Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire 110703759X, 9781107037595

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Decolonisation and the Pacific

This book charts a previously untold story of decolonisation in the oceanic world of the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, presenting it as both an indigenous and an international phenomenon. Tracey Banivanua Mar reveals how the inherent limits of decolonisation were laid bare by the historical peculiarities of colonialism in the region and demonstrates the way imperial powers configured decolonisation as a new form of imperialism. She shows how Indigenous peoples responded to these limits by developing rich intellectual, political and cultural networks that transcended colonial and national borders, and connected localised traditions of protest and dialogue with the global ferment of the twentieth century. The individual stories told here shed new light on the forces that shaped twentieth-century global history and re-configure the history of decolonisation. Decolonisation is presented not as an historic event but as a fragile, contingent and ongoing process that continued well into the postcolonial era. tracey banivanua mar is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Principal Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Australia. She has previously published Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (2007).

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Critical Perspectives on Empire Editors Professor Catherine Hall University College London Professor Mrinalini Sinha University of Michigan Professor Kathleen Wilson State University of New York, Stony Brook Critical Perspectives on Empire is a major series of ambitious, cross-disciplinary works in the emerging field of critical imperial studies. Books in the series explore the connections, exchanges and mediations at the heart of national and global histories, the contributions of local as well as metropolitan knowledge, and the flows of people, ideas and identities facilitated by colonial contact. To that end, the series not only offers a space for outstanding scholars working at the intersection of several disciplines to bring to wider attention the impact of their work; it also takes a leading role in reconfiguring contemporary historical and critical knowledge of the past and of ourselves. A full list of titles published in the series can be found at: www.cambridge.org/cpempire

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Decolonisation and the Pacific Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire Tracey Banivanua Mar La Trobe University, Australia

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107037595 © Tracey Banivanua Mar 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-107-03759-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Nisi and Jimmy

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

page ix xi

Introduction: sailing the winds of change – decolonisation and the Pacific

1

1

Borders: the colonisation of mobile worlds

22

2

Currents: the wellsprings of decolonisation

48

3

Churn: restlessness and world government between the wars

82

4

Saltwater: the separation of people and territory

114

5

Flight: territorial integrity and dependent decolonisation

147

6

Black: internalising decolonisation and networks of solidarity

183

Conclusion: procedural decolonisation and Indigenous philosophies of uncolonising

216

Bibliography Index

226 258

vii

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Preface

Bubu Taka was my great aunt. She was a regal figure when I met her in Melbourne in the 1980s on her first trip out of Fiji. She was small, frail and fierce with a shock of a white afro, a wicked sense of independence and the sharp tongue of a matriarch who had helped raise three generations. She died having lived in two, possibly three, centuries. No one was too sure how old she was as she had no birth certificate, but most of the family is content to say she was well over 100, old enough to remember when white men were a rumour. Not long after she died, the family dug up an old photo that was taken in the village on our island in the Lau Group, Fiji. It was blurry and scratched, but it has been reproduced many times, as one of the only known photos of some of our dearest relations. In the foreground, seated at a table laden with glassware and food, and in crisp white clothes, probably late Victorian or Edwardian, were a white man and a woman and presumably their children. In the background and standing were my relatives, my great grandfather in his prime and small children, among them Bubu’s little sister Qalo. It is unclear who was serving who, or how the table setting, the seating, the Victorian delicacies of the seated family and the clean white cotton were maintained in the village setting. The trappings of empire, in this instance at least, were conditional. Whatever her exact age, Bubu Taka was clearly a child around the turn of the twentieth century. She grew up at a time when she would have needed permission and a pass to leave the village, let alone the island. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, the Indigenous Fijian population appeared to be in terminal decline, as was the case elsewhere in the Pacific and Australia. In state-sponsored efforts, Indigenous mothers everywhere and especially in Fiji were being taught by wellmeaning European women how to mother, how to clean and how to think and behave like civilised women. This even as the kitchens and nurseries of white families throughout the islands and many parts of Australia were staffed by Indigenous houseboys and housegirls. These were Bubu Taka’s formative years, when she and her community were ix

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x

Preface

being systematically recast as ‘natives’ in a period when colonialism throughout the world had reached its zenith. In the decades that followed, as distant world wars were fought and the twentieth century unfolded, the formal empires crumbled – partly self-inflicted, partly imposed by ‘native’ men and women sick of being infantilised by colonial governance. The reverberations of these global currents reached the Pacific and the islands, touching the beaches and rippling away again, inherently transformed in the process. Bubu Taka, probably born a generation after Fiji was formally annexed by Britain, therefore lived to see Britain hastily leave again in 1970. If she ever internalised the smallness of colonialism’s view of natives, by the time I met her she had kicked against it. She was a global citizen then, independently and seamlessly traversing village life in the islands, urban life in the Pacific’s capital centres and international travel to Australia. This relative freedom of movement, to have a passport, to live independently in the village or city and even to work, is the tangible, measurable result of the era of decolonisation. But her sense of self, of being someone entitled to do these things – as any white man – was the product of a more complex, uneven and fragile process of unthinking and undoing colonialism. This book tells part of that story.

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Acknowledgements

The kernel of the idea that would become this book emerged from countless discussions held with friends and colleagues in the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies programme, and the History Department’s irrepressible John Medley corridor gang of the early 2000s. One conversation in particular, with Gary Foley, about a photo of him at a meeting in Pohnpei in 1978 that I had come across in the Oxfam library in Fitzroy, was seminal. The story of his attendance at the conference is his to tell and does not appear in this book. But it remained for me a clue that hinted towards a deeper story of connectedness between Indigenous and colonised peoples in and around the Pacific, that was yet to be told. Since then, the research for this book has been supported by many. The Decolonization Seminar, run jointly by the American Historical Association, the Mellon Foundation and the United States Library of Congress, made initial research possible. Funding from the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University supported some of this research, and so too, an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP 120104928) supported research for Chapters 2 and 6. Elsewhere the tireless and endlessly patient staff at the National Archives in Kew, United Kingdom, and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, were invaluable. An extra special thank you is also due to the research assistance provided at various stages by Ben Silverstein, Gabby Haynes and, most recently and most intensely, Nadia Rhook whose engagement was invaluable. It has taken ten years to produce this book, during which I have been at two universities, had two precious children, lived in three different cities and towns, and travelled to archive collections in five different countries. This has given me ample time and space to collect a substantial list of people to thank for their varied support, mentorship, inspiration and advice. These include Tony Birch, Gary Foley, Pat Grimshaw, Wayne Atkinson, Marilyn Lake, Roger Wm Louis, Dane Kennedy, Richard Broome, Katie Holmes, Claudia Haake, Clare Wright, Ian Coller, Cat xi

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xii

Acknowledgements

Gomes, Margaret Jolly, Katerina Teaiwa, Kim Kruger and Patsy Corowa. A special thanks is also due to Patrick Wolfe, Roland Burke, Penny Edmonds and two anonymous readers who generously read drafts of the book. On top of all this, an inexhaustible group of academic Mums in Melbourne have been a constant source of intellectual and scholarly sharing, inspiration, friendship and life-coaching. Without Kalissa Alexeyeff, Kat Ellinghaus, Penny Edmonds and Ann Standish I may well have lost the sanity required to finish this book. Finally, through all the upheavals and transformations Nick Volk has been there, with his smarts and support, making it all possible.

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Introduction Sailing the winds of change – decolonisation and the Pacific

. . . against imperialism there is no such thing as a small people, and . . . any people, no matter how small in numbers its population, is able to face the most barbarous aggression.1

There are few things with the capacity to unite, and divide, the peoples of the Pacific basin more than the Ocean itself. It has moved us, fed us, separated and linked us, inspired our songs and visual culture, and left us in awe. In 1978 activists, students, trade unionists, Christians, atheists and communists gathered in Pohnpei, in what is now the independent Federated States of Micronesia, to discuss strategies to protect the Ocean and its people from the effects of French, American and British nuclear testing. It was an extraordinary meeting by international standards, the first of its kind in the brave new decolonising world. For it was attended by Indigenous peoples from all over the Pacific and its rim, with the exception of West Papua whose representative was not granted an American visa to visit Pohnpei.2 Three years earlier, at the Nuclear Free Pacific Conference in Fiji, delegates had followed a circuitous route to the conclusion that colonialism underpinned nuclear testing. If colonised peoples, whose territories were testing grounds for all sorts of external militaries, had the independent capacity to say ‘no’ to what was done on their lands, nuclear testing might be stopped. In Pohnpei, Australian Aboriginal delegates, along with Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Kanak, Tahitian and Chamorro

1

2

Somara Mahel, President of the Peoples Republic of Mozambique to FRETILIN, Democratic Republic of East Timor, 28 November 1975, Vanua’aku Viewpoints, 7:1 (1977). Vimal Madhavan, ‘Introduction’, in Nuclear Free Pacific and Independence Movements Conference Proceedings (Suva: Joint Conference Committee, 1975). Indigenous peoples are loosely rather than categorically defined in this study, where the term ‘Indigenous’ is used generally to indicate the first peoples of a region. The term is used in the following pages to refer both to Indigenous and colonised peoples on their own country, and Indigenous peoples residing off country, but whose indigeneity, and the management of it, was the reason for their displacement.

1

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Sailing the winds of change – decolonisation and the Pacific

representatives therefore resolved to support each other in the fight for decolonisation, sealing the promise with a ‘Charter to establish the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’. The Pohnpei Charter was a radical document for its time. It invoked ‘the rights of indigenous peoples’ against ‘the degrading influences of Imperialism and Colonialism’ and asserted that these rights were defined by the customary systems of land tenure, indigenous languages, customs and land, sea, water, mineral and fishing rights that had all been subject to ‘direct attacks made by the colonial systems’. It recognised these rights as extending to those ‘nations that have been forced into a Fourth World position of subjugation in their own lands’, as well as to those experiencing ongoing imperialism in their postcolonial world. It asserted that the Indigenous peoples of Australia, New Caledonia, Tahiti, Hawaii, New Zealand, Micronesia, West Papua and East Timor were still subject to colonialism and noted that the antidote, decolonisation, was ‘an established procedure’ encouraged by the United Nations but yet to be fully extended to the peoples of the Pacific. Accordingly the Charter demanded that ‘the implementation of the policies of decolonization’ be extended to Indigenous peoples of the entire region, including those in the ‘fourth world’ settler colonies, along with a ‘return to the sovereignty of their ancestral lands’.3 At first sight the Pohnpei Charter is an anomaly. The accepted orthodoxy in historical accounts of decolonisation in the Pacific is that there was no energy for decolonisation in the islands. No nationalist movements forced colonial powers to their knees, and isolation, micro-status and a deficit of development, sophistication and capacity ensured the Pacific saw little of the solidarity and radicalism of African and Asian territories. Yet the aspirational manifesto articulated in the Pohnpei Charter was a shout-out to the various conditions of colonisation that exceeded the United Nations’ limited view. The decolonisation that the Charter called for departed sharply from the ‘procedure’ and ‘policies’ of decolonisation that had been developed over the 1960s by colonial, imperial and global bodies. It used terms such as ‘fourth world’, a term only coined in 1974 by Canadian George Manuel of the National Indian Brotherhood of Canada to describe the condition of Indigenous peoples in settler states – decolonisation’s forgotten people.4 In 1972 Manuel had established the World Council of Indigenous Peoples after visiting New Zealand and Australia. What he saw had convinced him that political

3 4

‘Charter to Establish Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, in Nuclear Free Conference Proceedings. George Manuel, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (New York: Free Press, 1974).

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Sailing the winds of change – decolonisation and the Pacific

3

unification of Indigenous peoples was the only means of achieving a state of decolonisation.5 The vision articulated in 1978 was therefore a radical, intellectually militant expression that was connected by language to global webs of thinking and expression. It therefore fits awkwardly with the standard story of decolonisation in the Pacific and suggests that there are lost stories to be told, ones that could completely reset the established narrative. Research for this book began as a search for the deeper story behind the Pohnpei Charter. In 1978 at the level of international organisation there was not an established discourse of ‘indigenous rights’ as an extension of decolonisation. It was not until 1982 that the United Nations established a Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the first mechanism dedicated to Indigenous peoples at the global level. It was not until 1993 that a Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples was completed, and another fourteen years before it was ratified. Yet here on this tiny island in the northern Pacific in 1978 a disparate coalition of Indigenous peoples from places spread across 30 per cent of the Earth’s surface had articulated their own Charter on Indigenous rights using terminology from the leading edge of international discourse. It contained the kernels of what would eventually form the bundles of economic, cultural and group rights now known and ratified by the United Nations in The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Pohnpei Charter therefore points to a political sophistication, physical mobility and a cosmopolitan connectedness to international networks that has been completely underestimated by existing histories of decolonisation. As the stories told in this book convey, the intellectual threads that came together in this document put the Pacific, or Oceania, at the forefront, not lagging in the slipstream, of the process of un-colonising peoples. The ‘winds of change’ that eroded European empires and shaped the political and territorial contours of the modern world arrived late in the Pacific and as a largely spent force.6 As this study shows, the new records becoming available to historians show that by the mid-1960s, the only imperial powers that even contemplated decolonisation in the Pacific were Britain and Australia, and they explicitly reconfigured the process to ensure it met their imperial desires. In addition, the proliferation of new 5

6

Douglas Sanders, The Formation of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (Denmark: The International Secretariat of the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs, 1977), p. 10. The famous winds of change speech was given by the British PM, Harold Macmillan, in Ghana in 1960, during his tour of British central and southern African possessions. For a discussion of the tour, see Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22:3 (1994): 505–11.

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Sailing the winds of change – decolonisation and the Pacific

and old settler colonies in the Pacific makes this region a signal example of the many limitations of formal decolonisation. For Indigenous peoples who are minorities within nominally independent settler nations, and for others for whom the ‘imperialism of decolonisation’ is intensified by the micro-status and isolation of the Pacific islands in world affairs – a status ushered in during the colonial era – decolonisation has been fragmented, precarious and contingent.7 Formal decolonisation in many cases was experienced as an ambivalent set of events that were remote or disconnected from the newly imagined communities of diaspora that were emerging in the Pacific’s universities, villages, reserves, missions and urban ghettos. This book charts the emergence, convergence and parting of ways of two distinct phenomena of decolonisation. The first was Indigenous and had its roots in the early colonial period as a dialogue that Indigenous peoples maintained with colonial powers, and in which they asserted their right to choose the best and reject the worst of colonisation. It began as localised responses, but quickly developed international and transnational linkages, shadowing the imperial networks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second was an international response to this kind of agitation the world over. When Resolution 1514 (XV), or the endlessly titled Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, was passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1960, the imperative of global powers converged and intersected with the general mood for independence radiating from colonised peoples. As we will see through a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ observation of administrative powers’ responses to United Nations resolutions, however, it was very quickly reconfigured as the next ‘stage’ of imperial appropriation for military and economic gain. As is traced through the pages of this book, these versions of decolonisation, the former focused on decolonising people and the latter on territory, remained constantly in tension, dialectically opposed and co-productive. In telling this story, this book charts the sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting, paths and border crossings of anti-colonial and Indigenous political movements that have helped to define and shape the postcolonial, or rather still decolonising, Pacific. Its observations include subversive mobilities; religious sovereignty and autonomy movements; militant Polynesian Panthers and black and brown power movements; and other subtle expressions of decolonisation that expanded beyond the territorial confines of colonial and national borders. In doing so the book adopts an unconventional framework within decolonisation histories. First, it treats 7

Louis and Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’.

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Decolonisation and history

5

decolonisation as a movement whose story begins in the nineteenth century, substantially re-positioning the timeline of decolonisation. Second, by accessing disparate social and cultural expressions of antiand postcolonialism it weaves the threads of colonised and Indigenous Pacific peoples’ counter imperial networks into the broad fabric of empire’s decolonisation.8 Third, it looks at the Pacific region or Oceania as an inter-connected whole, a ‘sea of islands’ as Epeli Hau’ofa put it, and as a crucial contributor to a wider global conversation of decolonisation.9 As the 1978 Pohnpei Charter indicates, this was primarily through an insistence that decolonisation in settler colonies be framed by the same paradigm of expectation as the decolonisation of external territories.

Decolonisation and history The study of decolonisation is a discrete field of historical enquiry within studies of empire. Originally coined in reference to the decline and dismemberment of the European empires, ‘decolonisation’, since at least 1960, has connoted the birth of nations and the deliverance of national sovereignty to non-self-governing territories.10 Martha Kaplan and John Kelly have pointed out in their essay on ‘Nation and Decolonization’ that the emergence of the nation state as the ‘paradigmatic political unit’ for global politics was concurrent with the post-1945 programme of decolonisation.11 Accordingly, this era is generally seen to be that period between 1945 and 1990 when the United Nations’ membership grew from the original 51 nation states to 159 as new postcolonial nations were born. In accounting for this rapid transformation in global affairs, historiography has been dominated by the nation as the culmination of decolonisation, reflecting a wider historical and political tendency to situate the nation as the un-interrogated ‘sovereign ontological subject’ of history.12 8 9 10 11 12

Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2001). Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), pp. 27–41. M. J. Bonn, The Crumbling Empire: The Disintegration of World Economy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938). John Kelly and Martha Kaplan, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 1–29. Antoinette Burton, ‘Who Needs the Nation?’, republished in her Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 45; Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed, 1986).

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Sailing the winds of change – decolonisation and the Pacific

While the agenda and chronology of the United Nations tends to structure current historiography, most overviews locate the history of decolonisation before 1945. Until quite recently most followed the lead of M. J. Bonn, whose 1938 book on the crumbling of empire is often cited as the first to coin the term ‘decolonisation’.13 He argued that decolonisation, or the retreat and weakening of empire, paralleled Oswald Spengler’s popularised notion of the decline of the West. It had metropolitan causes and followed a metropolitan agenda. His argument went on to influence many of the post-1960 histories in the vein of R. F. Holland, Rudolf Albertini, Henry Grimal and John Darwin, who also tended to argue that, as Henry Grimal put it, ‘colonialism contained the seed of its own destruction’.14 These and similar histories tended to see decolonisation as only those set of events that led to the end of empire, and inexorably to the establishment of new nation states. Moreover, interested primarily in narrating the decline of empires, they explored the colonial territories perceived to have had the greatest impact on metropolitan centres and world affairs – principally Asia and Africa. The Pacific was largely ignored. As histories of decolonisation began to branch out from studies of the decline of the British Empire to studies of the process of decolonisation itself, the early concentration on Asia and Africa compounded. While the overwhelming majority of studies of decolonisation ignored the Pacific, a few notable scholars have placed the region into a wider international story. Raymond Betts’ 2004 study, for example, briefly discussed Fiji, Tonga and Papua New Guinea, and Wm. Roger Louis’ histories of the British Empire have included integrated, as opposed to the more commonly appended, discussions of decolonisation in the Pacific region.15 These accompany a modest scholarship that has focused on individual island nations, often without broader reference to the regional or global context.16 Most recently W. David McIntyre’s Winding up the British 13 14

15

16

Bonn, The Crumbling Empire. R. F. Holland, European Decolonisation 1918–1981: An Introductory Survey (London: Macmillan, 1985); Rudolf von Albertini, Decolonization: The Administration and the Future of the Colonies, 1919–1960, trans. Francisca Garvie (London: Africana Publishing Company, 1982); Henry Grimal, Decolonisation: The British, French, Dutch and Belgian Empires, 1919– 1963, trans. Stephan De Vos (London: Routledge, 1965), p. 3; John Darwin, The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Raymond Betts, Decolonization: Second Edition (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2004); Roger Louis, ‘Introduction’, in Judith Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: OUP, 1999), pp. 1– 46; W. David McIntyre, ‘Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands’, in Judith Brown and Roger Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 667–92. Donald Denoon (ed.), Emerging from Empire? Decolonisation in the Pacific: Proceedings of a Workshop at the Australian National University, December 1996, (Canberra: Division of

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Decolonisation and history

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Empire in the Pacific Islands has focused on British decolonisation across the Pacific in a detailed, archivally rich account of British intent and reactions to local conditions.17 It is one of the only focused accounts of decolonisation in the Pacific that looks at multiple sites within the same analytic frame. But it is a decidedly British story that is told, and one in which Indigenous peoples are rarely visible. There is an established body of scholarship producing discrete national histories of decolonisation in the Pacific.18 The increasing tendency of this scholarship, however, has been to visit decolonisation from the perspective of postcolonial political upheaval. Its focus is on a history of flawed nation-making, weak national consciousness, failed political independence and poor governance. As Helen Gardner and Christopher Waters have noted of the scholarship in the western, or Melanesian, Pacific in particular, this grew from an initial concern to problematise neo-colonialism in early literature.19 But the instability of particularly the western region of the Pacific in the 1990s has since inspired an even more negative literature.20 Donald Denoon and Hank Nelson have emphasised separately that decolonisation is still unfolding post independence, and an increasingly vast scholarship since the 1990s emphasised failed states, arcs of instability, Balkanisation and decolonisation as a ‘door to disaster rather than emancipation’.21

17 18

19

20 21

Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1997); Max Quanchi, ‘End of an Epoch: Towards Decolonization and Independence in the Pacific’, Agora, 43:4 (2008): 18–23; Clive Moore, Decolonising the Solomon Islands: British Theory and Melanesian Practice (Melbourne: Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University, 2010). W. David McIntyre, Winding up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For a succinct historiography see Helen Gardner and Christopher Waters, ‘Decolonisation in Melanesia’, The Journal of Pacific History, 48:2 (2013): 113–21; Steward Firth, ‘Decolonisation’, in Robert Borofsky (ed.), Rememberance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), pp. 318–20. A representative sample of this literature can be found in the contributions to Denoon, Emerging from Empire?; Barry Macdonald, ‘Decolonisation and Beyond: The Framework for Post-Colonial Relationships in Oceania’, Journal of Pacific History, 21 (1986): 125. Gardner and Waters, ‘Decolonisation’, p. 115. Hank Nelson, ‘Liberation: The End of Australian Rule in Papua New Guinea’, Journal of Pacific History, 35 (2000): 269; Donald Denoon, A Trial Separation: Australia and the Decolonization of Papua New Guinea (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005). On the failed state literature see Gardner and Waters’ excellent overview in their ‘Decolonisation’, p. 117; Graeme Dobell, ‘The “Arc of Instability”: The History of an Idea’, in Ron Husken and Meredith Thatcher (eds), History as Policy: Framing the Debate on the Future of Australia’s Defence Policy (Canberra: Australian National University E-Press, 2007), pp. 85–104; B. Reilly, ‘The Africanisation of the South Pacific’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 54:3 (2000): 261–8.

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Despite being an afterthought in most overviews of decolonisation, there is much in and around the Pacific that promises to productively expand and complicate our understanding of what decolonisation is, should be and was. The proliferation of settler colonies in the region (Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Hawaii, French Polynesia, American Samoa, Guam, and arguably Fiji and West Papua) in which Indigenous or colonised peoples have limited sovereignty brings real ambiguity to the meaning of decolonisation. As Lorenzo Veracini has explored, settler colonialism is inherently resistant to it, for the national sovereignty and identity of settler nations are often predicated on Indigenous peoples within settler territories being essentially non-selfgoverning.22 This presumption is affirmed by histories of decolonisation that, focused on national territories, tend to leave the sovereignty of people unproblematised. Reconfiguring histories of decolonisation from the angle of vision offered from the Pacific, however, offers the opportunity to refocus on people rather than territory, as agents of decolonisation. In and around the Pacific, as a response to inherent territorial limits, Indigenous formations of decolonisation often exceeded the nation. As the 1978 Pohnpei Charter suggests, a virulent strain of conviction developed in and around the Pacific that located the ultimate site of decolonisation in peoples, not territory. Perhaps in revisiting this, we may learn of the innovative means by which independence and self-determination were practised in the absence of it being gifted by administering states. The vast majority of decolonisation literature and historiographical debate on decolonisation reflects the sources that are most readily available. The key debates revolve around those who argue that decolonisation was, as Bonn originally asserted, a metropolitan affair and those who have argued with David Birmingham or Ronald Robinson that it was driven by the periphery, resulting from the withdrawal of Indigenous collaboration, or the increasing pressure of Indigenous nationalisms.23 The overarching commonality of these histories, however, is that they present decolonisation through the prism of international diplomacy.24 Such work stresses and naturalises the institutional and gendered aspects of the transfer of 22 23

24

Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Settler Colonialism and Decolonisation’, Borderlands, 6:2 (2007): n.p. Darwin, The End of the British Empire; John Springall, Decolonization since 1945: The Collapse of European Overseas Empires (London: Palgrave, 2001); Dietmar Rothermund, The Routledge Companion to Decolonization (London; New York: Routledge, 2006); Wm. Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble of Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London: I. B. Taurus, 2006). Rothermund characterises these as political and diplomatic histories, constituting a discrete school of decolonisation scholarship. Rothermund, The Routledge Companion, p. 32.

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power, and the ‘subaltern’ stories of everyday women and men have tended to be either absent completely or rendered cultural (rather than historical or political). Moreover, through a tendency to see the achievement of postcolonial nationhood and the necessary retreat of European imperial powers as the end of the story of decolonisation, the historiography remains overwhelmingly Eurocentric and gender blind.25 Even conscious attempts to consider decolonisation from the local perspective, as championed by David Birmingham, have tended to focus on the push and pull of a metropolitan–periphery relationship.26 By tapping into the postcolonial concerns of Indigenous Pacific scholarship, this book moves towards the decentring and provincialising of metropolitan powers.27 Its concentration moves from the imperial turn of considering two-way connections between imperial metropoles and colonial peripheries to considering primarily transnational lateral connections and networks throughout the peripheries.28 Although transnationalism in new imperial and feminist studies of empire is now commonplace, Antoinette Burton and others have argued more recently that studies still tend to privilege transnational relationships between the metropole and colony, rather than lateral and transcolonial links. Exploration of these, she argues, is ‘one of the most exciting directions of the newest of the new’ studies of empires and their ends.29 The significance of telling stories of decolonisation from the peripheries is not just about the provincialising of Europe. It is also about the new insight and historical depth that can be gained from observing the

25 26 27

28

29

Partha Chatterjee, ‘Colonialism, Nationalism and Colonialised Women: The Contest in India’, American Ethnologist, 17:1 (1990): 622–3. David Birmingham, The Decolonization of Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1995). Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000). For an overview of Pacific postcolonial scholarship, particularly of literature, see Susan Najita, Decolonizing Cultures in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008); David Hanlon, ‘Beyond “The English Method of Tattooing”: Decentering the Practice of History in Oceania’, The Contemporary Pacific, 15:1 (2003): 19–40; Vilsoni Hereniko, ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism’, in Robert Borofski (ed.), Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2000). Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, ‘Introduction’, in A. Curthoys and M. Lake (eds), Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005); Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For studies exemplifying the Imperial turn in British empire studies see the collection of essays Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home with Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Burton, Empire in Question, pp. 278, 18.

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subaltern, subjugated and subversive webs of connections that existed between colonised peoples. As Elleke Boehmer put it, studies of crossborder power relations and interactions of colonised peoples undermine prevailing tendencies to privilege the relationship between the ‘European self and other; of colonizer and colonized’.30 Studies that detect and track Indigenous peoples’ mobilisation of imperial networks of information, knowledge and social or economic capital are a growing and increasingly rich body of work. In an early study Elizabeth Ellbourne argued, in 2005, that Indigenous peoples used imperial networks to interact both in ‘imagination’ and in person, with empowering bodies of imperial knowledge in the nineteenth century.31 So too Ravi de Costa’s 2006 study of what he calls ‘Indigenous transnationalism’ in Australia considered similar networks in the twentieth century, as has John Maynard’s work on Aboriginal transnationalism in the 1920s.32 Most recently contributors to the collection edited by Jane Carey and Jane Lydon on Indigenous Networks also demonstrate the variety and richness of translocal Indigenous political activity.33 This study therefore builds on an emerging scholarship that is exploring the inter-constitutive networks, interactions and exchanges that took place and chart the counter networks and hidden ‘webs of empire’.34 By focusing on the webs of connection that echoed and subverted the wider institutional history of decolonisation this book also engages with a third historiographical feature of decolonisation scholarship. As the excitement of the era has given way to the realities of new nations facing new imperialism, historiography that was already defined by a focus on the nation state as a framework of analysis has developed a narrative of noble failure. As Rothermund’s 2006 comprehensive overview of the birth of decolonised nations argued, the scrambled carve-ups of the colonial era, national self-interest, Cold War politics, and debt burdens set many new

30 31

32

33 34

Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 1. Elizabeth Ellbourne, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Imperial Networks in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, (eds), Rediscovering the British World, (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), p. 62. John Maynard, ‘“In the Interests of Our People”: The Influence of Garveyism on the Rise of Australian Aboriginal Political Activism’, Aboriginal History, 29 (2005): 1–22; Ravi De Costa, A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006). Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (London: Routledge, 2014). Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, ‘Bodies, Empires and World Histories’, in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 3.

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nations up to fail.35 This continuity of imperialism beyond the end of empire has been explored extensively. While Bonn coined the term ‘decolonisation’ as a negative one, referring to an undoing, or a moving backwards along the path of colonial intrusion, it now increasingly signals failure. In accounting for the rapid proliferation of nations and the subsequent challenges they faced, histories of decolonisation have also emphasised the hasty, chaotic and nearly always self-serving retreat of empires. Moreover Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, in agreement with the dependency theorists of the 1970s, and various critics of neo-imperialism, have extended this observation to argue convincingly that decolonisation was a form of imperialism through retreat rather than invasion.36 While the frequent emphasis in studies of decolonisation on the continuity of colonialism into the postcolonial era is well placed, it has had an unintended impact. In light of the unabated struggles of many Indigenous and formerly colonised peoples for economic, cultural and even physical survival, decolonisation as an historicised narrative has lost much of its sense of anticipation. As John Springall put it, the problem with decolonisation is that ‘we know the end of the story’, and being told from that perspective means the sheer potential of the time is largely lost.37 Instead a flattened uninspired image has emerged, which R. F. Holland described as an ‘endless succession of flag raising ceremonies set in dusty squares and presided over by some eminent (usually royal) metropolitan personage’ imposing decisions made in imperial metropoles.38 Such descriptions undoubtedly hit their mark. In the Pacific, flags could manifest perfunctory, procedural processes of decolonisation. The Fijian flag, for example, continued to carry the Union Jack at independence. But like the wider process of decolonisation, when presented exclusively within narratives of national birth and decline, the intellectual energy, the excitement and the aspirations invested in these newly hoisted symbols of potential futures after colonialism are lost. 35

36

37 38

Rothermund, The Routledge Companion; Wolfgang Mommsen, ‘The End of Empire and the Continuity of Imperialism’, in Wolfgang Mommsen and Jurgen Ostermammel (eds), Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities (Winchester, MI: Allen and Unwin, 1986), pp. 333–58; Brian Lapping, End of Empire (London: Granada, 1985); Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (London: James Curry, 1992). A. G. Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1969); Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Nelson, 1965); Louis and Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’. Springall, Decolonization since 1945, p. 4. Holland, European Decolonisation, p. 269.

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If flags were icons of the limits of decolonisation when they were hoisted in the passionless ceremonies of Holland’s vision, they were also icons of Indigenous peoples’ dialogue with these limits. In the regions of the western Pacific, of twelve major flags representing Indigenous peoples from East Timor to Fiji, six belong to peoples who are yet to be meaningfully acknowledged as sovereign, or who campaign for a stateless form of independence.39 Three of these flags have had two lives. The Morning Star flag of West Papuan separatists, the Bougainville flag and the East Timorese flag were designed and adopted in the 1960s and 1970s but remained unofficial until 1998 in the case of Bougainville and until 2003 in the case of East Timor. In both cases they were only hoisted after protracted and violent conflict that saw extensive loss of lives. In the case of the West Papuan Morning Star, annual flag-raising ceremonies that take place in dusty squares throughout the Indonesian territory, as well as in sites of West Papuan exile around the world on the anniversary of independence from the Netherlands, have notoriously been met since 1969 with reprisal arrests and extra-judicial violence.40 Like the aspirations they symbolised, flags were the product of a much broader and experimental history of ideas. Of those representing Indigenous and colonised peoples in the western Pacific, all but two (the Maori and Torres Strait Islander flag) were born in the late 1960s and 1970s and six contain colours, particularly red and black, that reference various political movements such as Black nationalism and socialism.41 Visually the flags of Indigenous peoples in the region 39

40

41

These include the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags; the Maori Tino Rangitiratanga flag; the flag of the Kanak Socialist Liberation Front (FLNKS) in Kanaky/ New Caledonia; the Australian South Sea Islanders flag; the national flags of Vanuatu, Fiji, the Solomons, Papua New Guinea and East Timor; and the flags of Bougainville and West Papua. Of these the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, the FLNKS, the Morning Star and Bougainville flags belong to people with no or limited autonomous sovereignty. Reports of human rights abuses in West Papua at the time of writing are extensively reported by bodies such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, and resident churches. For reports on legally verifiable cases see Elizabeth Brundige, Winter King, Priyneha Vahali, Stephen Vladeck and Xiang Yuan, Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control (New Haven, CT: Allard K Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School, 2004); John Wing and Peter King, Genocide in West Papua? The Role of the Indonesian State Apparatus and a Current Needs Assessment of the Papuan People (Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, The University of Sydney, 2005); Peter King, West Papua and Indonesia since Suharto: Independence, Autonomy and Chaos? (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004). These include West Papua (red); Australian Aboriginal (black, though representing land, it has also been explained as also referencing skin); FLNKS (black); Vanuatu (red, black, green and yellow); Torres Strait Islands (black) and Bougainville (black). The Papua

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represent the kinds of exchange that linked them to wider international discussions. But while the flags reference a global language of liberation and decolonisation, they are also inflected with local significance. Seven refer to the earth or the sea and six contain symbols such as the morning star, the sun, an opening fern or a bird of paradise in full flight, as carefully articulated expressions of hope, rebirth and freedom. The visual lexicon of flags might therefore be read as archival registers of peoples’ engagement with a global language of liberation that pursued the decolonisation of not just territories but also of bodies, cultures and minds. Repositioning decolonisation in time and space Peter Kenilorea, the former Solomon Islands prime minister, recalled the period of decolonisation in the Pacific as days when the ‘ugly head of fallacious white supremacy and the arrogance of colonialism manifested themselves unabashed’.42 In 1960, when decolonisation became a global imperative sanctioned by the United Nations, the vast majority of the Pacific’s Indigenous peoples were under some form of colonial rule. When the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonisation, or the Committee of 24, was established in 1961 to oversee global decolonisation, few Pacific colonial powers had begun to seriously consider the transfer of power to Indigenous peoples. The exception was New Zealand who left Western Samoa in 1962. But by 1980, when the United Nations adopted the resolution for the Eradication of Colonialism by 2000, only fourteen colonial territories in and around the Pacific had been formally decolonised.43 While some had gained independence as a result of dedicated political movements (Samoa, Nauru, Vanuatu), most had experienced either a partial separation or one that was imposed by colonial rulers on timetables that best suited departing administrations (Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati). During the United Nations Decades for the

42 43

New Guinea flag contains red and black as a reference to traditional rather than political colours. Cited in Quanchi, ‘End of an Epoch’, pp. 18–23. See also Denoon (ed.), Emerging from Empire? Samoa, 1962 (New Zealand trusteeship); Cook Islands, 1965 (New Zealand); Nauru, 1968 (United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand trusteeship); Tonga, 1970 (United Kingdom protectorate); Fiji, 1970 (United Kingdom Crown Colony); Niue, 1974 (New Zealand); Papua and New Guinea, 1975 (Australian colony and trusteeship); Solomon Islands, 1978 (United Kingdom protectorate); Tuvalu, 1978 (United Kingdom protectorate); Kiribati, 1979 (United Kingdom protectorate); Vanuatu, 1980 (United Kingdom-French condominium); Marshall Islands, 1986 (United States trusteeship); Federated States of Micronesia (Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei, Kosrae), 1986 (United States trusteeship); Palau, 1994 (United States trusteeship).

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Eradication of Colonialism, originally 1991–2001 and extended to 2011 in recognition of the unfinished business of decolonisation, only one colonial territory, the American trusteeship Palau, gained independence. In 2010, the Committee of 24 met in Noumea, New Caledonia, to focus discussions on the ways colonial and trust territories of the Pacific still pose significant socio-economic challenges for the nation-state-based model of independence. Amidst discussions of the need for a further Third International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism, delegates heard the ongoing grievances of Indigenous peoples from American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, Kanaky/New Caledonia, Bougainville and Buka, West Papua, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Tokelau and Rapanui/Easter Island. Many of these peoples have no status on the United Nations’s list of non-self-governing territories because they are occupied within the territories of (settler) nations with sovereign borders. At the time of writing, Indonesia, Chile, Peru, the United States, France, Australia and New Zealand still have either external colonial territories in the Pacific or internal Indigenous populations for whom independence and self-determination are only partially fulfilled.44 Decolonisation, as a formal internationally sanctioned and promoted process, has thus brought limited gains for Indigenous peoples in the Pacific. Moreover, nations that were born during the decolonisation era of 1960 onwards face significant and ongoing challenges in uniting a diverse and disparate population divided – in some cases for thousands of years – by linguistic, cultural or geographic difference, under a national imagined community. Under these historical circumstances, decolonisation has developed in the Pacific as a postcolonial phenomenon, characterised by a transnational identity politics of diaspora and displacement where the nation, as the primary formation of decolonised independence, has proven inadequate. In recognition of the limitations of the nation-based paradigm as the sole model for independence, this book focuses on the Pacific Ocean, rather than Pacific island nations. As Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic showed, and as Jerry Bentley has theorised, using the Ocean as a framework for understanding histories of political consciousness and change enables a dedicated focus on the ‘intricate emerging networks of global communication and exchange’ of Oceanic worlds.45 The Ocean that this study focuses on also offers convenient metaphors for understanding networks 44

45

Report of the Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples for 2010, United Nations General Assembly, Official Records, 65th Session, Supplement No. 23, (A/62/63). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Jerry Bentley, ‘Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis’, Geographical Review, 89:2 (1999): 222.

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of intellectual and physical connectivity and their relationship to what James Scott has termed the ‘onstage performances’ of political action that intermittently impacted on global forces of decolonisation.46 These surface currents, the onstage drama of political performances, tempests, calms and storms, were connected by deeper unseen currents and submarine rivers or memories that both underpinned and fed this political activity, and linked them to global movements. Like the enrichment of the Ocean, cultures of decolonisation in the Pacific were kept alive by processes of upwelling and downwelling that resemble the exchanges of water and oxygen between the surface and deeper currents that keep the Ocean alive. This framework of exchange, enrichment and energy characterises the accessibility of the ideas linking Indigenous networks of decolonisation as they surfaced and coalesced in expressive actions of protest, artistic and literary media, or written and spoken petitions, speeches and articles. Methodologically, access to the deeper currents of connection is often only detectable at such moments of exposure. They also require both a broader spatial scope and a deeper timescale to fully appreciate the connective threads that have linked Indigenous and colonised peoples’ conceptual protests and discourses. The passage with which this book begins offers a telling glimpse of the kind of transnational threads that connected decolonisation movements in the Pacific and Pacific Rim to international conversations. On the first anniversary of their independence from Portugal, the East Timorese were invaded by Indonesian forces. The passage is taken from a message of support offered to the people of East Timor from Samora Machel on behalf of the Peoples Republic of Mozambique in 1976. It was published in the independence newspaper Vanua’aku Viewpoints, which in 1977 circulated underground in Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides), away from the prying and possibly hostile eyes of the anglophone and francophone administrations. The speech appeared in a regular segment ‘Over the Horizon’ which regularly reported on the activities, protests and events from throughout the Pacific world and beyond, and on this occasion was expressing solidarity with the East Timorese. The paper was the mouthpiece of the Vanua’aku Pati, Vanuatu’s principal independence movement, whose flag carried the colours green, red and black in an unveiled reference to the colours of pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism. In addition, Vanua’aku Viewpoints was a paper dedicated, as many of its stories and regular segments testified, to the decolonisation of the mind. It used language, ancient stories, reconnections with displaced populations, 46

James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

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songs, poetry and prose as principal tools for undermining the internal reach of the New Hebrides’ two colonial powers, France and Britain. With other material from the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand, new political and economic visions formed, variously called the Pacific Way, Melanesian Way or Melanesian Socialism. Fashioned on a combination of mostly masculinist Christian, Marxist, Rastafarian, Black Nationalist and traditional island principles, these idealised visions represent the global reach of these counter-imperial networks.47 Viewpoints offers us just a glimpse of underlying currents of consciousness, of a shared and connected existence, and the role this played in producing globalised cultures of decolonisation. While the publication of Machel’s statement of support in Vanua’aku Viewpoints offers a glimpse of the intellectual reach of Pacific Island decolonisation movements, it also alerts us to the vehicles other than print media that enabled counter-imperial networks. The article in which Machel’s speech was published was accompanied by the report of the arrest of an East Timorese man in Australia for using illegal shortwave radio to communicate with the Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (FRETILIN) fighters in East Timor. Radio, like the information and music it broadcast, and the dances it could provide a rhythm for, was one of a creative range of mediums through which people communicated and maintained connections in the latter era of decolonisation. Further east, radio spanned the narrow waters and contested border separating Bougainville from the Solomon Islands in the early 1970s. In 1971, for example, Bougainvilleans would argue that they were so close ancestrally and physically to the Solomons rather than Papua New Guinea, that their relatives in the Solomons listened to and got better reception from Radio Bougainville.48 So too, Kastom radio in Vanuatu; Indigenous radio in Australia and New Zealand; and short-wave radio communication in West Papua, Bougainville and the Solomons have variously connected peoples in the late era of decolonisation, in ways that echo the use of maritime industries or new languages during the colonial era.49 The 47

48

49

For more on musico-political links in and across the Pacific see Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). The National Archives, United Kingdom (TNA): FCO 24/1435 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea. S. Vavitos, Chairman Local Government Councils of the Bougainville District of Papua New Guinea, Kieta to the Chairman, Legislative Council of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, Honiara, 1 November 1971. Lissant Bolton, ‘Radio and the Redefinition of Kastom in Vanuatu’, The Contemporary Pacific, 11:2 (1999): 335–48. On the use of media more widely see Betts, Decolonization, pp. 38–45. See also for a state-of-play article on the history of technology and colonialism David Arnold, ‘Europe, Technology and Colonialism in the Twentieth Century’, History and Technology, 21:1 (2005): 85–106.

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technologies of colonial and postcolonial globalisation were therefore vehicles for intellectual and physical border-crossings (such as shipping, telegraph, radio and air travel), in ways that effectively reframed the Indigenous Pacific as an integrated site of connectedness rather than isolation.50 In relating the story of the converging narratives of decolonisation in the Pacific, this book does not seek to offer an exhaustive account of decolonisation in each island and continental territory. Instead, it treats the Pacific as an integrated site of analysis, tracking decolonisation as a set of ideas, processes and practices, as it flowed through the region, transformed and transforming in the minds of Indigenous peoples and imperial discourses and strategies. Adopting a deeper timescale than is usual in studies of decolonisation, Chapters 1–3 explore the continuous and intermittently broken networks that resulted from or underpinned the extensive diasporas of the colonial era in the Pacific and especially the anglophone Pacific rim. A characteristic feature of colonialism in the Pacific basin was the massive displacement and scattering of peoples in ways that interlocked their experiences and futures. Whether moved to make way for settlement, grazing or mining, or to be used as enslaved or bonded labour, colonisation irrevocably redrew the boundaries and borders that had previously joined and separated peoples from one another. Tens of thousands of Islanders were moved for labour or to extract minerals and resources, from island to island, and from the islands to bordering mainlands, such as Australia and Peru. At the same time in Australia, New Zealand and North America tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples were moved to missions, reserves and institutions often far removed from their own country. Chapters 1 and 2 highlight the creation of the Pacific’s colonial diasporas and borders, arguing on the one hand, that they were deeply destructive, but on the other, they were facilitators of a cross-fertilisation of ideas and the articulation of resistant politics, cultures and languages.51 50 51

Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’; Donald Denoon et al., A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Maldon: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2010). On language Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Labor Trade (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), pp. 1–19; 101–20; John Maynard, ‘Transcultural/ Transnational Interaction and Influences on Aboriginal Australia’, in Marilyn Lake and Ann Curthoys (eds), Connected Worlds; History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2005), pp. 195–208; John Maynard, ‘Fred Maynard and the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA): One God, One Aim, One Destiny’, Aboriginal History, 21 (1997): 1–13; James Clifford, ‘Indigenous Articulations: Autonomy Movement in New Caledonia French Polynesia’, The Contemporary Pacific, 13:12 (2001): 468–90.

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To this extent empires and decolonisation were co-produced. The colonial displacement of populations left entire communities of disparate peoples stranded when the borders of colonial territories eventually shut in the late nineteenth century. Although colonial powers relied heavily on isolating colonised peoples on islands, reserves and villages during the twentieth century, Chapter 3 examines the porous and dynamic nature of imposed isolation. Between the World Wars, a transforming international language helped to shift global imperatives from colonising and civilising to developing colonial and mandated territories in preparation for independence. During this earliest evolution of an internationally sanctioned decolonisation discourse we can observe historic moments when the concept of territory was ascribed a primacy that would eventually abandon Indigenous peoples to the claimed sovereignties of settler states. Chapter 4 charts the ascension of territory at the United Nations. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the World Wars we observe the impact that technology and war had on the mobility of people and ideas in the Pacific. As a global enthusiasm for human rights and respect for human dignity chartered a new world order after 1945, this new order was experienced on the ground in and around the Pacific in unexpected ways that were frequently connected to past threads of consciousness. The ideological currents that were present and gathering momentum at this time can be viewed in some ways as reincarnations, ideas that were both in their infancy, but building on deeper genealogies from a colonial past. This chapter also charts the parallel story of administrative decolonisation procedures as they parted ways with disparate local movements that were envisaging decolonisation in millenarian ways, as access to unfettered Indigenous rights in land, or simply as relief from racial discrimination. It became obvious very quickly in and around the Pacific that the decolonisation of territory was, and could only ever be, the beginning of a far more complex and deferred project. When the floodwaters of international enthusiasm for decolonisation receded, arguably little had substantially changed in the Pacific. Chapter 5 explores the colonisation of the international enthusiasm for decolonisation that was enshrined in the United Nations’ Declaration on Independence ratified in 1960. Britain’s notoriously ‘migrated archives’ on decolonisation reveal an Anglo-Australian collusion in the Pacific, and an explicit and deliberate, but often privately held, intent to control territorial integrity and reconfigure decolonisation as the final stage of imperialism.52 This is set against a backdrop of a blossoming 52

On the background and significance of these Migrated Files, whose Pacific files are still being released, see Gregory Rawlings, ‘Lost Files, Forgotten Papers and Colonial

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transnational consciousness among Indigenous peoples, particularly in the western Pacific. The chapter centres on the 1960s when Pacific peoples increasingly gained access to global anti-colonial struggles in universities and churches that were explicitly anti-colonial, and supportive of independence and self-determination.53 This was a process of both physical and intellectual liberation. In Chapter 6 we see the Australian descendants of indentured Pacific Island labourers of the nineteenth century begin to re-establish personal and political links with the islands from the 1970s, taking with them and in turn receiving insights from anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles in each place. In the context of top-down, United Nations led decolonisation reaching its limits in the Pacific, this was a period of an intellectual, cultural and political flowering among Aboriginal, Kanaka Maoli, Maori, Pacific Island and Pasifika peoples who sought to imagine anti-racist, anti-sexist and postcolonial communities un-wedded to the model of the nation state. This chapter focuses on the new articulations of sovereignty, such as was encapsulated by the ‘power’ organisations of Black Power in Australia;54 Brown power, the Polynesian Panthers and Nga Tamatoa in New Zealand;55 or the Melanesian Spearhead in the islands of the western Pacific.56 Work has already been conducted on individual resistance and independence movements, particularly on Maori and Australian Indigenous movements, and national independence movements in the Pacific.57 But

53 54

55 56

57

Discourse: The “Migrated Archives” and the Pacific, 1963-2013’, The Journal of Pacific History, 50:2 (2015): 189–212. R. Smith, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Muroroa (London: Taurus, 1997). Gary Foley, ‘Black Power in Redfern, 1968-1972’ (Unpublished Hons. thesis, Department of History, University of Melbourne, 2001). Online at: www.kooriweb.or g/foley/essays; Kathy Lothian, ‘Seizing the Time: Australian Aborigines and the Influence of the Black Panther Party, 1969-1972’, Journal of Black Studies, 35:4, (2005): 179–200. Melani Anae, Polynesian Panthers (Auckland: Reed Books, 2006). Walter Lini, Beyond Pandemonium: From the New Hebrides to Vanuatu (Wellington: University of the South Pacific, 1980); Bernard Narokobi, The Melanesian Way (Suva: University of the South Pacific, and Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1983); Jean-Marie Tjibaou and P. Missotte, Kanake: The Melanesian Way, trans. C. Plant (Tahiti: Editions du Pacifique, 1978); M. Howard, ‘The Myth of Melanesian Socialism’, Labour, Capital and Society, 16:2 (1983): 176–203; E. Waddell, ‘Jean-Marie Tjibaou: Kanak Witness to the World’, in E. Waddell and P. Nunn (eds), The Margin Fades: Geographical Itineries in a World of Islands (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1994), pp. 67–92; Ton Otto, ‘After the “Tidal Wave”: Bernard Narokobi and the Creation of the Melanesian Way’, in Ton Otto and Nicholas Thomas (eds), Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997). E. Lipuma, ‘The Formation of Nation-States and National Cultures in Oceania’, in Robert Foster (ed.), Nation-Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 33–68; David Robie, Blood on Their

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Sailing the winds of change – decolonisation and the Pacific

these discrete studies are yet to specifically analyse the degrees to which these phenomena were integrated in transnational and global currents. Very few look beyond national histories in ways that capture the broad scope and political sophistication of Indigenous peoples’ transnational expressions of independence. In this book we look at articulations by Indigenous and colonised peoples in settler colonies – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia; Maori and Kanaka Maoli in Aotearoa and Hawaii, and Pasifika and South Sea Islander communities in Aotearoa, and Australia – of stateless forms of decolonisation. In performances of squatting, occupation and dwelling, by pausing and remaining confrontationally in streets, on land and in place, they produced connected discourses and politics of what Vine Deloria of the red power American Indian Movement considered re-colonisation.58 In doing so, I would suggest, they resisted the inherent and limiting territoriality of United Nations-led decolonisation, exploiting the conflicted, unstable and incomplete characteristics of settler-colonial states. As a final word of introduction each chapter in this book begins with a scenic vignette, a snapshot of unexpected people in unexpected places, and goes on to hover over specific locations in and around the western Pacific. These are not so much case studies as focal points, allowing the book to chart histories, rather than the history, of decolonisation and the Pacific. Rather than relating the discrete stories of individual postcolonial nations or colonial territories, the focus in this book is on the spaces between nations, the interstices between colonial and national borders where people travelled and connected. The opening vignettes allow us to view these individuals located at a nexus of intersecting threads of ideas, careers, travel, time or conflict. They offer a chance to reel in the disparate webs that converge at that point to observe the reach of connected worlds. For this reason, each chapter is guided by a motion or an entity – borders, seeds, saltwater and blackness, as well as churn, and flight – that was critical to the stories being told. Through these chapters, stories of decolonisation and the ends of empire radiate from imperial peripheries and revolve around the experiences and efforts of people rather than diplomacy, territories or nations. This book does not relinquish the fact of nation states and the borders that continue to be critical organising forces in global history. Rather it operates from the premise that the nation state need not become a

58

Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific (London: Zed, 1989); Smith, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific. Vine Deloria, ‘This Country was a Lot Better off When the Indians were Running It’, New York Times Magazine, 8 March 1970; Vine Deloria, Of Utmost Good Faith (San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow Books, 1971).

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predestination in studies of decolonisation. We need not dismiss as failures the myriad ways in which Indigenous or colonised peoples attempted to chart new futures out of colonisation. By exploring in their own context the ideas that would be dead ends; the discussions that never materialised; the ‘shifting trajectories’ that led nowhere and the ideals that would be hopeless alongside spectacular moments of onstage political activity, and achievement, we can gain a multidimensional picture of the counter networks of the ends of empire.59

59

Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), p. 28.

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Borders The colonisation of mobile worlds

[A]s the islands of the Pacific are opened up . . . [t]he next hundred years therefore may perhaps produce in the South Pacific unimagined changes which will fill the world with wonder. (Cheers) What a flood of light, and what an array of stupendous events have changed the character of the world since 1774. Sir Hercules Robinson, 1874.1

The year 1874 drew to a triumphant close for the loyal imperialists of New South Wales. At a banquet held in Sydney’s Merchants’ Dining Hall, glasses were charged between speeches that celebrated and honoured the formal arrival of the British Empire in the Pacific. Fiji had just been annexed as Britain’s first Pacific Crown Colony, and the newly established British Western Pacific High Commission was now extending shoots of British sovereignty into Pacific waters. In a lengthy speech, Sir Hercules Robinson, the governor of New South Wales and temporarily of Fiji, declared that the annexation of Fiji would enable the expansion of ‘the younger Britain which is now so rapidly growing into maturity in these seas’. His hope and expectation was that the island colony would become an outpost of Sydney, a valuable link in the chains of communication and trade joining Sydney to San Francisco, Vancouver and the British Empire at large. Also in the dining hall that night sat Fijian Ratu Seru Cakobau. He was an incongruous figure amidst the huddle of white men cheering an empire of white men’s countries. The ex-King of Fiji, Cakobau had ceded the islands to Britain in a last-ditch attempt to protect Fijian land from a small but permanent settler population intent on creating another white man’s colony. In a much shorter speech delivered in Fijian, although he was fluent in English, he ‘wished all the gentlemen present and chiefs of the white man’s country not to forget Fiji and to do all they could for it’.2 As both speeches foreshadowed, the annexation they celebrated was destined to become a turning point for colonial interests in and around the Pacific. It both coincided with and propelled a new imperial zeal in the region.

1

Sydney Morning Herald, 26 December 1874, p. 4.

2

Ibid.

22

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The gathering in Sydney was a turning point in the lives of the two men who spoke. Robinson was rewarded well for his services to empire and went on to become governor of New Zealand and later of the Cape Colony, eventually winning a privy councillorship in 1883.3 Ratu Cakobau, however, contracted the strain of measles that was circulating amongst the settler and Indigenous populations in urban and rural New South Wales. On returning to Fiji in January 1875, he met with 69 chiefs from throughout the islands to garner support for annexation, and to get their mark on the Deed of Cession. Within a matter of weeks, these chiefs also contracted measles, which went on to sweep unchecked through the unexposed Fijian population. Although Cakobau survived, the epidemic took the lives of his brother, son, daughter and more than a quarter of the Fijian population.4 From this point of convergence in Sydney, Robinson’s world expanded along the tendrils of empire spanning the globe, but Cakobau’s world, now a native one, contracted. The separate paths were deeply symbolic. This chapter tracks the mobilities that came together in Sydney in 1874 and goes on to consider what came next. In so doing, it observes the particularity of colonialism in the Pacific as its islands were threaded together to become an interdependent region, linked by the physical connections people made as labourers, travellers or traders. In the Pacific, as elsewhere, empires formed in uneven spaces with diverse impacts on Indigenous peoples. This chapter explores how the mobility and dwelling of imperial and Indigenous subjects, both forced or intentional, were indicative markers of colonisation.5 A long period of informal colonial contact proved critical to the ability of some Indigenous communities to integrate new economies and social structures, and to travel extensively, connecting and colliding along imperial and Indigenous circuits. Building on the claims made by Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann, while the formal empires were made up of critical webs of social and cultural movements, these built on networks that

3

4

5

Bede Nairn, ‘Robinson, Sir Hercules George Robert (1824–1897)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb .anu.edu.au/biography/robinson-sir-hercules-george-4493/text7343, published first in hardcopy 1976, accessed online 17 November 2015. Christine Weir, ‘“We Visit the Colo Towns . . . When It Is Safe to Go”: Indigenous Adoption of Methodist Christianity in the Wainibuka and Wainimala Valleys, Fiji, in the 1870s’, The Journal of Pacific History, 49:2 (2014): 141–5. David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–32.

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predated the arrival of formal empires.6 This ensured that when imperial spaces formed they remained contingent sites of colonial power, with borders that could be porous in places and always vulnerable to the physical and intellectual mobility of colonial subjects. Nevertheless, the advent of formal imperialism in the Pacific ushered in a new isolation for many Indigenous peoples that restrained established dynamics of exchange and interaction. By the end of the nineteenth century, most islands in the Pacific were partitioned, parcelled, transferred and traded by European powers in a process that incorporated the Ocean and its people into the global dynamics of empires, capital and nation-making.7 In the aftermath of sometimes catastrophic collapses of populations, the Pacific was left divided into sometimes arbitrary and always expediently defined colonies and possessions. For many, as Hercules Robinson predicted at the Sydney banquet, ‘unimagined changes’ transformed identities throughout the Pacific world as imposed relocation and diaspora emerged to define the region in new ways. In the settler colonies, Indigenous peoples were cleared from their land and confined to margins, reserves and missions, or what Cole Harris has termed ‘native spaces’, while in other colonies people were relocated in their thousands to other islands, or to plantations, mines or mission schools all over the Pacific.8 This is a critical context, for the effects of physical diaspora and a concomitant imposed isolation would play a constitutive role in the formation of decolonisation.

Expanding worlds: mobility and the Pacific’s middle ground When he journeyed to Sydney in 1874, Cakobau continued a tradition of mobility and journeying that was indigenous to Oceania. The Pacific and its fringes had been charted for centuries by countless maps detailing currents, island locations, outcrops, genealogical links and reciprocal trade relations. These were written in the stars, could be danced and

6

7

8

Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann (eds), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, 1880–1950 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 2. For recent regional overviews, see Thomas, Islanders; Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous Peoples from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2007). Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002).

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chanted like the Futa Helu, a map from Kiribati to Tonga, physically held as in the Marquesas, or remembered and passed on as guarded knowledge as in Tahiti and Australia.9 Throughout Oceania these enabled obsidian, ochre, pottery, copra, tattoos, whale teeth, flax, stories, songs and food to be traded and exchanged across vast distances. In the west, a region incorporating the island of New Guinea, the Torres Strait Islands and Australia’s north to the Kimberley, was the outer perimeter of an Asian exchange network that linked China, Macassa and the Dutch East Indies in thriving pearl, pearlshelling and trepang industries.10 Not all Indigenous peoples throughout the Pacific region were saltwater people, nor were they navigators, and throughout the Solomons, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and Australasia, trade between highlanders and lowlanders, or saltwater and inlanders, crossed the dynamic borders of hundreds of language and kinship groups. The Pacific world has been described evocatively by Matt Matsuda as the confluence of multiple sites of ‘trans-localism’, a world that was increasingly connected to the narratives of south-east Asia, Europe and the ocean-going peoples of Malaysia and Indonesia.11 From the 1500s especially, ocean highways began to be shared with Spanish galleons carrying their vast wealth and trade goods across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila.12 But it was not until the last thirty years of the eighteenth century that Pacific worlds were significantly impacted by newcomers. In quick succession, Samuel Wallis, Jean-François La Perouse, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, George Vancouver and James Cook with their numerous crews visited island groups in modern-day Tahiti, Hawaii, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Cook’s published journals and the arrival in Europe of Omai, a Tahitian traveller who accompanied the second of Cook’s voyages to England in 1774, sparked 9

10

11 12

Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Pasts to Remember’, We Are The Ocean: Selected Works, (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), p. 73; Matthew Spriggs, ‘Oceanic Connections in Deep Time’, Pacific Currents: eJournal of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Pacific Studies, 1:1 (2009): 7–27. Campbell Macknight, ‘“The View from Marege”: Australian Knowledge of Makassar and the Impact of the Trepang Industry Across Two Centuries’, Aboriginal History, 35 (2011): 121–43. See also Jayne Lydon, ‘Picturing Macassan-Australian Histories: Odoardo Beccari’s 1873 Photographs of the “Orang-Mereghi” and Indigenous Authenticity’, in Jane Carey and Jayne Lydon (eds), Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York; London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 140–2. Matt K. Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: A History of Seas, Peoples, and Cultures, 1st ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 7–8. Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, ‘“Silver Spoon”: The Origin of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World History, 6:2 (1995), pp. 201–221. See also Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giraldez and James Sobredo, European Entry into the Pacific: Spain and Acapulco-Manila Galleons (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).

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an intense fascination in Europe for all things Pacific.13 As Nicholas Thomas has recently emphasised, the fascination was mutual and new charts of the Pacific realigned both Indigenous and European worlds. This made both substantially larger. For Indigenous peoples throughout Oceania, including Australia, contact with Europe could be a valuable resource. New trades and commodities enhanced the wealth and prestige of some Indigenous elites, especially in Tahiti and Hawaii, and tipped the balance of old and new power struggles. In such an environment, missionaries and absconding Europeans or Americans found their own sources of enhancement. Throughout the Pacific’s islands, especially those on the trade routes, deserting ships’ crews, escaped convicts and other traders often stayed for months or years. Popularly despised outside the Pacific as beachcombers, and the ‘very vilest’ of the ‘lowest order’, they were popularly represented as a source of pure evil.14 But many who dwelled in the islands did so with the consent, or at the mercy, of locals. In Indigenous peoples’ new worlds, beachcombers were employed as labourers, social and linguistic interlocutors and could sometimes impart mechanical skills.15 By the 1840s and 1850s, there were an estimated 2,000 of these so-called beachcombers settled throughout the Pacific, living precariously at the mercy of their host communities.16 Whether they worked as cooks, as did African Americans in Fiji, or as political and economic intermediaries, these figures epitomised the delicate balance and flow of power of the new mixed worlds of the early colonial period.17 13

14

15

16 17

Studies of Omai are extensive. For more recent studies, see Richard Connaughton, Omai: The Prince Who Never Was (London: Timewell Press, 2005); Eric McCormack, Omai: Pacific Envoy (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1977); Michael Alexander, Omai, Noble Savage (London: Collins, Herville Press, 1977); and T. B. Clark, Omai: First Polynesian Ambassador to England (San Francisco, CA: Colt Press, 1940). For comparisons with visiting Aboriginal envoys such as Bennelong, see Kate Fullagar, The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710–1795 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012); L. R. Hiatt, ‘Bennelong and Omai’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2 (2004): 87–9; J. Brook, ‘The Forlorn Hope: Bennelong and Yemerawannie Go to England’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1 (2001): 36–47. ‘Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines British Settlements: With the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index’, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, no. 425. (London: House of Commons, 1837), p. 22. Edward D. Beechert, Honolulu: Crossroads of the Pacific (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 15; Carolyn Ralston, Grass Huts and Warehouses: Pacific Beach Communities in the Nineteenth Century (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1978), pp. 20–43; Ian Campbell, ‘Gone Native’ in Polynesia: Captivity Narratives and Experiences from the South Pacific, Contributions to the Study of World History, No. 63 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 1–26, 83–150. Kerry Howe, Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), p. 103. Howe, Where the Waves Fall, p. 108.

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Most newcomers to the Pacific did not dwell, but simply traded. Servicing ports in Tahiti, Hawaii, New South Wales and Aotearoa New Zealand became nodes connecting corridors of influence throughout the Pacific that conveyed and radiated people, information, wealth and disease.18 In new ports, British and American traders exchanged weapons and goods with Maori for flax, timber, potatoes and other agricultural products, while colonists in New South Wales acquired poultry, cattle, goats, dogs and horses from Tahitians.19 In Hawaii, George Vancouver reported that by the 1790s Kanaka Maoli had moved from trading salt, food and stock for iron, nails and hogs to trading arms, technology and knowledge.20 Trade for goods also acquired other resources, and when traders departed island ports, they increasingly took with them growing numbers of voluntary and curiosity-driven Tahitians, Kanaka Maoli, Maori and Aboriginal people who worked for passage.21 The crew of sealers and whalers, and later sandalwood and bêche-demer trading vessels, were a blend of Europeans and Americans, African Americans (enslaved and free), south and south-east Asian bonded workers, Aboriginal, Maori and Islander crew.22 As sailing crew, Maori, Aboriginal and Islander people joined a global traffic of maritime and other workers who crossed the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans between ports in New South Wales, Tahiti, Hawaii, Fiji, north island New Zealand and San Francisco, as well as Boston, Salem, Nantucket, Bengal, Manila and London.23 This diaspora was not just confined to maritime trades. Thousands of Hawaiian Kanaka Maoli worked for the 18

19

20

21

22

23

The language of nodes and corridors here is borrowed from Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 1–2. John Ward, British Policy in the South Pacific: A Study in British Policy Towards the South Pacific Islands Prior to the Establishment of Governments by the Great Powers (Sydney: Australian Publishing Company, 1948), p. 6. Beechert, Honolulu, p. 11; George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World (London: Thomas and Andrews, 1801): Vol. 1, pp. 353–5, 391–2; Vol. 3, pp. 183–4; Vol. 4, pp. 179–80; Ralph Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, Vol. 1 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1938), pp. 22, 35–6. Thomas, Islanders, pp. 1–30. See also Joan Druett, Captain Cook’s Polynesian Navigator (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010); Anne Salmond, The Trial of a Cannibal Dog (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 34–139; Beechert, Honolulu, p. 33; Edwin Dwight, Memoirs of Henry Obookiah, a Native of Owyhee and a Member of the Foreign Mission School (New Haven, CT: Edison, Hart, 1819). F. Rhodes, Pageant of the Pacific: Being the Maritime History of Australasia, Vol. 1 (Sydney: Thwaites, 1937), pp. 122–51; Frances Steel, Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, 1870–1914, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Robert Macnab, Murihiku and the Southern Islands: A History of the West Coast Sounds, Foveaux Strait, Stewart Island, the Snares, Bounty, Antipodes, Auckland, Campbell and Macquarie Islands from 1770 to 1829 (Invercargill: William Smith Printer, 1907).

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Hudsons’ Bay Company in the wilds of Canada in the early nineteenth century and travelled and settled as far afield as Oregon and Lake Superior. By the 1820s, a small Kanaka Maoli community had settled in Nantucket, and by the 1840s, thousands every year were engaged in visiting maritime industries.24 At the height of the whaling industry from the 1830s to 1850s, when the dominant New Englanders alone had 700 vessels staffed by at least 16,000 people in the Pacific, the demand for labourers was intense and incessant, and produced mixed mobile and transnational worlds.25 As new items of wealth and trade and new sources of prestige transformed Indigenous societies, the wider impact of interactions with European and American traders was ambiguous. On the one hand, maritime industries were brutal and mostly unregulated, with profit margins defended by violence. Sexual violence was notoriously rampant, and when conflict broke out between traders and Indigenous communities, it was governed by frontier methodologies in spaces viewed by traders as legal voids.26 Moreover, in unregulated waters, although many thousands of Islanders willingly volunteered their services to traders, they were notoriously vulnerable to abduction and exploitation. On the other hand this capacity for violence, and what Lynette Russell has called the ‘attenuated’ nature of labourers’ agency, this work also ushered unprecedented levels of social and physical mobility into Pacific worlds.27 Work in maritime industries provided wages (sometimes), travel and new experiences, and a new social value defined by enhanced expertise.28 For Aboriginal and Tasmanian labourers, these mobile maritime worlds could offer levels of autonomy and independence that increasingly could not be enjoyed in the settler colonies from which they came. In the Tasmanian whaling industry, for example, it was not uncommon for black seamen to be promoted to boat-steerers, officers and whaling 24

25 26

27 28

H. W. Bradley, The American Frontier in Hawaii: The Pioneers 1789–1843 (Stanford, CA: P. Smith, 1942): pp. 33, 227–8; Ernest Dodge, New England and the South Seas, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 47; Thomas, Islanders; David Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanian Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships (Armonk, NY; London: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). Howe, Where the Waves Fall, p. 93. For an excellent overview of the historiography of violence in the sealing and whaling trades, see Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870 (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), pp. 1–22. Russell, Roving Mariners, p. 7. Lynette Russell, ‘Kangaroo Island Sealers and Their Descendants: Ethnic and Gender Ambiguities in the Archaeology of a Creolised Community’, Australian Archaeology, 60 (2005): 1–5; Russell, Roving Mariners. See also Kerry Howe, ‘Tourists, Sailors and Labourers: A Survey of Early Labour Recruiting in Southern Melanesia’, Journal of Pacific History, 13:1 (1978): 22–35; and Howe, Where the Waves Fall, pp. 326–7.

