Collection of 13 essays about people who lived in the Pacific Islands during the past 150 years.

WATRIAMA AND CO (the title echoes Kipling's STALKY AND CO!) is a collection of biographical essays about people associated with the Pacific Islands. It covers a period of almost a century and a half. However, the individual stories of first-hand experience converge to some extent in various ways so as to present a broadly coherent picture of 'Pacific History'. In this, politics, economics and religion overlap. So, too, do indigenous cultures and concerns; together with the activities and interests of the Europeans who ventured into the Pacific and who had a profound, widespread and enduring impact there from the nineteenth century, and who also prompted reactions from the Island peoples. Not least significant in this process is the fact that the Europeans generated a 'paper trail' through which their stories and those of the Islanders (who also contributed to their written record) can be known. Thus, not only are the subjects of the essays to be encountered personally, and within a contextual kinship, but the way in which the past has shaped the future is clearly discernible. Watriama himself features in various historical narratives. So, too, certain of his confreres in this collection, which is the product of several decades of exploring the Pacific past in archives, by sea, and on foot through most of Oceania.

This book tackles photography’s role during Robert Louis Stevenson’s travels throughout the Pacific Island region and is the first study of his family’s previously unpublished photographs. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, the book integrates photographs with letters, non-fiction, and poetry, and includes much unpublished material. The original readings of photographs and non-fiction highlight Stevenson’s engagement with colonial ideology and reality and advance new arguments about Victorian travel, settlement, and colonialisms in the Pacific. Like the Stevensons, the book moves from the Marquesas to the atolls of the Gilbert Islands in Micronesia; from the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s political ambitions to Samoan plantations and the Stevensons’ settlement at Vailima. Central to this study is the notion that Pacific history and Pacific Island cultures matter to the interpretation of Stevenson's work, and a rigorous historical and cultural contextualization ensures that local details structure literary and photographic interpretation. The book’s historical grounding is key to its insightful conclusions regarding travel, settlement, photography, and colonialism.

Photographing Papua is a study of photography in the public domain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that southeastern New Guinea, known as British New Guinea and then as Papua when it became an Australian colony, was created as a geographical place through visual representation in illustrated magazines and newspapers, lavishly illustrated travelogues and mission hagiography, serial encyclopedia, lantern slides and postcards. Readers :knew" Papua because many thousands of black and white photographs of Papuans, villages and material culture rapidly swamped the reading public once the process of halftone, newsprint reproduction became possible. In an innovative and breakthrough fashion Photographing Papua switches attention from a few well known prints in museums and archives, in some cases repeatedly reproduced, but mostly rarely seen outside of scientific and scholarly circles. It deals instead with thousands of photographs, often used in ways not intended when the photograph was taken, but which editors and publishers (and subsequent photographers) gradually made conform to an iconographic imperative, a sort of abbreviated visual gallery of "natives" and a quick-access pathway to the actual and imagined lives of Papuans in the "last Unknown" as New Guinea was titled. It is a study of representation, colonialism, cross-cultural encounters and the early world of illustrated media and photo-journalism.

Reproduction électronique of a selection of photographs from the papers of the Reverend George Brown, held at the State Library of New South Wales. The images include portraits of Pacific Islanders, and scenes of village and mission life.

Electronic reproduction of a selection of photographs from the papers of the Reverend George Brown, held at the State Library of New South Wales. The images include portraits of Pacific Islanders, and scenes of village and mission life.

An encyclopaedia of information on major aspects of Pacific life, including the physical environment, peoples, history, politics, economy, society and culture. The CD-ROM contains hyperlinks between section titles and sections, a library of all the maps in the encyclopaedia, and a photo library.