Reliable account of diverse areaReview: CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDERS Donald Denoon's preface to this splendid book begins with a salute to the first in the grand series of Cambridge Histories, the Cambridge Modern History edited nearly a century ago by Lord Acton. How do the two compare? Well, there's an obvious difference of scale. Lord Acton was given 16 volumes; Donald Denoon and his collaborators have one. Donald Denoon detaches himself from the notion that a history can or ought to be definitive. "We seek to provide clear and reliable first words, not to lay down the last word." He begins chapter two, Human settlement, with these words: "There are many traditions of explaining how the world and its people came to be where they are and how they are. In this chapter we present several samples, including oral histories in poetry, archaeology in the prose of the natural sciences, linguistics in the form of genealogies, and the more conventional language of academic history." This chapter is the first of a number, with sections written by more than one author. "Clear and reliable first words," Donald has promised us in the preface: whenever I can judge, the words are reliable. Nearly always they're clear. How much editorial window-cleaning has gone to make that clarity I don't know. Some though not all Islander voices in the book are audibly distinct. Only two contributors, I think, use the first person, and they are Islanders. Vilsoni Hereniko, from Rotuna, on Pacific cultural identities, writes: " Islanders regard all aspects of life as inseparable parts of who they are, and our views as Islanders may not coincide with other people's views of us. Our cultural identities are always in a state of becoming, a journey in which we never arrive . . ." The only other user of the first person singular is Ruth Saovana Spriggs, writing with passion and with no attempt at neutrality about her own island, Bougainville. Part one is The Pacific to 1941, Part two, The Pacific Since 1941. War is the cataclysmic divider, and I can't imagine its horrifying and mind-blowing impact being conveyed more eloquently than in Stewart Firth's chapter. Here, too, Islanders speak. Some of them, in Papua New Guinea, are given voice by West Indian scholar, Neville Robinson, who happened to turn up at the University of Papua New Guinea at just the right time, and with the right appearance and cool outsider's sceptical curiosity, to ask questions and gather answers for his UPNG MA thesis and ANU book Villagers at War, used to fine effect by Firth. Knowing something of the war in Papua New Guinea and little about it elsewhere in the Pacific, I'm well placed to admire one of the book's most impressive qualities. How artfully comparative analysis is built into its structure. Through Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia, from west to east and north to south, we are led by learned and skilful guides to precolonial, colonial and postcolonial (or on some readings neocolonial) experience. Well-placed cross references in the text provoke us to track a theme from one chapter to another. A bibliographic essay at the end of each chapter equips us for further journeys of our own. These are judiciously selective, and succinctly record agreements and disagreements within the republic of scholarship. In the last three chapters, Karen Nero and Jocelyn Linnekin gather up the historical themes and sweep across the ocean connecting island to island and past to present: The Material World Remade, The Ideological World Remade, The End of Insularity. Here as earlier, pieces by other authors on particular places or subjects are inserted to illuminate. Under the heading "Custom Remade", for example, Lamont Lindstrom's eight pages on the changing meanings of a word (or variety of words: custom, Kastom, Kastam, Kastomu) would give valuable briefing to anybody - an inquisitive tourist, say, or a Foreign Minister - on present states of mind in the Pacific. For Australian readers the comparative analysis in these final chapters may be arresting. I had wondered how anybody could make an orderly book out of such vastly distant and diverse communities, but these authors have done it. They may have been impelled towards tight and coherent construction by being limited to that one volume. Emeritus Prof Ken Inglis | |