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Book ReviewsStephen Levine; Susanna Trnka; Max Quanchi; Michelle Carnegie; Oliver S. Buckton; Clive Moore;Susan Cochrane; Hugh Laracy; Adam Claasen; Eileen Chanin; Rani Kerin; Scott Sheffield; JonathanRichards; Miranda Johnson; Joanna Kidman

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The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 45, No. 1, June 2010

Book Reviews

Tuimacilai: a life of Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara. By Deryck Scarr. Adelaide, Crawford HousePublishing Australia, 2008. xþ414 pp, endnotes, bibliog., index. ISBN 978-1-8633-3328-3 (pbk). Fiji$50.00.

Deryck Scarr’s Tuimacilai — the title refers to the position of ‘lord or king over a particularly roughstretch of the South Pacific’ (p. vi), including Ratu Mara’s own Lau islands, in eastern Fiji — is thework of a scholar with long years of experience with the politics and culture of Fiji. His life-and-times of Ratu Mara draws upon that background, of course, but its content is derived largelyfrom archival materials and public records, in which he has thoroughly immersed himself,supplemented by observations and conversations with principal protagonists, including Ratu Maraand Sitiveni Rabuka among others. The book includes a glossary, one which would have beenmore useful had all the Fijian terms used in the manuscript actually been included in it.

Fiji’s ongoing problems give a study of Ratu Mara’s ideas and political life particular relevanceas well as a degree of poignancy. This biography provides a perspective on a life largelypreoccupied with questions of public policy, with crises of one kind or another — sugar prices,inflation, government deficits, cyclones and their aftermath — inevitably occupying much of itssubject’s time and energy. Insights into Ratu Mara’s private affairs are few, though the authorgives intermittent emphasis to aspects of his temperament — that he was ‘reserved’, often ‘angry’,sometimes charming, ‘impetuous’, at times ‘suspicious’ — while noting that at various timeshe enjoyed sports, including cricket and golf, as well as a good drink.

While a knowledgeable and insightful contribution, the book’s impact would have beenmore assured in the hands of a more disciplined stylist. Sentences seem often written almost back-to-front, spiralling onwards, an idiosyncratic writing style that sends waves of words rolling in, andnot always in an orderly fashion. As an aside, an otherwise faithful attention to detail falters whena review of the Fijian Administration is described as involving the appointment of ‘RodneyCole with others’ (p. 283), the report itself cited as ‘Cole et al.’, until at last it becomes simply‘the Cole report’ (p. 318) — all of which underscores the rule that one should seldom collaboratewith colleagues whose surname begins with a letter preceding your own: for the record, the equalco-authors of The Fijian Provincial Administration: A Review were Rodney Cole, Stephen Levine andAnare Matahau.

Early chapters of Tuimacilai offer glimpses of Fiji’s colonial period, brief asides revealing theera’s casual cruelties and easy prejudices. The deep-rooted nature of antipathies and antagonismspresent even today are also laid bare in these pre-independence chapters, with references, forinstance, to the indifferent contribution of Fiji’s Indian community to the Allied cause duringWorld War II, extending even to some fairly relaxed views about the prospect of a Japanesetakeover. Nor is this background without relevance to a life of Ratu Mara, for a powerful elementin the dilemmas of governance with which he was inextricably entangled had to do with the longshadow cast by historical events, Fiji’s citizens and communities in some ways all prisoners ofhistorical memory and interpretation.

Thus, while focusing on Ratu Mara’s career, this book offers a good introduction to thecomplexities of Fijian politics and society. At the same time, its complicated and at timesconvoluted writing style is perhaps inadvertently well suited to its subject matter, in which verylittle is entirely straightforward. The world into which Mara was born — and the world that hehelped to shape — are well described in this account, notwithstanding the at times clumsy writing.The crux of the matter today, moreover, is what it was then, under Mara: whether ‘the conceptof a single multi-racial community’ (p. 93) can be realised.

