Counter Networks of Empires: Reading unexpected people in unexpected places

Abstract

Australiawithin the settled grids of Auckland's urban centre. The same was happening throughout the Antipodean colonial world. In Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra, in study groups, breakfast clubs, gaols, pubs and public urban spaces, Aboriginal people from nations throughout Australia inhabited places long considered to have been "settled" by settler nations with their presence, their politics and their selfconsciously Black, and Black Panther, identities. So, too, in the streets of the Pacific's colonial cities-Port Vila, Port Moresby and Suva-in the villages and plantations of New Britain, Fiji and the Solomons, existing church networks and new political ones were being utilized and formed around new and localised notions of independence, sovereignty and decolonization. 1