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This series focuses on Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific region from the arrival of European seafarers and missionaries to the early twentieth century. Contemporary accounts document the gradual development of the European settlements from penal colonies and whaling stations to thriving communities of farmers, miners and traders with fully-fledged administrative and legal systems. Particularly noteworthy are the descriptions of the indigenous peoples of the various islands, their customs and their differing interactions with the European settlers.

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107 results in Cambridge Library Collection - History of Oceania

Page 3 of 6

A History of Tasmania
  • From its Discovery in 1642 to the Present Time
  • James Fenton
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    08 November 2011
    First published in:
    1884
  • James Fenton (1820–1901) was born in Ireland and emigrated to Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen's Land) with his family in 1833. He became a pioneer settler in an area on the Forth River and published this history of the island in 1884. The book begins with the discovery of the island in 1642 and concludes with the deaths of some significant public figures in the colony in 1884. The establishment of the colony on the island, and the involvement of convicts in its building, is documented. A chapter on the native aborigines gives a fascinating insight into the attitudes of the colonising people, and a detailed account of the removal of the native Tasmanians to Flinders Island, in an effort to separate them from the colonists. The book also contains portraits of some aboriginal people, as well as a glossary of their language.

The King Country, or, Explorations in New Zealand
  • A Narrative of 600 miles of Travel through Maoriland
  • James Henry Kerry-Nicholls
  • Published online:
    05 December 2012
    Print publication:
    22 December 2011
    First published in:
    1884
  • Originally published in 1884, this work by the relatively unknown 'gentleman explorer' James Henry Kerry-Nicholls (d. 1888) focuses on nineteenth-century New Zealand. It recounts the journey into what he describes as terra incognita, the area known as the King Country, almost exclusively Maori and little explored by Europeans due to political difficulties and Maori hostility. Travelling with only three horses and what he could carry on them, and accompanied by an interpreter, he endeavoured to cover and accurately record details of an area totalling 10,000 square miles; owing to good contacts, he was even able to meet Maori King Tawhiao. Writing in what now seems an imperialist style, he recounts a history of Maori–European relations, notes potential sites for European settlement, includes geographical surveys and descriptions of the landscapes, and supplies a map which gives the 'most complete chart of the interior of the North Island as yet published'.

History of Australia
  • Volume 1
  • George William Rusden
  • Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    29 April 2011
    First published in:
    1883
  • When George William Rusden (1819–1903) was fourteen, his family emigrated from England to Australia, where he later became a prominent educationalist and civil servant. Already an author of numerous books and pamphlets, he began work on his History of Australia after his retirement, and it was published in 1883 in three volumes. Although the work is considered sympathetic to the Aboriginal people of Australia, it is also infused with Rusden's Tory politics, infuriating his critics – one wrote that the volumes were 'as untrustworthy as a partisan pamphlet well can be without deliberate dishonesty'. Despite initial criticism, these wide-ranging volumes form an important early contribution to the writing of Australian history. Volume 1 begins with the arrival of Europeans in Australia, and then examines each colonial governor, starting with Arthur Philip (1738–1814), who was the first, and ending the volume with Thomas Brisbane (1773–1860) in 1821.

History of Australia
  • Volume 2
  • George William Rusden
  • Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    29 April 2011
    First published in:
    1883
  • When George William Rusden (1819–1903) was fourteen, his family emigrated from England to Australia, where he later became a prominent educationalist and civil servant. Already an author of numerous books and pamphlets, he began work on his History of Australia after his retirement, and it was published in 1883 in three volumes. Although the work is considered sympathetic to the Aboriginal people of Australia, it is also infused with Rusden's Tory politics, infuriating his critics – one wrote that the volumes were 'as untrustworthy as a partisan pamphlet well can be without deliberate dishonesty'. Despite initial criticism, these wide-ranging volumes form an important early contribution to the writing of Australian history. Volume 2 continues Rusden's examination of earlier governors, starting with Ralph Darling (1772–1858) and ending with George Gipps (1791–1847), before discussing immigration, the end of the practice of transporting prisoners, and the discovery of gold.

