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Australia - Oceania
Here are some of our favorite guides and literature on Australia and Oceania (New Zealand and the South Pacific) that we have previously featured on our home page.

Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story
Christina Thompson
( Bloomsbury USA, paperback, $15.00)

Christina Thompson is too smart to be satisfied writing a memoir about the miscommunications between a New England academic woman and her Maori working class husband. This is, indeed, a story about Thompson's marriage and family, but it is also a book about history and culture, specifically the history of and misunderstanding between European explorers and the Maori natives of New Zealand. The title of the book is "what Darwin said that Cook said the Maoris said at that interesting moment when the Europeans first appeared," but the quote was further mangled by the editor of Cook's first journals, who added his own remarks and digressions - written in Cook's first person - to heighten Cook's narrative tension. With chapters on cannibalism and head-hunting (and the role colonialism played in the head-hunting market), Thompson presents an unsentimental and insightful story of the two peoples.
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Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island
Peter Rudiak-Gould
( Union Square Press, hardback, $21.95)

Most people know of the Marshall Islands as the scene of World War II battles, 1950s nuclear tests, and a reliable U.S. supporter at the United Nations. Peter Rudiak-Gould spent a year teaching at the very small Marshall Island of Ujae where a coast-to-coast walk lasts five minutes. The culture clashes he experiences are inevitable, though not necessarily cliché. He realizes he is being an 'asshole' for seeking out privacy or quiet in a place where home life is surprisingly loud. Over time, though, he learns to fish, speak Marshallese, decline prospective spouses and inspire some of his students. With an overview of the coral reef ecology, nuclear fallout and the local economy, Rudiak-Gould's story is both memoir and introduction to the Marshall Islands.
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Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No Oneï' Land
Sven Lindqvist
( The New Press, $24.95)

As Sven Lindqvist explains at the beginning of his new book, the term 'terra nullius' was understood in Europe as land not yet claimed by any European power. When Britain settled Australia, they understood the term in a fuller dimension. An unclaimed land and a (literally) no manï¿½s land. The British believed that the few native inhabitants there were would eventually disappear. Lindqvist drives around Australia, visiting sites that most people have never heard of, but were at the heart of the British project to settle Australia and eliminate the Aborigines. Orphanages once populated by half-caste children kidnapped by government officials in order to lose their native customs; health clinics full of aboriginals rounded up by the state on the slightest suspicion of venereal disease; land confiscated from families for cattle ranching or nuclear testing. In all, more than 90% of the Aboriginal population was killed. Lindqvist looks at popular literature and ethnology to understand the European's shifting notion of not just the Aborigines, but 'the other.' By the end of this illuminating work, Linqvist makes the case that not just the Aborigines but other colonized and brutalized people are seeking and, in some cases, achieving redress and compensation.
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