No comments about Brindle Royalist - A Story Of The Australian Plains.

No comments about Travels And Adventures Of An Officer's Wife V1: In India, China And New Zealand.

No comments about New Zealand: A Pictorial Journey.

1 comments about White Shadows in the South Seas (Resnick Library of Worldwide Adventure).

1. Was there ever a more romantic title than "White Shadows in the South Seas?" The book sold like hotcakes in the early 1920s and a movie of it won an Oscar in 1928. I suspect, however, that a lot of the popularity of the book was due to photographs of undraped Polynesian women and hints of sexual delights. One of the female characters is named "Vanquished Often." This is pretty racy for 1921, the stuff that escapist dreams were made of after the horrors of World War I.
   
   Well, unfortunately, "White Shadows" while not a bad book is not a very good book either. It's about a visit the author made to the remote Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. He meets a lot of bizarre characters and tells us of them at length -- and I have a feeling he told a few "stretchers" as Huck Finn would say. There's plenty of colorful descriptions of scenery that is in truth spectacular, and stories of some of the people who have visited the Marquesas, including Herman Melville and Paul Gauguin. O'Brien gives the reader a good dose of history and folklore.
   
   I've had "White Shadows" and its companion volume "Mystic Isles of the South Seas" on my bookshelf for about 40 years. The titles are too evocative and the books too romantic to throw away. The photographs are pretty decent too, although not as revealing as some of Marquesan women in "The National Geographic" of the same epoch. So, buy the books and look at the pictures, read a bit of the purple prose, and dream of an Island maid named Vanquished Often.
   
   Smallchief

4 comments about Frommer's Australia 2003.

1. We will be going to Australia this November, and bought this book now in October. Having read a good portion of it (facinated by the "virtual tour" before the real one), I can say this is probably the only book one will need before and during the trip. Complete, straight, fun to read. The other book by same authors (Australia for under $50) is basically the same book without listing the expensive resorts and restraunts. G'Day!



2. I went to Melbourne and Sydney and the book turned out to be pretty skimpy. I flipped through the Fodor's book when I got home and wished I had bought that one instead. I found the Frommer's book to be very light on things to do and good places to eat for the 2 cities I visited. There isn't even a mention of Olympic Park in Sydney and only a handful of restaurants are mentioned. If you are only buying one book I would recommend checking out the Fodor's instead. It contains more thorough information and has good maps throughout for each city.



3. I went to Melbourne and Sydney and the book turned out to be pretty skimpy. I flipped through the Fodor's book when I got home and wished I had bought that one instead. I found the Frommer's book to be very light on things to do and good places to eat for the 2 cities I visited. There isn't even a mention of Olympic Park in Sydney and only a handful of restuarants are mentioned. If you are only buying one book I would recommend checking out the Fodor's instead. It is much more thorough and has better maps throughout for each city.



4. The trip was fantastic and I really enjoyed it, but this book didn't make it out of my bag when I was there. While a lot of the info was good, I used the Lonely Planet guide the whole time as it was more up to date and more accurate than Frommers.

No comments about Travels in New Zealand with a Map of the Country.

2 comments about Old New Zealand and Other Writings (The Literature of Travel, Exploration and Empire).

1. F.E. Maning was one of those Englismen who arrived in New Zealand before its being integrated in the British Empire. He became a Pakeha Maori, the personal « property » of a Maori chief, trading with his tribe in many articles particularly muskets and gunpowder. The book is interesting because it describes the Maori civlization before its being completely destroyed by colonialization. But it is of great interest in its showing the direct influence of European culture, particularly of the musket, on the fate of the Maoris from the very start of the European presence. Before, this warlike people was living in forts positioned on hilltops and on cliffs, that is to say in dry and healthy places. Only their agriculture was concerned by the low lands that were cultivated. This location of the forts and villages was perfectly well adapted to the use of the spear to defend them. With the musket everything changed. It was necessary, for it being used in best conditions, for the Maoris to move their forts and villages to the lowlands. This made them live in swamps, in very unhealthy territories. Their wars were changed, some of their customs were also changed and their habitat was changed. This last element caused the propagation of serious diseases among the population, causing its reduction over a few decades. This book is thus a perfect testimony about the changes colonialization brought to those populations, those people who some like to describe as primitive.

   Dr Jacques COULARDEAU




2. Old New Zealand put legs under two opinions I've gained in the last ten years or so: 1) many pre-Christian societies were incredibly savage and no Westerner would want to live among them w/o the incentives of Christian missionary work or mistreating them by enslavement or unfair trading practices; 2) most moderns have idealized the "noble savage" by ignoring the "nasty, brutish, and short" aspects of their lives.
   
