What do you think?
Rate this book
Audiobook
First published October 27, 2015
Sir Eugene Goosens, the towering and talented figure of English music who, while conductor of the Sydney Symphony, had begun the process that led to the building of the Opera House, turned out to be a man of highly exotic sexual tastes. And that, to the Australia of the time, was most decidedly not on. While in Sydney, Goosens became romantically involved with a woman named Rosaleen Norton, who was a pagan, a keen practitioner of the occult. And a lady who had a liking for both flogging and unusual kinds of misbehavior with animals, mostly goats. ..Can’t you just see that being broadcast on the BeeB by an expressionless news reader? Or delivered by John Gielgud with the same dead-panache he used in Murder on the Orient Express when asked about an injury. “Yes, there is an old contusion. The result of a slight fracas in the mess, sir, with regard to the quality of a pudding known as spotted dick.”
And Hong Kong, the British colony…was wrested from London’s hands [emphasis mine] in 1997 and is now an increasingly Chinese part of ChinaAs if the peaceful end of a lease constituted armed robbery.
Many military strategists have speculated that the world might have been a far safer place if postwar Korea had been divided four ways: among the United States, the Soviet Union, the Republic of China, and the United Kingdom, as was first proposed. Or if the Soviets had been given free rein to invade all of Korea, and be done with it. In this latter instance, there would have been no Korean War, for certain—merely a Leninist satrapy in the Far East that, most probably, would have withered and died, as did other Soviet satellite states.I thought this was rather cavalier of Winchester. Who is to say that a fully Sovietized Korea might not have given the USSR strategic advantages that might have impacted the development of Japan or other western leaning nations? And what of the impact on the residents?
Admiral Samuel Locklear III in charge of all US forces in the Pacific…declared his belief that it was actually changes to the climate—changes that were powerfully suggested by typhoon clusterings that he and his weather analysts had observed—that posed the greatest of all security threats in the region.I guess the Admiral is just another tree-hugger. One of the things that makes a good non-fiction read is the number of times one feels impelled to follow up the material the author presents with some extra digging of one’s own. You will probably be able to construct a prairie-dog town from all the digging you will want to do while reading Pacific. I have provided a few starter holes in the EXTRA STUFF section. For me, there was much here that was news, including how the line between North and South Korea came to be, some of the specifics of the US nuke tests, and the treatment of the test area locals, Jack London’s relationship to surfing, an almost comedic story of a DMZ tree, Gough Whitlam’s exciting PM term and the current growth of xenophobia in Australia, and China’s program of expanding their territorial claims and breadth of military installations in their coastal waters. Whether these items in particular float your boat or wash it ashore, there are plenty more bits and pieces in Winchester’s Pacific that, when taken as a whole, join to form a very large and satisfying read.
“Significant upheaval related to the warming planet is probably the thing most likely to happen…and that will cripple the security environment.”
... this is a reality of today's Pacific - of the fear of a coming collision between East and West, that there is challenge in the air...
The existence of the entity we call Polynesia, with her generally peaceable past, her wealth of undiscovered skills, the long survival of her people, hints that such belief of ours, in the permanent immiscibility of far-flung peoples, is a racial assumption that need not be so.
The Pacific should perhaps not be a place, where after years of conquest and dominion, we now only fear confrontation and collision. There has to be another model.
Polynesia suggests ... rather than consider competition, is something radically different. We should be learning ... malama honuma: Take care of where we live. It is all we have or will ever have. It is precious.
Thanks to the dominant cultural bias of modern history, there is a topsy-turveydom inherent in any description of the (Pacific) rim. On its western side are the eastern peoples: Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indonesians, Filipinos, and countless more if one chooses to push the ocean's frontiers westward towards Indochina and India. On the eastern side are the national admixtures of the various migrated and now notionally Western peoples: Canadians, Americans, Central Americans, Colombians, Ecuadoreans, Peruvians, Chileans. Around the south and beyond to Oceania are the more newly settled outsiders of modern New Zealand and Australia. The aboriginal peoples - Native Americans, Aleuts, Inuit, Maori, Australian indigenes, the Canadian First Nation, and a host of others, all genetically Pacific peoples as we now know - remain dotted around or within the rim, where their recent experiences have become conjoined with those of the Polynesian islanders, the inhabitants of Melanesia and Micronesia, and so have been protected or decimated, exploited or revered (but never left alone), as the various histories of newcomers have unfolded.
So I made a list. I scoured newspapers and history books and databases and academic papers, and came up with some hundreds of more or less notable occurrences between January 1, 1950, and the time I began to write this book, in the summer of 2004...
In the end, I chose just ten singular events, some of them portentous, some more trivial, but each appearing to me to herald some kind of trend.
The Japanese, still busy repairing their country and still occupied by American forces, had some small reason for good cheer that day with the ending of their custom of declaring children to be one year old at birth, and of everyone adding one year to his or her age on January 1. This change meant that all 80 million Japanese would not become numerically older on this day: a forty year old would wait until his next actual birthday before becoming forty-one. For a brief while that morning, all Japanese were said to have suddenly felt younger.
"...the Senkaku Islands—claimed by the Chinese, a new hot spot in the coming collision between the world’s superpowers (since the United States is pledged to come to Japan’s side if the latter’s territorial sovereignty is impugned)..."
"The unexpected eruption of the hitherto peaceable Mount Pinatubo smothered two critical U.S. bases nearby—one of them a navy headquarters—with enough ash and mud to cause their abandonment."
"Typhoon Tip, the deepest of them all, recorded an eye-watering low pressure of just 870 mbar—and enjoyed the unique distinction of being both the deepest and the widest of all tropical storms on record..."
"Woody Island is now the city of Sansha, and it serves proudly as the administrative capital of all China’s supposed properties in the entirety of the South China Sea."
"Kiribati ...the only nation that occupies all four hemispheres, its islands and atolls being scattered north and south of the equator, and east and west of the International Date Line..."