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masters based on their skill and ability, while at the same time intense violence raged on the frontiers of their homes.29 Although some in Oceania were able to embrace available opportunities that accompanied colonisation in Australia, and colonial trade in the Pacific, these nevertheless had an unambiguously devastating impact. While varying degrees of violence, sexual violence and exploitation were prevalent, this was compounded by disease that, like the measles in Fiji in 1874, precipitated sudden and sustained population declines. Disease was a notoriously swift and efficient killer, and epidemics of smallpox, chickenpox, measles, respiratory infection, flu and venereal disease decimated unexposed populations. These were recorded and witnessed in New South Wales the year after the British landed permanently in 1789, in Hawaii in 1804 and in Tahiti in the wake of Cook’s voyages. Throughout the islands, where months could pass between visits from European vessels, the virility and speed of epidemics meant that observers often recorded the aftermath of disease, and settlers and traders often arrived in communities already devastated. Cook estimated that the population of Tahiti and Hawaii was 200,000 and 400,000 respectively in the late eighteenth century.30 By the time the London Missionary Society missionaries arrived in Tahiti in 1797, there were only 16,000, and within ten years this had more than halved. In Hawaii, the population of nearly half a million had dropped to 150,000 according to a census conducted by the society's missionary William Ellis in 1823.31 In the Australian colonies after the 1820s, the scale of depopulation was compounded by the occupation of Indigenous peoples’ land with a brutality and swiftness that was unmatched in the Pacific.32 Occupation of land had expanded from 2,520 acres in 1821 to 91,636 acres in 1825. In the Port Phillip District, a region not officially opened to settlers until the late 1830s, and amongst the first to experiment with humanitarian models of colonisation, the settler population increased to 77,345 people, with seven million head of stock in less than twenty years.33 Echoing settlement practices in New South Wales and Tasmania, settler interest in land 29

30 31 32

33

Lynette Russell, ‘“A New Holland Half-Caste”: Sealer and Whaler Tommy Chaseland’, History Australia, 5:1 (2008): 2. See also Mari Nawi: Aboriginal Odysseys, 1790–1850 (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 2010), pp. 16–18. David Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), pp. 3–31. ‘Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines’, p. 24. Scholarship on Australia’s frontier wars is extensive and contested. For a good overview of the scholarship, see Stephen Foster and Bain Attwood (eds), Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003). Jessie Mitchell, In Good Faith? Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity and Empire, 1825–55 (Canberra: Australian National University E Press, 2011), p. 3.

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and territory was single-minded, and while a handful of missionary enterprises, both independent of and supported by government, had been trialled by the 1840s, most met with little support or success.34 While numbers are, in the end, estimates and notoriously unreliable, they nevertheless speak to the scale of the impact of early interactions between Indigenous peoples and Europeans throughout the Pacific. In Australia, numbers were based on crude headcounts, and in the islands, population was measured both by counting the living and, hauntingly, by taking stock of the numbers of abandoned dwellings and villages. Such qualitative measures of depopulation reflect the deep political and social transformations occurring in Indigenous communities whose ports and resources were being incorporated into expanding networks of new global trades.35 The informal colonial era in the Pacific triggered deep structural changes in the many Indigenous societies that found themselves in the path of colonial settlement or colonial trade routes. But as Indigenous peoples and communities adjusted throughout the region and, to the extent that it was possible, incorporated newcomers and their trades, desires, wealth, skills and objects into their transforming frameworks, some experienced new mobility and expanded the interconnectedness of the region. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the process by which Indigenous communities engaged in this connectivity was remarkably autonomous. In Tahiti, where Islanders had been cultivating potatoes and yams and raising cattle, chickens and pigs to trade with passing vessels for years, by 1836 they were cultivating, spinning and weaving their own cotton, producing sugar cane and had also built a 90-ton ship to trade sugar with New South Wales.36 Elsewhere, emergent trades in flax, copra, sandalwood and trepang engaged Indigenous peoples as cultivators and workers, allowing them to mix with maritime travellers, prisoners and traders. This activity crisscrossed the Ocean and islands, knitting them together with physical and conceptual webs in new ways. Power relations between newcomers and Indigenous peoples would remain ambiguous in these early decades, however, and as long as European traders and settlers remained outnumbered and outgunned, or as long as the autonomous men and women of the Pacific and its surrounds remained useful and skilful, power flowed both ways. 34 35

36

Mitchell, In Good Faith? pp. 33–4. For a detailed discussion of depopulation throughout the region, see Donald Denoon, Philippa Mein Smith and Marivic Wyndham, A History of Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific, the Blackwell History of the World (Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000). Evidence of Reverend W. Ellis, Secretary of the London Missionary Society, ‘Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines’, pp. 50–1.

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As the decade of the 1840s drew to a close, so too did the era of the Pacific middle ground.37 By this time a new era of colonial relations began to unfold that was signalled by events in Australasia. There, Indigenous survivors of the frontier violence that had radiated with ferocity from penal settlements, were being dealt with in the new Port Philip Protectorate (Victoria) and Van Diemens Land (Tasmania) as remnant and nuisance populations. Settler ambition in New South Wales had ensured the annexation of more territory in New Zealand, and in an early expression of territorial competitiveness, a French protectorate was declared in Tahiti in 1842. In other words, a new permanence underpinned colonial markets and settlements. New South Wales, no longer a temporary dumping ground for British convicts, was a self-aware, ambitious and outward-looking British offspring looking hungrily towards the Pacific.

Colonial land and labour: entwinement and interdependence In 1847, John Williams, the American commercial agent overseeing trade in coconut oil, bêche-de-mer and tortoise shell in Fiji, ordered a list of trade items from the United States Department of State. These included fish hooks, pipes and tobacco, vermillion, paper, scissors, plane irons, ‘Fancy Jewellery (cheap article)’, beads, muskets, red, blue and printed cotton, ‘Blankets, various Colours, but cheap’, and, most valuable of all, whale teeth. He added an explanatory note that Fijian trade was so cheap a trader could purchase bêche-de-mer or coconut oil for trinkets and still receive 30,000 or 40,000 dollars for it in Manila.38 Williams’ request is indicative of a prevailing raid mentality that inspired much trade in the Pacific. His explicit willingness to exploit the relative innocence of Fijian suppliers, who were yet to realise the true value of their resources, was an inherently short-term strategy. It reflected the way, at the end of the 1840s, much of the Pacific was still largely seen as something to be crossed or as the source of short-term profits and trade. Until this time it was only on the rim of the Pacific in Australia and the Americas where settlers had gone to stay with a voracious hunger for land. This changed dramatically after the 1850s when world events drew 37

38

Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). John Brown Williams to Department of State, 1 October 1847. Department of State, Consular Letters, Lauthala, Vol. 1. Cited in Jean Ingram Brookes, International Rivalry in the Pacific Islands, 1800–1875 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1941), p. 420.

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renewed attention to the Pacific. The 400 or so traders present in Fiji in Williams’ time swelled to 2,000 by 1870, and unlike previous arrivals, these new settlers arrived with their families to stay.39 As colonialism intensified throughout the Pacific, the distinct experiences of Indigenous peoples throughout the region became increasingly entangled and interdependent. While the advent of an expansionist, settler-colonial drive to occupy land directly effected the Australasian colonies in the 1840s, the impact was felt in different ways elsewhere. More settlement into western New South Wales and north into the tropical regions of what is now Queensland brought vastly more occupied land into use and cultivation, and generated a new desire for labour. This was exacerbated after 1847 by the abolition of convict transportation, which remained Australian agriculturalists’ principal source of cheap and forced labour. While Pacific Islanders had long provided Europeans with labour therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, this escalated to an industrial scale. Moreover, if Europe had been incorporated into island societies as a resource in the early nineteenth century, this was because the colonial presence was largely maritime. Mostly, ships came and went again, and something of a co-dependency with Islanders ensured that coastal communities had some time to adapt. But as had been the case in Australia from as early as the 1790s, and in New Zealand from the 1830s and 40s, the precarious balance of colonial middle grounds tipped when land became the focus. While Williams was overseeing commercial activity in Fiji, elsewhere traders were seeking new avenues for trade. Extreme profits in China and Europe had driven speculators and traders to scour most islands of Polynesia by this time, and by the 1840s a few traders, such as James Paddon in Vanuatu, were just beginning to access the southern and eastern reaches of Melanesia.40 In 1847, Australian-based mariner Benjamin Boyd took advantage of Paddon’s toehold and took seventy men and boys from the islands of Tanna, Lifu and Uvea to New South Wales to work as indentured agricultural labourers on land appropriated from the Wiradjuri west of Sydney. Around half of Boyd’s men and boys absconded once the conditions of bonded labour became apparent to them, and many were returned to their islands soon after they arrived in New South Wales. The remainder were returned eventually, but not before they had travelled throughout the western Pacific. A smaller handful ended up in Pohnpei in the 39 40

Howe, Where the Waves Fall, p. 273. Howe, Where the Waves Fall, pp. 296–8; Thomas, Islanders, pp. 210–11.

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northern Pacific where they were sold as labourers for pigs, yams and firewood. Six escaped and ended up in Hong Kong, where five died and the final labourer, whose name was not recorded, was eventually returned to Uvea via Hawaii in the east.41 Their experiences were the first of a new generation of travel for Islanders. Now, however, they did not engage as semi-free or free workers but as indentured objects of trade transported to extract value from acquired Indigenous lands elsewhere. This ensured that localised colonial experiences were entwined with and influenced by those of peoples elsewhere, and that the appropriation of the land and labour of Indigenous peoples was increasingly cross-subsidised. Following his failed experiment importing indentured pastoral workers, Boyd left for California in search of gold in 1849 on a vessel crewed by Aboriginal sailors from New South Wales.42 He and his crew joined a relative rush of Australian settlers embarking for California across the Pacific to seek their fortunes in the newly opened goldfields. Incomplete passenger lists suggest that around 7,000 to 8,000 Australian settlers followed gold to California.43 Many would make a round trip two years later in a return rush from California to the newly opened Australian goldfields. The circular traffic of the gold rushes was a boon for canny mariners such as Robert Towns, who made a number of passenger voyages to California at this time. Capitalising on the desperation of many to seek their fortune, he was simply able to convert his clappedout trading vessels into passenger ships, spending so little on their upkeep that the area in Sydney harbour where he moored his vessels became known as ‘Rotten Row’.44 Towns later became the second pastoralist to import indentured Pacific labourers to an Australian colony and the first to make it work. People, bodies and labour were beginning to replace goods as the key source of profit in the Pacific. The impact in the Pacific of the Californian and Australian gold rushes was both direct and indirect. Most obviously, it was felt in the ports of Hawaii and Tahiti, which lay between San Francisco and Sydney, Launceston or Auckland, and in the case of Hawaii, between Cape Horn and California for the traffic coming from the American east 41

42 43 44

Morell, Britain in the Pacific Islands, pp. 171–2; John Erskine, Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific, Including the Feejees and Others Inhabited by the Polynesian Negro Races, in Her Majesty’s Ship, Havannah (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1967), p. 342; George Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia (London: J. Snow, 1861), p. 509. Rhodes, Pageant of the Pacific, p. 151. Charles Bateson, Gold Fleet for California: Forty-Niners from Australia and New Zealand (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1963), p. 142. William Collin, The Life and Adventures of (an Essexman), Captain William Collin, A Queensland Pioneer (Brisbane: H.J. Diddams & Co., 1914), p. 105; Bateson, Gold Fleet, p. 30.

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coast. As the march of America’s Manifest Destiny continued westwards into the Pacific, the higher traffic brought increasingly permanent settlement and economic penetration into the islands, and in Hawaii a brief land rush and correspondingly intense demand for Kanaka Maoli labour followed.45 The indirect impact, however, was profound and long-lasting. As prospectors gravitated towards the goldfields, settler populations exploded in Australia, New Zealand and, by the 1860s, New Caledonia. At the same time, gold very literally put the Pacific on colonial maps, while increasing both the volume and efficiency of trans-Pacific traffic. Alongside increased sales of carbines, maps of the Pacific were advertised as ‘the way to California’ after 1848, and in 1851 Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury published Sailing Directions, a study of the best sailing routes of the Pacific, charting its winds and currents.46 As gold-fuelled population explosion in Australia, New Zealand and California drove further aggressive and intensive occupation of Indigenous lands, so too the scrutiny of the Pacific’s offerings to expanding colonial markets, industry and territory intensified. When the Australasian colonies were granted self-government in the 1850s, this signalled a new era of aggressive settler-colonialism and emerging settler-colonial imperialism. By the 1860s, and in the context of market gaps caused by civil war in the United States, a new interest in the profitability of labour-intensive tropical crops, particularly cotton and sugar, fuelled the Pacific’s first land rush. In Queensland, New Caledonia, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii, individuals, syndicates and land-purchasing companies acquired land in New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa and Hawaii. In Samoa, the aggressive San Francisco-based Central Polynesia Land and Commercial Company and Godeffroy & Sohn of Hamburg claimed to have purchased more than the entire acreage of Samoa.47 A Land Commission enquiring in 1892–94 into the legitimacy of claims to land found that westerners collectively claimed two and a half times the entire landmass of Samoa. Titles to land that had been sold by those without the authority to do so, had been sold multiple times over the same piece of land, or had been sold in overlapping, separately titled land.48

45

46 47 48

Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 247; Natsu Taylor Saito, Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law (New York; London: New York University Press, 2010), pp. 133–60. Bateson, Gold Fleet, p. 39. Deryck Scarr, Fragments of Empire: A History of Western Pacific High Commission, 1877–1914 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1967), p. 15. Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘New Political Orders’, in Donald Denoon et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 208.

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Land grabs throughout the Pacific were messy affairs in which Indigenous tenure was acknowledged, but only as a legal foundation for appropriation that would be recognised by non-Indigenous authorities. Throughout the Pacific, paper titles could be easy to acquire from Indigenous landowners but more difficult to assert as they frequently represented one thing to Indigenous landowners, who often dealt with usufruct rights to land, and another to purchasers, who sought exclusive rights to spatially allotted parcels of property. In New Zealand, such confusion led to widespread conflict during the land wars from the 1840s to the 1870s and in New Caledonia to the Kanak uprising in 1878. So too in Fiji, disputes between settlers and landowners over the use, boundaries or permanence of settlers’ use of land broke out in sporadic cycles of violence.49 The extent to which Indigenous landowners were thus dispossessed from the 1850s was uneven. In Queensland, New Zealand and New Caledonia, Indigenous peoples lost access to rights in the vast majority of their land. But in Samoa and Fiji, landowners would claw some of it back, though not the most fertile or useful lands. The immediate impact in the 1860s, however, was that as land was acquired, however dubiously, the resulting hunger for labour to work it was intense. Having joined the rush for land in Queensland, Robert Towns, by 1863, had abandoned his rickety fleet and turned to growing cotton. In search of labour he revived Boyd’s failed experiment and imported a load of Islander men and boys as indentured field workers. His act was immediately condemned as slavery by local humanitarians, and by settlers who objected to his importing black labourers into a white colony. His response underscores the racialisation of labour that would dominate the rest of the century. The importation of a cheap, exploitable and temporary black labour force, he wrote, would save the colony from the ‘inhumanity of driving to the exposed labor of field work, the less tropically hardy European woman and children’.50 Moreover, white men did not have the constitution to survive hard labour in the tropics, and if they did, they were too expensive for planters who sought free labour. The myth was convenient and it naturalised the vast expansion of trades in people’s bodies and labour that dominated the Pacific for the next few decades. 49

50

Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Cannibalism and Colonialism: Charting Colonies and Frontiers in Nineteenth-Century Fiji’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:2 (2010): 255–81. Captain Robert Towns, South Sea Island Immigration for Cotton Cultivation: A Letter to the Hon. the Colonial Secretary of Queensland (Sydney: Reading and Wellbank, 1864), p. 3. It continues, ‘for I suppose the most thorough advocate for European labor will admit, that in cotton clearing and picking they, as well as the men, must take part in the labor’.

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From the 1860s well into the twentieth century, labour trades in the Pacific saw hundreds of thousands of Pacific Islanders traded, kidnapped or employed under periods of indenture ranging from three to seven years. Mostly they were transported to work in agricultural, guano and mining industries in Queensland, Papua and New Guinea, New Caledonia, Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii and Peru.51 They were taken by labour traders from islands as isolated as Rapanui/Easter Island in the far southeast of the Pacific, and from throughout the south, south-western and northern Pacific. While many who were recruited were undoubtedly experienced and deliberately sought employment, many thousands of others were not and were taken either against their will or under false pretences. The industries they laboured in had mortality rates so high they were considered unacceptable for white workers, and in Queensland where reliable statistics were kept from the 1870s, the mortality rate of Pacific Islanders was never less than five times the rate of the white population. At its worst it was fifteen times the rate, and in 1889 Queensland’s registrar general estimated that an average of two out of every ten Islanders arriving in Queensland died during their term of employment.52 The most immediate impact of the Pacific labour trades was felt in the declining populations in the source islands of the most able-bodied men and women. The implications for agriculture, subsistence, genealogies, cultural transmission or landowning were profound and are still being measured. But while the effect was similar throughout the Pacific, the intensity was uneven. Communities in regular recruiting grounds, such as those in the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, were able to manage the loss in population in a reasonably sustainable way so that the trade continued into the 1920s.53 But the short-lived and intense Peruvian trade that visited the south-eastern Pacific, including Rapanui and the Cook Islands, devastated populations in short periods of time, with estimates of between 24 and 79 per cent of entire populations shipped to Peru. In a single day on the tiny island of Tokelau, half the population was taken, 51

52

53

Peter Corris, Passage, Port and Plantation: A History of Solomon Islands Labour Migration, 1870–1914 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1973); Dorothy Shineberg, The People Trade: Pacific Island Laborers and New Caledonia (Honolulu, HI: Center for Pacific Island Studies, University of Hawaii Press, 1999); Henry Evans Maude, Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Slave Trade in Polynesia, 1862–1864 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981); Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Labour Trade (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). These figures are likely underestimates as not every death was reported. ‘Kanaka Statistics’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1889), pp. 225–8. Shineberg, The People Trade.

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and from Rapanui a third of the entire population went to Peru. Only half returned, and in an all too familiar pattern, those who returned to Rapanui were ill, in their case with smallpox that went on to infect their home communities.54 Elsewhere labourers regularly returned to their communities with tuberculosis, cold and flu and dysentery. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Pacific was dotted with displaced communities of labourers who, for a variety of reasons, never returned to their homes. In addition, while Islanders were being moved out of or around the Pacific, tens of thousands of indentured workers, mainly from China, India and Japan, were imported after the 1870s to Hawaii, Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia establishing new, permanent and sometimes marginalised settler populations that put further pressure on Indigenous communities.55 There, their identities were reduced to the generic category of an indentured labourer, and if they were stranded in Fiji, Samoa, Queensland, Peru or New Caledonia, social restrictions contained and marginalised them. In Queensland, where they were known generically as ‘kanakas’, Islanders were treated as blacks in a white colony and subjected to extensive legal restrictions, social and spatial curfews and, ultimately, in 1906, faced forced deportation of three quarters of the population.56 In Fiji, where Islander labourers whose contracts had expired were simply known as ‘Melanesians’, they were mostly ignored at the end of their contracts, and denied the offers of land or other incentives to settle that some Indian labourers received. Although not actively discriminated against, their marginal and landless status forced many from plantations to urban slums and illegal settlements, and back again for employment.57 While individuals may have engaged freely, and others were taken by force, the overall structure of the Pacific labour trades was imposed without consent on island communities. They opened a new and minimally regulated frontier in the Pacific whose sheer scale was unprecedented. Unlike the earlier maritime industries, labour traders were not seeking labourers for their vessels where they would have some sort of 54 55

56 57

Maude, Slavers in Paradise, pp. 73, 171. The status of marginalised settlers in settler colonies in the Pacific has not been deeply examined outside Hawaii. The relevant literature is growing and can not be cited here, but the special edition of Amerasia (26:2) edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura provoked wide scholarship and discussion on the issue. This was published again in 2008. See Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura (eds), Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), pp. vii–xii; 1–42; 43–75. Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, pp. 140–2; 91–4; 116–18; 175–7. Winston Halapua, Living on the Fringe: Melanesians in Fiji (Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, 2001), pp. 43–4.

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ongoing relationship. They sought bodies to exchange for profit in a new industry that was structured to extract the most value for the smallest cost. Recognised as such at the time, the trade faced vehement opposition from missionaries and related organisations such as the Anti-Slavery Society who viewed it as little more than slavery. On the eve of the annexation of Fiji in 1874, therefore, ongoing reports from throughout the islands of frontier-style violence and legal chaos were strong incentives for the British Colonial Office to act, to impose some sort of sovereign presence in Pacific waters. So too, international rivalry was stirring and settler aggression in the western Pacific, particularly in Fiji in the preceding five years, meant that by the mid 1870s, the Pacific was on the verge of being incorporated into aggressively expanding Euro-American empires. Until the early 1870s, movement, adaptation and adjustment as well as violence and exploitation had characterised a period of informal colonialism in the Pacific. But as the insatiable desire for agricultural land, and labour to work it, gripped the Pacific and settler-colonial rim, the old traders in goods began trading in people, removing them to plantations and mines where the relative mobility and autonomy of maritime labour were replaced with a displaced isolation. This ensured that the lives and futures of Indigenous peoples across oceanic divides and borders were increasingly entangled and entwined, and the appropriation of land and labour were interdependent processes. As the formal colonial era unfolded in the Pacific from the late 1870s, in the settler colonies and annexed territories and protectorates, isolation, immobility, restriction and the shrinking of worlds would increasingly define colonial experiences. Paper partition, protection and isolation: severed connections Before Cakobau travelled to Australia his son, Ratu Joseph Celua, had studied in New South Wales. At a picnic in Sydney in April 1872 Celua honoured Charles St Julian, the newly appointed chief justice of the Fijian kingdom, and previously the Hawaiian Consul in Sydney, who was exceedingly close to the monarchs of both Hawaii and Tonga. Celua had met St Julian while in Sydney attending the newly established Wesleyan Methodist Newington College where, as he put it, ‘I have come to white man’s land to be trained . . . I am anxious to be . . . that I may be of service in the government of my country.’58 Celua would finish his training and return to Fiji at the end of 1873, but not before freely 58

The Mercury, 29 April 1872, p. 3.

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travelling throughout rural New South Wales, even helping to rescue a drowning child from the Hunter River near Maitland in July 1873, and attending the New South Wales parliament.59 He would again visit Sydney with his father and brother in late 1874 when he too would contract, but later survive, the measles. Celua’s and St Julian’s travels, like the careers of Cakobau and Robinson, are emblematic of the physical networks that connected colonial experiences in the Pacific, the intellectual impact of which will be explored in the following chapter. When they came into contact St Julian and Celua were physical conduits that joined seemingly disparate colonial experiences across vast spaces. But Celua’s own travels as a free agent, and his ability to gain an education and to move freely around Sydney within elite circles were also emblematic of a period of colonial contact in and around the Pacific that, by the time of his second visit, was on the brink of being closed down. When Britain annexed Fiji in 1874 the British Colonial Office extended the jurisdiction of common law to British subjects in the Pacific through legislation and the establishment of the Western Pacific High Commission. This was essentially an extension of the office of the Governor of Fiji, but it formalised and institutionalised the presence of common law on the Pacific frontier. Moreover it signalled a first step, or the first degree of sovereignty, in what would be a succession of European appropriations throughout the Pacific in the following years.60 As Lauren Benton has noted of the middle to late nineteenth century, imperial moves towards territorial expansion were matched by the rise and bureaucratisation of concepts of state sovereignty over bounded and administered territorial space.61 As the scramble for Africa gathered pace on one side of the world, in the Pacific the carving out and appropriation of territory took place in a more perfunctory partitioning of imperial possessions. With maps and coordinates at the ready, European and American delegates re-ordered and rationalized Indigenous spaces in ways that were dominated by short term expedience. The grappling of imperial powers for partitioned territory in the Pacific gathered pace from the early 1880s and was all but over by 1900. Spain, the Netherlands, Britain and France had already formally acquired degrees of sovereignty in the Micronesian islands (Spain), West Papua (Netherlands), Tahiti and parts of French Polynesia (France), Fiji (Britain) and the settler colonies in Australia, New Zealand and New Caledonia by the beginning of the Pacific partition. Elsewhere private 59 60 61

Sydney Morning Herald, 12 July 1873, p. 3; Sydney Morning Herald, 18 May 1872, p. 5. Ann Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture, 18:1 (2006): 138. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, p. 9.

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interests had established strongholds through companies such as those purchasing land in Samoa, or mission enterprises that reflected strong and increasingly dominant national allegiances. What was not claimed by the Netherlands on the island of New Guinea was divided between British Papua and German New Guinea in 1884. Chile annexed Rapanui, and Britain took over the administration of the Cook Islands in 1888, later establishing protectorates over the Solomon Islands, and Gilbert and Ellice Islands (Kiribati and Tuvalu) in 1893 and 1892. After decades of on-again off-again jostling for power in Hawaii the kingdom was occupied by the United States in 1893 and annexed in 1898. In the same year the United States inherited Guam from Spain following the Spanish– American war, and later annexed Wake Island. In Samoa the islands were divided between Germany in the west, and the United States in negotiations that also saw Germany acquire Nauru, and purchase the Caroline and Marianas island chains from Spain. Tonga, still a fiercely independent constitutional monarchy, was given protectorate status by Britain in 1900. Finally in 1906 the New Hebrides was shared between the British and the French who created an Anglo-French condominium in one of the more bizarre examples of administrative expedience. Initially, the partition of the Pacific into colonial territories meant little for the vast majority of Pacific islanders. Stewart Firth has estimated that at least one-third of the region’s population remained effectively independent or ‘lightly touched’ by colonial administrations. This was particularly the case where land ownership, and therefore subsistence and a source of independence, had been retained.62 Indeed in many cases it would not be until people attempted to move beyond newly, and inorganically, imposed borders that the presence of empire would be felt. This was key to distinguishing the new colonial order from the laissez-faire period of empire of the first half of the nineteenth century. Until the partition of the Pacific into imperial territories most Indigenous peoples, theoretically at least, maintained the autonomy of mobility to and from their homes. With new imperial borders acting as containment lines, Pacific worlds shrank during the formal colonial era and the expansiveness of trans-Pacific trade and movement was replaced with sanctioned contraction and isolation. This would be compounded by the ushering in, through colonial administrative practices, of the age of reduction when Indigenous identities would be collapsed into racially governed categories. 62

Stewart Firth, ‘Colonial Administration and the Invention of the Native’, in Donald Denoon et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 255.

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If imperial borders had the capacity to physically restrain people, their spatial discipline was partly predicated on the reduction, production and rationalisation of Indigenous identities. In the islands, landmasses were clustered together for administrative expedience, despite the lack of any Indigenous cultural or linguistic affinity. In other cases peoples were divided. The people of Bougainville, for example, who identify as blackskins, were to be part of red-skinned Papua New Guinea despite being closer and having greater cultural affinity and familial links with the blackskinned Solomon Islands.63 In the horse trading of 1898, when Germany negotiated with the United States and Britain over the division of Samoa, Germany had ceded its annexed territory in the Solomon Islands to Britain, but kept nickel-rich Bougainville as part of its New Guinea possessions. Elsewhere on the island of New Guinea and the Australian continent, the invisible but powerful line tracing the 141st east meridian imposed on people of the same or similar cultural and language groups new sovereign identities – Dutch, British or German. Along the same theoretical line, Indigenous peoples in Australia were divided by the borders separating Queensland from South Australia and New South Wales. The 141st east meridian carved a jurisdictional line through established nations and language groups, stranding communities and individuals in states and colonies that they could no longer legally leave without express permission and supervision well into the second half of the twentieth century. In settler colonies this time of partition was accompanied by a matching intensification of the regulation of Indigenous peoples. In Australia, as in the settler colonies of New Zealand, New Caledonia, and later Hawaii, the period of colonial administration was dominated by an overarching push to forcefully assimilate Indigenous peoples into settler society. This was governed in each state by Aboriginal Protection legislation that was mostly introduced after Australian federation. The first versions of such legislation were introduced in the colony of Victoria in 1869 giving a government-appointed body extensive and executive control over the care, custody and maintenance of the colony’s Koori population.64 This empowered administrators to micromanage those subject to the legislation with a spatial and time discipline that frequently extended into peoples’ intimate and private lives. In 1889 the legislation was strengthened with the introduction of a quasi blood quantum allowing mission and reserve residents, particularly politically active ones below the age of 34, and those of mixed descent to be reclassified as ‘half-caste’ and 63 64

Douglas Oliver, Black Islands: A Personal Perspective of Bougainville, 1937–1991 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1991). An Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria 1869 (Vic), ss. 2, 5, 8.

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removed from missions and families.65 Finally, in 1897 the colony of Queensland emulated Victorian legislation with its own Protection Act, one so draconian that protectors and reserve managers could, for loosely defined disciplinary purposes, summarily jail, punish, or relocate to asylums, missions, hospitals or other secure institutions, anyone deemed to be Aboriginal under the act. Later amendments would allow Australian South Sea Islanders, the descendants of indentured Pacific Islanders, to be ‘deemed’ Aboriginal for the purposes of discipline.66 Comparable legislation was introduced in every state in Australia in the early years of the twentieth century, ensuring that every Aboriginal person on the mainland was potentially subject to legislation that could control everything from identity to everyday mobility. In New Caledonia powers similar to the Australian models were granted to the colonial governor in 1887 by a legal code, the socalled code de l’Indigénat, originally designed to suppress anti-colonial resistance in Algeria. Like Australian Protection legislation it created a permanent state of exception for Indigenous Kanaks, legally defined by the French as Canaques, governing them as subjects rather than citizens. As was the case in Australia, the governor or representative gained control over the status, identification and residence of Kanaks and the ability, as in Queensland, to dispense disciplinary fines and to relocate individuals without recourse to courts, and with no right of defence or appeal.67 Kanaks were unable to leave reserves without permission, were subject to strict curfews and frequently required for forced labour. As was the case in Australia, legislative mechanisms served the dual purpose of controlling anti-colonial resistance and disobedience, while enhancing the accessibility of Kanak land. While Australia and New Caledonia were occupied and settled in ways that ignored in law any prior Indigenous sovereignty, in New Zealand the Treaty of Waitangi created a legal acknowledgement and theoretical safeguard for Maori land rights. There land would remain, as it was in the 65

66

67

An Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria Amendment Act 1886 (Vic), s 4(2). Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: A History since 1800 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005), pp. xvii–xxv, 183–257. An Act to Make Provision for the Better Protection and Care of the Aboriginal and Half-Caste Inhabitants of the Colony, and to Make More Effectual Provision for Restricting the Sale and Distribution of Opium 1897 (Qld), ss 9, 31; Thom Blake, ‘“Deported . . . at the Sweet Will of the Government”: The Removal of Aborigines to Reserves in Queensland 1897– 1939’, Aboriginal History, 22 (1998): 51–61; Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, pp. 175–85. Adrian Muckle, ‘Troublesome Chiefs and Disorderly Subjects: The Indigénat and the Interment of Kanak in New Caledonia, (1887–1928)’, French Colonial History, 2 (2010): 131–60.

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Pacific, a powerful buffer protecting communities from the assimilationist pressures of settler society and economy. It was therefore through the management of land rights, and by extension identity, that settler governments in New Zealand pursued the amalgamation of Maori into settler society. Amalgamation was something the state had promised since as early as 1844 when the Native Trust Ordinance committed to ‘assimilating as speedily as possible the habits . . . of the Native to those of the European population’.68 Andrew Armitage has argued in relation to comparative assimilation programmes in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, that New Zealand’s assimilation programme was pursued through the twin forces of education in English, compulsory after 1871, and the extinguishment of traditional land rights. While under the Native Reserves Act 1851 many Maori were confined to marginalised and isolated reserves dominated by assimilationist practices, extinguishment of native title compounded the policy.69 Extinguishment was a creeping tide in New Zealand that was bureaucratised in 1862 and 1865 by the establishment of the Native Land Court. In the aftermath of the New Zealand Wars Maori were required to apply to the Court to adjudicate land disputes, with winners receiving disposable Crown title. The overall impact of this over time, of a gradual fragmentation or alienation of Maori title, and thus the legalized dispossession of swathes of land, locked many dispossessed Maori landowners into states of dependency on settler society.70 In Hawaii, as in New Zealand, the United States inherited residual Kanaka Maoli rights in land that would need to be extinguished or disposed of to secure non-native property rights. While native education was also mainstreamed in Hawaii, as J. Kehaulani Kauanui has argued, assimilation and the dilution of Indigenous identity by absorption into settler society was principally pursued through the control of access to land. Most native lands were transferred to the United States government in trust for Kanaka Maoli as Home Lands in 1898. At the time access to land was openly recognised as crucial to the survival of Kanaka Maoli, whose population was in rapid decline, and many of whom, dispossessed and landless, were living in impoverished urban tenements and squatter camps reliant on the colonial state for survival. But in 1921 the Hawaiian Homes Commission restricted the grant of homelands to Kanaka Maoli with 68 69

70

Cited in Judith Simon, ‘Anthropology, “Native Schooling” and Maori: The Politics of “Cultural Adaptation” Policies’, Oceania, 69:1 (1998): 66. On native reserves in New Zealand, Angela Wanhalla, ‘Women “Living Across the Line”: Intermarriage on the Canadian Prairies and in South New Zealand, 1870–1900’, Ethnohistory, 55:1 (2008): 34–5. David V. Williams, ‘Te Kooti Tango Whenua’: The Native Land Court 1864–1909 (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 1999).

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no less than 50 per cent Hawaiian blood in an explicit move to racialise and quantify Kanaka Maoli identity. With only 8,000 homeland leases granted to individual applicants in the ninety years since 1921, the move effectively contained and practically extinguished both Indigenous claims on Hawaiian land and an important route to effective self-determination.71 Throughout the settler states of New Zealand, Australia, New Caledonia and Hawaii, the dispossession of land and appropriation of sovereignty were tightly bound to the racialisation and reduction of Indigenous identities. As such, definitions of indigeneity were coupled with a permanent state of legal exception even as the catch cries of integration, dilution, assimilation or amalgamation proliferated. In this way identity joined land, mobility and sovereignty as a principle site of conflict and appropriation as settler governments pursued policies of extinguishment that naturalised racialised disadvantage for generations. To varying degrees of intensity, this would also be the case throughout the Pacific. The partition of the Pacific into colonial territories produced small colonies with tiny economies and resource bases, and dwindling Indigenous populations. By this time the populations of Indigenous peoples had reached or were reaching their lowest point. With the notable exception of the island of New Guinea with upwards of two million people, most Pacific Islands had populations in the tens of thousands, mere fractions in many cases of pre-colonial numbers.72 By world standards these were small, readily forgotten and easily marginalised numbers. In the coming decades, the administration of these peoples would vary widely throughout the Pacific region with an uneven impact that will be explored more fully in coming chapters. But a commonality of the colonial experience itself was that of containment. Whether colonised in settler colonies where Indigenous identities were subject to the deeming 71

72

J. Kehaunani Kauanui, Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 67–84; J. Kehaunani Kauanui, ‘“For Get” Hawaiian Entitlement: Configurations of Land Blood and Americanization in the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1921’, Social Text, 59 (1999): 123–44. Solomon and Fiji islands and Australia had Indigenous populations close to 100,000, while most Pacific Islands had populations of less than 50,000. The Maori population was just over 45,000, and the Kanaka Maoli population in Hawaii was just over 40,000 in 1890. Tonga, Western Samoa, Gilbert and Ellice, Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Tahiti had populations of between 24,000 and 47,000. Smaller isolated islands such as Guam, Wallis and Futuna, the Cook Islands, Niue, Nauru and Rapanui all had populations of less than 15,000. Population Issues, Indigenous Australians: Occasional Paper 4708 (Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1996), p. 10; A. H. McLintock, ‘Population – Factors and Trends’, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/1966/publica tion/3. Last accessed 15 February 2012; Firth, ‘Colonial Administration’, pp. 253–4; Eleanor Nordyke, The Peopling of Hawai’i (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1977), pp. 174–8.

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Conclusion

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powers of authorised bodies and to slippery notions of blood quantum, race and tribal identity; or whether they were subject to colonial administrations concerned principally with extracting resources using cheap internally supplied labour forces, colonialism ruled through a reductive transformation of peoples. This reduction, or rationalisation, of peoples through a form of identity discipline mirrored the spatial reduction of place into bordered territorial possessions. Overcoming this confinement of minds and bodies, and the isolation imposed by colonialism’s formal and informal borders, would have to be a conscious, deliberate and decolonising act of overcoming smallness.

Conclusion When trader John Turnbull travelled the world at the turn of the eighteenth century, his Tahitian crew engaged in lengthy exchanges with their Kanaka Maoli hosts in Hawaii, and found Tahitian relatives living in Tonga.73 Already, within twenty years of sustained contact with Europeans, Islanders had expanded their exploration of the world. In Sydney, Turnbull’s unnamed crew spent time with Maori who had recently travelled to London and lingered at the water’s edge of this fledgling city that was already a key node in a vibrant global network. There, another traveller noted that an evening stroll along Sydney’s shores was frequently ‘melted with the wild melody of a [Tahitian] love song’ or the ‘terrific whoop of the New Zealand war-dance’.74 Sydney would continue during the nineteenth century to be a site of arrival and departure for visitors from all over the world, and unlike Celua and Cakobau whose travels are caught in the freeze frame of physical archives, most would move through unnoticed as steerage or crew. Over the next hundred or so years, Indigenous sailors, whalers and sealers, maritime and plantation workers would move throughout the Pacific ensuring that Indigenous Australians, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Tahitians, Fijians and Islanders from all over the Pacific visited each other, mixed together in missions and on plantations and ships and exchanged information and language along with songs, dance and gods. Connections, the vast majority of which we will never quantify, were 73 74

John Turnbull, A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, and 1804 (London: Printed for R. Phillips by T. Gillet, 1805), pp. 400, 506. P. Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), pp. 57–9; Alan Birch and David Macmillan, The Sydney Scene: 1788–1960 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1962), p. 53. For more on Sydney’s water’s edge see Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past’, Australian Historical Studies. 46:3 (2015): 340–355.

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significant enough to give birth to new languages by the 1880s. These pidgin languages and creoles grew in currents that flowed from the Caribbean and Atlantic via encounters between English speakers and Indigenous Australians on the coast of New South Wales.75 Functional words such as ‘by-and-by’ for the future tense, ‘savvy’ for understand or ‘plenty’ for much were common to Caribbean Creole, Pacific Pidgins, Australian Aboriginal English and Torres Strait Islander Broken. More subtle or emotional terms such as ‘picanniny’ for child, ‘bra’ or ‘brother’ for male peer, or ‘shame’ show direct links between Jamaica, the Bahamas, Hawaii, New South Wales and the Torres Strait.76 With the arrival of colonial administrations, infested as they were with racial taxonomies and reductions, the potential of the middle ground that had opened in parts of the Pacific was shut down. Physical movement across borders was both imposed and rendered illicit, and to differing degrees Indigenous peoples were governed and produced as ‘natives’ – small in number and perceived capacity, physically and intellectually isolated from the world beyond the colony and constricted by laws and borders. Depopulation, labour trades and dispossession had widely disrupted the region and everywhere islands of peoples were left to mend broken and disrupted genealogies and familial links, lost land and discontinuities. By the turn of the nineteenth century, as the abilities of individuals were defined by ideologies of race, the dynamic and skilled attempts to adjust to the new world were forgotten as imperial powers made decisions about native peoples’ abilities and potential to be self-governing, self-determining peoples. This forgetting would leave a state of deficit or absence that decolonisation would have to both un-colonise and fill. The process of colonisation had produced enmeshed and entwined experiences in and around the Pacific, where the loss of land in one colonial site precipitated the extraction of labourers from another and vice versa. But perhaps one of the internal flaws of the colonialisms of Oceania was the uniform and chronic underestimation of the abilities of Indigenous peoples. To this extent colonialism engendered the conditions of its own demise. This was an underestimation that was perversely acknowledged by the widespread limitation of Indigenous peoples’ access to education, civil rights, mobility, the economy and other fundamentals of self-determination. As a settler in Rabaul noted in 1929 in the Rabaul Times, the ‘coloured man in his own country with a little bit of insufficient 75 76

Darrell Tryon and Jean-Michel Charpentier (eds), Pacific Pidgins and Creoles: Origins, Growth Development (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004), pp. 1–4, 65–114. John Holm, ‘Atlantic Meets Pacific: Lexicon Common to the English-Based Pidgins and Creoles’, Language Sciences, 14:3 (1992): 187, 185–6, 194; R. Clark, ‘In Search of Beachla-mar: Towards a History of Pacific Pidgin English’, Te Reo, 22 (1979): 3–64.

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education is a great menace to the well being of that country’.77 This would prove the case throughout the colonies of the Pacific as fluency in the languages of empire enabled the establishment of deeply rooted traditions of both anti-colonialism and a longer-lasting decolonisation effort. It was this that would render the borders of empires porous enough to enable lingering currents of connected dissent, or the wellsprings of decolonisation.

77

Firth, ‘Colonial Administration’, p. 286.

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Currents: the wellsprings of decolonisation

In late January 1810 the ship The Union arrived from Bengal in Sydney Cove, Cadigal country in New South Wales.1 On board, a passenger whose name was recorded as Mary Bruce nursed a new baby. The passenger had been born Te Atahoe, and was the high-born daughter of a Ngapuhi rangatira, or chief, from the Bay of Islands in Aotearoa New Zealand. When she was fourteen or fifteen, her father Te Pahi had acquired the interpretive services of ex-convict George Bruce to help him navigate volatile trade relations with Europeans. In an exchange between men, Bruce ‘consented to be marked in the face’, or tattooed with a moko by Te Pahi. Exchanging loyalty for status, Bruce later stated that by ‘the rules of her country [Atahoe] was mine’, and he had taken her to Norfolk Island and India soon after. Atahoe probably went against her will, for Bruce recalled having ‘endeavoured to console my consort of her Grief’, but it ‘was useless’.2 They were taken first to Malaysia, then to India where Atahoe was bartered to the captain of another ship and returned to Malaysia as a domestic servant. Recovered by Bruce in Malaysia she returned with him to Port Jackson, expecting eventually to return to the Bay of Islands to collect and cultivate flax, an item of increasing value in Sydney.3 She would not make it. The mobility of the people of the Pacific world was increasingly extensive by the time Atahoe arrived in Sydney, and as Rachel Standfield has written, there was nothing incongruous in 1810 about the sight of Pacific 1

2

3

Sydney Gazette, 21 January 1810, p. 2. Research informing this introductory section has previously been published in Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past’, Australian Historical Studies, 46:3 (2015): 340–355. George Bruce, ‘The Life of a Greenwich Pensioner by Himself being the Memoirs of George Bruce, Native of London and First European Resident in New Zealand upon Whom on his Adoption into the Native Race the Rank of a Chief was Conferred in 1806’, pp. 91–2. Mitchell Library A1618. These unpublished memoirs were dictated while Bruce was in Greenwich Hospital. The manuscript was copied from his original memoirs in 1898 and includes notes by Thomas Whitley, signed and dated 1 January 1899. Sydney Gazette, 3 March 1810, p. 2. See also Patricia O’Brien, The Pacific Muse: Exotic Femininity and the Colonial Pacific (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 138–40.

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Islanders in Sydney.4 Four years earlier the governor had been visited by two Tongans, ‘a male and female . . . brought hither in the Criterion’, intent on visiting the governor.5 The year before, Atahoe’s own father Te Pahi also visited, reportedly striking an intimidating figure in Sydney’s streets at nearly 6 feet tall. He was described as ‘much disfigured by his face being completely tattooed’, with his moko, and was something of a spectacle before he too visited the governor, receiving seeds, goats and pigs with which to return to New Zealand.6 These journeys typify what was beginning to happen throughout the Oceanic world in the early nineteenth century as curiosity and foresight drew Indigenous peoples into new scales of mobility. This chapter considers what ideas and discourses were exchanged and left in their wake. Exactly what Ngapuhi learnt from the journeys of their rangatira is difficult to quantify. As Daniel Richter has put it in the North American context, while traces of Indigenous peoples’ presence and movements are often detectable in the archive, it is often our informed imagination that must picture their thoughts, emotions, desires, anger and intentions.7 As a woman, Atahoe enjoyed no audience with the governor. Her husband Bruce reportedly acted ‘most shamefully and cruelly’ towards her, and a month into her stay she contracted dysentery and passed away.8 Bruce, being what Governor Macquarie would later describe as ‘a man of no principle whatever’, returned to Britain abandoning Atahoe’s baby to Sydney’s Female Orphan School.9 For Ngapuhi, Atahoe’s disappearance and death in obscurity, ignored by the governor and local missionaries until after her death, must have provided an early and solemn lesson on the way politics was done in the British world. 4

5 6 7 8

9

Rachel Standfield, Race and Identity in the Tasman World, 1769–1840 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). On trans-Tasman crossings see also Raelene Frances and Melanie Nolan, ‘Gender and the Trans-Tasman World of Labour: Transnational and Comparative Histories’, Labour History, 95 (2008): 25–42; Damon Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 56; Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1992); Anne Salmond, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans, 1773– 1815 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1997); O’Brien, The Pacific Muse, pp. 68–164. Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 15 June 1806, p. 4. Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 1 December 1805, p. 2; Judith Binney, ‘Tuki’s Universe’, New Zealand Journal of History, 38:2 (2004): 219–20. Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 12–14. In order Governor Macquarie to the Under-Secretary of State, 12 May 1814, Historical Records of New Zealand, ed. Robert McNab, Vol. 1 (Wellington: Government Printer, 1908), p. 322; Sydney Gazette, 3 March 1810, p. 2; Sydney Gazette, 10 March 1810, p. 2. Governor Macquarie to the Under-Secretary of State, 12 May 1814 in McNab, pp. 322–3.

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Months after she died, Atahoe’s cousin Ruatara arrived from London having spent years at sea trying to get to Europe to visit the British King. Having finally reached London, his captain and crew had denied him shore leave, and as a result, Ruatara had grown depressed and so physically ill he coughed blood. He had eventually gained passage back to Sydney on the convict vessel Ann, a ‘sick and almost dying’ man according to fellow passenger Samuel Marsden, the chaplain of New South Wales.10 Ruatara and Marsden had met in Sydney at the start of Ruatara’s epic quest, and it was Marsden who would care for him on the return voyage to Sydney. Marsden himself was returning to Sydney intent on establishing a mission in New Zealand, and he encouraged Ruatara to stay with him for another eight months on arriving Sydney.11 Ruatara’s time with Marsden’s family in Parramatta would be a crucial period of preparation for both men. Having retuned to his home in the Bay of Islands, Ruatara visited Sydney for a final time in 1814, this time observing more closely the ‘miserable state of the natives of New South Wales – deprived by the English of their country’. When he later accompanied Marsden and a coterie of missionaries to the Bay of Islands, Ruatara reportedly said to Marsden and others that he knew the British would ‘deprive the New Zealanders of their country’ and that ‘having gained a footing’ with Christian missions, they would ‘pour into New Zealand . . . and take the country’.12 In the following short months before he died of a respiratory illness, he transmitted his expectations to other Ngapuhi rangatira. When Marsden duly proposed the formal colonisation of New Zealand in 1817, missionary Thomas Kendall informed Marsden that Ruatara’s fears had made a ‘deep impression’ on several Ngapuhi rangatira. They were alive to the probability that ‘a number of settlers’ would be sent to ‘take possession of their country’, reported Kendall, and they ‘cannot endure the thought that they should lose’ their land to ‘be driven into the bush, [like] the natives of New South Wales’.13 As journeys to and fro across the Tasman knitted together the indigenous spaces of Cadigal and Dharug countries in Sydney and Paramatta, and Ngapuhi land in the Bay of Islands, understanding and strategy gradually emerged. From the Ngapuhi perspective, and as Tony Ballantyne has recently explored in detail, the knowledge and 10 11

12 13

‘The Passing of Ruatara: Sailor, Chief and Christian’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 February 1925, p. 11. Kerry Howe, Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), pp. 209–10; Angela Ballara, ‘Ruatara’, in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/1r19/1. Reverend Samuel Marsden to Reverend J. Pratt, 26 October 1815. McNab, pp. 405–6. Thomas Kendall to Marsden, 25 July 1817, in J. R. Elder, Marsden’s Lieutenants (Dunedin: Coulls Soverville Wilkie, 1934), p. 139.

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Imperial literacy: humanitarian networks & Indigenous inflections

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understanding of British social and embodied practices would create trajectories of behaviour that reverberated through decades.14 This chapter traces just a handful of the currents of thinking and language that linked imperial spaces in the nineteenth century with Indigenous counter networks. It re-views relatively well-known moments of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with these spaces in terms of the translocal currents of thinking that connected them. This takes them out of the world of the Tasman Sea, and locates them instead within a wider transoceanic context where Indigenous peoples from numerous angles established resistant, convergent and accommodating discourses with and within empire. As Indigenous peoples became conscious of an imperial language regarding their status and entitlements within or against the colonial world, they made it their own. Their resulting dialogue with empire, over time, would continue to seep through imperial borders as they were imposed, rendering the imposition of isolation inherently unstable. Imperial literacy: humanitarian networks and Indigenous inflections In 1846 Mary Anne Arthur, a Pallawah woman from Tasmania, penned a letter to the colonial secretary from her home on Flinders Island, in the Bass Strait between Tasmania and the Australian mainland. She had been a teacher at the Flinders Island school until she married fellow teacher Walter Arthur, a Ben Lomond man from north-east Tasmania. She wrote that ‘my Father the Govr’ had told them that ‘us black people’ should write to the colonial secretary if they had a complaint, which she most certainly had. Hers was against Henry Jeanneret, the manager of the Aboriginal settlement in which she lived, who was persecuting resident men and women for their political activity. She wrote that he had threatened to hang them for it and he ‘does not like us for we do not like to be his slaves nor wish our poor Country to be treated badly’. The political activity she referred to was a petition she and others had sent to Queen Victoria years earlier complaining of conditions on Flinders Island and Jeanneret’s arbitrary use of power. From this desperately isolated settlement where Tasmanian Aborigines had basically been sent to die, residents were writing an articulate trail of complaint and entitlement that brought them into dialogue with the wider imperial world.15 14 15

Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missions, Maori and the Question of the Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Mary Ann Arthur to colonial secretary, Van Diemen’s Land, 10 June 1846, in The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History, Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus (eds) (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999), pp. 39–40. For a comprehensive history

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Although involved in ‘helping to write the petition to the Queen from our country people’, Mary Arthur had not signed it, leaving that to Walter Arthur and seven Pallawah men. But in her 1846 letter to the colonial secretary, Arthur signed it ‘Your humble Aborigine Child, Mary Ann Arthur’.16 Penny van Toorn has argued that by not signing the petition, in addition to framing her militant demand for improved conditions in the language of paternalism, Arthur both acknowledged and charted the inherent gendered and racialised rules that accompanied literacy.17 In so doing she was among the first in generations of Indigenous men and women across the Pacific and Australasian worlds to gain not only the skills of reading and writing, but to also learn that literacy was a tool of empire whose power was coded. She had learnt and was practising what amounted to an imperial literacy, an ability to navigate the connections to power that came with the bald skills of reading and writing. It was a skill and tool that would be widely transmitted. A wider web of imperial discourse linked Mary Arthur to Atahoe through George Augustus Robinson, the social architect of Flinders Island’s Aboriginal settlement. A group of administrators, including Marsden, had influenced and shaped Robinson's thinking in New South Wales and Van Diemens Land. Since 1815, Marsden and others had begun experimenting in Sydney with the idea that natives could be reprogrammed through spatial restrictions and by imparting literacy, language and religion. Marsden had taken back with him to Port Jackson a handful of Ngapuhi youths, men and boys, to be taught to read and write at a Maori Seminary he opened in Parramatta.18 In the same year Governor Macquarie, keen to make civilised subjects out of Aboriginal people, established the Native Institution next door to Marsden’s Seminary. There, mostly Dharug children were held in residence away from the supposed corrupting influence of their community, under the tutelage of William Shelley, one of the first missionaries to

16 17

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of Flinders Island, and a recent review of the historiography see Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2012), pp. 151–97, 273–310; Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People (Melbourne: Penguin, 1995), pp. xxi–xxiii. Mary Ann Arthur to colonial secretary, Van Diemen’s Land, 10 June 1846, in The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, pp. 39–40. Penny Van Toorn, Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), p. 178. See also the excellent PhD study of this written culture of protest by Leonie Stevens, ‘“Me Write Myself”: A CounterNarrative of the Exile of the First Nations People of Van Diemen’s Land to Flinders Island, 1832-47’, PhD Thesis, History Program, La Trobe University, 2013. On the evolution of missionary activity in Rangihou and the Bay of Islands see Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire.

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the Pacific.19 Marsden, Shelley, Macquarie and later Robinson would become part of a British imperial network that by the 1830s and 1840s was entrenched. Not only did they move in the same administrative circles, they also shared the same intellectual universe of evangelical humanitarianism. An innovative brand of evangelical missionaries had arrived in the Pacific and Australia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Inspired by Cook’s Pacific journals and Indigenous visitors such as Omai, a group of British enthusiasts established the London Missionary Society in 1796 to reach out and convert the ‘new world [that] hath lately opened to our view . . . [where] savage nature still feasts on the flesh of its prisoners’.20 That same year the first missionaries, Shelley among them, sailed on the Duff for the Pacific. Many on board, like Shelley, were artisans before they were missionaries, and had limited theological education. The Duff landed thirty missionaries in Tahiti, Tonga and the Marquesas, with Shelley being landed in Tonga. There he set about proselytising by trial and mostly error, and in 1799 was forced to flee to Sydney after three of his fellow missionaries were killed.21 It was an early signal that, in the years that followed, the social and religious mission worlds that emerged would be uncertain places, whose equilibrium was highly contingent on the individual personalities of missionaries, and the agency of Indigenous leaders and communities. Mission histories have been well told as narratives of physical and religious encounters.22 The establishment of the London Missionary Society was followed in 1799 by the formation of the Church Missionary 19

20

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Peter Read, ‘Shelley’s Mistake: The Parramatta Native Institution and the Stolen Generations’, in Martin Crotty and David Roberts (eds), The Great Mistakes of Australian History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), pp. 32–47; J. Brook and J. L. Kohen, The Parramatta Native Institution and the Black Town: A History (Kensington, NSW: University of New South Wales Press, 1991); Jane Lydon, ‘“Men in Black”: The Blacktown Native Institution and the Origins of the “Stolen Generation”’, in J. Lydon and T. Ireland (eds), Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australia (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005), p. 201; Rachel Standfield, ‘The Parramatta Maori Seminary and the Education of Indigenous Peoples in Early Colonial New South Wales’, History of Education Review, 41:2 (2012): 123–5. Cited in P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Dent, 1982), p. 294; Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society, 1795–1895, Vol. 1, (London: Henry Frowde, 1899), p. 120. Niel Gunson, ‘Shelley, William (1774-1815)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/bi ography/shelley-william-2653/text3701, accessed 18 March 2015. For recent historiographical overview Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May, ‘Reappraisals of Mission History: An Introduction’, in Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May (eds), Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange (Eastbourne; Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), pp. 1–9. See also Andrew Porter’s ‘An Overview,

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Society of the Church of England and the Wesleyan Missionary Society in 1817. In Hawaii, native Hawaiian traveller Opukahaia, who visited Boston for a number of years, inspired local Christians to land missionaries there in 1820.23 Elsewhere European mission endeavours were attempted throughout the Pacific islands, New Zealand and New South Wales by the 1820s. In Australia these met with little initial success before Robinson was able to gather a captive audience on Flinders Island in the 1830s.24 By then in the Pacific, evangelical missionaries, like the new maritime trades, rested uneasily on toeholds established throughout the islands. The missionary network that emerged in and around the Pacific was very quickly dependent on Indigenous missionaries, who, as so-called Native Teachers, expanded Christian networks well beyond advancing imperial frontiers.25 Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an estimated 895 local Indigenous missionaries from all over the South Pacific would volunteer to proselytise in Fiji, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, the Solomons, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Tuvalu.26 Their importance was captured by John Williams of the London Missionary Society as early as 1837 when he remarked that ‘[w]e should not have been able to extend . . . to the number of islands that we have, had it not been for the labours of the native missionaries’.27 As Sione Latukefu explored, while they had no less zeal, Indigenous missionaries proselytised in ways that

23

24 25

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1700-1914’ and Norman Etherington’s ‘Introduction’, in Norman Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 40–63, 1–18. David Chappell, Double Ghosts: Oceanian Voyagers on Euroamerican Ships (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), pp. 134–5; Lilikala Kam’eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desires (Honolulu, HI: Bishop Museum Press, 1992), pp. 67–82. Jessie Mitchell, ‘In Good Faith’? Governing Indigenous Australia through God, Charity and Empire, 1825–1855 (Canberra: Australian National University E-Press, 2012), pp. 23–5. See Richard Gray, Black Christians and White Missionaries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 80–1; and Etherington, ‘Introduction’, in Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empires, pp. 1–18. Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 7–8; John Barker, ‘Where the Missionary Frontier Ran Ahead of Empire’, in Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empires, pp. 86–106. Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 86–106. Charles Forman, ‘The Missionary Force of the Pacific Island Churches’, International Review of Mission, 59 (1970): 215–16; Sione Latukefu, ‘The Impact of South Sea Islands Missionaries on Melanesia’, in J. A. Bourilier, D. T. Hughes and S. W. Tiffany (eds), Mission Church and Sect in Oceania (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1978), pp. 91–108; Doug Munro and Andrew Thornley, ‘Pacific Islander Pastors and Missionaries: Some Historiographical and Analytical Issues’, Pacific Studies, 13 (2000): 2; Peggy Brock, ‘New Christians as Evangelists’, in Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empires, p. 141. Evidence of Rev. John Williams, ‘‘Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements): With the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index’, Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, no. 425 (London: House of Commons, 1837), p. 57.

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made Christianity less alien. They participated in village feasting, became absorbed in local clan systems, engaged in cultural exchanges and shared language, music, song and dance.28 Indigenous missionaries thus connected Pacific communities to global, evermore imperial networks where ideas and languages were traded, connecting both minds and bodies. In the wider context of social, cultural and economic upheavals in Indigenous worlds, missionaries offered more than spiritual or religious alternatives. As was the case for traders and the maritime industry, Indigenous peoples readily embraced the new tools that missionaries were adept at demonstrating, such as medicine, new agricultural and building techniques, and above all literacy.29 In 1837 the secretary of the London Missionary Society, Reverend William Ellis, stated that in the organisation’s zone of Pacific influence alone there were ‘78 schools, which contain between 12,000 and 13,000 scholars’.30 Elsewhere, in Hawaii by the 1830s, one hundred schools taught literacy, numeracy and religious education to as many as 50,000 adult students, and by the end of the century, missionary printing presses were established in Tahiti, Tonga, New Zealand and Samoa promoting literacy in both European and Indigenous languages.31 The presses were prolific. The Wesleyan press in Tonga alone produced at least 170,000 (religious) books in Tongan in the first year of operation.32 Indeed worldwide, in the British Empire alone, mission presses were as common and productive as secular

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Latukefu, ‘The Impact of South Sea Islands Missionaries on Melanesia’, pp. 91–108; Brock, ‘New Christians’, p. 151. Maretu, Marjorie Crocombe, (ed.), Cannibals and Converts: Radical Change in the Cook Islands (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies University of the South Pacific, 1983); Marjorie and Ron Crocombe, The Works of Ta’unga: Records of a Polynesian Traveller in the South Seas, 1833–9 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1968), pp. 21–2; David Wetherell, ‘From Fiji to Papua: The Work of “Vakavuvuli”’, Journal of Pacific History, 13 (1978): 153–72; Doug Munro and Andrew Thornley (eds), The Covenant Makers: Islander Missionaries in the Pacific (Suva: Pacific Islands Theological College, 1976). Norman Etherington, ‘Education and Medicine’, in Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empires, pp. 276–81; Norma McArthur, ‘And, Behold, the Plague was Begun among the People’, in Neil Gunson (ed.), The Changing Pacific: Essays in Honour of H. E. Maude, (Melbourne; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 273–82. Evidence of Reverend W. Ellis, Secretary of the London Missionary Society, ‘Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines’, p. 51. Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), p. 90; Howe, Kerry, Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule, (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), pp. 143–5; Judith Simon, ‘Anthropology, “Native Schooling” and Maori: The Politics of “Cultural Adaptation” Policies’, Oceania, 69:1 (1998): 66–7. Howe, Where the Waves Fall, p. 188; Gareth Griffiths, ‘Trained to Tell the Truth: Missionaries, Converts, and Narration’, in Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empires, pp. 154–5.

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presses, and they catered to an increasingly literate Indigenous readership.33 Literacy was a triumph. A central pillar of British evangelical activity was the notion that missionaries should impart more than simply religion. To this extent they often sought thorough transformation, reaching well beyond religious matters. Configuring Christianity as a civilising force, they changed the spatial appearances of villages, and shaped the organisation of new gender relations, means of individual comportment and dress. On Rarotonga in the Cook Islands, for example, missionary artisans insisted islanders be ‘decently clothed in garments made after the European fashion, produced from cotton grown in their own gardens, spun by their own children, and woven in the islands’.34 On Raiatea near Tahiti, they ensured houses were partitioned or divided into apartments, plastered in lime extracted from coral reefs, and furnished with ‘very good chairs and sofas’. Throughout the missions ‘neat’ settlements around the central buildings of a chapel and a school-house, with a chief and missionary’s house overlooking rows ‘of white cottages a mile or two miles long, peeping at you . . . under the splendid banana trees’ replaced ‘their little contemptible huts along the sea beach’.35 This basic template of supporting religious proselytising with an insistent and invasive transformation of worlds into something European in appearance was repeated throughout the Oceanic world. Beyond the religious and spiritual encounters between missionaries and Indigenous peoples, and yet to be more fully explored by historians, is the degree to which ideas, ideologies and politics, or as Elizabeth Ellbourne put it in her study of the same, ‘information’, were diffused along missionary and related humanitarian networks.36 As Zoe Laidlaw’s recent study has shown, all over the British Empire and beyond, Indigenous peoples certainly utilised these networks to articulate and engage with imperial powers.37 They did so, moreover, in ways that ensured they played an integral role in the development of these discourses. Exploring the ways Djadja Wurrung of the Port Phillip protectorate sought to use humanitarian networks to stay in and on country, 33 34 35 36

37

Gareth Griffiths, ‘“Trained to Tell the Truth”: Missionaries, Converts and Narration’, pp. 154–5. Reverend W. Ellis, ‘Report from the Select Committee’, p. 50. Reverend W. Ellis, ‘Report from the Select Committee’, p. 56. Elizabeth Ellbourne, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Imperial Networks in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, (eds), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), pp. 62–63. Zoe Laidlaw, ‘Indigenous Interlocutors: Networks of Imperial Protest and Humanitarianism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon, (eds.), Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 114–39.

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Alan Lester has deployed the concept of assemblages to argue that humanitarian discourses could be mutually constitutive, relying on Indigenous articulations while also shaping them.38 It is a useful concept for it captures the partial but ultimately limited utility of humanitarian and missionary concepts for Indigenous peoples. For missionaries shared and embraced the same mental world of racial thinking that permeated imperial discourse. It was a conceptual world epitomised to an explicit degree by missionary Hugh Thomas who wrote of Fijians in 1818 that they are ‘the very dregs of Mankind or Human Nature’ and are ‘quite unfit to live but far more unfit to die’.39 The premise of missionary work was to despise in order to love those they came to convert, making missionaries both destroyers and saviours. But in the nineteenth century, missionaries and humanitarians, evangelicals prominent among them, were the only people, other than Indigenous peoples themselves, committed to the well-being of Indigenous peoples, even if it was ultimately limited to spiritual well-being. As such they would be central to early traditions of counter-imperial currents.40 By opening Pacific spaces to the world of ideas contained in written words missionaries and their humanitarian brethren were frequently indispensable to the political traditions that emerged from imperial and counter-imperial connections. The evangelical movement from which most missions in the Pacific originated were notoriously political in Britain, having been central to the abolitionist movement. Evangelical missionaries were often firmly rooted in wider humanitarian networks that after 1837 were formalised by the Aborigines Protection Society and the activities, findings and recommendations of the 1837 British Select Committee on Aborigines. The Select Committee marked both the highpoint of humanitarianism’s political influence in Britain, but also the point from which a language of Protection in regards to Indigenous peoples would become naturalised in British imperial language.41 38

39 40

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Alan Lester, ‘Indigenous Engagements with Humanitarian Governance: The Port Phillip Protectorate on Aborigines and “Humanitarian Space”’, in Lydon and Carey, Indigenous Networks, pp. 50-74. Cited in Niel Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas 1797–1860 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 197. Janet Doust, ‘Setting Up Boundaries in Colonial Eastern Australia: Race and Empire’, Australian Historical Studies, 35 (2004): 156; Catherine Hall, ‘“From Greenlands’s Icy Mountains – To Africa’s Golden Sand”: Ethnicity, Race and Nation in Mid-Nineteenth Century England’, Gender and History, 5:2 (1993): 212–30. Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 77–113; James Heartfield, The Aborigines Protection Society:

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The 1837 Select Committee on Aborigines inquired into the abuses suffered by Indigenous peoples throughout areas of British influence. Driven by Thomas Fowell Buxton and informed by his and his sisters’ imperial networks, it offered an unprecedented opportunity for humanitarians, missionaries and select Indigenous peoples in diverse regions including Australia and the Pacific, North America and southern Africa to find common expression for their condemnation of a type of colonisation.42 The committee collated expressive evidence of violent appropriations of Indigenous lands, the use of forced labour and sexual violence against Indigenous women and children. In response it crafted in its recommendations to Parliament, a particular brand of protectionism which, as Fae Dussart and Alan Lester have argued, marked a shift from a language of asylum and amelioration to a protective, and necessarily invasive, governance.43 Protection through imposed civilisation would thus become a dominant humanitarian paradigm. The Select Committee on Aborigines is a ready gauge of the collective wisdom and shared language of missionaries and humanitarians throughout areas of British influence. Genuine concern was felt for the fate of native peoples, but it was tempered by the pervasive influence of notions of British superiority. The committee’s recommendations made explicit reference to the rights and entitlements of Indigenous peoples as a burden on the Crown. They referred to Aboriginal peoples’ ‘civil rights’, contingent though these were on the imparting ‘of civilization, and that religion, with which Providence has blessed this nation’.44 British sovereignty was thus framed as the best source of legal protection and the deliverance of rights, and the committee recommended that religious instruction and education be provided as a repaid ‘debt’ to displaced and dispossessed native peoples.45 In New South Wales the committee observed, the colonial government had grown rich on the sale of land ‘that in the recollection of many living men . . . was the undisputed territory of the Aborigines’. No ‘expenditure should be withheld’ the committee recommended, from the cost of maintaining a system of missionaries

42

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Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa and the Congo, 1836–1909 (London: Hurst and Company, 2011). Zoe Laidlaw, ‘Aunt Anna’s Report: The Buxton Women and the Aborigines Select Committee, 1835-37’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 32:2 (2004): 1–28; Laidlaw, ‘Indigenous Interlocutors’. Lester and Dussart, Colonisation and the Origins, 77. See also Lester, ‘Humanitarians’, pp. 66–7. Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements): Reprinted with Comments by the ‘Aborigines Protection Society’ (London: Hatchard and Son, 1837), p. 4. ‘Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines’, p. 80.

