Tracing connections between the people of Oceania.

The cosy, book-lined office in Canberra seems far, far away from the sea. You couldn’t even describe it as cabin-like - the leafy glimpse of the ANU campus out the window puts paid to that. But nestled on a shelf by the door is a length of coconut fibre rope, handmade by seafarers from the Caroline Islands. Its sinuous plaits have been braided into a compact crescent shape, so the overall effect is of strength and connection. Even though the ocean is hundreds of kilometres distant, to hold this maritime artefact is to feel a link with that wide blue world - the Pacific.

It’s an appropriate talisman for Dr Paul D’Arcy, an interdisciplinary historian at the Division of Pacific and Asian History at ANU. A first generation New Zealander, D’Arcy hails from a long line of seafarers from Liverpool, England. The ocean has figured largely in his family history and in his own attempts to reconcile his European background with an upbringing in the South Pacific.

“When I travelled to the tropical Pacific, the first thing that struck me was how at ease people are in the water, and how the sea pervades everything on these small islands surrounded by vast expanses of water,” D’Arcy says.

“Back in Britain, few seafarers learned to swim. The freezing waters of the North Atlantic reduce the chance of survival dramatically and instil an almost fatalistic attitude to seafaring. I started reading some books where Pacific islanders travelling in the colder reaches of the North Pacific or South Atlantic would fall into the water and survive. There was something going on there that had me interested.”

This interest led D’Arcy to write The People of the Sea, an ambitious history that highlights the common practices and beliefs of the people of Oceania. In it, he deals with how the sea is a source of food and resources, a means of transport and navigation, a place of contest and communion, and a major influence on social structures and cosmological beliefs.

A different tack

“The Pacific by its nature is small islands in a vast sea. For many years, people had seen these islands as isolated laboratories. Here we have people from the same origin going to a thousand different places – how have they diverged and changed? Europeans tended to hermetically seal cultures on an island, where their world stopped at the shoreline. That’s reflected in the academic disciplines too: people are Polynesian specialists or Micronesian specialists, or even specialists on individual islands. There are very few broad picture people.

“When you get to the islands it’s transparently obvious that people don’t think of themselves as isolated or sealed in. They have kin relations, sometimes extending over thousands of kilometres. They think nothing of going off-island for six months. They are very mobile people by necessity.

“Because there are so many languages in the region, previous academics have had to be narrowly focussed. My work could not have been done 30 years ago simply because I draw on all these specific works. I couldn’t have written this without hundreds of other scholars going in and doing these localised studies.”

By synthesising earlier scholarship about different cultures and regions in Oceania, D’Arcy has been able to see some of the many things that Pacific islanders have in common. One such link is the necessity of terraforming. Given the vast distances between many Oceanic islands and major landmasses, much Pacific flora and fauna were introduced by islanders. “The islands themselves are very hard to live on,” D’Arcy says “they are human landscapes. This is particularly the case on coral atolls where there’s very little on which to survive”. By necessity, the people of Oceania became very adept at making the most of what their land could offer. But their relationship to the land pales beside their connection to the sea.

“In maritime history, people have been questioning whether the ocean is a barrier or a highway,” D’Arcy says. “In Atlantic, Indian, and Mediterranean studies, people have increasingly said it’s not an isolator, it’s a link. In the pre-modern period before paved roads, sea travel was often much easier than land travel, even in Europe. But even this conception still views the sea as a void with wind blowing across it, to help you get your boat from point to point.

“The sea is also a seascape for Pacific islanders. They spend up to 50 per cent of their day there. Their mental maps of the water are as detailed as the land. They see it as part of where they live. They interact with the sea creatures in their mythology and in how they live. It’s a human seascape as much as a passage.”

