Australia is a product and an agent of empire. From the mid-nineteenth century, the Australian colonies experimented with ‘sub-imperialism’, an expansionist project obstructed by the fact that the ‘self-governing’ white settler colonies of the British empire lacked external sovereignty. This chapter begins with the Australian colonies’ interdependence with and aspirations to annex ‘adjacent islands’ in the mid-nineteenth century. It follows the construction and administration of a Pacific empire beginning with the annexation of the Territory of Papua, to the administration of New Guinea and Nauru as League of Nations C Mandates and then as United Nations Trust Territories. Law proved an indispensable tool of Australian empire-building, producing complex relations of economic and cultural domination and resistance in Papua, New Guinea and Nauru. Amid the significant re-alignments produced by World War II, Australia attempted to renovate its empire in order to retain it. A professionalised administration of Australia’s territories and the regulation of legal citizenship were met with increasing Indigenous resistance and activism for real self-determination. Although decolonization in the later twentieth century brought Australian empire to an official end, the legacies of those expansionist aspirations continue to shape the Commonwealth’s legal, political and economic relationships with islands and communities in the Pacific region.

Chapter 11 takes us to the edges of the Pacific archipelago for a closer look at the camps for Japanese Surrendered Personnel and the War Crimes Trials Compounds in the Australian-administered island territories of New Guinea. The chapter traces their changing accommodation in underground tunnels, timber barracks and Quonset huts. The War Criminals Prison at Manus Island precedes the later location there of the infamous offshore detention center, one of many such facilities later created for incarcerating unauthorized asylum seeker arrivals to Australia. The chapter makes the case for a genealogical approach to physical sites of incarceration as important for understanding the continuous historical entanglements of sovereignty and spatial forms of violence.

On 20 March 1939 the Burns Philp ship MV Macdhui docked at Port Moresby in the Australian territory of Papua. On board was the 13th Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery. Commanded by Major Kenneth Chalmers, the battery had been raised from permanent gunners in Sydney and had the task of installing and operating two 6-inch coast guns at Paga Point, Port Moresby. Less than four months earlier, on 6 December 1938, the Minister for Defence, Geoffrey Street, as part of a series of measures to strengthen Australian defences after the Munich crisis, had announced funding for the development of Port Moresby as ‘a base for mobile naval and air forces’.

Australia entered the Second World War with considerable experience of coalition warfare, mainly based on the events of the First World War. Reflecting its recent history as a group of separate British colonies, by the First World War the new nation had not developed a foreign service and had little capacity for independent strategic decision-making. The Australian Government learned that its troops had landed at Gallipoli four days after the event; it had not even been advised, let alone consulted. By the last year of the war, however, the Australian Prime Minister was sitting in the Imperial War Cabinet, although this was not a permanent arrangement. Similarly, at the operational level, the formations of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) became part of the wider Empire’s military forces and were deployed and employed by British commanders, who rarely consulted the senior Australian commanders. But by the last year of the war senior Australian commanders had learned to scrutinise the plans of their British superiors. Coalition warfare is therefore essentially about strategy and command.

Ultimately, strategy is decided by the government, which might or might not accept the views of its military advisers. In Australia, during February 1941 there were a number of remarkable meetings of the Advisory War Council and of the War Cabinet that resulted in a change in attitude towards the threat from Japan, and soon after to a change in Australian strategy. This is not to suggest that the magnitude of the Japanese threat had not previously been realised. Indeed, in December 1940 the Australian Government had offered to send a brigade to Malaya, and Prime Minister Robert Menzies had decided to visit London to press for reinforcements for the Far East. But the meetings in February saw a heightening of the concern about Japan and, more particularly, revealed a greater role for the non-government members of the Advisory War Council. The council had been formed the previous year to involve members of the Opposition in the management of the Australian war effort.

The brilliantly successful but nonetheless hard-fought and bloody campaign in New Guinea in 1943 received considerable publicity at the time and has been the subject of a series of historical accounts over the succeeding decades. The story of the development of Australian strategy in the context of Allied strategy during this period has, however, received less attention. But no military campaign is conducted in a political and strategic vacuum. The New Guinea campaign was the outcome of strategic decisions by American and British political and military leaders made in conferences on the other side of the world. The nature of Australia’s contribution was determined, within Allied strategy, by political and military leaders meeting far to the south in Canberra and Brisbane. This chapter examines Australia’s role in trying to influence Allied strategy and how it decided its own strategy in 1943.

A theory developed from New Guinea ethnography that finds status competition to be a conflict-management system also appears to apply to medieval England, where the system was monopolized by elites, and to quotidian life in contemporary Britain, albeit with a reduced reach and through an additional, novel avenue to status. These findings are deployed to discuss viable policy options for moderating environmentally damaging consumption in the contemporary world.

This chapter traces the spectacular growth of Christianity in the Philippines, Polynesia (including New Zealand), contrasting with the extreme racist attitudes towards the Australian aborigines and the much slower growth in Melanesia.

Mead and Bateson were two of the most famous and influential anthropologists whose research and advocacy have had broad influences on social sciences and mental health in the twentieth century. Although their marriage lasted only four years, they continued to influence each other until their dying days. After Mead’s death, their only daughter, Catherine Bateson, also an accomplished anthropologist, found out that Mead had been a closet lesbian since her early adulthood, and for years was a lover of another famous anthropologist, Ruth Benedict. These entangled relationships are described and discussed in the context of their achievements and contributions. Also included in the narratives are Mead’s original fieldwork in American Samoa and controversies surrounding Samoan teenagers’ sex life; Mead’s relationship with Benjamin Spock and their influences on contemporary child-rearing practices; Bateson’s complicated and tragic family background; and Bateson’s contributions to systems biology, double bind theory, and cybernetics.