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Pacific Skipjack »
The Remarkable Story Behind the World’s Biggest Tuna Fishery
Authored by: Bob Kearney
Publication date: August 2026
The Pacific skipjack tuna is a remarkable fish. With nowhere to hide in the wide-open spaces of the Pacific, it is one of the fastest and most mobile fish in the world. It is also one of the quickest fish to reproduce, such that the largest tuna fishery in the world, co-managed by more than twenty Pacific island nations, can yield enormous catches of skipjack without threat to the well-being of the species. The south-western Pacific is the only region in the world where all tuna stocks have a ‘healthy’ status. It supports the acknowledged best researched and managed tuna fishery on the planet. With skipjack being the most important renewable natural resource in the region, the fishery is crucial to the economic and wider social wellbeing of Pacific Island peoples, who are now largely managing these resources for themselves.
Astonishingly, while many individuals, groups, organisations, institutions and governments from around the world were involved in the establishment of this gigantic fishery, it came to be successfully managed primarily through the vision and tenacious efforts of a single young Australian scientist, Dr Bob Kearney. In this book, Kearney tells the extraordinary, colourful story of how, beginning in Papua New Guinea at the start of the 1970s, he crossed paths, and sometimes swords, with philanthropists, bankers, fishing executives, scientists, lawyers, government leaders and representatives from many nations, and even the Indonesian military. Kearney personally designed, obtained funding for, administered, managed, and demonstrated the scientific and commercial value of his dream experiment, carried out across more than thirty million square kilometres of ocean.
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At the Brink? »
Asia in the Global Economic Order
Edited by: Shiro Armstrong, Yves Tiberghien
Publication date: 2026
The global economic order is undergoing a period of profound transformation. Heightened geopolitical rivalry, rapid technological change and growing concerns about economic security are reshaping trade, investment, supply chains and global governance. These developments raise fundamental questions about the future of openness, cooperation and economic growth for Asia and the Pacific region.
This volume brings together leading scholars and policy experts from across Asia and the Pacific to examine how the region is navigating an increasingly contested international economic environment. The chapters explore the dynamics of great-power competition, the restructuring of global supply chains, the strategic role of technology and the pressures facing the liberal international economic order. They also consider the prospects for regional cooperation and the policy choices that may allow the region to sustain economic integration and prosperity in a more fragmented world. The book offers nine innovative proposals to buttress the global economic order and respond to current challenges.
Based on papers presented at the 41st Pacific Trade and Development (PAFTAD) Conference, At the Brink? offers timely analysis of the evolving global economic landscape and provides insights into how Asia and the wider international community can respond to the challenges of a shifting world economy.
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Vā Moana »
Space and Relationality in Pacific Thought and Identity
Edited by: Albert L. Refiti, A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul, Lana Lopesi, Billie Lythberg, Arielle Walker, Emily Parr
Publication date: April 2026
Vā may be a small word, but it carries expansive meaning. Rooted in Indigenous Pacific knowledges—Samoan vā, Tongan tā-vā, Māori and Hawaiian wā—this concept of relational space binds people, ancestors and cosmologies across time and place. Since the late 1990s, vā has become a powerful framework in academic and cultural contexts, energising conversations across Oceania and beyond.
As the world grapples with the rise of hyper-individualism, vā offers an urgent and restorative alternative: one that centres connection, responsibility and collective belonging. This rich collection of individually and collaboratively authored chapters explores how vā, wā, and related Indigenous concepts are lived, theorised and practised today. Drawing from diverse disciplines and grounded in specific cultural contexts, these contributions deepen our understanding of relationality, space and place across the Moana.
The AUT Vā Moana Research Centre is dedicated to exploring spatial concepts through Moananui (Pacific) thought. Established in 2012 by Albert L. Refiti and A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul at Auckland University of Technology’s School of Art and Design, Vā Moana brings together a vibrant international network of scholars. Their work reimagines how space is understood and experienced, both in contemporary and customary Pacific contexts.
