows.

If your exposure to Aboriginal culture from the women's perspective is limited to Lynn Andrews or Marlo Morgan, I highly recommend you read this book. Also a great book for anthropologists and students of shamanism or global spirituality. Or, if you enjoyed "Rabbit-Proof Fence," if you just like to hear about different perspectives than your own or want to understand the various people of the world, this book is for you. Recommended.

~heidimo

Editorial Review:

Women's stories from the world's oldest tradition, this collection of Australian Aboriginal myths was compiled at the turn of the century by K. Langloh Parker, one of the first Europeans to realize their significance. Here, women tell of their own ceremonies, relationships, and behavioral codes, bringing into focus the Aboriginal world view, in which humanity and nature exist in balance and harmony. (Inner Traditions International)

We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific (Revised)

David Lewis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

An academic book by a knowledgable navigator 4 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This book is written by an academic. I don't necessarily mean this in a negative sense. The author has done a very thorough research on the topic and presented his findings. The effect is a book that can be called a comprehensive treatment as far as it can be done given that the practictioners are disappearing fast.
The downside is that it can send you to sleep as the author systematically compares how the navigational techniques are practiced in the various island groups.

The strength of the book is not only its thoroughness but also the fact that the author is a skilled sailor who has gone on trips using these techniques. This makes the material so much more authentic, because the reader can relate how effective these skills are and yet how much practice they require.

The author provides commentary on many practices and relates them to our modern day knowledge. An example was their ability to recognize the impact of sub surface currents, something that is today a rather specialist piece of knowledge not available to the everyday sailor.

Editorial Review:

This new edition includes a discussion of theories about traditional methods of navigation developed during the past two decades, the story of the renaissance of star navigation throughout the Pacific, and material about navigation systems in Indonesia, Siberia, and the Indian Ocean.

The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People

Tim Flannery

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Humans first settled the islands of Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and New Guinea some sixty millennia ago, and as they had elsewhere across the globe, immediately began altering the environment by hunting and trapping animals and gathering fruits and vegetables. In this illustrated iconoclastic ecological history, acclaimed scientist and historian Tim Flannery follows the environment of the islands through the age of dinosaurs to the age of mammals and the arrival of humanity on its shores, to the coming of European colonizers and the advent of the industrial society that would change nature's balance forever. Penetrating, gripping, and provocative, The Future Eaters is a dramatic narrative history that combines natural history, anthropology, and ecology on an epic scale. "Flannery tells his beautiful story in plain language, science-popularizing at its Antipodean best." -- Times Literary Supplement "Like the present-day incarnation of some early-nineteenth-century explorer-scholar, Tim Flannery refuses to be fenced in." -- Time