   I reached conclusion #1 by reading of the savagery, cannibalism, or both in pre-Christian Rome and Greece, Ireland, Germany, Vikings, Fiji, Tasmania, Mexico (Aztec), Peru (Inca), and America (our word "cannibal" comes from the word for the Carib Indians). Try reading the Mohawk treatment of Isaac Jogues or the Auca treatment of Jim Eliot for a peek at the "noble savage."
   
   Maning's experience and sympathetic writing of the "good old times" of the Maori culture stretches the mind to wonder just how anybody could live they way they did, and how any modern could possibly kvetch at Christian missionaries "for not respecting native customs."
   
   How many murders of innocent children is the "right number" that the missionaries should have approved? How much foot-binding in China is good? How many widows should be burned in India with "Suttee?" How many people are the right number to have their hearts cut out while still alive to make sure the sun will rise in Mexico? (Does the Modern really believe that number is above zero? What if HE is the one?) Is Cortez really to be despised for putting an end to the ritual murder (and consumption) of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of innocent people each year?
   
   If Maning put legs under my respect for Christians who brought the concepts of mercy and justice to benighted people, the review by Jacques Coulardeau put a centipede's legs under my belief that moderns---in their general rejection of Christianity, especially Catholicism---have let their animus blind themselves to a simple reading of history.
   
   Of course I've heard the claim that more people have been killed in the name of religion than all other causes. And, if one will agree that Communism is a religion (answering man's deepest questions), albeit a godless religion, than I must agree. The Communists certainly killed more people in the 20th Century than all the "religious wars" of the prior 1.9 millennia.
   
   Back to Coulardeau. He writes, "With the musket everything changed. It was necessary, for it being used in best conditions, for the Maoris to move their forts and villages to the lowlands. This made them live in swamps, in very unhealthy territories. Their wars were changed, some of their customs were also changed and their habitat was changed. This last element caused the propagation of serious diseases among the population, causing its reduction over a few decades. This book is thus a perfect testimony about the changes colonialization brought to those populations, those people who some like to describe as primitive."
   
   Well, yes and no. What Coulardeau left out is that Maning described the need to move from the forts on the hills to the swamps near their crops was their survival need to get muskets, and they way they could get trade goods was from their farms (e.g., growing flax). What Coulardeau leaves out is the sad reason they needed muskets to defend themselves is that in this "primitive" (nay, let's call it SAVAGE) society. That sad reason is that they believed "might made right."
   
   Simply put, pre-Christian Maoris considered quite OK, even admirable, for any man or group to murder and pillage any other man or group if strong enough to pull it off.
   
   Viking raiders had the same opinion when they "went shopping" in England. In their society, it was morally right to swoop in, kill and plunder those who had eked out a living on the land. Imagine the Hatfields and McCoys running total amuck with revenge, murder, and even eating each other. Would any Modern admire THAT as a wee cultural pecadillo?
   
   Today's Maori do not live in constant dread of an individual or marauding gang appearing at any time holding the belief that they have every right to "harvest" the possessions and even the flesh of their neighbors.
   
   We Americans so respect the caribou that migrate twice each season for their economic benefit that we built parts of the Alaskan pipeline underground to preserve their travel patterns.
   
   Cannot we extend to the English a similar respect vis a vis Australia or New Zealand? French, Spanish, Dutch, Irish, Scots, English, Italians, Germans, Russians, Norse, Greeks, Pakistanis, Sihks, Gujratis, and Mexicans who move to the USA? Or Americans themselves, such as Daniel Boone, who moved "out west" to have a little more room, or Mormons who moved for a more peaceful clime than Nauvoo, Ill.?
   
   I think we should respect them when they did it peacefully. When they acted like Hitler looking for "lebensraum" or Maoris looking for plunder, we must chasten them. Why? Because they are not being "good Christians." The best Christians, e.g. Jogues and Elliot, were utterly peaceful. Cortez and many others fell short, yes, of the CHRISTIAN ideal. The Maoris, however, had no such ideals.
   
   In modern times, nobody ever say Stalin was a "bad atheist." You might call him a "bad man," but when you do you're smuggling in from Christianity your very definition of good and bad.
   
   Modernists! Admit your source for your belief in right and wrong: It emerged from Christianity not pond slime.

No comments about New Zealand,: Or Ao-teä-roa (The long bright world): its wealth and resources, scenery, travel-routes, spas, and sport.

No comments about Rambles and Observations in New South Wales: With Sketches of Men and Manners, notices of the Aborigines, glimpses of scenery and some hints to Emigrants.

No comments about The young traveler in New Zealand (The Young traveler series. American ed).