In December 2006, Fiji’s current prime minister, Commodore Voreqe (‘Frank’) Bainimarama,overthrew the elected government, the latest in a series of coups that began in 1987, when Rabukaled a military unit into the Fiji Parliament. The Bainimarama-led putsch inaugurated a sequenceof steps, still unfolding, intended to achieve results entirely different from those of earlier militarytakeovers. The events of 1987 and 2000 had the defence of ethnic Fijian ‘paramountcy’ as aprincipal goal, asserting indigenous rights, custom and tradition as values overriding adherence

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to democracy, equality, constitutional norms and the rule of law. The Bainimarama coup andits ongoing aftermath, in stark contrast, finds the prime minister and his government speakingout bluntly and assertively against the ‘old elites’ — the chiefs, the Methodist church, civil servants,the legal profession and the news media, among others.

This turn of events revives disagreements and disputes which have polarised the country fromthe colonial period onwards. Indeed, in many ways the history of Fiji, at least from the period sinceBritish control allowed for the introduction of migrants from India, has been one in which ideasabout establishing a ‘colour-blind’ society, in which shared norms and obligations of citizenshiptranscend cultural, racial and religious differences, have been in conflict with less egalitarianattachments. This conflict, of outlook and interest, in many ways defined the domestic politicalenvironment in which Fiji’s first (and longest serving) prime minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara,a chief himself, was compelled to operate.

While the sources of Ratu Mara’s authority were varied, his tenure as prime minister wasexercised, for electoral and parliamentary purposes, through a political vehicle of his owncreation — the Alliance Party, its name reflecting aspiration more than reality. This party gaveexpression to a vision of Fiji as a multiracial society, transcending communal difference, in whichindigenous Fijians and citizens of Indian ancestry would work together, not rivals but partners inthe building of a unified society. Notwithstanding the Alliance Party’s successive election victories— in fact, narrowly achieved — and Ratu Mara’s virtually uninterrupted period of service aschief minister (pre-independence: 1967–70) and prime minister (1970–92), his was, in fact, a viewof Fiji and its future largely unshared by those to whom it was addressed.

So long as Ratu Mara retained power, his multiracial rhetoric (and policies) could be tolerated,if not endorsed, by those preferring a more vigorous ethnic Fijian nationalist approach. On theother side of the communal divide, the Indian electorate remained largely unmoved by his appeals,at least so long as the capture of political power and institutional prerogatives seemed within reach.In this respect, that community — leaders and voters alike — could well be described as yetanother of whom it could be said that it never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

While Bainimarama can in some ways be seen as an unlikely exponent of Ratu Mara’s ideas,given his aggressive opposition to exclusive ethnic Fijian institutional dominance and his apparentcommitment to multiracial norms, his conduct and outlook makes for an altogether flawedinheritance. Ratu Mara’s vision of a multiracial society was inherently one which envisaged acelebration of diversity, and a sophisticated appreciation of difference, altogether at odds with thesuppression of dissent, and the crude display of coercive power, associated with the Bainimarara-ledgovernment. While Ratu Mara may have been critical, at times, of regional and internationalopinion, his approach seldom descended to the invective and disdain characteristic of the currentadministration.

In the end, as is often the case with political careers, for Ratu Mara only a vestige of powerremained. It all ended, somewhat abruptly, in defeat, sorrow and misjudgement. For the formerprime minister and president (1993–2000), there was only regret, anger and resignation, a leaderwhose ‘leadership was no longer wanted’ (p. 380). Since his fall, Fiji’s restless spirit has achievedlittle but strife, at least politically, and it is from that vantage point, really — and perhaps in partthrough this book — that a renewed respect and appreciation for Fiji’s first prime minister maybegin to re-emerge. The challenge now, delicate and complex, is to pursue the values of bothcultural pluralism and indigenous rights in a manner consistent with democratic principles.A measure of success in doing so would restore Mara’s legacy to the hands of a leadership qualifiedto advance it.

STEPHEN LEVINE

� 2010 Stephen Levine

In God’s Image: the metaculture of Fijian Christianity. By Matt Tomlinson. Berkeley,University of California Press, 2009. xiiiþ249 pp., illus., maps, references, index. ISBN978-0-520-25778-8 (pbk). US$21.95.