The ties that bind

In part, D’Arcy has set out to explode the myth of isolation in Oceania. He argues that this is a European colonial construction and not part of the way islanders think about themselves. He points to the common origins of all Pacific peoples, who migrated from southeast and eastern Asia to Papua New Guinea at least 35,000 years ago. He says the rest of the Pacific was colonised rapidly in the last 4,000 years, meaning that islanders have much in common – including one of the most geographically wide-ranging language groups in the world. Given these strong bonds, it’s not surprising that inter-island exchanges were common, despite the intentions of Europeans and other colonial powers to limit Pacific contact.

“Over the last 200 years, Micronesians had four colonisers: the Spanish, the Germans, the Japanese and the Americans,” D’Arcy says. “Each tried to stop the inter-island exchanges from going on, in the name of safety, but it was a control mechanism. There is still a widespread belief that the colonisers curtailed or stopped the exchanges. When I talk with islanders, they say, ‘It’s rubbish. There was no-one here to administer these edicts. When they weren’t looking, we went about our exchanges as usual’. They insist that they gave traditional tribute throughout the colonial period. There were also inter-island fights and status relationships, all continuing.”

One such process that brought people from a number of different islands together was the sawei in Micronesia. This traditional exchange system centred on the relatively wealthy island of Yap and connected islands in range extending 1,000km from east to west. Every one or two years, participants in the sawei would sail to Yap to give status tribute to the Yapese. Small, poorer islands would give their tribute of shell money or things they were good at making, such as weapons. In return, the relatively resource-rich Yapese would provide such valued items as turmeric or timber for canoe building. D’Arcy says that for these ‘high islanders’, the act of giving was an important indicator of status.

D’Arcy recalls one tangible example of how colonialism could divide people who had a lot in common. While teaching in Wellington, D’Arcy recalls a Tahitian exchange student feeling a little out in the cold. She soon met some Cook Islanders, who are related to Tahitians by blood and culture. But as the Cook Islanders were administered by the English and then New Zealand, and Tahiti by the French, the two peoples had grown apart. But once the Tahitian started talking in Maohi, which is a mutually intelligible Polynesian language, she was soon getting on with her Cook Island friends like a house on fire.

Weaving towards home

One of the most important commonalities in Oceania is navigation. Without it, islanders could never have maintained their strong cultural connections, nor made exploratory voyages in search of new lands and resources. Given the central importance of knowing how to get from A to B, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the art of navigation became privileged information jealously guarded by kin groups.

“The early European seafarers in the Pacific – Captain Cook and the like – said these people were wonderful navigators. Cook was astounded, and said he had no doubt that Pacific Islanders could have sailed there.

“Navigation tends to be privileged knowledge held by certain family groups, with different families having competing practices and techniques. Everyone had the broad principles, but specific things were kept within certain clan groups. It was a way of keeping power, because it opened up so much of the world to you. But it also could be problematic – if a tsunami or typhoon hit, or you were lost at sea, you could lose all your navigational knowledge. It was a double-edged sword.”

D’Arcy says that what separated the top navigators from the rest was their experience and ritual knowledge. Expert navigators would respect taboos (from the Polynesian word tapu) on certain foods before embarking on a voyage. Other taboos restricted certain activities such as sexual relations before you went on a voyage.

“At sea you didn’t want to cause offence. You might also appeal to totemic familiars of the gods of the sea. They tended to be sea creatures. It might be a shark or turtle.”

This idea of sea journeys and powerful sea creatures connects to how many Oceanic peoples think about their own origins. D’Arcy says that two common themes in creation stories involve ancestors travelling from beyond the sea or originating in it. “It was quite common in the 19th century to hear stories of sea people who are half human and half fish being caught in living memory,” he says.

But is D’Arcy himself an avid ocean swimmer? In this regard he favours the approach of his seafaring forebears, for whom the ocean was something to be admired from the safe distance of the shore or a sturdy boat. He says this attitude is being further cemented as he begins research for a new book on humans and sharks in the Pacific. Yet intertwined with this aquatic aversion is an abiding passion and respect for the sea and the peoples who call it home.

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ANU Reporter 
Summer 2007