Australia & the Pacific A history

Australia’s deep past and its modern history are intrinsically linked to the Paci?c. In Australia & the Paci?c, Ian Hoskins — award-winning author of Sydney Harbour and Coast — expands his gaze to examine Australia’s relationship with the Paci?c region; from our ties with Papua New Guinea and New Zealand to our complex connections with China, Japan and the United States. This revealing, sweeping narrative history begins with the shifting of the continents to the coming of the ?rst Australians and, thousands of years later, the Europeans who dispossessed them. Hoskins explores colonists’ attempts to exploit the riches of the region while keeping ‘white Australia’ separate from neighbouring Asians, Melanesians and Polynesians. He examines how the advent of modern human rights and the creation of the United Nations after World War Two changed Australia and investigates our increasing regional engagement following the rise of China and the growing unpredictability of US foreign policy. Concluding with the offshore detention of asylum seekers and current debates over climate change, Hoskins questions Australia’s responsibilities towards our increasingly imperilled neighbours.

Ian Hoskins has worked as an academic and public historian for 30 years. His book Sydney Harbour: a history won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Prize for History in 2010 and his history of the New South Wales coast, called Coast, won the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Regional and Community history in 2015. He was the CH Currey Fellow at the State Library of NSW in 2019 exploring the Library’s extensive Pacific collections.