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This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University] On: 21 November 2014, At: 17:02 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK The Journal of Pacific History Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjph20 The Austral Islands: history, art and art history Peter Brunt a a Victoria University of Wellington Published online: 23 Sep 2013. To cite this article: Peter Brunt (2013) The Austral Islands: history, art and art history, The Journal of Pacific History, 48:4, 502-503, DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2013.822651 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2013.822651 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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Page 1: The Austral Islands: history, art and art history

This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University]On: 21 November 2014, At: 17:02Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The Journal of Pacific HistoryPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjph20

The Austral Islands: history, art and arthistoryPeter Brunta

a Victoria University of WellingtonPublished online: 23 Sep 2013.

To cite this article: Peter Brunt (2013) The Austral Islands: history, art and art history, The Journalof Pacific History, 48:4, 502-503, DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2013.822651

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2013.822651

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: The Austral Islands: history, art and art history

Chapters 3 and 4 consider the ways in which individuals and families reacted to leprosy and accepted,resisted or contested the policy of compulsory segregation. These chapters are the most compelling, withInglis aptly showing how Hawaiian understandings of the land and family influenced their perceptions ofand responses to leprosy. Like many other Indigenous peoples, Hawaiians did not attach stigma to familymembers or friends diagnosed with leprosy and, instead, sought to care for them, with many choosing tomove to Molokai to look after their loved ones. The remaining chapters document how leprosy patientswrote about their confinement (mainly in letters and articles to Hawaiian-language newspapers) (chapter5) and consider the wider socio-political context in which leprosy controls were instituted (chapter 6).

As a cultural history,Ma‘i Lepera is interesting and engaging. A wealth of historical material, includingthe stories of individual patients and their families, and the use of Hawaiian metaphors add particularweight to the account. Those unfamiliar with the history of leprosy and the social history of colonial medi-cine will find Inglis’s discussion of the disease and segregation measures fascinating. For the specialist,Inglis’s account (particularly chapters 3 and 4) provides a much-needed patient- and family-centredaccount of leprosy controls in 19th-century Hawai‘i and turns the gaze away from doctors and mission-aries (most notably Father Damien). It is less successful, however, as a social history of medicine. Inglis’sattempts to weave together the diverse fields of environmental history, Pacific Islands ethnography, pol-itical history, social history and medical history mean a lack of engagement with the broader literature onthe social history of medicine.

Overall, the text is let down by its unusual structure. Each chapter is introduced by several paragraphs(‘historical vignettes’) that describe the political history of Hawai‘i, before a black line indicates the start ofthe specific discussion on leprosy. This structure is intended to assist readers unfamiliar with Hawaiianhistory, but the end result is disjointed chapters, repetition of key events and chronological confusion.Yet, Ma‘i Lepera remains a useful text, particularly for those looking for personal experiences of leprosyconfinement in the 19th century and for ways in which Indigenous societies responded to introduceddiseases.

MEG PARSONS

University of [email protected]

© 2013 Meg Parsonshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2013.827347

The Austral Islands: history, art and art history. By Rhys Richards. Porirua, NZ, Paremata Press,2012. 236 pp., illus., bibliog., index. ISBN 978-0-473-18886-3. NZ$50.00.

Rhys Richards is an independent researcher with an amateur’s passion for Polynesian history and asleuth’s taste for facts, evidence and detail. In The Austral Islands he takes up the great question facedby all historians of pre-colonial Polynesia: what can we know when so much is missing from the historicalrecord? And nowhere is this question more acute than in the case of the Austral Islands of easternPolynesia.

Richards’s book attempts to redress this lack – or at least to mitigate it – by establishing as compre-hensively as possible just what constitutes the documentary and artefactual record relating to the AustralIslands from 1769 to around the 1840s. What can it tell us about the material, social and cultural historyof Austral Islanders in that period? His answer: not much. But not much is not nothing and, for what itmay be worth, that modest offering is what Richards gives in this self-published book.

I, for one, think it is worth a lot and am grateful to have it. I can imagine Austral Islanders will poreover it as well, but that does not mean I liked the book. One does have to respect the author’s work inbringing his research to public view: years spent tracking down and painstakingly analysing hundreds ofobjects in museums and private collections around the world; verifying information about them; correct-ing misinformation; sifting through voyager accounts, shipping records, missionary journals, etc.Richards’s compilation of written descriptions by Europeans of interactions with Austral Islanders andhis analyses of the latter’s ‘material culture’ bring the art of the Austral Islands into focus as neverbefore. His commentary is always careful, authoritative and insightful. In essence, he lays out the rawmaterial from which any history, or art history, of the Austral Islands must draw.

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Nevertheless, overburdened with often superfluous information, confusingly structured, repetitiousand disjointed, it is not the most readable of books. Organised in sections object by object – documentaryobjects in part I, artefactual objects in part III (part II being a set of colour plates) – Richards’s obsessionwith information about particular things almost overwhelms his more synthetic insights and certainlyfragments the narrative coherence of the book as a whole. Moreover, this structure inevitably leads tothe repetition of information and key ideas and the fragmentation of the book’s core argument overhalf a dozen different sections.

The best piece of writing in the book is a section reproducing a paper delivered at a conference ofthe Pacific Arts Association in Christchurch in 2003, entitled ‘Austral Island “paddles”: their mainmotifs and a global search for their prototype’. Focusing on an extensive number of decorativelycarved ‘paddles’ in museum collections, this is the clearest exposition of an argument that is otherwisescattered through the book. Richards brilliantly deduces that the prevalence of these so-called paddles(they are ornamental not functional) is a phenomenon that arose after both European contact andChristian conversion. Made almost exclusively in Ra‘ivavae and Tubuai for commercial trade withforeigners (often from ports in Tahiti and other Society Islands), they proliferated from the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s as some of the most exquisite creations ever produced in Polynesia, paradoxi-cally at a time when the Austral Islands experienced massive population decline due to disease anddeath. In many ways, this section is the key to the book, where its many parts fall into place, butone does not get to it until over halfway through the book, in part III. Most of the sections of partI are the evidence trail for the argument made in this concise paper. While part I contains muchadditional information about the Austral Islands, most of it is unprocessed, apart from the runningargument about paddles.

Perhaps none of this matters for those who publish their own research, but in this case even this pointwas not straightforward. In the book’s preface, Richards explains his decision to self-publish after a fru-strated wait of seven years for the promised publication of the Christchurch paper, which had beenaccepted and submitted to the processes of peer review and revision. (The name of the journal or pub-lisher is not mentioned.) This is a shame. While the book gives us the benefit of the full range of Richards’sresearch on the Austral Islands, the paper is excellent and deserved the credibility of a professional aca-demic publication and readership. With some editorial guidance, it could have been improved andexpanded by integrating the additional information and insights in the various sections of partI. However, in a hyper-professionalised and overproducing academy, there is something rather appealingabout an independent scholar who goes his own way and publishes his own work, not answerable toanyone but himself.

PETER BRUNT

Victoria University of [email protected]

© 2013 Peter Brunthttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2013.822651

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