Colonial Australia and the Asia-Pacific region

Abstract

A regional perspective. The history of Australia has traditionally been written as though its geographical position in the south-west Pacific, at the edge of Asia and adjacent to Oceania, were largely irrelevant to its historical experience and formation as a nation, as though its history and geography were somehow at odds. In standard national histories, Asia and the Pacific might receive only a paragraph or two and barely rate a mention in the index. Beset by the ‘tyranny of distance’, located thousands of kilometres from the metropolitan centres of Europe, Australia and New Zealand have been conceptualised as isolated British outposts, ‘in most senses’, in Geoffrey Blainey’s words, ‘imita..