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‘employed to instruct the tribes’ and of ‘protectors, whose duty it should be to defend them’.46 The Select Committee thus invoked the notion that Indigenous peoples were the owners of inherent entitlements and rights. It went even further to suggest that dispossession itself gave rise to both Indigenous entitlements and encumbrances on colonial governance. Such ideas were already resident in the distant colonies, but with distinct local inflections. The Select Committee’s blunt evocation of the natural and inalienable rights of native peoples to land, civilisation and salvation provided a critical vocabulary for emerging Indigenous political discourses in the colonies. But the committee’s recommendations were far from a perfect fit, and reflected their deep missionary influences. The notion of protection hinged on the presumed ‘incapacity’ of ‘native inhabitants’ to ‘enforce the observance of their rights’, on the one hand, and Britain’s ‘obligations due to them as our fellow men’, on the other.47 The brand of cultural transformation they lauded was a powerful means by which colonialism would be thoroughly and culturally insinuated into the lives of Indigenous peoples. It was itself born of a social and economic context that equated Christianity with civilisation, and civilisation with European society. Indigenous peoples’ entire social fabric was viewed as needing change, as British humanitarians put it in 1837, ‘true Civilisation and Christianity are inseparable . . . No man can become a Christian’ it was held ‘without being a Civilised man’.48 Traced by Lester and Dussart across imperial spaces, in the realms of colonial governance, such thinking would eventually morph into colonial policies committed to evermore destructive and ruthless concepts of assimilation and amalgamation, with far-reaching impacts.49 The recommendations of the Select Committee were put into practice in New South Wales with the establishment in 1838 of the Port Phillip Protectorate. The following year, George Augustus Robinson was appointed the chief protector of Aborigines. At the time he was overseeing the Aboriginal settlement at Wybalena on Flinders Island where young teachers Mary and Walter Arthur helped to nurture a nascent written culture of political protest. As the Select Committee had collected evidence throughout the world in 1837, at Wybalena Thomas Bruny, the first Indigenous Australian editor of a newspaper, had written that 46 47 48

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‘Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines’, p. 83. ‘Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines’, p. 3. D. Coates, John Beecham and William Ellis, Christianity the Means of Civilisation: Shown in the Evidence Given before a Committee of the House of Commons on Aborigines (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1837), pp. 171, 174. Lester and Dussart, Colonisation and the Origins, pp. 173-225.

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‘[t]here is many of you dying my friends . . . and we ought to pray to God before we get to heaven [or] we must have eternal-punishment’.50 The Flinders Island Chronicle in which he wrote was closely overseen by ‘Commandant’ Robinson, yet Bruny was frequently and subtly subversive. ‘Why don’t the black fellows pray to the king’, he wrote in 1837, ‘to get us away from this place’.51 Bruny’s musings were part of the same literate and insistent culture at Wybalena, that extended half a century of protest and physical resistance on the Tasmanian frontiers, and which would be continued by Mary Arthur’s complaints in 1846. When Robinson left Wybalena for the settlement of Melbourne, he took with him a group of residents to work as intermediaries between himself and the Kooris of the Kulin nation in Port Phillip and its surrounds. In the group were Walter and Mary Arthur. Robinson and the Flinders Island group arrived in Port Phillip separately, and when he arrived from Sydney he found them already ‘congregated in the environs of the [Melbourne] Township in considerable numbers’. As the Tasmanians were to be ‘mediators and instructors’ to Kooris, Robinson was delighted that their engagement was ‘of the most friendly character’ with the Kulin peoples, and ‘the Van Diemens Land Natives . . . [seemed] in friendly alliances’.52 Following these early connections between politicised and resistant Flinders Island residents and Kooris from the Kulin nation around Port Phillip bay, a new protest literature would continue to flourish on the mainland. This coherent thread linked, though not necessarily in a causal relationship, Indigenous protest sites well into the twentieth century. By the 1840s when Walter and Mary Arthur petitioned Queen Victoria, Kooris in Port Phillip had also developed cultures of petitioning and letter writing. Kooris made use of the protectorate system to articulate demands and requests from places of what Lester and Laidlaw have called sites of ‘Indigenous perseverance’, including humanitarian spaces like reserves and missions. From these sites, their demands connected with transimperial sites elsewhere assembling locally inflected discourses that were overwhelmingly centred on land as a source of sustenance, and also of privacy, autonomy and renewal.53 In 1840, for example, the 50 51 52 53

Thomas Bruny, editor, Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle, 17 November 1837, in Attwood and Markus (eds), The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, p. 37. Bruny, in Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, p. 37; Stevens, ‘Me Write Myself’. Public Records Office Victoria (PROV), VPRS 10 1839/325. Robinson to Superintendent of Port Phillip, relative to V.D.L. natives, 12 December 1839. Alan Lester and Zoe Laidlaw, ‘Indigenous Sites and Mobilities: Connected Struggles in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Alan Lester and Zoe Laidlaw, eds., Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism; Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 6.

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Wadawurrung (Wathaurung) people near Geelong requested, through the missionary Francis Tuckfield, that they be granted land of their own, and from 1843 the Wurundjeri people near Melbourne repeatedly called on Assistant Protector William Thomas for ‘land in our own country’.54 So too, by 1847 as new alliances were developed with the previously hostile Kurnai of Gippsland, Kooris in the protectorate established political networks that would continue to articulate a ‘powerful narrative of entitlement’ demanding land as both asylum and compensation.55 By the late nineteenth century, letter-writing and petitioning campaigns proliferated particularly on the Australian east coast colonies, and as a distinctive mission-based protest movement. These would come to prominence in the twentieth century as Aboriginal people continued to reach beyond the limitations of the local setting to seek what Ravi de Costa has termed ‘a higher authority’.56 Using the same vocabulary as protectionist discourse, they would articulate eternal rights, also insisting on the role that land rights would play in producing autonomy rather than dependence or protection.57 Their writings were part of a wider pattern fanning out across the Oceanic world, where missionary and related networks connected both insistent and persistent Indigenous nodes and spaces of distant colonial worlds with a common, or imperial, literacy. Humanitarian and missionary networks of empire tapped into and generated currents of thinking around the indivisible rights of native peoples, their ownership of the soil, and their entitlement to compensatory education and religion. These had emerged as ‘assemblages’, to use Lester’s term, of consultation with local missionaries and Indigenous informants, whose thinking in turn was responsive to the local demands of Indigenous communities, pupils, elites and converts.58 The influence of the Aborigines Protection Society continued to be fairly ubiquitous in the Colonial Office until the late nineteenth century, but their influence in the colonies waned significantly in the later decades, particularly as settler colonies gained self-governing status. But into the space left by the dwindling influence of humanitarians would step multiple generations 54

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Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, ‘“Bring this Paper to the Good Governor”: Aboriginal Petitioning in Britain’s Australian Colonies’, in Saliha Belmessous (ed.), Native Claims: Indigenous Law Against Empire, 1500–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 188. Curthoys and Mitchell, ‘Bring this Paper’, p. 190. Ravi De Costa, A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006). R. E. Barwick and Diane E. Barwick, ‘A Memorial for Thomas Bungeleen, 1847–1865’, Aboriginal History, 8:1 (1984): 9; Curthoys and Mitchell, ‘Bring this Paper’, p. 190. Lester, ‘Indigenous Engagements’, pp. 50-55.

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of articulate, mission-educated Indigenous peoples such as the Wybalena residents visiting Port Phillip, who would continue to refuse their role in the colonial world as compliant victims. Whether conceptually, or physically, they continued to reach beyond the local confines of colonial conditions to imagine and assert alternatives to colonialism.

Sovereign dialogues: kingdoms, treaties and rights On 6 February 1840 a group of around forty north island Maori chiefs, Ngapuhi relations of Atahoe and Ruatara prominent among them, signed a treaty that is widely recognised today as the founding document for the colony of New Zealand. The British version of the treaty ceded Maori sovereignty, or kawanatanga (governorship) in Maori language, to Britain but retained for Maori ‘the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties’. The treaty also assured the Queen’s ‘royal protection’ of Maori, and promised the provision of ‘all the Rights and Privileges of British Subjects’. Ultimately, the English version of the treaty sought to protect Maori dominion and land rights as a means of giving certainty to Crown possession, and enshrining its pre-emptive right to alienated Maori land. The treaty, in other words, fell short of representing a position of consensus between the British and Maori rangatira. To this extent, it was the events of the day before that are illuminating. For they remind us that the treaty was part of a longer timeline of attempts by such figures as Atahoe and Ruatara a generation earlier, to manage and dialogue with imperial powers and representatives. A much larger gathering of Maori and British spectators had come together in preparation for the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on 5 February 1840. It was debated, according to observer Charles Wilkes, in heated exchanges. Many ‘arguments and endeavours’ to induce Maori chiefs to sign were refused, and the meeting had eventually broken up with ‘every chief refusing to sign’.59 Intense lobbying overnight ensured a much smaller group signed the following day, but in the days that followed Wilkes interviewed one of the signatory chiefs Pomare, and found that he and others ‘think they have not alienated any of their rights to the soil’. Pomare himself was under the impression that he had not ‘given up his authority, or any portion of his land permanently’.60 The treaty was 59 60

Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition during the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, Vol. 2 (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), p. 375. Wilkes, Narrative, p. 376. Literature on the treaty and arising confusion over the meaning of key terms relating to land and sovereignty is vast, and the issue is addressed in later chapters. For an introductory survey see the contributions to I. H. Kawharu (ed.), Waitangi: Maori and Pakeha Perspectives of the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland: Oxford

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then, and remains, a contentious document, and arguably represents a contingent moment of agreement in a much longer dialogue. Disagreements over the content of the Treaty of Waitangi suggest it was part of an ongoing attempt by Maori rangatira to convey the nature of relationships between power, land and people that had preceded and would follow the moment of the treaty’s signing. The Maori-language version of the treaty was translated in a hurry by missionary Henry Williams, and contained Maori equivalents for terms such as ‘land’, ‘property’, and ‘Chieftainship’ whose meaning was both looser and more constricted than their English counterpart.61 Article two, still the most controversial section of the treaty, promised in Maori ‘te tino rangatiratanga’ over ‘wenua’, which promised chiefly dominion over resources and land. By definition, in Maori, land included the people, things and genealogies it sustained, a concept that translated poorly into English.62 The relationship of land to people, people to chiefly dominion or sovereignty, and sovereignty to land were therefore poorly captured by the constitutional and protectionist language of the treaty. The ambiguity regarding the relative rights of possession enshrined in the Treaty of Waitangi paralleled or was part of wider patterns already emergent in Port Phillip, of Indigenous peoples explaining their world of rights and sovereignties in a borrowed language that imperial powers could contemplate. Declaring sovereign independence as the United Tribes of Aotearoa in 1835, a coalition of missionaries and many of the north island Maori that were later party to the treaty invited a formal dialogue with Britain and other imperial powers.63 As Indigenous peoples were beginning to do all over the Pacific, the

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University Press, 1989); Paul Moon, Te Ara Ki Te Tiriti: The Path to the Treaty of Waitangi (Auckland: David Ling, 2002). For a recent study of the translation practices of missionaries in New Zealand, which explores the process of translation as an extension of colonial relationships, see Jane Samson, ‘Translation Teams: Missionaries, Islanders and the Reduction of Language in the Pacific’, in Patricia Grimshaw and Andy May (eds), Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Exchange (Eastbourne; Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), pp. 96–8. On the standardisation of the northern New Zealand language as ‘Maori’ in the late 1830s, see Kay Sanderson, ‘Maori Christianity on the East Coast’, New Zealand Journal of History, 17 (1983): 166–84; Paul Landau, ‘Language’, in Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empires, pp. 194–215. Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 195–9. See for example Hugh Kawharu’s translation of the treaty at the Waitangi Tribunal: www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/waitangi-tribunal/treaty-of-waitangi/the-kawharu-trans lation, accessed 4 July 2015. M. H. Durie, Te Mana Kawanatanga: The Politics of Maori Self-Determination (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 176; Peter Adams, Fatal Necessity: British Intervention in New Zealand 1830–1847 (Auckland: Auckland University Press and Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 86–8. See also Lyndsay Head, ‘The Pursuit of Modernity in Maori Society: The Conceptual Bases of Citizenship in the Early Colonial Period’, in Andrew

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Declaration of Independence and the later treaty sought to locate an enduring source of protection for Maori independence. Elsewhere Indigenous peoples’ attempts to articulate land rights; construct kingdoms; establish embryo common law systems; or petition extra-colonial powers likewise appropriated imperial literacies to express diverse Indigenous concepts. In the Polynesian Pacific, a ‘contagion of sovereignty’ spread from Hawaii to Tahiti, and on to New Zealand in the early part of the nineteenth century.64 It followed trade and missionary networks, centralising and stabilising Indigenous power structures under kingdoms run by alliances of newcomer and Indigenous elites. Hawaii was unified under King Kamehameha I in 1810 and a monarchist government of allied Kanaka Maoli elites and newcomers. So too, in Tahiti in the late eighteenth century the Pomare family ruled the island and under Pomare II, who converted in 1815, gave rise to a missionary-supported kingdom run through scriptural codes of law.65 Like the United Tribes of Aotearoa in 1835, these trading states went on to be recognised, even briefly, as sovereign entities in international law. The Pacific outbreak of expressions of sovereignty had not run its course with the ceding of Maori sovereignty in 1840, and in 1845 the Tongan paramount chief Jioaji Taufa’ahau emerged from decades of civil strife in Tonga to unify the islands under a monarchy that has lasted to the present day. After this in New Zealand, a new alliance of north island iwi established a subversive Maori king in 1853, and in Fiji, Ratu Seru Cakobau declared a kingdom in 1871, partly to prepare the way for British protection. Unlike Tahiti, Hawaii and Tonga however, these latter kingdoms were declared under a rising tide of both settler-colonial expansion and imperialism. None therefore received legal sanction, in large part due to the changing international context where humanitarian interest in native rights had significantly declined. By the end of the 1840s the high-minded humanitarian impulse to ameliorate the destructive impact of colonial contact, trade and settlement seemed to have run its course. In Australia the Port Phillip experiment failed, and vast tracts of land had been occupied by squatters

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Sharp and P. G. McHugh (eds), Histories, Power and Loss: Uses of the Past: A New Zealand Commentary (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001), pp. 103–5. David Armitage, ‘The Contagion of Sovereignty: Declarations of Indendence since 1776’, South African Historical Journal, 52 (2005): 1–18. For more on the 1819 law code, based on the ten commandments, see Neil Gunson, Messengers of Grace: Evangelical Missionaries in the South Seas, 1797–1860 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 284.

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throughout the rich grazing country of what is now western Victoria. Robinson and the staff of the Port Phillip Protectorate had failed to stem the destructive and frequently vindictive violence against the Koori population, and in 1849 the Protectorate was disbanded.66 In all the Australian colonies sweeping swathes of Indigenous peoples’ territory was being fenced off and policed, and in less than a generation in some cases, whole language groups had lost access to critical sources of physical, economic and cultural sustenance, effectively dispossessed.67 Here as elsewhere land-hunger gripped colonial settlers substantially undermining protective or humanitarian impulses. In New Zealand initially high-minded emphases on protecting exclusive Maori possession of land had given way by the end of the 1840s to a Crown emphasis on its own right of pre-emption.68 By 1844 some northern parts of the British colony were at war with Maori landholders in sporadic and violent conflict that would continue to escalate into the NewZealand Wars which would last until the 1870s. This was underpinned by pressure from London after 1847 to occupy and acquire all ‘waste’ Maori land.69 So undermined was the Treaty of Waitangi by the 1850s that it was largely considered an anachronism among settlers, and as James Richmond put it in 1851, it was widely considered ‘preposterous’ and little more than the ‘ridiculous claims of the native to thousands of acres of untrodden bush & fern’.70 By the end of the New Zealand Wars more than two thirds of land in the south island and a 66

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For closer to first-hand accounts and details of the extent and quality of frontier violence in Victoria see Ian Clark, Scars on the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859 (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1995); George Mackaness (ed.), George Augustus Robinson’s Journey into South-Eastern Australia, 1844 with George Henry Hayden’s Narrative of Part of the Same Journey (Dubbo: New South Wales Review, 1978). For the workings of the Port Phillip Protectorate, Ian Clark, The Journals of George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector, Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate, Vols. 1–6 (Melbourne: Heritage Matters, 1998–2000). For a recent synthesis of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations during the expansion period of settler-colonisation in the Australian colonies, with relevant literature see T. Banivanua Mar and P. Edmonds, ‘Settler/Indigenous Relations’, in Stuart Macintyre and Alison Bashford (eds), The Cambridge History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 342–66. I. H. Kawharu, Maori Land Tenure: Studies of a Changing Institution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977); Moon, Te Ara Ki Te Tiriti. In 1847, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Early Grey, ordered the incoming New Zealand Governor to consider all Ma¯ori land not properly possessed under Lockean notions of property, to be ‘waste’ and available for settlement. David Williams, Te Kooti Tango Whenua: The Native Land Court, 1864–1909 (Wellington: Huia Publishers, 1999), pp. 108–14; Clare Charters and Andrew Erueti, Maori Property Rights and the Foreshore and Seabed: The Last Frontier (Wellington: Victoria University Press), pp. 34–5. Alan Ward, A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995), p. 18.

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quarter in the north island had been alienated in a pattern of dispossession that would continue largely unchecked until 1975.71 For Indigenous observers across the Pacific, and particularly the British colonial world, events in Australia and New Zealand must have given a clear indication by the 1850s that colonialism was entrenched. We know that some Pacific leaders, such as Taufa’ahau of Tonga, took a keen interest in the colonial activities of the Pacific. Taufa’ahau was well versed in the impact on both Aboriginal and Maori people of intensifying settlercolonial land hunger, and had sought advice from Governor Grey in New Zealand and the New South Wales Parliament, also corresponding regularly with missionaries, colonial officials and Queen Pomare IV of Tahiti.72 The rapid, violent and total occupation of the southern settler colonies demonstrated that the colonial world was not just here to stay, nor simply in search of permanent access to resources and trade. Colonial newcomers after the 1850s were instead arriving in the islands in search of land and control. Taufa’ahau’s keen understanding of this was transmitted in correspondence with other Pacific leaders. In a visit to Fiji in 1850, for example, he had warned Cakobau of settler intentions to destroy his influence and any Indigenous authorities, in order to secure land. In Sydney three years later when the United States commercial agent John Williams published a letter in the Sydney press announcing colonial opportunities for land purchasing in Fiji, Taufa’ahau forwarded the letter to Cakobau noting, ‘I am not certain whether Fiji will be in danger, or whether it will escape.’73 By mid-century, Indigenous leaders in the eastern Pacific were demonstrably and meaningfully interconnected. Taufa’ahau, for example, not only travelled extensively but also corresponded with missionaries, colonial administrators and Indigenous leaders, especially the Tahitian, Queen Pomare, Fijian paramount chief Cakobau and Tongan leader Ma’afu in the eastern regions of Fiji.74 These leaders also borrowed from and built on each other’s precedents in interwoven attempts to protect their lands and people from colonised futures. A most compelling example was the connection between separate attempts to reform and 71 72 73

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Donald Denoon et al., A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Maldon: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), p. 130. Howe, Where the Waves Fall, pp. 191–2. George Tubou I (Taufa’ahau) to Cakobau, Nukualofa, 28 February 1854. Cited in Joseph Waterhouse, The King and People of Fiji: Containing a Life of Thakombau, with Notices of the Fijians, Their Manners, Customs and Superstitions Previous to the Great Religious Reformation of 1854 (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1866), pp. 243–4. See for example Taufa’ahau to Reverend Charles Tucker, Neiafu, 4 July 1844, in which he mentions frequent correspondence and travel between Fiji, Samoa and Tahiti. Sioana Faupula and Geoff Cummins, ‘Manuscript XXII: A Letter from Taufa’ahau’, Journal of Pacific History, 45:3 (2010): 357–70.

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protect land ownership from colonial land hunger, and to establish enduring foundations for rights in Hawaii and Tonga. Outsider, and particularly settler, interest in land and economic influence intensified throughout the Pacific, but especially in Hawaii during the Californian and Australian gold rushes. In the aftermath of the failures of the Treaty of Waitangi and the forced takeover of Tahiti by France in 1842, the Hawaiian elite seemed keenly aware that land was being sought all over the Pacific for conversion into private settler property. In the Privy Council in 1846, for example, the ‘King and Chiefs laughed very heartily’ in response to numerous arguments regarding the desire of white residents to own land in fee simple. They frequently remarked, ‘so they think we are fools – that we know not the value of our own lands’.75 In partial response to this changing landscape between 1848 and 1855, the Hawaiian government reorganised the ownership of land in an effective revolution known as the Mahele.76 While the Mahele was a means of reorganising, and more importantly, explicitly articulating the nature of land ownership in Hawaii, the degree to which it protected the vast majority of Hawaiian rights in land was mixed. Before 1848 land was held according to a dynamic oral title in Hawaii, and commoners, or the makaainana, could hold interests in land on which they laboured and produced. In an attempt to clarify and record the ownership of all land in Hawaii, and to protect it as personal or state property, the Board of Commissioners to Quiet Land Titles, established in 1846, called on Kanaka Maoli and foreigners with an interest in land to register their claims by early 1848 on pain of being barred from ownership. At the same time all land was divided between the king and chiefs, and in March 1848, the king’s lands were divided between his personal property and effectively state property. In 1850 legislative changes allowed foreigners, or Haole, to acquire land in fee simple, while the Kuleana Act of the same year enabled Hawaiian commoners to obtain fee-simple title to government or chiefly land that they could ‘occupy and improve’.77 Through this process of registration and articulation the Mahele transferred and codified interests in land into individualised and fee simple forms of property.78 This proved disastrous for many makaainana, for while the 75

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Hawaiian Privy Council Records, 13 August 1846, Cited in Stuart Banner, ‘Preparing to Be Colonized: Land Tenure and Legal Strategy in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii’, Law and Society Review, 39:2 (2005): 285. Banner, ‘Preparing to Be Colonized’. Maivan Lam, ‘The Imposition of Anglo-American Land Tenure Law on Hawaiians’, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 17:23, (1985): 103–28. Banner, ‘Preparing to Be Colonized’. Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘New Political Orders’, in Donald Denoon et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 206–7; Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Statistical Analysis of the Great Mahele’, Journal of Pacific History, 22 (1987): 15–33.

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Mahele clarified and confirmed the land-holding status of the Hawaiian elite, it effectively dispossessed many makaainana unable to register their interests. Registration depended on the tripartite prerequisites of literacy, knowledge of the commission and physical access. With many makaainana still either illiterate, living in remote areas, or women and family members dependent for registration on others, many never registered, or were unable to register, their claims. Moreover, while deadlines were extended for chiefs, the last of which did not expire until 1895, the same privilege was never extended to makaainana.79 The Commission granted only 12,000 titles for a population of 72,000 makaainana. This was an inequity compounded by the title being individualised and fee simple, a form notoriously vulnerable to alienation when landowners were exposed to the increasingly aggressive maritime economy of mid-century Hawaii.80 To a significant degree the Mahele was motivated and driven by Haole interests, mainly those of American missionaries and planters, and it would be a critical step in the eventual alienation of Kanaka Maole land and sovereignty.81 It enabled Haole to purchase Hawaiian land at such a rate that by the eve of the United States’ takeover of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, Haole Americans owned at least two-thirds of land in the kingdom.82 In his survey of Pacific processes of dispossession, however, Stuart Banner has argued that the Mahele can also be understood as the Hawaiian monarchy’s attempt to prepare for colonisation, and was one of the earliest implementations by Indigenous peoples and their allies of a land tenure reform movement that reorganised Indigenous systems of property.83 Indeed it was one among a series of treaties, 79

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Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘The Hui Lands of Keanae: Hawaiian Land Tenure and the Great Mahele’, Journal of Polynesian Society, 92 (1983): 169–88; Jon J. Chinen, The Great Mahele: Hawaii’s Land Division of 1848 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1958); Sally Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 110–11. Edward Beerchert, Honolulu: Crossroads of the Pacific, (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 55–7. Hanauni-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’I (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), pp. 4–20; David Barnard, ‘Law, Narrative and the Continuing Colonialist Oppression of Native Hawaiians’, Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review, 16 (2006): 31–42; Ward Churchill and Sharon Venne (eds), Islands in Captivity: The Record of the International Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Hawaiians (Boston, MA: South End, 2004); Ward Churchill, ‘Stolen Kingdom: The Right of Hawai’i to Decolonization’, in his Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Angloamerican Law (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2003), pp. 73–124. Barnard, ‘Law, Narrative’, p. 5; Chinen, The Great Mahele. Banner, ‘Preparing to Be Colonized’. See also Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous Peoples from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press, 2007); Sanford Dole, Evolution of Hawaiian Land Tenure (Honolulu, HI: University Hawaii Press, 1892); Linda Parker, Native American

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agreements and declarations undertaken by Indigenous peoples throughout the Pacific that effectively insisted on their sovereign status. Seen in the broader context of Indigenous peoples’ responses to the colonial land rush, the Mahele was, in addition to being a pre-emptive strike, an enunciation and assertion of Indigenous alternatives to colonial dispossession. It was a deeper multifaceted insistence on Indigenous forms of sovereign rule and cultural continuity that demonstrated an intent to articulate a Hawaiian way. Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa has argued more broadly that the Mahele should be understood as a selective acceptance by the Hawaiian elite of Western legal patterns to fill the gaping spatial, cultural and demographic voids left in the wake of colonial intrusion.84 At its heart, therefore, the Mahele was at least partly propelled by the continuity of Indigenous ways of being, beginning a political trajectory, a wellspring, that would feed decolonisation movements of the future. Following the Mahele’s radical reconfiguration of oral tenures into a systematised codification of land tenure recognisable in imperial legal systems, the Hawaiian government prepared a new constitution in 1852. It began with a Declaration of Rights that reflected the influence of Kamehameha’s American advisers, and affirmed that ‘all men’ were created ‘free and equal’ and endowed ‘with certain inalienable rights; among which are life and liberty, the right of acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and of pursuing safety and happiness’. It went on to affirm the civil and political rights of ‘all men’ to free speech and expression, religion, assembly, freedom from slavery; and legal rights of trial by jury and Habeas Corpus.85 The Hawaiian Constitution, like the Treaty of Waitangi, declared the Hawaiian government’s determination to be taken seriously by circling imperial powers. This was underscored the following year when the kingdom appointed a Hawaiian consul in Sydney, Charles St Julian. Also titled the Commissioner to the Independent States and Tribes of Polynesia, St Julian was expected to encourage the development of independent governments in the

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Estate: The Struggle over Indian and Hawaiian Lands (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1989); Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio, Dismembering Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa, Native Land and Foreign Desire: Ko Hawlia’i Ama a me Na Ko Pu’umake a ka Po’e Haole (Honolulu, HI: Bishop Museum Press, 1992), pp. 298–306. David Stannard, for example, has estimated that between 1778 and 1893 the Hawaiian population had dropped by up to 80 per cent. See David Stannard, Before the Horror: The Population of Hawai’i on the Eve of Western Contact (Honolulu, HI: Social Science Institute, University of Hawaii, 1989), p. 51. Kingdom of Hawai’i Constitution of 1852, 14 June 1852. www.hawaii-nation.org/constitu tion-1852.html, accessed 4 July 2015.

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Pacific on the constitutional pattern of Hawaii, with an eye to a future confederation, a protection in numbers.86 So it was that when Taufa’ahau visited Sydney in 1853 and 1854 in search of strategies to defend his islands against colonisation, it was the Hawaiian consul, St Julian, who was also working as the law reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, who covered his visit. St Julian described substantial audiences attending Taufa’ahau’s talks, with 250 on one occasion, attending his talk on the ‘duty and diligence and perseverance in the study of the Bible’.87 In other Sydney press Taufa’ahau was described as ‘a very tall, well-made intelligent looking black’, as ‘herculean and muscular’, with a ‘mild and intelligent expression of countenance’.88 Although in Sydney to complete a speaking and fundraising tour for the Wesleyan church, Taufa’ahau also pursued his own agenda. Like generations of Pacific visitors before him, he visited the governor general and attended the prorogation of the New South Wales Legislative Council. Although he was spoken of as the ‘King’ of Tonga, St Julian was quick to point out in the Sydney Morning Herald that no public demonstration of recognition such ‘as is usually accorded to a Sovereign’ was offered: ‘no public reception; no salutes, no honours’.89 Taufa’ahau returned to Tonga earlier than planned as homesickness and ‘the changeable climate’ in Sydney had taken their toll.90 Exposed to colonial ambitions in Sydney, and treated as a native king, he returned to Tonga more keenly aware of the potential for emerging imperial interest in the Pacific to intensify. He also returned having cultivated a working relationship with St Julian, with whom he continued to correspond and from whom he received a copy of the Hawaiian Constitution.91 After careful and lengthy consideration in 1862, and again in 1875, Taufa’ahau established a constitution himself, fashioned on the Hawaiian model. It too began with a Declaration of Rights, the Koe Tahi Tauataina, which emulated the Hawaiian Declaration in every way, except for one important variation. The Tongan Constitution forbade the sale of land to anyone but Indigenous Tongans. This set a new precedent for the region, and when Fiji was offered to Britain by Cakobau in 1874, the enabling 86

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Mark Lyons and Marion Nothling, ‘St Julian, Charles James Herbert de Courcy (1819– 1874)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/st-julian-charles-james-herbert-d e-courcy-4530/text7419, published first in hardcopy 1976, accessed online 19 March 2015. ‘Public Amusements’, Illustrated Sydney News, 10 December 1853, p. 6. Empire, 13 January 1853, p. 3; Illustrated Sydney News, 10 December, 1853, p. 6; Illustrated Sydney News, 7 January 1854, p. 2. Charles St Julian, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 1854, p. 3. Empire, 24 December 1853, p. 4. 91 Howe, Where the Waves Fall, p. 192.

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document known as the Deed of Cession, emulated Tonga’s ban, declaring Indigenous peoples’ rights in land to be inalienable. Tongans and Fijians thus created two of the world’s most enduring protections for Indigenous peoples’ land title. The web of circulating discourses and concepts that linked minds and bodies in Australia, New Zealand, Tonga, Hawaii, Fiji and Tahiti was expansive and increasingly articulate in the nineteenth century, both shadowing and foreshadowing imperial networks. The Pacific’s midcentury rights declarations are considered, at best, marginal to the wider intellectual history of twentieth-century decolonisation. But they were a foundation for a far-reaching trajectory of expectation regarding Indigenous peoples’ land and sovereignty in the Pacific. While they were clearly derivative, adopting and adapting European and American ideas of civil and political entitlements, they were also overlaid with local and Indigenous inflections. They effectively deployed imperial literacies to create an ongoing dialogue with imperial interests in the Pacific – particularly British, Australian and American – which would also be an integral part of the discursive history of decolonisation. These declarations stand beside similar explicit acts of sovereignty, including the Treaty of Waitangi, as intriguing records of the networked production of idioms of rights that Indigenous peoples would repeatedly reach for from the coalface of colonial encounters. They thus set in motion strategies that would continue into the era of decolonisation.

Negotiating natives: identity and private patterns of survival There were around 10,000 Pacific Islanders, or ‘kanakas’ as they were generically called, in Queensland when the Australian settler colonies federated to form a white Australia in 1901. Almost immediately, however, Australia’s new federal parliament legislated to deport all Pacific Islanders and to exclude them, along with Aboriginal people, from a range of rights and entitlements including the federal and state franchise.92 The Queensland state government too made it illegal and expensive to employ Pacific Islanders by introducing a bounty on sugar produced by white labour. Pacific Islanders in Queensland, some of whom were by this time identifying as Australian South Sea Islanders, protested. In 1906 Peter Wien, a Lifu Islander from New Caledonia, fronted the sitting Royal Commission investigating the viability and justice of forced deportation. 92

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Color Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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He came to represent the North Rockhampton community of Pacific Islanders, some of whom had been in Queensland since they were brought against their will in the 1870s. ‘We know white people don’t like black men in this country and hate the sight of us’, Wien said, but ‘I am ashamed to think you drive away people . . . that is a thing I would not do.’93 Likewise Henry Tongoa, named after his island in Vanuatu and chairman of the Pacific Islanders’ Association in Mackay, warned that if ‘the “boys” have to leave Queensland then the white man will have to leave the islands’.94 These were men who, by representing communities that had adeptly resisted imposed identities as kanaka boys and Marys, mirrored identity struggles occurring throughout the Pacific. If the first decades of the nineteenth century in the Pacific were characterised by expansive, adaptive and grand gestures of interaction and accommodation on the part of both Indigenous peoples and newcomers, the last three were marked by contraction. Colonial or imperial powers carved the Pacific into territories imposing new, territorially defined forms of sovereignty that physically shrank Pacific worlds, and disrupted established networks. Movement continued, of course, but in a controlled or enforced way. Planters still needed labourers, and in the Melanesian pocket of the Pacific, Islander labourers continued to be hired as indentured workers to be ferried to mines and plantations in Queensland, Papua and New Guinea, New Caledonia and Fiji. It was a process that not only removed the sovereignty of mobility that defined independence but also inherently reconfigured diverse identities, linguistic groups and social complexities to the reductive constructs of natives, kanakas and blacks. This intensified following the Pacific’s paper partition and the arrival of colonial administrations. Administration within the borders that partitioned the Pacific often sought to directly and indirectly contain the conceptual worlds of Indigenous peoples. The intimate reach of colonial interference into Indigenous peoples’ lives reached its extreme form in Australia where, in the eastern Australian colonies especially, the letter-writing campaigns of the 1840s had expanded. By the 1870s Aboriginal people were routinely either directly requesting grants of land, recruiting white supporters to convey their desire for land or directly reoccupying and squatting on land in their country. This formed a part of wider traditions of 93 94

Peter Wien, ‘Deportation Royal Commission’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings, 2 (1906): 599. Henry Tongoa, ‘Deportation Royal Commission’, Queensland Votes and Proceedings, 2 (1906): 618.

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petitioning.95 Echoing the articulation of the earlier generation of petitioners from Flinders Island and Port Phillip, they and their supporters continued a rich political tradition of assertion and insistence that dovetailed with claims for land. Increasingly, however, settler legislation sought to limit the capacity of Aboriginal people to act autonomously, or to adapt to the occupation of their land. After 1886 and 1897 a developing network of Aboriginal protection laws enabled Australian settler states to confine Aboriginal people to remnant colonial spaces, reserves and islands. Overarching policies of ‘merging’ and ‘assimilation’ brought the state into the heart of Aboriginal families, subjecting generations of Aboriginal children to the threat of arbitrary removal from their families into state care for the purposes of assimilation into settler society.96 Here, as was the case elsewhere, in the settler states scientific theories of race and physical anthropology drove colonial and state administrations into the core of Indigenous peoples’ identities. Although theoretically diverse, these ideologies converged around the central idea that blood and biology determined a taxonomy of abilities and prospects, and that this could be read from such physical attributes as skin colour.97 In the settler states of Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii the very identity, and existence, of Indigenous peoples was administratively acknowledged and denied in the quantitative language of scientific racism according to quantum, caste and the dilution of blood. Defining away indigeneity ensured that colonisation remained, as Patrick Wolfe might put it, built in to the structure of settler colonies and settler states.98 95

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97 98

Heather Goodall, ‘“Land in Our Own Country”: The Aboriginal Land Rights Movement in South-Eastern Australia, 1860–1914’, Aboriginal History, 14:1 (1990): 1; Curthoys and Mitchell, ‘Bring this Paper’; Ann Curthoys, ‘Taking Liberty: Towards a New Political Historiography of Settler Self-Government and Indigenous Activism’, in Kate Fullagar (ed.), The Atlantic World in a Pacific Field: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012), pp. 237–55; Penny van Toorn, ‘Hegemony or Hidden Transcript? Aboriginal Writings from Lake Condah’, Journal of Australian Historical Studies, 86 (2006): 15–27. The first historian to track the removal of Aboriginal children in detail was Peter Read in his The Stolen Generation: The Removal of Aboriginal Children in New South Wales, 1883– 1969 (Sydney: Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs, 1984). For a national overview and personal testimony see Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Canberra: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997); and Coral Edwards and Peter Read (eds), The Lost Children: Thirteen Australians Taken from Their Aboriginal Families Tell of the Struggle to Find Their Natural Parents (Sydney: Doubleday, 1989). Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006): 41–72. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999), pp. 2, 96. See also Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism’, pp. 387–409, where he develops this central concept of the structure of settler-colonialism in terms of its genocidal impact.

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Elsewhere in the Pacific, despite demonstrations to the contrary, Indigenous peoples were routinely configured as natives incapable of independence. Colonial governments varied widely throughout the Pacific’s protectorates and Crown colonies, but their underlying commonality was their paternal assumption of control over the sovereign decisions of administered communities. Questions of who would profit from trade, when and where wages would be earned, who would continue to live in and be confined by neo-traditional lifestyles, who would go to school and how much they could learn were widely answered by colonial administrators well into the twentieth century.99 These administrations authorised their own extensive capacities to interfere intimately in the cultural, economic and even sexual autonomy of communities. For as much as colonisation in the Pacific was about enriching imperial stores of territory, labour and resources, it remained dependent on the potential to micromanage and reform native societies from the village, to the family, to everyday interpersonal bonds. The attempts in Fiji to reconfigure mothering were exemplary. As the Fijian population continued to decline in the decades following the devastating impact of measles in 1874, the British colonial administration fixated on continuing high rates of infant mortality. Fijian women, configured as deficient mothers, increasingly became the focus of extended training schemes such as those promoted by the ‘Hygiene Mission of European women to Fijian Women’. As Margaret Jolly and Vicky Lukare have explored, these programmes sought to teach Fijian women how to develop a maternal instinct, thought lacking in native women, and to replace traditional methods of child rearing with European ones.100 In contrast Fijian men after 1912 could only gain a pass to leave their village for waged employment if a magistrate could be convinced their children were cared for.101 Although motivated by the 99

100

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Stewart Firth, New Guinea under the Germans (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1983), pp. 2–26; William Otto Henderson, Studies in German Colonial History (London: Frank Cass, 1962), pp. 1–73. Margaret Jolly, ‘Other Mothers: Maternal “Insouciance” and the Depopulation Debate in Fiji and Vanuatu, 1890-1930’, in M. Jolly and K. Ram (eds), Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Post-Colonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 177–212; Vicki Lukere, ‘Mothers of the Taukei: Fijian Women and the Decrease of the Race’, PhD Thesis, Australian National University, 1997); Nicholas Thomas, ‘Sanitation and Seeing: The Creation of State Power in Early Colonial Fiji’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 32 (1990): 149–70; W. J. Durrard, ‘The Depopulation of Melanesia’, in W. H. R. Rivers (ed.), Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 3–24; S. H. Roberts, Population Problems of the Pacific (London: Routledge and Sons, 1927). Stewart Firth, ‘Colonial Administration and the Invention of the Native’, in Donald Denoon et al., The Cambridge History of Pacific Islanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 267.

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desire to stall a declining population, these efforts are indicative of the potential internal reach of colonial or imperial sovereignty. At the same time the focus on Fijian mothers as the source of population decline reflected a wider gendered focus of colonial and missionary administrations, and its frequently idiosyncratic forms.102 While methods used to remake Indigenous peoples into compliant natives were united by common overarching imperial theories, in the Pacific they were frequently eccentric, shaped by local and interpersonal interactions between administrators and governed peoples, and reflective of the eccentricities of imposed isolation. Hence in Papua where white administrators were obsessed with maintaining the appearance of superiority, Papuan men were forbidden from wearing clothing on the upper part of their bodies in the early twentieth century.103 Alternatively in the Gilbert and Ellice islands where Arthur Gribble held executive power, his Regulations for Good Order and Cleanliness of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands forbade sleeping in an eating-house and eating in a sleeping-house. They also allowed public dancing on Wednesday and Saturday between 6 and 9 PM and private dancing on a Monday and Thursday between 6 and 9 PM as long as not more than four people attended. The Regulations also forbade ‘shameful gestures and movements of the body’ and ‘magic rituals and unclean games’.104 Such idiosyncrasy, bemusing in the abstract, was underpinned by inherently destructive assumptions of the incapacity of native islanders for self-governance, and the overwhelming logic that to save, develop or assimilate natives, their native-ness and will had to be reformed. By 1900 most of the Pacific was under some kind of external administration, and although the impact could be slight compared to the settler colonies, the infantilisation of Indigenous locals would, in temporal terms, be far-reaching. Assimilation, amalgamation, development and modernisation were all policy terms that at one time or another drove colonial administrative logic in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. They remind us of the transformative intent of colonial administration, its 102

103 104

For more see the Introduction by Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre, and chapters by Patricia Grimshaw on the cult of True Womanhood in Margaret Jolly and Martha Macintyre (eds), Family and Gender in the Pacific: Domestic Contradictions and the Colonial Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 1–18; 19–44. J. D. Waiko, A Short History of Papua New Guinea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 77. Roger C. Thompson, ‘Britain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand in Polynesia’; K. R. Howe et al., Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 79–80; Regulations for the Good Order and Cleanliness of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (Suva: J. J. McHugh, printer to the Government of His Britannic Majesty’s High Commission for the Western Pacific, 1930).

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intolerance for Indigenous worlds and its reduction of their diversity to singular notions of the native. But they also encompass the transformative civilising mission that legitimised colonial activity, sought to rationalise native spaces, minds and bodies, and ultimately to discipline Indigenous identities. In important ways, therefore, in order for colonial administration to work, Indigenous peoples had to internalise its ideologies, and belittle, infantalise and marginalise their own ways of being. This was a way of thinking, of identifying, that could readily take hold in the context of the weakened social structures and voids that opened up in the wake of colonial contact. But it also created a critical site of interplay, dialogue and resistance – identity. It would be beyond the scope of this study to detail the myriad forms and means by which Indigenous peoples defended, protected, retained and reformed Indigenous identities during the colonial era. The processes by which individuals and communities retained a sense of self, independently, could be exceedingly private. They thus often lie beyond the reach of historical research, with the exception of such onstage moments as Peter Wien’s and Henry Tongoa’s strident self-assertions before the 1906 Royal Commission. The strong ethical stance, race-consciousness and sense of entitlement they expressed, in the context of settler Queensland, had to be cultivated and maintained over decades. There is evidence, for example, that labourers communicated back and forth between island homes and plantations creating increasingly empowering lines of communication that drove up wages and forced traders to comply. In 1883, for example, following a race riot during which numerous Islanders were killed and injured, news of the riot in the islands effectively closed the traditional recruiting grounds of the New Hebrides and Solomons to Queensland traders.105 Unlike the eastern Polynesian Pacific, the diversity of languages and cultural practices in Melanesia ensured that centralised indigenous formations of power did not emerge to stage large-scale sovereign acts of 105

Clive Moore, ‘The Mackay Racecourse Riot of 1883’, in Lectures in North Queensland History: Third Series (Townsville, QLD: James Cook University, 1978), pp. 181–96; Douglas Rannie, My Adventures among South Sea Cannibals: An Account of the Experiences and Adventures of a Government Official among the Natives of Oceania (London: Seeley Service and Co., 1912), pp. 67–8. See also Peter Corris, ‘Kwaisulia of Ada Gege: A Strongman of the Solomon Islands’, in J. W. Davidson and D. Scarr (eds), Pacific Island Portraits (Canberra: Australian National University, 1970), pp. 253–65. If a reminder is needed of the capacity for violence of the labour trade, however, this move north resulted in violence, abductions and murders so extensive that the Queensland government held a Royal Commission in 1885, resulting unusually in numerous trials of recruiters for kidnapping; see Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Labour Trade (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), pp. 48–51.

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protection of land and other rights. The labour-trade-led diaspora, which depleted the populations of many islands, did not help. Nevertheless, in substantial parts of Melanesia, a shared history of indentured labour, of exploitation, restrictions and unpredictable violence against black kanakas formed the basis for new strands of group identification. This, in some ways, helped to create a mobile working class in pockets such as Rabaul, New Britain, Malaita Island and Queensland that would continue as a thread linking the experiences and identity formations of peoples throughout the colonial and decolonising period. In Australia and the Pacific, identity remained a space, both tiny and momentous, of myriad and complex acts of resistance. On the plantations of Queensland, where men and women from diverse islands and island groups were administered and policed as un-differentiated and racialised black kanakas, a resistant spatial culture of island identification emerged on plantations where housing was organised by islands. The court records of Queensland too were saturated with cases where islanders self-identified as ‘Man Aoba’, ‘Man Santo’, ‘Man Tanna’ and so on.106 So too on Cherbourg, a Queensland mission where peoples from diverse Indigenous language groups spanning the state were levelled as ‘Aboriginal’ inmates, residents arranged their housing according to place and private kinship networks.107 They, like Islanders on the plantations, spatially expressed and thus maintained independent and inherently resistant identities. Elsewhere identity-based movements frequently produced vibrant autonomy movements. In the west of Viti Levu in Fiji, for example, an active resistance first to Cakobau, and then to the British regime, repeatedly mushroomed over generations despite attempts by the administration to execute, exile and banish its leaders. The Tuka Movement of the 1880s and the Apolosi Movement of 1915 following the charismatic leaders Navosavakadua and Apolosi Nawai respectively were linked over time by a genealogy of place, dissatisfaction and identity.108 106

107 108

See for example Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, pp. 43–69, 149–74; Clive Moore, ‘The Counterculture of Survival: Melanesians in the Mackay District of Queensland, 1865-1906’, in Brij Lal et al. (eds), Plantation and Accommodation (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), pp. 69–100. G. Ramsay, ‘Cherbourg’s Chinatown: Creating an Identity of Place on an Australian Aboriginal Settlement’, Journal of Historical Geography, 29:1 (2003): 109–22. Brij Lal, Broken Waves (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii, 2003), pp. 48–52; James Heartfield, ‘“You Are Not a White Woman!”: Apolosi Nawai, the Fiji Produce Agency and the Trial of Stella Spencer in Fiji, 1915’, Journal of Pacific History, 38:1 (2003): 69– 83; Robert Edgar, ‘New Religious Movements’, in Etherington (ed.), Missions and Empires, pp. 230–4; Martha Kaplan, ‘Meaning, Agency and Colonial History; Navosavakadua and the Tuka Movement in Fiji’, American Ethnologist, 17:1 (1990):

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Finally, in Taranaki, New Zealand, the supporters of the charismatic leader Te Whiti used ploughs in 1879 to prevent the settler government from performing its confiscation of land and to ‘plough the belly of the government’.109 The message of ownership, identity and protest through identity was clear when, after a government survey team failed to mark out Maori reserve lands, protestors ploughed Te Whiti’s moko into the land.110 Far from comprehensive, this list indicates the broad diversity of identity struggles that kept notions of identity, sovereignty and memory alive throughout the Pacific during intense periods of colonisation. None were more intriguingly and privately so than the charismatic or syncretic movements, termed ‘autonomy movements’ in this study, like those that revolved around Te Whiti, Navosavakadua and Nawai. Autonomy movements, occasionally termed ‘cargo’ and ‘millenarian’ ‘cults’, proliferated in New Zealand and the western Pacific, and were a central element of the private history of maintaining Indigenous identities. They have been so culturally, socially and economically numerous, and often so intensely local, that their numbers and diversity defy easy and reductionist generalisations. Organised around prophesy, spirituality or charismatic leaders, they were until recently widely interpreted as the product of collisions between primitives and modernity. As such they have mostly been analysed in the realm of ethnography.111 Constructed by colonial administrators and observers as being resistant to rationalisation, they have variously been termed cults, manias, madnesses and ‘hokus pokus’, names that resist historical explanation.112 More considered analyses of autonomy movements have more recently interpreted them as proto-nationalist, inarticulate or primitive forms of anti-colonial protest. But we might also view them historically and politically, as symptoms of a sustained will to continue independent and adapted, and ultimately continuous ways of being Indigenous. In the colonial era the much-emphasised irrationality of autonomy movements had the effect of also maintaining privacy in newly imposed colonial and imperial worlds where

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3–22; Martha Kaplan and John D. Kelly, ‘On Discourse and Power: “Cults” and “Orientals” in Fiji’, American Ethnologist, 26:4 (1999): 843–63. R. S. Thompson, Telegram to Colonel Whitmore, 19 September 1879. Cited in Katherine Saunders, ‘Parihaka and the Rule of Law’, Auckland University Law Review, 11 (2005): 179, 188. Saunders, ‘Parihaka’, p. 186. This is detailed more fully and with reference to relevant literature in Chapters 4 and 5. ‘Fiji. (From Our Own Correspondent.) Levuka, Dec. 29’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 January 1884, p. 4; Kerry Bolton, ‘The Parihaka Cult’, Journal of Anthropology 7:1 (2011): 79–98.

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administrative power radiated from the capacity to know, survey, rationalise and categorise. During the twentieth-century era of decolonisation, such opaque movements would continue to protect Indigenous peoples from surveillance in sites where deep histories of anti-colonial dissatisfaction endured. Identity was a critical site of colonisation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was here that compliant natives were made, and where the last traces of consciousness regarding sovereignty, independence and ownership of land were to be found. The trajectories of resistance to, and adaptation of, colonial impositions on Indigenous peoples’ individual and collective identities were established in the nineteenth century as a basis from which stuttering and fluid continuities would flow into the twentieth. In myriad ways, the subversive, secret and open practices of kinship, memory, language, dances and cultural practices would continue to keep alive independent identities. Thus, as imperial powers set to the work of decolonising dependent territories in the twentieth century, Indigenous peoples would raise identity as one of, if not the principal site of a dynamic, contingent and potentially permanent process of decolonisation. Conclusion: thickening streams of decolonisation Diaspora and mobility were defining characteristics of the many imperialisms that carved up the Pacific and its western rim by the end of the nineteenth century. Trades in goods, bodies and labour, as well as environmentally transformative industries such as mining and plantation agriculture, resulted in extensive movements, dispersals and concentrations of peoples to free up land, labour and resources. The transoceanic travels of Atahoe, who was taken in the interests of Ngapuhi and British trade relations to far-flung trading posts bordering the Indian Ocean, and stranded permanently in Port Jackson, Sydney, remind us of the individual and gendered impact of colonial diasporas. Atahoe’s capacity to exercise agency, as a woman, was especially precarious. As such, she died away from home, was buried in Dharug land, and her daughter was effectively lost in exile, stranded without her ancestral identity in a colonial institution. But while both voluntary and involuntary mobility could cause potent and sometimes violent disruptions in Indigenous communities, as was the case for Atahoe’s Ngapuhi community, physical and intellectual mobility could also set in motion streams of consciousness that endured the colonial era.

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Formal colonial administration introduced an era in and around the Pacific when indigenous social hierarchies were frequently levelled by infantilising discourses of colonial rule. Chiefs, monarchs, commoners, teachers, matriarchs, elders, men and women were collectively reconfigured as ‘natives’, ‘kanakas’, ‘Marys’, ‘full bloods’, ‘blacks’ and ‘half castes’. This happened more quickly in some places than others, and with varying degrees of intensity. In Australia, it happened excessively fast, and within a single generation Indigenous clans could go from hosting European visitors, to writing letters of protest at being treated with disdain and dishonesty as was the case for Mary Arthur of Flinders Island. Or it could happen over generations, as was the case in Hawaii, Tahiti, Tonga and Fiji. The slower it occurred, the more time Indigenous people had to notice what was happening elsewhere, as Ruatara and the Ngapuhi rangatira did. Simply by staying still they could be informed by the constantly moving network of missionaries, traders, consuls and other Indigenous workers and leaders. As was the case in New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji, and Tahiti this could give communities and leaders the time needed to respond, to shore up land holdings, and prepare for the onslaught they saw happening elsewhere. In the case of Cakobau and Taufa’ahau their success was enduring. Indigenous peoples studied colonialism as it intermittently trickled and swept into the Pacific in the nineteenth century. Over decades in some cases, years in others, Ngapuhi, Dharug, Pallawah, Tahitians, Kanaka Maoli and others observed colonial behaviour, adopted their means of communication and developed an imperial literacy in dialogue with imperial allies. On the plantations, islanders such as Henry Tongoa and Peter Wien observed the operation of racial hierarchies, resisted being reduced to landless kanakas and considered and measured the fairness of colonial activity in the islands. In such ways Pacific Islanders, Maori and Aboriginal people would go on in the twentieth century to develop their own definitions of who they were, what they owned and what they were entitled to against and in dialogue with colonial worlds. They would define new moral universes specific to the colonial world, invoking internal, external and supernatural sources of authority to underpin them, and to define the indefinable – their relationship to land, to independent sovereignty and to identity. Petitions, letters, treaties, deeds and declarations of rights attest to an energetic intellectual activity during the nineteenth century as Indigenous peoples all over Oceania, imperial networks of humanitarians and others reached for higher, external and eternal authorities to define the limits of colonialism. They sought a language that exceeded

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the local prejudices of colony and empire, and in this reaching Indigenous peoples in particular resisted the imposed isolation of colonised sites, ensuring colonial borders remained unstable and porous. In conversation with humanitarian and missionary discourses, Indigenous peoples’ conceptions of land, sovereignty and identity would continue to thicken and deepen into universal claims regarding inherent rights. These were the political and cultural wellsprings that would flow, albeit haltingly, into the era of decolonisation as inherited, globalised traditions.

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Churn: restlessness and world government between the wars

[T]he German colonies in the Pacific and Africa are inhabited by barbarians, who not only cannot possibly govern themselves, but to whom it would be impracticable to apply any ideas of political selfdetermination in the European sense. They might be consulted as to whether they want their German masters back, but the result would be so much a foregone conclusion that the consultation would be quite superfluous. Jan Smuts, 1915.1

On 20 November 1918, the New Zealand military garrison stationed in German Samoa, led by Colonel Robert Logan, cabled Wellington from Apia. Influenza was running rampant in the territory infecting both the Samoan population and the military occupiers. It was later described as a descending ‘calamity’ that was ‘bewildering in its suddenness and awful in its consequences’.2 Desperate medical assistance was needed, but New Zealand too was in the grip of its own influenza outbreak and was unable to spare medical assistance.3 Having evolved its potency in the trenches of Europe, the so-called Spanish Flu had been exported in 1918 to infect the world as fast as ships and trains could carry its infected hosts. As Samuel Hopkins Adams put it in 1919, ‘wherever ships touched, there the influenza was disseminated’. From British India where 5 million perished, to China and South Africa where ‘natives went down before it as if it were cholera’, the ‘contagion was shipped to Australia and New Zealand and thence was diffused throughout the South Sea Islands’ leaving ghost towns and tabooed villages in its wake.4 1 2 3

4

Jan Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (London; Toronto; New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), p. 15. ‘Report of the Samoan Epidemic Commission’, in Journals of the House of Representatives, H-31C (Wellington: Government Printer, 1919), p. 10. ‘Samoan Garrison’, Northern Advocate, 21 November 1918, p. 2. See also Geoffrey W. Rice, ‘Japan and New Zealand in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Comparative Perspectives on Official Responses and Crisis Management’, in H. Phillips and David Killingray (eds), The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19: New Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 73–85. Samuel Hopkins Adams, ‘War’s Deadlier Rival the “Flu”’, Oamaru Mail, 9 September 1919, p. 2.

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Here was a tragic marker of the unprecedented global connectedness of the new twentieth century. The New Zealand vessel Talune had left Auckland for Fiji and Samoa in October 1918. On board were sick passengers who infected the Fijian crew, who in turn infected dockworkers throughout Fiji. The Talune eventually arrived in Apia on 7 November, and within less than two weeks the epidemic was unstoppable. Without medical assistance or the capacity to quarantine the sick, German Samoa was devastated. Witnesses and survivors later gave evidence that practically ‘all the Natives were down with influenza’ and ‘were dying at a startling rate’. In the villages near Apia, with so many ill, there was no one to nurse and feed the sick, or to bury the dead.5 Between 80 and 90 per cent of the Samoan population contracted the disease, and an estimated fifth of the population, including more than half the governing European and Samoan elite, perished. Among the numerous dead were the Samoan mother and only child of the trader Ta’isi Olaf Nelson.6 The tragedy of the influenza epidemic would help to reignite old anti-colonial sentiments in German Samoa against a new mandatory power, New Zealand. For Nelson, grief would help drive him to transmit these grievances to a post-pandemic globalised world. The period immediately preceding 1914 had been one of imperial and colonial consolidation in and around the Pacific, and the social and political lines of partition that had closed borders were settling into and shaping new social landscapes. Many parts of the Pacific had only recently become formal annexes of imperial powers where Indigenous peoples were still learning the limits of their new status. It was a status so unnatural to many that it had to be taught. In 1906, after suppressing the Samoan autonomy movement the Oloa company, the German administrator of Western Samoa, Wilhelm Solf, informed chiefs that ‘there is only one Government and that is the Government of His Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm the Second and this government is called the Imperial Government. The word imperial means “that which belongs to the Kaiser and are under his control”.’ As Solf encouraged the assembled chiefs to drink with him, he instructed once again that they ‘must thoroughly understand’ that they were subject only to the ‘rule of His Majesty the Kaiser’.7 Like other administrators in the Pacific and Australia, Solf 5 6

7

Ibid., 9. Samuel Hopkins Adams, ‘War’s Deadlier Rival the “Flu”’, p. 2; Susan Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage: Petitions and Peoples before the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40:2 ( June 2012): 242. ‘A translation of the first copy of the “Savali” printed by direction of Dr. Solf one time German Administrator of Samoa’, in Te’o Tuvale, An Account of Samoan History up to

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would go on to stamp his authority over colonised peoples by relocating, deporting and exiling troublemakers at will, manifesting power through dictating and circumscribing mobility. As was the case elsewhere, borders and colour lines, passes and passports, deportation orders, incarceration and banishment became critical means by which Indigenous peoples’ social and political mobility was suppressed. In such a context Indigenous peoples’ mobility, dwelling and border crossings were rendered inherently political. In stark contrast to the circumscribed mobility of Indigenous peoples was the increasingly connected globe. As the flu had painfully highlighted, steam shipping conveyed people and information faster than ever in the twentieth century.8 The trans-Pacific cable, which conveyed requests for medical assistance during the flu pandemic, had opened in 1902, and linked Canada to Australia and New Zealand via Fiji and Tabuaeron or Fanning Island. The cable was the final segment of Britain’s so-called All Red Line that linked the many outposts of empire to London. It was capable of telegraphing information and news throughout the empire between colonial governments and administrators in minutes rather than weeks and months.9 Unequal access to the world and its information was a crucial pillar of colonial rule, but it was one that would be appropriated persistently by Indigenous peoples between the wars. Then, the processes of accessing, identifying and collaborating with the world, what we might now call transnationalism or globalisation, would start to underpin indigenous structures of decolonisation. In the wake of the First World War, with the sweeping destruction of the flu pandemics of 1918 and 1919, the establishment of the League of Nations, and the revolutionary ferment that accompanied years of economic depression, the political and cultural activities of Indigenous peoples developed new transnational dimensions. As Michael Adas has argued, a global disillusionment with the West and its Civilising Mission after the First World War produced new generations of colonised thinkers and activists. They delivered devastating critiques of empire, and

8 9

1918, digital edition published by The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection, Victoria University of Wellington (http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-TuvAcco-t1-body1 -d47.html). On the Solf administration and the handling of Oloa see Malama Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the History of Western Samoa (Suva: University of South Pacific, 1987), pp. 46–63, 79–82. Frances Steel, Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c.1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). George Johnson (ed.), The All Red Line: The Annals and Aims of the Pacific Cable Project (Ottawa: James Hope & Sons, 1903); See also the chapter on cable as an instrument of empire in Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 77–84.

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inspired visions of alternative modes of identifying beyond nation and empire, that for the first time could be almost instantly telegraphed around the world.10 In and around the Pacific, a churn of local political activity threw up numerous transnational moments when the presentation of a petition, visits to the League of Nations or organised protests offer glimpses of deeper conceptual undertows. In these moments were compressed longer histories during which Indigenous peoples formulated and connected their own, often local visions of independent futures, internationally and across borders. Although much of Indigenous peoples’ political action between the wars did not succeed in their immediate objectives, to measure the worth of such moments in terms of success or failure isolates them from their wider context. Viewed instead as windows, we can detect underlying processes by which new collective identities and consciousness, and new expressions of long-held counter-hegemonic world views were being formulated. With a focus on Maori prophet and healer Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana and a determined Ta’isi Olaf Nelson, this chapter focuses on the impact of Indigenous peoples’ transborder mobility, as they drew connections spanning time and place. They not only linked local campaigns isolated by oceans and borders to a global ferment, in addition their disparate and sometimes narrow demands flowed from older genealogies, the wellsprings of the nineteenth century. These links were mostly subtle, sometimes disjointed and nearly always detectable only through language, strategy or genealogy. During the nineteenth century, Indigenous peoples made effective use of imperial literacy to engage colonial powers or to seek protections and a ‘higher’ authority – whether spiritual, cosmological or political – that exceeded colonial borders.11 To some extent this trend continued after 1918 when the establishment of the League of Nations provided a new global forum and discourse. Although its value to Indigenous peoples was limited, the League itself was to some extent at least shaped and extended by their engagements with it. On the one hand, its establishment would reinstate the imperialism of the nineteenth century by categorising the Pacific and south-west African colonies according to Jan Smuts’ 1915 ‘practical suggestions’. But at the same time, it would do so using a new language of self-determination that, in dialogue with Indigenous peoples’ own discourses, would begin to open up the closed worlds of the missions and colonies. At the same time the emerging notion of decolonisation that 10 11

Michael Adas, ‘Contested Hegemony: The Great War and the Afro-Asian Assault on the Civilizing Mission Ideology’, Journal of World History, 15:1 (1 March 2004): 31–63. Ravindra Noel John De Costa, A Higher Authority: Indigenous Transnationalism and Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006).

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was being articulated internationally would begin to develop along two distinct trajectories. The focus of one would be on the rights and sovereignties of peoples, while the other’s would be on the independence and integrity of territories. The implications were far-reaching.

Self-determination and the League of Nations: a global language and a global stage As preparations for the Fifth Assembly of the League of Nations were being made in neutral Geneva in 1924, two men, ‘Mr Ratana’ and ‘Mr Moko’, were shown up to the room of ‘Mr J. V. Wilson’. They wanted to meet with the secretary general of the League but were told that he was not authorised to communicate with requests ‘other than those emanating from or transmitted by the Government of a Member’ state. Mr Moko, who took the lead in discussions, was congenial. He understood but perhaps ‘for reasons of amour-propre and because he has come a long way’ he asked if just a very short interview could be granted.12 He was again refused. Given no audience, Ratana and Moko and their party accepted an offer by a hotel concierge to take them on a surreptitious tour of the Salle de la Reformation. This was the temporary meeting place of the League’s General Assembly. Inside, it was inauspicious and ‘poorly lighted, innocent of ventilation with abominable acoustics and seating about as ordinary as an American church’.13 Photos were taken of Ratana’s posing party, and in this temporary meeting place for the world’s leaders, one of the party, an unnamed woman ‘with the blue marks on her chin’ of a Maori moko, ‘stood up like a queen’, in a show of un-intimidated composure.14 The unnamed woman, Ratana and Moko were part of a Maori delegation led by the prophet Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana. They had left New Zealand for Britain in April 1924, and like Ruatara nearly ninety years earlier, Ratana intended visiting King George V of Britain. He carried with him a petition with 34,750 Maori signatures that detailed breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi and called for a commission of inquiry. The 12

13 14

Record of Interview with M. Moko and M. Ratana, who have come to Europe to submit to the League the claims of the Maori People, 15 September 1924. League of Nations Archive (LNA) R618/11/38827 Claims of the Maori People with Regard to the Tenure of Land in New Zealand. Arthur Deerin Call, ‘The Fifth Assembly of the League of Nations’, Advocate of Peace through Justice, 86:11 (1924): 601. ‘Polyglot Parliament: The League of Nations at Work’, The Daily News, Perth, WA (11 March 1925), p. 6. See also McLeod Henderson, Ratana: The Man, the Church, the Political Movement (Wellington: A.H. and A.W. Reed in Association with the Polynesian Society, 1972).

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petition itself was a significant achievement for it represented a meeting of minds between the Maori King Movement with its political focus on land grievances, and the prophet and healer-based movement of Ratana.15 But the party was ignored in London, and Ratana’s secretary Pita Moko, who would later meet with Mr Wilson in Geneva, reported that they had been badly treated, and the Prince of Wales had refused their gifts and petition at a garden party.16 On deciding to continue to Geneva the party was belittled both by those dignitaries whose audience they sought, as well as the Australian and New Zealand press. In Britain, the Western Times of Devon reported that Ratana and his party were representatives of the ‘Maori Remnant’ and that they were ‘travelling to gain experience of the outside world’ during which they would ‘give Maori entertainments with appropriate scenery and costumes’ demonstrating ‘simple native melodies and dances’.17 In New Zealand, the Evening Post encouraged readers to imagine the League of Nations delegates ‘startled by the arrival of forty picturesque Maoris . . . adorned with feathers’.18 Journalist E.S. Harston mockingly wondered who the Maori delegates ‘thought the concierge in his smart uniform could be – the president of the League, I suppose, or the Secretary-General at the very least’.19 From Ratana’s vantage point of Geneva in 1924 we can see that possibly the most significant thing that had happened for Indigenous peoples in the formation of the League of Nations was the provision of a global space. Here was a world stage on which imperial relations could be spotlighted, scrutinised and even directed in unprecedented ways. The League had emerged in the aftermath of the First World War, amidst the collective determination of world powers to maintain peace. Accordingly a discourse formed around the question of what to do with the territories of the German and Ottoman empires that contrasted ‘bad’ and ‘good’ imperialisms.20 The condemned practices of the nineteenth century, when possessions were collected like trophies, was held in stark relief against a better, modern imperialism into which 15 16

17 18 19

20

Angela Ballara, Te Kingitanga: The People of the Maori King Movement (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), pp. 95–6. Angela Ballara, ‘Moko, Pita Te Turuki Tamati’, in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: Te Ara – The Encylopedia of New Zealand. www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/4m56/mo ko-pita-te-turuki-tamati. Accessed 18 November 2015. Western Times, 20 June 1924, p. 27. ‘The Maoris at Geneva’, Evening Post, 17 September 1924, p. 5. ‘Polyglot Parliament: The League of Nations at Work’, The Daily News, Perth, WA, 11 March 1925, p. 6. League of Nations Archive (LNA) R618/11/38827 Claims of the Maori People with Regard to the Tenure of Land in New Zealand: Papers on Ratana’s visit. Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 145–6.

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would be built an inevitable progress towards independence. In reality the League would institutionalise Smuts’ views that colonised peoples’ ‘deficient’ capacities for self-government meant they needed ‘nursing’ towards independence.21 But it would be married to the strongly promoted views of the United States President Woodrow Wilson, who favoured the concept of an international duty to protect and bestow sovereignty and self-determination. This ‘Wilsonian Moment’ with its language of self-determination, however, was deceptively imperial and conservative.22 As this section outlines, enduring imperialisms and unedifying scraps over the leftovers of the German and Ottoman empires ensured that the League of Nations remained closed to many colonised peoples. Like Ratana many would only ever access the General Assembly and higher echelons of the organisation surreptitiously. Nevertheless, many colonised and Indigenous peoples would take seriously Wilson’s and the League’s rhetoric ensuring that this supranational space would also be an Indigenous one. In Paris during the post-war peace talks, and later Geneva, the international mood of 1918 was captured and set by Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech first given to the US Congress on 8 January 1918. He branded the pre-war days of ‘conquest and aggrandizement’ an ‘age that is dead and gone’. Noting the new age of global interconnectedness he stated that all ‘the peoples of the world are in effect partners’ and ‘unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us’. His fourteen points for a better world, called for, among other things, a ‘free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims’ based on the principle that ‘questions of sovereignty’ must be settled ‘in the interests of the populations concerned’, and those interests ‘must have equal weight’ with those of the colonial government.23 In so doing, he attached the principles of self-government and self-determination to ‘the interests of the populations concerned’, or to people rather than territory.24 Telegraphed almost instantaneously around the globe, Wilson’s speech, with its seemingly progressive notions that all peoples had, at 21 22

23 24

Smuts, League of Nations, p. 2. Erez Manela, ‘Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt of Empire in 1919’, The American Historical Review, 111:5 (2006): 2–30; Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Woodrow Wilson, ‘Fourteen Points’, in Thomas Benjamin (ed.), Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450, 3 (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), p. 1176. Wilson, ‘Fourteen Points’, p. 1177; Trygve Throntveit, ‘The Fable of the Fourteen Points: Woodrow Wilson and National Self-Determination’, Diplomatic History, 35:3 (2001): 445–81. While Throntveit correctly points out that Wilson did not mention self-determination explicitly in his speech, Wilson was nevertheless explicit about supporting its constituent elements.

