Frances Steel

Oceania under steam: sea transport and the cultures of colonialism, c.1870-1914

cheeks . . . his back, too, was all over squares’. This imprecise entanglement of European and Polynesian perceptions is the weakest link in Sanborn’s argument. Hypothesis entirely displaces fact in his explanation of how stories of Maori chiefs and the culture they embodied entered the imaginations of two American writers. Cooper’s access to the story of the Boyd is based purely on speculation: it was likely he read of it (p. 42); the world of sailors would have been of great interest to him (p. 41). As for Melville, there is good reason to believe that a local from the Bay of Islands signed on to a ship he knew of (p. 100), and the unrecorded reunion with Richard Greene (‘Toby’) most likely included Maori material (‘He must have met and spoken to several Maori men and women in the Bay of Islands’ [p. 98]). When Jim Shepard praises in the blurb this reorientation of American Studies as an ‘exhilarating example’ of what it can do, I wonder what this doing does — add to the murk of colonial misunderstandings, or set them in a new light? I wish I could believe it was the latter.

Re-Routing Empire? Steam-Age Circulations and the Making of an Anglo Pacific, c.1850–90

The introduction of steam not only enhanced Australias transport links within the empire. It also altered attitudes towards the feasibility and desirability of transpacific connectivities, and brought new prominence to the Pacific-orientations of Australias eastern colonies. By envisioning steam-age connections across the Pacific, first to Panama and then to San Francisco, Australia sought to imagine and situate itself in a transpacific sphere. The routes shaped cultural sensibilities and political ideologies across the Pacific, expressed in affinities and allegiances between Australia and North America. This article examines transpacific steam from the mid- to the late nineteenth century, a fractured and indeterminate period which nevertheless laid the ground for Australias sense of itself as an autonomous white nation, relating across the Pacific and within a wider Anglo world beyond Britain and empire.

Cruising New Zealand's West Coast Sounds: Fiord Tourism in the Tasman World c.1870–1910

Abstract The hugely popular summer cruise tours of the West Coast Sounds in the South Island of New Zealand reveal a colonial history of leisured mobility and landscape appreciation common to New Zealand and Australia. Cruising the Sounds was a practice imbued with privilege, exclusivity, emotional upliftment and wonder, generating shared attachments to wilderness space. This culture of maritime tourism offers new insights into the mobile practices which shaped the Tasman World, and points to the centrality of ships and shipping routes as spaces of transcolonial history.

Anglo-worlds in transit: connections and frictions across the Pacific

The emerging cultures of late-nineteenth-century steamship mobility can be distinguished broadly by ocean-basin and by specific route. In the Pacific, a steamship connection between Sydney and San Francisco was envisaged to forge and sustain strong bonds between regional ‘branches’ of the Anglo-Saxon race. This article moves beyond the rhetorical purchase of assumed affinities, to explore the more layered ways in which difference was articulated in transpacific encounters, and the attendant uncertainties and frictions in these evolving relations. When compared to routes bridging the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, with familiar imperial hierarchies and formalities behind them, British and colonial travellers in the Pacific were frequently unsettled by the more democratic and republican attitudes of the American crews and passengers they encountered. At the same time, Britain’s long-standing supremacy on the high seas provided a benchmark against which American enterprise and power in the Pacific could be assessed and found wanting.

Introduction: on the critical importance of colonial formations

In 1921 the National Geographic Magazine published a special issue on ‘The Islands of the Pacific’. Richly illustrated with photographs, as was the hallmark of the magazine, the issue also featured a map produced as a special colour supplement (see Figure 1). In his introductory essay for the edition, J.P. Thomson, C.B.E., LL.D., who was the Honorary Secretary and Treasurer of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, referred readers directly to this map, so they might situate themselves within what he assumed would be an unfamiliar geography for most. He also included a detailed written description of ‘this Polynesian Empire, if I may so call it’ which ‘extends across the Pacific from the eastern waters of Australia and New Guinea for a hundred degrees of longitude to Easter Island’, listing all of the major island groups and ‘numerous clusters of islands, reefs, and lagoons scattered over wide expanses of tropical ocean’. The map supplement also emphasised empire, but from a quite different perspective. It, too, included all of the ‘Islands of the Pacific’, but these were overlaid with ‘Sovereignty and Mandate Lines in 1921’. Indeed, these lines dominated the map. Assigning a different colour to each of the imperial powers in the Pacific (Japan, the US, France, the Netherlands, Britain, Australia and New Zealand), thick borders partitioned islands and sea. In this representation, the land mass of Australia looms large (although depicted at an atypical angle, as if acted on by the ‘weight’ of the Pacific) and New Zealand particularly assumes a new prominence, exceeding the conventional mapping of its three main islands. Great Britain’s possessions are centrally positioned, but it is not especially dominant in the region, with Australia and New Zealand mapped as distinct and equivalent imperial powers, rather than encompassed within the British Empire as a whole (as typically identified by the same shade of red on world maps at the time). China and the mainland United States are relegated to either side of the top corners of the map just peeping into view, almost as afterthoughts, belying their continental proportions. If the thick sovereignty and mandate boundary lines implied clear divisions of territory and authority, a series of fainter lines indicated something different. They represented the various cable lines of the region. These cut across the partitioned Pacific, creating numerous connections that defied these seemingly solid borders.

Servant mobilities between Fiji and New Zealand: the transcolonial politics of domestic work and immigration restriction, c.1870–1920

Abstract In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europeans travelling beyond Fiji were often accompanied by Melanesian, Indian or Indigenous Fijian servants. Occasionally, families resident in the Australasian settler colonies also hired servants, mostly men, from Fiji. This article traces such patterns of transcolonial domestic labour mobility, and highlights instances of servants challenging employer controls and seeking out more autonomous futures. Viewed together, these fragmentary histories suggest possibilities for juxtaposing and integrating temporary, short-term and circular transcolonial mobilities that tend to be overlooked in nation-centred histories of immigration and colonial domesticity.

A Pacific Industry: the history of pineapple canning in Hawaii. By Richard A. Hawkins

ur akau’ and of a ‘world that no longer exists’ (p. 91). I wh anau au ki Kaiapoi ends rather abruptly with the Creed manuscript and moves straight into the bibliography. A conclusion outlining the significance of these texts for K ai Tahu readers, as well as for historians of M aori literacy, would have added value to this book, helping it move beyond offering an overview of the account, its production, translations and collection. Nevertheless, I wh anau au ki Kaiapoi is a welcome addition to a growing list of publications concerned with exploring the K ai Tahu past.