‘And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ So begins the King JamesVersion of the biblical verse Genesis 1:26, a verse that, as deftly demonstrated in Matt Tomlinson’snew book In God’s Image, is crucial for understanding the spirit of contemporary Methodism in Fiji.

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According to Tomlinson, when Methodists in Kadavu, Fiji repeatedly invoke this verse, they areboth asserting humanity’s similarity to the divine (by nature of having been created in God’simage) and lamenting the loss of divine power that was theirs during a now long-gone ‘golden age’.Citing Genesis 1:26, alongside other popular biblical verses, Fijian Methodists thus engagein rhetorical acts that lament lost power and efficacy (mana) and hold out the possibilityof recuperation through Christian salvation. This tension between loss and hope of recovery, theauthor asserts, generates some of Christianity’s appeal. The affect produced by such assertions ofloss is furthermore not one of despondent nostalgia but rather one that can ‘motivate new kindsof religious and political action’ (p. 10).

As part of the University of California Press’ series on the Anthropology of Christianity, thespecific focus of Tomlinson’s book is on language and the power of oratory among FijianMethodists, with particular emphasis on religious sermons and biblical invocations. But in manyrespects, In God’s Image can be read as a broader ethnographic examination of rural indigenousFijian life. Throughout the book, Tomlinson adroitly moves between a detailed exegesis ofMethodism on Kadavu to a more generalised ethnography of indigenous Fijian sociality, andin particular the relationships between conceptions of mana and vanua (land, place or people),lotu (Christianity) and matanitu (government). Perhaps most significant are the connections hedraws between local sermons and wider political events, such as the 2000 coup. As Tomlinsonpoints out, while George Speight, who fronted the 2000 coup, did not deploy Christian rhetoricwith the same forcefulness as his predecessor Sitiveni Rabuka, among many grassroots Fijians thepolitical disturbances of 2000, like those of previous and subsequent years, were often laden withreligious meaning through the creative deployment of biblical references. Another notable aspect ofTomlinson’s analysis is his examination of how assertions about the Bible not only interrelate withcultural values, but form part of a ‘meta-culture’ or mode of commenting upon, reifying and,at times, opening up for critique various cultural forms. Government workshops on how to honourindigenous cultural traditions and employ them in combating contemporary social malaise are justone example that he considers.

Tomlinson’s book is written in a very accessible style, with individual chapters which couldeasily stand alone, but are also thematically intertwined. Part I of the text, ‘Situation’, introducesreaders to Kadavu and to more general aspects of Fijian culture. In the four chapters that composePart II, ‘Lamentation’, Tomlinson explores the interconnections between sentiments of loss,biblical sermons, kava and chain prayers. The final section, ‘Recuperation’ examines bothindividual routes towards recovery of perceived losses, through the life history of a former convictedmurderer turned catechist, and more collective modes for recuperation, such as the galvanisation ofFijian ethno-nationalists towards political action through the employment of Christian imagery.

One area that could have been more substantially dealt with is the difference betweenlamentations based in Christian imagery and other forms of loss, despair and nostalgia. In hisopening chapter, Tomlinson specifically differentiates his argument from that of James Ferguson’sExpectations of Modernity (1999), in which Ferguson suggests that much of the despondency felt incontemporary Zambia stems from the broken promises of urbanisation and industrialisation whichboth raised and shattered people’s hopes for material security. In contrast, Tomlinson highlights‘religious language’s force behind the creation of a sense of decline, disorder, diminution, and loss’(p. 11). While his text does masterfully support the claim that Christianity is central to this process,more material on how other factors — such as the promises held out by political independence,participation in global capitalism and other facets of ‘modernity’ — are not so salient in creatinga palpable feeling of powerlessness among indigenous Fijians, would have been useful. While suchfeatures of ‘modernity’ may not be central to life in Kadavu, they are prominent in other partsof Fiji where similar lamentations over the loss of mana take place.

On a more ethnographic note, Tomlinson’s intricate analysis of Methodists’ perspectives on thefraught relationship between the past and the present could have been further elucidated if thebook had included a discussion of how the views of Methodists, who are the largest Christiancongregation in Fiji, compare with those of members of Fiji’s other Christian denominations,such as Catholics or members of the Assemblies of God.

