Boots

Abstract

between the promises of the travel industry and the binary oppositions of Polynesia, where Tahiti and the female body were typecast as the definitive Polynesian people, and Melanesia, where the frisson of savagery added colour to travellers’ accounts. The history of representation is a relatively well-trodden path in recent scholarship of the Pacific but Halter chooses fine examples to test how the experiences met the expectations. The more innovative chapters of Halter’s analysis are those on trade, which display a welcome return to the economics of Australian engagement in the region. ‘In Search of a Profitable Pacific’ is focused especially on Melanesia and includes a useful list of the key companies operating beyond Australian shores as sugar, copra, general trade and shipping companies consolidated their hold on the region. Here is the hard edge of Australian interest in the Pacific Islands. As sojourners or travel writers provided anodyne accounts of happy people, plantation life or mission success for the reading public, extractive industries pulled labour and profit from the islands. Walter Gill, overseer to Indian labour on Colonial Sugar Refinery plantations in Fiji from 1915 to 1926, published his memoirs in 1970 when the tide had turned on colonialism. Gill described the abuse and physical violence, suicide and murder on the plantations as the power struggles of racialised colonialism. He concluded that the whole system of big business and indentured labour was only possible when those at the top out-brutalised those at the bottom. The New Hebrides held a special place in Australian Pacific imagining. These islands were the focus of Australian religious and economic interests, fuelled by influential Australian Presbyterians. Moreover, they were the site of Australian fears of French expansion, a threat to the Australasian Monroe doctrine. Yet Australian travellers to the Anglo French Condominium were charmed by French colonialism: exconvicts and free settlers mingled with Islanders from across the French Pacific while excellent roads accessed cheap French hotels. Halter brings a clear political eye to his analysis. He knows that colonialism and the industries that profited from it rested on the tropes of primitivism. Theories of racial distinctions between Islander and European bodies drove policies that allowed abusive practices, while concentrating on the dangers of the Pacific, especially in Melanesia where malaria threated the health of all. Racial hierarchies ensured that labour laws, active in Australia, did not apply to non-Europeans or were irrelevant beyond Australian shores, including in the Australian Territories of Papua and New Guinea. Australian Travellers in the South Seas is an ambitious book for a young scholar, yet the scope goes well beyond the title. This is not simply an exploration of the representation of the Pacific from the settler state of Australia. Halter has explored the economic and political orientation of white Australia in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Here was the time when Australians might look to Britain for identity but spread themselves into the colonial Pacific with a sharp eye for profit filtered through the soft vision of Pacific travel, shored up by racial theories. This important element of Australian history has slipped from the historical consciousness of Australians. Halter’s excellent contribution, therefore, is especially commendable.