Bøger om Oceania

'Darkly funny, astute, timely' Sofie Laguna, author of The Eye of the Sheep'Powerful, restless, irresistible' Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in That CountryA black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman's struggle to be free.When Winona Dalloway begins her day - in the peaceful early hours before her children, that 'tiny tornado of little hands and feet', wake up - she doesn't know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices - a mind both wild and precise.And meanwhile, a storm is brewing ...

Two Tongue World is a richly evocative collection of poems by the Greek/Australian poet, Maria Koukouva. Sub titled, The Diaspora Dialogues, the poems are indeed a dialogue between past and present, between the cultures of origin and upbringing, between the generations of a family.Deeply personal, these poems will strike a chord with everyone affected by the migrant experience and will enlighten and enthrall those who have not had to live through the upheaval of migration. Koukouva unflinchingly confronts the pain and exultation of growing up in the baffling world of the new migrant. She chronicles her growing up at once enveloped and estranged from the culture of her origin, the pain of trying to fit into a new world, and the maturation of a love and acceptance of the cultures, new and old, which have shaped her.This is an important collection. Koukouva brings a wonderfully sharp observation to her poems. They are at once clever, poignant, loving, enraged, joyful, and profound.

3 drops of oil in the navel, and thus improve or maintain its health.... sounds simple, is simple.The navel is the first organ formed during the formation of man. Through it we receive all vital nutrients in the womb. It is connected to over 72,000 veins throughout the body. We in the western part of this earth have simply forgotten how important this part of the body is. Therefore, we should revive this ancient and original treatment and strengthen our self-healing powers to regain and maintain our health - with only 2 minutes a day.

'Who would not want to time-travel through the night sky? This is exactly what Carmel Summers offers us in her latest book Lost in the Pleiades. This is much more than a collection of verse - it is a compilation of careful poetic research into a cluster of stars that has fascinated humanity since its ¿rst discovery. Summers takes us through the present and mythological past in a journey of awe as it we learn to read star maps and explore the mysteries of the Pleiades. There is plenty of whimsical beauty in this collection. Venus photobombs the Seven Sisters. Joanna Lumley attends a hypothetical Javanese sacred dance. Galileo writes a treatise. We revisit a childhood fairy tale. This selection of poetry is Carmel Summers' best yet. She has a gift for choosing the most appropriate form for each poem and her writing is humorous, poignant, wildly exciting and always respectful. It's a must for every bookcase. Lost in the Pleiades twinkles with wonder like Jane Taylor's well known children's poem. I'm still hankering after that Seven Sisters bracelet with Orion's stone set in the middle!' - Hazel Hall, Australian poet and musicologist'Lost in the Pleiades by Carmel Summers is a stylistically diverse and meditative poetic exploration of the seven sister jewels in the night sky. She brings a feminist perspective to historical sources and mythological tales that have woven stories around the constellation of the Pleiades. From Galileo to the Australian First Peoples, we are taken on an historical and geographic journey that is yet deeply personal and reflective of contemporary life. We are invited to look heavenward to see "those lost girls glow and glitter" and to realise that "they shine to remind us - to love".' - Julie Thorndyke

Awakened in Australia is a short travel memoir recounting Lisa Rosmeissl's, owner of Boomerang Escapes, first visit to Australia. Her tale shares her experiences and the people she met over ten days in Australia, from her arrival in Sydney to her departure in Melbourne. This tale will inspire you to visit this destination and travel more.

"Ellen Anderson's Aboriginal Dreaming stories, as recorded by C.W. Peck in the 1920s and 1930s, evidence the rich oral tradition of the Indigenous people of eastern Australia. Dealing with plants and animals, the physical environment, cultural practices and historic events, they open a window into a civilisation distinguished by its close association with Country."Michael Organ introduces us to an original storyteller from the NSW Illawarra district.

Three cheeky kookaburras named Larry, Sophia and Ben live at Burrinja Park, and love to cause mischief for the families who picnic there!

One River is a series of haibun studies of the Hunter River and its tributaries. Haibun is a Japanese poetic form of prose punctuated by haiku. In this instance, the longer, but still brief, Korean sijo are employed as lively sketches of the birds, trees, weather and waterways encountered in the author's wanderings. The heart of this book are unique meditations on the river and its hinterland. In their whimsical complexity - and leaps of imagination - they are an immersive experience, inviting the reader to find flow in the limber movements of water falling.

