Book Review: Australia & the Pacific: A History: By Ian Hoskins

Australia & the Pacific: A History

By Ian Hoskins. Sydney, NewSouth, 2021. 489 pp., illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9781742235691 (pbk). AU$39.99.

Australia & the Pacific is an engaging book. In the words of its author, Ian Hoskins, it is a ‘thematic survey’ of Australia’s Pacific history from deep time until the present (p. 18). Having noted the lack of a comprehensive synthesis on the market, Hoskins set out to ‘produce both a work of reference and a compelling account of Australia’s place in the Pacific’ (p. 19). In this, he hoped to help ‘mend the national amnesia’ (p. 6), targeting what Warwick Anderson, and Donald Denoon before him, once termed ‘our repressed Oceanic memories’ (pp. 3–4). Just who is meant by ‘our’ is left implicit, but it does not take long to realize that this is a book written predominantly for non-Pacific Islander Australians. It is a clever, popular history aimed at an educated, book-buying public – and with an introduction and closing chapters anchored in the present, the book will more readily find a home on the shelves of those who, like Hoskins, are fed up with close to a decade of Liberal-National coalition government and an equally ineffective Labor opposition.