Max Quanchi – författare

The authors have brought together a collection of works from specialists in Pacific History from across Australia and throughout the Pacific. The individual contributions were specifically written to meet the needs of senior history courses in Australia. Max Quanchi and Ron Adams are well-known educationists who have specialised in the pacific. They have extensively travelled and studied in the Pacific and have spent many years teaching history to secondary and fertiary students. The result is an authoritative text for all senior History and Australian Studies students who need to understand the Pacific region.

The South Seas, as this region used to be called, conjured up images of adventure, belles and savages, romance and fabulous fortunes, but the long voyages of discovery and exploration of the vast Pacific Ocean were really an exercise in amazing logistics, navigation, hard grit, shipwreck and pure luck. The motivations were scientific and geographic, but at the same time nationalistic and materialistic.A series on global exploration and discovery would not be complete without this book by Quanchi and Robson. It is ambitious and informative and includes the familiar names of Laperouse, Bougainville, Cook, and Dampier, as well as the intriguing stories of the Bounty Mutiny, scurvy, and the mysterious Northwest Passage, Terra Australis Ignotia, and Davis Land. There are entries on first contacts, ships, navigational instruments, mapping, and botany. The scene is carefully set in the introduction, the chronology spans several centuries, and the extensive bibliography offers a guide to further reading. There are more than just dry facts in this book. It has a whiff of salt air, the clash of empires, cross-cultural beach encounters, and personal adventure.

This book investigates the histories of photography, photographers and the camera in the Pacific, and the parallel histories of colonial expansion, colonies, territories and Empires, and decolonisation from the 1830s through to the 1960s. It looks at albums, postcards, portraits, colonial handbooks, illustrated newspapers and magazines, serialised pictorial encyclopaedia, and illustrated books, and how published black and white photography documented a place, people and their cultures. The material ranges across the early years of the camera in the Pacific, to the colonial era, and through to today's increasingly prolific mobile phone photography. Most of the argument, insight and data is from so-called old photographs, but reference to the present underpins the discussions on how photographs have been used in historiography over the two hundred years following the invention of the camera. Four essays focus on Papua New Guinea, two on Fiji, and one on American possessions in the Pacific, one each on pictorial encyclopaedia, colonial handbooks, illustrated magazines, and illustrated books, two on postcards, and three on photography generally in Oceania.

This volume investigates Pacific collections held in Australian museums, art galleries and archives, and the diverse group of 19th and 20th century collectors responsible for their acquisition. The nineteen essays reveal varied personal and institutional motivations that eventually led to the conservation, preservation and exhibition in Australia of a remarkable archive of Pacific Island material objects, art and crafts, photographs and documents. Hunting the Collectors benchmarks the importance of Pacific Collections in Australia and is a timely contribution to the worldwide renaissance of interest in Oceanic arts and cultures. The essays suggest that the custodial role is not fixed and immutable but fluctuates with the perceived importance of the collection, which in turn fluctuates with the level of national interest in the Pacific neighbourhood. This cyclical rise and fall of Australian interest in the Pacific Islands means many of the valuable early collections in state and later national repositories and institutions have been rarely exhibited or published. But, as the authors note, enthusiastic museum anthropologists, curators, collection managers and university-based scholars across Australia, and worldwide, have persisted with research on material collected in the Pacific.

What represents Melanesian art today? Is there modern Melanesian art? Who are the artists? What are the subjects of their art? Art and Life in Melanesia is timely in its exploration of Melanesian artists and their voices, providing an important juncture for many in the region and beyond to take stock of what is happening in Melanesian art.The thirteen chapters are linked essays premised around major cultural themes including Kastom, Christianity, Indigenisation and Globalisation, Markets, Festivals, Diasporas, Urban Culture and Politics. Each theme focuses on ideas, issues and some specific arts practices, drawing examples from a few localities. Not every country is addressed under each theme, an approach that provides the reader with substantive country-specific information. Research for this book was supported by the University of Queensland.