Biography of Joseph Jenkins (1818-98) who left his family and successful farm in Wales to travel Australia as a farm labourer. His self-improvement through reading led to prizes for his poetry, and his diary is one of the most celebrated sources of information about life in rural Australia then.

Award-winning author Alecia Simmonds uncovers a hidden history of love and heartbreak in the archives of law Until well into the twentieth century, heartbroken men and women in Australia had a legal redress for their suffering: jilted lovers could claim compensation for 'breach of promise to marry'. Hundreds of people, mostly from the working classes, came before the courts, and their stories give us a tantalising insight into the romantic landscape of the past - where couples met, how they courted, and what happened when flirtations turned sour. In packed courtrooms and breathless newspaper reports, love letters were read as contracts and private gifts and gossip scrutinised as evidence.In Courting, Alecia Simmonds brings these stories vividly to life, revealing the entangled histories of love and the law. Over the long arc of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pre-industrial romantic customs gave way to middle-class respectability, women used the courts to assert their rights, and the law eventually retreated from people's romantic lives - with women, Simmonds argues, losing out in the process. Challenging our preconceptions about how previous generations loved and lost, and prompting fascinating questions about the ethics of love today, Courting is a transcontinental journey into the most intimate corners of the past.'Enthralling and compelling' - Anne Summers'A beautifully written account of the trials and tribulations of romantic love across the centuries. Delightful and engrossing, Courting is filled with stories of infatuation, deception and heartbreak, as well as the legal, moral and gendered regulation of betrothal and marriage. This is history richly told.' - Anna Clark, author of Making Australian History'Original and provocative, witty and wise, Alecia Simmonds' Courting is an example of the new Australian history at its finest. Diving deep into legal records, this illuminating book explores the changing relationships between men and women, love and law, as enacted in courtship and courtrooms over two centuries ... Women are the key actors in these entangled stories as they seek legal avenues for redress and compensation for material harm and lacerated feelings. In a powerful conclusion, Simmonds ponders on what has been lost in legal reform and the ambiguities of feminist progress.' - Marilyn Lake'In this marvellously engaging history, Alecia Simmonds takes us through a sparkling collection of stories in which the path of true love - or what was sometimes mistaken for it - led not to the altar but to the courtroom.'-Frank Bongiorno

On the East Coast of New Zealand's South Island there is a town called Timaru. The name derives from the Māori phrase te-tihi-o-maru meaning 'a place of shelter'. It's place of shipwrecks and cabbage trees, smoky pubs and volcanic shores, and it's where Brent Cantwell's first collection of poetry begins.Tether takes its inspiration from this shaken landscape, exploring the fault lines that rumble between friends and family as they move and migrate, as they tether vast distances small. Whether it's Timaru, or Turnpike Lane, or Tamborine Mountain on the Gold Coast Hinterland, at its heart lies a possibility: a connection to place, to the past and to each other. Each poem is a 'place of shelter'.

The book is set within the Brigalow Belt North bioregion, approximately 855kms northwest of Brisbane in Central Queensland, where you find one of the last remaining habitats of the critically endangered northern hairy nosed wombat.

A brief pocketbook account of my visit to the Independent State of Sāmoa, with tips for other travellers. Despite living in New Zealand all her life and travelling to a hundred different countries, I had never been to Sāmoa, even though it is only a few hours from New Zealand by jet. Finally, in 2023, I caught up with these beautiful islands and wondered why I didn't do so earlier!

Roundabout, life's journey, memories, and contemplation that rest on small shelves of my dreams. At times seem mundane yet somehow remain catalogued, until in the stutter of nights connect come selected through a sepia of drift. And so a roundabout of dreams interrupt my day, demand storage in folds of writing.