These minor points aside, In God’s Name is an innovative and compelling book which makesa stimulating addition to both the anthropology of Christianity and the ethnographic literatureon Fiji.

SUSANNA TRNKA

� 2010 Susanna Trnka

BOOK REVIEWS 159


The Pacific. By Donald B. Freeman. Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2010. ‘Seas inHistory’ series. xiiþ260 pp., illus., maps, references, bibliog., index. ISBN 978-0-415-77572-4. US$115.00.

The series ‘Seas in History’ was commissioned by the late Geoffrey Scammell when he saw the needto focus on seas and oceans, on oceanic exploration and imperial expansion, seaborne commerce,technology, and the cultures and economies that developed in ports on the ocean’s littoral zones.This brilliantly conceived plan offered to redirect our thinking finally to the ocean itself, and itspeople. Scammell also saw the Pacific as an ocean that was crossed, exploited, fought over andwhich exerted significant cultural influence on the civilisations adjoining. Unfortunately, this newbook in the series overlooks the fact that the Pacific, the fourth to be covered, after the Atlantic,Baltic and North Sea, and the Indian Ocean, is also a homeland, occupied by Pacific Islanders,and by nations and territories with their own histories, not necessarily dependent on the nationsof the littoral zone. The flawed perception that the rim is more significant than Oceania itselfis accentuated by Donald B. Freeman in The Pacific. Despite opening with the promising line ‘thisbook examines the role of the Pacific Ocean in human history’, the subsequent eight chaptersdiverge nearly entirely to the geography and history of Asia and North and South America,creating a book not on the ocean or its peoples, but on the littoral zone, more well known as thePacific Rim.

The book is well written and the structure interesting and truly thematic, starting with‘comprehending the Pacific’, followed by peopling, claiming, encompassing, exploiting, contesting,picturing and developing. This leads to some repetition but does provide a useful set of windowsthrough which to study the long sweep of history, and the amazing expanse of one-third of theearth’s surface.

Chapter one is the best, and Freeman, a geographer, summarises a number of complexscientific, geomorphologic and hydrological phenomena. This survey chapter offers succinct andeasily understood explanations which will be of value to those coming to the Pacific for the first timeor from non-scientific backgrounds. The author does make, however, the strange claim that‘tsunamis have occasionally proven useful’ (p. 31), which erroneously claims that Aitutaki is oneof the largest coral atolls in the world, and that Tarawa is a raised coral platform.

From here on errors proliferate. The failure across the following chapters to consult the largescholarly archive and library on the Pacific islands and to be aware of the latest research is shownon the opening page of chapter two, when the only source cited for Oceanic archaeological, geneticand linguistic evidence is an online site by Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin on Australianpygmies. Windschuttle is later cited as a source for the debate over Lono at Kealakekua Bay. Later,the source cited for cultural markers, kinship, tattoo, mana, tapu and artefacts is a blurb by ShirleyCampbell for a cruise ship company advertisement. Chapter two, ‘Peopling the Pacific’, opens with14 pages on the rise and fall of dynasties in China, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan and the Philippines.Brief sections on the actual Pacific islands are marred by outright errors of fact and judgment:Kiribati is not suffering depopulation through migration; there is no mention of the amazingarchaeological find at Kuk in the Papua New Guinea Highlands, which proves the technologicalachievements in irrigation and cropping of early settlers in PNG; the murder of shipwreck survivorsin the Torres Strait in 1836 is added to provide colour; Indo-Fijians are no longer numerically andeconomically dominant sector of the population in Fiji; and the amazing claim is made that fewMelanesian cultures ‘exhibit seafaring traditions with broad-ranging perspectives on the world theyinhabit’ (p. 55). Freeman repeats the oft-made but incorrect claim that Tonga was never colonised,claims the King voluntarily relinquished his absolute powers in 2008 and that climate change hasalready caused I-Kiribati and Tuvaluans to be resettled. He ends this chapter by predicting thatNauru will be the first Pacific nation to be abandoned.

