Claire Brennan

An Africa on your own front door step: the development of an Australian safari

The safari arrived in Australia in the 1950s. Promising luxury and excitement the Australian safari deliberately drew on African precedents to create an instantly recognisable hunting experience. Hunters came from southern Australia and overseas to hunt crocodiles in northern Queensland, and, later, the Northern Territory. But despite its glamour and contemporary public profile the presence of the safari in tropical Australia has been overlooked by historians although its development reveals the way in which Australians (and international big game hunters) imagined the tropical north. The safari’s establishment in Australia created an alluring, exciting and exotic vision of the north.

Book review of "Sea of Dangers: Captain Cook and his rivals" by Geoffrey Blainey, Viking, Melbourne, Australia

There is no absolute time. Time is relative. The achievement of this work is in telling of Maohi encounters with British, French and Spanish voyagers during the first two decades of contact, alert to the immersion of Maohi within the flow of their ancestral past. It has been said of the ancient Greeks that they thought of the past as stretching out before them while the future waited behind their backs. Whether or not this was so, Salmond convincingly shows that consciousness of the eternal presence of the past was implicit in how Maohi responded to the first Europeans they encountered. Maohi lived acutely conscious that the most mundane or intimate dimensions of their existence were subject to the abiding agency of all-powerful, capricious beings existing since the world was formed out of utter darkness. Salmond begins by tracing the unfurling of the ancestral past into the time of those whose fate it was to encounter the first European voyagers. This history is told making careful use of surviving genealogical narratives, and drawing on the justly esteemed scholarship of Douglas Oliver, Neil Gunson and, most importantly, Hank Driessen. Salmond’s remaining chapters tell of the successive interactions between Maohi and the expeditions led by Wallis, Cook, Bougainville and Boenecha, interleaved with accounts of the experiences and fates of Tupaia, Mai and other Maohi who sailed with the voyagers to Europe and Peru. Salmond is especially good at illuminating how the ancestral past licensed chiefly title-holders and priests — in direct proportion to the sacredness of their ancestral lineage — daring to use these sea-borne strangers to secure the favour of the gods and their agents in furthering their personal and dynastic ambitions. For in one critical respect at least, the indigenous polities of the Society Islands were no different from those of contemporary Europe. As Salmond shows, they had experienced religious and political upheavals as dramatic in their consequences as those shaping the three kingdoms of the British Isles from the outbreak of civil war in the 1640s until the revolution of 1688. By situating the arrival of Tahiti’s discovery within this history, Salmond enables us to see that, culturally, there was logic in much of what Cook, his contemporaries (and many historians since) found exotic or, as was often the case, confusing and unpredictably volatile, in how Maohi responded to their presence. Importantly, too, Salmond shows us that the meanings and values of this ancestral past were not immutable. They proved open to change in the play of cross-cultural interaction, and even furnished Maohi with psychic and cultural resources enabling them to accommodate and exploit Europeans who came among them until well into the missionary era. The centrality of Maohi in this book is welcome. However, as with many of the best works of revisionist scholarship, what is gained equally alerts us that there is further work to be done. Salmond’s concerted focus on recovering what Maohi made of their discovery by Europe is a major contribution to the historiography of Oceania. But it also throws into sharp perspective the need for further, more contextualised investigation of what late Enlightenment Europe made of Maohi. Salmond variously suggests that Tahiti’s European discoverers were also disposed to mythic projection of the past onto the present, seeing Maohi lifeways and culture through a haze of eroticism and enchantment with an idealised Greco-Roman world. But recent scholarship elucidating the diverse social and political uses that Greek and Roman antiquity were made to serve in 18th-century European discourses strongly suggest that there is more yet to be discovered about the ends that Arcadian allusion and the eroticisation of Tahiti were intended to serve.

Book review of "The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World" by John C. Weaver, McGillQueen's University Press, Canada

[Extract] The Great Land Rush is a wide-ranging book that demonstrates the advantages of a transnational approach to history. The integration of the history of the early United States with later events in the Australasian colonies, the Cape Colony and Canada works very well, and the patterns that John C. Weaver identifies in the earlier North American context provide a useful theoretical framework for examination of later frontier and settler societies.

Harry Liebersohn, The Traveler's World: Europe to the Pacific . London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. xviii + 380 pp. ISBN: 0-674-02185-1 (hbk.).

[Extract] The American viewpoint that informs this book underwrites its themes of networks and of the role of the outsider in European perceptions of the cultures of the Pacific. Harry Liebersohn is based in Clrbana-Champaign, Illinois, and has previously written about European-North American encounters. His location and experience has allowed him to produce a fresh and interesting book that has a novel awareness of the networks acting on both Europeans and Pacific Islanders in their encounters with each other in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.