Donald Denoon

The Transvaal Labor Crisis, 1901-1906

One of the crucial reasons for the failure of British policy in South Africa during the Reconstruction period was an acute shortage of African labour for the mines, which were therefore unable to support a large English-speaking immigrant community. According to the prevailing economic beliefs, there was a fairly rigid ratio between the numbers of unskilled coloured workers and of skilled white workers which the mines could employ, so that the scarcity of African labour did inhibit the mines from expanding their white labour force. The reasons for this scarcity include the deplorable physical conditions in which labourers lived and worked, and the unusually large demands for African labour in other sectors of the economy. British policy also, inadvertently, put less pressure on Transvaal Africans to take industrial or agricultural employment. However, the scarcity of labour was noticeable not only within British South Africa, but more especially outside its borders, where Africans seem to have been more reluctant than usual to take employment in the mines. It is possible to argue that the shortage was caused partly by the disillusionment of the workers as a result of their experience of British administration, and partly by a fairly extensive determination to withhold labour until conditions were improved. Such an interpretation is compatible with the facts of the case, though impossible at this stage to prove. Whatever the reasons for the scarcity, the result was the importation of Chinese labour to supplement the existing unskilled labour force. The well-documented complaints of the Chinese labour throw some light on the treatment of African labour. The Chinese also undercut the wages paid to Africans, who lost their commanding position as unconscious arbiters of the success of mining. Further, the Chinese were employed in terms of a very restrictive contract, whose terms were later extended to cover African labour as well, with the result that the industrial colour-bar was solidified at a time when white labour was in control of an unusually large area of employment.

The isolation of Australian history

(1986). The isolation of Australian history. Historical Studies: Vol. 22, No. 87, pp. 252-260.

Capitalism in Papua New Guinea

mental questions. As a locus classicus of modern anthropology, the region has played host to many of the leading ethnographers and social theorists of the 20th century. Their precise observations and general theories have brought Pacific islanders to the attention of generations of students and scholars around the world: there must be tens of thousands of graduates, from Canberra to Connecticut, who understand perfectly that the kula trading system always re quires one kind of shell to travel clockwise, while another travels anticlockwise.1

Re‐Membering Australasia: A repressed memory

Throughout the nineteenth century, the term Australasia embraced all the British dependencies in the South Pacific. Federation brought six of these dependencies together, but disrupted the wider Australasia by excluding New Zealand, British New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Fiji. The consequent national histories and historiographies sought to ignore or deny the regional context; but economic, political and cultural links persisted and evolved. This regional nexus has no name (Australasia having been debased), but it is very real for most of its member states and societies. Now Australians are reluctant to acknowledge the only regional club which accepts us as members; but chronic crises in many parts of the region demand our reconsideration.

A Nuclear Pacific

The nuclear history of the Pacific begins with two central facts. The test sites were on Islands remote from Western population, and Islanders were politically subordinated to the nuclear powers. The American tests contaminated and destroyed land, and left physical injury and psychological disturbance among groups of Marshall Islanders whose lives have revolved around the bomb since the 1940s. Towards the end of the war in the Pacific, the Americans expelled Japan from the scattered islands of Micronesia in a series of bloody battles. The United States exploded sixty-six nuclear weapons in the northern Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, including the most powerful and contaminating bombs in the history of American testing. As in Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, colonialism and nuclear testing have gone together in French Polynesia. The Conference for a Nuclear-Free Pacific in Fiji in 1975 initiated an organised movement for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific.

Pacific Island history at the Australian national university: The place and the people ∗

This article describes the context in which Pacific Island history developed at ANU. It suggests ways in which its agenda and methods were influenced by its loction in the Australian capital in 194...

Book Reviews : HIGHLANDERS AND FOREIGNERS IN THE UPPER RAMU: THE KAINANTU AREA 1919-1942 Robin Radford. Melbourne University Press, 1987. 240 pp.

first book in which missionaries, prospectors, and administrative officers appear alongside each other, and this is one of its important contributions to historical understanding. She also shows that highlanders became sufficiently committed to the presence of mission workers, that they were willing to make substantial efforts (including the ritual burning of spears, and more amicable relations among themselves) to retain their strange but useful visitors. These are important findings, which correct the standard accounts of the country’s colonial era.