Jennifer Newell

When Captain Samuel Wallis became the first European to land at Tahiti in June 1767, he left not only a British flag on shore but also three guinea hens, a pair of turkeys, a pregnant cat, and a garden planted with peas for the chiefess Purea. Thereafter, a succession of European captains, missionaries, and others planted seeds and introduced livestock from around the world. In turn, the islanders traded away great quantities of important island resources, including valuable and spiritually significant plants and animals. What did these exchanges mean? What was their impact? The answers are often unexpected. They also reveal the ways islanders retained control over their societies and landscapes in an era of increasing European intervention. Trading Nature explores—from both the European and Tahitian perspective—the effects of "ecological exchange" on one island from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Through a series of dramatic episodes, Trading Nature uncovers the potency of trading in nature. In the interweavings of chiefly power, ordinary islanders, the ambitions of outsiders, transplanted species, and existing ecologies, the book uncovers the cultural and ecological impacts of cross-cultural exchange. Evidence of these transactions has been found in a rich variety of voyage journals, missionary diaries, Tahitian accounts, colonial records, travelers’ tales, and a range of visual and material sources. The story progresses from the first trades on Tahiti’s shores for provisions for British and French ships to the contrasting histories of cattle in Tahiti and Hawai‘i. Two key exportations of species are analyzed: the great breadfruit transplantation project that linked Britain to Tahiti and the Caribbean and the politically volatile trade in salt-pork that ran between Tahiti and the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century. In each case, the author explores the long-term impacts of the exchanges on modern Tahiti. Trading Nature is a finely researched and entertaining work that will find a ready audience among those with an interest in the Pacific, ecological history, and the startling consequences of entangling people, plants, and animals on island shores.

Tahitians, Europeans, and Ecological Exchange

Trading Nature

Join the author on a tour of senses, thoughts, and emotions during brief, poignant, powerful, moments in time.

The Night Watchman

Kirsten Wehner

Libby Robin

Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change. Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming. There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this book is the museum communities, like those in the Pacific, who have to find new ways to express their culture in a new place. The book considers how collections in museums might help future generations stay in touch with their culture, even where they have left their place. It asks what should the people of the present be collecting for museums in a climate-changed future? The book is rich with practical museum experience and detailed projects, as well as critical and philosophical analyses about where a museum can intervene to speak to this great conundrum of our times. Curating the Future is essential reading for all those working in museums and grappling with how to talk about climate change. It also has academic applications in courses of museology and museum studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, design, anthropology, and environmental humanities.

Jennifer Newell

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