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the very least, rights to self-determination that were equal to colonial powers, was delivered to news syndicates everywhere. It reached both urban centres and remote towns including in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. Within hours the Bathurst Times in outback New South Wales reported, for example, that President Wilson had ‘outlined a definite world programme’ that recommended ‘the self-determination of all nations’.25 It was, as far as Wilson was concerned, ‘the only possible programme, as we see it’ and his will would dominate the Paris Peace Talks later in 1918.26 The air of possibility articulated by Wilson would resonate with colonised peoples around the world. But by the time the League of Nations Covenant was drafted, the rhetoric of delivering self-determination around the world had been subsumed by the articulation of a distinctly imperial process of achieving it – the mandate system. Notions inherent to Wilson’s Fourteen Points were not new. The notion of self-determination as the absence of foreign rule and the ultimate authority of a people had been maturing in European and African American discourses since the eighteenth century.27 So too the language of responsible imperialism, of a ‘white man’s burden’, and a ‘trusteeship’ had been part of an articulate political expression at least since the Berlin conference of 1885 internalised a discourse of native welfare and protection.28 What was new in 1918 was the distinctly settler-colonial overlay of United States jurisprudence. Article 22 of the League’s Covenant, stating that ‘those colonies and territories’ which had ‘ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which had formerly governed them’ and were ‘inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves’, asserted the principle that ‘the well-being and development of such peoples’ would form a ‘sacred trust of civilisation’.29 The ‘tutelage of such peoples’ would be mandated to ‘advanced nations’ on behalf of the 25 26

27

28

29

‘Peace: Wilson Speaks: Definite Terms Stated’, Bathurst Times, 9 January 1918, p. 2. Page Smith, America Enters the World: A People’s History of the Progressive Era and World War I, 7 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), pp. 720–38; Natsu Taylor Saito, Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law (New York: New York University Press, 2010), pp. 161–94. Patrick Thornberry, ‘Self-Determination, Minorities, Human Rights: A Review of International Instruments’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 38:4 (1 October 1989): 869. Quincy Wright, Mandates under the League of Nations (New York: Greenwood, 1968), pp. 16–17; James Lorimer, The Institutions of the Law of Nations: A Treatise of the Jural Relations of Separate Political Communities (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2005 [1883]), p. 157; De Costa, A Higher Authority, pp. 63–5. Article 22. Covenant of the League of Nations, The Treaty of Peace between the Allied Powers and Germany, (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1919); Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, pp. 120–2.

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League, ‘until such time as they are able to stand alone’.30 What was outlined here was the basis for what would become the mandate system, whereby the former territories of the German and Ottoman empires would be treated as sovereign dependents entitled to self-determination. But because of their dependent natures, as defined by advanced nations, instead of gaining independence, they would be locked in a sacred and paternal trust with more advanced nations who in turn would be mandated to develop them.31 Here was a new imperialism driven not by the burden to civilise but by the mandate to develop a capacity for selfdetermination. The mandate system that emerged from the Paris Peace talks in 1918 was steeped not just in the theories of Franciscus de Vitoria, as had been the case in the nineteenth century, but also in the conceptual legal universe created by the United States Supreme Court justice John Marshall in his trilogy of the so-called Cherokee decisions.32 In the 1820s and 1830s, these had reduced the independent sovereignty of Native American nations, then theoretically recognised at international law, to the status of ‘domestic dependent nations’, subject or trusted as ‘wards’ to the plenary powers of their ‘guardian’, the United States federal government. This state of what was effectively a permanent trusteeship went on to enable the widespread and far-reaching processes of assimilation, land alienation and the denial of civil, political and economic rights of Native American nationals, rendering all the benign act of wardship.33 What made the imperialism of the Marshall decisions and the new mandate system distinct from the shunned old practices of imperialism was that here the sovereign status and even latent self-determination of dependent nations was acknowledged, but as the imperative for a continued guardian-to-ward relationship. Thus the stage was set for 30 31

32

33

Article 22. Covenant of the League of Nations, The Treaty of Peace between the Allied Powers and Germany; Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, pp. 120–2. On the incorporation of European territories into sovereign states, Nathaniel Berman, ‘“But the Alternative Is Despair”: European Nationalism and the Modernist Renewal of International Law’, Harvard Law Review, 106 (1993): 1821–59. These were Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh 21 U.S. 543 (1823); Cherokee Nation v. Georgia 30 U.S. 1 (1831), Worchester v. Georgia 31 U.S. 515 (1832). See William Swindler, ‘Politics as Law: The Cherokee Cases’, American Indian Law Review, 31 (1975): 7. Ward Churchill, ‘The Law Stood Squarely on Its Head: U.S. Legal Doctrine, Indigenous Self-Determination and the Question of World Order’, Oregon Law Review, 81 (2002): 663–706; Ward Churchill, ‘The Indigenous Peoples of North America: A Struggle Against Internal Colonialism’, in his Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization (San Francisco, CA: City Light Books, 2002), pp. 15–22. For a particularly concise evaluation of the far-reaching implications of these decisions see Vine Deloria Jr and David Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties and Constitutional Tribulations (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 29.

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imperialism to retreat from its bad name, even as sovereignty and selfdetermination of colonised peoples and territories continued to be withheld until bestowed. It would only be when people, as a nation bounded by territory, conformed to an international standard set and defined by Western powers that they would be deemed capable of self-determination. Arguably, under such a system, genuine self-determination remained illusory.34 For on such a trajectory decolonisation was merely envisaged as a global form of assimilation. As territories and their people were divvied up between French, Japanese, Italian and British (including Australia and New Zealand) interests, their respective empires grew substantially. Territories were divided on taxonomic scales of civilisation between those considered most advanced in the A mandates of the Middle East and old Ottoman Empire, the B mandates of central and west Africa, and the C mandates of south-west Africa and the Pacific Islands. The C mandates were considered too savage, untutored or remote to be afforded any kind of meaningful autonomy, and were to be ‘administered under the laws of the mandatory as integral portions of its territory’.35 Britain, Britain’s Dominions, and Japan were thus mandated the Pacific territories of German New Guinea (Australia); Western Samoa (New Zealand); phosphate-rich Nauru (Australia, Britain and New Zealand); and the Micronesian islands north of the equator (Japan).36 The category of a C Mandate was hard fought for and won by the representatives of the white settler nations, principally Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.37 Billy Hughes of Australia, in particular, was explicit in his campaigns. He wanted New Guinea as a colony of white Australia, to be used as a buffer against what he saw as a rising tide of colour threatening to invade from Australia’s north. He was actively hostile and antagonised Japanese delegates in particular, later describing their attempts at diplomacy as ‘beslobbering me with genuflexions and obsequious deference’.38 He got his wish. The mandatory powers 34

35 36 37

38

Antony Anghie, ‘Colonialism and the Birth of International Institutions: Sovereignty, Economy and the Mandate System of the League of Nations’, New York University Journal of International Law and Politics, 34 (2001–02): 513–633; Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, pp. 107–8; Wright, Mandates, pp. 559–84. Article 22. Covenant of the League of Nations, The Treaty of Peace between the Allied Powers and Germany. Wright, Mandates, pp. 43–8. Gerald Chaudron, New Zealand in the League of Nations: The Beginnings of an Independent Foreign Policy, 1919–1939 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company Publishers, 2011), pp. 6–17; L. F. Fizharding, ‘Hughes, Borden and Dominion Representation at the Paris Peace Conference’, Canadian Historial Review, 49:2 (1968): 160–9. William Hughes, Policies and Potentates (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1950), p. 245. See also Thomas Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations: Empire and World Order,

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governed C mandates as colonies to be administered as ‘integral portions of territory’. These extraordinary powers in the C mandates would be nominally policed by the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission, and a system of reporting that Australian and New Zealand administrations notoriously and antagonistically treated as a formality.39 The mandate system had rescued a new imperial era from a period of decline.40 On the one hand, old imperialisms continued unabated, and, on the other, a new form of imperialism informed by the logic of settler colonialism was enabled as Britain’s white dominions inherited mandated colonies of their own. The mandates system therefore extended the existing imperial possessions of the Allied powers consolidating rather than challenging the imperialism that Wilson had branded ‘an age that is dead and gone’.41 But viewed from the peripheries, and from the perspective of colonised and Indigenous peoples in particular, the League of Nations was only ever going to be a device for existing imperial powers. Although the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission lacked any real power, the symbolism that mandatory powers were policed and subject to an external authority was something Indigenous peoples had been reaching for since the nineteenth-century petitioning campaigns. Here was a nominal avenue for complaint and protest for Indigenous and colonised residents of both mandated and mandatory territories. Hence not only did the League provide a new international stage to air colonial grievances, it also promoted a language – however rhetorical – in which imperialism and colonialism was temporary, finite and fallible. The international prominence of the Wilsonian rhetoric of independence and self-determination fuelled existing and new anti-colonial nationalist groups around the world.42 As the world’s leaders descended on Paris in 1918 and 1919 to draw up the architecture of a new world order, a parallel convergence of anti-colonial and nationalist leaders and spokespeople arrived in London, Paris and Brussels. Nationalists from China, Vietnam and India arrived to present their cases to the League, while others fought local colonial regimes for the ability to do so, or convened local movements driven by the new universal concepts

39 40

41 42

1914–1938 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), pp. 80–5; J. Hudson, Australia and the League of Nations (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1980), pp. 5–31. Hudson, Australia and the League, pp. 132–90. This has been articulated most recently and forcefully by Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 1–76. Wilson, ‘Fourteen Points’, p. 1176. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment; David Steigerwald, ‘The Reclamation of Woodrow Wilson?’, Diplomatic History, 23:1 (1999): 79–99.

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emerging from Paris.43 There, in 1919 the Second Pan-African Congress was convened by W. E. B. DuBois who asserted that the time had come for the ‘interests and welfare of the negro to become articulate instead of relying upon philanthropic effort’. The Manchester Guardian reported that the Congress sought to prepare measures ‘regarding land, capital, industries and education of the black peoples of the world for presentation to the peace conference’.44 In a half-hearted attempt to contain alternative global visions, the United States’ State Department reported that ‘no passports would be issued for American delegates’ attempting to attend the conference, but at least forty African, African American and Caribbean delegates nevertheless attended. If the atmosphere inside the League of Nations had thus been conservatively limited by precedent and imperial self-interest, outside, the atmosphere continued to be charged with the energy of new potentials. Thus an evermore articulate race-consciousness was telegraphed along with reports of Asian and African anti-colonial protests, further and wider than Europe.45 Although journalist Harston imagined Ratana’s and his party’s visit to the League of Nations in 1924 as that of wide-eyed innocents, in reality they were part of a transnational political strategy that had converged on Europe since 1918. In their interview with Mr Wilson, he put it to them that their presence and requests repudiated British sovereignty. They were told that ‘the League would certainly consider’ their complaints about land loss in New Zealand to lie ‘within the domestic jurisdiction of the New Zealand government and therefore outside [the League’s] own competence’. Legally this was true, and it defined the distinction between Wilsonian rhetoric regarding the interests of ‘populations’, and the reality of the League’s commitment to the interests of nation states and territories. This was a distinction that would sharpen in the lead up to the formal decolonisation era, and would ensure that Indigenous peoples within settler nations were cast beyond the competence of global leagues or united nations. Ratana’s party were not the first Indigenous peoples from within the borders of Members of the League to attempt to access the global avenues of redress that emerged in the post-war period. In

43 44 45

Erez Manela, ‘The Wilsonian Moment and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism: The Case of Egypt’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 12:4 (2001): 116–18. ‘Pan-African Congress: Negro Delegates in Paris’, The Manchester Guardian, 24 February, 1919, p. 4. ‘Pan-Africans to Meet: Reported Congress is a Mystery to Washington’, New York Times, 16 February 1919, p. 23.

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hand-written notes on the League’s record of interview with Moko and Ratana, a connection was drawn between their request and a ‘very similar’ one, ‘that of the Chief of the “6 peoples”’. It ‘is obvious’, it was concluded, ‘that it is not a matter for the League’.46 The margin note referred to a visit in the months prior to Ratana arriving in Geneva, by Deskaheh, the representative of the Haudenosaunee or the Six Nations of the Iroquois.47 Deskaheh had written and published a petition seeking independent statehood in 1923, and in a letter to the secretary general had invoked Article 17 of the Covenant seeking to ‘bring to the notice of the League of Nations that a dispute and disturbance of peace has arisen between the State of the Six Nations of the Iroquois on the one hand and the British Empire and Canada, being Members of the League, on the other’.48 The response in Canada and Britain had been swift. The Canadian Department of Indian Affairs sought Deskaheh’s arrest and extradition, eventually exiling him temporarily to the United States.49 In addition Britain successfully argued to the League that Deskaheh’s concerns were a domestic Canadian matter, and as such were beyond the competence of the international body.50 Deskaheh remained in Switzerland following the rejection of his petition, and was supported in Geneva by the Bureau International pour la Defense des Indigenes, an organisation with its roots in the nineteenth century. As Fiona Paisley has explored, this organisation also interviewed the Australian Aboriginal activist A.M. Fernando who was in Europe in 46 47

48

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Record of interview. LNA R618/11/38827 Claims of the Maori People. Ingrid Washinawatok, ‘International Emergence: Twenty-One Years at the United Nations’, New York City Law Review, 3 (1998): 42–3; Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 31–6. Deskaheh, Six Nations, The Redman’s Appeal for Justice: The Position of the Six Nations that they Constitute an Independent State, (n.p., 1923). Article 17 states that ‘In the event of a dispute between a Member of the League and a State which is not a Member of the League . . . the State or States . . . shall be invited to accept the obligations of membership in the League for the purposes of such dispute . . . Upon such invitation being given the Council shall immediately institute an inquiry into the circumstances of the dispute and recommend such action as may seem best’, Article 17, Covenant of the League of Nations, The Treaty of Peace between the Allied Powers and Germany. Siomonn Pulla, ‘“Would You Believe That, Dr. Speck?” Frank Speck and the Redman’s Appeal for Justice’, Ethnohistory, 55:2 (20 March 2008): 191. B. Smith Donald, ‘Deskaheh’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. 15, University of Toronto/Univesité Laval, 2003, www.biographi.ca/en/bio/deskaheh_15E.html. Accessed 10 April 2014. For more on Deskaheh see Joelle Rostkowski, ‘The Redman’s Appeal for Justice: Deskaheh and the League of Nations’, in Christian F. Feest (ed.), Indians in Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 435–54.

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the 1920s attempting to generate international interest in the treatment of Aboriginal people.51 This small convergence of Indigenous peoples from within the borders of settler colonial Members of the League of Nations was a sign that the liberationist rhetoric of 1918 had resonated with some. But their reception also signalled that the League’s interest in managing the behaviour of mandatory powers and ensuring they act in the best interests of the ‘well-being and development’ of dependent and colonised peoples, stopped at some colonial borders.52 Hence, while the Category C-mandated territories of the Pacific, which were governed as though they were internal domestic territories subject to domestic law, remained within the competent reach of the League, the interests of Indigenous peoples physically internal to settler colonies were configured as beyond it. The League’s was thus a selective competence, and one shaped by the new quiet imperialism of international government. In testing the capacity of the League of Nations to act as a kind of global authority, Ratana and the numerous other colonised peoples who attended Geneva helped to transform it into a vital transnational forum for the airing of grievances against colonial powers. Although the efforts of Ratana and Deskaheh confirmed that the League would rarely consider acting on the grievances of Indigenous peoples, particularly in settler colonies that were not mandates, the Permanent Mandates Commission as the principal body for supervising the mandatory powers indirectly would. As Susan Pedersen has discussed, the Permanent Mandates Commission was frequently compelled to engage in numerous, ongoing and comparative discussions about the legitimacy and justifiability, or otherwise, of ruling over foreign and domestic subject peoples.53 To this extent, Indigenous peoples’ engagements with the League subversively shaped it into a space more relevant to themselves. It was a process encapsulated when the anonymous Maori woman with Ratana’s party stood tall like a queen with moko on her chin, disrupting the airless half-light of the Salle de la Reformation.

51

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Fiona Paisley, The Lone Protestor: A.M. Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012), pp. 54–74. See also Fiona Paisley, ‘Death Scene Protestor: An Aboriginal Rights Activist in 1920s London’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 110:4 (2011): 867–83. Article 22, Covenant of the League of Nations, The Treaty of Peace between the Allied Powers and Germany. Susan Pedersen, ‘Settler Colonialism at the Bar of the League of Nations: Projects, Practices, Legacies’, in Susan Pedersen and Caroline Elkins (eds), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (New York; London: Routledge, 2005), p. 114.

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Reaching beyond the local: physical and conceptual mobility In the aftermath of the devastation in Samoa brought on by the Spanish flu, the New Zealand government inquired through a Royal Commission into the causes and severity of the epidemic. It found that New Zealand had failed to inform the military in Samoa of the epidemic, that the virus had been carried to Samoa on board a New Zealand vessel, that the occupying forces had failed utterly to contain and quarantine the virus once it hit the Samoan population, and that medical help for Samoans was perceived by them to have been utterly inadequate and passive. Moreover, in an infamous oversight, on the same day that Logan had unsuccessfully sought medical assistance from New Zealand, the United States governor at Pago Pago in American Samoa had telegrammed an offer of assistance. There, a United States-imposed quarantine had prevented the Talune from landing infected passengers, and as a result, American Samoa had escaped the pandemic. Even as medical staff were ready for dispatch to Apia, Logan ignored the offer.54 For many Samoan survivors of the pandemic these failures and oversights epitomised the unwelcome military occupation by New Zealand during the First World War, simply to secure its radio station.55 Many grieving Samoans would blame New Zealand for the epidemic’s devastating losses, and the resulting animosity and suspicion would leave many in Western Samoa resistant to the New Zealand administration.56 Under the League of Nations mandate, New Zealand’s administration in Samoa, particularly under the Brigadier General George Richardson, was focused on making ‘the natives better Samoans’, and was thus invasive and controlling.57 He intruded unnecessarily in traditional authority structures, and as Pedersen has elaborated, his affected pomposity was resented and his ‘pidgin Samoan was laughed at’.58 In a ham-fisted act to 54

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‘Report of the Samoan Epidemic Commission’, Journals of the House of Representatives, H31C (Wellington: Government Printer, 1919), pp. 9–10; Herman Hiery, The Neglected War: The German South Pacific and the Influence of World War I (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), pp. 173–5. W. R. Louis, Great Britain and Germany’s Lost Colonies, 1914–19 (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 37ff. On the longer period of New Zealand’s interest in Samoa, see Mary Boyd, ‘The Record in Western Samoa to 1945’, in A. Ross (ed.), New Zealand’s Record in the Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1969), pp. 6–9; Paul Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German-American Relations, 1878–1900 (Chicago, IL: Queensland University Press, 2013 [1974]), pp. 115–19, 258–63. Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa, p. 126; Mary Boyd, ‘Military Administration of Western Samoa, 1914-19’, New Zealand Journal of History, 2:2 (1968): 148–64. Cited in Meleisea, Making of Modern Samoa, p. 126. Pedersen, Guardians, p. 175.

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lock in his own authority he introduced the Samoan Offenders Ordinance of 1922, forbidding Samoans from exercising traditional forms of punishment, and granting himself the exclusive power to ‘punish any Samoan in any village, district or place’ deemed ‘a source of danger to the peace, order or good government’.59 By 1926 more than forty chiefs had been banished or exiled from their villages or islands under the ordinance for increasingly trivial offences. Puipa’a, for example, was banished from his village for twelve months for having ‘discussed and disclosed family genealogies’, while chief Tupua Tamasese Lealofi was repeatedly banished for disobeying an order from the Secretary of Native Affairs to remove a fence and hedge from his land.60 Others were slightly more serious, including for assault, adultery or behaviour deemed ‘likely to provoke breach of the peace’, but perhaps the most serious offences were political. Josefa Matautu of Savai’i, for example, was banished from Upolu for twelve months in 1923 for having ‘agitated for a petition against Government officials’.61 Discontent ran deep in Samoa, however, and Richardson’s attempts to use the spatial discipline of banishment, exile and expulsion did not go far enough in preventing an articulate movement forming against him. In the immediate wake of New Zealand’s acquisition of the Samoan mandate, a coalition of Samoan Fono, or village assemblies, had petitioned King George V in 1921 requesting the removal of New Zealand’s administration. As they put it, ‘may it please Your Majesty to consider favourably a petition . . . We and our children who have been educated are quite sufficient to perform the various duties of our Administration.’62 They complained that the German protectorate had been replaced by a heavyhanded administration that limited local power, and treated Samoa as a colony. As would be the case throughout the inter-war years, the petition was ignored. It arrived in London attached to a statement from the New Zealand government asserting that it reflected ‘no real Native dissatisfaction’ and the petition should not be taken seriously.63

59 60

61 62

63

Meleisea, Making of Modern Samoa, p. 132. No. 3 – File G. 1483 Puipa’a and No. 16 – File G747, ‘Report of the Royal Commission Concerning the Administration of Western Samoa’, Journal of the House of Representatives, Session 1, A-04B (Wellington: Government Printer, 1928): 475, 478. Pedersen also discusses Lealofi’s case in Guardians, p. 175. No. 7 – File G. 1627, ‘Report of the Royal Commission’, p. 476. ‘A Humble Prayer to His Majesty George V. King of Great Britain and Ireland from the Government Councilors of British Samoa who Represent all the districts and all the Natives of Western Samoa’, 16 July 1921. Cited in Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, p. 243. Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, pp. 242–3.

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Although the petition was accordingly ignored, it was a moment that demonstrated a heightened and transnational awareness in Samoa both of international discourse, as well as the devastating global interconnectivity of the post-war, post-pandemic period. After 1922 Samoan attempts to dialogue with the New Zealand administration and League of Nations took place prominently in the international arena of the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission. As Susan Pedersen has detailed, between 1925, when a petitions register was started in Geneva, and 1939 when it ended, the Commission registered fifty-six petitions regarding the Pacific mandates. Of these, well over half concerned Samoa.64 While the petitioners were exercising their right to petition, the process of petitioning itself was flawed and protracted, and designed to allow mandatory powers to manage both the petitions and their public fallout. Petitioners first had to send their grievances to the mandatory powers, who were then required to make relevant observations before sending them on to the secretariat of the League. Even when these were received by the League, and mandatory powers were asked to comment, the exchanges of information that took place often confirmed that the Commission was either unable to effectively manage the mandatory powers, or were inclined to collude. This was to be the outcome following one of the more protracted engagements between resistant Samoans, the Commission and the New Zealand government when, in 1928, Ta’isi Olaf Nelson followed Ratana, Moko, Deskeheh and Ferdinand to Geneva. He took with him a petition representing the vast majority of Samoans. Nelson had amassed a financial fortune in Samoa after inheriting his Swedish father’s trading business. Receiving the title of Ta’isi from his Samoan mother’s family in Savai’i, Nelson was highly ranked in both Samoan and European terms, but was prevented under New Zealand law, and as a defined half-caste, from involvement in Samoan politics. He was also trilingual and, having travelled widely, was something of a transnational subject. Having recovered from the intense grief of his losses to the Spanish flu, he went on in the 1920s to bankroll Samoan independence activities which, by 1926, had coalesced around the increasingly nationalist Mau Movement or the Mau a Pule. The Mau Movement built on the pro-autonomy sentiments of the Oloa a generation earlier, and it rose to prominence at a public meeting held at 64

A total of 1,500 petitions were received for all the mandates. Of the Pacific mandates, thirty-five related to Western Samoa; ten for New Guinea; nine for the Japanese northern Pacific; two for Nauru. Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, pp. 236–7. See also Pedersen, Guardians, pp. 169–92.

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the Apia market hall on 15 October 1926.65 The meeting brought together a formidably interlinked network of kinships that spanned the European and Samoan populations, creating a movement that effectively joined immediate political and economic concerns to the deeper links of descent, title and marriage. Malama Meleisea has since argued that what made the Mau movement unique, and what separated it from other fermenting movements in the Pacific at the time, was the fact that the Mau resisted colonial rule while also asserting the superiority of Samoan systems of life and government.66 In addition to protests that engaged in an imperial literacy such as petitioning, the Mau also behaved like an autonomy movement, and practised an effective independence in its literal absence. The Mau withdrew from paying taxes; established their own newspaper, the Samoa Guardian; established a uniformed police force; and ignored the authority of the administrator, effectively making him irrelevant, and establishing their own indigenous governance structures. This was a programme of civil disobedience that unsettled the New Zealand government deeply, and would eventually highlight the complicity of the League of Nations in colonial governance. The reaction of the League of Nations Mandates Commission to appeals from Samoans and their supporters was unambiguous. The Commission was first made aware of Samoan discontent through a petition submitted by the Anti-Slavery Society in 1927. Asked to comment the New Zealand government simply asserted that there was no real discontent, and dismissed the Mau as the product of ‘a simple and loveable race’ being ‘most susceptible to the wiles’ and manipulations of their superiors, in this case the ‘half-caste called Nelson’.67 Requested to investigate, New Zealand held a hasty Royal Commission and forwarded copies of the report to the League in 1928. In the same year a steady flow of petitions was received by the Permanent Mandate Commission from the Anti-Slavery Society, from Nelson himself and from other Samoan leaders requesting either self-government or the transfer of Western Samoa’s administration from New Zealand to Britain.68 The commission 65

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67 68

Meleisea, Making of Modern Samoa, pp. 129–54. On Oloa see Peter Hempenstall, Pacific Islanders under German Rule: A Study in the Meaning of Colonial Resistance (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978), pp. 43–50. See also Patricia O’Brien, ‘Ta’isi O.F. Nelson and Sir Maui Pomare Samoans and Maori Reunited’, Journal of Pacific History, 49:1 (2014): 26–49, for an examination of the links of the Mau Movement to the Maori Parihaka Movement of the nineteenth century. Meleisea, Making of Modern Samoa, pp. 139–40, 154. See also J. W. Davidson, Samoa mo Samoa: The Emergence of the Independent State of Samoa (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1967); and for a contrasting view Felix Keesing, Modern Samoa: Its Government and Changing Life (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1934), pp. 152–3. Cited in Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, p. 240. Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, pp. 231–2.

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ignored the Samoan petition, refused Nelson’s and looked at, but ultimately dismissed, the Anti-Slavery Society’s petition. Ultimately it supported New Zealand’s authority, with one of the members of the Commission, Huntington Gilchrist, reminding other members that the League and the Commission were an alliance of sovereign states, not ‘peoples’.69 Amidst intensifying civil disobedience among Mau followers in Western Samoa, Nelson was exiled to New Zealand in 1928. From New Zealand, and with little expectation that he would receive an audience, Nelson again visited Geneva to deliver a petition signed by 8,000 Samoans.70 When he arrived in Geneva, however, the Commission refused to see him, instead holding a ‘secret meeting’ the following day and demonstrating in the process that at least his efforts had some, albeit marginal, impact.71 Returning to New Zealand in exile after 1928, Nelson went on to establish the New Zealand Defence League, continued to fund the Mau in Samoa and relentlessly petitioned the Privy Council and the Mandates Commission, publishing his petitions as he went.72 The Mau Movement and the sophistication of their transnational protests rattled both the Mandates Commission and the New Zealand government enough that the Commission received the New Zealand government’s promise to ‘stamp out the whole subversive movement’ approvingly.73 On what has become known and revered in Western Samoa as ‘Black Saturday’, 28 December 1929, the New Zealand military police were sent fully armed to police a Mau protest and arrest supporters deemed tax evaders. They clashed violently with protestors. Armed with machine guns against unarmed protestors and Mau police in uniform, the New Zealand police lost control and in a panicky scuffle, opened fire on the crowd. Eight Samoans were shot and killed, and one New Zealand police officer died from resulting injuries. In the following weeks another three Samoans died from their injuries. Among the dead on the day, was the high chief and Mau leader Tupua Tamasese Lealofi who had earlier been exiled for refusing the petty orders of the administration.74 69 70 71 72

73 74

Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, p. 246. ‘Samoan Petition: Received at Geneva: Forwarded to Mandates Commission’, Evening Post, 26 May 1928, p. 9. ‘Not To Be Heard’, Evening Post, 14 June 1928, p. 13. O. F. Nelson, Samoa at Geneva: Misleading the League of Nations: A Commentary on the Proceedings of the Permanent Mandates Commmission at Its Thirteenth Session Held at Geneva in June, 1928 (Auckland: National Print Company, 1928). See also O. F. Nelson, A Petition to Geneva (Auckland: National Print Company, 1930). Cited in Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, p. 252. Michael Field, Samoa Mo Samoa: Black Saturday, 1929 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2014); Micahel Field, Mau: Samoa’s Struggle for Freedom (Auckland: Polynesia Press, 1991), pp. 147–59; Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, pp. 251–2.

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In a telegram to the Mandates Commission, the New Zealand government described the massacre of Black Saturday as a defence against ‘“Mau” natives [armed] with sticks and stones’. After being dispersed with machine-gun fire, the native rabble had ‘then left the town, subsequently wrecking telephone lines’ as they went.75 Having extended to New Zealand the authority to ‘re-establish peace and prosperity in Western Samoa by a policy both firm and liberal’ the Mandate Commission greeted news of the ‘regrettable incidents’, and news that the Mau ‘might be considered as having virtually ceased to exist’ with ‘satisfaction’.76 In Samoa, as the deep shock of Black Saturday subsided, the bodies of the dead were buried. The grave of Tamasese became and remains a site of commemoration every 28 December, and as such it remained a site that continued to fire a spirit of independence. Far from being suppressed, the influence of the Mau crossed the border into American Samoa by the 1930s, where there continued to be widespread sympathy and ongoing coordination.77 In an almost carbon copy of the 1921 petition from Western Samoa, the Mau Committee of American Samoa petitioned a Congressional Commission in 1930 declaring that the ‘education of the Samoan people is at present sufficient to take care of their own affairs’.78 In both Samoas the Mau no longer bothered with the League of Nations, and appealed instead to the British foreign secretary, German chancellor and United States secretary of state. In 1935 a new and explicitly progressive government in New Zealand finally conceded some of the Mau’s claims, repealing the most hated laws, cancelling tax debts and revoking Nelson’s sentence.79 It was the first concession in a path that would eventually lead to independence in Western Samoa, and a level of autonomy in American Samoa. Nelson and his fellow petitioners had embraced the opportunity to access the international forum that many believed the League of Nations could be. 75 76

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Telegram re: riot in Apia in ‘Annexes’. League of Nations Official Journal, 11 (1930), p. 149. ‘Annexes’. League of Nations Official Journal, 9:10 (1928), p. 1578; ‘Annexes’. League of Nations Official Journal, 12 (1931), p. 459. It is worth noting that in the 1929 report the Commission noted the significant ‘passive resistance’ of the Mau and hoped that ‘when examining the next annual report [from New Zealand] it will find that the Administration has regained complete control of the situation’. ‘Annexes’. League of Nations Official Journal, 10 (1929), p. 576. David Chappell, ‘The Forgotten Mau: Anti-Navy Protest in American Samoa, 19201935’, Pacific Historical Review, 69:2 (2000): 217; John Gray, Amerika Samoa: A History of American Samoa and Its United States Naval Administration (Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1960), p. 210. Chappell, ‘The Forgotten Mau’, p. 217. Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, p. 252.

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Although the League proved to be a device better suited to protecting imperial interests and perpetuating racial thinking, Indigenous petitioners and visitors nevertheless helped to entrench a universal discourse of selfdetermination and self-government by testing the limits of the concepts. In doing so they actively participated in a global process by which universal norms were increasingly developing a coherent discourse capable of connecting disparate local political identities and authority. This was a process made visible by petitions, which, although frequently dismissed, nevertheless injected themselves into these circulating discourses. In essence they were performances and expressions that opened up a stage for the ideological work of decolonisation.80 In the process petitioners gave words to their own incipient desires, and linked them to global and universal ones that circulated empires and other transnational networks. To this extent, even though focused on the minutiae of their own experiences, they drove transnational processes of decolonisation, helping to normalise the notion that empires had very little legitimacy, and that, at best, they required explicit and ongoing defence. The League of Nations was thus framed by petitioners such as Nelson, Deskaheh and Ratana, as a testing ground for the legitimacy of imperial practices. This positioned them as agents in the broader ideological work of thinking beyond empire, within a discourse whose production was energised by a physical mobility that exceeded the boundaries of centre and periphery.81 By inserting themselves into developing transnational discourses and journeying out of the ‘closed world’ of colonial and mandatory borders, petitioners to the League of Nations were also engaging in deeply resistant acts.82 If colonialism in and around the Pacific was characterised by smallness, or the imposition of remoteness and disconnection through borders, legislation and restrictions, transborder mobility was rendered intensely political. Indeed, as John Torpey put it, the state monopolisation of mobility through policing borders and passports was as significant as the state’s monopolisation of violence.83 This was even more the case for colonised peoples who often required passes even to move around within state or colonial territorial borders. Paisley also noted in her 80 81

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Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 10. This is a play on Antoinette Burton’s ‘ideological work of empire’ in Antoinette Burton, ‘Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury’s “Black Man” and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42:3 (2000): 655. Paul Gilroy, ‘Route Work: The Black Atlantic and the Politics of Exile’, in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds), The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 17–29. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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discussion of Fernando that his physical and conceptual mobility beyond the oppressive restrictions of Western Australia was inherently political.84 If the politics of mobility was inherent, engaging in the political act of mobility was not unconscious, for in the early to mid twentieth century, colour lines and restricted passports ensured that travel and movement had to be actively and consciously transgressive. Pita Moko, for example, persisted for months in acquiring passports for Ratana and his party in New Zealand.85 Deskaheh too travelled on a Six Nations rather than Canadian passport, while Nelson flaunted his financial capacity to exceed exile by hand-delivering his petition from New Zealand to Geneva. The ideological work that was being produced in the physical and conceptual journeys of Indigenous peoples as they sought redress and recognition on the world stage was making decolonisation. Their travels to international forums to air their grievances repudiated colonial sovereignty, resisting, opposing, testing and redefining imperialism’s boundaries, and reconfiguring the concepts of space imposed by colonial administrations. Moreover, as physical and conceptual journeys crisscrossed imperial space in both embodied travel and in the discursive interplay that turned Indigenous peoples’ protests in Europe into racialised spectacles, the local and the global became mutually constitutive. But the examples considered here were uncompromisingly gendered, public moments that occurred in administrative settings where detailed archives and records of events were kept. With the exception of the passing reference to a female member of Ratana’s party acting, by implication, inappropriately regal in the Salle de la Reformation, these moments give us little immediate insight into the kind of diverse engagements that were occurring beyond the archive. New collectivities and transnational identities All bodies, including nobodies, have of late years taken up the Congress craze . . . Next week a Pan-African Conference will be held at the Westminster Town Hall, when colored gentlemen will become eloquent on the theme of human equality and endeavor to remove misconceptions about dark folk generally . . . and some of these dark gentlemen speak well. West Gippsland Gazette, 18 September 1900.

Ta’isi Olaf Nelson, as far as the New Zealand government and the League of Nations were concerned, was a ‘half-caste’. By this designation 84 85

Paisley, ‘Death Scene Protestor’, pp. 872–3. Angela Ballara, ‘Moko, Pita Te Turuki Tamati’, in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/4m56/m oko-pita-te-turuki-tamati. Accessed 15 November, 2015.

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they dismissed his authenticity and authority to speak with and for Samoans, and thus branded the Mau Movement a half-caste movement ‘inspired . . . by personal ambition and interests’.86 Members of the Mandate Commission, such as Frederick Lugard, famously concerned as he was by signs of the racial contamination of traditional authority, were intense in their condemnation of Nelson on these grounds.87 The Commission noted that it ‘cannot too strongly condemn’ Nelson, for by ‘unworthy means’ he had worked his racial advantages ‘upon the minds of an impressionable people’.88 The Mandates Commission reflected Richardson’s own conclusions and that of the 1928 Royal Commission on Western Samoa, which expended substantial energies determining the role that racial caste had played in manipulating the ‘very childlike and uncontrollable minds’ of Samoan ‘natives’.89 Much was made of the halfand quarter-caste status of leading Mau members, as well as their resulting access to modernity. As the Royal Commission concluded, their manipulation of native Samoans was enhanced by their capacity, as partEuropeans, to master the tools of modernity including modern cable, international travel and the passports denied by the New Zealand administration to Samoan Mau members.90 As they stated, Samoans were influenced by opinions expressed in ‘radios sent by [Nelson] from New Zealand’ to Apia and from there to the ‘chiefs and orators’ of Samoa. They were further encouraged by Mau ‘literature and propaganda’ distributed to Samoan villages in pamphlets and the Mau press.91 In such ways, the Royal Commission concluded, although the vast majority of Samoans supported the Mau and its call for self-government, ‘there was no real dissatisfaction amongst the Natives’ prior to half-caste agitations.92 86 87

88 89 90

91

92

‘Annexes’. League of Nations Official Journal, 9:10 (1928), p. 1578. Pedersen, ‘Samoa on the World Stage’, p. 247. For more on Lugard see Ben Silverstein, ‘Indirect Rule in a Settler Colony: Race, Indigeneity, Government’ (PhD diss., La Trobe University, 2012). ‘Annexes’. League of Nations Official Journal, 9:10 (1928), p. 1578. Richardson, 29 July 1927. Cited in Mary Boyd, ‘Racial Attitudes of New Zealand Officials in Western Samoa’, New Zealand Journal of History, 21:1 (1987), p. 149. A deputation of Europeans and Samoans was to travel to New Zealand to interview the minister for external affairs in 1927. However, passports and permits to leave Samoa were refused for all the Samoan delegates. ‘Report of the Royal Commission’, p. 78. ‘Report of the Royal Commission’, pp. xxvii, xxxix. The findings of the Royal Commission were summarised in The Brisbane Courier: ‘The Royal Commission . . . reported in December last, and stated that the persons of mixed or wholly European blood concerned in the activities of the Mau were Mr. Nelson, a wealthy halfcaste Samoan . . .; Mr. Meredith, also a half-case Samoan; Messrs. Westbrok Williams and Gurr – the last named the editor of te ‘Samoan Guardian’ – al Europeans married to native women; and Mr. Smyth, a leading merchant of Apia, of pure European descent.’ ‘Refusal to Hear Mr. Nelson’, The Brisbane Courier, 15 June 1928, p. 20. ‘Report of the Royal Commission’, p. xx.

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Between the wars the figure of the ‘half-caste’ was potent in the minds of many colonial administrators. Stuck in a state of hybridity, a ‘human borderland’ as Damon Salesa has put it, the half-caste of popular imagination was often an object of derision, heightened surveillance, anxiety and management in Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, Fiji and Hawaii.93 Granted, there was, as Warwick Anderson has detailed, a Pacific-led exception in the way racial hybridity was being conceived from the 1920s. From at least twenty significant studies of mixed-race peoples in and around the Pacific between 1910 and the 1940s, Anderson has shown that a significant stream of scientific thought began advocating race mixing as a source of vigour rather than degeneration.94 But this simply recast the Pacific as, in Felix Keesing’s words, ‘a most interesting laboratory for the study of race mixture’, rendering peoples’ genealogies and bodies as specimens of scientific scrutiny.95 The reduction of the Mau movement to the actions of a few ‘troublesome half-castes’ was thus a signifier of the continued potency of that key site of colonisation, Indigenous identities.96 Race and particularly soft and hard eugenic preoccupations with blood quanta, caste, purity and contamination were dominant ideological conditions in colonial and settler-colonial thinking in the early twentieth century. A new, harder scientific racial logic drove assimilation, amalgamation, surveillance and restrictive policies in the region, forcefully shaping Indigenous peoples’ lives, reconfiguring identity as a quantifiable site of manipulation and struggle. In 1927, for example, the New Zealand administration was asked by the Mandates Commission whether ‘the children of the union of a European, even with some native blood and registered as a European, with a full-blooded native woman’ could be registered as ‘European’ in Samoa. It was advised that the children ‘of a half-caste father and full-blooded Samoan mother’ could be ‘European’ but only if they were over 18, had ‘a European education’ and were living ‘under European conditions’.97 Notions of racial capacity and identity, 93

94

95 96 97

Toeolesulusulu D. Salesa, ‘Half-Castes between the Wars: Colonial Categories in New Zealand and Samoa’, New Zealand Journal of History, 34:1 (2009): 98–116; Vicki Lukeri, ‘The Half-Caste in Australia, New Zealand and Western Samoa between the Wars: Different Problem, Different Places?’, in Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (eds), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940, pp. 307–35. Warwick Anderson, ‘Ambiguities of Race Science on the Reproductive Frontier of Australia and the Pacific between the Wars’, Australian Historical Studies, 40:2 (2009): 143–60. Keesing, Modern Samoa, p. 450. See especially his chapter 11, ‘The People of Mixed Parentage’, pp. 450–74. Damon Salesa, ‘“Troublesome Half-Castes”: Tales of a Samoan Borderland’ (PhD diss., University of Auckland, 1997). Replies to the observations of the Mandates Commission and various questions of its members regarding the report on Western Samoa for the year ended 31 March 1926. In

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though imagined as quantifiable, remained contingent categories, flexing according to intersecting imperatives of discipline, civilisation or development. In Australia, Hawaii and New Zealand, caste and blood quanta would linger as a notorious means by which colonial governments determined access to privilege, lending arbitrary power to the appearances of objective science and numeracy. Race remained a compelling backdrop for the physical and conceptual transnationalism of the 1920s and 30s, and for the vast majority of colonised people ideas of race and racial capacity, and imposed racial identity remained ties that continued to bind them. Remaking, or retaining, identities other than those determined by a racial category was therefore foundational to the ideological groundwork of decolonisation. As much as the Mau movement was about self-determination and autonomy, it also, at its heart, took a determined stand against the New Zealand administration’s insistence on the attenuated natures of halfcaste identities. There is a term in Samoan for half-caste, afakasi, but it does not have an equivalent meaning. Salesa has written that where the European language of half-caste was taxonomical, the Samoan discourse was genealogical, and a person’s social place was mapped in a network of Samoan relations. Meleisea argued similarly that it was this genealogical weave that held the Mau Movement together, something the New Zealand administration struggled to understand. The term afakasi denoted a European, rather than indigenous, category, and one formed not by racial intermixture but by the enhanced access to privilege of an increasingly racially stratified colonial society.98 Nelson, the 1928 Royal Commission was to learn from Samoan witnesses, was a well-connected Samoan whose title Ta’isi came from his high-ranking Samoan mother. Other Mau members were similar. Samuel Meredith, who had the status of ‘European’ in Samoa, was also a chief, Tupua, from his mother’s side. Asked whether he gave evidence ‘as a Native yourself, or as a half-caste’, he replied, ‘I say that as a Samoan.’99 In this he echoed the evidence of other witnesses. When Faumuina from Lepea was asked whether he classified half-castes as Europeans or Samoans he answered, ‘I consider them Samoans, on account of their Samoan connection.’100 In agreement

98

99 100

‘Mandates’. League of Nations Official Journal, 8 (1927), p. 1556. See also Boyd, ‘Racial Attitudes of New Zealand Officials in Samoa’, pp. 98–116. Damon Salesa, ‘Samoa’s Half-Castes and Some Frontiers of Comparison’, in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 83, 85–7. ‘Report of the Royal Commission’, pp. 77–8. ‘Report of the Royal Commission’, p. 162.

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Ainu’u Tasi said that ‘halfcastes should be called Samoans. Nobody can break the connection between them and the Samoan side’.101 Determining who was ‘Samoan’ through indigenous networks and genealogies was an integral element of the Mau Movement’s wider exercise of self-determination. By resisting the New Zealand administration and other external attempts to dismantle Samoan communities by chipping away at their identity, the Mau’s refusal to halve the Samoan selfhood of mixed descent quietly foregrounded identity in the wider struggle for decolonisation. In so doing they mirrored trends that underpinned a wider proliferation of Indigenous political organisation in the 1920s and 30s. In and around the Pacific, Indigenous peoples were mobilising into associations, clubs, movements and religions explicitly dedicated to the welfare and continuity of Indigenous communities. As in Australia and New Zealand, these diverse community organisations also quietly began forging selfdefined identities that often ran in sharp contrast to the weight of colonial categories. Maori and Aboriginal people formed organisations throughout the 1920s and 30s that were distinctive for being the first to connect communities across both language and iwi boundaries, as well as to wider networks of like-minded non-indigenous organisations. Many of these would seek improved welfare within the laws, discourses and idioms of the settler state. The Te Akarana Maori Association established in Auckland in 1927, for example, sought to direct the energies and skill of ‘educated Maoris’ towards ‘Maori welfare’ and to improve relations between Maori and Pakeha during the ‘Storm and Stress’ of the ‘transition from the primitive stages to the enlightenment of civilization afforded by the European’.102 Like their Australian counterparts, organisations with names such as the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association and the Aborigines Progressive Association explicitly adopted the racialised language of their context, often linking race and civilisation and utilising the language of assimilation. Nevertheless many also reflected the broadening focus of an increasingly international counter colonial discourse. In their assessment of Aboriginal organisations between the wars Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus have argued that they ‘had little impact’ on

101 102

‘Report of the Royal Commission’, p. 168. Barbara Brookes, ‘Gender, Work and Fears of a “Hybrid Race” in 1920s New Zealand’, Gender and History, 19:3 (2007): 505–6.

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government, and were somewhat less important than the work of wellconnected mixed-race organisations of a later era.103 Such a summary, however, misses a more subtle, and no less significant importance of these organisations. Their impact was also conceptual, and the formation of organisations for and by Aboriginal people was an inherent act of selfactualisation. Organisers defined Aboriginality for themselves against a context like that of mandated Samoa, where racial categories arbitrarily invaded Indigenous genealogies. Unlike state legislation, which defined Aboriginality in at least 67 different and expedient ways over 700 pieces of legislation, many of the inter-war year organisations defined Aboriginality in ways similar to the Australian Aborigines League and Aborigines Progressive Association as ‘Aborigines and Persons of Aboriginal Blood’ irrespective of quantity or cast.104 A poster advertising the first panAboriginal political protest in Australia, the 1938 Day of Mourning protest, not only dispensed with the half- and full-caste categories dominating Australian administration of indigenous affairs. In addition they did so in a remarkably affirmative way, stating that only Aboriginal people, and not white Australians, were invited to the Day of Mourning Conference.105 This was a bold stance and protest against a white Australia in which whiteness was constituted, theoretically at least, with universal entitlement. The political activity of Indigenous Australians in the 1920s and 30s included, but was not restricted to, petitions to government, letters to or interviews with local and international media, letters to government officials and the provision of evidence to government inquiries. In so doing they kept alive the unbroken narratives of the previous century. Time and again these organisations insisted that the questions of land ownership and rights, of sovereignty and justice for past dispossession remained unsettled.106 But underpinning this there was also an assumption of the right to determine the membership and identity of communities. As W.M. Taylor of the Australian Aborigines Association put it in a

103 104 105

106

Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009), pp. 14–15. John McCorquodale, ‘The Legal Classification of Race in Australia’, Aboriginal History, 10:1 (1986): 724. Poster advertising the Australian Aborigines Conference on the Day of Mourning, 26 January 1838. Pictured in Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, between pp. 40–1. Heather Goodall, From Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in NSW from 1770 to 1972 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996); Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003), pp. 213–54.

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letter to the editor of the Advertiser in Adelaide, Aboriginal people were ‘willing to shoulder their own responsibilities and work on their own destiny’. Of ‘half-castes’ he said, ‘standing midway between the white and the black, we rightly claim to be the successors of the aboriginal race, the former owners of this great island continent, and one day we will ask His Majesty’s Government overseas, also the League of Nations to decide this all important question’.107 While Taylor spoke only for himself and the organisation he represented, he shared with other Aboriginal activists and leaders of the time, a public willingness to redefine imposed colonial categories of identity as part of an emergent consciousness. Identifying as Indigenous, like mobility, was becoming its own act of liberation. In addition to locating an internal source for claims on land and sovereignty Aboriginal organisations in Australia joined Maori, Samoans and others in looking beyond national governments to international sources of authority such as the United Kingdom League of Coloured People, Anti-Slavery Society and the League of Nations. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike frequently invoked the League of Nations as a kind of global authority, and a moral yardstick, for local concerns. Mary Bennett, for example, threatened to go to the League in 1934 after being ignored by the local government.108 A year later Canon Needham, the chairman of the Australian Board of Missions and senior vice-president of the Sydney-based Association for the Protection of Native Races in Sydney, noted with approval in a speech to the Aborigines’ Amelioration Association in Perth that it ‘had been suggested in some quarters’ that there was to ‘be an inquiry by the League of Nations into Australia’s treatment of the aborigines’.109 Of course by 1935 the League of Nations had already made it clear to Ratana and Deskaheh that it considered the fate of Indigenous peoples within the borders of sovereign states to be beyond its competence. But such appeals to external authorities for justice was a means of raising and broadening the consciousness of both white and black in Australia, an achievement that could have a far-reaching impact.

107

108

109

W. M. Taylor, ‘Black and White Dissatisfied: Half-Castes’, The Advertiser, 23 April 1934, p. 12. See also the numerous documents collected in Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, pp. 58–169. ‘Constructive Policy Wanted. W.C.T.U. Convention’s Views’, The West Australian, 22 August 1935, p. 9. See also Alison Holland, ‘Whatever Her Race, a Woman Is Not a Chattel: Mary Montgomery Bennett’, in Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins and Fiona Paisley (eds), Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005), pp. 131–2. ‘Views and Comments Black and White Dissatisfied Half-Castes: To the Editor’, The Advertiser, 23 April 1934, p. 12.

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Developments in Australia, New Zealand and Samoa in the early twentieth century were in step with, indeed were an integral part of, a global churn as disillusionment with the old pre-war imperialism gave way to organised imaginings of a new world order. A new identity consciousness seemed to underpin the proliferation of these various organisations, movements, associations, councils, commissions and leagues. No longer just the humanitarians and anti-slavery campaigners of a previous era, women, workers, Indigenous peoples and people of colour were organising into networks and collectives that began to knit together coherent narratives out of diverse ideas, beliefs and dreams across even more diverse physical and political spaces. External to the colonial worlds of Australia and the Pacific, transnational, transoceanic and global movements, such as the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association, the Pan-African Movement and the United Negros Improvement Association, were reimagining and establishing new stages for world politics that transcended political borders. Some, such as United Negros Improvement Association and the feminist British Commonwealth League, expressed their ambitions for a new world order within a strategically re-purposed discourse of old imperialism while others adopted a discourse that was wholly counterimperialist.110 Terminology is significant here, for these were more than simply anti-colonial, de-colonising visions. Ratana, the Mau, Nelson and the various Aborigines Advancement and Progressive Associations, for example, sought change and asserted visions of themselves that ran counter to the colonial world, and sought to imagine and make alternatives. Moreover, reverse traffic between colonial peripheries and metropoles saw peoples of colour and Indigenous or colonised peoples imagine the decline of the West, or articulate their alternative, counter-imperial and decolonising critiques of racial prejudice and empire from the heart of Europe. London and Manchester, through which Fernando, Ratana, Moko, Nelson and their travelling partners all moved, was home to the ‘Black Internationale’, and at times the headquarters for United Negros Improvement Association, the Pan-African Movement and the League of Coloured Peoples.111 While Black Britain and Black Europe were focused fairly intently on the Atlantic world, their message of race-conscious empowerment through solidarity and consciousness trickled into the Pacific. Unlike 110

111

By the 1930s Marcus Garvey increasingly adopted the trappings of empire, both in dress and in his political discourse. See for example his article ‘The Negro as Colonizer’, The Blackman, 1:4 (1934): p. 15. Ashley Dawson, ‘The Rise of the Black Internationale: Anti-Imperialist Activism and Aesthetics in Britain during the 1930s’, Atlantic Studies, 6:2 (2009): 159–74.

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the hard and structural networks of empire, or the archive-rich League of Nations, however, the circuitry connecting Australia and the Pacific world to this international churn is often in unrecorded, subaltern connections. As John Maynard has shown, for example, the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association, Australia’s first Aboriginal organisation, was established in 1925 by an Aboriginal dockworker, Fred Maynard. Maynard worked in Sydney on the wharves and side-by-side with African American, West Indian, Indian and Pacific Islander dock workers. Some of them were members of the Coloured Progressive Association, described in 1903 as a ‘society of coloured Britishers’ who protested the Immigration Restriction Act and entertained the black fighter Jack Johnson in 1907.112 Others would have been members of the Sydney chapter of the United Negros Improvement Association, and influential enough for Maynard to adopt the Garveyisms of uplift, rights and destiny.113 The subaltern circuitry that linked Maynard and the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association to Garvey and United Negros Improvement Association was painstakingly uncovered by John Maynard as he compared language, mottos and sentiments and highlighted a shared conceptual universe. This kind of ideological networking invokes what Alan Lester has termed as transnational ‘processes’ that evaded the kind of permanent, structural and institutional connectivity of imperial networks, instead developing a connectivity that constantly rises, connects and slips from historical view.114 Such connectivity was provisional, contingent and fleeting by force of historical context. In this sense the significance of proliferating organisations in the inter-war years lies not so much in the direct political action or change that was achieved – usually the measure of success or failure – but in the fact that they existed at all. Each organisation, regardless of its immediate political gains, charted a point on a broader map of Indigenous peoples’ engagement with a diasporic global ferment, and they did so against the powerfully centripetal tides of colonial borders and governmentality.

112

113 114

‘A “Vile and Wicked” Act’, Evening News, 29 January 1903, p. 4; John Maynard, ‘Vision, Voice and Influence: The Rise of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association’, Australian Historical Studies, 34:121 (2003): 94–9. See also John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007). Maynard, ‘Vision, Voice and Influence’, pp. 99–101. Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’ History Compass, 4:1 (2006): 134–5.

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Conclusion: counter-civilising narratives and internal sources of higher authority Although the ‘Wilsonian Moment’ of 1918 offered a brief affirmation of Indigenous peoples’ calls for self-determination and economic or political sovereignty, it was not long-lived. Very quickly the resulting League of Nations abandoned the language of individual self-determination in favour of one whose limits were defined by territory. In 1924, in response to Deskaheh and Ratana, the League of Nations declared it was not competent to hear the calls for self-determination of colonised peoples internal to a state, and could not recognise sovereignty beyond state borders. When colonised peoples approached the League from the mandated territories of the Pacific, imagined by the League to be too backward for independence, they too were faced with the reality underpinning the rhetoric. Mandatory powers were rarely required by the League to do anything more than report their activities. Determined not to hear the petitions of the Mau and of Nelson, standing in the halls of Geneva waiting to be heard, members of the Mandate Commission met in secret. By this time, and in response to Samoa’s Mau Movement, members of the League had openly declared in words and deeds that the organisation’s interest was in territory not peoples. If nothing else, the activity of Indigenous peoples from the Pacific region had helped to force the League into this clarification. Very few of the travels of people such as Ratana, Ferdinand, or Nelson to halls of global power were conventionally successful. Ratana’s petition was ignored, and Nelson remained in exile. But they were witnesses to, and actors in, a longer struggle with more subtle markers of success. Born in the late nineteenth century, Ratana, Nelson and Moko had lived through the period of high imperialism in and around the Pacific – the paper partition in particular – to be present when isolated threads of thinking and activity that challenged empires began to coalesce in transnational ways during the twentieth century. As an organisation dominated by imperial states, the League of Nations could never do much to usher in a new world order for colonised peoples. Nevertheless it remained in the interwar years a beacon for numerous bodies of people campaigning for justice within their state’s borders as they searched for external authorities and discourses to elevate their cause beyond the pettiness of local or national politics. The fermenting self-expression of many Indigenous peoples between the wars did not merely derive from an emerging global order. A defining feature of many Indigenous peoples’ calls for self-determination and entitlements to land or culture had an internal authority, an internal

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universal principle. It was this feature, the primacy of identity, of being ‘native’ to a place, of genealogy however embattled, of protecting, recovering and practising cultures, that was present in the framing and authorising of Indigenous political engagements. Between the wars this element of political activity remained ignored or sometimes misunderstood by non-indigenous supporters, and certainly mocked by non-supporters. Exemplary here, was the dismissal of the Mau Movement as simply a half-caste movement, or the attention given to the unnamed Maori woman in Ratana’s Geneva party whose moko was a visual language connecting her to her genealogy and status emboldening her enough to stand in the Salle de la Reformation as though she were a queen. The inter-war mood of agitated dissatisfaction, coupled with the revolutionary confidence that alternatives could be achieved, and empire could be dismantled, joined the search for sovereignty that had been started in the nineteenth century. By the 1930s, these had taken many forms in Australia and the Pacific, although many had been dismissed as the product of influential missionaries, humanitarians and later communists, or as racialised ethnographic events. Felix Keesing’s 1934 evaluation of the Mau Movement, for example, likened it to other native prophetic movements and cargo cults including Maori prophet movements, the Ghost dance or the heathen revival movement under King Kalakaua in Hawaii. In a chapter dealing with the ‘Modern Problem of Native Government’, Keesing wrote that these ‘indigenous movements’ were ‘essentially a manifestation of a cultural-pathological condition’; they were ‘inarticulate and unintelligent’ ‘psychological conditions’.115 In others words the campaigns for sovereignty themselves came to be construed by many, including the Mandates Commission, as an imperative for continued colonial rule. But throughout the decades between the wars Indigenous peoples nevertheless continued to seek ways and means, not just to gain greater independence and demand redress for colonisation but to do it in Indigenous ways. If the inter-war years were about organising, international networking and consciousness-raising amidst a global desire for a new order, the period following the Second World War would be about hope.

115

Keesing, Modern Samoa, pp. 177–9.

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4

Saltwater: the separation of people and territory

The vexed questions were Colonialism and Racism. This was the end of a war, having been fought to save the world from the ravages of racial oppression, dictatorship and all manner of inhumanities. Hitler and his hordes had been defeated, and the world was at peace to sort things out and plan a better way of life for mankind. F. R. Kankam-Boadu, West African Student Union, 1995.1

On Guadalcanal during the Second World War, Malaita Islander Jonathan Fifi’i’s universe changed forever. Fifi’i had grown up in his Kwaio community on Malaita, under the shadow of the brutal massacre of late 1927 that had suppressed the Kwaio resistance to British rule. At least fifty-five, and estimates of up to 200, Kwaio were killed in a punitive mission that had been sent to avenge the murder of a British tax collector. In the months that followed nearly 200 more Kwaio were arrested and detained by the British administration.2 Fifi’i remembered the massacre as being pivotal to the Kwaio finally accepting Christianisation and British rule, and as a child his parents had sent him to the mission school to be educated in an act of surrender. After school Fifi’i went to work as a houseboy in Tulagi where, as a native, he was not allowed to wear a shirt, and recalled having eggs thrown at him by his mistress for not setting the table properly.3 When the Second World War arrived on Guadalcanal Fifi’i worked with thousands of other young Solomon Islanders in the labour corps, mixing regularly with United States troops. Not noticing that they were racially segregated, he instead had been amazed to see black men who 1

2 3

F. R. Kankam-Boadu’s recollections of the Manchester Pan-African Congress, in Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited (London: New Beacon Books, 1995), p. 35. Roger M. Keesing and Peter Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind: The Malaita Massacre (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 119–39, 161–4. See generally Jonathan Fifi’i, From Pig-theft to Parliament: My Life between Two Worlds, Roger Keesing (ed.) (Honiara: University of the South Pacific, 1989); and a play that dramatises the dialogue-based autobiography: Julian Treadaway, Fifi’i (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 2002), pp. 57–8.

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were allowed to wear clothes on the top half of their body. Not only that, they wore exactly the same uniforms as white men, they ate the same food and they lived in the same sort of housing. He later recalled being told by African Americans, ‘[y]ou are a strong people’, and, shoulder to shoulder, Islanders could ‘stand up and look [the British] in the eye’, and could ‘be strong and big and break the ties holding you to the whites’.4 The experiences of Fifi’i personified a process that was happening throughout colonial empires during the twentieth century as the isolation, so critical to colonial rule, was steadily eroded. Borders were porous and Indigenous and colonised peoples were becoming a conscious and connected, if constantly disrupted, political force. On the other side of the world, when war ended in 1945, a loose coalition of labour unions, student and women’s organisations, the Pan-African Federation and anti-colonial organisations from throughout the British Empire met at the Holborn Town Hall in London under the banner of the ‘All Colonial People’s Conference’. Its name was a play on earlier meetings held by world powers in Moscow, Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco as another new world order of united nations was mapped out. The opening session of the All Colonial People’s Conference called for elected representatives of subject peoples to be invited to participate on ‘terms of absolute equality’ at the United Nations meetings then taking place in San Francisco. The London Conference was attended by forty delegates and twenty-five observers representing ‘Burma, India, West Africa, East Africa, Malaya, the West Indies and other colonies’, and speaker Iqbal Singh remarked that despite the diversity of voices, he was struck by the unity of their story, that of ‘degradation imposed upon the human spirit by imperialism’.5 Delegates at the All Colonial People’s Conference produced a manifesto, The Colonies and Peace, which asserted that imperialism was the root cause of war and only ‘liberation from [its] tentacles’ would ensure peace.6 Delegates called for a World Colonial Council, to replace the Permanent Mandates Council, that would be run by representatives of colonised countries rather than imperial powers. Its task would be to formulate a programme for the unconditional and immediate ending of colonialism. They sought also to form a ‘colonial international’, a body that could coordinate a broad anti-colonial ‘front in the struggle for national liberation and 4

5 6

Jonathan Fifi’i, ‘World War II and the Origins of Maasina Rule: One Kwaio View’, in The Big Death: Solomon Islanders Remember World War II (Suva; Honiara: University of the South Pacific, 1988), p. 226. ‘Subject Peoples at Peace Conference: Plea at London Conference’, The Times of India, 11 June 1945, p. 7. Adi and Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited, pp. 19–20; ‘The Colonies and the Peace’, Left, 104 (June 1945): 417–19.

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social emancipation’.7 Their demands, resolutions and manifesto were sent to the United Nations meeting in San Francisco, where they were ignored. The United Nations Conference on International Organization had begun in San Francisco on 25 April 1945, and was attended by 260 people representing the governments of fifty member states. Like the All Colonial People’s Conference, lofty ideals and language defined the collective hopes of the conference as it drafted the United Nations Charter. In the first weeks of sitting, as delegates arrived and turned their minds to articulating a Charter enshrining fundamental human freedoms, victory in Europe was celebrated and San Francisco’s cinemas showed emerging footage of the terrors of concentration camps and devastation in Europe. The resulting ‘[g]asps of horror . . . more audible than any shouting in the streets’ helped to sharpen a focus in the city on humanity, rights and freedoms.8 The resulting preamble to the United Nations Charter spoke of ‘the scourge of war’ and affirmed a ‘faith in fundamental human rights’ and the equal ‘dignity and worth of the human person’ without distinction as to ‘race, sex, language, or religion’.9 Such elevated aspirations captured the transformative mood in the wake of war, but the words had also been chosen carefully and always with an eye to what they may authorise. The conferences in London and San Francisco are emblematic of the gulf that still existed between the parallel goals of an increasingly transnational community of Indigenous and colonised peoples, and the instruments of world government. They shared basic concepts, such as the need for a global and universal authority on human freedoms, and spoke a common language of self-determination, self-government, independence, freedom and equality. But they operated with distinct expectations and motivations, and each offered distorted reflections of the other. Although both were motivated to prevent a repeat of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, delegates to the United Nations were tethered to the interests of the states they represented and to a world of territories. Delegates to the All Colonial People’s Conference, however, did not consider that the atrocities being prevented were limited to the actions of a rogue state. The world’s first concentration camps, delegate Peter Abrahams would later remind the Pan-African Congress, ‘were in the 7

8

9

Hakim and Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress, pp. 19–20. Citing ‘Subject Peoples’ Conference in London Plan Formation of “Colonial International”’, Public Opinion, 25 June 1945. ‘World Thoughts at San Francisco: Results and Trends Analysed’, The Argus, 12 May 1945, p. 4. For a dramatisation of the UNCIO that is based in historical research see Alex Buzo, Pacific Union (Sydney: Currency Press, 1995). United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 24 October 1945, 1 UNTS XVI.

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British Empire’.10 Their enemy was not a geographic place, nor limited to a territory or a state. It was a mindset – imperialism – that could permeate even radically humane language. The All Colonial People’s Conference, or Subject People’s Conference as it became known, was virtually ignored by the world’s media. But while its shared vision disappeared into obscurity, the deeper sentiment of its resolutions did not. In October 1945, at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester, many delegates who had attended the earlier conference held on to the idea of an ‘international Colonial and Coloured unity’ that could transcend isolating borders and the introspective affairs of nation states. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it, the interests of ‘all coloured groups’ were interlinked across empires.11 In this chapter, we observe the interplay between increasingly unstable imperial powers and localised yet transnationally linked attempts to take seriously the global rhetoric of self-determination. For all its attention to the rights of human beings, the failure of the United Nations’ General Assembly to establish a framework for grappling with the rights of non-state actors would eventually render decolonisation an imperial project concerned ultimately with territory. This chapter therefore also charts the process by which concepts of self-determination and self-government became irrevocably coupled with territory, rather than people, within the United Nations-driven discourse of decolonisation. In the Pacific where Jonathan Fifi’i would be jailed for doing, as opposed to being granted, independence, it would become clear that a re-constituted imperialism would accompany the post-war discourse of decolonisation. ‘Not colonies . . . outposts’: overcoming latent independence at the United Nations Acquisition of [the Pacific trust territory] by the United States does not represent an attempt at colonization or exploitation. Instead it is merely the acquisition by the United States of the necessary bases for the defense of the security of the Pacific for the future world. To serve such a purpose they must belong to the United States with absolute power to rule and fortify them. Henry L. Stimson, US Secretary of War, 23 January 1945.12 10 11

12

Peter Abrahams, Daily Herald, 17 October 1945, p. 3. Cited in Adi and Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited, p. 43. Peter Abrahams, ‘The Congress in Perspective’, and W. E. B. DuBois, West African Pilot, 3 November 1945, p. 1, cited in Adi and Sherwood, The 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress Revisited, pp. 60–1, 44. United States Secretary of War to Secretary of State, 23 January 1945, cited in Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper Brothers, 1947), p. 600.

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Tens ‘of thousands of new workers have been drawn to the massive dockyards’, to service the war effort, journalist Michael Foot wrote of San Francisco in May 1945, and sailors ‘throng [the] streets’.13 Europe was celebrating the end of the war, but this bustling harbourside city still hosted the United States war effort in the Pacific. The crowded docks merely hinted at the scale of machinery, cargo and personnel that had swept into the northern and southern Pacific in the preceding three years. For after Japanese imperial forces bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on 7 December 1941, war had been unleashed on the Pacific with unprecedented scale and, for many in its path, a mind-altering intensity. Moving south into south-east Asia and the northern Pacific – Guam and the Micronesian islands – Japanese forces had continued on from Hawaii to invade Rabaul on New Britain, Bougainville and the Solomon Islands. In turn, the Allied, mostly United States forces, intensified naval and supply bases in Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, French Polynesia, Vanuatu (New Hebrides) and New Caledonia. Seemingly overnight, therefore, Japanese and Allied bases had sprung up throughout the Pacific. By 1942 intense air and land battles halted the Japanese advance on Guadalcanal and Bougainville, and over the next year United States forces island-hopped north in an attempt code-named ‘Operation Cartwheel’ to sever the supply lines to Japanese bases in the Solomons, New Guinea and Bougainville. A brutal twin campaign of starving and bombing Japanese troops into submission or withdrawal left the people of Guam, Pohnpei and the Mariana group bombed, strafed and once again occupied as Allied forces eventually replaced the Japanese. It was not until August 1945, when the United States bombers Enola Gay and Bockscar took off from wartime airstrips built on Tinian in the Marianas to deploy the world’s first atomic bombs, that the Pacific war finally came to an end. By and large, military histories of the Pacific war have been written with little to no awareness of the people whose labour, land and crops supported the war efforts of both the Japanese and Allied forces.14 As Marty Zelenietz has elaborated, the Pacific instead appears as an empty stage for military and naval battles where locals are simply ‘invisible people, 13 14

‘World Thought at San Francisco Results and Trends Analysed’, The Argus, 12 May 1945, p. 4. For example see Douglas Ford, Pacific War: Clash of Empires in World War II (London: Continuum International Publishing, 2011); J. Costello, The Pacific War, 1941–45 (New York: Rawson-Wade, 1981); R. Spector, The Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985); Samuel Morrison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vols. 5, 7 and 8 (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Co., 1947–62).