The following chapters contain much the same approach — snippets and anecdotes to supporta few lines of generalisation, with lots of wars, resource exploitation and European self-interestin Asia, Alaska, Bolivia and elsewhere, but very little on the Pacific Islands. Pacific Islandersare rarely mentioned, and only two, Kamehameha and Omai, are referred to by name. The readergets no sense of events that have created the Pacific Island nations and territories as we know themtoday. There is so much on James Cook, repeated each thematic chapter, that The Pacific starts toappear as another in the long line of Cook hagiography. For example, readers are told three times



that Cook’s exemplary charts were still in use a hundred years later. There is also an uncomfortableobsession with finding lawlessness, violence, reckless disregard for life and degradation scatteredaround the ocean, to the extent that the author apologises that there have not been enough warsin the Pacific. This is compensated for by including the Chile–Peru war of 1879–84 and the OpiumWars in China. The final chapter on development, a critical and contested topic in the region todaycontains 19 pages on the Rim — with four pages on China, four on Asia–America shipping andnine pages on environmental issues in Asia. The author’s focus on the Pacific rim did not extend tocoverage of New Zealand and Australia, two key players in both the rim and the region.

There are many minor quibbles — such as noting his reliance on the wealth of sources on theInternet, but listing only four quite specific Internet news items in the bibliography. Cook’scolleague and adviser, Omai, is labelled a ‘shaman’. Dates are sometime randomly listed: 1772 and1774 for the Spanish arrival in Tahiti, 1907 rather than 1901 for the transfer of British New Guineato Australia. Germany, for example, did not start mining Nauru’s phosphate ‘soon after’ annexingthe island in 1888, Banaba was not ‘abandoned by its inhabitants’ because mining deposits weredepleted, and the Australian colonies did not form a ‘confederation’ in 1901. Nauru and Banabaare referred to under phosphate mining, but not Makatea and Angaur. Louis Buvelot did notfound Australia’s Heidelberg School, and readers are told four times about the Treaty ofTordesillas. New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands are not in French Polynesia. Reflecting theemphasis on the rim, entities such as Palau, Tuvalu and Nauru have five or six index entries,respectively, but Java in South East Asia has 11 entries. Niue and Tokelau are not mentioned,and the surprising claim is made that many young Marquesans committed suicide rather thancontinue living under French domination (p. 195).

The title ‘The Pacific: seas in history’ promises much but fails to deliver the fascinating andexciting overview conceived originally by the series editor Geoffrey Scammell. The Pacific is marredthroughout with errors of fact and interpretation, focuses more on Asia and the Americas than onthe Pacific itself and, with a structure that relies on a quick summary followed by two or threeexamples, it is far from being the authoritative reference work the hard cover, fine binding and highprice might suggest. The much thumbed monographs and edited collections of the old schoolof general histories and area studies by Howe, Campbell, Scarr, Kiste, Borofsy, Rapaport and thelate Ron Crocombe are not challenged by this new title. Routledge should withdraw this book,rename it The Pacific Rim and commission another scholar to compile the ‘thematic,interdisciplinary . . . interplay of human activities and physical aspects’ (p. 1) in Oceania thatwas promised in the introduction.

MAX QUANCHI

� 2010 Max Quanchi

Sailors and Traders: a maritime history of the Pacific peoples. By Alastair Couper. Honolulu:University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. xiiiþ262pp. nautical glossary, illus., maps, endnotes,bibliog., index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3239-1. US$55.00.

Alastair Couper was a master mariner before he turned his interest in maritime matters intoa scholarly pursuit and second profession. He wrote a PhD thesis at the Australian NationalUniversity on seaborne trade in the Pacific (‘The Island Trade’, 1967), but other Pacific historiansknew little of ‘The Island Trade’ — the fate of any thesis that is not converted into a book. All theseyears later, echoes of ‘The Island Trade’ are evident in Alistair Couper’s latest book, Sailors andTraders, but it is fundamentally a quite different text. The European side of the story is largelyomitted, and Couper attempts instead the more difficult task of writing ‘a maritime history of thePacific peoples’. The evidential problems are that seafaring Islanders present the later historianwith the twin curses of a mobile and pre-literate population. Despite the challenges, Couper hasproduced a comprehensive monograph which synthesises material from the few existing maritimehistories of the Pacific, with further archival, archaeological, interview, ethnographic andsecondary data, as well as drawing on his own personal experience to imaginatively reconstructseafaring scenarios. My only (minor) criticism of the book is that at times Couper tends to assumetoo much nautical knowledge of his readers. Couper does provide a nautical glossary, but this short

BOOK REVIEWS 161


list could have been greatly expanded to include more of the terminology used in the book that isforeign for the non-nautically minded.

