The publication of this book – and its reception – reveals a good deal about New Zealand as well as Australia in the past four or so decades, not least the remarkable rise of indigenous as a cultural and political keyword.

An Indigenous Ocean owes much to its canny publisher’s series BWB Texts. Billed as ‘short books on big subjects for Aotearoa New Zealand’, this series of essays is designed to provide a platform for critical discussion of important contemporary issues. History, colonisation, and indigeneity have been to the fore. Recent examples include Imagining Decolonisation; Island Time (by the author of the book being reviewed here); Introducing Te Tiriti o Waitangi; Fragments from a Contested Past; and Encounters Across Time.