The true, harrowing story of the ill-fated 1913 Canadian Arctic Expedition and the two men who came to define it.In the summer of 1913, the wooden-hulled brigantine Karluk departed Canada for the Arctic Ocean. At the helm was Captain Bob Bartlett, considered the world's greatest living ice navigator. The expedition's visionary leader was a flamboyant impresario named Vilhjalmur Stefansson hungry for fame.Just six weeks after the Karluk departed, giant ice floes closed in around her. As the ship became icebound, Stefansson disembarked with five companions and struck out on what he claimed was a 10-day caribou hunting trip. Most on board would never see him again.Twenty-two men and an Inuit woman with two small daughters now stood on a mile-square ice floe, their ship and their original leader gone. Under Bartlett's leadership they built make-shift shelters, surviving the freezing darkness of Polar night. Captain Bartlett now made a difficult and courageous decision. He would take one of the young Inuit hunters and attempt a 1000-mile journey to save the shipwrecked survivors. It was their only hope.Set against the backdrop of the Titanic disaster and World War I, filled with heroism, tragedy, and scientific discovery, Buddy Levy's Empire of Ice and Stone tells the story of two men and two distinctively different brands of leadership-one selfless, one self-serving-and how they would forever be bound by one of the most audacious and disastrous expeditions in polar history, considered the last great voyage of the Heroic Age of Discovery.

In every generation since the legendary 'whale rider', a male descendant inherits the title of chief. But now there is no male heir-there's only Kahu. She should be next in line for the title, but her great-grandfather is blinded by tradition and sees no use for a girl.But Kahu will not be ignored. And in her struggle, she has a unique ally: the ancient whale rider himself. With a fierce determination and the power of her gifts, Kahu may be able to strengthen her tribe's ancestral connections, earn her great-grandfather's attention-and lead her community to a bold new future.Can she embrace her destiny and become the next whale rider?

'Poetry has the ability to cover a lot of ground in a few lines, and Muriel Bergel's book deals with so many questions and conundrums. In these pages we find goddesses, dreams, music, mothers and even ugg boots. Mythology and the everyday are combined to great effect. This is a remarkably poised first collection, inviting us to travel with the poet as she navigates her way through loss, labyrinths and the art of kissing. Vivid images and memorable phrases will linger in the reader's mind.' - PS Cottier'Personal reveries free the spirit. Poems unfold memories, send postcards that weave a delicate web. Reveal ancient mythologies of love and sadness, "a cord still attaches us, I've tried to cut it but my scissors are rusty, so I keep coming back." Words caress family, lovers, nature, with a gentle kiss and release of "dandelion wishes". A beautiful collection.' - Jenni Nixon'In this debut collection, the world of spirits and nature flows alongside the domestic and the everyday. Muriel Bergel journeys through a maze of grief, yet is resuscitated by the startling energy of the "fiery orange blooms" of the marigolds, by gum trees, cicadas and dragonflies. Accompanied by the power of goddesses, she navigates through life, finding her way toward regeneration, renewal and new beginnings. As well, often light and playful, this satisfying collection is infused with vamos - a Spanish word meaning "let's go, come on".' - Jane Skelton

This book focuses on twentieth-century Australian leprosaria to explore the lives of indigenous patients and the Catholic women missionaries who nursed them. Distinguished from previous historical studies of leprosy, the book examines the care and management of the incarcerated, enabling a broader understanding of their experience, beyond a singular trope of banishment, oppression and death. From the 1930s until the 1980s, respective governments appointed the trained sisters to four leprosaria across remote northern Australia, where almost two thousand people had been removed from their homes and detained under law for years - sometimes decades. The book traces the sisters¿ holistic nursing from early efforts of amelioration and palliation to their part in the successful treatment of leprosy after World War II. It reveals the ways the sisters stepped out of their assigned roles and attempted to shape the institutions as places of health and hygiene, of European culture and education, and of Christianity. Making use of accounts from patients, doctors; bureaucrats; missionary men; and Indigenous families and communities, the book offers fresh perspectives on two important strands of history. First, its attention to the day-to-day work of the Australian sisters helps to demystify leprosy healthcare by female missionaries, generally. Secondly, with the sisters specifically caring for Indigenous people, this book exposes the institutional practices and goals specific to race relations of both the Australian government and Catholic missionaries. An important and timely read for anyone interested in Indigenous history, medical history and the connections between race, religion and healthcare, this book contextualizes the twentieth-century leprosy epidemic within Australia's broader colonial history.