Format: Hardback
Gender and Politics Reimagined »
Centring Oceanic and Asian Lenses
Publication date: December 2025
This timely collection reflects a coming together of academics, gender and development practitioners and activists to reflect on the gendering of politics. By centring Asia and Oceania and traversing numerous disciplines, the volume disrupts the illusion of certainty and clarity as to what is known about gender and politics. Individual chapters present specific research projects, while providing epistemological, theoretical and methodological reflections on how knowledge is produced and by whom, challenging the existing canon. The contributions collectively demonstrate the possibilities for theorising from Asia and Oceania to address the lack of diversity in political representation and leadership on a global scale, in which gender, race, class, caste, (dis)ability and sexual identity are powerfully interconnected.
Arising out of the Gender and Cultural Diversity in Politics: Australia, Asia and the Pacific workshop held at The Australian National University in 2022, this collection underscores the importance of fostering scholarship and mentorship in the academy. The diversity of authorship encompasses differences in ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and career stage, with an emphasis on the inclusion of authors from various Oceanic and Asian countries. The volume promotes academic practice as integral to social change, and social action as a form of knowledge production. As such, Gender and Politics Reimagined is sure to be a cornerstone in future scholarly and activist discussions.
Format: Hardback
Mandates and Missteps »
Australian Government Scholarships to the Pacific – 1948 to 2018
Authored by: Anna Kent
Publication date: February 2024
Mandates and Missteps is the first comprehensive history of Australian government scholarships to the Pacific, from the first scheme in 1948 to the Australia Awards of 2018. The study of scholarships provides a window into foreign and education policy making, across decades, and the impact such policies have had on individuals and communities. This work demonstrates the broad role these scholarships have played in bilateral relationships between Australia and Pacific Island territories and countries. The famed Colombo Plan is here put in its proper context within international aid and international education history. Australian scholarship programs, it is argued, ultimately reflect Australia, and its perception of itself as a nation in the Pacific, more than the needs of Pacific Island nations. Mandates and Missteps traces Australia’s role as both a coloniser in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea and a participant in the process of decolonisation across the Pacific. This study will be of interest to students and scholars of international development, international education and foreign policy.
Islands of Hope »
Indigenous Resource Management in a Changing Pacific
Edited by: Paul D’Arcy, Daya Dakasi Da-Wei Kuan
Publication date: May 2023
In the Pacific, as elsewhere, indigenous communities live with the consequences of environmental mismanagement and over-exploitation but rarely benefit from the short-term economic profits such actions may generate within the global system.
National and international policy frameworks ultimately rely on local community assent. Without effective local participation and partnership, these extremely imposed frameworks miss out on millennia of local observation and understanding and seldom deliver viable and sustained environmental, cultural and economic benefits at the local level.
This collection argues that environmental sustainability, indigenous political empowerment and economic viability will succeed only by taking account of distinct local contexts and cultures. In this regard, these Pacific indigenous case studies offer ‘islands of hope’ for all communities marginalised by increasingly intrusive—and increasingly rapid—technological changes and by global dietary, economic, political and military forces with whom they have no direct contact or influence.
Uncovering Pacific Pasts »
Histories of Archaeology in Oceania
Publication date: June 2022
Objects have many stories to tell. The stories of their makers and their uses. Stories of exchange, acquisition, display and interpretation. This book is a collection of essays highlighting some of the collections, and their object biographies, that were displayed in the Uncovering Pacific Pasts: Histories of Archaeology in Oceania (UPP) exhibition. The exhibition, which opened on 1 March 2020, sought to bring together both notable and relatively unknown Pacific material culture and archival collections from around the globe, displaying them simultaneously in their home institutions and linked online at www.uncoveringpacificpasts.org. Thirty‑eight collecting institutions participated in UPP, including major collecting institutions in the United Kingdom, continental Europe and the Americas, as well as collecting institutions from across the Pacific.
Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society »
Women’s lives in the Wahgi Valley
Authored by: Marie Olive Reay
Publication date: January 2022
Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society brings to the reader anthropologist Marie Reay’s field research from the 1950s and 1960s on women’s lives in the Wahgi Valley, Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Dramatically written, each chapter adds to the main story that Reay wanted to tell, contrasting young girls’ freedom to court and choose partners, with the constraints (and violence) they were to experience as married women.
This volume provides readable ethnographic material for undergraduate courses, in whole or in part. It will be of interest to students and scholars of gender relations, anthropology and feminism, Melanesia and the Pacific. The material in this book, which Reay had written by 1965 but never published, remains startlingly contemporary and relevant.
Marie Olive Reay was a social anthropologist who did research in Australian Indigenous communities and in the Wahgi Valley in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Employed at The Australian National University from 1959 to 1988 when she retired, Reay passed away in 2004. In 2011 this manuscript was found in her personal papers, reconstructed and edited by Francesca Merlan, augmented here by an additional introduction by eminent anthropologist of the Highlands, and of gender, Marilyn Strathern.
Had this manuscript appeared when Reay apparently completed it in its present form – around 1965 – it would have been the first published ethnography of women’s lives in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Its retrieval from Reay’s papers, and availability now, adds a new dimension to works on gender relations in Melanesian societies, and to the history of Australian and Pacific anthropology.
The Genesis of a Policy »
Defining and Defending Australia's National Interest in the Asia-Pacific, 1921–57
Authored by: Honae Cuffe
Publication date: November 2021
The years 1921–57 marked a period of immense upheaval for Australia as the nation navigated economic crises, the threat of aggressive Japanese expansion and shifting power distributions with the world transitioning from British leadership to that of the US. This book offers a reassessment of Australia’s foreign policy origins and maturation during these tumultuous years. Successive Australian governments carefully observed these global and regional forces. The policy that developed in response was an integrated one—that is, one that sought to balance Australia’s particular geopolitical circumstances with great power relationships and, in assessing the value of these relationships, ensure that the nation’s trade, security and diplomatic interests were served.
Amid the economic and strategic uncertainty of the interwar years, the Australian government acknowledged the shifting power distributions in the global and Asia-Pacific orders and that neither the policies of Britain nor the US completely served the national interest. The nation, accordingly, sought to intervene within the policies of the great powers to ensure its particular interests were secured. This geopolitically informed, interventionist approach, which had its genesis in the 1930s, is traced throughout the 1940s and 1950s, highlighting Australia’s gradual and uneven transition from the British world order to that of the US and the frank assessments made about which relationship best served Australia’s interests.
The Genesis of a Policy identifies a comprehensive and pragmatic approach—albeit not always effectively executed—in Australian foreign policy tradition that has not been previously examined.
Russian Energy Strategy in the Asia-Pacific »
Implications for Australia
Edited by: Elizabeth Buchanan
Publication date: June 2021
Given Australia’s lack of energy security strategy, it is not surprising that the country is void of institutional knowledge and know-how of Russian foreign energy strategy. The ‘lucky country’ as it were, relies entirely on sea-lines of communication to the north to supply fuel and to export Australian coal and natural gas. Australia has entered the 2020s as the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter; however, maintaining complacency in Canberra’s current export activities will ultimately lead to a long-term security crisis. This book critically examines Russian energy strategy in the Asia-Pacific, with a view to determining the security implications for Australia. Russia is important for global energy security chains because of its vast resource wealth and its geographical position – a pivotal position to supply both the European and Asian markets. Australia has no such luxury, geographically constrained as an island continent; it relies on the nearby Asia-Pacific import market to demand our energy and to facilitate the delivery of our national oil supplies. Understanding Russian foreign energy strategy in the region is crucial given the growing energy requirements in Australia’s emerging Asia-Pacific arena.