When Raphael Cilento drafted his unpublished autobiography, he called it ‘The World, My Oyster’. Some of the other titles he considered—such as ‘Confessions of an International Character’, ‘20th Century Spotlight’, ‘Mankind in the Raw’ and ‘Tapestry of Humanity’—similarly evoked his international career. Other alternatives—such as ‘Topical Confessions of a Tropical D…
I am very thankful to be here. And there is something more in my heart, something I cannot say.’ Sister Teresa González speaks firmly, with characteristic Spanish emphasis in the English she learnt in Australia 53 years ago. She speaks for us all, and we nod. We have sung an ancient liturgy of psalms to remember the eight Benedictine Missionary Sisters who a…
The interaction between people and place is the basic ingredient of human history. The historians who interpret this complex and ever-changing relationship are inevitably bit players in the processes they seek to unravel. In settler societies the terms of the relationship are re-negotiated and the heightened awareness of the new and the different reshapes expectations and communal at…
In this book we share the rich documentary and photographic sources from the early years of the Oenpelli mission. Though it consists mainly of records produced by non-Indigenous missionaries, we consider this book a book of Aboriginal history. Why? The letters, reports and photographs that form its core were produced by missionaries who sought to convert and change Aboriginal peop…
Every man sees a war in which he fights from two points of view. The one is his own, his view of his personal life in relation to the harsh environment of battle; the other is the outlook of his unit which makes him share closely the corporate experience of this unit and gives that unit an individual entity and character with its own peculiar difficulties and joys, its…
In early 2012, when I visited Theodore (Ted) Schwartz at his home in Del Mar, California, he had recently finished digitising audio recordings of interviews he had conducted with Manus people in Papua New Guinea (PNG) from 1953 through 1995; the annotated catalogue went on for many pages.1 Ted gave me an audio tour and we listened to Paliau, his supporters, an…
A company formed by the young, avowed British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes and his business partner Charles Dunell Rudd, with interests in the diamond mines of the Kimberley and gold mining in the Witwatersrand, became one of the foremost British mining-finance companies in the twentieth century. Emanating from South Africa, the company that Rhodes and Rudd founded, The …