History of Australia
  • Volume 3
  • George William Rusden
  • Published online:
    05 August 2011
    Print publication:
    29 April 2011
    First published in:
    1883
  • When George William Rusden (1819–1903) was fourteen, his family emigrated from England to Australia, where he later became a prominent educationalist and civil servant. Already an author of numerous books and pamphlets, he began work on his History of Australia after his retirement, and it was published in 1883 in three volumes. Although the work is considered sympathetic to the Aboriginal people of Australia, it is also infused with Rusden's Tory politics, infuriating his critics – one wrote that the volumes were 'as untrustworthy as a partisan pamphlet well can be without deliberate dishonesty'. Despite initial criticism, these wide-ranging volumes form an important early contribution to the writing of Australian history. Volume 3 is mainly devoted to political matters, especially the Constitution Act of 1856 and the relationship between the colony and Britain. Rusden also gives a brief sketch of the governors who took office from this period onwards.

Recollections of Travel in New Zealand and Australia
  • James Coutts Crawford
  • Published online:
    05 October 2012
    Print publication:
    24 November 2011
    First published in:
    1880
  • Having decided to try his fortune in the new colonies of South Australia and New Zealand, budding geologist James Coutts Crawford (1817–89) landed at Sydney in 1838 and lost no time in buying and driving a herd of cattle from Braidwood, New South Wales, to Adelaide, a distance of more than three hundred miles of unfamiliar territory. This remarkable journey proved typical of the rest of his travels, during which he served variously as explorer, translator, and sheriff of Wellington. This book, which includes illustrations and maps, is his own record of his experiences, first published in 1880. Even at that time, New Zealand and Australia had changed radically since Crawford's first arrival in the earliest, minimal colonies; today, his account offers not only a fascinating insight into the difficulties and dangers of life there, but a useful source for students and researchers in history and geology.

Australian Dictionary of Dates and Men of the Time
  • Containing the History of Australasia from 1542 to Date
  • Edited by J. H. Heaton
  • Published online:
    05 November 2015
    Print publication:
    20 October 2011
    First published in:
    1879
  • A pioneering Australian reference work, this dictionary was published in 1879 by John Henniker Heaton (1848–1914), who in his youth spent twenty years as a journalist in Australia before returning to England and campaigning in Parliament for postal reform. Published amid a bitter dispute with the government printer, it is still acknowledged to contain much useful information despite some inaccuracies. The first part, 'Men of the Time', focuses on notable men and women with Australian connections, from 1542 to the date of publication, including explorers, governors, leading colonists, writers and scientists. The second part, 'The Australian Dictionary of Dates', provides an alphabetical listing of the most remarkable Australian historical events and topics, from Aboriginal cricketers to the Zig Zag railway line, particularly noting political and legal landmarks. Heaton's book is an important document of Victorian colonial historiography and a valuable resource for the history of European settlement in Australia.

Kennedy's Colonial Travel
  • A Narrative of a Four Years' Tour through Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc.
  • David Kennedy, Jr
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    08 November 2011
    First published in:
    1876
  • Published in 1876, this vivid, action-packed account describes the experiences of David Kennedy Jr (1849–85) as he toured the world with his musician father and family choir between 1872 and 1876 performing 'The Songs of Scotland'. Kennedy travelled through 'nearly every town and village in Australia, New Zealand and Canada', and over a three-year period wrote articles recording his impressions for publication in Edinburgh newspapers; this book is an edited and expanded compilation of those pieces. Kennedy describes places and events including Sydney Harbour, floods in Melbourne, the New Zealand volcanic country, a violent storm at sea, the cosmopolitan, frenetic atmosphere of San Francisco, the American trans-continental railway and a Canadian snowstorm. His closely observed vignettes of local society are particularly fine, and depict entertainments and pastimes, education and worship, and indigenous traditions as well as individuals such as innkeepers, stage-coach drivers, travellers, miners, and particularly his fellow Scots.