Sailors and Traders impressively includes all geographic areas of the Pacific. Much of thebook (chapters 3–8) focuses on the period of trading and deep sea whaling activities in the18th and 19th centuries, with some additional material from the early 20th century (chapter 9).This is fascinating reading, of encounters between Pacific Island communities and Europeans(including the sexual encounters between European sailors and Island women); the particularitiesof trade between the Pacific and other places such as the New South Wales colony and theAmerican northwest coast; and rich descriptions of life at sea during this period. The topicsdiscussed under the latter heading include: shipwrecks, massacres, venereal and other disease,accidents, savagery, abuse, piracy, desertion, abandonment and mutiny; leaving no doubt aboutthe extremely harsh and perilous occupation that sailing was. The volume is book-ended with fourinteresting chapters that bring a greater temporal and comparative perspective to this work.Couper beautifully portrays ‘ship culture’ across the Pacific, while contrasting the historical andcontemporary, blurring the traditional and the modern, and highlighting the commonalitiesin Pacific seafaring values, lifestyle, traditions and myths with those in Asia, America and Europe.The second chapter begins with the ancient open ocean migrations from Southeast Asia and thesubsequent diaspora of 2000 BC to AD 1300, documenting in considerable detail what has becomeknown as the superior navigational and seafaring prowess of the Pacific peoples that was in placewell before the arrival of the Europeans. The final two chapters discuss contemporary seafaringfrom the mid-20th century to the present, with case studies from Fiji and Kiribati which showcasethe political and social changes over time for those Islanders choosing a seafaring life, including therecruitment of female crew and modern occupational hazards such as HIV/AIDS.

What is striking upon reading the book in its entirety is the deep insights provided into theinter-generational impact of commercial shipping and colonialism on the various Pacific societiesand their maritime economies — in multiple and complex ways. For example, as shipping becameindustrialised from the mid- to late-19th century, commercial and colonial policies displaced Pacificseafarers who had previously been recruited as crew on foreign ships owing to labour shortages.Working-class movements in Australasia, Europe and America saw the rise of industrial tradeunions demanding better wages and safety and living conditions for seafarers, and the recruitmentof crews from the ship-owning countries. This, coupled with the fact that colonial administrationsrestricted indigenous inter-island trade, meant that the seafaring skills of Islanders were eroded,as well as the opportunities to reap the financial benefits of commercial shipping enterprises.Couper nonetheless provides a balanced analysis, stating that ‘the Pacific islanders clearly werenever simply observers of the colonization of their lands or the total domination of their seas’ (p. 4).He weaves narratives into the text of how Islanders resisted European control, such as protestingunfair actions by European commercial enterprises in relation to labour practices and theenforcement of trade monopolies. Although greatly curtailed, domestic inter-island trade survivedand, in some places, seaborne trade was revived through organised indigenous cooperatives, andfor a short-lived period, maritime unions. The book concludes noting that the employmenton foreign ships has come full circle, with the current situation replicating periods in the 18th and19th centuries. Couper states: ‘Pacific sailors are now, as then, recruited to overcome the reluctanceof people in the traditional ship-owning countries to follow careers at sea’ (p. 208). Equal pay hasnot eventuated, but conditions aboard are greatly improved. Pacific seafarers have accessto excellent training programmes and many have become high-ranking officers on overseasmerchant ships.

In summary, Sailors and Traders is a fine contribution to Pacific history, which demonstrates theimportant past and continuing presence of Pacific peoples in local, regional and global seafaring.Its accessible style means the book will be enjoyed by both academic historians and lay historianswith an interest in the region and/or maritime endeavours. For teaching, the book providesexceptional case study material for any course that aims to promote understanding of the longhistorical processes of the integration of ‘peripheral regions’ into the world economy, and theinfluence of colonialism in shaping Pacific Island societies.

