Establishing the Bougainville Mining Workers' Union, 1969–1976

Bougainville Copper Limited's Panguna mine was a huge and complex undertaking that, despite its potential for creating social disruption, operated successfully for two decades before the outbreak of armed conflict in 1988. One source of conflict, common in mining but neglected in previous research on Bougainville, is labour relations and, in particular, how a local workforce was integrated into a system of negotiation that facilitated the operation of the mine by limiting the level and intensity of workplace conflict. Between 1969 and 1988, the Bougainville Mining Workers’ Union (BMWU) played a key role in this structure of accommodation of conflicting interests. This paper uncovers the history of how the BMWU developed the capacity to represent its members' interests successfully and play a positive role in conflict resolution.     

Scotland,Atlantic slavery and the Scottish National Party: From colonised to coloniser in the political imagination

Over the last three decades, a major shift has taken place in Scottish nationalist understandings of Scotland's colonial past. During the second half of the twentieth century, independence supporters viewed Scotland's relationship with England in colonial terms. Since the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999, nationalists have increasingly recognised Scots' role in Atlantic slavery. This paper explores this change within the Scottish National Party (SNP) using archival sources, published material and Scottish Parliamentary records. It demonstrates that a maturing historiography has drawn attention to Scotland's slavery past. History has become politically relevant in transatlantic deliberations over racial injustice, which have grown in intensity since the international Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. SNP ministers and parliamentarians have responded to this context by incorporating addressing Scotland's role in Atlantic slavery within a case for independence that is styled as progressive and contrasts with the more recalcitrant attitudes, which predominate at UK level.     

Planning the new industrial nation: Scotland 1931 to 1979

Despite the continuing strength of Unionist politics in Scotland, from the inter-war economic crisis onwards, there slowly emerged distinctive understanding of a Scottish industrial economy. Aided by administrative devolution, and from the 1940s by a UK-wide turn towards economic planning, a project aimed at a planned modernisation of Scottish industry gained increasing traction. This article focuses on the activities of the technocratic elements of the Scottish elite, the civil servants and academic economists who played a key role in conceptualising and quantifying the Scottish economy, and making and applying policy to develop the Scottish industrial nation between the 1930s and 1970s.     

A palaeobiogeographical synthesis of Australasian Mesozoic marine tetrapods

Kear, B.P., Fordyce, R.E., Hiller, N. & Siversson, M., December 2017. A palaeobiogeographical synthesis of Australasian Mesozoic marine tetrapods. Alcheringa 42, 461-486. ISSN 0311-5518.

THE LAST 15 years has witnessed a blossoming of research on Australasian Mesozoic marine tetrapod fossils. Much of this work has focused on amniotes, particularly those from the prolific Lower Cretaceous (Aptian–Albian) Lagerstätten of the Eromanga Basin in central and eastern Australia, and Upper Cretaceous (Campanian–Maastrichtian) sequences of the North and South islands of New Zealand. However, rare and less popularized remains have also been found in Lower Triassic–mid-Cretaceous rocks from Australia, New Zealand and the Chatham Islands, and on the tectonically proximal landmasses of New Caledonia and Timor. Currently identified taxa include estuarine–paralic rhytidostean, brachyopid, capitosaurian and trematosaurian temnospondyls from the earliest Triassic (Induan–Olenekian), Middle–Late Triassic (Anisian–Norian) eosauropterygians, and mixosaurian, shastasaurian and euichthyosaurian ichthyosaurians, Early–Middle Jurassic (Sinemurian–Bajocian) ichthyosaurians, together with plesiosauroid and rhomaleosaurid-like plesiosaurians, and diverse Early (Aptian–Albian) through to Late Cretaceous (Campanian–Maastrichtian) elasmosaurid, leptocleidid, polycotylid, probable cryptoclidid and pliosaurid plesiosaurians, as well as ophthalmosaurid ichthyosaurians, sea turtles incorporating protostegids, and mosasaurid squamates. This faunal succession evidences almost continuous occupation of southern high-palaeolatitude seas, and repeated endemic diversifications (including nascent members of some key lineages) amongst emigrant cosmopolitan clades. The primary dispersal routes are likely to have been peri-Gondwanan, with coastal migrations along the western Tethys and polar margins of the Panthalassan Ocean. However, augmentation by increasing continental fragmentation and seaway corridor connectivity probably occurred from the Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous. Latest Cretaceous mosasaurid and elasmosaurid taxa also reveal regional affinities with the emergent western Pacific and Weddellian austral bioprovinces. The extreme rarity, or complete absence, of many major groups prevalent elsewhere in Gondwana (e.g., tanystropheids, Triassic sauropterygians, bothremydid marine turtles, thalattosuchians and dyrosaurid crocodylomorphs) is conspicuous, and might be related to stratigraphical/collecting biases, or the predominantly higher-palaeolatitude, cooler-water Mesozoic palaeogeography of the Australasian region. Although the burgeoning record is substantial, much still awaits discovery and adequate documentation; thus Australasia is still one of the most exciting prospects for future insights into the global history of Mesozoic marine tetrapods.