Kopar is a very moribund, close to extinct, language spoken in three villages at the mouth of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. This is the only description of the language available. It also discusses areas where rapid language shift is affecting the structure of Kopar. Although the period of fieldwork was necessarily short, this book provides as comprehensive a description as possible of the grammatical structure of this complex and fascinating language. It is quite thorough and detailed and goes well beyond what is normally considered a sketch grammar. It covers all the phenomena essential to description and comparison and gives clear, typologically sound definitions and explanations. The grammar is written with the research interests of language typologists and comparative grammarians foremost in mind. Typologically, Kopar can be described as a split ergative, polysynthetic language. The language lacks nominal case marking so ergativity or lack thereof is signaled by verbal agreement affixes. Tenses and moods which describe as yet unrealized events, like future and imperative, pattern accusatively for agreement affixes, while those express realized events, like past and present, pattern ergatively. In addition, the ergative case schema is overlaid by a direct-inverse inflectional schema determined by a person hierarchy, a feature Kopar shares with other languages in its Lower Sepik family. As a polysynthetic language, incorporation of sentential elements like temporals, locationals, adverbials and verbals is extensive, though noun incorporation is not. Sadly, this work is all the documentation we will likely ever have of Kopar, a language of potentially very high theoretical interest, given its rare typological profile. It will certainly be of interest to language typologists and comparative grammarians, and anyone who wants to explore the range of language variation

¿This book examines whether Australiäs constitution should be reformed so as to enable the country to fulfil its obligations under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which it ratified in 2009. The book surveys the history of the constitutional status of Australiäs Indigenous peoples from the time of colonisation through to the current debate on ¿Indigenous constitutional recognition¿. However, it argues that the term ¿Indigenous constitutional recognition', implying that mere acknowledgement of the existence of Indigenous peoples is sufficient to meet their legitimate expectations, misrepresents the nature of the project the country needs to engage in. The book argues that Australia should instead embark upon a reform programme directed towards substantive, and not merely symbolic, constitutional change. It argues that only by the inclusion in the constitution of enforceable constitutional rights canthe power imbalance between Indigenous Australians and the rest of society be addressed. Taking a comparative approach and drawing upon the experience of other jurisdictions, the book proposes a comprehensive constitutional reform programme, and includes the text of constitutional amendments designed to achieve the realisation of the rights of Australiäs Indigenous peoples. It ends with a call to improve the standard of civics education so as to overcome voter apprehension towards constitutional change.

This volume charts alternative courses through history via the physical conditions and artisanal ecologies in which cultural artifacts were created in Europe from roughly 1400 to 1700. Maker Space: Creative Environments in Early Modern Europe asks how spatial considerations initiated, supported, and thwarted creative activities and highlights points of intersection and overlap across practices that we otherwise tend to think of as separate. Scholars have long had an interest in, for instance, the workshop, laboratory, studiolo, or Kunstkammer as distinct places of production-named coordinates that situate social and technical actions in a defined context. The essays in this volume use the less fixed notion of space to break open such typologies, emphasizing the fluid, improvisational, and idiosyncratic aspects of creative work. They demonstrate how the ever-shifting array of tools, materials, environmental conditions, and bodies involved in artisanal production redirects our attention to the shared conditions that unite various enterprises of intellection, imagination, experimentation, and making. The book comprises a series of short case studies and extended meditations on particular sites where the work of the mind and hand coincided, from mines, arsenals, theaters, and imagined hermitages to tailors' shops, artists' workshops, the home, and even the space of a chemist's notebook. This format of short and long essays animates the story of early modern making and thinking practices at various scales. The specifics of these case studies move us away from either totalizing or categorical views that would gloss over the fluid, messy, and insistently material conditions of daily work-that is, the raw material of history. These essays also suggest fundamental shared concerns-from environmental and moral control to the conditions necessary for the mental demands of making-that supersede distinct makers or creative practices.

Persuasive and eloquent, Exterminate with Pride comprehensively re-assesses established views of Aboriginal-European relations in the Townsville-Bowen region of north Queensland to 1869.The benevolent intentions with which George Dalrymple has been credited in founding the township of Bowen are re-examined and dismissed.Contrary to the prevailing narrative, Aboriginal people were accepted into the stations and townships because armed suppression had failed to crush their patriotic defence of their homelands.Originally published in 1992, this edition includes a timely update. It links the experiences of the Aboriginal people on the north Queensland frontier in the 1860s to the present-day initiatives of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the Queensland government's Path to Treaty.

