Judith A. Bennett

War, emergency and the environment: Fiji, 1939-1946.

When World War Two broke out, Fijis colonial administration assumed emergency powers to marshal the civilian population to produce goods and services for the war effort, particularly the support of American and New Zealand military personnel based there during 1942-43. This context of emer gency framed land legislation revision, enabling the government at times to deal in a high-handed manner in resuming Fijian leased land for native reserves, mainly from Indian tenants. The added population and wartime construction placed extensive demands on Fijis resources, inducing environmental changes. The government as well as the various racial groups in Fiji were largely unconcerned with this unless the degradation was obvious, threatening the well being of the human population.

Across the Bougainville Strait: Commercial Interests and Colonial Rivalry, c. 1880-1960

In the years since political independence, the peoples of the border lands between Papua New Guinea and the Western Solomon Islands have had extensive and varied contacts, mirroring in their nature, if not their extent, more ancient linkages. From the mid-19th century European traders and local chiefs had collaborated to exploit these connections. Colonial annexation by Germany and Britain introduced constraints on free access across this border. Despite rationalisations about the welfare of the indigenous people, the main reason for this was the interests of commerce, especially plantation development. Bougainville was seen as a major reserve from which all concerned colonial administrations wished to draw labour for their own planters. Local preference found little recognition until post-war decolonisation began.

Natives and Exotics

Some 30 years ago, when researching a thesis on the history of Tuvalu, I could not help but be aware of the impact of the atoll environment on the lives of the inhabitants. The word ‘environment’ crops up repeatedly in the thesis, but I thought in terms of the environment’s effect on people and only marginally on humans’ impact on their environment. Judith Bennett’s latest book, Natives and Exotics, looks at both sides of the coin, and more. As Bennett explains, Natives and Exotics ‘aims to consider the whole ecology of war in the Southern Pacific . . . ’. In what is likely to be an enduring contribution, she has placed the Pacific Islands firmly within the corpus of the growing literature of environmental history world-wide. Pacific historians will see the Islands in a different light and environmental historians will have to take notice of the Pacific. The Journal of Pacific History proudly presents the following Forum on Natives and Exotics and it remains for me to thank the four discussants for their thoughtful contributions and ready cooperation.

Fears and aspirations

Very little study has been done of the role of US Intelligence in the South Pacific command in the Second World War. Collection of information on the civilian population concentrated mainly on settlers, sojourners and migrant labour, but military personnel also come under scrutiny. US intelligence collecting was at its most intense in New Caledonia, a major base for the US forces and a country rated as highly strategic by the Allies, especially in the early phases of the war with Japan. Because of the Vichy‐Free French divide from 1940 on, the US was especially wary of possible subversion of the war effort there, but its purview also took in the Asiatic and Melanesian population though the latter, as in the Southwest command, were not considered a major threat. Even so, the magnitude and detail of the intelligence carried out suggests that post‐war political considerations were never far from the US governments wider concerns and aspirations.

'The grievous mistakes of the Vanikoro concession': the Vanikoro Kauri Timber Company, Solomon Islands, 1926-1964.

The British Solomon Islands Protectorate government, in the 1910s, encouraged logging operations on Vanikolo in order to diversify the economy and extend government control in the easternmost islands. The Vanikoro Timber Company began operations in 1926 without any reforestation clause included in its licence. Problems with the assessment of royalties on trees felled in the 1930s drew the attention of the Colonial Office to this. Little could be done to change the original agreement, but the British administration halted any major extension of logging until a Forestry Department could oversee a sustainable extraction regime, including reforestation, in the 1960s. The logging company, working under difficult conditions in an isolated area, was never a financial success and finally closed in 1964 when cheaper timbers became readily available on the Australian market. The Vanikolo people remained ambivalent towards the company, valuing its presence as a pathway to the wider world, but often resisting extension of its demands on the islands resources.

Isles of Amnesia: the history, geography, and restoration of America’s forgotten Pacific Islands

Cook Islands, French Polynesia, and Hawai‘i again. Three chapters relate the author’s experiences in the institutions where he studied and worked –Yale, the BurkeMuseum and Berkeley – offering his reflections on the joys and pains of academic and institutional adventures. The final chapter, ‘Reflections’, looks back on five decades of change in the ideas, practices and institutional frameworks of Pacific archaeology, focusing on Anglo-Saxon and North American traditions. While generally positive in tone, the book contains a handful of less enthusiastic evocations of people, theories or places, often expressed in Kirch’s trademark colourful biting phrases. I cannot resist citing his description of postmodernism and the danger of hyper-reflexivity, which can only lead ‘in ever-tighter and convoluted circles of self-criticism until you fly up your own arse and disappear’ (p. 329). Here is a great, rich read, instructive and enjoyable, marked by the author’s passion for his work, the Pacific and its people. There is a latent sense of romanticism about some traditional Polynesian societies and about fieldwork, which seems presented in an overly positive light; but this is a personal story and not an objective relation of facts. Kirch’s respect and fondness for the islands and their inhabitants colour the entire book, dedicated to the many people who helped him and welcomed him in their communities. This attachment and state of mind has certainly played a central role in Kirch’s research, and it is important that he recognises this himself, here and previously where he wrote: ‘I sometimes feel that the Pacific is in my blood’ (On the Road of the Winds, p. xix).