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shadows of nonentities’.15 But in Hawaii, Guam, Fiji and Samoa, locals had watched and been employed for years during the military build-up before 1942 as infrastructure and machinery were prepared for war.16 Indeed in Samoa, the war marked the first time locals were allowed to volunteer for and receive a wage from the United States military.17 When war arrived in the Pacific, Islanders worked as armed scouts, coastwatchers and soldiers in island regiments beside Allied troops, and they served in their thousands as carriers, labourers and wartime labour corps for both the Japanese and Allies.18 In trends that echoed the colonial era, many thousands of these labourers, including Palauan workers in Rabaul, Nauruans in Truk and Kiribati and Pohnpeians in Kosrae Island, were transported far from their homes to military bases.19 In the Solomons, Bougainville and New Guinea military tactics of living ‘off the country’ when supply chains were severed actually meant the appropriation of local farms and crops by the military, and the relocation and re-deployment of owners as the labourers for Japanese and Allied military farms.20 The presence of war in the Pacific unevenly brought a range of impacts stretching from disrupted communications to total devastation. In most cases it arrived with little warning. In the Solomons, District Officer Donald Kennedy alone was tasked in January 1942 with informing the entire western Solomon Islands of the likelihood of a Japanese occupation.21 Within weeks thousands of servicemen had arrived in the islands and the British administration had evacuated, and within six months on Guadalcanal, the living Indigenous population of 15,000 was outnumbered two to one, just by the dead of both the Japanese and 15

16

17

18

19 20 21

Marty Zelenietz, ‘Villages without People: A Preliminary Analysis of American Views of Melanesians during World War II as Seen Through Popular Histories’, in Geoffrey White (ed.), Remembering the Pacific War (Honolulu, HI: Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawaii, 1991), p. 188. Lin Poyer, ‘Echoes of Massacre: Recollections of World War II on Sapwuahfic (Ngatik Atoll)’, in Geoffrey White and Lamont Lindstrom (eds), The Pacific Theater: Island Representations of World War II (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990), pp. 97–115. Tuala Sevaaetasi, ‘The Fitafita Guard and Samoan Military Experience’, in White (ed.), Remembering the Pacific War, pp. 181–4; Robert Franco, ‘Samoans, World War II, and Military Work’, in White (ed.), Remembering the Pacific War, pp. 173–7. Asesela Ravuvu, Fijians at War (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1974); Michael Somare, Sana: An Autobiography (Port Moresby: Niugini Press, 1975); Walter Lord, Lonely Vigil: Coastwatchers of the Solomons (New York: Viking Press, 1977). Karen Nero, ‘Time of Famine, Time of Transformation: Hell in the Pacific, Palau’, White and Lindstrom (eds), The Pacific Theater, pp. 117–47. Ford, Pacific War, pp. 128–9. Geoffray White, ‘Histories of Contact, Narratives of Self: Wartime Encounters in Santa Isabel’, in White and Lindstrom (eds), The Pacific Theater, p. 47.

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Allied forces.22 Villages were evicted or evacuated from coastal to inland areas, turning villagers into refugees with neither land nor security, and in some cases entire island populations were removed. The people of Mavea in Vanuatu, for example, were relocated wholesale so that their island could be used for target practice. The people of Nissan island too, were evacuated to Guadalcanal where many succumbed to malaria, and on Ulithi islanders were relocated to local islets and their homes cleared to make way for military construction.23 For those who remained in place, such as coastal villagers in and around Guadalcanal, war made their homes unliveable as the dead, along with the detritus, oil and debris of intense naval and airborne warfare washed up on beaches and turned their sea toxic. Caught in a war that had come to them, villagers in New Guinea, Bougainville, New Britain and the Solomons found that cooperation with opposing forces could readily become treason punishable by death at the hands of either the Japanese or Allied forces. In New Guinea, for example, while forty New Guineans were executed for disloyalty by Japanese command during the war, a further ten were hanged for treason by Australian authorities following the Allied liberation.24 Indeed liberation by Allied forces frequently subjected Islanders to the same warfare – bombing, strafing, bombardment and isolation – that was directed at the Japanese forces. As the war retreated north in 1943, and Allied forces utilised such psychological tactics as starving Japanese strongholds, Indigenous peoples would suffer extensively.25 In New Guinea, Bougainville, Kosrae, Guam and Palau tens if not hundreds of thousands of Japanese servicemen were cut off from their supply lines, plunging both locals and servicemen into prolonged famine. One soldier in Bougainville wrote of eating grass and tree sprouts, in Kosrae labourers from Kiribati ate only potato leaves for months and in Guam and Palau local Chamorros were faced with severe famine and incarcerated in jungle camps, or were forced to retreat into the bush to survive.26 The death toll resulting from all of this has not been fully estimated, but in Papua 22 23 24

25 26

Geoffrey White and Lamont Lindstrom, ‘War Stories’, in White and Lindstrom (eds), The Pacific Theater, pp. 1–2. White, ‘Histories of Contact’, pp. 59–67. Hank Nelson, ‘Taim Bilong Pait: The Impact of the Second World War on Papua New Guinea’, in A. W. McCoy (ed.), Southeast Asia under Japanese Occupation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1980), p. 253. A. Gilmore, You Can’t Fight Tanks with Bayonets: Psychological Warfare Against the Japanese Army in the Southwest Pacific (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 1998). Ford, Pacific War, pp. 128–31; Suzanne Falgout, ‘From Passive Pawns to Political Strategists: Wartime Lessons for the People of Pohnpei’, in White and Lindstrom (eds), The Pacific Theater, pp. 279–98; Tony Palomo, An Island in Agony (Agana: Privately Printed, 1984); Nero, ‘Time of Famine, Time of Transformation’, pp. 117–47.

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New Guinea alone, Douglas Oliver has suggested that at least 15,000 civilians perished in the crossfire.27 The Pacific War was a vicious dehumanising encounter charged with an intense racial antagonism between Allied and Japanese forces, that John Dower has argued gave rise to a particularly virulent violence.28 While racial hatred is not at the forefront of the many recorded memories of Islanders at the centre of the Pacific war, racialised attitudes nevertheless shaped the civilian experience.29 The people of the Pacific remained either invisible in memories of war, or else were framed as natives, childlike in their loyalty, in the American and Allied civilian psyche.30 Still, on some islands, as Keith Camacho has explored in relation to the commemoration of the traumas of war in the Mariana Islands, remembering Islanders’ place in the war has remained fraught with historical silences.31 In the immediate aftermath of war, in Europe and North America, while images of devastation in Europe dominated newsreels when war drew to an end in 1945, corresponding images of the war-ravaged Pacific were not made public. Existing footage and images of skeletal civilians being liberated by American forces in the Marianas, Guam, New Britain, New Guinea and Palau were instead archived in favour of war photography that cast Islanders as loyal and heroic natives, and fuzzy wuzzy angels.32 Thus when the United Nations met in San Francisco in May 1945, a full year after Allied liberation had swept through the Japanese-occupied Pacific, only European horrors of war sharpened delegates’ minds. There were no images, no voices to people the Pacific theatre’s empty stage as United Nations delegates laboured over the question of what to do with colonial territories. There was nothing, therefore, to counter the narrative that the Pacific was, by global 27 28 29

30 31

32

Oliver Douglas, The Pacific Islands (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 376. John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986). For a collection of personal histories see the edition of O’O: Journal of Solomon Island Studies guest edited by Hugh Laracy and Geoffrey White (eds), Taem Blong Faet: World War II in Melanesia: ‘O’O: Journal of Solomon Islands Studies, 4 (1988); Geoffrey White, ‘Remembering Guadalcanal: National Identity and Transnational Memory-Making’, Public Culture, 7 (1995): 529–55. Zelenietz, ‘Villages without People’, pp. 188–90. Keith Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory and History in the Mariana Islands (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2011). See also the collection of essays Gillian Carr and Keir Reeves, (eds.), Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from Small Islands (London; New York NY: Routledge, 2015). Lamont Lindstrom and Geoffrey M. White, Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War (Washington, DC; London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), pp. 2–6; Among those Present; the Official Story of the Pacific Islands at War Prepared for the Colonial Office by the Central Office of Information (Great Britain: Central Office of Information, 1946).

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standards, vacant of existing rights for the purposes of imperial acquisitions. The groundwork for a global organisation that could ensure peace and oversee a more humane world order had been well laid in Europe and the United States by numerous charters, agreements and declarations during the war.33 With regard to the question of what was to be done with dependent colonies, a total withdrawal of colonial powers had already been dismissed by 1945 as an attempt to ‘unscramble the colonial egg by reversing’ history.34 The emerging preference by then was for an international system of supervising colonial administrations in the old mandates, if not in all dependent territories. In San Francisco a dedicated committee, Committee II/4, was formed and tasked with drafting the principles and mechanisms for such a system. It met sixteen times between the start of May and mid-June, and the trusteeship system that emerged, while resembling the former mandate system, had key distinctions. In contrast to Paris in 1918, delegates of non-aligned and newly independent states joined negotiations in San Francisco, ensuring the trusteeship system gestured towards the rights and protections of peoples in dependent territories. Chinese, Mexican, Iraqi and Egyptian delegates, for example, ensured that the Charter’s general ‘respect for human rights . . . without distinction as to race, language, religion, or sex’ was an explicit and ‘basic objective’ of the trusteeship system.35 Committee II/4 thus articulated a system in which the rights of peoples to be selfgoverning were framed as inherent, although the capacity to manifest this was curtailed by member states who baulked at being compulsorily committed to such a programme. The trusteeship system therefore remained voluntary ensuring the spirit of the Charter was effectively unenforceable. But more than this, while Russia, China and the smaller nations successfully included the term ‘independence’ as a goal of trusteeship, it was qualified to the point of ineffectiveness by the phrase ‘as may be 33

34

35

These include the Atlantic Charter, 1941 (the United States and Britain), the United Nations Declaration, 1942, and the drafting of the Charter at Dumbarton Oaks in August 1944. Stephen Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003), pp. 25–68. Benjamin Greig, ‘Colonial Aspects of Post-War Settlement’, International Conciliation, 21 (1942–43): 195. See also William Hocking, Colonies and Dependent Areas: Summary of the Replies Received from the Cooperating Groups on Problem IX/Universities Committee on PostWar International Problems (Boston, MA: Universities Committee on Post-War International Problems, 1943). Article 76(c), United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, 24 October 1945, 1 UNTS XVI, available at www.un.org/en/documents/charter/, accessed 1 June 2014; ‘Summary Report of the Thirteenth Meeting of Committee II/4’, UNCIO Documents, 10 (8 June 1945), pp. 513–14.

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appropriate . . . and as may be provided by the trusteeship arrangement’.36 Britain, Australia and South Africa had all vigorously argued that an unqualified reference to independence ‘might be used for political purposes’, or in the words of Australian delegate Herbert Evatt, it could be ‘explosive’. At an overnight meeting American, British and Dominion delegates agreed to include ‘independence’ and ‘self-government’, but to leave it so qualified it would ‘break no bones’.37 Arguably it was never contemplated in 1945 that widespread decolonisation would occur. Exemplary, as Natsu Saito has pointed out, was the design of the new United Nations building in New York. The brief for the hall of the General Assembly advised architects they need to create a space large enough for the delegations of as many as seventy countries. This was less than half the eventual membership of nearly 200 nations.38 What Committee II/4 designed in 1945 then, and which was in turn incorporated into Chapters XI–XIII of the United Nations Charter, was not a blueprint for decolonisation but rather a process for managing dependent territories in the interests of global peace. Chapter XI, the general ‘Declaration Regarding Non-Self-Governing Territories’, invoked the ‘sacred trust’ of former years and noted that ‘the interests of the inhabitants’ of dependent territories ‘are paramount’. The trusteeship system was outlined in Chapters XII and XIII as voluntary but extending to all colonial, or dependent, territories. The objectives of trusteeships outlined in Article 76 included the very gentle, almost feeble, aspiration to prepare the ‘inhabitants of trust territories’ for the ‘progressive development towards self-government or independence as may be appropriate’.39 The mechanisms for international supervision were the same as for the former mandates system, but they were also rendered somewhat pointless. Administering governments, in the end, could devise their own trust agreements, effectively making their own rules subject only to approval by the General Assembly. New Zealand was the first to volunteer the transfer of its mandated territories to the new trusteeship system, followed by Australia, Britain and Belgium. New Zealand’s first draft of the trusteeship agreement for 36 37

38 39

Article 76(b), Charter of the United Nations. ‘British Concession on UNCIO Charter Independence of Colonies’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 May 1945, p. 1; ‘Summary Report of the Thirteenth Meeting of Committee II/4’, UNCIO Documents, 10 (8 June 1945): 545–8. For an account of the spirit of contest that marked many of the negotiations over the United Nations Charter at San Francisco see James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (New York: Anchor Books, 2001), pp. 21–5; Schlesinger, Act of Creation, pp. 53–68. Natsu Taylor Saito, Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law (New York: New York University Press, 2010), p. 191. United Nations, Charter of the United Nations.

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Western Samoa granted the New Zealand government ‘full powers of administration, legislation and jurisdiction over the territory . . . as an integral part of New Zealand’. This was vehemently opposed by Krishna Menon, the delegate for India, who argued that ‘the peoples of the trust territories were latently independent’. If such ‘latently independent’ people were governed as integral to administering states, Menon argued, ‘rebellion or secession would be necessary for the realization of their independence’, defeating the entire purpose of the system.40 The agreement was amended and New Zealand gave itself the full power to govern the territory ‘as if’ it were integral to New Zealand itself.41 The same wording was adopted for the remaining Pacific trust territories, which included New Guinea, Nauru and the former Japanese mandates in the Micronesian Pacific. The administering powers of Australia, Britain, New Zealand and the United States thus enabled themselves to govern as if Pacific territories were geographically integral. Moreover, each trust agreement enhanced the powers of trustees affirming their right to fortify and militarise Pacific territories, to establish naval, military and air bases; station and employ armed forces; and make use of volunteer forces in the trust territories. In essence, administering states of the United Nations trusteeship system gave to themselves the full scope of powers exercised in other colonies in the Pacific, subject only to United Nations supervision. They could treat trusteeships as the full annexation of territory, effectively evaporating the saltwater that separated trust territories from trust powers, and enhancing their capacity to treat the land, waters and byways of Pacific territories as their own military and resource-rich hunting grounds. Even the United States, which had long supported the rhetorical notion of peoples’ latent independence, had come to explicitly view the Pacific as exempt. The United States acquired the Pacific Trust Territory, including the Marshal, Mariana and Caroline Islands, in 1947 as a colony whose largely military occupation was framed as strategic to global peace.42 The United States departments of war and navy argued strenuously that for the sake of 40

41

42

James Murray, The United Nations Trusteeship System, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1957), pp. 56–7. ‘Report of the Fourth Committee to the General Assembly on Trusteeship Agreements, with First Three Annexes, December 12, 1946’, International Organization, 1:1 (February 1947): 209. ‘Trusteeship Agreement for the Mandated Territory of Western Samoa, Submitted by the Government of New Zealand to the General Assembly, First Session, Second Part, as Revised by the Assembly’, International Organization, 1:1 (1947): 216. ‘Trusteeship Agreement for the Former Japanese Mandated Islands Approved at the One Hundred and Twenty-Fourth Meeting of the Security Council, April 2, 1947’, International Organization, 2:2 (June 1948): 410–14. A relatively recent collection of essays edited by Keith Camacho and Setsu Shigematsu, eds., Militarized Currents:

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peace the Pacific territories would need to be wholly annexed by the United States, and overseen by the Security Council rather than General Assembly. ‘They are not colonies’, argued Henry Stimson the secretary of war in a memorandum to the State Department, ‘they are outposts, and their acquisition is appropriate under the general doctrine of self-defense’.43 The Pacific outposts were of interest ‘as sources of raw materials and as potential markets’, Ernest Lindley for The Washington Post argued, but their retention would ‘have only strategic value [as] naval and air bases’ protecting ‘not only the United States, but also Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands south of the equator’.44 The Second World War had significantly intensified international awareness of the Pacific as a desirable and strategic site available for appropriation. Dotted with islands of tactical significance for international power relations, and an imagined emptiness it would become increasingly appealing in the new atomic age. Within ten years the United States, Britain and France would have all begun atmospheric nuclear testing in their Pacific territories, including in Australia. So too in the lifting fog of war, Britain removed the last remaining obstacle, people, in the way of its plan to access the underground deposits of phosphate in Kiribati. As evocatively told by Katerina Teaiwa, the population of Ocean Island, or Banaba, was permanently removed to Rabi Island in Fiji in 1945.45 This context reminds us that even as lofty aspirations were enshrined in the United Nations Charter, some member states were already actively engaged in suppressing existing independence aspirations. Nevertheless the post-war climate had undeniably generated an inspirational and aspirational language inflected with concepts of inherent, inalienable and indivisible human rights that were enshrined in the Charter during the post-war fervour that promoted decolonisation. So too independence and self-government, the concept of self-determination coupled with notions of humanity’s ‘equal rights’ in articles 1(2) and 55 of the Charter implied that this was a right residing inherently in peoples, not territory. Saying that people were, as Krishna Menon put it, latently

43 44 45

Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War, p. 600. The memorandum was dated 23 January 1945. Ernest Lindley, ‘Colonial Policy: U.S. Interest in Pacific’, The Washington Post, 17 January 1945, p. 9. Katerina Teiaiwa, Consuming Ocean Island: Stories of People and Phosphate from Banaba (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2015), pp. 3–64; Nic Maclellan, ‘The Nuclear Age in the Pacific Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific, 17:2 (2005): 363–72; Yami Lester, Yami: The Autobiography of Yami Lester (Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1993).

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independent, would not in itself bring about decolonisation. But if the post-war period had ushered in a new age of colonial desire, it had also left in its wake a transformed environment. In the Pacific at least, a new consciousness was emerging that would directly and indirectly challenge colonialism. Post-war transformations: raised consciousness The war brought a very big change. Peoples’ minds were open, eyes were open, brains were open, to outside things. Esau Hiele, Solomon Islands.46

As the United Nations debated the terms of its Charter from April through May 1945, the full impact of the conflict of the Second World War was still playing out in and around the Pacific. On the islands of Micronesia, the north of New Guinea, and on Bougainville, for example it was reported on 25 May that ‘[e]maciated natives are constantly creeping through Japanese territory to the sanctuary of the Allied positions . . . mere skeletons’.47 Parts of the Pacific had been utterly transformed in a few short years, and the changes were not just physical. When Jonathan Fifi’i and fellow labour corps members returned home to Malaita in the Solomon Islands, he was fired with a determination to look the British in the eye as he had learnt he could do during the war.48 He and others would establish a cultural, political and economic movement on Malaita that, like the Mau in Samoa between the wars, effectively commandeered colonial administration. Named the Maasina Rule, or Rule of the Brotherhood, the movement would encapsulate the overarching lesson he learnt at war: ‘[w]e were all to be united as brothers in our struggle’.49 This epitomised transformations in thinking that the war ushered in to colonies throughout the Pacific, and it would prove corrosive to colonial relations. In Australia and New Zealand, the media reported frequently on the ‘terrific problem’ facing colonial administrations in the Solomon Islands, New Britain and New Ireland, where the war had caused seemingly irreparable damage. Villages and farms along entire fertile strips of land 46 47 48

49

Esau Hiele, cited in Hugh Laracy and Geoffrey White, ‘Of Food and Friendship: Selected Comments’, O’O: A Journal of Solomon Island Studies 4 (1988): 115. ‘Starved and Ill-Treated: Natives on Pacific Islands’, Ellesmere Guardian, 25 May 1945, p. 5. As Fifi’i said in an interview, the things he learnt in the war, to look the British in the eye ‘those things . . . that was the beginning of Maasina Rule’. Fifi’i, ‘World War II and the Origins’, p. 226. It went by numerous names including Marching Rule, Masinga Lo and Masinga Rulu. Fifi’i, From Pig-Theft, p. 60. For his own account of Maasina Rule see pp. 60–77.

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lay ‘in ruin and deserted’, it was reported, and air and maritime bombardment of islands had left tens of thousands of people missing and unaccounted for.50 Over 60,000 people in the southern mountain areas of Bougainville and Buka Islands remained missing, as did thousands on Guam and the former Japanese mandates.51 In the United States Pacific Trust region, Allied strafing raids had denuded the landscape on many islands including Chuuk, Pohnpei and Palau. But beyond the devastated physical landscape the internal terrain of peoples’ consciousness had shifted. The ‘stirrings of nationalism . . . amongst subject peoples in the south-west Pacific’ were reported in the aftermath of war, as being spurred on by ‘a good deal of bloodshed in French Indo-China’.52 In south-east Asia, particularly Indonesia and Vietnam, the Netherlands and France clung to power as Japanese forces retreated, and throughout the colonial world, and to differing degrees, subject peoples were straining against the ties of empire. In the Pacific many of those touched by war would prove reluctant, and militantly so, to go back to the way things had been before the war. As Able Reka from the Solomon Islands put it ‘the world seemed to open up for us . . . we thought more about the rest of the world. It was as though we had been in the dark and the light was taking over’.53 The change did not go unnoticed. In July 1945 Sir Cosmo Parkinson, ‘an acknowledged expert on colonial administration’, toured the Pacific on behalf of the British secretary of state for the colonies. Keen to talk up the ‘outlook’ of the Pacific colonies, he noted the war had ‘proved . . . the extreme loyalty’ of Pacific Islanders to the King, and strengthened ‘the link between the colonies and Great Britain’.54 He conceded, however, that a big ‘problem facing the colonial official’ was going to be the ‘settling down of the natives’ in areas where they had been exposed to the United States war machine with its modern technology and the ‘Army education’ that had brought people ‘comparatively up-to-date’. Inducing people to return to ‘village life, customs and ways’, he thought, would be difficult.55 He grossly underestimated the transformation that had occurred, particularly for men, and particularly with regard to the maintenance of pre-war racial boundaries. 50 51

52 53 54 55

‘Starved and Ill-Treated: Natives on Pacific Islands’, Ellesmere Guardian, 25 May 1945, p. 5. Charles Arnot and Mac Johnson, ‘Japanese Cut off 51 Heads on Guam: Mutilated Bodies of Natives Discovered as Navy Hunts 2000 Missing Chamorros’, New York Times, 2 September 1944, p. 8. ‘Pacific Nationalism’, Kalgoorlie Miner, 5 October 1945, p. 4. Able Reka, cited in Laracy and White, ‘Of Food and Friendship’, p. 114. ‘Island Colonies’, Auckland Star, 30 July 1945, p. 3. ‘These Natives Earned Our Help’, Auckland Star, 30 July 1945, p. 4.

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Significant attempts had been made by the Allied command in the Pacific to maintain the social distances of the colonial era. The Australian government especially had fretted over the potential erosion of internalised boundaries between white and black that might be caused by Papua New Guineans’ exposure to outside influences. Allied troops were thus advised in a war pamphlet, titled You and the Native, that the ‘New Guinea Natives’ were ‘nearly, if not quite, as good a man as you are’, but it must always be that ‘he stands in awe of us’. Troops were advised to always ‘maintain your position or pose of superiority’, and not ever to ‘deliberately descend to his level’, or ‘clasp him around the neck’. Brotherhood, the pamphlet announced, was fine but ‘don’t act like a twin brother . . . be the master’.56 If colonial power relied on a naturalised and internalised racial segregation between white masters and black natives, as You and the Native advised, the experiences and exposure of wartime did much to undermine this. In many parts of the south-west Pacific, in New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Papua, Solomon Islands and West Papua, and to a lesser extent Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, the large majority of able-bodied men engaged in some sort of military labour where their work was deeply valued.57 With the military, they worked alongside white service personnel in jobs as scouts, labourers and coastwatchers that frequently saved the lives of, and was saved by, white service personnel. As George Maelalo noted after being stationed in both Guadalcanal and Bougainville, for example, the old racial signifiers of ‘white, brown, black or red’ skin did not matter under fire, ‘Everyone was “Charlie” or “Joe”.’58 Of profound influence too, was the sight, as Fifi’i recalled, of African American soldiers doing any ‘kind of thing that the whites did, they could do it too. They knew how to do carpentry and they knew how to write.’59 So too John Guise in New Guinea recalled the ‘tremendous effect’ of seeing black men who were

56

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58

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You and the Native: Notes for the Guidance of Members of the Forces in Their Relations with New Guinea Natives (Sydney: Allied Geographical Section: Southwest Pacific Area, 1943), pp. 2–4. Lamont Lindstrom, ‘Working Encounters: Oral Histories of World War II Labor Corps from Tanna, Vanuatu’, in White and Lindstrom (eds), The Pacific Theatre, p. 398; Laracy and White, ‘Of Food and Friendship’, p. 107. Hank Nelson, ‘Taem Bilong Masta’: The Australian Involvement with Papua New Guinea (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1982), p. 172. See also George Maelalo, ‘In the Thick of the Fighting’, in Geoffrey White (ed.), The Big Death (Suva and Honiara: University of the South Pacific, 1988), pp. 180–96. For an analysis of what United States personnel made of the Pacific, Sean Brawley, Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour (New York: Palgrave, 2012). Fifi’i, ‘World War II and the Origins’, pp. 222–4.

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captains, colonels or majors in segregated squadrons, ‘it made us think that the brown and black person was just as good as the white person’.60 Hundreds of thousands of African American military personnel served in south-east Asia and the Pacific, and they were mostly subject to the same rules of segregation as in the United States. Noted Jackie Robinson who was a member of a black company at Fort Riley in the United States, he was to be sent ‘10,000 miles away to fight for democracy when a hundred feet away they’ve got stools I can’t put my black butt on to drink a bottle of beer’.61 While stationed in Australia, African American troops were restricted by the White Australia policy to Queensland, and were segregated in the same neighbourhoods as Aboriginal people. There they shared similar experiences of racism, but also shared recreation at black clubs like Brisbane’s Dr Carver.62 In the islands too, African American soldiers were restricted to menial manual labour and deemed unfit for the command of white personnel.63 Nevertheless their presence, and the appearance of relative equality, compared to colonial-era social boundaries, represented a significant break from the stifling rigidity of the pre-war years. Where military bases were established, particularly in the south-west Pacific, occupying forces brought different rules of social engagement that, if nothing else, served to de-naturalise the previous colonial order, for men at least. In the Markham Valley in Papua New Guinea and in Bougainville, Japanese servicemen were willing to share their food and tables with locals, contrasting starkly with the exclusions of colonial servitude.64 So too, Solomon Islanders on islands like Guadalcanal remembered the war as a contrast between the mean and petty nature of the protectorate administration’s separation of master and native, and the relative generosity of New Zealand, American and Japanese servicemen. Jim Bennett recalled that ‘we learned to know white people for the first time – to talk to them, have a smoke’.65 As visions of the protectorate’s antithesis, the Americans were also remembered as being notoriously generous with their rations, exchanging them with locals, and 60 61 62 63

64

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Nelson, ‘Taem Bilong Masta’, p. 29. Cited in Dan Leach, ‘An Incident at the Upper Ross: Remembering Black American Servicemen in Australia during the Second World War’, Overland, 177 (2004): 85. Leach, ‘An Incident at the Upper Ross’, p. 84. ‘Pacific GIs Save Color Line for “Negroes Only” in Philippines’, Chicago Defender, 3 March 1945; Charley Cherokee, ‘National Grapevine’, Chicago Defender, 19 February 1944, p. 13. Lindstrom and East-West Center, Island Encounters, p. 21; Satoko Lincoln, Japanese Schools in New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, during the Pacific War, 1942–45 (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Library, 1979). Jim Bennett in Laracy and White, ‘Of Food and Friendship’, p. 110.

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sometimes putting things ‘outside their tents meaning for us to take them’.66 Uziah Aeah Maeke recalled being paid with money after getting coconuts for some thirsty New Zealand troops on Mono in the Solomon Islands, ‘I nearly forgot the war. It was the first time I’d ever earned money’ for labour.67 Recalling Americans and New Zealanders in the Solomons, John Lotikena highlighted the way marines would sometimes ‘just take up the burdens on their own backs!’ of women they saw carrying firewood, and would visit villages to share food, movies and music.68 Such was the intermingling between locals and servicemen from Australia, the United States, New Zealand and Fiji that one British Officer lamented that in the Solomon Islands ‘it can be safely assumed’ that the natives would find ‘all the anti-British talk that he wants’.69 Geoffrey White and Lamont Lindstrom have argued that in many parts of the Pacific, and particularly Melanesia, wartime experiences and interactions with United States servicemen and the war effort reframed men’s perceived relationship with outsiders from one of colonial master and servant to a more fraternal relationship.70 More profound perhaps was the lasting impression for men and women of the capacity for transformation that outsiders brought with them. Unlike the lumbering, bureaucratic penny-pinching colonial administrations, the Japanese and Allied war efforts were nimble and well funded, they established schools, airfields, roads, hospitals, telecommunications, radio channels that broadcast music, world newsreels and entertainment where there had been none before. In the space of weeks and months they built movie theatres – with reportedly 43 on Espiritu Santo alone – and dance halls, along with so much associated infrastructure that buzzing new townships popped up in months in stark contrast to the relative neglect and glacial changes of the colonial administration.71 Honiara, once a dull stratified colonial outpost in the Solomon Islands, hummed during the war. Jim Bennett, working in the town, said that for men and women it ‘was like nothing we’d ever seen – all the service clubs, cinemas . . . doughnuts, ice cream, hotdogs . . . we knew that would never happen with the government’.72 The sheer volume of change was 66 67 68

69 70 71 72

Nathan Oluvai, cited in Laracy and White, ‘Of Food and Friendship’, p. 110. Uziah Aeah Maeke, cited in Laracy and White, ‘Of Food and Friendship’, p. 111. Respectively John Lotikena and John Havea, cited in Laracy and White, ‘Of Food and Friendship’, pp. 110, 111. For first-hand accounts from New Guinea see Nelson, ‘Taem Bilong Masta’. Lindstrom and East-West Center, Island Encounters, p. 18. On Fijian interactions throughout the Pacific see Ravuvu, Fijians at War, pp. 54–6. Lindstrom and East-West Center, Island Encounters, pp. 180–1. Lindstrom and East-West Center, Island Encounters, pp. 97, 112–13. Cited in Laracy and White, ‘Of Food and Friendship’, p. 109.

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equalled by the dazzling scale of cargo and technology. Four million tons of cargo was shipped from United States ports to the Pacific for army use alone, and Islanders in labour corps used shortwave radio, viewed radar in action, drove trucks, cars and motorbikes, operated telephone exchanges and strung telephone wires, laid railways, built roads and handled the extraordinary volume of cargo as it arrived in the docks.73 This contrasted sharply with the rapid evacuation of colonial officials and settlers when the Pacific war had started. On Nggela in the Solomon Islands, for example, the hasty evacuation of British officials and European residents in 1942 left an enduring impression against a glittering backdrop recalled by members of the Nggela Labour Corps of Allied ‘airplanes, ships, motor cars, bombs, truck car, the ships it goes on sea and land, all kinds of food, plenty of people’ from America, Solomons, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, and Fiji, who ‘gave up their lives and they died for us’.74 These impressions spotlighted the material meanness of the protectorate administration, and must have significantly undermined the paternalist colonial narrative of protection. For the men, women and children left at home in villages and on farms, the transformations ushered in by war could be as equally intense as exposure to the buzzing energy of the war machine. On Malaita, as David Gegeo has written, and on Palau, women were left to take up agricultural and leadership responsibilities. If their village was evacuated or appropriated by Allied or Japanese militaries, they were left without the structures of village life for support and, as Gegeo put it, experienced the full terror of war. As had been the case in the West, however, the war experience on Malaita emboldened women in new ways that, as was the case for men, transformed traditional Indigenous and colonial worldviews.75 Rather than strengthening loyalty to the King as Cosmo Parkinson had hoped, the war sharply impacted the way many Indigenous peoples in and around the Pacific viewed their relationship with, and sense of worth to, colonial rulers. In the western Pacific, Islanders had worked in their tens 73

74

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Lindstrom and East-West Center, Island Encounters, pp. 108, 113; Alesasa Bislili, ‘Scouting in the Western Solomons’, O’O: A Journal of Solomon Islands Studies, 4 (1988): 79–84; Anon Ngwadili and Issac Gafu, ‘Malaita Refuge, Guadalcanal Labour Corps’, in Geoffrey White et al. (eds), The Big Death: Solomon Islanders Remember World War II (Suva; Honiara: University of the South Pacific, 1988), pp. 197–215. Laracy and White, ‘Of Food and Friendship’, pp. 107–8, citing two members of the Nggela detachment of the Labour Corps recording their memories in 1944. On the evacuations, White, ‘Histories of Contact’, pp. 48–9. David Welchman Gegeo, ‘World War II in the Solomons: Its Impact on Society, Politics, and World View’, in Geoffrey White (ed.), Remembering the Pacific War (Honolulu, HI: Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawaii, 1991), pp. 27–35.

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of thousands on colonial plantations and mines as indentured labour. During the war, however, in New Guinea alone August Kituai has estimated that at least 40,000 men, women and children supported the war effort, freely and sometimes for wages.76 The Allied labour corps, variously made up of Solomon Islanders, ni Vanuatu, Fijians, Tongans, Samoans, Kanaka Maoli and Papuans, while loyal, were also increasingly aware of their value. Paid a fraction of what white workforces were paid, labourers increasingly appealed for higher wages and better conditions with a militancy that continued beyond the war.77 Far from unthinkingly loyal subjects, for example, New Guinea workers threatened ‘serious unrest’ in 1945 unless they were paid three pounds a month in wages, and given a diet scale equal to that of the army.78 It is not necessary to claim that the new self-consciousness of some was the universal experience of the entire Pacific. Rather transformations in consciousness were easily transmitted. Around the Pacific numerous counter-colonial moments and movements blossomed after the war, many as a result of a handful of influential people like Fifi’i. In Western Samoa the prospect of a return to New Zealand’s administration was again met with strikes and protests. A seething ‘restiveness’ returned with Samoan workers, and was ‘disturbing the permanent European residents’. It would require ‘a strong hand’, it was reported in 1945, to settle this peoples who ‘would sooner govern themselves’.79 Elsewhere too, from Tahiti to Vanuatu, the Solomons and both East and West New Guinea, explicitly anti-colonial, autonomous and ‘native leadership movements’ formed around newly radicalised individuals and communities.80 Among the most well known were the so-called John Frum and Nagriemel movements in what would be Vanuatu;81 the movement for independence that congealed around Pouvanaa A Oopa in Tahiti;82 the Paliau Movement of 76 77

78 79 80 81

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August Kituai, My Gun, My Brother: The World of the Papua New Guinea Colonial Police, 1920–1960 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), p. 168. Geoffrey White; David Gegeo; David Akin; Karen Watson-Gegeo, ‘Preface’, in Geoffrey White et al. (eds), The Big Death: Solomon Islanders Remember World War II (Suva and Honiara: University of the South Pacific, 1988), pp. 130–1. ‘Native Demands: Unrest in New Guinea’, New Zealand Herald, 82 (30 August 1945), p. 5. In order, ‘Restiveness Seen below Surface in Western Samoa’, Auckland Star, 11 September 1945, p. 4; Auckland Star, 20 September 1945, p. 4. ‘Preparing for Manus Island Trials’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 1950, p. 2. Lamont Lindstrom, ‘Cult and Culture: American Dreams in Vanuatu’, Pacific Studies, 4:2 (1981): 101–23; Lamont Lindstrom, ‘Knowledge of Cargo, Knowledge of Cult: Truth and Power on Tanna, Vanuatu’, in Garry Trompf (ed.), Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements: Transoceanic Comparisons of New Religious Movements (Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 239–62. Bruno Saura, ‘The Prophetic and Messianic Dimension of Pouvanaa a Oopa: Father of Tahitian Nationalism’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, 28:1–2 (2001): 45–55;

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Manus Island that revolved around the ex-soldier Paliau Maloat;83 and the Maasina Rule in the Solomon Islands.84 More than simply manifestations of what anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner referred to as the ‘latent irrational potential’ of native Pacific Islanders, these movements tended to represent deeply rational political dissatisfaction.85 As would be the case with the Maasina Rule, they would also become performances of the latent independence of their followers. Cults and cold war: colonising native independence The emergence of the Maasina Rule movement shocked the British administration in the Solomon Islands, for it was worse than an anticolonial or nationalist movement. Far more disconcerting for the administration, keen as it was to re-establish life as it had been before the war, the Maasina Rule would render the colonial administration momentarily irrelevant. Initially focused on overwhelming colonial servitude with collective bargaining and communal living, Fifi’i and the leaders of Maasina Rule established a governance structure through a network of chiefs and large coastal villages that unified previously fragmented settlements. They established communal gardens and went on to articulate and codify a political ideology of kastom that dynamically blended customary laws with selective aspects of colonial administration.86 They also withdrew cooperation, refusing to pay taxes or to work on the colony’s plantations, eventually also establishing their own native court system. From relatively small beginnings, during which the colonial administration initially extended cautious support, the movement quickly developed an extensive following. Often appropriating existing networks such as the South Seas Evangelical Mission and labour corps connections, they were effective at

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Bruno Saura, ‘The Emergence of an Ethnic Millenarian Thinking and the Development of Nationalism in Tahiti’, Pacific Studies, 21:4 (1998): 33–66. Theodore Schwartz, The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946–1954 (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1962); Robert Maher, New Men of Papua: A Study of Culture Change (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961); Margaret Mead, Continuities in Cultural Evolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964); ‘A Fuzzy-Wuzzy Whose Name is Admired, Feared and Hated’, The Courier Mail, 24 November 1951, p. 2. For an overarching discussion of the post-war proliferation of these movements, particularly those that spread across wider geographic and linguistic areas such as and in addition to those already mentioned, the Malekula Native Company in Vanuatu, and the movement revolving around Tommy Kabu, see Ronald May, Micronationalist Movements in Papua New Guinea (Canberra: Australian National University, 1982). William Stanner, ‘The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands, 1946–1954 Review’, American Anthropologist, 66:2 (1964): 457. David W. Akin, Colonialism, Maasina Rule and the Origins of Malaitan Kastom (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2013), pp. 6–7.

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unifying multiple language and religious boundaries, first on Malaita, and then beyond to Guadalcanal, San Cristobal, Nngela, Ulawa and other islands.87 The Maasina Rule was significant initially because of its capacity to unify Solomon Islanders across numerous and hitherto unbridged language and sectarian divisions. In doing so it also momentarily disabled colonial rule and government. British Intelligence reports would claim well into the 1960s that Maasina Rule had ‘demonstrated that Melanesians . . . could achieve a high degree of organization without expatriate assistance’, and dangerously, these could ‘cut across normal tribal barriers’.88 But the movement was also notable because it built on, and therefore highlights, existing traditions of protest. The Maasina Rule, like other post-war movements, grew out of a context where residing resentment towards colonial rule already existed. In particular it had thrived on Malaita, a central node of the indentured labour trade of the nineteenth century, and home to deep-set resentments towards colonial intrusions. Although organised Kwaio resistance had been brutally suppressed in 1927, throughout the 1930s confrontational resistance had morphed into politico-religious movements throughout the Kwaio region of Malaita, prefiguring the Maasina Rule.89 The later movement was therefore an extension, and a radically translocal and internationally informed extension, of ongoing discursive engagement with colonial rule, religion and economy. As this section explores, like many of the politico-cultural movements that bloomed in the Pacific particularly in the twentieth century, Maasina Rule was often dismissed as a cargo cult, or even as a proto-nationalist movement. I want to suggest in subtle contrast, however, that such movements should be understood as examples of locally defined decolonisation, of people doing independence, rather than waiting for it to be granted. 87

88 89

Roger Keesing, ‘Politico-Religious Movements and Anticolonialism on Malaita: Maasina Rule in Historical Perspective. Part II’, Oceania, 49:1 (1978): 48–52. On the appropriation of existing Christian networks: Secret Intelligence Report, December 1963, British Solomon Islands, The National Archives, United Kingdom (TNA), CO 1036/1225, Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963–65. Secret Intelligence Report December 1963, British Solomon Islands. TNA, CO 1036/ 1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963–65. On the extent to which Maasina Rule was an extension of existing dissatisfaction see Fifi’i’s own account of the early days of recruitment in Fifi’i, From Pig-Theft, pp. 60–77; 124–37. Roger Keesing has argued that Maasina Rule was only one dimension of a longer and deeper struggle by Kwaio on Malaita for cultural autonomy. See Roger Keesing, Custom and Confrontation: The Kwaio Struggle for Cultural Autonomy (Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992); Roger Keesing, ‘Politico-Religious Movements and Anticolonialism on Malaita: Maasina Rule in Historical Perspective. Part 1’, Oceania, 48:4 (1978): 257–61. On the violent events of 1927 see Keesing and Corris, Lightning Meets the West Wind.

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A striking feature of many of the counter colonial-movements and moments that emerged in the Pacific in the twentieth century was that so many merged increasingly explicit political expression with syncretic religion, cultural revivalism or millenarian and utopic visions of inverse colonial worlds. For this they have been broadly understood as cargo cults or framed by colonial authorities as the confusions of primitive minds. Their prevalence in and around the Pacific, and particularly the Melanesian Pacific, has helped to ensure that they have been framed within a powerful colonial discourse of what I have described elsewhere as Melanesianism.90 This potent discursive lens has helped to transform political and cultural movements and activities throughout Melanesia into exclusively ethnographic, often ahistorical, phenomena. Exemplary is some of the earliest press and administrative coverage of the Vailala Movement in Papua New Guinea, which started among returned labourers in 1919. It was almost universally described as an infectious madness or mania that broke out in Vailala, spreading like a ‘physical epidemic’, until communities all along the coast were ‘infected’.91 Suppressed by colonial authorities, any re-emergence of unrest was described in the language of contagion, as an ‘outbreak’, with adherents described as being gripped by ‘hysteria’ or ‘mania’.92 By the late 1940s and early 1950s the press reportage of so-called cargo cult movements was firmly locked in a mocking discourse of savagery. Likened to the ‘Voodoo of Haiti’, movements such as the John Frum movement of Vanuatu, the Maasina Rule, and the Paliau Movement of the Admiralty Islands were variously described as a ‘mysterious psychological disease . . . of primitive people’ and an ‘idiot faith’.93 When Paliau, who had worked in the wartime labour corps, sought to rebuild decimated supplies of canoes and water craft in the wake of wartime damage, Brisbane’s Courier Mail described these as his ‘canoe navy . . . manned by yelling fuzzy-wuzzies armed with underwater fishing spear-guns’ with which he would seek to capture independence from ‘the Australians’.94 In this way the political dimensions of these movements was both diminished as the actions of mere ‘children whose minds have been warped and 90 91 92 93 94

Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Labour Trade (Honolulu, HI: The University of Hawaii Press, 2007), pp. 3–17. ‘“Vailala Madness”: Strange Outbreak in Papua’, The Argus, 26 December 1923, p. 8. ‘Strange Mania in Papua: Vailala Madness’, The Argus, 7 May 1938, p. 3. ‘“Cargo Cult”: A Native Rouser in Pacific Islands’, The West Australian, 12 August 1950, p. 23. ‘A Fuzzy-Wuzzy Whose Name is Admired, Feared and Hated’, The Courier Mail, 24 November 1951, p. 2. Like Maasina Rule, the Paliau Movement revolved around the construction of new villages; building economic self-sufficiency; and establishing schools, courts and communal gardens. See Schwartz, The Paliau Movement; Mead, Continuities.

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twisted’, and also discounted as jealousy, resentment or ‘bewilderment’ at the superiority of ‘the white man’ and his cargo.95 Some reports acknowledged the political content of these movements, noting of Maasina Rule, that it produced a ‘dangerous and fertile field for political agitation’ and that behind ‘the façade of ritual and “mumbo jumbo” the Cult is violently anti-European’.96 But the dominant theme of primitive insular backwardness, savage delusions and psychological fragility prevailed. In the Solomon Islands where the Maasina Rule started explicitly as a campaign to improve conditions and wages on plantations, it was despised by planters and eventually colonial officials as a Marxist cult. The name was a corruption of ‘Marxian Law’, reported The Argus, while ‘A missionary’ reported that the ‘Natives . . . have been indoctrinated with communism’.97 A local planter too reported that ‘Communism had arrived among the atolls’, and that the ‘head hunters’ of Malaita had been either ‘proselytised by Australian communist servicemen’, or Americans had organised a ‘Communist cell on Guadalcanal’.98 Maasina Rule, it was reported, was ‘an anti-everybody, progressive trouble’ rendering ‘the natives . . . almost impossible to control’.99 By 1947, when thousands of supporters regularly attended Maasina Rule meetings, the British deemed the movement a seditious push for independence. As the Colonial Office and Western Pacific High Commission described in a press release in late 1947, it was a ‘primitive Nationalist movement’ with ‘illegal native courts’ that was in ‘direct conflict with the Government’.100 A campaign with the dehumanising code-name of Operation De-Louse was eventually established to bring the movement down. Using mass arrests and the Sedition Act all Maasina Rule chiefs and thousands of supporters were arrested, of whom nine chiefs were eventually jailed, including Fifi’i. By 1950 the mass and unified Maasina Rule movement

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In order ‘Cults among Pacific Islanders’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 January 1954, p. 2; ‘“Cargo Cult”: A Native Rouser in Pacific Islands’, The West Australian, 12 August 1950, p. 23. ‘Sullen Natives Await a White Man’s Death’, [Perth, WA] The Mirror, 3 March 1956, p. 5. In order ‘South Pacific Islanders “Expect” All Mod Cons’, [Melbourne] The Argus, 22 November 1948, p. 6; ‘Red Natives Make His Work Harder’, [Perth] The Daily News, 25 February 1950, p. 3. ‘Australian Soldiers Had Sown Communist Seed’, [Hobart] The Mercury, 27 September 1947, p. 1. ‘Arms among Natives “Causing Worry”’, [Adelaide, SA] The Mail, 27 May 1950, p. 50. In order ‘Warships Going to Solomons to “Show the Flag”’, Barrier Miner [Broken Hill, NSW], 17 September 1947, p. 1. ‘Islanders’ Defiance: “Marching Rule”’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 August 1947, p. 4.

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was broken, completing what the Sydney Morning Herald described as ‘an unpublicized “little war”’.101 Clearly, the demonisation of movements such as Maasina Rule had the effect of explaining away political dissatisfaction, a kind of ‘prose of counter-insurgency’.102 Agency and intellect could be bled from reports of any political unrest or disturbance, either by attributing unrest to invisible ‘agents of Bolshevik Russia’, as Sydney’s Sunday Times had reported on the Rabaul uprising in 1929, or the ‘mysteries and witcheries, [of] native sorcerers’ of the entire Melanesian region.103 So too, the cultural practices that accompanied the movements, such as in the case of Vailala the erection of flagpoles, offices or communication houses, was similarly described as the product of mindless mimicry, a ‘ferment of excitement’ and ‘weird’.104 When the United Nations took an interest in 1952, requesting a briefing on Australian governance in New Guinea and Papua, the Trusteeship Council was told of ‘weird’ behaviours, and of ‘natives . . . imitating the white man’s habits’ in the hope of acquiring his ‘superior “magic”’ and cargo.105 Such reports must have helped to perpetuate the naturalised assumption at the United Nations that much of the Pacific was still unfit for self-government. Although colonial authorities perceived many of these movements as dangers and were quick to stamp them out as with Maasina Rule, portrayals of cargo cults in anthropological and journalistic discourse alike continued to emphasise their puzzling and strange nature. Divorced from the space and time from which they emerged they were frequently described as ‘springing up’, and having a ‘spontaneous emergence’ out of nowhere.106 Those who acknowledged their political underpinnings also tended to frame them as the reflexive actions of an ‘inarticulate, basic demand for equality by native races’, and the product of poorly developed anti-colonial emotions that need not be interpreted as readiness for self-

101 102

103 104 105 106

‘“Marching Rule” Cult is on Wane among Natives’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 November 1951, p. 2. Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies II (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 45–86. ‘Looking after “Black Brother”: Mandate New Guinea’, Sunday Times, 20 January 1929, p. 26. Roy S. Keesing, ‘Madness Came to Vailala: “Head-He-Go-Round”’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 June 1940, p. 11. ‘U.N. Told of N.G. Cargo Cult’, [Broken Hill, NSW] Barrier Miner, 20 March 1952, p. 3. In order ‘New Spread of Native Cults’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 January 1954, p. 9; ‘Strange Cults Thrive on Our Doorstep’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 December 1952, p. 6.

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government.107 Early anthropological literature has also tended to explain these cults as primitive attempts to reconcile the ancient with the modern; Christianity with Indigenous worlds populated by ancestors; and the deep structural inequalities of colonial rule with Indigenous reciprocal community organisation. Later analyses have understood them as proto and primitive nationalist and Marxist movements struggling to articulate a projection of nationalism.108 More recently numerous deep studies of localised movements have provided more nuanced understandings of the contextual, cultural and historical variety of their emergence. If nothing else such studies demonstrate the deeply local nature of these movements and the way they resist reductive attempts to explain them. Not all were anti-colonial or even political, and many were primarily religious. But viewed historically, many were significant as temporally located and specific attempts to negotiate autonomous cultural, social or economic change.109 Voluminous studies of autonomy movements have heightened our understanding of their distinctiveness and uniqueness but they still tend to be understood as a principally cultural or ethnographic phenomena arising from cultural contact. What has garnered far less attention is their historical connectivity and transnational links. Having been for so long understood as ‘ephemeral native eccentricities’, their ubiquity and frequency throughout the Pacific has, perhaps too readily, been explained as a peculiarity of ‘Melanesian’ or native culture rather, than history.110 Beyond the rituals accompanying many movements, however, was a historically formed ethic of independence. Enthrallment with material wealth and ‘cargo’, ancestors or revived culture, around which many of these movements revolved, were often the bedrock on which more extensive critiques of colonial division and inequality rested. They constituted the expression of selective engagements with old and new systems of thought

107 108

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‘Strange Cults Thrive on Our Doorstep’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 December 1952, p. 6. The most notorious being Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1957). For a similar but more considered account, see Michael Adas, Prophets of Rebellion: Millenarian Protest Movements Against the European Colonial Order (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Dorothy Billings, Cargo Cult as Theater: Political Performance in the Pacific (Oxford: Lexington Books, 2002). The relevant literature is vast. Two edited collections give a good indication of more recent work. See Holger Jebens (ed.), Cargo, Cult and Culture Critique (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2004); Trompf (ed.), Cargo Cults and Millenarian Movements. ‘Strange Cults Thrive on Our Doorstep’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 December 1952, p. 6.

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ranging from Christianity to Marxism, and to this extent were part of a transnational discursive network. Historically speaking the autonomy movements that proliferated in the western Pacific were not coincidental, but connected over space and time by the trails of labour migration that connected much of the western Pacific and Australia.111 The Melanesian islands in particular were home to some of the best travelled of the Pacific’s indentured labourers, many of whom re-settled in the islands when the Fijian and Queensland trades ceased. British planters and administrators in Malaita, one of the epicentres of the Fijian and Queensland labour trades, complained that these returned labourers were ungovernable, having lost their reverence – fear – of white men on the plantations of Queensland and Fiji.112 As the Maasina Rule emerged, prominent among its leaders was Timothy George, born in Queensland to Malaitan parents, who returned to the Solomons after deportation in 1906, ‘angry’ with the lack of fairness dealt by ‘the white people’.113 Like other followers of the movement who had been politically active in Queensland, he was aware of, and had tried engaging in an imperial literacy through the letter-writing and petitioning practices of the previous century, but to no avail.114 During the war a new generation of mobile labourers travelled to sites of intense political agitation like Rabaul in New Guinea, where pre-war anti-colonial protest movements were connected during wartime to new sites. Ex-labour corps worker Paliau Maloat, for example, returned from Rabaul to establish his own movement that gave expression to deeper intergenerational discontent among Paliau’s followers.115 To the extent that these movements arose in the footprints of the labour trades and missionary networks that connected Indigenous worlds during the colonial era, we might begin to view them very differently. Far from primitive reflexes, these movements had deep roots that tapped into the transnationalism and mobility that was a definitive feature of the Pacific’s colonial world. More extensive research into the hard and traceable historical connections linking nodes of cargo cult activity is needed to identify what Alan 111 112

113 114

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Martha Kaplan, Neither Cargo nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). For an exploration of the immediate impact of what were generally seen as ungovernable returned labourers see Akin, Colonialism, Maasina Rule and the Origins of Malaitan Kastom, pp. 29–36. Fifi’i, From Pig-Theft, p. 63. For example see the letters and petitions in the section on ‘Precedents’, in Hugh Laracy (ed.), Pacific Protest: The Maasina Rule Movement Solomon Islands, 1944–1952 (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1983), pp. 43–52; Akin, Colonialism, Maasina Rule and the Origins of Malaitan Kastom, pp. 30–1. Schwartz, The Paliau Movement; Maher, New Men of Papua.

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Lester has termed the ‘hard-wired’ networks of transnational organisation. But in the already known content, methodology and context of counter-colonial protests and political movements that adopted elements of millenarianism, we can certainly detect the parallels and connectivity of transnational ‘processes’.116 If there is a recurrent sameness to Pacific politico-cultural movements, it is that this sameness was the product of a Pacific-wide conversation about colonialism, exploitation, culture, land, identity and sovereignty in the presence of colonial influence that was being had from the Torres Strait to Tahiti. For as we have seen in previous chapters, for decades the colonial Pacific was a mobile, cosmopolitan, interconnected site in which the potential for exchanges of political and cultural activity was vast. That so-called cargo cults proliferated along the trade and missionary routes, and in the wake of consciousness-changing events like labour raids, illness, war or mass religious conversion is as much an historical dimension of Indigenous transnational engagement as it was a series of disconnected ethnographic events. To this extent they went beyond being proto-nationalist movements. Rather they were transnational manifestations of envisioned alternatives to the dystopic elements of colonial worlds in which Indigenous peoples recovered lost entitlements and rights. If they were nationalist in their ability to imagine bounded and collective identities, they were also performances of a real independence. The Solomon Islands protectorate government arrested Fifi’i and large numbers of Maasina Rule leaders in 1951, effectively bringing the first phase of the movement to a close. It would re-emerge later that year and in the years following, however, as politically organised councils – first as the Federal Council Movement, and then as a local Malaita Council. In the latter form the movement would win concessions from the protectorate administration after 1953 as it steadily conformed to the British administration’s expectations for political development towards independence.117 The emergence of the Maasina Rule movement draws attention to the ways in which the post-war period was one of increasing transnationalism for Indigenous peoples in and around the Pacific. During the war many Indigenous peoples whose mobility had been restricted by borders and passes in 1939 accessed new degrees of mobility either as servicemen in the Australian, New Zealand or Fijian armies or as waged labourers stationed away from home. But the more remarkable mobility of the 116 117

Alan Lester, ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass, 4:1 (2006): 124–41. Keesing, ‘Politico-Religious Movements and Anticolonialism on Malaita’, pp. 46–73.

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post-war world was internal and a matter of consciousness. The world after the war was a more connected one, knitted together by both technology – radio and film – and by a new global consensus that peace and oppression was everyone’s business. New and universal concepts of human rights and entitlement were articulated that supported the localised struggles of wartime travellers who returned to colonial rule within a newly empowered international context. Colonised peoples could now protest colonial rule in a shared language that articulated concepts of inherent and latent independence, equality and rights that resided within Indigenous peoples themselves. In the case of the Solomon Islands, this manifested in a movement that performed real independence and sovereignty, if only for a brief time. In contrast, as the member states of the United Nations turned their collective eye to colonialism, the General Assembly began to articulate a discourse of decolonisation driven by a territory-based agenda, and managed in the interests of colonial states. Conclusion: the ascendance of territory The drafting of the United Nations Charter in 1945 appeared to open up a period of tremendous potential for worldwide change. Self-determination, as a subcategory of inherent human rights, had been inextricably linked to the maintenance of global peace and harmony, and for the first time the world’s powers seemed to explicitly commit to enabling what Krishna Menon had called people’s latent independence. The emergence of autonomy movements like Maasina Rule in the Solomon Islands reflected a new confidence in the colonial world that resonated with this transnational context. In reality, however, the wording of the Charter had been engineered to be weak and in 1945 there was still no established means of knowing where, and in how many forms, a ‘sacred trust’ to deliver independence resided. Moreover, there was an abiding mismatch between the right of self-determination residing in all peoples and the more restrictive right of self-government residing in non-self-governing territories. This was yet to be resolved. The unanswered question that was critical to the international framework of decolonisation, was that if the right to self-determination resided in people, did it also reside in people who were internally colonised within a self-governing, but settler-colonial, state? The question itself was not fully answered until 1960, the year of Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech, and the General Assembly’s adoption in the same year of Resolution 1514, or the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. The Declaration on Independence signalled that decolonisation was an official global priority, but it would continue to be bogged down

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in the practicalities of maintaining the territorial integrity of colonial and national borders. This would have a resounding impact on decolonisation in and around the Pacific. By December 1946, the year after the United Nations promised selfgovernment to non-self-governing territories, the General Assembly passed resolution 66(1) establishing the first list of non-self-governing territories. This would be the road map to a world of independent states and it initially listed seventy-four colonial territories volunteered by member states.118 Being voluntary, however, member states could choose to list their colonial territories, and could also choose to remove them. Hence in the Pacific, Indigenous Maohi in French Polynesia, Kanaks in New Caledonia and Kanaka Maoli in Hawaii were listed as people in possession of a latent independence via the listing of their territories in 1946. But by 1960 all had been removed. In 1947 France removed New Caledonia and the Establissements Francais de l’Oceanie, or French Polynesia, explaining the following year that the territories had been incorporated into metropolitan France. The inhabitants of the territories had been granted ‘extensive political rights’ and now had a legal status in France ‘closely resembling . . . that of Metropolitan France’.119 A decade later, in 1959 the United States also incorporated Hawaii. In doing so President Eisenhower announced, ‘the citizens of Hawaii will soon decide whether their Islands shall become our fiftieth State’ in a demonstration of ‘the principles of freedom and selfdetermination’.120 It was celebrated as the triumph of racial equality because a principally brown territory had been incorporated, as a fully entitled state, into the white settler union.121 Effectively, the French territories and Hawaii had been rendered internal states, and their geographical separateness, or the saltwater between them, was legally made to disappear. In a sense they could be forevermore governed as 118

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Resolution 66 (I). 14 December 1946. Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories transmitted under Article 73 e of the Charter. In the Pacific, the following territories included those for which reports had already been transmitted: Papua, French Establishments in Oceania, New Caledonia, Vanuatu (New Hebrides), Cook Islands, Fiji, American Samoa, Guam, Hawaii. In addition member states promised to transmit information on the following Pacific territories: Tokelau and the High Commission Territories of the Western Pacific (Gilbert and Ellice Island Colony, British Solomon Islands protectorate, Pitcairn Island). Lorenz Gonschor, ‘Mai te hau Roma ra te huru: The Illusion of “Autonomy” and the Ongoing Struggle for Decolonization in French Polynesia’, The Contemporary Pacific, 25:2 (2103): 271. Dwight Eisenhower, ‘Statement by the President upon Signing the Hawai’i Statehood Bill’, 18 March 1959. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pld=11686. John S. Whitehead, ‘The Anti-Statehood Movement and the Legacy of Alice Kamokila Campbell’, The Hawaiian Journal of History, 27 (1993): 46.

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settler colonies, giving the latent independence of Kanaks, Kanaka Maoli and Maohi an ambiguous status at the United Nations. By the end of the 1950s the question of who was entitled to decolonisation was gaining clarity at the United Nations. Firstly, successive resolutions and covenants in United Nations discourse had increasingly linked the right of self-determination to the peoples ‘of Non-Self-Governing and Trust Territories’ only.122 At the same time definitions of what constituted a non-self-governing territory were defined in increasingly reductive ways during the 1940s and 50s.123 The over-riding but unclarified assumption was that a non-self-governing territory was physically external to and geographically separate from the administering territory. This was most clearly articulated after 1952 when Belgium put forward the socalled Belgian Thesis. In a series of treatises Belgium had argued that the provisions of Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter ‘should be extended to all the peoples who have not yet attained a full measure of self-government, whatever designation may be given to the territories in which they lived’.124 The Belgian Thesis was a radical intervention in United Nations discourse, that had the potential to see settler colonies like the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand with internally colonised and nonself-governing Indigenous peoples, placed on the United Nations’ decolonisation agenda. The response of the vast majority of United Nations member states was, therefore, an unequivocal rejection of the thesis in favour of the so-called Saltwater principle. This held that only non-selfgoverning-territories separated by ocean, or saltwater, from their administering power would be able to evolve towards self-determination and self-government.125 Theoretically this construed the right of self-determination as residing in a people, but only if they were separated by saltwater from the state that rendered them non-self-governing. This echoed the League of Nations’ response to Ratana and Deskaheh, 122

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Roy Audrey, ‘Sovereignty and Decolonization: Realizing Indigenous SelfDetermination at The United Nations and in Canada’ (MA dissertation, Victoria University, 1998), pp. 12–13. These included Resolution 334 (IV) 2 December 1949; Resolution 567 (VI) 18 January 1952; Resolution 648 (VII) 10 December 1952; Resolution 742 (VIII) 27 November 1953. See Audrey, ‘Sovereignty and Decolonization’, pp. 10–11; S. Hasan Ahmad, The United Nations and the Colonies (New York: Aligarh Muslim University and Asia Publishing House, 1974), pp. 170, 183–263, 283–6. F. Van Langenhove, The Question of the Aborigines before the United Nations: The Belgian Thesis (Brussels: Royal Colonial Institute of Belgium Section of Social and Political Sciences, 1954), p. 9. Roy, ‘Sovereignty and Decolonization’, pp. 14–16; Yassin El-Ayouty, The United Nations and Decolonization: The Role of Afro-Asia (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 50–1.

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asserting that the domestic concerns of settler-colonial member states was beyond its competence. But the Saltwater principle went further. It privileged as inherent those historical and often expediently defined imperial articulations of territory, over the latent independence that a peoples may hold. By the end of 1960 the United Nations General Assembly pronounced an even clearer vision for decolonisation in Resolution 1514, or the Declaration on Independence. This recognised ‘the passionate yearning for freedom in all dependent peoples’ and the ardent desire for ‘the end of colonialism in all its manifestations’. Article 2 declared the right of ‘All peoples’ to self-determination and Article 5 undertook to ‘transfer all powers to the peoples of’ non-self-governing territories ‘to enjoy complete independence and freedom’. As expansive as the rhetoric was, it was constrained by the requirement that independence and freedom must cause no ‘partial or total disruption’ to the ‘national unity and the territorial integrity’ of existing states.126 In other words decolonisation was to be a neutral or centripetal force, sucking peoples and polities into nation states that were neatly contained by the territorial integrity of colonial borders. For the peoples of the Pacific, arbitrarily grouped together by colonial borders of convenience in the nineteenth century, this qualification would have an enduring impact. Immediately following the passing of the Declaration on Independence, an additional Resolution 1541 was adopted in the General Assembly outlining principles that would guide member states in determining whether or not they accrued any obligations to decolonise under the United Nations Charter. In its most clear statement yet of the Saltwater principle the General Assembly agreed that member states only acquired obligations in respect of ‘a territory which is geographically separate and is distinct ethnically and/or culturally’ from an administering state.127 This ruled out settler states, but if it had stopped here, it would still have meant that France and the United States acquired obligations in respect of French Polynesia, Hawaii and New Caledonia. But the Resolution went further. Self-government, and therefore independence, was to be defined by one of three conditions. The first was the obvious, the emergence of a sovereign independent state. The second was the free association of a 126

127

For a discussion of this in an African context see Makau Wa Mutua, ‘Why Redraw the Map of Africa: A Moral and Legal Inquiry’, Michigan Journal of International Law, 16 (1995): 1113–75; Tayyab Mahmud, ‘Geography and International Law: Towards a Postcolonial Mapping’, Santa Clara Journal of International Law, 5 (2007): 525–61. For more on the definition of ‘Geographically separate’ see Catherin Iorns, ‘Indigenous Peoples and Self Determination: Challenging State Sovereignty’, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, 24:2 (1992): pp. 293–5.

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formerly non-self-governing territory with an independent state, and the third was the integration of a formerly non-self-governing state into an independent state. The latter two had to be done with some act of selfdetermination, a plebiscite or referendum, by the people of the incorporated territory. For the Pacific region, Resolution 1541’s narrow clarification of who (or where) had the right to self-government, and what self-government would be, effectively abandoned the majority of native, Indigenous, first and colonised peoples who were minorities in settler states. More problematic, it also meant that settler states and imperial powers could now incorporate geographically separate territory simply by redefining their relationship with externally governed territories. The requirement for an act of self-determination through the holding of a vote or plebiscite remained a compelling protection, but in reality it was open to manipulation by administering powers. In the Pacific, when needed, it would easily be overcome.128 In the post-war world colonial powers had begun to catch up with Indigenous and colonised peoples’ ongoing assertions of rights to independence. In the Pacific these assertions were part of a longer, though discontinuous, set of trajectories that had shadowed imperialism during its presence in the region, but they were finding expression in unsanctioned and readily dismissed ways. The United Nations materialised out of the international mood of enlightened self-interest that drove global and imperial powers towards a new enthusiasm for degrees of decolonisation in the aftershocks of war. The far-reaching aspirations of 1945, however, were not robust enough to undermine the interests of member states nor creative enough to be able to fathom Indigenous alternatives to the nation state such as was articulated by the Maasina Rule and others. By 1960 ‘decolonisation’ was articulated as an ordered global programme that would shape a new world order, a homogenised ‘family of nations’, in which ex-colonies would remain oriented towards their former powers.129 As the march of imperial retreat gathered pace in the 128

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See Churchill, ‘Stolen Kingdom’, pp. 73–123; Ka Pakaukau, ‘The Right of Hawai’i to be Restored to the United Nations List of Non-Self-Governing Territories’, in Ward Churchill and Sharon Venne (eds), Islands in Captivity: The Record of the International Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Hawaiians (Boston, MA: South End, 2004), pp. 303–21. On the Northern Pacific see Jon Hinck, ‘The Republic of Palau and the United States: Self-Determination Becomes the Price for Free Association’, California Law Review, 78 (1999): 915–71; Marie Rios-Martinez, ‘Congressional Colonialism in the Pacific: The Case of the Northern Mariana Islands and Its Covenant with the United States’, Scholar, 3 (2000): pp. 41–69. Joel Ngugi, ‘The Decolonization-Modernization Interface and the Plight of Indigenous Peoples in Post-Colonial Development Discourse in Africa’, Wisconsin International Law Journal, 20 (2002): 304.

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Pacific in the following decades, it would, on occasion, converge with the aspirations and desires of colonised peoples. But in the Pacific the territorial constraints of the United Nations’ decolonisation rhetoric would be foregrounded. Resolutions 1514 and 1541 had, by 1960 defined away the procedural access of many Indigenous peoples, including Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, Maori, Kanaks, Maohi, Kanaka Maoli, Chammorros and more, to self-determination. Moreover, the established procedure of decolonisation, as defined by Resolution 1541 would ensure that Indigenous attempts to do independence, such as the Maasina Rule movement, would be deemed dangerous if they deviated from an assimilationist script requiring statehood, colonially-defined territorial borders, constitutional change and economic access. The two distinct Indigenous and state-driven narratives of decolonisation present in 1945, having briefly converged, had therefore separated with enduring outcomes.

