Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Staff Profiles

Research Interests: Race formation and race relations; colonialism and colonial relations; Indigenous studies; Australian and Pacific colonial history.

Projects in Progress: I am currently finishing off a project on the racialisation of criminality in colonial NSW and Fiji during the late nineteenth century which was funded by the ARC and called ‘The Mission to Civilise: Colonialism, Race and Criminal Codes’. I am also currently working on a project looking at transnational strategies of anti-colonial resistance and decolonisation in the western Pacific.

Selected Publications:

Books:
Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australia-Pacific Labor Trade, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007.

Banivanua Mar, T. and Evans, J., (eds.), Writing Colonial History: Comparative Perspectives, Melbourne: RMIT Publishers, 2002.

Book Chapters:
“Cannibalism in Fiji: A Study in Colonialism’s Discursive Atavism’, Grimshaw, P. and R. McGregor, (eds.), Collisions of Cultures and Identities: Settlers and Indigenous Peoples, Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2006, pp. 155-75.

“Sugar and Labor: Tracking Empires”, Benjamin, T., (ed.), Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism Since 1450, Detroit: McMillan Reference, USA 2007, pp. 1064-67.

‘The Bunya Black’: Fear and Loathing on Queensland’s Racial Borderlands’, in J. Carey, K. Ellinghaus and L. Boucher, eds., Historicising Whiteness Conference Proceedings, Melbourne: RMIT Publishers, 2007.

"'No Aboriginal Native of … the Islands of the Pacific': South Sea Islanders and the Distant Vote of the Commonwealth', in Chesterman, John and David Philips, (eds.), Selective Democracy: Race, Gender and the Australian Vote, Melbourne: Melbourne Publishing Group, 2003, pp. 71-88.

“Stabalising Colonial Violence: Indentured Labour and Settlement in Colonial Queensland”, in Evans, J. and Banivanua-Mar, T., (eds.), Writing Comparative Colonial History: Perspectives and Approaches, Melbourne: RMIT Publishers, 2002, pp. 145-63.

Journal Articles:
“Consolidating Violence and Colonial Rule: Discipline and Protection in Colonial Queensland”, Postcolonial Studies, 8:3, 2005, pp. 303-320.

“Human Rights through the Lens of Critical Race Theory”, Just Policy, March 2007.

“A Thousand Miles of Cannibal Lands: Imagining West Papua into a Colonial Past”, Meanjin, July 2007.