Fluid Frontiers and Uncertain Geographies: US Controls on Immigration From the Pacific, c. 1880−1950

ABSTRACTUS policies of immigrant exclusion evolved from the so-called Asiatic barred zone of 1917 to the Asian ‘triangle’, but also included people of the Island Pacific. In the latter case, the test for eligibility to enter the United States (US) as a potential citizen was race based. World War II induced pressures by US citizens in the occupying armed forces for marriage to both Asian and Pacific Island women. Internal lobbying in the US plus diplomatic expediency resulted in some post-war relaxation of the ban on Asian immigration via marriage. In New Zealand there was at least one challenge to the extent of the Pacific boundary of the Western Hemisphere wherein greater mobility of migrants was acceptable to the US government. Political Cold War pressure, more than geographic boundaries, proved eventually more potent for potential immigration via marriage but this was too late for most Pacific partners of US servicemen.

Meditations: New Directions in the Study of the Decolonisation of Melanesia

It seems that occasionally nodding can occur among us all, as this paper ‘fell off” the last special issue of the journal, a happy fault that has given me more time for meditation. Let us continue. In August 2010, in a small cultural centre on Malekula Island, I saw a display of photographs and posters commemorating the achievements of three decades of Vanuatu’s independence. The most striking photograph was that of Prime Minister Walter Lini and his ministers taking the oath of office on Independence Day in 1980. With their hands raised over a carved slit gong or ancestral figure (atingting kon) draped with the new national flag, these leaders were flanked on all three sides by a variety of religious ministers, sisters and attendants in ecclesiastical dress. Beyond them, but no less respectful, were crowds of people. This scene conveyed the old and the new, grounded in custom (kastom) and many cultures, but committed to the new state and Christianity, as Vanuatu’s motto states: ‘Long God yumi stanap’ (In God we stand). The public display of this image, thirty years later in a small cultural centre far from the capital, belies the frequent claim that Melanesian citizens lack a national identity. Despite the fragility of the Melanesian states, Melanesian nationhood ‘remains a stubborn rock’, and the citizens of these nations celebrate their respective independence days as significant. These meditations take up the suggestions of Gardner and Waters’s introduction to the special issue and indicate new topics and themes for historians investigating the decolonisation of Melanesia. With new light cast by Helen Gardner on the role of Christianity in the independence movement, especially Presbyterianism in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), we may well ask what the role of regional and global Christian institutions was elsewhere in the Pacific. While in his splendid overview of the region John Garrett gives a context, intensive localised study may reveal more nuanced political influences. What did church assemblies, theological colleges, the International Missionary Council, the World Council of Churches, the Melanesian Council of Churches and the Pacific Conference of Churches bring to the Pacific as both stimuli and facilitators of a sense of Island identity and capacity? To what degree did these institutions assist the politicisation of Christians, resulting in the development of skills and a theology supportive of political independence? Many historians and political studies experts, themselves espousing secularism, sometimes forget that most Pacific peoples and societies value spirituality. For most, that includes some form of Christianity, a potent force.

Japanese Wartime Internees in New Zealand

A small group of Japanese civilian internees from the South Pacific were confined in New Zealand during World War II, with some being subsequently transferred to Australia in readiness for planned civilian exchanges with Japan. Most from Tonga had Japanese wives and children who were also detained in New Zealand. With one exception, all Japanese who had local wives and families were forced to leave them behind in either Tonga or Fiji. These families proved an anomaly to the Fijian authorities who had to provide care for some, even non-Fijians. In defining who was supported in their former island homes and who was ultimately deported to Japan or allowed to return to the islands, racial attitudes of the various administrations emerge, reflecting an antipathy towards Asians not found in regard to other enemy aliens of the time. New Zealand played the role of honest broker but it, too, did not offer any permanent home to displaced Japanese civilians after the war ended, and supported the expulsion of them from the South Pacific.

Gorai and Population Decline in the Shortlands

Peter Sack in the last issue of this journal takes me to task for writing narrative history in Wealth of the Solomons: a history of a Pacific archipelago, 1800–1978, a book published in 1987, an extended version in time span of a doctoral thesis submitted in 1979. Twenty years is a long time to wait for such a critique by a legal scholar and a noted translator of the Annual Reports of German New Guinea. I recall Dr Sack with fondness, as he was most encouraging to me when I was a student at the Australian National University. I am not entirely sure what Dr Sack means by ‘narrative history’ as he does not define it. I can only suppose that it means history that tells a story. This seems tautologous, since I cannot think of any history that does not tell some kind of story. It may be a story about politics, economic conditions, origins of peoples’ trade patterns, evolving environmental views and so on. It may even be the story of how Europeans in New Guinea acquired land from the New Guineans, such as in Peter Sack’s Land Between Two Laws: early European land acquisitions in New Guinea (Canberra 1973). If Dr Sack means a sequential account of events, then this applies to myriad histories, though some may select aspects of a particular sequence in depth, analysing actions, reactions and context. I would put Wealth of the Solomons in this category because it covers a finite period of time, its major themes being the development of external trade relations, the plantation economy and their links with the evolution of the colonial state in the Solomon Islands. Dr Sack thus seems to have missed the whole point of the book and indeed my discussion in the early chapters. In these chapters, I was using evidence from written sources to argue that chiefs and big-men were active in determining relationships with traders and that such Western contact had ill effects as well as benefits. As I was writing neither a biography of Gorai nor a detailed demographic history of the Shortland Islands, it is not clear how Dr Sack’s comments are relevant. More generally, it seems Dr Sack is addressing the methods and practice of historians. He states what is common knowledge to all historians — that our sources are limited and sometimes equivocal. Even their very survival is often random. Moreover, when one attempts to write a history, one rarely has every extant source, though most historians try mightily to uncover as many as possible. Dr Sack attempts to create doubt that sources are reliable. Any historian is aware that sources can be inaccurate and contradictory, but this should not immobilise analytical and contextual thought about why this might be so and what information can be considered more reliable. For example, one source for this early period that Dr Sack does not mention is that of the ethnographer, G.C. Wheeler who lived among the people of the Shortlands in the western Solomons for an extended