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Flight: territorial integrity and dependent decolonisation

We know we are powerless as a small people. We have to follow the United Nations and we have to trust that the UN will ensure selfdetermination. Nicholas Jouwe, Papuan National Congress, 17 September, 1962.1

Late in September of 1962, eighty men from the villages and towns of Netherlands, New Guinea, assembled in the administrative capital Hollandia, later to be known as Jayapura. They were a blend of colonial and traditional elites, some were educated by Dutch schools or missionaries, and others occupied the lower rungs of colonial administration. All fostered ambitions for West Papuan independence.2 Claiming to represent more than half the region’s population they established the first Papuan National Congress and met to discuss the imminent departure of the Dutch administration.3 In New York, Jakarta and The Hague at the same time, however, plans were being devised to transfer West New Guinea from Dutch control to the United Nations and from there, not to independence, but to Indonesian administration. Called the New York Agreement, this proposed transfer of West New Guinea to Indonesia would, in accordance with Resolutions 1514 and 1541, maintain the territorial integrity of the former Dutch East Indies. The agreement was made without consulting indigenous West Papuans, explicitly privileging territorial integrity over the self-determination of peoples that only two years earlier had been enshrined in the United Nations’ Declaration on Independence.4 Not content to be left out of negotiations, three Papuan 1 2 3 4

‘Papuans En Route to Attend U.N. Debate’, South China Morning Post, 18 September 1962, p. 20. Christian M. Penders, The West New Guinea Debacle: Dutch Decolonization and Indonesia, 1945–1962 (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 384–434. ‘Papuans Criticize Pact on New Guinea’, New York Times, 16 September 1962, p. 15. On the ascendance of territory at the United Nations see Chapter 4. On West Papua specifically see David Webster, ‘Self-Determination Abandoned: The Road to the New York Agreement on West New Guinea (Papua), 1960-62’, Indonesia, 95 (2013): 9–23; David Webster, ‘Regimes in Motion: The Kennedy Administration and Indonesia’s New Frontier, 1960-1962’, Diplomatic History, 33:1 (2009): 95–123. For an account of British

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Congress delegates, Nicholas Jouwe, Marcus Kaisiepo and Herman Womsiwor, left Jayapura for New York on 18 September for the United Nations. They did not make it in time. Four days after the Papuan Congress members left for New York, the General Assembly of the United Nations ratified the New York Agreement on the condition that Indonesia would hold a United Nations-supervised plebiscite in 1969. Although there was no consensus among Papuans over whether they preferred full independence or some sort of association with Indonesia or the Netherlands, the Agreement transformed the Netherlands’ departure from an act of decolonisation to an act of transmission. In the General Assembly on the night of the vote, fourteen delegates abstained and five were absent. Maxime-Leopold Zollner of Benin explained his abstention as not being willing to ‘give approval to the transfer of a people from one nation to another’.5 On the day the Dutch governor departed, L. Mofu of the Papuan National Congress captured the mood of abandonment in West Papua. With a ‘frightened heart, the Papuans called for help, but there was no reply’, he said, and none ‘of the big countries lent us a hand. Papua stands alone . . . The world ignored Papua.’6 When the Netherlands left West Papua, or what was then referred to as West New Guinea, the New York Times reported widespread disruption as schools closed, administration disappeared from many areas and Papuans ‘brought under the control of the former Dutch Government’ returned ‘to the primitive, tribal ways they previously followed’.7 Women and children returned to villages away from the central towns, and a number of Papuan leaders prepared to seek asylum in Australian New Guinea and the Netherlands. But journalist Abraham Rosenthal for the New York Times wondered what the ‘Stone Age’ Papuans thought of this changeover ‘or even whether the news has penetrated to tribes deep in the

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involvement see Nicholas Tarling, ‘“Cold Storage”: British Policy and the Beginning of the Irian Barat/West New Guinea Dispute’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 46:2 (2000): 175–94. ‘New Guinea Pact Approved in U.N.’, New York Times, 22 September 1962, p. 3. On Papuan responses and organisation before the Agreement see Penders, The West New Guinea Debacle, p. 402; David Webster, ‘“Already Sovereign as a People”: A Foundation Moment in West Papuan Nationalism’, Pacific Affairs, 74:4 (2001/02): 507–29. For a detailed account of United Nations negotiations see John Saltford, The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962–1969: The Anatomy of Betrayal (London: Routledge, 2003). A. M. Rosenthal, ‘Papuans Deplore Dutch Departure’, New York Times, 29 September 1962, p. 1. ‘Changeover in New Guinea’, New York Times, 2 October 1962, p. 38. Arend Lijphart, The Trauma of Decolonization: The Dutch and West New Guinea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).

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jungle’.8 His musings traded on a racial mythology regarding West Papuans that was blind to their sophisticated transnational activity, and insisted on a narrative that framed them as Stone Age primitives locked in place in intractable jungles. The United States State Department was just as explicit when, in a letter responding to a query from the Missouri Student’s Association in 1969, the New York Agreement was defended as being in ‘recognition of the extreme primitiveness of much of the territory’.9 This reflected international views that the wider Pacific, and Melanesia in particular, was too much of an imperial remnant, too small and primitive, to be independent. Such thinking had rendered the Pacific territories C mandates in 1918, and after 1960 would ensure that the expectation of Islanders’ incapacity for self-rule would lead colonial administrations to deal poorly with Indigenous expectations. During this period, Australians were patrolling the border region of Australian New Guinea informing locals of the existence along the 141st east meridian of a border that would separate them from Indonesian West Irian.10 The problem for the Australian and Indonesian administrations was that no real border existed beyond a theoretical line on a map, and in much of the border region a straight line would have to cleave its way through the spherical networks of Indigenous worlds in lowland, midaltitude and highland regions of the island of New Guinea.11 People continued to move, network and trade throughout these regions, ‘moving back and forth freely to work their lands, visit relatives and other similar activities’.12 Attempts to mark out a border after 1963 triggered a passive aggression between Indonesia and Australia, as much of the border ‘frontier’ was unmarked on the ground and followed no physical, topographical or cultural features.13 Instead it cut an invisible line across ‘mist-shrouded’ mountains 15,000 feet high, villages and crop fields, tracks, roads and waterways.14 Attempts to mark its existence paid little reference to local circumstances or people. Absorbed only in each other, Australian surveyors and Indonesian soldiers wrestled over the placement 8 9

10 11 12 13

14

Rosenthal, ‘Papuans Deplore Dutch Departure’, p. 1. Australian Embassy, Washington, DC, to Canberra, 18 June 1969. NAA, A452 1969/ 4432. Freedom Committee of West Papua. See also Webster, ‘Self-Determination Abandoned’, pp. 9–24. ‘Quarantine on New Guinea Border’, The Canberra Times, 30 April 1963, p. 3. Clive Moore, New Guinea: Crossing Boundaries and History (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), pp. 34–57. ‘27 Attempts by West Irians to Cross Border’, The Canberra Times, 2 March 1965, p. 1. ‘W. Irian Border Solution Likely’, The Canberra Times, 8 May 1963, p. 7. See more generally Ronald May, ‘The Indonesia-Papua New Guinea Border Landscape’, in Dennis Rumley and Julian Minghi (eds), The Geography of Border Landscapes (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 152–68. ‘W. Irian Border Solution Likely’, The Canberra Times, 8 May 1963, p. 7.

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of survey pegs and marker posts, in numerous armed ‘episodes’.15 In one case the Drum reported in December 1963 that border markers were moved six miles inside Australian New Guinea and then policed by armed soldiers.16 As Australia and Indonesia continued to police the border with arms in Indonesia’s case, and by proposing a fence, in Australia’s case, they gave an early indication of the difficulties decolonising powers would experience in the Pacific as they sought to impose administratively convenient borders on Indigenous peoples’ patterns of existence.17 Events in West Papua in 1962 were an early indication, particularly for Indigenous peoples, of the deep inadequacy of territory and colonial borders as a determinant for independence. On the last day of that year, the United Nations flag was raised on West Papuan soil alongside Indonesia’s flag, a moment pictured on this book’s cover.18 The flagraising ceremony signalled the handover of West Papua from the United Nations as caretaker, to the newly independent sovereign state of Indonesia. It was a moment that solidified the departure of the United Nations programme for decolonisation from many Indigenous peoples’ own aspirations for self-determination. Only months before the New York Agreement had been made, the clocks in Apia, Western Samoa, had struck midnight on 1 January to thousands of firecrackers and ringing church bells heralding the longawaited arrival of independence.19 This made Western Samoa the first Pacific nation to gain independence and seemed a promise of more to come. But the New York Agreement over West Papua signalled that the momentum of decolonisation’s winds of change was stalling in the Pacific. As this chapter explores, secret British planning had concluded by 1962 that the Pacific region remained of strategic interest to all administering powers – both economically and militarily. At the very 15 16 17

18 19

‘No Aid on Border from Indonesians’, The Canberra Times, 23 December 1963, p. 1. ‘N.G. Border Patrols Halted: British Experts Leaving Indonesia’, The Canberra Times, 21 December 1963, p. 1. ‘Infiltration of N.G. Denied’, The Canberra Times, 18 February 1964, p. 5; ‘N.G. Quarantine Fence’, The Canberra Times, 13 May 1964, p. 11; ‘Australia “Will Go to War” Over Border’, The Canberra Times, 11 June 1964, p. 23. More generally on Australia’s response to West New Guinea, Hiroyuki Umetsu, ‘Australia’s Response to the West New Guinea Dispute, 1952-53’, The Journal of Pacific History, 39:1 (2004): 59–77; Richard Chauvel, ‘Up the Creek Without a Paddle: Australia, West New Guinea and the “great and powerful friends”’, in Frank Cain (ed.), Menzies in War and Peace (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1997), pp. 55–7; Stuart Doran, ‘Toeing the Line: Australia’s Abandonment of “Traditional” West New Guinea Policy’, Journal of Pacific History, 36:1 (2001): 5–18. UN Photo Library, Image 159701. U.N. and Indonesian Flags Raised in West New Guinea (West Irian), Hollandia, West New Guinea, 31 December, 1962. ‘Jubilant Samoans Hail Independence’, The Canberra Times, 3 January 1962, p. 7.

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least, nuclear testing by France, Britain and the United States, and military agreements between these nuclear powers required that ‘if possible’ sovereignty should be retained over numerous islands ‘due for independence’.20 As a result of this and other strategic interests, timetables for self-government throughout the Pacific Rim would stretch out from 1960 to 69, and from there to the mid-70s and beyond, and in many cases to an indefinite end-point. This chapter argues that the stalled programme of decolonisation in the Pacific was determined by the structures of neglect, and racial thinking of the colonial period. In this way decolonisation in the Pacific was transformed from a process of national liberation to the sedate and conservative term British and Australian administrations preferred, ‘constitutional development’. The result would be a uniquely Pacific approach to decolonisation as Indigenous peoples found and practised discrete, and often localised, forms of self-determination that resisted administrative borders of convenience, and developed Indigenous alternatives to national sovereignty. Focused on the western Melanesian Pacific, this chapter observes the migration and mingling of local and international ideas of self-determination across colonial borders in the minds and hearts of increasingly mobile peoples. It shows that one of the essential weaknesses of colonial administrations was their tendency to chronically underestimate the capacities of Indigenous peoples. This would mean they were frequently caught off guard both by the speed with which organised, articulate movements coalesced, and by the transnational connections that underpinned them.

Colonising decolonisation: the unexpected urgency of the United Nations ‘hook’ In [decolonisation] what is most important is to be ahead and not behind public opinion – to take and keep the initiative. Sir Hugh Foot, British Ambassador, United Nations Trusteeship Council, 12 May 1962.21

The administrations in the Pacific that would be most pressured by the United Nations after 1960 were Australia and Britain. The United States and France had, in various ways, incorporated their possessions by 1960 and the trust territories held by the United States were mostly overseen by 20

21

‘Future Policy in the Pacific: Pacific Defence Interests’, forwarded to Prime Minister’s Department, 12 September 1962. NAA, A1209 1968/9888 Future Policy in the Pacific – British Defence Interests. Correspondence Files relating to Policy Matters, Prime Minister’s Department. ‘Confidential’ note, Sir Hugh Foot to Department of External Affairs, 12 May 1962. NAA, A1838 909/8/1/5 Dependent Territories – Visit of Sir Hugh Foot.

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the United Nations Security Council as ‘strategic’ trusts. The Netherlands were being pressured out of West Papua by Indonesia and would be out by the end of 1962, and New Zealand by that time too had transferred independence with various forms of association to Samoa and the Cook Islands. By contrast, Australia was still administering a colony and trust territory in Papua and New Guinea that was the largest in the Pacific, and had spent the 1950s entertaining further expansion into the Pacific. Moreover in Papua and New Guinea, rather than contemplating the move towards political independence, Australia in 1960 was articulating an assimilationist agenda.22 Britain, on the other hand, held ‘fragments of empire’ throughout the Pacific in numerous forms of protectorates, Crown colonies and trust territories.23 These were relegated in the Colonial Office to what W. David McIntyre has described as the ‘never’ category, judged to be too minuscule to ever be fully independent and viable. Together these administrations reluctantly moved into the era of the Pacific’s decolonisation, mutually doubtful of the capacity of Pacific peoples for full independence.24 In 1962 the United Nations sent a delegation of four representatives of Britain, India, the United States and Bolivia to tour and report on Australia’s dependencies in the Pacific. They were preceded by the leader of the delegation, Sir Hugh Foot, Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations Trusteeship Council since 1961.25 His visit took place only months after the United Nations’ Declaration on Independence when the Committee of Twenty-Four was still the Committee of Seventeen, and as yet unsure of how it ‘was going to work’.26 His early arrival was intended to give preliminary access, and provide advice to Australian officials, and as the secretary of external affairs was advised, Foot was ‘very good value indeed’ with ‘clear and firm views on colonial topics . . . and “recently 22

23 24

25 26

See for example Paul Hasluck, A Time for Building: Australian Administration in Papua New Guinea, 1951–63 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976); David Goldsworthy, Losing the Blanket: Australia and the End of Britain’s Empire (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), pp. 51–72; and for an earlier period Roger C. Thompson, Australian Imperialism in the Pacific: The Expansionist Era, 1820–1920 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980). Barrie Macdonald, Cinderellas of the Empire: Towards a History of Kiribati and Tuvalu (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982), p. 220. On the ‘never’ territories, W. David McIntyre, Winding Up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 62; and see for an enunciation of the imagined problem of microstates B. Benedict, Problems of Smaller Territories (London: Athlone Press, 1967). On Ango-Astralian relations see McIntyre, Winding Up, pp. 85– 113; A. Benvenuti, Anglo-Australian Relations and the ‘Turn to Europe’, 1961–1972 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2008). ‘Leader of U.N. Mission Arrives’, Canberra Times, 29 March 1962, p. 14. Record of Discussion with Sir Hugh Foot, 30 March 1962. NAA, A1838 909/8/1/5 Dependent Territories – Visit of Sir Hugh Foot.

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emerged” nations’ with a ‘high regard for the Afro/Asian Nations’ at the United Nations.27 He had the capacity, that is, to advise Australian policymakers on the best ways to handle the United Nations and, in particular, the greatly expanded Afro-Asian bloc in the General Assembly.28 When Foot met with officials from the Australian Departments of Territories and External Affairs, he was informed that the people of Papua and New Guinea were ‘an unsophisticated people’ who, despite showing a ‘genuine interest in the United Nations’, were incapable of adequately conceiving of the ‘advanced political concepts’ contained in the United Nations’ Declaration on Independence. They described the United Nations’ expectations as ‘completely unreasonable and unrealistic’ for the territories, declaring also their ‘pessimism about the future for the West in the United Nations where a large African group was currently so influential’. The Afro-Asian bloc, they complained, was ‘irredeemably irresponsible’ in pushing the world towards decolonisation.29 Foot, who was known for his liberal views, disagreed with the Australian estimation of the Afro-Asian bloc.30 On the contrary, he assured, he had found them to be committedly careful, considered and rational in finding solutions to the difficult problems of decolonisation. He cautioned that ‘there were plenty of pegs upon which to hang an attack upon Australia’, and he was sure that unless Australia shifted its stance on having a ‘great deal of time . . . to prepare the Papuans for self-government’, they would be ‘heading for a serious crisis’.31 In a personal note to the secretary of the Department of External Affairs, written after his tour of Papua and New Guinea, Foot reiterated. Australia must find ways to ‘avoid being a main target of international anticolonial hostility’ and be seen to be making progress towards independence. Appearances of 27 28

29

30 31

Confidential Memo, Assistant Secretary to Secretary of External Affairs, 28 March 1962. NAA, A1838 909/8/1/5 Dependent Territories – Visit of Sir Hugh Foot. In 1960 alone, the year of Macmillon’s Winds of Change speech, seventeen new nations, the vast majority of them African, had gained entry to the General Assembly. See D.A. Low, ‘African Year 1960’, Eclipse of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 215–25. Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Record of Discussion with Sir Hugh Foot, 30 March 1962. NAA, A1838 909/8/1/5 Dependent Territories – Visit of Sir Hugh Foot. For an analysis of Australia’s responses to decolonisation in general, see Christopher Waters, ‘Against the Tide’, Journal of Pacific History, 48:2 (2013): 194–208; Chirster Waters, ‘Manuscript XXVII: Australia and the South Pacific’, Journal of Pacific History, 48:2 (2013): 209–16; David Lowe (ed.), Australia and the End of Empires: The Impact of Decolonisation in Australia’s Near North (Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1996). Goldsworthy, Losing the Blanket, p. 46. Note to Secretary of Department of Territories, 10 April, For the Minister. NAA, A1838 909/8/1/5 Dependent Territories – Visit of Sir Hugh Foot.

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progress could buy time and allow Australia to fly below the Decolonisation Committee’s radar. Rather than ‘turn one’s back’ on the ‘anticolonial movement’, he advised, Australia should ‘go out to meet it’. Anti-colonialism was ‘a real force’ at the United Nations he advised, and Australia should seek to ‘channel Afro-Asian interest . . . into helpful channels’ to effectively control the agenda.32 Foot’s advice contained the key elements of the policy approach that would drive British and Australian activities in the Pacific throughout the 1960s and 1970s, at least in confidential communications. On the one hand, administrations would dodge scrutiny by appearing to be preparing for independence through the provision of education, the setting up of local governing structures and the encouragement of moderate nationalist political parties. On the other hand, by not resisting decolonisation, administering powers sought to harness and control enthusiasm for independence. In private correspondence all levels of the administration of Pacific territories operated on the presumption that independence, if it came, was never going to work. In his study of Britain’s winding up of empire in the Pacific ‘never lands’, McIntyre has suggested this stance was paradoxical.33 As this section elaborates, however, if it was paradoxical it was also entirely consistent with the form colonial administration had taken to date, for it sought to control and sequester independence. The significance of this extended argument is the new light that it throws on the significance of Indigenous peoples’ anti-colonial and autonomous activity. Following the United Nations’ Declaration on Independence, Britain found itself ‘uncomfortably conspicuous’ on the list of Non-SelfGoverning Territories.34 Of 57 dependent territories being reported to the United Nations, 44 were British, an imbalance that was accentuated in the Pacific. In private correspondence staff at the Colonial Office lamented Britain’s subjection to ‘a continuous barrage of largely illinformed criticism and attack’ such that ‘emotions and prejudices on this subject [seem] likely to bedevil our international position so long as we continue to be regarded as a colonial power’.35 Having convened a Pacific Futures Policy Committee in London in the early 60s, in 1962 the 32 33 34

35

Sir Hugh Foot, Record of Discussion with Sir Hugh Foot, 30 March 1962. NAA, A1838 909/8/1/5 Dependent Territories – Visit of Sir Hugh Foot. McIntyre, Winding Up, p. 101. ‘Confidential. Smaller Colonial Territories: An Examination of the Possibility of Integration or Close Association with the United Kingdom as a Constitutional Objective’. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. ‘Confidential. Smaller Colonial Territories: An Examination of the Possibility of Integration or Close Association with the United Kingdom as a Constitutional

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Colonial Office reached out to the Pacific governors and administrators for feedback on their findings.36 Taking the opportunity while the United Nations was focused on the larger African colonies, the Committee report was circulated in ‘secret’ requesting feedback on the best strategies to ‘remove their dependent territories from Colonial status without necessarily granting them independence’.37 They sought above all, to ‘evolve solutions wherever possible which will not be attacked internationally’. Highlighted was Hawaii, described as an ‘outstandingly successful case of integration’, but one that was not always practical in the Pacific. The alternative that the report praised was New Zealand’s approach in Samoa, which had offered Independence with Free Association.38 The Colonial Office Circular of 1962 prompted responses from administrators in Suva, Honiara, Port Vila and Canberra that were marked by a determination to ensure decolonisation would follow an imperial rather than Indigenous agenda. With little variation, full independence of island states was considered hopelessly unrealistic. Although the Western Pacific high commissioner David Trench was positive in public about the capacity of the Solomon Islands to evolve ‘our own system’ of independent governance, in private he reported that, with its population of 124,000, the idea of the Solomon Islands ever achieving full sovereign independence went against common sense.39 The level of education in the protectorate was minimal, he noted, with the highest level of education being equivalent to ‘a Western child of about nine to twelve years of age’. There was only a ‘very weak’ and slow-growing sense of national identity in the protectorate, and a ‘vigorous effort’ and substantial funds

36 37

38

39

Objective’. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. On the Pacific Futures Policy Committee and their proposals see McIntyre, Winding Up, pp. 85–104. ‘Confidential. Smaller Colonial Territories: An Examination of the Possibility of Integration or Close Association with the United Kingdom as a Constitutional Objective’. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. ‘Confidential. Smaller Colonial Territories: An Examination of the Possibility of Integration or Close Association with the United Kingdom as a Constitutional Objective’. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. On Samoa see J. Scott, ‘Getting Off the Colonial Hook: New Zealand’s Record of Decolonisation in the United Nations’, in M. McKinnon (ed.), New Zealand in World Affairs, Vol II, 1957–1972 (Wellington: NZIIA, 1991), pp. 125–6. D. C. C. Trench, Western Pacific High Commission to Hilton Poynton, 26 November 1962. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. Trench’s public comments were made at the first meeting of the Legislative Council in 1961, British Solomon Islands Protectorate Legislative Council Debates, 31 May 1961, p. 1. Cited in Clive Moore, Decolonising the Solomon Islands: British Theory and Melanesian Practice (Melbourne: Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University, 2010), p. 6.

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would be required to establish an appropriate education and communications system, and to hasten economic development. His optimistic assessment was that a delay of up to fifteen years was necessary, before a ‘theoretically independent sovereign’ state was vaguely feasible. This would only be possible if ‘independence is a purely transitory state’ leading to a new form of close association with Britain, Papua New Guinea or Australia.40 The idea of some sort of federation or close association of island states in Melanesia, particularly between Papua New Guinea and the Solomons, proved enticing to the Colonial Office, and slightly less so to Australia.41 The Australian minister for external affairs, Garfield Barwick, responded positively to the idea in 1963 but insisted Britain needed to spend substantial funds to be sure ‘New Guinea would not take over too great a liability’.42 In 1964 a secret memo in the Colonial Office noted that ‘Our own desire to “get off the U.N. hook” is prompting us to seek urgent constitutional formulae that can be presented as no longer “colonial”.’ Closely associating a less-than-independent Solomons with an equally less-than-independent Papua New Guinea would be awkward but convenient. To this end, the memo concluded, they would need to start influencing the thinking of Papuans and Solomon Islanders by ‘discreetly getting opinion moving in the direction of our long-term ideas’.43 This was necessary because, it was noted, the British would have to demonstrate an act of self-determination where peoples were given the chance to determine their own destiny. Having local government structures would overcome the impossibility of consulting ‘the natives since they are too primitive to be able to give an opinion’.44 A 40

41

42

43

44

D. C. C. Trench, Western Pacific High Commission to Hilton Poynton, 26 November 1962. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. Floated in secret, the idea was finally reported on Radio Australia on 31 August 1967. Outward Cablegram, Department of External Affairs, to Australian Consulate, Noumea, 3 October 1967. NAA, A1209 1968/9888. Future Policy in the Pacific – British Defence Interests. For more see James Griffin, ‘Papua New Guinea and the British Solomon Islands Protectorate: Fusion or Transfusion?’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 27 (1973): 319–28. Record of a Meeting between Mr. Fisher and Sir Garfield Barwick in the Colonial Office, 5 April 1963. TNA, CO 1036/1293 Future of the New Hebrides. Waters, ‘Against the Tide’, pp. 194–208. ‘The Future of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate’, in Trafford Smith, Colonial Office to David Trench, Western Pacific High Commission, 20 February 1964. D. C. C. Trench, Western Pacific High Commission to Hilton Poynton, 26 November 1962. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. Secretary of State A. G. Poynton’s amendments to report on ‘Small Territories’ paper. TNA, CO 1036/1293 Future of the New Hebrides.

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note in the margins of correspondence also noted that ‘consultation’ as required by the United Nations could be creatively interpreted. Britain, therefore, ‘need not reasonably be put off’ by the self-determination requirement, for ‘we have “consulted” some fairly unsophisticated publics before’.45 While British administrations in the Pacific were contemplating a rapid programme of economic and constitutional development in the Solomon Islands and Gilbert and Ellis Island territories, they planned the opposite for an estimated 60,000 Ni Vanuatu (New Hebrideans). In Vanuatu, then the New Hebrides, power was shared with a French administration that was resolutely determined to stay in the Pacific. Described as having ‘a denial value but no positive strategic value to Britain’, Vanuatu was described internally as posing a difficult security commitment and a financial cost of about 350,000 pounds a year.46 Trench was deeply pessimistic about the territory’s prospects and he could see little chance of an ‘orderly Constitutional evolution in the New Hebrides until a State of some kind is created’ and Ni Vanuatu, then stateless, were given some form of civil identity.47 In 1963, unless educated in the French or missionary systems, Ni Vanuatu had to travel to the Solomon Islands or Fiji for a secondary education, and like in the Solomons Trench estimated a timetable of ten years before there would be enough education ‘to do the job of independence’.48 Often against ministerial orders, staff in Britain’s Colonial Office, Foreign Office and Commonwealth Relations Office continued to model and test the benefits and drawbacks of giving up the British ‘share’ of Vanuatu to France or Australia.49 Nevertheless, as had 45 46

47

48

49

‘New Hebrides Meeting 2/6/63’. TNA, CO 1036/1293 Future of the New Hebrides. ‘Confidential Note. The Anglo French Condominium of the New Hebrides’, D. C. C. Trench, Western Pacific High Commission to Hilton Poynton, 26 November 1962. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. ‘Secret and Personal’ letter, David Trench, Western Pacific High Commission to Hilton Poynton, Colonial Office, 6 March 1963. D. C. C. Trench, Western Pacific High Commission to Hilton Poynton, 26 November 1962. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. Gregory Rawlings, ‘Statelessness, Human Rights and Decolonisation: Citizenship in Vanuatu’, Journal of Pacific History, 47:1 (2012): 45–68. ‘Secret and Personal’ letter, David Trench, Western Pacific High Commission to Hilton Poynton, Colonial Office, 6 March 1963. D. C. C. Trench, Western Pacific High Commission to Hilton Poynton, 26 November 1962. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65. On 21 February J. E. Marnham of the Colonial Office wrote to E. H. Peck in the Foreign Office, ‘I am shaken by the suggestion that we should start taking soundings [regarding a handover to Australia] in advance of Ministers taking a decision in principle to withdraw. Our existing instructions are to take no action for the time being.’ J. E. Marnham to E. H. Peck. Foreign Office, 8 April 1964. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65.

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been the case with the Solomon Islands, the idea of a potential federation of Melanesian islands protecting British economic interests in the region was ultimately preferred. The plans being discussed, tested and formulated in the early 1960s indicate the way, as far as Britain and Australia were concerned, decolonisation was being configured in the Pacific as the final stage of imperialism. These plans were not a prediction of the final outcome. The timelines were off, and the drawing of lines around potential federations was, like the preparation of colonial maps eighty years earlier, an administrative exercise. Little reference was made to the diversity of languages, ethnic affiliations or desires of the peoples who they had been both effectively and explicitly written off as incapable of forming an opinion. Yet they remained sensitive to the urgency generated by the United Nations and were therefore willing to pay ‘public attention’ to Indigenous peoples’ claims, such as the privately mocked ‘mystical attachment which the islander has for his land’.50 Ultimately, however, decolonisation would follow a formula of ‘constitutional development’ and ‘constitutional evolution’, and one that preferably would not result in full national sovereignty, nor even independence. Ironically, this shadowplay ensured that a complex set of pressure points were available to Indigenous peoples to begin to affect degrees of independence or selfdetermination during the decolonisation process. Placing the Pacific’s public path to formal decolonisation against private and in many cases secretive administrative background is key. The historical consensus in decolonisation literature, which has been repeated most recently in McIntyre’s study of Pacific decolonisation, is that Indigenous nationalist movements of Oceania failed to make it impossible for colonial powers to stay as was the case elsewhere. With the exception of military responses to the Samoan Mau and Solomon Islands Maasina Rule, for example, McIntyre has argued that nationalist and independence movements were not potent in the Pacific, leading to a somewhat lacklustre ‘winding up’ of the Pacific empire.51 A significantly different picture of decolonisation emerges, however, when emphasis is given to the importance Britain and Australia placed on maintaining tight control over the decolonisation process to ensure it was a lacklustre affair. Their early, privately expressed, intent was to take charge of constitutional development, to engineer nationalist affinities, and to reconfigure decolonisation as a means of getting off the United 50

51

British High Commissioner to I.K.C. Ellison, South West Pacific Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 8 August 1968. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and NewGuinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). McIntyre, Winding Up, pp. 38–9.

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Nations’ ‘hook’ without delivering independence. The natives were to be prepared to ‘go French’ or go Australian, or even to see federation as the only logical future.52 Decolonisation in the Pacific therefore had a distinct dynamic, where degrees of independence were explicitly envisaged in continuity with, and as an extension of, colonial rule. This was partly due to the small scale of Pacific territories and populations. But it was also based in erroneous but endemic assumptions about the incapacity of Pacific Islanders to think in sophisticated or translocal ways. Solomon Islanders were assessed as not yet capable of forming ‘a considered view of their own’, Ni Vanuatu were ‘too primitive to be able to give an opinion’, but Papua New Guineans were assessed as ‘very responsible people’ because they ‘would ensure that some white settlers were elected’ to remain in power.53 The point here is that decolonisation in the Pacific is not about Indigenous nationalist movements making it impossible for colonial administrations to stay. Rather, as administering powers reconfigured the United Nations agenda to suit their needs, decolonisation happened as Indigenous peoples frustrated imperial agendas, and determined their own strategies. The ‘incessant talk of “custom”’: synergies of consciousness and strategies of self-determination In August 1963 the first South Pacific Games, in which 500 athletes from all over the Pacific competed, was held in Suva, Fiji, the first pan-Pacific event of its kind.54 It was fashioned on the Olympics and Commonwealth Games where athletes would compete in sports for their country and medal winners would stand on a podium beneath his or her national flag as the athlete’s national anthem was sung. ‘The trouble is’, reported the Canberra Times, ‘seven of the 13 territories fly the British Union Jack and sing God Save the Queen, two fly the French Tricolour, and sing La Marseillaise and one does both’. The Games Council suggested the 52 53

54

‘New Hebrides Meeting 2/6/63’ minutes. TNA, CO 1036/1293 Future of the New Hebrides. In order ‘The Future of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate’, in Trafford Smith, Colonial Office to David Trench, Western Pacific High Commission, 20 February 1964. D. C. C. Trench, Western Pacific High Commission to Hilton Poynton, 26 November 1962. TNA, CO 1036/1291. Future of the Solomon Islands Protectorate: General Policy 1963–65; Secretary of State’s amendments to the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee report on the future of the New Hebrides, 16 January 19645; and Record of a Meeting between Mr. Fisher and Sir Garfield Barwick in the Colonial Office, 5 April 1963. Both in TNA, CO 1036/1293 Future of the New Hebrides. The ‘incessant talk of “custom”’ quote comes from Political Intelligence report for December 1963 ‘Priority Secret’. CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963.

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solution should be that each territory bring its own ‘specially designed flag and victory song’.55 By the end of the Games, however, when territory teams were supposed to march onto the Games grounds in ordered ‘separate units’ arranged by territory and future nations, athletes decided against it. Instead they ‘surged on to the field in one large mass to demonstrate that the Games had set aside national barriers’.56 Reported in the Canberra Times as a descent into confusion, it carried the symbolism of the kind of breakdown of order most feared by colonial administrations in their private correspondence. Arguably, it was also symptomatic of a residing reluctance among Islanders to talk exclusively in terms of national identity, or to think within the constraints of state and territorial integrity craved by the United Nations and decolonising administrations. Departing British and Australian administrations in the western Pacific were determined to maintain a firm hold on the territorial, economic and political shape of independent Pacific nations. They feared the emergence of independently indigenous nationalist sentiments, or worse, communist ones, and in order to catch hold of incipient developments, from the early 1960s an elaborate intelligence network became operational throughout the western Pacific. Information regarding ‘Native’ movements was thus collected and shared between the Western Pacific High Commission and British intelligence; and Special Branches in Fiji and Papua and New Guinea; and between the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the New Zealand Security Service.57 In the British territories ‘Local Intelligence Committees’ reported to colonial administrations or to consulates, and places like Honiara, Suva and Port Moresby became ‘listening posts’ for the transmission of local intelligence.58 Notwithstanding the tint cast by the purposeful intent of colonial surveillance, intelligence reports offer a unique insight into the kind of local activity that was taking place in Australian and British territories. Through their reports, we can see that the long threads, those trajectories of counter-colonialism that wound their way through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were still active in the Pacific, and maturing into murmurings of activated consciousness and an insistent independence. 55 56 57

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The Canberra Times, 29 August 1963, p. 48. ‘Games End in Confusion’, The Canberra Times, 10 September 1963, p. 35. Telegram from High Commissioner for the Western Pacific to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 14 January 1964. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963. ‘Listening post’ was used in reference to the French establishing a consulate in Honiara as a ‘listening post to watch the possible spread of political developments from Papua/New Guinea and the Protectorate to the New Hebrides and New Caledonia’. Intelligence Summary for Month of May, 1964 by the Local Intelligence Committee. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1964.

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In the Solomon Islands, for example, where the anti-racist, anti-colonial Maasina Rule only a decade earlier had proven the capacity of Malaitans to effect the whole protectorate, race continued to be capable of ‘arousing deep passions’.59 In Honiara, discontent over racial discrimination continued to seethe, and in the early 1960s much of this resentment was directed at the symbols of old world colonialism, such as the proprietor of the Mendana Hotel who oversaw segregated drinking rights. Between March and June 1964 this discontent peaked, to the extent that even expatriates began boycotting the hotel. From intelligence reports we learn that in June an unnamed ‘Melanesian senior administrative officer’ caused himself to be evicted from the hotel for being black . . . when it was full of passengers’ from a visiting cruise liner.60 Race was becoming ‘a live issue’, it was reported, and was precisely the kind of low-key simmering tension that was generally only picked up by observing intelligence operatives.61 Detecting and preventing dangerous nationalist or communist sentiment was a prime concern for most of the intelligence community in the early 1960s. In particular the British Colonial Office sought to counter ‘the infiltration of Communist reading matter’ whose ‘eye-catching qualities and reader-appeal’ was capable of having ‘a positive, forceful impact on the unsophisticated mind’ of a native.62 An intelligence note in 1961 reported that there had been ‘two attacks in the Soviet press against colonialism generally in the Pacific’, and that Australian and New Zealand Communists, mostly ‘visiting seamen’, were ‘active in Fiji’, Nauru and Ocean Island where they were getting in ‘touch with discontented elements and [seeking] to exploit workers’ grievances . . . through trade unions’.63 With intelligence networks focused intently on external influences, individuals often only came into view when they were mobile. Thus the secretary of the Solomon Islands Ports and Copra Workers Trade Union, Johnson Olisikulu, became prominent when he travelled to Sydney in 59 60 61 62

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Intelligence report for December 1963. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963. Intelligence report for June 1964. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963. Intelligence report for April 1964. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963. K. P. Maddocks to Carstairs, 23 April 1959. TNA, CO 1036/859 Communism in Fiji, 1960–62; TNA, CO 1036/957 Study of Trade Unionism in the USA by Mohammed Ramzan, Fiji. Note on Soviet and Communist Interests in British Pacific Territories. TNA, CO 1036/ 859 Communism in Fiji, 1960–62; Resident High Commissioner, New Hebrides to Acting High Commissioner of the Western Pacific, 17 April and 15 July 1963. TNA, CO 1036/1227 Political Intelligence Reports: New Hebrides, 1963–65.

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1964 as a guest of the Waterside Workers Federation of Australia. His movements were not only closely tracked, they were also held responsible for his influence and activism. Numerous times it was noted that he had ‘become far more active and has gained a certain amount of prestige’ in the Solomon Islands as a result of his travels and contact with external influences.64 The intelligence networks thus construed the outside world as a most significant political threat in the Pacific, and one whose danger was enhanced by the influence it could have on the insular, primitive and unconscious societies of the Pacific. While the focus of the Australian and British administrations was on external influences, they tended to underestimate the degree to which forces for political change could also be internal and Indigenous. In the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and later Bougainville and Papua New Guinea localised custom or autonomy movements still proliferated, but mostly they were seen as intensely local and of little concern. In Tanna in Vanuatu, the followers of John Frum were watched, and it was reported in 1964 that in Santo there ‘is an outbreak of cargo cult activity . . . characterized by the usual “custom movement” activity’ of building roads in preparation for the arrival of cargo.65 In the Solomon Islands too it was reported in 1963 that on North Malaita ‘a “custom movement” . . . is becoming more active and assuming something of a neo-marching rule [neo-Maasina Rule] form’.66 Elsewhere, on Guadalcanal in an area that had been a Maasina Rule stronghold, a new movement, the Moro, emerged to assert the independence of its followers. It was described as displaying the ‘aloof, secretive conservatism’ of Guadalcanal landowners, and its followers were described as ‘non-cooperative’ with the administration, and ‘intensely interested’ or ‘over interested in custom’. Like the Maasina Rule before them, followers refused to be counted for a census, developed a conformity and a back-to-custom ethos, collected money to build ‘custom’ houses and refused to pay tax or allow survey beacons to be erected on their land.67 Within a few years of being founded, leaders of the Moro Movement had been voted on to the Guadalcanal Council, 64

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‘Intelligence Summary for December, 1964 by the Local Intelligence Committee’ and ‘Quarterly Intelligence Review, December 1964’. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1964. ‘Intelligence Summary for the Month of May, 1964 by the Local Intelligence Committee’. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1964. See also Richard Shears, The Coconut War: The Crisis on Espiritu Santo (North Ryde: Cassell Australia, 1980); J. Besant, The Santo Rebellion: An Imperial Reckoning (Richmond: Heinemmann, 1984). Political Intelligence report for December 1963 ‘Priority Secret’. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963. Political Intelligence report for December 1963 ‘Priority Secret’. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963. William Davenport and Gülbün Çoker, ‘The

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and it was becoming more militant in its defence of land and hunting rights. By 1965, however, British intelligence still mildly judged the organisation as constituting only ‘a potential threat to the maintenance of law and order’, even though its ethic of land rights and independence had entered the mainstream of Indigenous political organisation through the Guadalcanal Council.68 The Solomon Island administration’s response to movements like the Moro was conditioned by decades of colonial knowledge about Melanesian cargo cults.69 Of the custom movements in the Solomons, the Political Intelligence Review of 1963, for example, simply noted that they were ‘residual movements [that] have not been unduly embarrassing’ and they ‘follow a pattern . . . common all over Melanesia’. Their ‘incessant’ and over-interested approach to reviving custom was treated, on the whole, as a problem of primitive minds, of isolation and a lack of development, and hardly likely to ‘present any major threat to . . . law and order’.70 At worst, these ‘reactionary . . . politico-religious’ movements threatened to interrupt the ‘orderly progress’ of the Pacific Islands towards constitutional change, but unless they transgressed boundaries, physical or legal, they were considered transitory concerns – fads that would take hold and die out quickly.71 Accordingly organisations like the Moro were mostly left alone until their political expression and noncooperation became too transparently anti-colonial and impossible for the British administration to ignore. When they finally moved on the Moro Movement, the administration treated it as being ‘typical Pacific Islands cargo cult’ whose best antidote was rationalisation and civilisation. The administration thus concentrated its efforts ‘for political reasons’ on establishing ‘as much contact as possible with the population of the area’. A land survey was undertaken, an airfield established, and a ‘high priority [was] given to the construction of a road’ to the regions

68

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Moro Movement of Guadalcanal, British Solomon Islands Protectorate’, The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 76:2 (1967): 123–75. ‘Quarterly Intelligence Review for the Period Ending 31st March 1965’. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1965. For more on the Moro Movement see Davenport and Çoker, ‘The Moro Movement’, pp. 123–76; and more recent assessment of its Socio-Political content, Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka, ‘A Socio-Political Pressure Group: A Study of the Moro Movement of Guadalcanal’, O’o: A Journal of Solomon Islands Studies, 2:2 (1990): 42–62. See the extensive discussion of this in Chapter 4. ‘Quarterly Intelligence Review for the Period Ending 30th June 1964. British Solomon Islands Protectorate’. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1964. Political Intelligence report for December 1963 ‘Priority Secret’. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963

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where the Moro was most active.72 This was followed by a ‘campaign of propaganda and advice’ along the no-longer-remote Weather coast of Guadalcanal encouraging locals to ‘utilize their energy and resources in a constructive manner’.73 Like the protectorate government on Guadalcanal, the prevailing tendency for colonial administrations was to treat custom movements as unhinged outbreaks that were intensely isolated, reactionary, emotional and products of the short duration of native concentration spans. But this severely underestimated the significance of these movements in two key ways. First, many of the back-to-custom movements that emerged during the decolonisation era looked to the past as a means of progress. An express aim of the Bula Tale Association in Fiji, for example, was to use a return to custom to ‘retrieve the Fijian people from the alien doctrine of private property to traditional communal ownership’.74 Building on the influence of the Apolosi Movement of a generation earlier, and the Navosavakadua movement before that, it was focused on developing a foundation for economic and cultural independence for its followers.75 So too the Moro Movement along with other custom movements that had grown from the splinter groups of the Maasina Rule a generation earlier, established their own tax collection programmes to build schools and to establish a private police force.76 They improved agricultural techniques and output, fiercely guarded hunting rights, established independent markets and attempted to mine for gold. In 1965 the people of Makaruka village on Guadalcanal’s Weather Coast visited Honiara to request the law be amended so they could form their own custom courts to govern according to their own laws.77 These were, in effect, movements that were doing and practising independence. If the Moro Movement was effectively suppressed by providing the administration greater access by road and air to active regions to enhance 72

73 74 75

76

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Secret telegram, High Commissioner for the Western Pacific to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 13 May 1965. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1965. ‘Quarterly Intelligence Review for the Period ending 30th June 1965’. TNA, CO 1036/ 1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1965. ‘Not Communists’ Extract from News from Fiji, 6 September 1961. TNA, CO 1036/859 Communism in Fiji, 1960–62. Brij Lal, Broken Waves (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii, 2003), pp. 48–52; Martha Kaplan, Neither Cargo nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 135. Acting High Commissioner for the Western Pacific to Secretary of State for the Colonies. Secret Telegram, 9 May 1964. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1964. ‘Intelligence Summary for February 1965 by the Local Intelligence Committee’. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1965. See also Davenport and Gülbün, ‘The Moro Movement’, pp. 123–32.

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‘contact’, it did not necessarily work because it brought civilisation and modernity to primitive minds over-interested in custom. It is as likely that it worked because it undermined the independence that followers had already been practising. That is, at their heart, many of these movements were what Ronald May has termed ‘self-help’, or what I would term ‘autonomy movements’. They marked a shift in the post-Second World War period from ‘religion to pragmatism, from myth to self-help’.78 In other words, many custom movements in an age of decolonisation practised the conditions of independence, and took for themselves and on their own terms a state of self-determination. Far from being insular, moreover, many appealed translocally, were pan-tribal, and appealed across old colonial and indigenous divides. The leaders of many were themselves travellers, having worked as sailors, indentured labourers, police or military labourers. In the case of the Moro, the key organisers had travelled internationally, and one, Joseph Goraiga, was already of interest to the administration, not for his beliefs regarding custom but for having worked as a sailor and visited Sydney.79 Read from this angle, these movements can be understood as Indigenous and local, but also transnationally informed events in which self-determination and decolonisation were overtly understood and practised. A second characteristic of custom or autonomy movements that seemed to have been underestimated by intelligence and administrative networks in the 1960s was the importance of land to Indigenous landowners. Land had a rational, as well as emotional or customary centrality to any decolonised future. In 1965 a report assessing future threats to the security of the Solomon Islands noted that land, ‘together with the complicated but traditional system of land ownership’, posed a ‘difficult and delicate problem’ for the British.80 A discourse was circulating in the districts of the Moro Movement, for example, that ‘the European is “stealing” the people’s land’, thus motivating peoples’ attachment to

78 79

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Ronald May, State and Society in Papua New Guinea: The First Twenty-Five Years (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2012), p. 53. May, State and Society, pp. 53–76; Ronald May, Micronationalist Movements in Papua New Guinea (Canberra: Australian National University, 1982), Chapter 4; Davenport and Çoker, ‘The Moro Movement’, pp. 133–4. ‘An Appreciation of the Threats to the Security of the Protectorate as at 1st June, 1965’. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1965. See generally Collin Allan, Customary Land Tenure in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, (Honiara: Western Pacific High Commission, 1957); Harold W. Scheffer and Peter Larmour, ‘Solomon Islands: Evolving a New Custom’, in R. G. Crocombe (ed.), Land Tenure in the Pacific (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1987), pp. 303–38; and Michael Scott, Severed Snake: Matrilineages, Making Place & a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic, 2007).

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the movement.81 Australian and especially British administrations in the Pacific acknowledged the complexity of land and land ownership, and in Britain’s case expended significant effort trying to understand the ‘legacy of bitterness’ it engendered for Indigenous Fijians, Solomon Islanders and Ni Vanuatu.82 But Indigenous land connections were frequently configured as counter-productive, and emotionally charged, attachments. In seeking to rationalise populations, economics and land holdings in the Solomons, Vanuatu and parts of Papua and New Guinea, colonial administrations would not only miss opportunities to engage with Indigenous peoples’ visions. In addition they also often established the conditions for turbulent, enduring and divisive contests. Land alienations through sale or lease, and the resettlement of populations in preparation for decolonisation throughout the western Pacific gave rise to numerous disputes between landowners and newcomers over land, hunting and surveying rights throughout the 1960s.83 On Guadalcanal, for example, Malaitan and other settlers sought to undertake agriculture or ‘improve their land’, but were repeatedly frustrated or obstructed by Moro followers.84 In Vanuatu too, in Tanna and Maewo, local landowners including John Frum followers refused to allow government geologists and tourists free access to their land, a situation that was only overcome in Maewo by the arrest and exile of resistant leaders.85 The key point here is that land was not just a resource, and for these autonomy movements it was the basis for physical, customary, genealogical and economic self-reliance and independence. It was already rationalised, and its place at the heart of many autonomy movements signalled this. Colonial administrations were, in some ways, justified in their pessimism about the applicability in the Pacific of the standard model of the nation state as the means of getting themselves off the United Nations hook. The western Pacific, or Melanesia was, culturally, linguistically and 81 82

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‘Intelligence Summary for September, 1964 by the Local Intelligence Committee’. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1964. Citing Resident High Commissioner, New Hebrides to Acting High Commissioner of the Western Pacific, 17 April and 15 July 1963. TNA, CO 1036/1227 Political Intelligence Reports: New Hebrides, 1963–65; TNA, CO 1036/1218 Annual Review of the Threats to the Security of Fiji, 1963–65; TNA, CO 1036/811–2 Commission of Enquiry to Investigate Land and Populations Problems in Fiji, 1960–62. See generally Crocombe, Land Tenure; Barak Sope, Land and Politics in the New Hebrides (Suva: South Pacific Social Sciences Association, 1983); and the contributions varied to Howard Van Trease (ed.), The Politics of Land in Vanuatu: From Colony to Independence (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1957). ‘Intelligence Summary for March, 1965’. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1965. Inward Telegram to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 6 July 1963 and 8 August 1963. TNA, CO 1036/1225. Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963.

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historically, diverse to a seemingly impossible extent. The impact of colonisation had also been extremely uneven. Yet from this diversity and unevenness, emerged a proliferation of localised dissident or autonomy movements that had definite synergies of both consciousness and strategy across space and time. Spanning colonial and Indigenous borders and space, similarities, parallels and shared trajectories insisted on a lived independence and self-determination. Arguably too, an emerging strength of these movements was their links across time. Many emerged from the wellsprings of suppressed movements of previous generations, or in regions that had been rebellious and resistant to colonisation in the past. Places like Malaita or Guadalcanal’s Weather Coast, for example, often remained radically independent as decolonisation approached. As the intelligence overview for the Solomon Islands summarised, memories of the punitive massacre of 1927 still remained ‘fresh in the memories of the Sinerango people’.86 More widely Maasina Rule ‘will linger’ in the memories of Solomon Islanders ‘for many years’, leaving ‘residual pockets of trouble’ all over the protectorate.87 The point here, is that if the model of the nation state was ill-fitting for many Pacific territories, Indigenous peoples had deep traditions to draw on to build independent, self-determining, and functional alternatives. But, almost universally, these were dismissed as cargo cults and the mere incessant talk of custom. The chronic underestimation by colonial observers of the capacities of Melanesians in the British and Australian territories meant that administrators frequently expressed surprise at Islanders’ sophisticated and interconnected critiques of the colonial system and of their status. In December 1964, for example, the British Intelligence Report for the month prominently noted under the ‘New Hebrides’ section that the Indigenous members of the Advisory Council were ‘remarkable for the frequency and fluency with which’ they spoke, and for their open and strong criticism of the administration’s management of land.88 Foot too, reporting for the United Nations in 1962, reported being struck in Papua New Guinea by the capacity of Papuan leaders to ‘think hard and straight’.89 This consistent underestimation of the political consciousness and capacity of Indigenous peoples would, in the end, be the weakness of decolonising administrations. The autonomy movements that emerged in this era maintained a quiet insistence on degrees of 86 87 88 89

‘Intelligence Summary for the Month of April, 1964 by the Local Intelligence Committee’. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1964. Intelligence Report, December 1963. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963. ‘Intelligence Summary for December, 1964 by the Local Intelligence Committee’, TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1963–65. The Canberra Times, 16 May 1962, p. 1.

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self-sufficiency, and economic, cultural and spiritual independence. They were effectively a localised discourse and practice of decolonisation. But while administrations remained focused on communist threats or on overcoming the primitive, emotional and cultish mind of Melanesians fixated on custom, Islanders went on to erode closely guarded borders and make evermore meaningful contact with the decolonizing world. Linking ‘centrifugal’ forces: frustrating mobility and intellectual flight After some fifty years or so, more and more Melanesians are becoming aware of the anachronistic ramshackle system which governs them, and sooner or later (and more likely sooner), there will be a challenge to that system . . . The insularity from which this area has suffered is now disappearing fast. Report on Visit to the Pacific, 1965.90

On 1 August 1969, on Bougainville Island, which lies slightly to the west of the British Solomon Islands protectorate, a tense but comical stand-off was being acted out on Rorovana land. Australian surveyors had recently arrived in the area, laying survey pegs in purposeful patterns. It was the first physical indication to gathering villagers that their land had been compulsorily acquired by the Australian government for a privately operated copper mining venture by Rio Tinto.91 The women of the village repeatedly removed the survey pegs as surveyors set them out, while the men of the village watched on, offering ‘passive support’. Women were the landowners of Rorovana land, but the Australian government had dealt mainly with men when trying to negotiate a sale, a two-year-long negotiation that utterly failed.92 As tensions over land negotiations had intensified in the weeks before the stand-off, Australia deployed extra police to Bougainville, who, with ‘urgent attention’, had been outfitted with riot gear, ‘tear gas grenades and blank rifle cartridges’.93 The standoff between the women of the land and surveyors eased after villagers managed to throw one of the ‘main poles into the sea’, but tensions remained high.94 Four days later, as bulldozers arrived to begin Rio 90 91

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Paragraph 45. TNA, CO 1036/1132 Constitutional development: Harrison and Horner report, Western Pacific High Commission territories, 1965. R. A. Neilson British High Commission, Canberra to I. K. C. Ellison, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 5 August 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). R. A. Neilson British High Commission, Canberra to I. K. C. Ellison, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 10 July 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). Ibid. Neilson to Ellison, 5 August 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret).

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Tinto’s land-clearing, villagers lined up in front of them, bringing the operation to a standstill. Armed police tried unsuccessfully to clear the protest with tear gas, eventually resorting to a more forceful baton charge. This was immediately reported in the Australian press, with the Sunday Times Supplement reporting that ‘the gassing and clubbing of tribesmen is certain to arouse the hostility of the Afro-Asian bloc’.95 The Australian minister for external affairs had originally preferred to send Australian military troops in to Bougainville, but the administration’s forces were already ‘seriously over-stretched’ patrolling the West Papuan ‘frontier’, and attempting to dampen ‘unrest’ on the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain.96 There a coalition of Tolai landowners, the Mataungan Association, had joined Bougainvilleans’ call of ‘Buka for the Bukas’.97 Adding ‘Tolai for the Tolais’ they repeated an anti-colonial refrain heard throughout the Pacific over generations, variously calling for ‘Samoa for Samoans’, ‘Tonga for Tongans’ or ‘Viti for Kai Viti’.98 Discussing the events on Bougainville and the Gazelle Peninsula Richard Neilson of the British High Commission in Canberra, described the ferment in the region as resulting from two of many of the Pacific’s ‘centrifugal tendencies’.99 Throughout administrative discourse, these so-called centrifugal forces were configured as the political barbs on which the territorial integrity of future postcolonial nations could catch and tear. At their most benign, they were seen as threatening to turn the desired uneventful handover of power to Indigenous elites into an eventful and embarrassing event. Their suppression needed to be swift, but it also threatened to catch ‘the world press’, drawing the United Nations’ attention before Australia or Britain were ready to part on their own terms.100 Grass-roots movements with local interests and deeply intractable anticolonial grievances did seem to be pulling political consciousness in the colonial and trust territories in ‘centrifugal’ directions, away from the neat 95 96

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Press clipping ‘Batons Out in Bougainville’, Sunday Times Supplement, 10 August 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). R. A. Neilson British High Commission, Canberra to I. K. C. Ellison, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 10 July 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). John Allan, ‘Political Development Begins at the Grass Roots’, The Canberra Times, 25 November 1969, p. 2. Ibid. Richard Neilson to Ian Ellison, 21 November 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and NewGuinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret): ‘There are sufficient centrifugal tendencies in the Territory that once started a process of fragmentation would be hard to stop.’ Telegram, marked ‘Secret UK Eyes Only’, British High Commission Canberra to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 3 September 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret).

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borders of nation states. The West Papuan independence movement; autonomy and land rights movements on the Gazelle Peninsula, Bougainville and the western Solomon Islands; and the explosive issues of land, ethnicity and labour in Fiji, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and on Guadalcanal were issues that received frequent attention from colonial administrations.101 Time and again Indigenous peoples’ concerns over land use and cultural practices were framed as emotional anachronisms in a global nation-making process where economic development and territorial integrity dwarfed isolated and local concerns. But if we reconfigure these centrifugal forces in terms of their networks and connectivity, we can see that many were actually the result of coalescence, a coming together, of diverse and transnational Indigenous narratives. Underpinning seemingly remote political movements were deeper shared currents of thinking, border crossings and ruptures that enabled a proliferation of conceptual connections. From at least the mid-1960s, these forces blossomed with the increased degrees of mobility, of bodies and ideas, that accelerated in the Pacific to a point from which it could not be wound back. In a new development in 1965, the sixth South Pacific Conference in Lae, New Guinea, was attended by Indigenous representatives appointed by administering powers. It was the first year that Western Samoa became a formal and independent member of the South Pacific Commission, and matters of decolonisation and independence dominated proceedings at the conference.102 Thoughts frequently turned to the future and to independence as delegates mixed, talked and compared situations. In informal discussions Mariano Kelesi, the president of the Malaita Council, a reincarnation of the old Maasina Rule, floated the idea of a united Melanesian political party along the lines of his recently established Solomon Islands Democratic Party. The Papua and New Guinea delegates rejected the idea at first, citing the impossibility of uniting the enormous cultural and linguistic diversity of their region. But the seed of an idea had been planted and with some interest British intelligence in the Solomon Islands later reported that Kelesi influenced the inception of dedicated political parties in Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, and in the recently turbulent Gilbert and Ellice Islands.103 Reverend Titus Path of 101

102 103

See for a general overview of the region Peter Hempenstall and Noel Rutherford, Protest and Dissent in the Colonial Pacific (Apia, Western Samoa: University of the South Pacific, 1984); and the case-studies in Alex Mamak and Ahmed Ali (eds), Race, Class and Rebellion in the South Pacific (Winchester, MA: Allen and Unwin, 1979). Uentabo Fakaofo Neemia, Cooperation and Conflict: Costs, Benefits and National Interest in Pacific Regional Cooperation (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1986), pp. 18–22. Telegram Assistant High Commissioner for the Western Pacific to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 13 October 1965. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1965.

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Vanuatu had also consulted widely with Melanesian delegates at the conference, and was reported to have been inspired by the note of unity underpinning the concept of political parties. He went on to attempt to establish his own united party spanning the language and cultural divisions of the Condominium.104 The conference, in other words, had become a site for the cross-pollination of potent ideas, and spoke to the growing significance of mobility. The fact that the South Pacific Conference in 1965 inspired new strategies would be unremarkable were it not for the background in which it took place. The conference met in a colony where the administration was described by the ever-observant British as ‘rigid and reminiscent of the high days of colonialism’, where the attitude still prevailed among white settlers that ‘firm handling’ is the only language ‘the natives understood’.105 None of the Indigenous delegates, with the exception of the Samoans, travelled to Lae without express approval from colonial administrations, and in a reflection of their civil status as natives, many did not even have a passport. While most would have travelled with permits and passes for which they had sought permission, Ni Vanuatu delegates from the then New Hebrides were stateless ‘native non-status’ subjects who travelled with documents simply affirming they were ‘domiciled in the New Hebrides’. This was a source of shame in Lae, they would later report, and other Islanders looked ‘at those pieces of paper’ with scorn.106 The conference nevertheless enabled the Ni Vanuatu delegates to compare their own status to others, finding to their grief that in comparison with other Pacific Islanders, ‘they had no civil status whatever’.107 Mobility, in other words, was still heavily circumscribed in the Pacific, and as restrictions relaxed, it would enable Indigenous peoples to make transformative connections. Difficult to control explicitly in the prevailing winds of international opinion, border-crossings would emerge as a potent source of empowerment and a matter of some concern to decolonising administrations from 1965.

104

105

106 107

Extract from Western Pacific High Commission Intelligence Summary, August 1965; and Quarterly Intelligence Report, 1965. TNA, CO 1036/1295 Future of the New Hebrides, 1963–65. In order of appearance: Richard Nielson, British High Commission, Canberra to Ian Ellison, South West Pacific Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, 8 August 1968; and Report of a survey trip undertaken by Commander Short the Assistant Naval Adviser to Papua New Guinea. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and NewGuinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). Report on Visit to the Pacific, July/August, 1965. TNA, CO 1036/1295 Future of the New Hebrides, 1963–65; TNA, FCO 32/708 Status of New Hebrideans, 1960. TNA, FCO 32/708 Status of New Hebrideans, 1960.

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In increasing numbers during the 1960s Indigenous peoples began breaking out of the confines of colonies, both physically and conceptually. Movement within and between borders was something colonial administrations remained eager to monitor, and then to control as the bordercrossings of ideas, concepts, money and resources threatened to undermine efforts to ‘develop’ stable and conforming nation states. Thus in assessing future threats to security in the Solomon Islands in 1965, British intelligence informed the Colonial Office that ‘a total of 217 . . . mostly students’ remained abroad in the United Kingdom, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea where it was expected ‘they will come into contact with many shades of political opinion’.108 Indeed they did. During the 1960s in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Suva, Vila, Port Moresby, Lyon, Paris, London, Honolulu and Auckland, Pacific Islanders, Indigenous Australians, Kanaks and Maoris mixed, connected and compared situations in numbers not seen since the early nineteenth century. Opening access to higher levels of education for Indigenous peoples started in the 1960s and was originally motivated by Britain’s and Australia’s desire to produce a generation of independence leaders. In the time that Australia was in power in Papua and New Guinea, very few Papuans were a part of colonial governance structures, and virtually none acquired a colonial education beyond that provided through missions.109 On Foot’s advice, however, and as a precursor to the opening of a university, an Administration College was opened in Port Moresby in 1963 with the fairly sedate task of training administrators and leaders to be ready for independence. But the college quickly became part of a wider transnational network of radical thinking. Described by locals as having walls ‘adorned with a picture of Chairman Mao’, a group of radical thinkers, nearly all men save for one woman, formed the Bully Beef Club.110 Hosted by 108

109

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‘An appreciation of the threats to the security of the protectorate as at 1st June, 1965’. TNA, CO 1036/1225 Political Intelligence Reports: BSIP, 1965. They were located in ‘the United Kingdom (3), New Zealand (16), Fiji (5), Australia (35) and the Territory of Papua/New Guinea (158)’. On Australia’s changes during this period see Don Woolford, Papua New Guinea: Initiation and Independence (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2013) particularly Ch. 2; Jonathan Ritchie, ‘Defining Citizenship for a New Nation: Papua New Guinea, 1972-1974’, Journal of Pacific History, 48:2 (2013): 144–61; Clive Moore and Mary Kooyman (eds.), A Papua New Guinea Political Chronicle, 1967–1991 (Bathurst and London: C. Hurst, 1998). Confidential report of Brian Barder’s visit to Papua New Guinea, New Hebrides and BSIP. TNA, FCO 24/1990 Political situation in Papua New Guinea. Anne DicksonWaiko, ‘Women, Nation and Decolonisation in Papua New Guinea’, Journal of Pacific History, 48:2 (2013): 183–5. Albert Maori Kiki, Kiki: Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime, a New Guinea Autobiography (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1968), pp. 148, 152–3; See also

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Albert Maori Kiki and his wife Elizabeth, the club met regularly to debate politics and colonial injustices and inequalities. It eventually evolved along lines suggested by Kelesi in 1965, and in 1967 they established the Pangu (Papua and Niugini Union) Party. The party would eventually lead the country to independence, and in the 1960s it was radically aligned with a unifying politics of independence inspired by AfroAsian streams of nationalism, and pan-African streams of non-state nationalism.111 Building on the importance of the Administration College, the University of Papua New Guinea was established in 1965 to cater more broadly to Islanders from throughout the western Pacific, and the University of the South Pacific shared this role when it was established in 1968. The increasingly radical East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, and schools and universities in Australia and New Zealand, also offered education and scholarships under various development policies to students throughout the Pacific. In 1966, and despite the White Australia Policy, around 400 Papuans attended schools and later universities in Australia.112 In the hands of some students this access to education helped to produce waves of new consciousness. In the French Pacific too, the capacity for physical and conceptual mobility was opening up by the mid-1960s. Kanak student Jean-Mari Tjibaou travelled from Kanaky New Caledonia on a Crossance des jeunes nations (Growth of Young Nations) scholarship to study nation building and development at the Faculté Catholique de Lyon. One of his fellow students and close friends was Ni Vanuatu Gérard Leymang. Among students and teachers from developing and newly independent countries in Africa and South America he studied economics, political science, sociology and development studies. Together they observed French reactions to immigration from North Africa and witnessed the formation of racialised ghettos in Lyon, benefiting all the while from the explosion of ideas in the wake of the 1968 student riots. When Tjibaou went on to study at the Collège Coopératif in Paris, he developed his thesis project on

111

112

Rachel Cleland, Grass Roots to Independence and Beyond: The Contribution by Women in Papua New Guinea, 1951–1991 (Claremont, WA, 1996). J. H. Smith, ‘Preparations for Independence: West African Experience Applied to the Pacific’, in John Smith (ed.), Administering Empire: The British Colonial Service in Retrospect (London: University of London Press, 1999), pp. 305–21. Donald Denoon, A Trial Separation: Australia and the Decolonization of Papua New Guinea (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005), p. 54; Davianna Pomaika’i McGregor and Ibrahim Aoude, ‘“Our History, Our Way!”: Ethnic Studies for Hawaii’, in Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua, Ikaika Hussey and Erin Kahunawaika’ala (eds), A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 66–77.

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Melanesian cultural identity, and gravitated towards the apartment of Roce Pidjot, the grand-père (grandfather) to a whole generation of Melanesians in Paris. Pidjot was the first Melanesian to enter the National Assembly in 1964 where he represented New Caledonia, and his apartment was visited constantly by Melanesian students and soldiers.113 Like the Bully Beef club in Port Moresby, it became a critical hub of intellectual decolonisation and Tjibaou returned to Kanaky New Caledonia in 1971, having learnt to better read his world. ‘It is as clear as crystal!’ he would pronounce with insightful flare, the ‘colonial powers have left, they’ve decolonized, granted independence, but they arranged things in such a way as to maintain a presence, an economic domination with the complicity of the new regimes’.114 Reflecting on the rise in consciousness throughout Papua and New Guinea, the western Solomons and Vanuatu, Neilson wrote to the British Foreign and Colonial Office from Canberra in 1969 that it is the ‘final stages of the decolonisation process that are the most difficult to keep under control’. He worried that everywhere in Melanesia there were ‘centrifugal’ forces, of local, informed, militant and radical movements calling for their own kind of independence. These threatened the topdown administered programmes of national independence driven by the imperative to maintain territorial integrity, and to prioritise economic development and constitutional construction. He, and the Australian officials he spoke with worried that the ideas that people like Tjibaou, Kiki and others were connecting with would produce ‘disintegration’ and ‘fragmentation’ of national consciousness and borders.115 One of the sites of enduring concern to both British and Australian administrations was the ambiguous borderland area between the western Solomon Islands and mainland New Guinea.116 On the one hand, this region was rich in agricultural land and mineral resources, and Bougainville on the New Guinea side of the border was to be the site of the administration-backed Panguna mine. On the other hand, the region was interlinked by familial and identity networks that contested the border between the Solomons and New Guinea. Created in a bargain between colonial powers, the border was inorganic, but something Britain and Australia were doggedly sticking to. This was despite, indeed in 113 114 115 116

Eric Waddell, Jean-Marie Tjibaou: Kanak Witness to the World (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), pp. 61–72. Tjibaou, 1989, p. 17, cited in Waddell, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, p. 62. Neilson to Ellison, 8 September 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). Judith Bennet, ‘Across the Bougainville Strait’, Journal of Pacific History, 35:1 (2000): 67–83; Ralph R. Premdas et al., ‘The Western Breakaway Movement in the Solomon Islands’, Pacific Studies, 7:2 (1984): 34–67.

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response to, the internationally informed and Indigenous forms of independence being expressed on the Gazelle Peninsula, Bougainville and parts of the Solomon Islands. Key among these was the Mataungan Association formed in 1969 on the Gazelle Peninsula under the leadership of Oscar Tammur and John Kaputin, who was a recent graduate of the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.117 Like the Moro and Maasina movements, the Mataungan Association was a village-based autonomy movement that practised civil disobedience by withholding taxes from colonial administrations and redirecting them to the association.118 For Australian and British administrations, the association seemed to pop up out of nowhere, growing in strength ‘remarkably quickly’, and was able within months to rally 8,000–10,000 Tolai marchers in a peaceful demonstration on the streets of Rabaul.119 As with other autonomy movements, it unified regional and clan-based animosity around the performance of self-determination, calling for land justice and identity-based unity. Months earlier Kaputin, who was a member of Papua and New Guinea’s House of Assembly, had tabled a paper, ‘The Politics of Melanesia’, in which he laid out plans for an independent Papua New Guinea that was based on collective agriculture and the appropriation of foreign enterprises. It was an assertion, later backed by the Mataungan Association, that Papuans could and should design their own independent future, but it was summarily dismissed by Britain and Australia as having ‘vague Black Power ideas . . . and Maoist leanings’.120 In July 1970 the Mataungan Association moved on to land at Keravat near Rabaul which they claimed had been illegally appropriated for the Australian administration. They immediately began clearing the land, and over the next month hundreds more Tolai would join the occupation. Squatting at Keravat highlighted the rawness of issues of land and land 117 118

119

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Memoir to Director-General, 9 September 1970 NAA, A452 1970/2883 Communist Interest in Papua New Guinea. Territories Correspondence Files. For differing interpretations see John Kaputin, The Mataungan Association and the Need for Political Organisation for Greater Indigenous Economic Development (Port Moresby: Waigani Seminar, 1970); Peter Connolly, Simon Gaius and Aisea Taviai, Report of a Commission of Inquiry into Local Government and Other Matters in the Gazelle Peninsula of East New Britain: 29th September to 17th October, 1969 (Port Moresby: Territory of Papua and New Guinea, 1969). Martin Reith British High Commission, Canberra to Ian Ellison, SWPD. TNA, FCO, 8 September 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). John Bennetts, ‘Mr Gorton’s Four-Point Message to Papua-NG’, The Canberra Times, 14 July 1970, p. 2; R. A. Neilson British High Commission Canberra to W. A. Ward, South West Pacific Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 22 July 1970. TNA, FCO 24/800 Civil Unrest in Papua and New Guinea.