Six Months among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands
  • The Hawaiian Archipelago
  • Isabella Bird
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    17 February 2011
    First published in:
    1875
  • Recommended an open-air life from an early age as a cure for physical and nervous difficulties, the indefatigable Isabella Bird (1831–1904) toured the United States and Canada, Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, the Far East, India, Turkey, Persia and Kurdistan. Her accounts of her travels, written in the form of letters to her sister, were bestsellers. In 1875 she published her account of six months in the Hawaiian archipelago. During this time she explored the islands on horseback, visiting volcanos, climbing mountains, and living with the natives. The book includes considerable detail about the lifestyles, customs, and habits of the people she encountered, and of the geography and geology of the islands. Her enthusiasm for Hawaii and its people is evident from her vivid descriptions, but she disliked the restrictive atmosphere of the foreign settlements. The book includes outlines of the history and economy of the islands.

Explorations in Australia
  • I–Explorations in Search of Dr Leichardt and Party. II–From Perth to Adelaide, around the Great Australian Bight. III–From Champion Bay, across the Desert to the Telegraph and to Adelaide
  • John Forrest
  • Published online:
    05 October 2012
    Print publication:
    08 November 2011
    First published in:
    1875
  • John Forrest (1847–1918), was an Australian surveyor and explorer. At twenty-two, he led an expedition to determine the fate of Ludwig Leichardt, who had earlier disappeared in the western desert. The following year he surveyed the coastal route from Perth to Adelaide, establishing the possibility of a telegraph line. In 1874, he crossed the central western desert, a two-thousand mile journey which confirmed his heroic reputation. He received the founder's medal of the Royal Geographical Society in London and was appointed Deputy Surveyor-General. His account of these expeditions, published in 1875, is based on his diaries, with extracts from official letters and the newspapers that covered the events. Forrest became Premier of Western Australia, held several positions under the subsequent federal government, and was the first native-born Australian to be recommended for a barony. This book thus illuminates the political history of Australia and that of its geographical exploration.

Knocking about in New Zealand
  • Charles L. Money
  • Published online:
    05 May 2012
    Print publication:
    15 December 2011
    First published in:
    1871
  • Little is known about Charles L. Money, who sailed in 1861 from Gravesend to New Zealand, where, as he recounts in this volume, he spent the next seven years, working as a gold prospector, a surveyor, a sheep hand, a baker's boy, and a log splitter. He also spent periods in the military, serving in McDonnell's campaign against the Maori in the second Taranaki war (1863–6), which was instrumental in establishing colonial control of the area, and participating in the notorious Pokaikai raid, an eyewitness account of which is included in the book. Money also, pragmatically, worked with, and occasionally for, the Maori. His narrative provides source material for social tensions in this formative period of New Zealand history, as well as giving a vivid picture of the hardships of emigrant life. It was published in 1871 by Samuel Mullen, the owner of the first literary library and bookshop in Australia.

Station Life in New Zealand
  • Mary Anne Barker
  • Published online:
    07 September 2011
    Print publication:
    30 June 2011
    First published in:
    1870
  • Written by the adventurous and widely travelled Lady Mary Anne Barker (1831–1911), this 1870 publication records 'the expeditions, adventures, and emergencies diversifying the daily life of the wife of a New Zealand sheep farmer'. Born in Jamaica and educated in England and France, Barker married her second husband in 1865 and spent the next three years living on his sheep station on the South Island. This book is based on letters written to Barker's younger sister, beginning with an account of her two-month voyage to Melbourne and her onward journey via Nelson and Wellington to Christchurch. Barker vividly describes her domestic surroundings, friends, neighbours, servants, her first (and last) experience of camping, the Canterbury landscape and vegetation, and the 7,000 sheep on the farm. Her enthusiastic personal account of Victorian colonial expansion captures the 'delight and freedom of an existence so far from our own highly-wrought civilization'.

