Beach Crossings - Tapa dura

Acclaimed ethnohistorian Greg Dening revisits the bloody history of the Marquesas and other Islands in Oceania to craft an extended essay on human change and transition. Beach Crossings is part memoir, part history, and part imaginative exploration of the symbolic strip of land where ocean meets beach. A book to treasure and to think about. The history of the Marquesas ('To Henua' or 'The Land') is the most terrible in all the Pacific. The silences of its depopulated valleys are intense. In Beach Crossings Greg Dening begins to break that silence with a visual essay arising out of his fieldwork diary of 1974, writing the history into the places and things he saw there. He reduces the terrible history to four stories. They are stories written with the freedom of imaginative history. They are simple, direct, passionate and beautiful. The book ends with a reflection on what is required to translate silence into history.

Greg Dening, an anthropologist turned historian, is Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University, Canberra. His books include Islands and Beaches ('a passionate book about a tragic subject'); Mr Bligh's Bad Language (acclaimed as 'magical realism'); The Death of William Gooch ('a fascinating combination of narrative history, personal reflections and critical "after-meditation" '); Performances ('full of mystery and allure'); and Readings/Writings ('meditations on the erotics of reading by one of our most readable historians').