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rights throughout the Peninsula during the 1960s. A post-war boom among the Tolai population saw numbers grow from 60 to 80,000 people in a short space of time, helping to accentuate the fact that the most fertile land on the peninsula was in the hands of expatriate plantation owners, or the Australian administration.121 Spatially resistant strategies of occupying and re-settling land, or preventing its occupation, had been used the year before by Oscar Tammur, who in 1968 had led a group of villagers on to Raniola plantation, occupying it with plantations of their own crops. After a month of squatting at Keravat the Australian administration responded as it had in Bougainville a year earlier, with force. A reported 1,000 police, who had been gathering near Rabaul since September the previous year, were sent in to clear the land, following up in the weeks that followed, with the mass-arrests of Tolai tax evaders.122 In a show of defiance, Oscar Tammur claimed in 1971, that ‘many thousands’ more Tolai would continue to be jailed or arrested to avoid paying tax to the Australian administration.123 The commitment of Tolai supporters to the Mataungan Association and their practice of self-determination was framed by the Australian administration as a determination to resist progress, a failure to see beyond insularity and local concerns, and a failure to understand the requirements of a modernised future. The language of reportage remained mired in colonial phrases, with the Tolai described as an advanced ‘proud’ people, and ‘top quality’ natives, while their protests were dismissed by the minister for external territories, C. E. Barnes, as the cultural by-product of the ‘rapid . . . advances towards a modern economy’.124 Configured as a centrifugal force, the Mataungan Association, along with protests on Bougainville, was construed as a primitive, isolationist and secessionist movement rather than as a serious engagement with the global concept of decolonisation.125 Configured 121 122

123 124

125

Linda Welch, ‘Capitalism, Modern or Primitive’, The Canberra Times, 24 October 1968, p. 21. Telegram, marked ‘Secret UK Eyes Only’, British High Commission Canberra to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 3 September 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). ‘P-NG Men Choose Goal’, The Canberra Times, 1 May 1970, p. 10. In order of appearance: Martin Reith British High Commission, Canberra to Ian Ellison, SWPD, FCO, 8 September 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and NewGuinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret); Richard Neilson to Ian Ellison, 21 November 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). On the Tolai past see Klaus Neumann, ‘Not the Way It Really Was: Writing a History of the Tolai (Papua New Guinea)’, Journal of Pacific History, 24:2 (1989): 209–20; Klaus Neumann, Not the Way It Really Was: Constructing the Tolai Past (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1992). ‘33 Police Hurt in Rabaul Violence’, The Canberra Times, 2 July 1971, p. 1; ‘Villagers Clash with Mine-Survey Party’, The Canberra Times, 10 September 1968, p. 11; ‘Police

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thus as secessionist rather than an independence movement the violence of their suppression could be treated internationally as a matter of internal security. As the British Mission to the United Nations advised, if it was made clear that ‘the aim of the Australian operation was to maintain the territorial integrity of the Trust Territory of New Guinea’, then criticism of Australia at the United Nations ‘would be more muted’, for the United Nations would prioritise territorial integrity over the self-determination of peoples.126 There is another way to look at these centrifugal forces that views them from the broader perspective of connectivity. Some of the movements that emerged in the 1960s were explicitly separatist. The Melanesian Independence Front for example, founded in Rabaul in 1968, sought to create a state of Melanesia, made up of New Britain, New Ireland, Bougainville and Manus islands, that would be supported economically by Indigenous-owned copper and palm oil industries.127 The Melanesian Independence Front eventually dissipated, but it is significant for the sentiment it encapsulated. People throughout Melanesia were seeking independence independently, and their transnational search is what connected and anchored them to this international community. This was something that was common to numerous so-called centrifugal movements throughout the Pacific. In July 1969 Australian prime minister John Gorton visited Papua and New Guinea. In the House of Assembly he instructed Papuan members on how to avoid the fragmentation of the future nation, and instructed them on the importance of majority rule. Kaputin responded with a rebuke, ‘We may be black but we are not stupid. We know where we are going.’128 He captured the key dynamic of decolonisation in and around the Pacific where colonial administrations remained weighed down in the blinkered racism of the past. These administrations systematically lacked

126

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to Enforce Authority’, The Canberra Times, 9 May 1969, p. 2; ‘Riot Police Fly in as NG Land Deal Ends’, The Canberra Times, 25 July 1969, p. 9; ‘Bougainville: Bare-Breasted Women Wrestle Police over First Survey Peg’, The Canberra Times, 2 August 1969, p. 1; ‘Gorton Backs Force Against Natives’, The Canberra Times, 7 August 1969, p. 1. These various clashes are discussed at length by British, Australian and United Nations officials in TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). D. N. Lane, UK Mission to the United Nations to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 5 May 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). This was noted as part of a conversation between the British High Commission in Canberra and the United Kingdom Mission to the United Nations to Australians preparing to send the military to Arawa on Bougainville. ‘New Party in NG Forms Branch’, The Canberra Times, 1 November 1968, p. 8; Extract from the Australian Intelligence Weekly Report, 6 November 1968. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). Bennetts, ‘Mr Gorton’s Four-Point Message to Papua-NG’, p. 2.

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a capacity to fathom the extent to which Indigenous peoples had made extensive links and connections with a world of ideas and strategies. People and ideas criss-crossed the Ocean in meaningful ways and often with a nimbleness that left British and Australian intelligence personnel struggling to keep up. Paul Lapun, the House of Assembly Member for Bougainville and deputy leader of the Pangu party, for example, used the Australian courts against the Australian administration, and raised significant support from students, unions and individuals up and down Australia’s east coast.129 So too in 1970 John Kaputin visited Australia. The ‘tall good-looking Tolai’ visited Wollongong where he stirred ‘things up among the revolutionary students and workers of that city’ and was followed by Oscar Tammur, who like Kaputin was closely observed by Australia’s Security Intelligence Organisation.130 Tammur reportedly made substantial contacts with ‘radical New Guineans and Aborigines’, attended the March against Racism in Sydney and met with ‘Radical Aborigines’ in Brisbane and Sydney.131 Australian intelligence would conclude that ‘the impact of Tammur’s visit’ was that there was now ‘a well established contact’ between Papuan leaders and ‘black radicals’ in Australia.132 In 1970 ‘a small indigenous Christian church’ in Papua and New Guinea petitioned the United Nations stating that Indigenous peoples were better able to protect their rights to land and culture than Australia. Their complaint was that they needed ‘full control in internal matters with power to call in experts from Australia, the United Nations and newly developed countries’ to develop real independence.133 The frustration and impatience expressed in this petition and in movements like the Mataungan Association and the Melanesian Independence Front was a growing and potent force in parts of Papua and New Guinea by the end of the 1960s. It is not surprising therefore that by that time race consciousness and philosophies of Black power, with its underlying ethic of transnational unity as the basis for building independence, were connecting disparate movements and interests in and around the Pacific. In a 129 130 131 132

133

Petitions to the United Nations contained in TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and NewGuinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). Canberra Times, 19 September 1970. NAA, A452 1970/2883 Communist Interest in Papua New Guinea. Territories Correspondence Files. Memo on the travel of Oscar Tammur, 13 December 1971. NAA, A452 1970/2883 Communist Interest in Papua New Guinea. Territories Correspondence Files. Memo, Regional Director of ASIO to Secretary, Department of External Territories, 31 December 1971. NAA, A452 1970/2883 Communist Interest in Papua New Guinea. Territories Correspondence Files. TNA, FCO 24/805 Discussions at United Nations Conferences on Papua and New Guinea.

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memo to the Department of External Territories the regional director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation would thus predict that ‘racialism and the related issues of colonialism [would] emerge as the major issue for radical protest’ after 1972.134 The prediction could not have been more correct. Across the Pacific race consciousness and cultural affirmation had become a powerful coalescing force symbolising a shared and entwined historical grievance for Indigenous peoples. In the case of centrifugal movements such as those on Bougainville and the Gazelle Peninsula, these did not displace and dilute localised expressions of identity. Rather they reinforced them. In cities around the Pacific and the world Indigenous peoples were connecting numerous local sites of countercolonial struggle to transnational streams of thought finding unity in diversity. This was decolonisation. For like the physical mobility of handfuls of independence leaders in the 1960s, it served to undermine and erode some of the limiting capacities of colonial, and soon to be national, borders. Moreover by frustrating the private plans of decolonising administrations they forced dialogue, and in so doing, ensured the emergence of Indigenous narratives of decolonisation. Conclusion: coalescing forces By the end of the 1960s, deep in the Papuan jungle that New York Times journalist Rosenthal had wondered about in 1962, the border had been crossed by substantial numbers of West Papuan dissidents seeking asylum in the New Guinea highlands. Well into 1965 Australian officials had denied the persistent stories that settlements of refugees were popping up along the border with West Papua. But according to Papua New Guinean House of Assembly member Wegra Kenu, hundreds of asylum seekers were refused asylum and escorted back across the border by Australian armed police.135 This would change later in the decade as Australian officials responded to international pressure. By 1969 when Indonesian control of West Papua was confirmed by a controversial United Nations plebiscite, asylum-seeking West Papuans were being cared for in 134

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Memo, Regional Director of ASIO to Secretary, Department of External Territories, 31 December 1971. NAA, A452 1970/2883 Communist Interest in Papua New Guinea. Territories Correspondence Files. ‘Refugees “sent to death” in N.G.’, The Canberra Times, 1 March 1965, p. 1; ‘Questions on Asylum Policy’, The Canberra Times, 21 August 1965, p. 10. See also David Palmer, ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Case of Papuan Asylum-Seekers’, Australian Journal of Politics & History 52:4 (2006): 576–603; Klaus Neumann, ‘Asylum Seekers and “Non-Political Native Refugees” in Papua and New Guinea’, Australian Historical Studies, 22:120 (2002): 359–72.

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Australian refugee camps and provided with ‘food, accomo, medical attention, clothes etc. on standards comparable those applicable our own indigenous [sic]’ peoples.136 The New York Agreement, like the border it had so abruptly brought to prominence, had been a convenient solution for the administration of both a territory and a peoples who the world assumed were too primitive to govern themselves. But on the ground these plans were resisted by social and physical landscapes pockmarked by the persistent acts of self-determination of administered peoples. From his small concrete home in the suburb of Hohola in Port Moresby, West Papuan refugee Eli Marjen waged an extensive campaign against what he saw as the re-colonisation of his country. The West Papuan Morning Star flag, a symbol of independence, hung on his wall alongside photos of members of the West Papuan government-in-exile, Jouwe, Kaisiepo and Womsiwor, who had left West Papua for New York in 1962.137 Since then Jouwe and Kaisiepo had applied repeatedly to Canberra to be able to return to the island of their home. In 1967, 1968 and 1969 they applied for entry to Papua stating they wanted to visit the West Papuan refugee camps on Manus Island and the border, but Australian officials repeatedly refused. On Jouwe’s application to ‘return to a democratic “Melanesian Atmosphere”’ in 1969, a handwritten margin note simply said, ‘I take it the answer is no.’138 In support of the government-in-exile, Marjen fought tirelessly to hold together this alternative, independent, nation-in-exile. A large radio capable of picking up international broadcasts adorned the room in which he wrote to university students around the world for support. In a letter dated 13 May 1969, for example, he wrote to the Missouri Students Association. ‘We are not worldly people’, he wrote, massively understating the reality of the West Papuan nation-in-exile.139 Eli was a radio announcer until 1963 when he sought refuge in Papua and New Guinea having broadcast in favour of Papuan nationalism. There he and other 136

137 138

139

‘Secret’ Telegram, 19 November 1969. NAA, A452 1969/4432. Freedom Committee of West Papua. On the Act of Free Choice and why Papuans refer to it as the Act of No Choice see Saltford, The United Nations, 158–76. Press clipping, Hank Nelson, ‘Exile from West Papua’, 17 May 1969. NAA, A452 1969/ 4432 Freedom Committee of West Papua. NAA, A452 1969/4432 Freedom Committee of West Papua. The treatment of West Papuan refugees and Australia’s sensitivity to Indonesian protests were a prominent concern throughout this period. See Doran, ‘Toeing the Line’; Chauvel, ‘Up the Creek’; Neumann, ‘Asylum Seekers’; Palmer, ‘Between a Rock’; Hank Nelson, ‘Liberation: The End of Australian Rule in Papua New Guinea’, Journal of Pacific History, 35:3 (2000): 269–80. Eli Marjen to Missouri Students Association, 13 May 1969 and Press clipping. NAA, A452 1969/4432 Freedom Committee of West Papua.

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West Papuans edited the newspaper Fadjar Melanesia for West Papuan exiles transmitting news from West Papua brought to them by refugees and Indonesian allies, across borders and across the world. Of the West Papuan border he said in an interview in May 1969, it ‘is only a line and mosquitoes cross it freely’.140 In the final months before Indonesia and the United Nations oversaw the plebiscite that became known as the Act of Free Choice, delivering West Papua to President Suharto’s Indonesia with United Nations sanction, Marjen recalled that since the 1963 takeover ‘the Indonesians said they would wipe out the Papuan mind’.141 If that were the case, it was a categorical failure. The ‘mind’ of West Papuans, though dispersed, remained focused on decolonisation and throughout the 1960s a complex network spanning the world, kept the dream alive. Handwritten notes in Australian intelligence files attempting to map that network, resorted to incomprehensible diagrams made up of lines and dashes, connecting and intersecting with geometric and abstract shapes on paper to signify and track the links and circuits that spanned vast expanses of distance.142 Decolonisation for West Papuans, was by definition, all in the mind. The revolutionary significance of the physical and intellectual mobility that Indigenous peoples, such as West Papuans, Papua New Guineans, Ni Vanuatu, Kanaks and Solomon Islanders accessed in the 1960s cannot be overstated. At the start of the decade the Pacific world was still governed by a casual and unashamed racism where access to wealth and privilege was deeply colour coded. For the vast majority of Indigenous peoples who interacted regularly with white people, it was to serve them, work for them, clean and cook for them, be supervised by them or very occasionally to learn from them. In most Pacific colonies, that is, ‘the whites are in the dress circle and the blacks in the pit’.143 Settlers and expatriates owned or leased much of the most fertile and valuable land, controlled local economies and very few Indigenous peoples worked in colonial administrations or received a western education beyond the lowest levels of primary school. In Vanuatu, any students with a talent for schooling had to go to the Solomons, Fiji, a French or a missionary school where, if they were lucky, they might receive secondary 140 141 142 143

Press clipping, Nelson, ‘Exile from West Papua’. NAA, A452 1969/4432 Freedom Committee of West Papua. Press clipping, Nelson, ‘Exile from West Papua’. NAA, A452 1969/4432 Freedom Committee of West Papua. This diagram is on the front cover of NAA, A452 1969/4432 Freedom Committee of West Papua. Secret UK Eyes Only Telegram, British High Commission Canberra to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 3 September 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and NewGuinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret).

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schooling.144 So, when Papua and New Guinea’s House of Assembly opened in 1964, of the 38 Papuan members, only nineteen had been to a western school, only four had been educated past primary school and twenty were illiterate.145 Within less than a decade this situation would transform as colonial boundaries and borders became evermore porous, and the consensus grew that colonialism, and Indigenous peoples’ dependence on it, would end. The West Papuan network was only the most coherent of the transnational and global threads that underpinned networks of decolonisation throughout the Pacific. These variously coalesced in organisations such as the Moro or the Mataungan Association, which far from being destructive centrifugal forces, were nodal points within which localised Indigenous concerns intersected with the global ferment. From the ground up, Indigenous peoples were linking in to subaltern currents of thought and action in which interlocked imperatives of land rights, self-determination, and cultural identity and autonomy, prevailed over territorial borders as the pillars of Indigenous discourses of decolonisation. In the hands of Indigenous peoples, the trajectories of anti-colonialism and counter-colonialism continued to define an alternative to the potentially oppressive programme of decolonisation through nation-making that was being progressed by the United Nations and colonial administrations. After 1965, when education, air travel and radio waves democratised mobility in and around the Pacific, Indigenous peoples extended these trajectories giving rise to an explosion of political and cultural expressions of Indigenous independence.

144 145

Report from Resident Commissioner, New Hebrides, 6 March 1963. TNA, CO 1036/ 1293 Future of the New Hebrides. Denoon, A Trial Separation, p. 37. On the challenges faced in government in this context see the autobiographies Michael Somare, Sana: An Autobiography of Michael Somare (Port Moresby: Niugini Press, 1975); Kiki, Kiki.

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Black: internalising decolonisation and networks of solidarity

Black is beautiful, right on brothers and sisters, and screw you whitey. Bruce McGuinness, 1972.1

In September 1969, Albert Maori Kiki, who hosted the Bully Beef Club at his house in Port Morseby, travelled to Australia where he made headlines. He had already attracted attention in Papua and New Guinea for what were seen as his increasingly radical, anti-colonial views, and Richard Neilson for the British Foreign and Colonial Office had characterised him as ‘an intelligent, coherent and vocal Papuan’ who was ‘ripe for cultivating by those wishing to fish in troubled waters’.2 Before audiences in Sydney and Melbourne, Kiki berated the Australian administration for ‘creating a mess’ in New Guinea and for treating the New Guinea ‘black man’ as a ‘black dog’, expecting him ‘to say yes sir, thank you sir, and shut his mouth’. But with independence, he said, Australia would have to learn to relate to Papuans not ‘as our masters but as our friends’.3 His words offer an insight into a quiet revolution that was forming in and around the Pacific as Blackness, or colour, was transforming from a source of isolation and shame to one of transnational connectedness and strength. Kiki’s ‘fiery’ speech did not go unnoticed at a time when British and Australian administrations in the Pacific were sensitive both to criticism and to signs they were losing control of the decolonisation process.4 In an undated letter marked ‘secret’, and hand delivered to Australia’s Security Intelligence Organisation some time in 1969, Australian administrators 1 2

3 4

‘Aborigines Get a New Voice’, The Age, 27 November 1972. R. A. Neilson, British High Commission Canberra to W. Swain, South West Pacific Division, 17 October 1969. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New-Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret). ‘Politician’s Warning: Australian “Mess” in New Guinea’, The Canberra Times, 15 September 1969, p. 7. D. P. Sheekey, Head of Special Branch to the Commissioner of Police, Konedobu, 1 October 1969. NAA, A452 1969/3045 Expatriate Political Influence in Papua New Guinea, p. 189.

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blamed ‘European members of staff’ at the University of Papua New Guinea for increased political agitation in Port Moresby over anti-racism and Bougainville.5 Of particular note was German Ulli Beier, who lectured in English and had arrived in Port Moresby in 1967 from Nigeria and before that Kenya, and who was a constant visitor in Kiki’s home. The Head of Special Branch blamed Beier for ‘motivating and mobilizing indigenous students to protest and demonstrate’, highlighting also that a particularly ‘disturbing feature’ of his influence was that he induced students to see themselves as ‘a powerful pressure group’.6 Under his instruction, it was noted, his students had written plays criticising the Australian administration and ridiculing white rule from a Papuan perspective. In leading ‘indigenes to produce and act this sort of drama’, the Department of External Affairs complained, he could hardly be ‘more subtle and . . . effective’ in undermining the administration’s authority.7 It was symptomatic of a general underestimation of the capacities of Indigenous peoples that those seeking to contain consciousness would assume that it was Europeans who were the agents of political ferment. In a letter to the University’s Vice Chancellor, Australian administrators justified requests to intervene in the political activities of expatriate academics by drawing attention to the ‘immature mind’ of Papuans and New Guineans who, having come ‘from an unsophisticated background’, were too easily confused by the ‘startlingly new environment’ of modernity.8 Amidst such thinking, Australian officials in Papua and New Guinea were more likely to seek to limit the flow of ideas in to Indigenous spaces than to conceive of the notion that ideas could also flow out. As such, while the British and Australian administrations worried that progress towards modernity was too blindingly fast and disorienting for simple Indigenous minds, they were caught off guard by the speed with which Indigenous peoples connected with international synergies. In 1969, therefore, 5

6

7

8

In the memo the Department urgently requested information on the extent to which ‘European members of the staff of the Papua New Guinea University have been involved in fermenting protests and other political activities’. ‘Secret’ Memo, Department of External Territories to ASIO, Canberra, Undated. NAA, A452 1969/3045 Expatriate Political Influence in Papua New Guinea, pp. 15–16. D. P. Sheekey, Head of Special Branch to the Commissioner of Police, Konedobu, 1 October 1969. NAA, A452 1969/3045 Expatriate Political Influence in Papua New Guinea, pp. 189–90. See also Ulli Beier, Decolonising the Mind: The Impact of the University on Culture and Identity in Papua New Guinea, 1971–74 (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2005). Secret, M. A. Besley, Hobart Place, Canberra to R. Whitrod, Commissioner of Police, Papua, NAA, A452 1969/3045 Expatriate Political Influence in Papua New Guinea, p. 179. G. Warwick Smith to Professor Karmel, Draft, 17 July 1969. D. P. Sheekey, Head of Special Branch to The Commissioner of Police, Konedobu, 1 October 1969. NAA, A452 1969/3045 Expatriate Political Influence in Papua New Guinea, pp. 182–7.

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as Australian officials sought advice from the governments of Malaysia and Singapore on how best to deport expatriate Europeans for their ideas, Kiki and numerous other Papua New Guineans travelled relatively unhindered to Australia and beyond.9 This chapter explores mobility and observes its role as a powerful agent of change in and around the Pacific, as people travelled, observed and connected with the global ferment of the late 1960s. In doing so travellers left colonial administrations and their intelligence networks struggling in their wake to chart and measure the impact of the circuits of thinking that were being made. Through this global circuitry the localised concerns of seemingly intractably colonised Indigenous peoples, especially but not exclusively those in settler colonies, transformed decolonisation in the Pacific region into a transnational, elemental and often postcolonial process. While at the Aborigines Advancement League in Melbourne, and before an audience that included deeply respected greats of Aboriginal political history such as Pastor Doug Nicholls, Kiki made clear his thinking on decolonisation. Independence was not something that could be bestowed by colonial powers, he said. Rather it had to be gained by ‘doing’, through the practice of self-governing.10 This thinking was the product of the heavily circumscribed nature of decolonisation in Papua and New Guinea, where doing decolonisation, often under the administrative label of centrifugal forces, was producing an elemental and internal breaking down of colonial dependence. Kiki’s words connected with the thinking emerging among a new generation of Aboriginal and Islander people then present at the Advancement League, who were impatient for substantial change. For while the world was buzzing in the 1960s with the challenges of decolonisation, Aboriginal people, like colonised people in settler-colonial nations elsewhere, were simply considered to be minorities by the United Nations and international community. There was not yet a coherent discourse configuring them as a peoples entitled to independence or self-determination, and like Indigenous peoples in Hawaii, Tahiti, New Caledonia, West Papua and New Zealand, they were either physically or politically incorporated by their colonising powers, or else rendered invisible as in Guam by being designated as militarily strategic to

9

10

In consultation with the governments of Malaysia and Singapore, the Department investigated whether or not specifically European staff could be deported as seditious. Secret, M. A. Besley, Hobart Place, Canberra to R. Whitrod, Commissioner of Police, Papua, NAA, A452 1969/3045 Expatriate Political Influence in Papua New Guinea, p. 180. Nigel Oram, ‘Albert Kiki Is a Man for His Time’, The Canberra Times, 23 November 1969, p. 13.

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global security. Nowhere did colonialism seem as irreversible and in need of simply being done as in the settler and military states of Oceania. In the weeks after Kiki’s visit, the Aborigines Advancement League replaced its non-Aboriginal executive with a board made up, for the first time, of a majority of self-consciously Black members.11 On doing so, the organisation released a public statement saying that ‘many of the colored people who lived under white colonial rule have gained their independence’, but in settler nations ‘colored minorities are claiming the right to determine the course of their own affairs’. That was why a new all Black board had been voted in, ‘That is black power’.12 Here was a new militant tone that was seeking other forms of decolonisation, independence and autonomy with a new and explicit race consciousness. With alarm the Victorian minister for aboriginal affairs Edward Meagher described it as a ‘black-power upsurge’ and a ‘steadily growing black power crisis’.13 Speaking more generally of Aboriginal organisation in Australia, the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation also reported privately to the federal attorney general that ‘it has become evident that the Aboriginal contingent has found its voice and will no longer allow itself to be silenced or manipulated by the “whites”’.14 Black Power had arrived in Australia and parts of the Pacific as a force for decolonisation. It was an exotic, dangerously radical concept in White Australia in 1969 that recast issues of structural racism in the language of decolonisation.15 Over the next decade it would transform the political and social landscape in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and parts of the Pacific, while also driving decolonisation inwards. This chapter tracks the mobility of that idea, of being Black or Brown with a capital B, through transnational, or trans-Pacific, networks that weaved Port Moresby, the northern suburbs of Melbourne, and Manhattan together into broader 11

12 13 14

15

The new committee members were Eric Onus, Mary Tucker, Jim Berg, Harry Penrith, Patsy Corowa (Kruger) and Eleanor Harding. ‘Aborigines to Hold Majority on Committee’, The Canberra Times, 2 December 1969, p. 7. Richard Broome, Fighting Hard: The Victorian Aborigines Advancement League (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2014), pp. 121–41. ‘Aboriginals Say Black Power Need Not be Violent’, Sun, 1 September 1969. ‘“Black Power” in Victoria Cause of Concern’, The Canberra Times, 1 September 1969, p. 3. This was in relation to the replacement of the white leadership of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders with Aboriginal leaders. C. C. F. Spry, ASIO Director General’s office to Nigel Bowen Attorney General, 8 August 1969. NAA, A 432 1969/2639 Aboriginal Affairs – Correspondence re: Communist Influence in Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Correspondence Files, Attorney-General’s Department. Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Random House, 1967); Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (New York: New Press, 2007).

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global networks that spanned the new African nations of Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. The chapter argues that at a time when progress towards decolonisation was stalling in the Pacific, indeed had been colonised by administering powers; and when Indigenous peoples in settler nations were being offered assimilation, amalgamation and integration with settler majorities as their means of escaping disadvantage, Black politics sought to do independence. In the process, Indigenous and colonised peoples would manifest a transnational, race-conscious, stateless philosophy that located the space of decolonisation internally. This drove a quiet revolution in the way Australian South Sea Islanders, Indigenous Australians, Maori and Islanders in the Pacific were able to see and convey themselves. At the same time, this new confidence drove a new militancy in the ways Indigenous peoples occupied space in settler nations. This would effectively drive decolonisation inwards into the public settler spaces of the nation. Unlocking the chains on the mind: race and decolonisation in a settler colony We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite . . . in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny. Black Power pamphlet, 1972.16

By the time Kiki visited the Aborigines Advancement League in 1969, the consciousness of both Black and White Australia was in a state of transformation. Two years earlier a seemingly momentous turning point had occurred when Australians voted by referendum to give equal Constitutional status to Indigenous peoples. Since the late 1950s the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders had framed the campaign to change the Constitution as a question of civil rights, and particularly, whether or not Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders should have rights that were equal to all Australians. When the referendum result was a resounding ‘yes’ it seemed to be a momentous win for civil and political rights.17 But what Australians had said yes to was not the inclusion of a rousing preamble on rights or the inclusion of an explicit promise of equality, nor was there 16 17

NAA, A6122/2293 The Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2. Marilyn Lake, Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002), pp. 84–11; Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007).

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any recognition of the first status of Indigenous Australians. Rather they had voted to make conservative constitutional amendments that enabled the federal government to govern Aboriginal affairs, and Indigenous Australians to be counted in the national census for the first time. In the wake of the referendum, prime minister John Gorton declared that on the question of ‘how best to advance our Aboriginals’, the ‘ultimate objective’ of the federal government would be to aggressively pursue the ‘assimilation’ of Indigenous peoples ‘as fully effective members of a single Australian society’.18 With the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into settler Australia thus affirmed as the form that equality would take, it seemed simply to be business as usual. The removal of constitutional inequality in 1967 undoubtedly constituted substantial progress in the campaign against racism. But in a settler colonial context, equality was not decolonisation. In the hands of a settler state, equality could be an oppressive imposition of sameness, a denial and assimilation of indigeneity, and an affirmation of dispossession. By the end of the 1960s, some Indigenous Australians were already questioning whether the referendum had delivered anything more substantial than a federal minister for Aboriginal affairs.19 Undoubtedly, their confidence to do so, and the safety with which they did it, was a function of the progress towards civil and political rights that defined the 1960s in Australia. But it would also propel Indigenous discourses towards strident rejections of assimilation and other strategies that worked within the settler colonial system. As this section argues, as Black Australians critiqued equality and asserted an autonomously defined difference, they also articulated distinctive pan-Australian and transnationally connected narratives of decolonisation. The decade of the 1960s for Indigenous Australians had been one of a slow but steady winding back of race-based restrictions and laws. Typified by the granting of the federal franchise in 1962, the last ban on Indigenous voting rights in Australia ended in 1965 when Aborigines, Torres Strait and Pacific Islanders received the right to vote in Queensland. By then each state was also dismantling the protection legislation that for generations had imposed deep dependency on Indigenous people, limiting their abilities to decide where they could live and work, the people they could live with, the goods they could consume and where and whether they could travel. While governments retracted racial laws in the 1960s, formal and informal segregation and 18 19

‘Prime Minister Speaks on Aboriginal Affairs’, Dawn, October 1968, p. 3. Bob Maza, ‘The Koorie’s Disillusionment’, Smoke Signals, 8:1 (1969): 4; Jennifer Clark, Aborigines and Activism: Race, Aborigines and the Coming of the Sixties to Australia (Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, 2008).

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local restrictive by-laws and regulations remained firmly in place in many parts of the country well into the 1960s. In New South Wales, this was spectacularly exposed by the Australian ‘Freedom Ride’ of 1965 through the western and northern parts of the state. The tour showcased the simmering violence and debilitating racism against Aboriginal people that was part of the economic and social fabric of regional Australia.20 Led by Indigenous student Charlie Perkins the Freedom Ride clearly referenced the United States civil rights movement and was well covered by national media. These myriad gains against the rigid structures of Australian racism set the stage for the 1967 referendum that capped the progress of the 1960s. The quiet revolution that moments like the Freedom Ride and the 1967 referendum set in motion is probably immeasurable, for in the rising era of mass-media coverage, they were able to inform and inspire a new generation of Indigenous and Islander peoples. In the late 1960s, all along the east coast rimming the Pacific, predominantly young Indigenous people migrated from missions and reserves to urban centres like Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. Amidst the global push for decolonisation the language of rights, of independence and of self-determination struck a nerve. At places like the Advancement League in Melbourne, and the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs in Sydney, they met and learnt from the veterans of Indigenous organisation like Doug Nicholls, Jack Patton, Marge Tucker and Bill Onus who had kept an Indigenous protest movement alive through two world wars. But as historian and participant Gary Foley has written, they also consumed a radically new, articulate and militant international language of anti-colonialism and Black literature. In Sydney, Foley writes, Black Power and the writings of Franz Fanon, Stokeley Carmichael and Malcolm X were sold in the international bookshop in Redfern in inner-city Sydney.21 The revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, a large and radical student population and a growing anti-war movement provided a heady mix that primed Indigenous community organisations for transformation. As was the case throughout the Pacific, mobility and the erosion of restrictive political and social borders had been a catalyst for change. At the end of 1969, the year the Advancement League framed Black Power as a means of decolonising the settler state, its newsletter informed 20 21

Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002). Gary Foley, ‘Black Power in Redfern, 1968-72’, The Koori History Website www.koori web.org/foley/essays/essay_1.html, Accessed 1 July 2015; Kathy Lothian, ‘Seizing the Time: Australian Aborigines and the Influence of the Black Panther Party, 1969-1972’, Journal of Black Studies, 35:4 (2005): 179–200; Broome, Fighting Hard, pp. 119–42.

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readers that three ‘coloured people from overseas’ had visited that year, bringing a radical ‘international element to the thinking of some Victorians Aborigines’.22 Kiki was one, and so was Leo Hannett from Bougainville. But coinciding with Kiki was the Bermudan Black Power leader Pauulu Brown, then going by the name of Roosevelt Brown. Brown’s visit, he said at the time, was to ‘let the black people of Australia know they were not alone’.23 Brown was a thoroughly transnational figure. His political mentor was the giant of Black intellectual culture, C. L. R. James, and with a PhD in Ecological Engineering, Brown had worked in Liberia, Ghana and Kenya in the early years of independence. In 1969, he helped to organise the Black Power Conference in Bermuda with an emphasis on building Black communities, the ‘control of white violence’, and the production of ‘a positive Black political force’.24 In Australia where the media had developed an interest in the ‘sinister aspect of Black Power’, Brown was interviewed on Australian radio about the conference. From Bermuda he noted in the course of the interview the abuse of the land and human rights of Black ‘brothers and sisters’ in Australia and the Pacific.25 Listening to the interview in Melbourne, Bob Maza, Bruce McGuinnes and Patsy Corowa (then Kruger) of the Aborigines Advancement League, had immediately immediately invited Browne to Australia.26 Browne’s arrival in Australia and attendance at the Advancement League at the same time as Kiki was a convergence of parallel developments in collective Indigenous and Black politics. New approaches by this time were picking up the discursive threads first articulated in the nineteenth century, that emphasised an identity politics of discrete entitlement to land, selfreliance and self-determination, and economic and political independence. Unlike previous, necessarily non-confrontational strategies of imperial literacy and petitioning, however, this new generation adopted more strident approaches. They viewed equality through assimilation as no equality at all and saw non-indigenous control of indigenous affairs as indicative of perpetuated colonialism. As the incoming President of the Advancement League, Patsy Corowa put it in 1970 ‘Aborigines are undergoing a revolution in their way of thinking’.27 They reconfigured Blackness in their political discourse and activity as an explicit source of pride and identity, empowered by 22 23 24 25

26 27

Aborigines Advancement League Newsletter, 25 October 1969. ‘Meagher Hits Back at Black Power Leader’, Ballarat Courier, 30 August 1968, p. 2. Black Power Conference Reports, Bermuda, 1969 (New York: Action Library, 1970), p. 7. ‘Black Power Tries the Caribbean Temperature’, The Canberra Times, 7 March 1969, p. 2; Gayleatha B. Cobb, ‘An Interview with Roosevelt Browne’, Black World, March 1976, pp. 32–3. Quito Swan, Black Power in Bermuda: The Struggle for Decolonization (New York: Bermuda, 2010), pp. 89–90. Cobb, ‘An Interview’, p. 32. ‘Be Militant for Natives’, The Age, 31 August 1970.

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community, culture and history. Influenced by the international Black Panthers, they would go on to establish community-run services and police patrols re-igniting what Foley has called a pan-Aboriginal nationalism.28 Later breakfast programmes for Aboriginal schoolchildren, medical and legal services, a Council for Aboriginal and Islander women and a national Black theatre company were organised by and for communities throughout the country.29 So too in Brisbane, a Black community news service, bail fund and childcare service were all established to counter a notoriously combative culture of policing Black people in the city.30 Instead of tackling racial disempowerment in and of itself, the Australian Black Movement identified the dismantling of colonialism as the antidote to racial disempowerment. As such the surge of community activity in the urban centres of Australia’s east coast were effectively doing and making elements of community independence rather than waiting for it to be gifted. Black Power in Australia was therefore far from simply a derivative discourse. In a published debate between Black Power advocate Roberta Sykes and the first Aboriginal man in any Australian parliament, conservative Neville Bonner, Sykes spelled it out clearly.31 While the fundamentals of the international Black Power Movement were about self-help, self-defence and pride, in Australia these were interwoven with existing Indigenous and counter-colonial narratives regarding land rights, identity and culture. McGuiness and Corowa were explicit that in Australia ‘land rights is at the top of our list’. Land was demanded not just as an inherent ancestral right that had been dispossessed, but also as a source of restorative justice and compensation for colonisation. As with the movements on the Solomon Islands Weather Coast, on Bougainville and on the Gazelle Peninsula, land was a key foundation of decolonsation and independence. It was the critical source of economic and cultural self-determination, and as McGuiness put it at a land rights protest in 1971, ‘We’re not asking’ for land, ‘we are demanding’ it.32 28

29

30 31 32

Foley, ‘Black Power’; Edwina Howell, ‘Black Power – By Any Means Necessary’, in Gary Foley, Andrew Schaap and Edwina Howell (eds), The Aboriginal Tent Embassy: Sovereignty, Black Power, Land Rights and the State (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), pp. 67–83. ‘Aboriginal Breakfast Programme’, New Dawn, May 1972, pp. 3–14; ‘Aboriginal Medical Service’, New Dawn (November 1971), pp. 6–7; ‘Aboriginal Women Record Dissent’, The Canberra Times, 31 January 1972, p. 6; NAA, A6122/2281 Black Cultural Theatre Redfern Miscellaneous Papers. Black Power pamphlet from the Brisbane Chapter of the Black Panther Party of Australia. Contained in NAA, A6122/2293 The Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2. Roberta Sykes in Ann Turner (ed.), Black Power in Australia: Neville Bonner vs Bobbi Sykes (South Yarra: Heinemann Educational, 1975), p. 21. The Age, 31 August 1970; ‘“Direct Action” Urged on Land’, Sunday Observer, 2 August 1970.

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The new confidence and robustness of Black communities in Australia marked a significant and quite rapid shift that attracted constant and covert surveillance in Australia and internationally. In 1972, the Regional Director of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in Canberra offered a belittling description of the Black Power Movement to the British High Commission, describing it as an unthreatening movement that had emerged from the ‘ghettoes’ of urban areas whose followers were mainly ‘white radical and communist organizations’.33 Despite assertions that it was not a force, however, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and international intelligence agencies habitually kept the activities of Aboriginal people and Black Power advocates, and of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific, under constant surveillance. Seemingly innocuous groups like the Redfern All Blacks, a football team whose membership was limited to Aboriginal players, were watched and reported on from locker rooms and meeting halls for signs of communist or radical infiltration.34 By the late 1960s, a three-way exchange of communication was established between the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the police and federal and state offices of Aboriginal Affairs. They collected and monitored community literature which was gratifyingly provocative and confrontational: ‘It is the pigs that carry out the violent acts of aggression against us’, stated a Black Power pamphlet distributed to students at the University of Queensland in 1972, in ‘darkened streets or behind . . . the locked doors of the concentration camps’.35 Such strident condemnations, even as a rhetorical flourish, would have been unimaginable even ten years earlier, and they proved that revolutionary change, worthy of surveillance, was under way. Campaign literature gave government observers limited insight into the collective thinking of monitored groups, but it was the mobility of people and the connections they made in transit that received the most coverage in existing intelligence records. The movements and encounters of visitors to Australia, such as Polynesian Panther Will Ilolahia, who visited from Auckland in 1972, remained of interest. It was noted in his case that he joined the March against Racism in Sydney, also attended by Oscar Tammur, and complained of police brutality and racism on the streets of 33

34

35

Regional Director, ACT to British High Commission, 19 April 1972; British High Commission to Regional Director, ACT, 24 May 1972. NAA, A6122/2293 The Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2. Report, Senior Field Officer, 16 November 1962. NAA, A6122/2026 Redfern All Blacks Football and Social Club. See also ‘The Redfern All Blacks’, New Dawn, June 1970, pp. 1–3. Black Power pamphlet from the Brisbane Chapter of the Black Panther Party of Australia. Contained in NAA, A6122/2293 The Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2.

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Sydney.36 In the same year, 1972, Brisbane-based Black Panther Denis Walker was watched and tracked when he and ‘a coloured female’ travelled to Melbourne, met a group of ‘eight coloured persons’ and then went to a house in Fitzroy. There, it ‘was believed that the Melbourne chapter of the Black Panther Party was formed’.37 In these examples of surveillance, little was learnt from watching, and the intelligence that was collected was vague, speculative and inconclusive. The only observable fact was the movement and mobility of Ilolahia and Walker, and their collisions with other mobile people. In other words, it was the mobility itself, and its inherent potential, that ensured people like Walker continued to be of interest.38 What intelligence agencies in both Australia and the Pacific sought to trace and understand as they tracked mobile Indigenous peoples was the transnational network of ideas that was forming. This was difficult to contain or control, though efforts were made to contain the spread of the idea of Black Power in particular. In 1972, a secret cablegram from the Australian prime minister’s office instructed ‘all posts including trade and immigration posts’ that visas should not be granted to members of the ‘Black Panther Movement’, including ‘Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver’ and Cassius Clay.39 But publicly, closing the borders to new influences in the charged global environment was more complicated. In 1971, the federal government had come under significant public pressure from Australian voters to stop a planned visit by United States Black and Red Power advocates to Brisbane, Palm Island and Port Moresby to ‘compare [Australia] with the negro situation’ and ‘to explain how Black Power militancy works’.40 The Department of Immigration requested that the Australian embassy in Washington suspend all applications for visas pending further clearance.41 But the ban was lifted when the minister for Aboriginal 36 37 38

39 40 41

Press clipping ‘Ningla A-Na! Black Moratorium’, Tribune. A6122/2293 The Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2. Queensland Police Special Branch Commissioner of Police to Regional Director of Security, 1 March 1972. NAA, A6122/2293 The Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2. Frank Cairn has noted that the Vietnam War protests triggered a significant increase in government funding for ASIO and police Special Branches in the 1960s and early 1970s, making this sort of surveillance possible. Frank Cairn, The Australian Security Intelligence Organization: An Unofficial History (Milton Park, NY: Frank Cass, 1994), pp. 200–1. See also Meredith Burgmann, Dirty Little Secrets: Our ASIO Files, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2014). Outward Cablegram, Prime Minister to all posts, including trade and immigration posts, 27 September 1972. NAA, A446 1970/95140 Black Panther Power Movement, 1969–1975. Director General, ASIO to The Secretary, Department of Immigration, 2 June 1971. NAA, A446 1970/95140 Black Panther Power Movement, 1969–1975. Department of Immigration to Australian Embassy, Washington, 30 April 1971. NAA, A463 1971/5320 Visit by Black Power Workers to Queensland, 1971.

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affairs Bill Wentworth argued that ‘although we don’t want these people in Australia we would do more harm by making publicized effort to keep them out’.42 The visit, organised by the World Council of Churches, was allowed to continue, and throughout the 1970s the organisation funded numerous visits from Indigenous radicals, including from the Maori youth organisation Nga Tamatoa.43 The isolation produced by colonisation had rapidly unravelled after 1960, and Australian authorities struggled to keep track of and then to censor the mobility of Indigenous peoples throughout the Australian territories and beyond. The impact was profound. In 1973, after a delegation of Redfern-based activists travelled to China, delegate Foley pointedly described the travel as waging a ‘psychological warfare’ on the colonial state. Everywhere Black Australia went in the world, he said, they found people in solidarity with them, and they could claim to have ‘800 million Chinese on its side’.44 His point goes to the heart of the emerging decolonisation movement in and around the Pacific, where colonial administrations were turning decolonisation into the last stage of imperialism. Black Power was a means to the bigger and more eternal prize of decolonising the mind. If isolation had empowered colonial states before 1960, mobility and solidarity eroded those borders, allowing a transnational, global connectedness that conversely empowered the colonised. Black Power, and the wider Indigenous rights movement that emerged from and in parallel with it, was effectively an independence movement, focused on dealing with the aftermath of colonialism from the inside out. Pauulu Brown was in Australia for only a few days, so short in fact that by the time his request for a visa reached the Prime Minister’s Office, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Office for Aboriginal Affairs, he had already been and left.45 Nevertheless, with members of the Advancement League already under surveillance, numerous photographs were shot of Brown leaving Essendon airport.46

42

43

44

45 46

W. C. Wentworth, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs to P. R. Lynch, Minister for Immigration, 8 April 1970. NAA, A446 1970/95140 Black Panther Power Movement, 1969–1975. ‘Aborigines and Red Indians “Parallel”’, The Canberra Times, 6 August 1971, p. 3. Memo detailing funding of ‘Nga Tamatoa person travelling Auckland, Sydney, Darwin retun, Don Borry to David Cuthbert, 28 June 1973’. ATL MS-Papers-1617–667. Maori Organsations – Tamatoa and Nga Tamatoa Council. See also Lake, Faith, pp. 148–51. Press cuttings; ‘In Peking We’re People – Aborigines’, The Age, 31 October 1972; The Age, 12 February 1973; ‘Aborigines Go ‘Bush’ in China’, The Age, 12 February 1974; NAA, A6122/2293 The Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2. R. Brown to Prime Minister, 26 August 1969 and File Note 28 August 1969. NAA, A463 1969/2306. R. Brown MP – Bermuda – Visit to Australia, 1969. Surveillance Report No. 531, 18 September 1969. NAA, A6119/6090 Patricia Kruger.

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On leaving he invited several members of the Advancement League to travel to the United States, and in 1970 a delegation of five prepared to go. Among them was Corowa, who by then was president of the Advancement League. She was going, she said to the press, to start a ‘thought rebellion’ and to link Australian Indigenous attempts to decolonise with those of the world who shared a Black, historically colonial, struggle.47 When the Australian delegation left in 1970, intelligence switchboards lit up in London and Washington. The director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation cablegrammed a request that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation stay abreast of the delegation’s actions and words, and ‘Scorpion Melbourne’ reported to ‘Snuffbox London’ that ‘five delegates, including [Corowa]’, had left for Atlanta, and that Washington should be advised.48 In the United States the Advancement League group attended the Congress of African Peoples in Atlanta and visited New York, attending the National Black Theatre in Harlem and visiting the United Nations.49 At the United Nations they presented two petitions, one on Aboriginal land rights and another on Australia’s attempted cultural and physical genocide against Aboriginal people.50 Their journey followed an arterial path from the Pacific to the United Nations that Indigenous peoples had been travelling with petitions, protests and simply a desire to be acknowledged since the 1950s. West Papuans in exile, petitioning Papua New Guineans, Samoans and from the 1970s Indigenous Australians, Ni Vanutu and New Caledonians, all converged on the site of the United Nations. Here, as far as you could get from the myriad shores of the western Pacific, chance meetings between Indigenous peoples from around the world would continue to spark new connections and pathways to decolonisation. As they increasingly established their own agenda, one that started with identity and decolonised from the inside out, intelligence agencies would scramble in their wake to keep track.

47

48 49 50

Press clipping ‘Patsy wants to learn how to start a thought rebellion’, The Australian, 2 September 1970. NAA, A6122/2293 The Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2. Those that went were Bob Maza, Bruce McGuiness, Sol Bellear, Patsy Corowa (then Kruger) and Jack Davis. ‘Aborigines to Study in U.S.A.’, The Northcote Leader, 2 September 1970. Director-General to Liaison Officer Washington, 25 August 1970; Outward Cable, Scorpion Melbourne to Snuffbox London, NAA, A6119/6090 Patricia Kruger. Cobb, ‘An Interview’, p. 39. Report titled ‘Black Power Workers and Aborigines’ by B. G. Dexter, Director, Office of Aboriginal Affairs to Mr. Le Gassic, 29 April 1971. NAA, A463 1971/5320 Visit by Black Power Workers to Queensland, 1971.

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‘Thought rebellions’: border crossings, global networks and fear of a Black planet The more Black people come together, even if it is just to talk and even if it is to become aware of other Black people around the world who have similar problems – oppression from the white people. Roosevelt Brown (Pauulu Kamarakafego), Black Power Conference, Philadelphia, 30 August 1969.51

When Patsy Corowa left the United States, she did not return directly to Australia, detouring instead to Vanuatu. Her grandfather, John Corowa, had been taken in the nineteenth century from his home on Tanna Island when he was ten to be traded in Queensland’s indentured labour trade, only to be stranded in Queensland after the deportation years.52 Returning to Tanna in 1970, Corowa said, ‘was a really emotional experience’, and she was able ‘almost immediately’ to find and re-connect with relatives.53 Corowa was one among a number of women, including Faith Bandler and Evelyn Scott, who were part of the Black Movement in Australia, and who were also part of, what was in the 1970s, a largely ignored and denied Australian South Sea Islander community. The Australian South Sea Islander community had descended from the indentured labourers taken to Queensland in the nineteenth century and were thus a community that was colonised but not Indigenous. South Sea Islanders’ involvement in the Black Movement in Australia personified the interlinkages and interdependency of the colonial past in and around the Pacific. The experiences of Corowa, Bandler and Scott, of being Black women in Australia, had been influenced by colonial race relations and by the entwined histories of the colonisation of Islanders’ bodies and labour, with the dispossession of Aboriginal land. Their activities in this period therefore refused the limitations of the internationally approved granting of territorial independence, and ensured that the language of decolonisation was extended to more complex conditions of colonisation. In Vanuatu, Corowa very quickly came to the attention of the New Hebrides Intelligence Committee.54 Five days after she arrived, the Head of Special Branch in Vila wrote to the Australian attorney general requesting information on this Australian citizen ‘claiming’ to be of ‘New Hebridean stock’. Being loud and proud, she was making numerous ‘remarks of a bitterly anti-European nature’, was wearing ‘Afro-style’ 51 52 53 54

Black Power Conference Reports (New York: Action Library, 1970), p. 3. ‘Patsy Kruger Heads AAL in Victoria’, Smoke Signals, September 1970: 4–5. Press Clipping. NAA, A6119/6090. Patricia Kruger. ‘Red Tape Keeps a Black Girl in White Australia’, The Herald, 5 June 1971. Press Clipping. NAA, A6119/6090. Patricia Kruger. G. R. S. Haines, Head of Special Branch, Vila to British Special Branch, 2 November 1970. NAA, A6119/6090. Patricia Kruger.

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dress and was publicly making statements like ‘Jesus Christ was a black man’. In further correspondence after she had left Vanuatu, Special Branch reported that before leaving she had distributed a number ‘of “Black Power” buttonhole badges, red, black and green in colour’. Further, she had made a number of other contacts in the islands with ‘English-speaking Melanesians’ and Pacific Islanders, including Tongans and Fijians.55 If Black consciousness was being configured as a form of decolonisation in settler colonies, it had the capacity to do the same in spaces like Vanuatu, where administrations were neglecting decolonisation. In Vanuatu, progress towards decolonisation and the provision of such necessary skills as literacy was painfully slow. As late as 1978, the New Zealand Department of Education estimated that only 5 per cent of Ni Vanuatu received a formal secondary education.56 This indirectly imposed an isolation from the world that could be every bit as powerful as the prevention of physical travel. In Vanuatu, this was compounded by the limitation of communication networks. The only newspapers available were printed by and for the administration in English or French, and for the largely illiterate population, there was a single radio station, Radio Vila, which operated mainly for expatriates who could afford a transistor radio. Someone like Corowa, with so many ideas and such confidence, was potentially dangerous, and in 1971 when she tried to move permanently to Tanna, the British Resident declared her an ‘undesirable immigrant’, instructing the only airline serving Vanuatu not to carry her ‘under any circumstances’.57 But, as had been the case in Australia and Papua New Guinea, the British administration underestimated the capacity of Ni Vanuatu to think radically about futures beyond colonialism. While the administration routinely controlled who came in to Vanuatu, they were less restrictive of New Hebrideans travelling out. So it was, a few years later, that Pauulu Brown would again arrive in the Pacific region. In 1974, Walter Lini, who was then the leader of Vanuatu’s most popular independence party, the National Party, travelled to New York to petition the United Nations Committee of 24. He and other ‘Brothers’ from the Solomon Islands and Papua and New Guinea’s Constitution 55 56

57

GRS Haines, Head of Special Branch, 13 November 1970. NAA, A6119/6090. Patricia Kruger. The figures were echoed around the Pacific where an average of only 15 per cent of the population attended secondary school, equating to as low as 2 or 3 per cent in the Solomons, as high as 60 per cent in independent Fiji and 90 per cent in the Cook Islands. ‘Lucky 15% of Pacific Kids’, Vanua’aku Viewpoints, 8:2 (1978): 7. Citing Pacific Islands Monthly, March 1978. Head of Special Branch, Vila to British Special Branch, 24 May 1971. NAA, A6119/ 6090. Patricia Kruger.

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Committee had recently attended the sixth Pan African Congress in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.58 It inspired Lini and the National Party to step up their campaign for immediate decolonisation, and Lini was sent by the party to petition the United Nations. The petition began by informing the Committee that the majority of Ni Vanuatu wanted independence by 1977, noting it was ‘imperative’ that they be able to ‘decide what their future would be’. No longer wishing ‘to be spoon-fed’, Ni Vanuatu wanted the ‘opportunity to show the world’ what they could do.59 The British administration had encouraged the trip, hoping it would ‘lead to further cultivation’ of Lini by Australian officials based in New York.60 Instead Lini ran in to Pauulu Brown, who was also petitioning the Committee of 24 on behalf of Bemurda. For Lini, Brown’s Black Power credentials, his PhD in engineering, his science and technology background, and his experience in newly independent Ghana, Liberia and Kenya gave him skills that were sorely needed in Vanuatu.61 Lini was a formidable builder of networks. As a student in the Solomon Islands and then in New Zealand, he had overseen a network for Pacific Island students, the Western Pacific Students’ Association, whose, mouthpiece, the newspaper Onetalk, had linked students in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch to their home islands in the Solomons, Kiribati, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.62 Onetalk broadcast community news from throughout the Pacific, as well as commentary on issues, including independence, development and education. When he eventually returned to Vanuatu, Lini co-founded, with Fr John Bani and Donald Kalpokas, the Vanuatu Cultural Association with the publication New Hebrides Viewpoints, later Vanua’aku Viewpoints, as its mouthpiece. On a shoestring budget and produced in editors’ houses, Viewpoint was distributed as widely throughout the islands as possible. Publishing local and international news, as well as pieces on culture, stories and poetry, Viewpoints informed Ni Vanuatu in unprecedented ways. Written in French, English and Bislama, it was read and spoken to communities throughout the islands and generated floods of articles, letters and interest. With what Lini would later describe as a ‘tremendous’ groundswell of 58 59 60 61 62

Cobb, ‘An Interview’, p. 33. Walter Lini, Beyond Pandemonium: From the New Hebrides to Vanuatu (Wellington: Asia Pacific Books, 1980), pp. 26, 35–8. Confidential Report of Brian Barder’s visit to Papua New Guinea, New Hebrides and BSIP, 1974. TNA, FCO 24/1990 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea. Swan, Black Power in Bermuda; Cobb, ‘An Interview’, p. 33. Lini, Beyond Pandemonium, p. 15. See also Chris Plant (ed.), New Hebrides: The Road to Independence (Suva: Univesrity of the South Pacific, 1977); Barry Weightman and Hilda Lini (eds), Vanuatu: twenty wan tingting long team blong independens (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1980).

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support, the Association changed its name in 1971 to the New Hebrides National Party, and later the Vanuaku Pati.63 Inadvertently, what had started as an information network focused on building the capacities of Indigenous peoples had swelled into an independence movement. It was this guiding principle, of building independence by networking diverse people’s capacity and confidence, that led Lini to invite Brown to visit Vanuatu in 1975. Brown’s visit, like the independence network Lini and others had built, would link the politics and concerns of villages and rural areas to a global network. When he arrived in Port Vila, Brown was greeted by a strong independence movement deeply inspired by the solidarity networks of the Black Power and Pan-African movements. Touring the islands, he advised on the formulation of independence policies and began the process of organising adult education and youth activities to counteract the almost total neglect of education by the condominium powers. The National Party wanted him to teach ‘our own people to make commodities that we can make in [our] own homes’, and to learn more efficient agricultural practices, independent of ‘mechanical assistance’, while training school leavers as teams of educators.64 He taught students to make diesel from coconuts, for cooking and lighting at night, and to refine their own sugar so they were not dependent on British, Australian and New Zealand companies.65 Like the urban-based breakfast clubs and police patrols in Australia, these were the practical skills of decolonisation that could break the bonds of dependency, not just on condominium powers, but on postcolonial imperial markets. They would do independence. Brown was watched by both French and British intelligence in Vanuatu. The British resident commissioner Roger du Boulay telegrammed London in May 1975 saying that the Black Power leader had entered the colony unannounced, and that his ‘presence has given rise to alarm among French expatriates’. Paris was ‘closely interested’, he remarked, and the French ‘regarded all black power propagandists as a threat to security’.66 The spread of doctrines of Black Power throughout the Pacific region was a personal worry to du Boulay. He reported that during his residence in Vila, he had had ‘many discussions’ with the

63 64 65 66

Lini, Beyond Pandemonium, pp. 24–5. Walter Lini to Roger du Boulay, 19 June 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret. Cobb, ‘An Interview’, pp. 33–4. Confidential Telegram, Vila to Foreign and Colonial Office, 29 May 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret.

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French residency about the ‘perniciousness of the doctrines’ and about how best to ‘contain’, ‘limit’ and ‘counteract’ their effects.67 In truth Du Boulay had expected that the ideas of Black Power would be too ‘novel and sophisticated’ and ‘somewhat above the heads’ of rural Ni Vanuatu, but he was wrong.68 Brown did not discuss an alien and new set of concepts in Vanuatu. Instead, in his well-attended talks he spoke about global communities of Blacks in diaspora. On Leleppa Island, and to the alarm of the British Special Branch members, he linked Islanders’ history of Blackbirding in the Pacific to the enslavement of Africans, connecting deep local memories to an international story.69 On hearing of Brown’s talks on the Black diaspora, the violence of the Pacific indentured labour trade, and the rates of dispossession of Ni Vanuatu land, the British Foreign and Colonial Office sought advice on whether he could be charged with sedition and deported from Vanuatu. After a typically conservative consideration, the British attorney general advised that Brown had committed no offence because essentially, his comments about land and blackbirding were true.70 The condominium powers were forced to wait until Brown’s permit to be in Vanuatu expired before preparations could be made to deport him. He was served notice to leave the condominium on 5 June 1975, and when he refused to leave, du Boulay telegrammed London. He needed ‘contingency plans’ and ‘reinforcements’ in Vanuatu, and queried the ‘likely availability of British’ troops.71 When, a few weeks later Brown, Lini and what du Boulay described as ‘party extremists’ travelled to Aoba Island, du Boulay again requested military reinforcements.72 The following day he requested again, advising he would rely on the gendarmerie from Noumea, but would prefer ‘a platoon of British troops from Singapore or . . . or Gurkas from Hong Kong’.73 He was advised that the First Royal Hampshire Regiment was training in Fiji and the Royal Airforce Belfast, or Royal Air Force Britannia, could be in Fiji or Vila, 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Du Boulay to Robert Gauger, Resident Commissioner, 20 May 1975. TNA, FCO 23/ 1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret. British Resident, Vila to Pacific Dependent Territories Department, 29 May 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret. British Special Branch, Vila to British Resident Commissioner, 13 May 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret. Memo from Attorney General’s Office, 22 May 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret. Secret Telegram to TNA, FCO, 11 June 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret. Telegram Roger du Boulay to TNA, FCO Office, 26 June 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret. Telegram Roger du Boulay to TNA, FCO Office, 27 June 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret.

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both within 48 hours.74 With backup secure, preparations were made to enter Aoba and arrest Browne. In an anti-climax, Brown cooperated peacefully, was flown to Vila and was given a ticket to Bermuda. On leaving, Brown like Corowa was proclaimed a prohibited immigrant.75 The reaction of the Condominium government to Brown’s visit was symptomatic of a key site of contest in the struggle to control decolonisation. Information. While Du Boulay had not expected that New Hebrideans would be sophisticated enough to understand Brown’s message of empowerment, he did worry about the impact of Brown’s unmediated ‘gospel’.76 For with the exception of Viewpoints, information from outside Vanuatu was routinely mediated through the archipelago’s principal source of news and information, Radio Vila. By the mid- to late 1970s, the radio had become a central thread through which numerous independence movements, the Vanuaku Pati included, used bislama to talk about Ni-Vanuatu custom, or kastom, as a foundation for building a unified sense of independence.77 Radio, more than print, enabled the development of a translocal identity throughout the archipelago. But it remained susceptible to censorship, and in 1978, the Vanuaku Pati accused the condominium government before the United Nations of censoring the broadcasting network to produce ‘news, information or communiqués of a political character’.78 In response to the perceived heavy ‘colonial control’ of Radio Vila, which was routinely omitting and censoring news ‘or views that are thought to connote anti-colonial tones or sentiments’, the Vanuaku Pati sought to decolonise the airwaves.79 Vanua’aku Radio was established in 1978. From 1977 it had operated underground from different islands, broadcasting music, news and information in the evenings on shortwave radio that could be heard throughout most of the islands. Its stated purpose, like Vanua’aku Viewpoints, was to unite and co-ordinate ‘the struggle for real independence’ across the diverse and isolated islands of the archipelago.80 Vanua’aku Radio supported Viewpoints in reporting less on kastom and more on local and international politics, ensuring along with the recurring segment in 74 75

76 77 78 79 80

Ibid. J. Mallett, Migration and Visa Department, London to R. Hand, Deputy Governor’s Office, Bermuda, 19 May 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret. Confidential Telegram, Vila to Foreign and Colonial Office, 29 May 1975. TNA, FCO 23/1231 New Hebrides National Party – Roosevelt Orid Nelson Brown. Secret. Lissant Bolton, ‘Radio and the Redefinition of “Kastom” in Vanuatu’, The Contemporary Pacific, 11:2 (1999): 338–40. Speech Delivered to the United Nations General Assembly, 22 November 1978. Cited in Seli Hoo, 7 (December 1978). V. Nikinike, ‘Colonial Rule in Disguise’, Vanua’aku Viewpoints, 8:5 (1975): 3. Advertisement. Seli Hoo, 2 (December 1977).

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Viewpoints, ‘Over the Horizon’, that world news and information from the region, especially from East Timor, New Caledonia and Tahiti, was widely disseminated. Another segment in print, called ‘Viewpoints’, published political and philosophical pieces such as a letter from Kalpokas on Lelepa, who wrote of racism and colonialism in a 1978 edition. Linking Ni Vanuatu history to South Africa, ‘the Queensland Aborigines Act’, the slave trade and the ‘terrible wars’ inflicted on Australian Aborigines and New Zealand Maori, Kalpokos argued that colonialism was an ‘instrument’ of racism. In its extreme form, he argued, colonialism had led to the near extinguishment of Tasmanian Aborigines and the Islanders of ‘Aore Island in the Niu Hebredis’.81 Viewpoints, in other words, was an open forum for thinking through connected issues of colonialism and decolonisation. By the end of the 1970s, the Vanuaku Pati had established a network of education and information that was entirely independent from the Condominium government. In 1978, the newly formed Vanua’aku Womens Association met at the Malaru Community Centre to discuss the status of women in traditional society, church and politics, and considered the role women were to play in guaranteeing a ‘better future for women and the nation’.82 It was a formidable organisation, with women from 23 different islands, aged from sixteen to sixty, and ranging in eminence from Elder Leingole Pierre, one of only two women elders then in Vanuatu, to poet and the first female Ni Vanuatu with a Bachelor of Arts, Grace Molisa. By 1979, the Association agreed that women would focus on education, where the British and French ‘have badly failed’.83 They would run pre-school and adult education, extending the preparatory work of Brown in 1975 into the area of nutrition and family planning, to empower women. More than this, the Association remained a political wing of the Vanua’aku Pati and expected to attend and be centrally involved in Pati policies and planning, but their focus would be on building ‘up strong families in a healthy country’.84 The centrality of women, and of gendered roles in the political and capacitybuilding activities of the Vanua’aku Pati, was an emerging point of difference between Indigenous peoples’ decolonisation activity and that driven by colonial administrations. Here, as with Patsy Corowa in Australia, women were not just involved and central; they also sought to 81 82 83 84

Donald Kalpokas, ‘Less Equal than Others’, New Hebridean Viewpoints, 7:1 (1977): 7, 15. ‘Smol Nius’, Vanua’aku Viewpoints, 8:5 (1978): 9. Kathleen Lini, ‘Vanua’aku-Women’, Vanua’aku Viewpoints, 9:1 (1979): 12. Lini, ‘Vanua’aku-Women’, p. 12. Margaret Jolly, Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu (Philadelphia, PA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994), pp. 1–11.

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define and critique future gender roles and gender bias from within the decolonisation movement itself. By the mid-1970s, Corowa, like Faith Bandler, had turned towards Australia’s South Sea Islander community, helping to establish the Australian South Sea Islanders United Council, which started the long campaign for government recognition in Australia. Its newsletter, laboriously hand typed and distributed up and down the east coast of Australia, reported community news in Australia and the islands. Its emblem depicted the islands of the Solomons, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Fiji woven into the outline of Australia, in the ‘the Black Nationalist colours’ of red, black and green.85 Corowa had been one of, if not the first Australian South Sea Islander to return to her island community after generations of absence, and in the later 1970s the United Council continued to assist a steadily growing stream of people going back. The Council’s newsletter, distributed throughout Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, helped to link families and islands, sometimes for the first time in generations. Increasingly, those who had lost family to Queensland generations earlier telegraphed their existence to Australian networks in search of family. Jack Malia, for instance, searched for the family of Buel who had married and therefore stayed in Australia in 1906.86 In addition to supporting familial networks, Council members also worked tirelessly on strengthening its networks regionally. When attending Pacific regional conferences such as the Regional Women’s Conference in Fiji in 1975 delegates were instructed not only to attend the conference but to also gather information on publications in the Pacific; to obtain lists of Pacific Islander organisations and education centres; to search for contacts for Australian-born South Sea Islanders looking for family; and to find people or organisations that could come to Australia and teach the ‘dances, songs stories and languages’ lost to Australian descendants.87 Building networks was conscious, strategic and laborious work. The activities and dedication of people like Corowa, Brown, Lini and others show that the transnational work of decolonisation was a deliberate and calibrated strategy of making and building networks. If colonial power had relied on the closed borders of states, missions and colonies, and the limited access Indigenous peoples had to liberating ideas and 85

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‘Report from 2nd Representative Council Meeting, Rockhampton, 13 September, 1975’, Australian South Sea Islanders United Council Newsletter, October 1975, p. 2. State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library (ML), Q325.999/1. ‘Seli Hoo’ Newsletter of ASSIUC, 4 (1977). ML, Q325.999/1. Lake, Faith, pp. 168–9. Australian South Sea Islanders United Council Newsletter (October 1975), p. 2. ML, Q325.999/1.

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information, then dissolving those borders was inherently empowering. Imparting information and ideas that reconfigured peoples’ identities from backward isolated natives to unique nodes in a global network of Black people helped to effectively dissolve these borders. It was that knowledge, that reconfigured and connected identity, that intelligence agencies instinctively sought to track and mediate but could not. The revolution they feared, was happening, but it was internal. What Corowa had described as a ‘thought rebellion’ in 1970 threaded its way through minds in Vila, Noumea, Port Moresby, New York, Dar es Salaam, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Auckland connecting them with the invisible lines of migrating ideas. Where passports, aeroplanes, boats, buses and cars failed or were shut down by colonial administrations, typewriters, shortwave radios, word of mouth and the post stepped in as the vehicles for internal change transmitting an atomised, elemental form of decolonisation and self-determination. But as local movements made translocal and transnational connections, this did not seem to dilute local struggles. In Vanuatu, the more connected the Vanuaku Pati was to the transnational Black Power and Pan-African movements, the more this enhanced its interest in kastom, cultural identity and cultural unity. So too, the global connections that raised the consciousness and voice of South Sea Islanders up and down the Australian coast resulted in renewing connections with long-lost villages, relations and cultures. The extraordinary capacity of the simple idea of being historically Black or Brown, connected in diaspora, had helped to weave rich streams of consciousness throughout the region. By the late 1970s, the peoples of Oceania and its antipodean rim, whether Indigenous peoples at home or those displaced by colonial patterns of trade and economy, were on the cusp of a decolonising revolution that radiated from the identities people carried to the spaces they occupied.

Dwelling and occupation: decolonising land and space The streets are our only true meeting place. They are free, which suits our pockets, and they are readily available. Once on the streets we can voice our problems and our demands. Bobbi Sykes, 1975.88

During a police operation in November 1973, a task force on ‘Operation Cleanup’, swept Auckland’s inner city streets clearing the disorderly behaviour of Polynesian youth. They combed the alleys and raided bars 88

Bobbi Sykes and Neville Bonner, Black Power in Australia, Ann Turner (ed.), (South Yarra: Heinemann Educational Australia, 1975), p. 21.