Benjamin P. Kear* [benjamin.kear@em.uu.se] Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University, Norbyvägen 16, SE-752 36 Uppsala, Sweden; R. Ewan Fordyce [ewan.fordyce@otago.ac.nz] Department of Geology, University of Otago, Post Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand; Norton Hiller [norton.hiller@gmail.com] Canterbury Museum, Rolleston Avenue, Christchurch 8013, New Zealand; Mikael Siversson [mikael.siversson@museum.wa.gov.au] Western Australian Museum, 49 Kew Street, Welshpool, Western Australia 6106.     

Engagement or empire? American power and the international order

Three recent surveys of American foreign relations lie at the intersection of topical academic and policy debates. Robert Lieber's Eagle rules? makes a case for American primacy as a precondition for global stability, and in so doing reflects an agenda for US foreign policy that is broadly associated with the current Bush administration. By contrast, Joseph Nye's The paradox of American power argues against US unilateralism, and may be read as an implicit critique of the apparent recent shift in American strategy. Nevertheless, both Lieber and Nye make a case for extensive American engagement with the world as a basis for international stability. By contrast, Chalmers Johnson's Blowback views America's global ‘engagement’ as a thinly disguised diplomatic veil for imperialism. Although they make very different arguments, these three books are usefully considered together. Nye's stress on the importance of soft power, multilateral diplomacy and wider structural changes in the nature of world politics is a useful corrective to Lieber's emphasis on US primacy. But Johnson is right to criticize the excessive and ultimately counter‐productive level of military involvement of the United States around the world. In the absence of a more effective global balance of power, the preconditions for a robust system of international diplomacy as well as the management of globalization will not be satisfied.     

A fossil sea turtle (Testudines: Pan-Cheloniidae) from the upper Oligocene Pomahaka Formation,New Zealand

Gard, H.J.L. & Fordyce, R.E., August 2016. A fossil sea turtle (Testudines: Pan-Cheloniidae) from the upper Oligocene Pomahaka Formation, New Zealand. Alcheringa 41, XX–XX. ISSN 0311-5518.

An isolated turtle xiphiplastron similar to that of Puppigerus sp. is described from the upper Oligocene (27.3–25.2 Ma) Pomahaka Formation near Tapanui, Otago, New Zealand. The bone is unlike any previously described turtle from the Cenozoic of New Zealand and is from a newly recognized estuarine vertebrate locality. It represents the first Oligocene cheloniid turtle bone described from the southwest Pacific.

Henry J. L. Gard [henrygard@hotmail.com] and R. Ewan Fordyce, [ewan.fordyce@otago.ac.nz], Department of Geology, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, 9054, Otago, New Zealand.