Ian Hoskins - Australia & the Pacific: A history

To Lisa who first suggested a Pacific trip and made the arrangements.
It was a wonderful journey, thanks for everything.

A captivating general history of Australia viewed in a Pacific context Hoskinss meticulously researched and well-crafted account of Australias place in the Pacific certainly deserves a wide readership.
ROSS FITZGERALD

Ian Hoskins has written a major book. It is a fundamentally important subject, and is timely, original, fair-minded and accessible a fascinating history that shows how Australias relationships with the Pacific have shaped and informed each of our worlds. He reveals the major underlying historiographical and political disputes with subtlety, clarity and power, while always displaying a remarkable fairness of judgement.
IAIN MCCALMAN

It is possibly no secret that I have been a passionate campaigner for Australia and especially the Australian media to pay more attention to the island nations to Australias North and East. Therefore, I am more than happy to see the publication of Ian Hoskinss Australia & the Pacific. I spent the majority of my career as a journalist visiting and reporting on these island nations and I believe that today it is even more crucial for us to understand exactly what is going on in our region.
SEAN DORNEY

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

Ian Hoskins 2021

First published 2021

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This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Peter Long

Cover image Shutterstock / Nejron Photo

Printer Griffin Press, part of Ovato

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Our repressed Oceanic memories

The Pacific Ocean has washed, scoured and thumped Australias east coast for more than five million years. The continent had, by then, nearly reached its present position on the oceans edge, having parted company with Gondwana some 40 million years beforehand. During that time the Pacifics waters rose and fell repeatedly and the continent was shaped and reshaped accordingly. With each exposure and inundation, reefs and marine ecologies have come and gone and been rebuilt. The climate, too, was affected and, with that, the ocean influenced the land.

The last great sea level rise ended just 6000 years ago. Aboriginal people have lived along that ever-changing coast for much longer, adapting to successive environmental conditions. They have been people of rivers, salt marshes, mangroves, forests, dunes and beaches. In 1770 the Pacific delivered James Cook and the company of the naval bark Endeavour from Tahiti and New Zealand to the far south of Australia and up to its tropical tip. There the Englishman claimed everything he had seen for his king, George III. As a consequence 11 ships arrived unannounced and uninvited in Sydney Harbour in 1788. Thousands followed that First Fleet carrying passengers, sailors, stock and seed the willing, the dragooned, the pioneering species of new ecologies. Their arrival led directly to dramatic environmental change and the dispossession of the first harbour people. Ultimately, first Australians up and down the Pacific coast and across the continent lost their land. Australias deep past and its modern history is intrinsically connected to the Pacific.

Some of those early migrants and mariners lie in the first European burial ground on Sydney Harbours northern shore, high up in a suburb appropriately named after a ships lookout, Crows Nest. It is a place I know well as the areas local historian. St Thomass Cemetery is now a small park but all the human remains and many of the monuments are still there. Graves are normally associated with quietude, but they can speak loudly of local, national and international stories if one spends time studying the stones and making connections. The tall Celtic cross of Commodore James Goodenough is one of the more audible monuments. From 1873 to 1875 he was commander of the flotilla that comprised the Australia Station, Britains west Pacific fleet based in Sydney Harbour. In that capacity Goodenough played a part in projecting British power into the worlds largest ocean. He assisted with the annexation of Fiji in 1874 and policing islands where British subjects, including Australian colonists, operated as traders, planters and missionaries. Australia Station vessels helped to regulate the trade in Pacific island labour which many, including Goodenough, regarded as kidnapping and enslavement. Blackbirding was the vernacular expression. In August 1875 Goodenough sailed on the flagship HMS Pearl to Santa Cruz Island in the Solomon group, where the unwelcome activities of the blackbirders had created ill-will. As he moved through a village the Commodore was hit by an arrow. His condition worsened over several days aboard ship and he died before landfall in Sydney. In accordance with his wishes, Goodenoughs body and those of two sailors similarly wounded were returned for interment at St Thomass Cemetery. Steam power hastened the Pearls return.

The farewell of James Goodenough was a particularly reverential moment in colonial New South Wales. Thousands watched the casket being rowed from the Pearl to Milsons Point then trundled from harbourside to gravesite where the man, whose name seemed to epitomise the esteem in which he was held, was finally laid to rest. Goodenough was the Victorian-era officer and Christian gentleman par excellence. Indeed, having forbad the taking of life in retribution for his impending death, he was declared a Christian hero. Goodenoughs passing, in the words of one report, produced a deep sensation in the metropolis.

That so many turned out for the Commodore suggests that the connection between Australia and the Pacific was keenly felt in 1875. White Australia sat nervously and expectantly on the edge of an ocean that contained at once the threat of invasion or sudden death for those who ventured there, and the potential for personal wealth and colonial influence for the intrepid. By the last quarter of the 19th century, just as the Commodore was felled, the belief that Australias star was rising over the Pacific was becoming commonplace. The