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throughout inner city Auckland and in Queen Street came across a group of Islander boys. They singled out one Cook Islander, fourteen-year-old ‘K’. He fitted a description they had been given for the perpetrator of a recent robbery, but quickly cleared him of suspicion. On questioning him, however, they discovered he had no money in his pocket, and no job. He had a place to go home to, but he was nevertheless arrested on a single charge of idle and disorderly.89 It was his first offence. He was remanded in custody overnight and shared his cell with the co-founder of Polynesian Panther Party Will IIlolahia. Having returned from his visit to Sydney Illolahia, on remand for assault, coached K in the cells, rehearsing with him the procedure of putting in no plea and demanding a lawyer. But scared and intimidated by the police and the courtroom, K pleaded guilty the following day before Magistrate H.Y. Gilliand. There were rooms available at Owairaka Boys Home where K, as a minor, should have been remanded for sentencing. Instead, he was sent to the adult gaol Mt Eden Prison. He was there for nearly three weeks, and his only visitor was his mother, who saw him ‘once in the corridor’.90 The official ministerial response to K’s case when it was investigated was that his arrest and appearance before the Children’s Court had been a welfare measure, and for his own good. ‘K’ was probably a first-generation Cook Islander born and raised in New Zealand by parents who joined the migration from the Cook and Samoan islands, New Zealand’s dependent territories, as cheap labourers during the economic boom of the 1960s. This pattern of migration, coupled with the unrelenting alienation of Maori land and policies of integration and urbanisation that drove many young Maori from rural areas to urban centres, was changing the complexion of New Zealand’s urban streets.91 In the 1970s, New Zealand cities such as Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington experienced a steady economic decline and for young Pacific Islanders and Maori concentrated in the poor 89

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‘How many other young Polynesians are now on remand in Mr Eden Prison?’ Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination and Polynesian Panther Party. National Library of New Zealand, Alexander Turnbull Library (ATL), 95–222-1/09. Polynesian Panther Party. Pamphlets: Polynesian Panther Party, Bulletin 2, ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. Press clipping: Peter Franks, ‘Migrant Workers’, Canda, 12 (27 June 1975) in ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers; Ranginui Walker, ‘The Genesis of Maori Activism’, Journal of Polynesian Society, 93:3 (1984): 267–82. On policies and impacts of urbanisation, see Dan Morrow, ‘Tradition and Modernity in Discourses of Maori Urbanisation’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 18 (2014): 85–105; Angela Wanhalla, Matters of the Heart: A History of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013), Chapter 7; Mary Archer and Dane Archer, ‘Maoris in Cities’, Race, 13:2 (1971): 179–85.

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suburbs of the inner city, the streets became their domain. Rising unemployment, racism in schools and substandard and insecure housing ensured the streets were the only place of refuge, and there gang and street culture, boredom, and occasional violence played out in public.92 By the mid-1970s a discourse of disorder painted the presence of brown faces on the streets of Auckland as an irregularity to be removed. In the media, government ministers and police complained that Maori and Islanders made a ‘difficult transition’ to ‘European-oriented society’ and could not handle alcohol. Urbanisation and a ‘breakdown’ of the ‘traditional way of living’ amidst ‘rapid social change’ were represented frequently as spilling on to the streets in waves of crime.93 In reality, the vast majority of offences going through the courts at the time were petty social order offences, with less than four violent crimes a month in 1974.94 But the perception remained powerful that Auckland had been overrun, as the police minister put it, by ‘street fighting, gang violence’ and ‘irresponsible and offensive behavior’.95 The problem, he said, could only be dealt with by policing. The result was that the vast majority of children in state care and inmates in jail were Polynesians or Maori.96 Much scholarly attention has been paid to the struggle for land and land rights as Indigenous rights movements emerged, but significantly less attention has been paid to the wider spatial strategies within which the focused campaigns for land rights were nestled.97 In settler nations where Indigenous peoples were colonised within the territorial borders of the colonising nation, contests over the occupation and use of space were struggles that continued to undermine dispossession.98 Historically, as Penelope Edmonds has shown in relation to Pacific Rim settler cities, 92 93

94

95

96 97

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William Tagupa, ‘Law, Status and Citizenship’, Journal of Pacific History, 29:1 (1994): 19–36. Press clippings: ‘Concerned at Maori Crime Rate’, New Zealand Herald, 15 July 1971; ‘Nelson Group Reaffirms Charge on Justice and Maori Children’ (11 January 1973). ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination, Task Force: A Failure in Law Enforcement. A Disaster in Community Relations (1975) in ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. Press clipping: ‘Auckland Police Task Force Work is Strongly Defended by Ministers’, 12 October 1974. ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. Polynesian Panther Party Info Service Sheet. ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. For a recent historiographical overview, see Bain Attwood, ‘Law, History and Power: The British Treatment of Aboriginal Rights in Land in New South Wales’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 42:1 (2014): 171–92. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, ‘Introduction: Making Space in the Settler Colony’, in Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (eds), Making Space: Settler-Colonial Perspectives on Land, Place and Identity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–24.

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urban space in settler nations was configured and often aggressively policed to remain uncontested and occupied settler space.99 Efforts to manifest public byways, streets, footpaths, parks, beaches and places of dwelling as the exclusive domain of settlers rendered public places enduring sites of colonial contest. As the Black Power movement had shown in Australia, in the era of decolonisation these spatial contests became conscious decolonising strategies. While this section focuses on New Zealand, in Hawaii too, Kanaka Maoli in military space and settled on the beaches and lands they claimed as theirs routinely, and repeatedly, resisted their evictions and construction in United States discourses as ‘homeless at home’.100 So too in Australia daily contests over the use of space played out frequently in the courts. In just one example, following a fight between white men and a group of Aboriginal and Maori men outside a Brisbane pub in 1972, the ‘black militants’ were charged with disorderly behaviour while the white participants went free. As Queensland police later noted, their arrest was emblematic of the worrying numbers of ‘coloured youths’ moving into and occupying the city.101 In New Zealand, as in Australia and Hawaii, the sight and sound of unsanctioned Indigenous and other colonised peoples drove decolonisation inwards, into the settler spaces of the nation. The Polynesian Panther Party, like the Black Power Movement in Australia, emerged, with other new political movements like the Maori youth organisation Nga Tamatoa, from the context of contests over the use of public space by a coalition of young Maori and Polynesian men. According to Will Ilolahia, one of the founding members, the Panthers originally emerged from the street gangs of Auckland to tackle unemployment, poverty, police harassment and concentrated racism with a new ethic of solidarity. Ilolahia had been in the ‘niggs’, reflecting what Polynesians were frequently called at the time, and in 1970 a coalition of gangs formed first the Black Panthers, and later the Polynesian Panthers.102 Like ‘Power’ adherents elsewhere, they organised at first to 99 100

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Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous People and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010). Anne Keala Kelly, ‘Marie Beltran and Annie Pau: Resistance to Empire, Erasure and Selling Out’, in Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua, Ikaika Hussey and Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright (eds), A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 37; Haunani Kay Trask, ‘The Birth of the Modern Hawaiian Movement: Kalama Valley O’ahu’, Hawaiian Journal of History, 21 (1987): 126–53; Haunani Kay Trask and Ed Greevy, Ku’e: Thirty Years of Land Struggle in Hawaii (Honolulu, HI: Mutual, 2004). Inward Telegram, ASIO regional, Brisbane, 16 May 1972. NAA, A6122/2293. The Black Panther Part of Australia Vol. 2. Not to be mistaken with the Black Panthers Maori gang. Robbie Shilliam, ‘The Polynesian Panthers and the Black Power Gang: Surviving Racism and Colonialism in

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keep young people off the streets and away from police. They established homework centres that offered students a quiet space with a desk and a chair, they established food co-ops, a tenant aid brigade that targeted substandard housing and rogue landlords, and prepared detailed and targeted legal advice in various Pacific Island languages. In addition a free bus service took relatives and family members to the prisons that overflowed with a majority of Polynesian or Maori inmates. They, like the autonomy movements of the western Pacific, the Vanuaku Pati in Vanuatu and the Black Movement in Australia, were doing independence for their communities, in their own spaces, and making decolonisation happen in elemental ways. Adopting the style of Black Power with relish – the berets, the fro, the funk and the raised fist – the Polynesian Panthers primarily sought a Polynesian unity because, as Ilolahia put it, ‘racists try to rule us by divide and rule’ and unity was their strongest weapon.103 They read Dubois and Malcolm X, and, in adopting the language of Huey Newton’s ‘Intercommunalism’, they injected into their practices an ethic of ‘knowing about the other struggles in this world [to] see that our struggle is only a part of the world struggle’.104 The Polynesian Panthers conceptually tackled issues facing both Maori and Polynesians in New Zealand, as well as Indigenous Australians, and Islanders in the Pacific as intrinsically linked by the fundamental need for self-determination as an antidote to racism. Black Power, Ilolahia declared when he visited Sydney in 1972, was ‘the power of self-determination, of taking control of our own lives’ and bringing an end to the ‘cultural genocide’ of racist and assimilationist policies.105 If self-determination was the stated ultimate aim of organisations like the Panthers, in both New Zealand and Australia, this was pursued through coordinated and unified occupations of the streets and public space, as well as through the assertion of land rights. In Australia and New Zealand especially, the streets were a lifeline for many Indigenous and colonised peoples in the inner cities, particularly amidst the poverty of

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Aotearoa New Zealand’, in N. Slate (ed.), Black Power Beyond Borders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Melani Anae, Polynesian Panthers: The Crucible Years, 1971–74 (Auckland: Reed Publishing, 2006). Press clipping: ‘Ningla-A-Na! Black Moratorium’, Tribune, 11 July 1972; NAA, A6122/ 2293 the Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2. Polynesian Panther Party Newsletter (November/September 1974). ATL, 2004–024-3/ 11. Task force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. Angelique Stastny and Raymond Orr, ‘The Influence of the US Black Panthers on Indigenous Activism in Australia and New Zealand from 1969 Onwards’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2 (2014): 65 Citing Mua Strickson-Pua. Press clipping: ‘Ningla-A-Na! Black Moratorium’, Tribune, 11 July 1972; NAA, A6122/ 2293 The Black Panther Party of Australia Vol 2.

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working-class suburbs. The streets had to serve residents as a playground, a source of information, entertainment and sustenance. They enabled journeys to work, to school and to family, and they facilitated the practice of language, culture and politics in the relative privacy of urban anonymity. The streets were central to the lived lives of Maori and Polynesians in the cities, ensuring that in the heart of the settler nation’s urban centres, the streets were increasingly the domain of the colonised. It was for this reason that the ability of Maori and Polynesians to be in public space, and on the streets autonomously, without being criminalised became the battleground for new Indigenous movements like the Panthers and Nga Tamatoa. In 1974, a ‘highly-trained, tightly-knit and mobile squad of police’ was appointed as a Task Force in Auckland, to ‘attack violence and disorder on the streets’.106 In predominantly Islander and Maori neighbourhoods, they cruised the streets, scrutinising groups of Islanders, randomly stopping and questioning others, and raiding bars to impose unofficial curfews. The result was an immediate and significant spike in the number of young and mostly Maori and Polynesian men charged for a first offence that was usually related to social order. Mass arrests for offensive language, resisting arrest, and drunkenness at the end of the Task Force’s notoriously pro-active raids on hotels, drove an increase of 134 per cent in arrests for petty street offences.107 Considered a success, residents, police and governments responded positively to having ‘their streets restored’ to them free of ‘misbehaviour’.108 In response to the methods of the Task Force a coalition of community organisations, including the Panthers, Nga Tamatoa with its particular interest at the time in Maori language restoration, and the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination formed a Police Investigation Group (PIG) to patrol the streets and keep the operations of the Task Force under community surveillance.109 Issuing a report based on both police statistics and those collected by the patrols, the coalition found that 60 per cent of arrests by the Task Force were Polynesian or Maori, and a vast majority mirrored K’s arrest in 1971. Drunk in a public space, obscene language and offensive behaviour 106

107 108 109

‘Behind the Formation of a Task Force’, Task Force: A Failure in Law Enforcement. A Disaster in Community Relations, ACORD, April 1975. ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. Task Force: A Failure in Law Enforcement. A Disaster in Community Relations, ACORD, April 1975. ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. Press clipping: ‘Police Foot Patrols to be Increased in Curbing Violence’, 23 October 1974, ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. ‘People Challenge Police Power’, Panther’s Rap, January–February 1975. ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers.

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constituted nearly 80 per cent of arrests alone, and of that 90 per cent were for trivial anti-social behaviour.110 The qualitative evidence collected on patrol, moreover, showed that what counted for obscenity and offensiveness tended to be distinctly racialised with Polynesians being stopped and targeted principally for being Polynesian. Moreover, Polynesians and Maori who spoke English as a second language were being arrested for speaking language, and over half of those charged with offensive language were Pacific Islanders. On numerous occasions Polynesians were arrested because they did not speak English, or did not know enough English to follow police orders.111 In late 1974, the findings of the community coalition’s investigation were presented with police statistics to an unofficial community tribunal, comprised of a panel of Maori, Polynesian and Pakeha men and women. The tribunal recommended the Task Force be disbanded, and publicly presented an alternative solution, which included a range of non-policing, community-controlled strategies. Polynesian communities, the tribunal recommended, needed to be left to ‘solve their own problems in their own terms’, and traditional community-based forms of authority needed to be empowered to police young Polynesians on the streets without incarcerating them. In promoting community independence and a capacity to practise spatially authorised degrees of self-determination and self-government, the tribunal recommendations drew a clear link between the management of the streets and of the police, and the broader decolonisation movement.112 The ability to use, be on, and incorporate the streets into community life was as much an act of decolonisation in settler states, as it was an act that tackled structural racism. It enabled Indigenous and colonised communities in urban areas to claim a space as their own, to maintain a presence that unsettled and undermined urban settler mythologies of assimilation, and to enact a critical means of cultural and physical survival. As such the struggle for occupation rights in urban public space resembled the concept of re-colonisation coined by Vine Deloria, of the militant Red Power organisation the American Indian Movement.113 But 110 111

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Task Force: A Failure in Law Enforcement. A Disaster in Community Relations, ACORD, April 1975. ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. ‘Obscene Language Charge Proves Racial Discrimination’, Task Force: A Failure in Law Enforcement. A Disaster in Community Relations, ACORD, April 1975. ATL, 2004–0243/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. Press clipping: ‘Abolish Police Task Force, Tribunal Urges’, [publication details not available] 21 October 1974; ‘Call to Abandon Task Force for New Concept’, New Zealand Herald, 21 October 1974 in ATL, 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers. Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), pp. 243–68; Vine Deloria, ‘This Country was a Lot Better off When the Indians Were Running It’, in Alvin Josephy Jr., Joane Nagel and Troy Johnson

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its particularity in the Pacific and Australian context came from the practices of solidarity between Indigenous and colonised peoples, which effectively recognised the interdependency of colonisation in and around the Pacific. The daily battle to establish and maintain community-run legal, medical, women’s and housing services in urban centres like Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Wellington and Auckland, where it was safe to be Black or Brown, and where the police were policed, established enclaves of decolonised space where communities kept the settler state under surveillance. This was a critical foundation for some of the more spectacular and transformative land rights and cultural movements. Joining Indigenous strategies in North America and Hawaii, Indigenous peoples in the western Pacific region used the spatial strategies of occupation and mobility to unite disparate struggles for land rights, particularly in both Australia and New Zealand. In Australia, perhaps the most remarkable of these was the Aboriginal Tent Embassy of 1972. It began as a land rights protest on the lawns of Parliament by members of Sydney’s Black Power movement. Discovering they could not be legally evicted from this public space, which allowed camping on the lawns, the protest transformed from a few people and a single beach umbrella to a fully functioning embassy in receipt of mail, tourist visits and unprecedented national and international support.114 Calling it the Aboriginal Embassy, the doors to the main tent were adorned with two flags, one of which would morph into the now widely recognised flag of Aboriginal Australia and the other displayed the colours of Black nationalism.115 As an embassy it highlighted the sense of non-state Black nationalism that was flowering in Australia, while the tent accentuated the relative poverty of Indigenous Australians. The Aboriginal tent embassy was a brilliant and sophisticated protest that did not just give emphasis to the refusal of the conservative Australian government to engage meaningfully in a dialogue with Indigenous peoples about residual and restorative land rights. In addition, it was a force, like the ‘centrifugal forces’ of the western Pacific, that highlighted the failure of the United Nations’ decolonisation project to address, or even acknowledge, the non-self-governing status and national identities of Indigenous peoples in settler colonies. In both Australia and New

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(eds), Red Power: The American Indian’s Fight for Freedom (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 28–38. For extended essays on the Tent Embassy, see Foley et al., The Aboriginal Tent Embassy. For the story behind the flag of Black nationalism, see John Maynard, ‘Marching to a Different Beat: The Influence of the International Black Diaspora on Aboriginal Australia’, in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (eds), Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 262–73.

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Zealand, the assertion of rights to land, and the intermingled calls for a recognition of sovereignties, was a genealogical constant of Indigenous decolonisation narratives reaching back into the nineteenth century. In the 1970s, this emerged as a transnational movement that linked Indigenous groups in unprecedented ways, taking them to the streets and public spaces in assertions of the right to be loud, political and confrontational in numbers. The Tent Embassy was emblematic of this in Australia, and the equivalent in New Zealand was the Land Rights March, the hikoi, of 1975. Since 1967 Maori had been protesting the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1967 through various political means, but the Land Rights hikoi of 1975 unified and solidified nearly 150 years of diverse protest movements and organisations into a tightly woven, pan-iwi national narrative. It was led by Whina Cooper of the Maori Women’s Welfare League, and the organisation Te Roopu o te Matakite of the Mangere marae. The march took over a month to ‘weave’ its way down the centre of north island, stopping at diverse marae, or Maori meeting houses, all the way, collecting marchers and merging with tributary processions.116 Under the banner ‘not one more acre’ the march grew from 50 to over 5,000 by the time it reached Wellington. More indicative was the organisation behind the scenes. Organising Committees throughout the north island were responsible for arranging food for the marchers, accommodation and catering. In their reliance on churches, unions, local community groups and individuals for donations of food and billeted accommodation, the march and the embassy that was eventually established, was simply the tip of a broader and united section of the Maori, Polynesian and Pakeha community.117 In Wellington, the petition that was eventually presented to the government by the Land marchers, demanded the cessation of alienation of Maori land. But the petition was almost incidental to the demonstration of cohesion that had preceded it on the march. Although most of the marchers dispersed after a non-committal response from New Zealand’s prime minister Bill Rowling, a smaller group of Nga Tamatoa and Panther supporters stayed and established a Maori embassy in continued protest. In this case the significance of the embassy, as symbolic as it was, was dwarfed by the march that got it there. The hikoi has recently been described by historian Aroha Harris as ‘a profound cultural, spiritual and political reawakening’ for Maori. Like the Aboriginal Tent Embassy it 116 117

‘Te Roopu Ote Matakite’, explanatory pamphlet. ATL, 95–222-1/06. Maori Struggles/ Papers relating to and Pamphlet. ‘Te Roopu Ote Matakite: Land March on Parliament – September/October 1975’ pamphlet, ATL 2004–024-3/11. Task Force and Polynesian Panther Party Papers.

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was also a profound spatial demonstration of unity as it went from marae to marae, weaving disparate iwi together in a clear declaration that the dispossession must stop.118 These national demonstrations of Indigenous re-occupations of settler space mirrored and would be mirrored by countless smaller occupations at the local level. Exemplary and high-profile examples include the initially illegal occupation of Dagurugu by the Gurindji people after 1966; the occupation of Bastion Point, or Takaparawha, in Auckland by the Ngati Whatua and their supporters in 1977; and that of Kahoolawe in Hawaii from 1976. Each of these in their own way forced national governments into dialogue, sometimes but not always resulting in lasting changes.119 If decolonisation was articulated at the United Nations as a project to liberate the territories of self-determining peoples, in settler nations Indigenous peoples turned to spatial strategies to produce elements of self-determination and decolonised spaces. Strategies varied, but three themes dominated. These included the defence and assertion of an ability to be in, to dwell as a community in, public spaces; the occupations and squatting in spatially meaningful places like Parliament House in Canberra and Wellington, or on ancestral land; and the use of mobility to command acknowledgement and weave alliances. Dwelling in unsanctioned spaces, squatting on country and moving unhindered across national borders both highlighted and ignored the capacity of settler nations to complete the process of dispossession. In so doing, Indigenous peoples transformed settler landscapes, scattering them with places of limited self-determination. Conclusion: decolonisation, identity and space In Australia and New Zealand, the campaigns of organisations like Nga Tamatoa for Maori language renewal, the hikoi, the Polynesian Panthers and the militant Black Movement achieved significant political concessions by the end of the 1970s. By then the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand and a raft of land rights legislation in Australian states were established to fractionally address land rights grievances. Governments 118

119

Aroha Harris, Hikoi: Forty Years of Maori Protest (Wellington: Hula Publishers, 2004); Aroha Harris and Melissa Matutina Williams, ‘Rights and Revitalisation, 1970-1990’, Atholl Anderson, Judith Binney and Aroha Harris, Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2014), pp. 41–4. Jonathan Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio, ‘Hawaiian Souls: The Movement to Stop the U.S. Military Bombing of Kaho’olawe’, in Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua, Ikaika Hussey and Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright, (eds), A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty (Durham NC; and London: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 137–60.

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were also forced into some kind of dialogue with Indigenous groups that would lead to further concessions and progress by the 1980s and beyond. Structural change remained elusive, however, and many of the concessions won would remain subject to the good will of governments. Arguably the more significant change, therefore, occurred both internally and transnationally. By the end of the 1970s Indigenous peoples around the world were self-empowered, mobile and confident in ways that could not have been envisioned even a decade earlier. Moreover, a discourse of decolonisation had been defined, developed and articulated by Indigenous peoples between themselves, which was radically alternative to the limited United Nations programme of decolonisation. Theirs was one that came to light in Pohnpei in 1978, and it would inspire a generation of Indigenous cultural, literary and political renewal in the next few decades, as decolonisation in the Pacific became a postcolonial phenomenon. By the end of the decade of the 1970s, the social and political landscapes of the Pacific and Pacific Rim had changed immeasurably. A cascade of independence ceremonies had seen Fiji granted independence in 1970, Papua New Guinea in 1975, the Solomon Islands in 1976, Tuvalu in 1978, Kiribati in 1979, Vanuatu in 1980 and the Federated States of Micronesia in 1986. Vanuatu was one of the last places to gain formal independence in the southern Pacific, but by no means the last place where people remained non-self-governing. There a resistant French administration and their overly tentative British partners had made the road to independence longer than many locals would have liked.120 As such, and in the absence of formal independence, organisations like the Vanuaku Pati, which would eventually lead the country to independence, had to solidify a sense of unity around key Melanesian concepts and the semiotics of decolonisation. They defined a genuinely grass-roots and assertive independence movement that rallied around transnational concepts of decolonisation organised around the politics of doing independence. It was not perfect nor universally supported, but like the Power movements in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, they successfully anatomised decolonisation, defining its elements of self-determination, independence and spatial rather than territorial autonomy. By the time independence was granted to the last British territory in 1980 in the Pacific, decolonisation had come to mean something else and was being fought for around the Pacific on many fronts. The decade of the 120

Keith Woodward, A Political Memoir of the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2014); Lini, Beyond Pandemonium.

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1970s, for Indigenous peoples and for many of those displaced by the colonial era, was a decade of radical transnationalism. Solidarity networks that were often tenuous and fleeting but drawn together by a deep vein of shared experience perpetuated the story of decolonisation in the Pacific well beyond the point at which independence was granted to nation states. The significance of the unifying concept of Blackness in this context was that it shifted the focus of decolonisation towards identity. This inspired an internal transformation, resituating the starting point for decolonisation in the individual and collective mind, rather than territorial borders. Rallied by its transnational notions of brotherhood and sisterhood, Black Power crystallised the notion that self-determination was determined by the collective self, not colonial powers. This provided the tipping point between protest and change. It forced a dialogue from which emerged a new language of Indigenous rights. From the end of the 1970s, this discourse would begin to address the invisible status imposed by the Saltwater principle on Indigenous peoples caught within the boundaries of colonial states. This would drive the United Nations to widen its myopic focus on nation states.

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Conclusion Procedural decolonisation and Indigenous philosophies of uncolonising

We the Pacific people, want to get some things clear. We are sick and tired of being treated like dogs. You came with guns and fancy words and took our land. You were not satisfied with that so you took our language and raped our culture and then tell us we should be grateful . . . and now you bring in your nuclear bomb and you want to ‘practice’ on us.1

Josephine Abaijah, the first woman voted into the Papua New Guinea House of Assembly, was interviewed on radio on 27 June 1974 about her campaign for Papua to be separated from New Guinea. Abaijah had established the Papua Besena Movement, which campaigned unsuccessfully for Papuan independence from New Guinea.2 She had also spent substantial time in the mountain settlements and villages around Port Moresby speaking with women and men about independence, and two weeks earlier she had led a demonstration of around 1,500 women in Port Moresby against the economic hardship being caused by rapidly rising inflation. She demanded from then Chief Minister, Michael Somare, an immediate price freeze, improved roads to bring more food to Port Moresby and a fairer distribution of wealth. The observing British consul, Gordon Slater, was scathing of Abaijah’s radio interview, describing it as ‘woolly and emotional’ and designed to appeal most to ‘Papuan womenfolk’.3 But a handwritten margin note ascribed substantially more importance to the mobilisation of Papua’s womenfolk, noting that the demonstration was another in ‘what seems to be an increasing spate of heated demonstrations . . . that does not auger well’.4 The writer of the 1

2 3 4

Cited in Vijay Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement: Problems and Prospects’, Paper presented to the United Nations University Conference ‘Peace and Security in Oceania’, 3–6 April 1986. ATL, 91–081-5. Correspondence and misc. papers re FANG and NFIP Conferences. ‘Riots in Port Moresby: A First Hand Report’, Woroni, 11 July 1973, p. 1. Gordon Slater, Port Moresby to South West Pacific Department, 28 June 1974. TNA, FCO 24/1990 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea. G. S. Cowling, British Consulate Port Moresby to South West Pacific Department, 20 June 1974. TNA, FCO 24/1990 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea.

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anonymous margin note reflected the mood that pervaded Australian and British administrations as the procedure of decolonisation unfolded in the Pacific territories. Time and again observers privately bemoaned the absence of ‘sane’, sensible and capable leadership in the soon-to-beindependent territories.5 The administrations were preparing to exit dependent territories with the full expectation of failure. On the one hand, this demands a comment on the gendered nature of decolonisation, for until the radicalisation of the 1970s, decolonisation was men’s business. It involved the handing over of a male-dominated form of colonial rule to a male-dominated form of a nation state. It was men that colonial administrators negotiated with over land and resources. It was mostly men who were educated by colonial administrations in preparation for independence. It was men who travelled to conferences, joined constitutional committees and petitioned other men at the United Nations. By and large, but with notable exceptions, it was men who joined the ‘spatial oscillation’ of the decolonisation era.6 Moreover of Papua New Guinea, Anne Dickson Waiko has since argued, independence signalled the beginning of the colonisation of Papuan women.7 In the Pacific more widely women tended to be incorporated into the new nation as mothers, or the keepers of custom rather than as political individuals, and the home or the village tended not to be sites marked for decolonisation.8 By associating the political expressions of women in public, with a descent into disorder, the nameless administrator commenting on Abaijah’s file thus spoke directly to the heavily constrained nature of the decolonisation procedure that colonial administrations sought to deliver. The inability to fathom the concerns of half the population as more than disorderly, or to incorporate these into what was to be a

5

6 7 8

‘Mr Somare’s best and most sane colleague is undoubtedly Mr. Chan.’ Confidential Report of Brian Barder’s visit to Papua New Guinea, New Hebrides and British Solomon Island Protectorate’. TNA, FCO 24/1990 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea. Margaret Jolly, Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu (Philadelphia, PA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1994), p. 11. Anne Dickson-Waiko, ‘Women, Nation and Decolonisation in Papua New Guinea’, Journal of Pacific History, 48:2 (2013): 177–93. There is an extensive scholarship on this but see: Dickson-Waiko, ‘Women, Nation and Decolonisation’, pp. 178–84; Lissant Bolton, ‘Leading in the “Mother of Darkness”: Perspectives on Leadership and Value in North Ambrym, Vanuatu’, Oceania, 73:2 (2002): 126–42. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986); Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 68–92; Margaret Jolly, ‘Women-Nation-State in Vanuatu: Women as Signs and Subjects in the Discourses of Kastom, Modernity and Christianity’, in Tan Otto and Nicholas Thomas (eds), Narratives of Nation in the South Pacific (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 133–62.

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nation state is a reminder that decolonisation in the Pacific was not configured by departing powers as an instrument for the liberation of people. As we have seen, in the years directly following the United Nations’ Declaration on Independence, the two key decolonising powers in the Pacific, Britain and Australia, agreed in private to harness decolonisation procedures to a broader imperial agenda. That agenda was to get Britain and Australia off the United Nations’ ‘hook’ without necessarily delivering independence to non-self-governing territories. Decolonisation in the Pacific was therefore distinct for being explicitly reconfigured as a continuation and extension of colonial rule, the last stage of imperialism. The implication of this argument is that it shifts our understanding of what should be significant in our evaluation of Indigenous processes of decolonisation. In the Pacific, the significant story of decolonisation does not lie with the number or potency of Indigenous nationalist movements, nor in the question of whether or not they made it impossible for colonial administrations to stay. Rather, as administering powers reconfigured and sought to manage the United Nations agenda, the imposition of independent national statehood, bound by administratively expedient colonial borders wedded the procedure of decolonisation to colonialism itself. Indigenous decolonisation, or uncolonising, happened as Indigenous peoples frustrated these imperial agendas and articulated their own strategies for cultural, economic and spatial self-determination. The independence ceremonies that were held in Fiji in 1970, Papua New Guinea in 1975, the Solomon Islands in 1976, Tuvalu in 1978, Kiribati in 1979 and Vanuatu in 1980 thus marked the formal exit of external administrations. But decolonisation has had to develop for many Indigenous peoples in the Pacific after independence, and as a process, rather than an event. By the time Vanuatu gained its independence in 1980 the procedural decolonisation of the Pacific that was driven by the United Nations and Committee of 24 remained unresolved, incomplete and thoroughly out of puff. The process in many cases had been unedifying. Australia’s rush to get out of Papua and New Guinea ‘as fast as it decently can’ had been unseemly, and the overlordship with which ‘independence was granted unusually swiftly’ in Fiji was high-handed.9 The new Fijian constitution was drawn up in London, and Ratu Mara who would take the reins of power did not even have access to the details of internal security, such as 9

James Morris, Diplomatic Report, 14 June 1972. TNA, FCO 24/1435 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea; David Edwards, Ministry of Defence to J. Thomas, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 12 June 1972. TNA, FCO 24/1433 Decolonisation of Papua New Guinea.

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the size of the police force, until after independence was granted.10 So too the refusal by decolonising powers Britain and Australia to yield to such ‘centrifugal’ forces, as separatist desires and concerns over the alienation of land, led to awful mistakes amidst the haste. Deep social ruptures and cleavages were left raw and unresolved by decolonisation procedures in West Papua, New Britain and the Gazelle Peninsula, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Bougainville. As a result the imposed, engineered and administratively expedient forms of nationhood that were unfolded over the diverse communities of Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Solomons have remained unstable in the postcolonial period. Ten years of civil war between Papua New Guinea and Bougainville, recurring political upheaval and instability in Fiji, violence over landholding in the Solomons and an irrepressible pattern of conflict and suppression in West Papua have ensured the postcolonial period for independent nations has been one of deeply rooted, violent and sometimes fatal turbulence. The deep wells of independent identity that were plain to all in the lead-up to independence, were simply smoothed over by administering powers keen to not to be left in charge if, or when, conflict emerged. In a brief to the Secretary of State in 1972, the British High Commissioner, Morrice James, noted with approval that Australian officials were privately favouring a speedy road to independence in Papua New Guinea. It was deemed preferable for an ‘indigenous regime to take whatever repressive action may be needed’ to suppress any upheavals in Bougainville or the Gazelle Peninsula.11 To be fair, decolonisation, the handing of power to a people that only years before had been considered incapable of self-government, was a complex procedure. As British observers in Canberra were keen to point out to Australian personnel in Papua and New Guinea, decolonisation was difficult to get right. In 1971 after the United Nations resolution on the ‘Question of Papua New Guinea’ called for the ‘speedy attainment . . . of self government’, Australian officials asked Britain how to grant independence, and sought a list of the ‘last ten independencies’.12 The general template was forwarded to the Australian government in the form of enabling legislation used in Zambia, Kenya, Uganda and Fiji detailing the need for a ‘gradual transfer to the local authorities’ of the control and operation of everyday matters. But Australia’s questions became 10 11 12

Secret Report, S. Warman, Commonwealth Section, Research Department, 8 June 1972. TNA, FCO 24/1433 Decolonisation of Papua New Guinea. James Morris, Diplomatic Report, 14 June 1972. TNA, FCO 24/1435 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea. D. W. Fall, South West Pacific Department to P. Vereker, British High Commission, 23 February 1972. TNA, FCO 24/1433 Decolonisation of Papua New Guinea.

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increasingly more detailed inquiries into the minutiae of such a transfer. When a ‘Priority Secret’ list of nine questions about the stages and speed of empowering local leaders was forwarded in May 1972, the British Department of Defence responded by saying that nobody was left with the expertise to answer Australia’s questions. Whatever ‘experience may have existed on these subjects in the Colonial Office seems largely to have been dissipated’, and the answers Australia sought could only be attained by ‘considerable research among past papers’.13 As straightforward as the template for decolonisation could be, the actual process of transferring power throughout the Pacific territories generated folios and folios of records, letters, exchanges and intelligence in Canberra, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Deeply sensitive to currents of discord on the ground, intelligence networks reported constantly to British and Australian officials on the murmurings and rumblings of so-called centrifugal forces. Antagonism between the territory of Papua and the ‘black colonialists’ of New Guinea continued to be a thorn in Australia’s side.14 So too did Bougainville, Black Power, Tolai squatters on Australian plantations and the Tolai nation on the Gazelle Peninsula, and Papua New Guinea independence leaders’ ‘fascination’ with Africa and, in particular, Tanzania.15 Britain too, fretted about the custom movement Nagriamel in Vanuatu, autonomy movements in the Solomon Islands, and the potential for radicalism from elsewhere to ‘infect’ the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.16 Close reporting was maintained, particularly on the gravitation of Bougainville islanders towards the Solomons, and prior to 1970 even closer reporting was maintained on the blossoming and occasionally militant labour movements of Fiji, Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands. The procedures, the order, and perfunctoriness that departing administrations craved rarely went unchallenged by these forces that often had deep roots in the colonial past. In this sense the abiding story of procedural decolonisation in the Pacific was that departing administrations were spooked into haste by the

13

14

15

16

Priority Secret Telegram, Canberra to London, 17 May 1972; E Emery Pacific Territories Department to Defence Department, 1 June 1972. TNA, FCO 24/1433 Decolonisation of Papua New Guinea. ‘Confidential Report of Brian Barder’s Visit to Papua New Guinea, New Hebrides and British Solomon Island Protectorate’. TNA, FCO 24/1990 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea. ‘Confidential Report of Brian Barder’s Visit to Papua New Guinea, New Hebrides and British Solomon Island Protectorate’. TNA, FCO 24/1990 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea. James Morris, Diplomatic Report, 14 June 1972. TNA, FCO 24/1435 Political Situation in Papua New Guinea.

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speed with which Indigenous peoples developed global networks, political movements and, above all, a decolonised consciousness. The existence of centrifugal forces reminds us of just how much was achieved by Indigenous peoples in only a few decades. As had been the case a century earlier, access to and proficiency in imperial languages and discourses – education – was a dose of smelling salts throughout the Pacific. It provided liberating tools for making global connections, and an exposure to ideas that undermined the isolation of the colonial era as effectively as passports and radio waves eroded colonial borders. As we have seen from West Papua to Samoa, to Tahiti and New Caledonia, access to education and a counter-imperial literacy gave subject peoples an international voice. It brought them together in classrooms filled with people similarly situated to compare, discuss, debate and learn. Under surveillance, conceptual and intellectual links and connections were made across oceans, carried in pamphlets, books, on radio waves and in speeches. Individuals became missing links that connected parallel movements and ideas. Olaf Nelson, Wiremu Ratana, Jonathan Fifi’i, Pauulu Brown, Patsy Corowa and Albert Maori Kiki, Bobbi Sykes, Will Illolahia, and Oscar Tammur all undertook journeys that would thread together disparate, derivative and home-grown movements to coalesce into a globalised fabric of Indigenous identity and an un-colonising philosophy of decolonisation. As Indigenous philosophies and aspirations for decolonisation took a more organised form, and one that parted from procedural decolonisation, the movements that emerged seemed to be dominated by men. At the surface this was the case, but the absence of women also reflected the interests of those collecting information. Intelligence networks in particular, we have seen, were quite dismissive of women, often not naming them or classifying them as girlfriends and wives, or in the case of single women like Abaijah, dismissing them as emotional and irrational. But it is very clear that women were centrally and indispensably involved with many of these movements. In Papua New Guinea they were clearly politically active alongside men, and when the Melanesian Independence Front burst onto the political scene in 1968, for example, a third of the membership were women.17 While it was not rare for women to be at the forefront, as were Whina Cooper and the Maori Womens Welfare League, or Bobbi Sykes, Patsy Corowa, Grace Molesi and Josephine Abaijah, they were also central to the driving forces that kept movements going. They worked in the health and legal services, ran the homework 17

Australian Intelligence Weekly Report, 6 November 1968. TNA, FCO 24/472 Papua and New Guinea: Political Affairs Internal (Secret).

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centres in Auckland, coordinated and produced Seli Hoo in Australia and worked in Vanuatu’s sheds and houses editing, writing and producing Vanua’aku Viewpoints. The massive efforts required to coordinate the marae in Aotearoa New Zealand during the 1975 hikoi, and to accommodate and feed marchers, demonstrators and speakers, very often rested on the dedicated labour of women. Organised groups such as the National Council of Aboriginal and Island Women in Australia and Vanua’aku Women’s Association show also that women were organising around the gender-conscious implications of decolonisation and thinking through the hierarchies and intersections of oppression, but this was often underpinned by a public gender solidarity. The education, border-crossings and journeying that so successfully cultivated transnational networks, and radicalised or inspired individuals, did so in dialogue with home-grown movements, the wellsprings from the nineteenth century. Throughout the Pacific, and especially in the western Pacific, deep veins of political and historical discontent underpinned numerous autonomy movements that seemed to observing officials and international media to be spontaneous and inexplicable outbreaks of unstable culture. While these movements may well be explained anthropologically as something particular to a Melanesian cosmology, others have sprung up repeatedly in sites heavily impacted by the translocal flows of indentured and wartime labour. The recurring themes of the withdrawal of consent to the colonial order, a role reversal of coloniser and colonised, the generation of alternative sources of wealth and the promise of ritual practices of culture is what makes these movements intensely local, but also transnationally informed, decolonisation moments. In this sense they formed part of a latent network of similar but different movements. Thus the Moro, Maasina Rule or Apolosi movements were delicately threaded together with the Mau Movement in Samoa or King Movement in Aotearoa by common discursive fibres of culture, land and autonomy. In this now fleshed-out context where historical trajectories of protest and syncretic politics were connecting with and incorporating global ideas, the coming together of Indigenous delegates and non-indigenous supporters in 1978 in Pohnpei is not at all surprising. The attending delegates, Gary Foley and Walter Lini especially, were members of extremely well-connected and developed political movements that were on the leading edge of global thinking about Indigenous rights. Coming as they did from the Pacific region, with its proliferation of settler colonies, and where decolonisation procedures were playing out as a new form of imperialism, their political discourse incorporated sophisticated, radical and Indigenous iterations of decolonisation. But if the Pohnpei Charter of

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Indigenous Rights was, by global standards, a radical document for 1978, its predecessor penned in Suva in 1975 was more so. Known as the ‘Fiji Declaration’ it situated nuclear testing and dumping in the Ocean as a product of colonialism: ‘Pacific Islanders are considered insignificant in numbers and inferior as peoples’, and nuclear testing was an extension of ‘oppression, exploitation and subordination of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific’.18 Its preamble was angry, militant and unrepentant, a talking up that reflected the impatience for progress that could be seen all over the Pacific. Although this book has had an archival concentration in the western Pacific, we have seen that everywhere in the Pacific, from Pohnpei to Hawaii, Guam, Tahiti and Kanaky, Indigenous and native groups were marching, squatting, petitioning and talking up matters of sovereignty, self-determination, cultural rights and land rights. They were the same issues that subject peoples had been campaigning for since the nineteenth century when Indigenous peoples fought hard to gain a literacy and fluency in imperial, humanitarian, Christian and other circulating discourses. Talking back to empire, seeking a higher authority and journeying to the seat of power were thus recurrent and distinctive themes across the space-time of the Pacific. The story of decolonisation and the Pacific, finally, is defined by the historical circumstance that so many of the Pacific’s colonised peoples were removed from the view of the United Nations’ Committee of 24 on Decolonisation without being granted independence. As we have seen, the United Nations decolonisation resolutions, 1514 and 1541, locked the peoples of non-self-governing territories in to their colonial borders, and locked Indigenous peoples colonised internally by self-governing territories out of the international decolonisation discourse. This had a significant impact in the Pacific where settler and other incorporated colonies proliferated, as did hastily and administratively drawn borders that blended poorly into their geographic and cultural locations on the ground. As we have seen, Hawaii, Guam, the Micronesian islands and American Samoa were either incorporated by the United States or disappeared from view by military designations as strategic territories; New Caledonia and French Polynesia were incorporated by France; West Papua’s occupation by Indonesia was overseen by the United Nations and considered an incorporation by act of free choice; the colonial borders defining the island chains between Papua and the Solomon Islands fitted poorly with Indigenous identities in the region; and Indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand were classified merely as minorities by the Saltwater principle. 18

Cited in Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement: Problems and Prospects’.

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Territory was a poor means of identifying the need for decolonisation in the Pacific with its proliferation of settler colonies and incorporated territories. This alone makes the Pacific’s relationship to decolonisation unique. It has meant that in the hands of Indigenous peoples decolonisation has become an internal, often spatial, postcolonial project. In the 1960s and 70s, in the absence of territorial sovereignty or national autonomy, we saw decolonisation emerge as an identity, a belief system and a thought process that practised independence, and injected the spaces that Indigenous peoples occupied with practices of self-determination. Decolonisation has thus been practised as an ongoing, ever contingent process of uncolonising that has necessarily worked from the inside out. As we have seen throughout the western Pacific and in the settler colonies, decolonisation was turned inwards in the 1960s, to decolonise the mind of newly self-conscious Black and Brown peoples. From there it extended to the voice and to language, and moved outwards to the practice, retention and revival of culture, stories and custom, and to the spatial occupation, re-colonisation and transformation of sites of coalescence. Throughout the long period during which Indigenous narratives of decolonisation were in formation, from the nineteenth century onwards, Indigenous peoples throughout the Pacific have found ways of asserting independent notions of identity, self-determination and rights to land and space. This became most articulate, mobile and globalised from the late 1960s and 70s. During this time separatist West Papuans raised their Morning Star flag on every anniversary of the day the Netherlands left, their independence day; Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Tolai, Ni Vanuatu, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people squatted on their own lands, however temporarily; and Black Australians and Polynesian New Zealanders found ways within their own communities to deliver food, child care, medical, legal and housing services to protect each other from over policing and overt racism through reverse surveillance; and young Maori found ways to retain, learn and speak in the Maori language. Borrowing liberally from race-consciousness and feminist movements, internationally intermingled discourses of a spatial as opposed to territorial nationalism was asserted by Indigenous peoples in Australia, Hawaii, West Papua and Kanaky claiming rights to self-determination as nations within nations, or as transnational non-state alternatives. Emphasising autonomy, cultural pride, survival and revival, custom and identity became crucial in these years to locating and asserting independence. From this agitation has sprouted a renaissance of Indigenous cultural expression throughout the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and the Americas. A flowering of writing, theatre, poetry and dance has explored

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and produced self-defined identities, alongside and in dialogue with strident theorisations of the meaning, extent and future of decolonisation. Exemplary is the Pacific Arts Festival, held every four years since 1972 to celebrate and showcase ‘Melanesian, Polynesian, Micronesian, Aboriginal, Indian, Chinese and European cultures’, during which cultural and artistic expression is never far removed from the politics of decolonisation.19 If there is a Pacific experience of decolonisation then, it is not one of failure, nor simply of incompletion. Indigenous peoples necessarily anatomised decolonisation in the Pacific, removing its elements from the binds of the nation state. Decolonisation has thus been an ongoing and necessarily recurring, mobile story of insistence and persistence in the face of imposed invisibility. It has produced an internalised identitybuilding process of un-colonising the mind, speech, knowledge and space. National independence has been part of that process in some cases. But the Pacific’s story is ultimately one that forces a recognition of, and engagement with, decolonisation’s forgotten peoples, those subsumed by, or caught in the interstices between, national state borders. These are not just those referenced at Pohnpei in 1978 as the imagined communities of the ‘fourth world’, those Indigenous peoples stranded by the United Nations’ subscription to the Saltwater principle. It is also those peoples displaced and dislodged during the colonial era for the purposes of settlement, mining or labour, and stranded away from home, off country, or colonised but not indigenous. The descendants of colonialism’s diaspora, the displaced and dispossessed Aboriginal and Maori moved off country, Australian South Sea Islanders, Fiji’s Melanesians and the Indo-Fijian community, and the Banabans, Nauruans, West Papuans in exile, Cook Islanders and Samoans scattered throughout the Pacific and Pacific Rim. Displacement and dispossession in the Pacific has therefore produced a unique, diasporic and stateless process of daily decolonisation characterised by a globalised connectivity.

19

Participants Information: South Pacific Festival of Arts Rotorua, New Zealand 6–13 March, 1976 in ATL, Eph-B-Festival-South-Pacific-1976.

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Index

Abaijah, Josephine, 216, 221 Aboriginal tent embassy, 211, 212, See decolonisation, spatial Aborigines Advancement League, 107, 185, 186, 187, 190 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, 1, 129, See Port Phillip protectorate; Australia; Black movement, in Australia and Blackness, 185–195 and identity, 77 and inter-war mobilisation, 107–110 and settler-colonial governance, 41–42 and spatial decolonisation, 206–207, 212 and the ‘fourth world’, 2, 225 and translocal networks, 110–111, 178, 215 and use of petitioning, 51–53, 72–73 Aborigines Progressive Association, 107 Aborigines Protection Society, 57, 61 Afro-Asian bloc, at the UN, 153, 169 All Colonial Peoples Conference, 116, 117 American Indian Movement, 210, See Red Power Ann, The, 50 Anti-Slavery society, 38, 99 Aotearoa, 14, 20, 48, 63, 186, 208, 214, 222, See New Zealand Apolosi movement, 77, 107, 164, 222 Arthur, Mary, 51, 52, 59, 60, 80 Arthur, Walter, 51, 52, 59 assimilation and amalgamation, 59, 142, 152 and decolonisation, 146 and identity, 75–76, 105 and the mandate system, 90–91 policies of, 41–44, 73 Atahoe, 48, 49, 62 Auckland, 33, 83, 107, 172, 192, 198, 204, 213 and Polynesian Panthers, 207

policing of, 209–211 Polynesians and Maori in, 204–206 Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination, 209 Australia, 158, See Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders; Australian South Sea Islanders; assimilation and amalgamation and Bougainville, 168–169 and decolonisation, 151–154, 156, 157, 158, 169–179, 216–221 and Papua New Guinea, 91–92, 128, 149–150, 180, 214 and settler-colonial governance, 34, 41–42 and settler-colonialism, 14, 31, 44, 73 and the indentured labour trade, 36–37 and the United Nations Charter, 123, 124 and West Papuan refugees, 180 Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association, 111 Australian South Sea Islanders, 71–72, 77, 187, 225 Australian South Sea Islanders United Council, 203 autonomy movements, 138, See Apolosi movement; Moro movement; Maasina Rule; cargo cults ambiguity of, 77–79 and decolonisation, 168 in historical context, 132–141 John Frum, Vanuatu, 132, 135, 162, 166 Nagriemel, Vanuatu, 132 Oloa company, Samoa, 83 Paliau movement, Papua New Guinea, 132, 135 Pouvanaa A Oopa, Tahiti, 132 racialised explanations of, 113 Vailala ‘Madness’, Papua New Guinea, 135

258

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Index Banabans, 225 Bandler, Faith, 196, 203 Bani, Fr John, 198 beachcombers, 26 as interlocutors, 26 Belgian Thesis, 143, See saltwater principle Ben Lomond people, of Tasmania, 51 Bermuda, 190, 201 Black movement, in Australia, 187–195, 196, 208, 213 and decolonisation, 186, 191, 194 in the United States of America, 194–195 Black Panthers, 191, 193 and Polynesian Panthers, 207 Australian, 193 Black Power, 4, 183, 186–187, 189, 190, 211, 215, 220 in Australia, 189–195 in New Zealand, 208 in Papua New Guinea, 175, 178 in Vanuatu, 196–197, 199–201 borders. See meridian, 141st east; passports and spatial discipline, 149–150 as spatial discipline, 39–41 colonial as national, 141–146, 174–175 establishment of colonial, 39–41, 44–45 porous, 16–17, 102–103, 115, 117 Bougainville, 12, 14, 16, 41, 76, 165, 170, 184, 190, 220 and borders, 16–17, 174–175, 177, 179, 220 and civil war, 219 and land, 168–169, 176, 191 and WWII, 118–121, 126, 127, 129, 162 Boyd, Benjamin, 32–33 Brown, Pauulu (Roosevelt), 194, 202, 203 at the UN, 198 in Australia, 190 in Vanuatu, 199–201 Bruce, George, 48, 49 Bula Tale Association, 164, See Apolosi movement Bully Beef Club, 172, 174, 183, See Pangu Party Cakobau, Ratu Seru, 22–24, 45, 66, 70, 80 cargo cults, 113, See autonomy movements as a prose of counter-insurgency, 137 as discursive phenomena, 134–138, 162–165 as historically linked, 139–140 Carmichael, Stokeley, 189 Celua, Ratu Joseph, 38, 39, 45

259 centrifugal forces, 170, 174, 176, 177, 211, 219, 221 definition of, 169 Cherokee decisions, 90–91 Church Missionary Society, 54 civil and political rights and the settler state, Australia, 187–189 and the settler state, French colonial territories, 142 and the settler state, Hawaii, 142 the impact of, 188–189 the limits of, 188 Cleaver, Eldridge, 193 Cleaver, Kathleen, 193 Committee of 24 (United Nations Special Committee on Decolonisation), 13, 14, 197, 198, 218, 222 communism, 1, 113, 136, 160, 161, 164, 168, 192 Cook Islands, 36, 40, 56, 152 Cook, James, 25, 29, 53 Cooper, Whina, 212, 221 Corowa, Patricia, 190, 191, 195, 202, 203, 204, 221 in the United States of America, 195 in Vanuatu, 196–197 Davis, Angela, 193 Day of Mourning, Aboriginal protest, 108 decolonisation and gender, 202–203, 216–218, 221–222 and settler colonialism, 143–144, 185–186, 187–195, 204–213 as defined by United Nations instruments, 122–123, 141–146 as the last stage of imperialism, 11, 18, 154–157, 158, 194 early ideological work of, 85, 92–93, 101–103, 106, 115–117 information as a site of, 201–202 procedural, 216–221 decolonisation in the Pacific, 3–5, 6–8 dates of, 214 procedural, 216–221 significance of, 158–159, 206–207, 213–215, 223–225 decolonisation of people, 8, 116–117, 145–146, 213–215, See uncolonising in Australia, 190–191 in Vanuatu, 196–204 Indigenous articulations of, 222–223 decolonisation of territory, 116–117 ascendance of, 141–146 the limits of, 223–225

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260

Index

decolonisation, spatial, 175–176, 204–213, 223–225 in Bougainville, 168–169 Deloria, Vine, 20, 210 depopulation, 24, 29–30 and measles, 23 and Spanish influenza, 82–83 and the indentured labour trade, 36–37, 77 and WWII, 120 in Fiji, 74 in the Pacific, 44 Deskaheh, 94, 95, 102, 103, 109, 112 in Geneva, 94 dispossession, 64–66 See land and blood quantum, 43–44 in Australia, 29 in Hawaii, 43–44, 67–69 in New Zealand, 42–43 in the Pacific, 34–35 Du Boulay, Roger, 199, 200, 201 Duff, The, 53 East Timor, 1, 2, 12, 15, 16, 202 exile, 12, 77, 79, 97, 100, 112, 166, 180, Fanon, Frantz, 189 Federated States of Micronesia, 1, 214 Fernando, A.M., 94, 103, 110 Fifi’i, Johnathon, 114, 115, 117, 126, 128, 132, 133, 136 Fiji, 8, 26, 34, 57, 64, 77, 84, 139, 157, 159, 161, 165, 166, 170, 172, 181, 200, 203, 219, 220 and indentured labour, 36, 37, 72 and land, 35, 166 and mothering, 74–75 and settlers, 66 and Spanish influenza, 83 and WWII, 118, 119, 125, 128, 131 annexation of, 22–23, 38, 39, 70 independence, 11, 218–219 US trade with, 31–32 Fiji Declaration, The, 223 flags as symbols of consciousness, 12–13, 211 raising ceremonies, 11 Flinders Island, 51, 52, 54, 59, 60, 73, 80 Flinders Island Chronicle, 60 Foley, Gary, 189, 191, 194, 222 Foot, Sir Hugh, 151, 167, 172 and Australian visit, 152–154 Gazelle Peninsula, 169, 170, 179, 191, See Papua New Guinea

and the Mataungan Association, 175 and Tolai squatters, 175–176, 220 Geneva, 88, 95, 98, See the League of Nations visits to, 86–87, 95, 98, 100, 103, 112 Ghana, 190, 198 Gilbert and Ellice islands, 40, 170, See Tuvalu; Kiribati administration of, 75 globalisation, technologies of, 84, 104, 130–131, 141, 204, See passports; radio; telegraph Goraiga, Joseph, 165 Guadalcanal Council, 162, See Moro movement, the Guam, 8, 14, 40, 118, 223 and WWII, 118, 120, 121, 127 half-caste, 109 and Samoan resistance, 102–107 construction of, 41, 103 Hannett, Leo, 190 Hawaii, 69–70 and land, 43–44 and settler-colonialism, 73 and the Mahele, 67–69 as a state of the United States of America, 142 disease impact in, 29 identity and the raising of consciousness, 126–133, 172–174, 187–189 as a site of colonisation, 44, 79 as a site of decolonisation, 75–76, 77–79, 103–111, 112–113, 213–215 discipline of, 44–45, 73, 105 Ilolahia, Will, 192, 205 and Polynesian Panthers, 208 imperial literacy, 51–62, 64, 80, 85, 139, 190 defined, 52 Indigenous rights, 194, 206, 215 and the Pohnpei Charter, 1–3 James, C.L.R., 190 Jouwe, Nicholas, 148, 180 Kaisiepo, Marcus, 148, 180 Kalpokas, Donald, 198, 202 Kanaka Maoli and land, 43–44, 67–69 and sovereignty movement, 207, 224 and the ‘fourth world’, 2, 225 and trade relations, 27–28

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261

Index status of, at United Nations, 142–143, 146 Kanakas. See Australian South Sea Islanders construction of, 72, 76–77, 80 Kanaks and colonial governance, 42 status of, at United Nations, 142–143, 146 Kaputin, John, 175, 177 in Australia, 178 Kelesi, Mariano, 170, 173 Kenya, 184, 187, 190, 198, 219 Kiki, Albert Maori, 173, 190 in Melbourne, 183, 185 Kiki, Elizabeth, 173 Kiribati, 13, 25, 54, 120, 125, 198, 220, See Gilbert and Ellice Islands; Tuvalu and WWII, 118–121 date of independence, 214 Kruger, Patricia, 190, See Corowa, Patricia Kulin nation, 60 labour and WWII, 114, 126, 130–132, 133, 135 in relation to land, 32–33 the indentured labour trade, 34–37, 71–72, 76, 196 land. See decolonisation, spatial; dispossession and rights, 60–61, 158, 165–166, 191, 211–213, 223 protection from alienation, 70–71 land rights march (hikoi), 212–213, See decolonisation, spatial language and decolonisation, 203, 209–210, 213, 224 and Pidgin, 45–46 and trade, 16 Lapun, Paul, 178 League of Nations, 84, 87–90, See mandate system; Ratana, Tahupotiki Wiremu; Nelson, Ta’isi Olaf; Permanent Mandates Commission, the League of Nations Indigenous peoples’ influence on, 93–95 significance of, 112–113 Lealofi, Tamasese, 97, 100 Liberia, 190, 198 Lini, Walter, 197–198, 222 and the Vanuaku Pati, 198–199

London Missionary Society, 29, 53–54, 55 Maasina Rule, the, 126, 136–137, 139, 140, 141, 145, 158, 222 legacy of, 162–163, 164, 167, 170 Mahele, the Hawaiian, 67–69 Malaita Council, the, 140, 170, See Maasina Rule Maloat, Paliau, 133, 139 mandate system, the League of Nations, 90–93 Maori, 1, See Ngapuhi; dispossession; Waitangi, the Treaty of and sovereignty, 62–64, 87 and spatial strategies of, 78, 211, 212–213 and the ‘fourth world’, 2, 91, 225 and urbanisation discourses, 205–206 early colonial trading relations, 27–28 representations of, 87 Maori Women’s Welfare League, 212, 221 Marquesas, The, 25, 53 Marsden, Samuel, 50, 52–53 Mataungan Association, the, 175–176, 178 Mau movement, the, 98–101, 222 and Samoan identity, 106–107 racialisation of, 103–105, 113 Maynard, Fred, 111 Maza, Bob, 190 McGuiness, Bruce, 191 Melanesian Independence Front, 177, 178, 221 melanesianism, 135 meridian, 141st east, 41, 149–150, See borders missionaries, 38, 53–59, 63 and literacy, 55–56 Indigenous, 54–55 mobility and decolonisation, 102–103, 172–174, 181–182, 184–185, 203–204 and maritime industries, 26–29 and WWII, 118–120 as a site of colonisation, 83–84 impact of, 79 Indigenous patterns of, 24–26 moko, facial tattoos, 48, 78, 113 Moko, Pita and passports, 103 in Geneva, 86–87 Molisa, Grace, 202 Moro movement, the, 162–165, 175 and land, 166

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262

Index

natives, constructions of, 46, 72, 121, 176, 184–185, See assimilation and amalgamation; identity; cargo cults and mothering, 74–75 and the mandate system, 90–91 through colonial governance, 41–44, 73–76 Nauru, 40, 91, 124, 161 and WWII, 119 Nawai, Apolosi, 77, 78, See Apolosi movement Nelson, Ta’isi Olaf, 98–101, 103 construction as a half-caste, 103–104 networks, 9–11, 14–17 British humanitarians, 53–62 in exile, West Papua, 180–182 Indigenous, 24–26, 66–71 of consciousness, 110–111 of decolonisation, 183–215 of indentured labour, 139–140 of surveillance, 160 the ‘colonial international’, 115–117 the work of, 203–204 New Caledonia, 14, 34, 173–174 and colonial governance, 42 and French incorporation, 142–143, 185, 223 and indentured labour, 36–37, 72 and land, 35 and settler-colonialism, 44 and WWII, 118–121 New Hebrides, 13, See Ni Vanuatu; Vanuatu New York Agreement, The, 147–151 New York City, 148, 180 point of convergence, 195, 197 New Zealand. See Ngapuhi; Samoa; Maori and decolonisation, 204–213 and land, 35 and Ngapuhi travel, 48–51 and Samoa, 13, 82–83, 96, 98–101 and self-government, 34 and settler-colonialism, 14, 31, 33–34, 42–43, 44, 62–66, 73 and the mandate system, 91–92, 96–98 and United Nations trusteeship system, 123–124 early colonial trades, 27–28 Newton, Huey, 193, 208 Nga Tamatoa, 19, 194, 207, 209, 212, 213 Ngapuhi, 52, 62, 64, 79 travels of, 48–51 Ni Vanuatu, 156 access to education, 197

and decolonisation, 201–203 civil status of, 171 underestimation of, 197, 200 Nicholls, Pastor Doug, 185, 189 Nigeria, 184, 187 non-self-governing territories, United Nations list of, 154 formation of, 141–146 limits of, 141 nuclear testing, 1, 125, 151, 223 Olisikulu, Johnson, 161 Omai, 25, 53 Pacific Ocean, the. See decolonisation in the Pacific and militarisation, 124–126 and tropes of emptiness, 121–122, 125–126 as a site of analysis, 5, 14–15 partition and isolation, 39–41, 44–45, 72 Pacific Trust Territory, 124 Pallawah people, 51, 80 Pan-African Congresses Manchester, 116, 117 Paris, 93 Pan-Africanism, 15, 110, 173, 199 Pangu Party, 173, 178, See Bully Beef Club Pan-Pacific Womens Association, 202 Papua Besena Movement, 216 Papua New Guinea, 75 and decolonisation, 152, 168–179, 183–185 and independence, 218 and WWII, 118–121, 126–133 as a League of Nations mandate, 91–92 as a United Nations trust territory, 124 partition of, 16–17, 39–41 Papuan National Congress, 147, 148 Paris, 199 and Melanesian community, 173–174 and Paris peace talks, 88, 89, 92 passports, 84, 93, 102, 103, 104, 204, 221, See globalisation, technologies of; borders Perkins, Charlie, 189 Permanent Mandates Commission, the League of Nations, 92, 95, 98, 99, 104, 105, 113 and Western Samoa, 101 petitioning, Indigenous peoples’, 15, 51–52, 60–61, 72, 139, See imperial literacy Maori to King George, 86–87

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Index Mau to League of Nations, 99–100 Samoan Fono to King George V, 97 Samoans to United States Congressional Commission, 101 to the League of Nations, 98, 101–103 to the United Nations, 195, 198 Pidjot, Roce, 174, See Paris Pierre, Leingole, 202 Pohnpei, 214, 225 and indentured labour trade, 32 and the Pohnpei Charter, 1–3 and WWII, 118–121, 127 Pohnpei Charter (Charter to Establish the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), 1–3, 5, 8, 222 Polynesian Panthers, 4, 19, 207, 208, 213 Polynesians, in New Zealand, 204–206 mobilise, 208–209 policing of, 209–211 Port Phillip protectorate (Victoria, Australia), 29, 31, 60, 62, 63, 64–65 Rabaul, 176, See Papua New Guinea and Mataungan Association, 175 and WWII, 118–121, 139 strike in, 107, 137 race, 45, 73, See Polynesian panthers; Black movement, Australian; Black Power and colonial governance, 46, 73, See natives, constructions of; assimilation and amalgamation and consciousness, 178 and quantified identities, 105–106 and WWII, 121–122, 128–130 consciousness of, 76, 93, 110–111, 160–161, 177 policing, and urbanisation, 205–210 radio, 96, 104, 130, 131, 141, 180, See globalisation, technologies of and borders, 16–17 Rapanui (Easter Island), 14, 36, 37, 40 Ratana, Tahupotiki Wiremu, 85, 95, 102, 103, 109, 112 in Geneva, 86–87, 94 Red Power, 20, 193, 210, See American Indian Movement Resolution 1514, United Nations, 4, 141, See UN Declaration on Independence Resolution 1541, United Nations, 144 Robinson, George Augustus, 52–53, 54 in Port Phillip, 59–60, 65 Robinson, Sir Hercules and annexation of Fiji, 22–24 Ruatara, 50, 62, 80

263 saltwater principle, 144, 223, 225, See Belgian Thesis Samoa, 110 and identity, 102–107 and indentured labour, 37 and land, 34, 35 and Spanish influenza, 82–83 and the Mau movement, 96–101 as League of Nations mandate, 91 as United Nations trust territory, 123–124, 132 independence of, 150, 152, 155, 170 partition of, 41 Samoa, US, 8, 14, 223 and Spanish influenza, 96 and the Mau movement, 101 in WWII, 119 Scott, Evelyn, 196 Seale, Bobby, 193 Select Committee on Aborigines, British Settlements, 57–59 self-determination a new language of, 86–95 act of, in West Papua, 148, 181 and autonomy movements, 164–166 and race-consciousness, 207–209 and settler-colonial nations, 141–146 manipulation of, 156–157 settler-colonialism, 8, See assimilation and amalgamation; New Zealand; Australia and elemental decolonisation, 188, 191, 214–215, 223–225 and governance practices, 41–44, 73 and League of Nations mandate system, 91–92 and League of Nations’ non-competence, 93–95 and spatial decolonisation, 204–213 and United Nations-defined decolonisation, 141–146, 185–186 in the Pacific, 8, 14, 222–224 Solomon Islands. See Maasina Rule; Moro movement, the and borders, 16–17, 41, 174–175 and consciousness, 126–133 and indentured labour trade, 36 and independence, 155–156, 157–158 and Maasina Rule, 133–134 and WWII, 118–121 date of independence, 214 South Pacific Commission Conference,1965, 170–171

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264

Index

South Pacific Games, 159–160 sovereignty. See autonomy movements British, 58 Indigenous expressions of, 64–71, 87, 211 of Maori, 62–64 of mobility, 72 uneven extensions of imperial, 39–41, 74 Spanish influenza, 82, See epidemics spatial decolonisation. See decolonisation, spatial St Julian, Charles, 38–39, 69 surveillance, 160–164, 183–185 as an archive, 160 by Indigenous communities, 191, 209 of Black Australians, 192–195 Sykes, Roberta, 191, 204, 221 Tahiti, 31, 33, 45, 56, 66 and depopulation, 29 and early trade relations, 26, 27, 30 and sovereignty, 64, 132 Talune, The and Spanish influenza, 83, 96 Tammur, Oscar, 175–176, 221 in Australia, 178, 192 Tanzania, 187, 198, 220 Taufa’ahau, Jioaji, 64, 66–67, 70–71, 80 Te Whiti, 78 telegraph, 17, 84, 85, 88, 93, 203, See globalisation, technologies of Tjibaou, Jean-Marie, 173–174 Tolai people, 169, See Mataungan Association, the and land rights, 175–176 construction of, 176 Tonga, 169, See Taufa’ahau, Jioaji and literacy, 55–56 and partition of the Pacific, 40 Tongoa, Henry, 72, 76, 80 Towns, Robert as a plantation owner, 35 as a trader, 33 trusteeship system, the United Nations, 122–126 Tuka movement, 77, See Apolosi movement Tuvalu, 13, 54, 198, 220, See Kiribati; Gilbert and Ellice Islands date of independence, 214 uncolonising, 216–225 Union, The, 48

United Nations Charter, 116, 123, 125 formation of, 122–123 United Nations Conference on International Organization, 116 United Nations Decades for the Eradication of Colonialism, 13, 14 United Nations Declaration on Independence, 4, 18, 147, 152, 153, 154, 218, See Resolution 1514 content of, 144 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 3 United Nations list of non-self-governing territories, 14, See non-selfgoverning territories, United Nations list of United Nations Special Committee on Decolonisation, 13, See Committee of 24 United Negros Improvement Association, 110 United States of America, 94, See Hawaii; Samoa, US; Guam; Pacific trust territory and the League of Nations, 88–91 and the United Nations, 116, 118, 124–125 Vancouver, George, 25, 27 Vanua’aku Viewpoints, 15–16 and decolonisation, 201–202 formation of, 198–199 Vanuaku Pati, 201, 202, 208, 214 formation of, 198–199 Vanuaku Womens Association, 202, 222 Vanuatu. See Ni Vanuatu and consciousness, 126–133 and decolonisation, 196–204, 214 and land, 166 and WWII, 118–121 British plans for independence, 157–158 date of independence, 214 Waitangi, the Treaty of, 42, 67, 86 signing of, 62–64 Walker, Denis, 193 Wesleyan Missionary Society, 54 West Papua, 1 and decolonisation, 147–151, 180–182 flag-raising ceremonies, 12 Western Pacific High Commission, 22, 39, 136, 155, 160 Western Pacific Students Association, 198 Wien, Peter, 71, 76, 80

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265

Index Wilson, Woodrow. See League of Nations; self-determination and Fourteen Point speech, 88 and League of Nations mandate system, 88–91 and the ‘Wilsonian Moment’, 88, 112 Woiwurrung, 61 Womsiwor, Herman, 148, 180

World Council of Churches, 194 World War Two and the United Nations, 116 impact on consciousness, 126–133 in the Pacific, 118–122 X, Malcolm, 189, 193, 208

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