The developed countries of the Australasian region have legislative and healthcare systems similar to the UK, consistent with their relatively recent colonial history. Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand both demonstrate varying approaches to provision of healthcare, disability support services and legislative frameworks for people with neurodevelopmental disabilities who commit offences. Particular areas of need are described, including the impact of the lack of capacity in neurodevelopmental disability healthcare and also the additional skills and understanding required to develop cultural competence to better support and work with the Indigenous people of both countries facing additional disadvantage. The challenges of service delivery across vast geographic areas of low population density are also discussed. Common features of both countries are discussed initially, then unique aspects in Australia andAotearoa New Zealand. Significant improvements have been made in recent years, but both countries still suffer from a lack of capacity in the workforce and sufficient funding to deliver high-quality services to people with neurodevelopmental disabilities who commit offences.

This chapter examines the relationship between climate stress, Indigenous sustainability, and sovereignty in the trans-Pacific context. Using the work of Keri Hulme (Maori), Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro Guam), Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands), Nequo Soqluman (Bunun Taiwan), Rimuy Aki (Atayal Taiwan) as counter-narratives, I challenge readers to reconsider the centrality of the Indigenous subject by retrieving overlooked trans-Pacific Indigenous experiences. Instead of ‘small islands in the remote sea’, as Epili Hau’ofa puts it, the Pacific/Oceania should be re-visioned as ‘a sea of islands’, giving rise to unique Indigenous ways of life expressed through outstanding cultural landscapes and seascapes in the intangible heritage of traditions, knowledge, and stories. The Pacific Islanders are united in their concerns of rising ocean levels, the connection between militarisation and colonialisation of the seas, and the ecological impacts of climate change on the ocean. I argue that narratives and poetry from Pacific Indigenous communities forge a constellation of resistant practices in the era of global climate crisis. Indigenous texts from the trans-Pacific propel us to reconsider human transformation of planetary networks in which Indigenous agency plays an important role. They formulate Anthropocene problems and reconceptualise connectivity between humans and other species, lands and waters, as possible solutions.

This chapter focusses on the different vowel and consonant systems in European languages, and the representation of these speech sounds in writing.

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.

“Jesus and the Gender of Blood.” Here’s a place blood seeps in where it hardly seems to belong: Crucifixion kills not by blood loss but suffocation. Neither crucifixion nor a common meal requires blood. Hands and feet can be lashed without nails. Why must Jesus bleed? Gospel writers portray Jesus at the Last Supper as mobilizing the language of blood to transform a structure of violent oppression – crucifixion – into a peaceful feast. The image of the Woman with a Flow of Blood, read as dysmenorrhea, recognizes a kinship: three gospels identify both the woman and Jesus with their bleeding, as leaky. The stories feminize Jesus by turning his blood away from male-gendered violence and toward female-gendered purposes of new life and rebirth. Reflections on the Eucharist and taboo.

The British government’s decision in 1839 to seek the consent of native chiefs to its assumption of sovereignty in the islands of New Zealand cannot be explained adequately by reference to international law, European political thought or Christian humanitarianism. It owed a great deal instead to strategic and political considerations and a complex sequence of historical events that took place in the preceding seventy years. The decision to treat with the chiefs for sovereignty was in large part a function of protection talk that generated a status for Māori as being more or less an ally of Britain and brought into being a relationship of mutual protection between the chiefs and the British Crown. At the same time, small parties negotiated with natives to purchase land from the outset of European settlement, and later groups of European adventurers and land-grabbers followed suit. At the point the Colonial Office reluctantly accepted that the British government had to intervene and assume sovereignty, the long history of encounter in New Zealand persuaded it that the means required to make a treaty were available in the form of chiefs as interlocutors and missionaries as go-betweens.

While the appointment of Howick, now Earl Grey, to the position of Colonial Secretary in 1846 promised the triumph of the New Zealand Company’s campaign to undo the consequences of the imperial and government’s recognition of native title over much of the colony’s lands, this did not come to pass. In both New Zealand and London, leading figures were troubled that the principles Earl Grey championed in regard to native title would mean that the government would break the promises they claimed the British Crown had entered into with the natives in making the Treaty of Waitangi, and they brought pressure to bear on the government. But, most importantly, for all the talk about the importance of defining the nature of native rights of property, philosophical ideas and legal principles counted for very little in the way that native title was finally treated by the British government. A new governor, George Grey, had been provided the resources denied to his predecessors, and he purchased large swathes of land from the natives. In doing so, native title was made, once and for all, in New Zealand.

The winter and spring of 1844–45 saw debate about native title in New Zealand reach a zenith in Britain. In a fierce parliamentary clash, the Treaty of Waitangi became the reference point in discussions of native title. This was not a consequence of the meanings or the importance attributed to the Treaty at the time it was made in 1840 but a result of the claims that had been made about it since 1842–43. In fact, the Treaty’s rise to prominence was the result of a struggle over the meaning of native title. The continuing attack by the New Zealand Company and allies, such as Lord Howick, saw the government increasingly arguing that the Treaty had to be upheld because it had acquired the nature of a solemn contract, and the honour and good faith of the British Crown and the nation were at stake. At the same time, the way that principal political players in Britain represented the natives’ military power varied enormously according to political circumstances and need, which draws into question the conventional wisdom that the British government respected the New Zealanders and their rights because of the simple fact of their might.

The Catholic Irish comprised a small but coherent group in New Zealand’s nineteenth century. They retained a recognizably Irish identity, largely but not only in Otago, well into the twentieth century. This chapter looks at how the Catholic Church in New Zealand passed from French to Irish control and from a mission centred on the Maori to one focussed on the settled Irish.