An original survey of the Renaissance painter's life and work. This book is a concise survey of the life of the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522) within his social and cultural surroundings. Delving into the artist's deliberately idiosyncratic life, the book shows how di Cosimo chose to live in squalor--eating nothing but boiled eggs cooked fifty at a time in his painting glue. Sarah Blake McHam shows how the artist became a favorite among sophisticated patrons eager for pagan artworks featuring Greco-Roman mythological subjects as well as orthodox, but never ordinary, religious altarpieces and private devotional paintings. The result is a newly accessible introduction to the life of this important Renaissance artist.

Vivid memories prompted by hearing a few stray notes playing sent me wandering through my very rich life to renew my love of particular pieces of music and songs. When I started writing poems, I recognised that, for me, music is like ekphrastic poetry. A composer responds to something and in turn there is my response to the composer. From my own experiences, I was reminded how my mental image or emotional response to a piece of music was not necessarily what the composer had in mind. Being more aware of the silences throughout a piece of music or when it comes to an end, I started to write about silence. In doing that, I realised that in our ordinary lives it doesn't exist. What is silence? It appears to be a momentary pause between one sound and the next - a heartbeat. Even if everything else can be blocked out, we can still feel or hear our own heart beating. Having got that far, I explored places where there was 'silence' and discovered what I could really hear.

Praise from reviewers of Ian Reid's previous booksRhumbs, Woods Hole, Mass. (USA), Pourboire Press'I like best his tough humorous approach and nearly epigrammatic style, his intelligence in using words and his width of focus - taking in not just the immediate situation but its context too. That's rare, now that so much verse is self-preoccupied, concentrating on the personal at the expense of thinking and feeling outwards, and without bringing up enough to justify the inwardness. Reid has always been able to relate in the opposite direction. To be humble and humorous about oneself is a lost art, but he has it. To look at the not-me with love and real interest and say something valid - Reid knows what poetry's for.' - Judith WrightUndercover agent, Adelaide, Adelaide University Union Press'Throughout Undercover Agent Reid places this uneasiness about living up to the Romantic ideal of man and poet insistently at the centre of his poetry, till we recognise in his procedure a dogged honesty. He becomes a keen and hard quester after what makes opportunities for poetry...a series of startling and versatile prose poems...an assured and authoritative syntax.' - Christopher Pollnitz in SoutherlyThe Shifting Shore, Grange Press (Vancouver, Canada) and Mattoid (Geelong)'There's a great deal of verbal flair, at times almost pyrotechnics, but the poems also have a terrific sense of place, of being located in a physical world inhabited by real people. All this gives the collection a human and physical solidity which is very appealing, and all the more because the language is full of tricks and surprises.' - Andrew Taylor'Reid approaches his subject with humour, precise imagery, and an emphasis on the aural... The poems discuss the self through extended metaphors so thoroughly that self and seashore merge, diverge and merge again. This is poetry of the littoral regions. In reading it one finds oneself standing on the physical, wet sand or in the conceptual territory of the individual psyche, depending on the tidal movements of each stanza and line... Not only a fine sense of the interstices between self and world, but an exceptional sense of imagery [moving] towards the fascinating territory that Reid calls "the ruffled edges of the real".' - Michael Wiley in Antipodes (USA)

"On a moonless night in August 1943, a US torpedo boat commanded by Lt John F Kennedy, on patrol in Solomon Islands, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Left clinging to wreckage within sight of Japanese encampments, the eleven surviving members of Kennedy's crew eventually struggled ashore on a small uninhabited island. Missing, presumed dead, behind enemy lines, with no food or water, and with several injured, the future looked bleak for the shipwrecked Americans. Fortunately, Australian 'coast watcher' Lt Reg Evans witnessed the immediate aftermath of the collision from his nearby jungle hideaway. Working under the searching eye of the Japanese military, over the next five days Evans and two Solomon Islander scouts Eroni Kumana and Biuku Gasa located Kennedy and his crew and ensured their rescue. This story of wartime bravery and survival helped create JFK's legend and paved his way to the White House. It also shone a spotlight on Australia and America's shared wartime experience. In Saving Lieutenant Kennedy, Brett Mason, author of Wizards of Oz, sets the heroic rescue and its colourful aftermath against the background of the Pacific war and the birth of the Australia-US alliance, which remains as vital today as when Kennedy and Evans first shook hands"--Publisher's description.