That Australia’s future lies in engaging with the Asia-Pacific is axiomatic. But where (and what) is the Asia-Pacific? This vast and diverse region is usually reduced to major players such as China and Japan, and intermittently parts of Southeast Asia. Indeed, the very term Asia-Pacific has become passé. The ‘Indo-Pacific’ is now touted as a better means of strategising international alliances, being more inclusive of a rising India and a way of countering the intimidating clout of China. Whatever the favoured demarcation, the small Pacific Island nations of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia tend to be neglected as dots on a map that mean nothing to most Australians, except as holiday daydreams.

In Australia and the Pacific, Hoskins aims to redress what he calls the ‘national amnesia’ about the region. Perhaps the problem is not so much loss of memory as pervasive indifference. Hoskins reveals the impact of the Pacific on the European imaginary long before it was colonised, from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (c.1611) to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), part of which is set in ‘nations’ proximate to Australia, then still unknown and skirted by navigators. Swift’s satirical conflation of travel with imperialism anticipated the British ‘claim for the Pacific half of the continent’ following Captain Cook’s voyages of so-called discovery and the establishment of the convict colony in 1788. However, the Pacific registered little on the Australian consciousness in the first decades of settlement, despite a rapidly developing network of trade links.

‘There were surprisingly few Australian travelogues and even less fiction and poetry set in the Pacific’ in the nineteenth century, Hoskins writes. Little has changed. Since the end of the Vietnam War, many important Australian novels have been set in countries such as Indonesia, China, and India, signalling the surge of interest in Asia, fuelled by tourism from and migration to Australia. But aside from the numerous narratives produced by the war against the Japanese, Pacific nations remain comparatively unrepresented. A singular exception is James McAuley’s Captain Quiros (1964), an epic poem about the southern voyages of the early seventeenth-century Portuguese navigator, a work here paid detailed attention. Perhaps the most substantial Australian responses have come in the form of academic research, including that of Greg Dening and especially Bernard Smith, whose ground-breaking European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) revealed the role of art as a representational tool of colonial mastery. As Hoskins rightly remarks, Smith’s insights anticipated those of Edward W. Said by many years.

The relative lack of Australia’s imaginative response to the Pacific belies the fact that, as Hoskins notes, the nation’s ‘deep past and its modern history’ are ‘intrinsically connected’ to the ocean. The chronological range of Australia and the Pacific is kaleidoscopic, arcing back to the formation of the major Pacific landmasses and archipelagos themselves. The arresting opening counterpoints the formation of the Australian continent, created by stupendous geological upheaval millions of years ago, with the appearance of ‘a new Pacific neighbour’ in 2015 following a volcanic eruption, when a small patch of land suddenly emerged from the sea near Tonga, its survival against the elements uncertain.

‘Existence in the deceptively named Pacific Ocean can be precarious,’ Hoskins observes. While rising seas and wild weather throw the very existence of some Pacific Island states into question, local leaders regard Australia’s politicised arguments about climate change and its loyalty to fossil fuels with ‘anxiety and bewilderment’, he writes. One can imagine their sense of abandonment. Take the low-lying Melanesian nation Kiribati, long pillaged for the phosphate that provided Australian farmers with thousands of tonnes of much-needed fertiliser. Today, the Kiribati people watch their land disappear as distant glaciers melt and the sea rises and warms. In 2018, Prime Minister Scott Morrison spoke about Australia as a member of the ‘Pacific family’, from which a China seeking to extend its influence has become pointedly excluded. But visiting Tuvalu for the Pacific Islands Forum not long after his election triumph in May 2019, he dismissively refused to commit to significant action on climate, despite leading the region’s largest emitter of carbon.

Pacific nations may not be ‘family’, but they do have their Australian uses. As immigration minister in the Howard government, Morrison had ‘stopped the boats’, repelling the flow of unauthorised refugees from the Middle East and Asia. In 2001, Nauru, another fruitful phosphate source that had fallen on hard times, was made an offer it could not refuse, an aid package in exchange for housing Australia’s unwanted asylum seekers. The old friend and former colony Papua New Guinea was also provided supplementary aid as a sweetener to set up the detention centre on Manus Island. Thus Australia’s vexing problem with ‘illegals’ was provided with a ‘Pacific Solution’, the unpleasantly Hitlerian echo of which seemed lost on John Howard.

Australia’s repulsion of asylum seekers was reminiscent of the forced return at the turn of the twentieth century of Pacific Islanders, the last of the community of indentured labourers brought to the country in the second half of the nineteenth century, not always by choice. Rapacious entrepreneurs eyed the Pacific as ‘an oyster to be shucked’, Hoskins writes in one of the book’s most powerful chapters. The Pacific was a ‘cornucopia of commodities’, desirable products like flax and sandalwood – and people. Blackbirding, the exploitation of Pacific Islanders on the cotton and sugar plantations of Queensland, bore an uncomfortable resemblance to American slavery, and ran contemporaneously with the continued repression of Aboriginals and the rising tide of violent opposition to the Chinese who had gravitated to Australia during the Gold Rushes.

Australia and the Pacific is a welcome contribution to the fraught history of Australian regional relationships. It is voluminously documented, though one could have wished for more than the single page granted to the proactive Australian involvement in the postwar occupation of Japan, which lasted longer than the conflict that preceded it and signalled the nation’s political determination to play a constructive role in Asia–Pacific affairs. The multiple controversies over France’s nuclear testing in the Pacific from the 1960s also deserve a more extended and sceptical treatment. The anti-French brouhaha over the resumption of atmospheric testing at Mururoa Atoll in 1995, when some Australians displayed their anti-nuclear credentials by temporarily eschewing baguettes and berets, is ignored. A decade earlier, in the mid-1980s, the Hawke government’s outrage at the testing didn’t stop it from discreetly lifting its embargo on lucrative uranium sales to France at the earliest opportunity. As has become patently clear, Australia has never been as committed to a ‘nuclear free’ Pacific as New Zealand.