The Daily Life and Origin of the Tasmanians
  • James Bonwick
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    08 November 2011
    First published in:
    1870
  • James Bonwick (1817–1906) arrived in Tasmania, then Van Diemen's Land, in 1841, beginning an unstable and itinerant career as school-master, writer, and archivist. A zealous non-conformist and mystic, who was briefly in contact with Madame Blavatsky, Bonwick became interested in the plight of the Tasmanian aborigines after a visit to Flinders Island, to which the last of the nearly extinct population had been removed. Published in 1870, by which time Bonwick had become a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, this book is a sympathetic anthropological study of indigenous Tasmanian culture and society, based on colonial records, interviews with early settlers and Bonwick's own experiences. The companion volume to The Last of the Tasmanians, which discussed the reasons for the extinction and was cited by Darwin in The Descent of Man, it provides important source material, as well as insight into the morally difficult subject of nineteenth-century anthropology.

The Founders of Canterbury
  • Being Letters from the Late Edward Gibbon Wakefield to the Late John Robert Godley, and to Other Well-Known Helpers in the Foundation of the Settlement of Canterbury in New Zealand
  • Edward Gibbon Wakefield
  • Edited by Edward Jerningham Wakefield
  • Published online:
    05 May 2012
    Print publication:
    24 November 2011
    First published in:
    1868
  • Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862) was a colonial advocate and political theorist, who was influential in the early colonisation of New Zealand and South Australia. Wakefield read widely on contemporary economics and social questions, and his theory of colonisation helped shape the British Empire. He formed the New Zealand Association in 1837 to create a new colony in that country, finally emigrating himself in 1852. His son, the editor of this volume of letters, was appointed secretary of the first settler expedition to New Zealand in 1839, and was elected political representative for Canterbury in 1854. The letters in the volume, published in 1868, which span the period 1847–50, trace the history of the town of Canterbury from Wakefield senior's suggestion of church-led settlement in the 1840s to its foundation in 1850–1. A planned second volume was never published.

The History of Discovery in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand
  • From the Earliest Date to the Present Day
  • Volume 1
  • William Howitt
  • Published online:
    05 August 2011
    Print publication:
    23 June 2011
    First published in:
    1865
  • The prolific writer William Howitt (1792–1879) embarked for Australia in 1852 and spent two years there travelling and panning for gold. His experiences resulted in several books that appealed to the Victorian public's avid interest in Antipodean exploration. Published in 1865, when New Zealand had only been recognised as a country for a generation, this two-volume work describes 'scenes of danger and of wild romance, of heroic daring and devoted deaths, such as few countries have to show'. It gives a valuable account of early European exploration and settlement in Australia and New Zealand as well as insights into European travellers' responses to this previously unknown continent. Volume 1 covers the early voyages of discovery to the Antipodes made by explorers including Abel Tasman and Captain Cook, and later expeditions up to the 1840s, including Fitzroy and Darwin's voyage around Australia and New Zealand aboard the Beagle.

The History of Discovery in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand
  • From the Earliest Date to the Present Day
  • Volume 2
  • William Howitt
  • Published online:
    05 August 2011
    Print publication:
    23 June 2011
    First published in:
    1865
  • The prolific writer William Howitt (1792–1879) embarked for Australia in 1852 and spent two years there travelling and panning for gold. His experiences resulted in several books that appealed to the Victorian public's avid interest in Antipodean exploration. Published in 1865, when New Zealand had only been recognised as a country for a generation, this two-volume work describes 'scenes of danger and of wild romance, of heroic daring and devoted deaths, such as few countries have to show'. It gives a valuable account of early European exploration and settlement in Australia and New Zealand as well as insights into European travellers' responses to this previously unknown continent. Volume 2 begins in the mid-1840s, and focuses on the 1861 disappearance in Australia of Burke and Wills, the expeditions searching for them (including one led by Howitt's son), and visits to New Zealand by explorers including Charles Heaphy and Julius Haast.

The Maori King
  • Or, The Story of our Quarrel with the Natives of New Zealand
  • J. E. Gorst
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    08 November 2011
    First published in:
    1864
  • The British politician and lawyer Sir John Eldon Gorst (1835–1916) arrived in New Zealand in 1860, shortly after the outbreak of the Taranaki Wars (from 1860 onwards), with idealistic intentions of working with Bishop Selwyn and the Maori. He took on various governmental roles that required contact with the Maori, including those of school inspector, magistrate and, later, Civil Commissioner for the Waikato region, whose powerful chiefs had not signed the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. In 1864 he published this book analysing the social and economic situation in New Zealand, the rapid deterioration of relations between Maori and Europeans (which he ascribes largely to errors and neglect on the part of the British administration) and Maori demands for self-government. He describes, often as an eye-witness, the complex political wrangling that took place, and sets out his own views about the past and future relations between the two ethnic groups.

The Journals of John McDouall Stuart during the Years 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861, and 1862
  • When He Fixed the Centre of the Continent and Successfully Crossed It from Sea to Sea
  • John McDouall Stuart
  • Edited by William Hardman
  • Published online:
    05 November 2012
    Print publication:
    03 November 2011
    First published in:
    1864
  • John McDouall Stuart (1815–66) was a surveyor and a pioneering explorer of Australia. Born in Scotland, he emigrated in 1839 to Australia where he worked in surveying and made many expeditions into the outback. The treks he undertook from 1858 to 1862 are the focus of this account, published in 1864, and are compiled from Stuart's notes by William Hardman (1828–90). During these periods of exploration he managed - though suffering from scurvy - to cross the continent, and he also discovered various rivers and geographical features. Hardman's account uses Stuart's journals to give an account of six historic and often gruelling expeditions. The first was to the north-west; the following two were explorations around Lake Torrens; the fourth was an attempt to find the centre of the territory; a fifth involved a forced retreat after an aboriginal attack; and in the final one Stuart traversed the continent.

A First Year in Canterbury Settlement
  • Samuel Butler
  • Published online:
    05 May 2012
    Print publication:
    29 December 2011
    First published in:
    1863
  • Samuel Butler (1835–1902) became famous with his satirical Utopian novel Erewhon, based on his experiences as a sheep farmer in New Zealand and published, initially anonymously, in 1872. This earlier book, published in London in 1863 while he was still abroad, is a compilation of his letters home. Having obtained a degree in Classics from Cambridge, Butler had left England in 1859 with generous funding from his father, who hoped that making his fortune in the colonies would cure his son's ambition to become an artist. Butler was highly successful in his farming enterprise, and his letters provide both financial details and information on the practicalities of animal husbandry, pasture management and colonial life. Butler also explored Canterbury and travelled to the Southern Alps, and describes vividly the landscapes, flora and fauna of South Island. This classic source for New Zealand history also sheds light on Butler's later work.

The Mines of South Australia, Including Also an Account of the Smelting Works in that Colony
  • Together with a Brief Description of the Country, and Incidents of Travel in the Bush
  • J. B. Austin
  • Published online:
    05 October 2014
    Print publication:
    06 May 2013
    First published in:
    1863
  • The British journalist and mining expert John Baptist Austin (1827–96) moved to Adelaide as a young man with his family. During the 1850s he became closely involved in the South Australian mining industry and the gold rush in Victoria. Austin was rewarded for his outstanding expertise and became secretary of several corporations, including the Adelaide and West Kanmantoo mining companies. His extensive knowledge is reflected in this work, first published in 1863. Offering a first-hand account of South Australian mining culture, it contains a great many descriptions of individual mines along with details of the everyday life of the miners. The book also provides insight into the region's Cornish mining heritage: many mines were named 'Wheal', family names such as 'Rodda' are mentioned, and direct comparisons of the mineralogy and the regulations for mineral prospecting are made.

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