MICHELLE CARNEGIE

� 2010 Michelle Carnegie



Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: travel, empire, and the author’s profession. By Roslyn Jolly.Farnham, Ashgate, 2009. xiiiþ193 pp., illus., endnotes, bibliog., index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6195-5 (pb). £50.00stg.

Roslyn Jolly’s challenging and powerful study begins with an epigraph from Stevenson’s late essay‘My First Book’, in which he reflects on the ‘indifference, if not aversion’ with which his non-fictionis viewed by ‘the great public’. The prominence given to this quotation is significant, for Jolly’sbook is both a critical history of this aversion to Stevenson’s Pacific non-fiction and a challenge tothe distortions it entails. Enshrined in the figure of ‘Tusitala’ — usually rendered as ‘Teller of Tales’— by which Stevenson was known in Samoa, the ‘popular Stevenson’ is perhaps the ultimate targetof Jolly’s thesis: ‘it is against the simplifying, smoothing, reductive powers of that myth that thisbook is written’ (p. 28). Intriguingly, Jolly’s study begins with a discussion of a period before heeven got to Samoa. Calling 1887 ‘The Turning Point’, Jolly works backward to explore howStevenson became a literary author (rather than a lighthouse engineer, like his ancestors, or alawyer like Sir Walter Scott), and shows him labouring under a sense of inferiority to his father’sachievements in engineering. She also works forward from this point, showing that decisionsStevenson made in 1887 would influence the course of his future career, and looks ahead toThe Wrecker (1892), offering an extended analysis of this ‘novel of vocational crisis’ (p. 16) whichdeserves praise.

The three central chapters of Jolly’s study follow a pattern that adds a pleasing sense ofstructure and symmetry to the book. Each chapter reads one or more of Stevenson’s Pacificwritings — In the South Seas, A Footnote to History, and his letters to The Times about Samoa — in thecontext of a specific discipline or field of inquiry (what Jolly refers to as ‘a key discourse or discipline. . . related to Stevenson’s education and his vocational aspirations’ [p. 27]). Thus, In the South Seasis examined in light of Stevenson’s engagement with anthropology, as he sought to produce aserious study of the South Seas region rather than the kind of romantic travel narrative that readersexpected (and desired). Next, A Footnote to History is read as exemplifying the competing claimsof the earlier ‘romantic’ model of historiography, associated with Froude and Carlyle, and the new‘scientific’ approach, associated with ‘circumstantial’ research of Henry Thomas Buckle. The fourthchapter departs somewhat from the pattern, offering a parallel reading of Catriona (published in theUnited States as David Balfour) and Stevenson’s letters to The Times protesting about European(especially German) interference in Samoa. Although she later quotes Oscar Wilde’s famousquip about Stevenson’s failure to write a new Trois Mousquetaires in his ‘romantic surroundings’,Jolly strongly challenges the somewhat conservative Victorian dismissal of Stevenson’s politicalengagement with Samoan affairs. Indeed, the chapter traces the compelling intertextuality ofStevenson’s Samoan letters and the novel that was generally welcomed as a return to ‘the realStevenson’ (p. 157). Ostensibly written about the aftermath of the Appin murder in 18th-centuryScotland, Catriona’s immersion in Samoan colonial politics has now been well documented; yet Jollybrings fresh evidence to bear on this immersion, reading The Times letters as a fragmented narrativeof a colonial crisis whose narrator, like David Balfour, is a witness ‘to inconvenient truths’ (p. 122).Arguing that novel and letters ‘are both products of a legal imagination’ (p. 121), Jolly shows howStevenson’s training in jurisprudence provided him with the tools to explore both Scottish Jacobitehistory and Samoan colonial politics. This chapter is the strongest in the book, yet it is so forreasons that in some ways undermine the main thrust of the book’s argument. For, while Jolly hasexplained early in her study that she focuses on Stevenson’s non-fiction ‘because these works bestrepresent Stevenson’s new sense of writing as action in the world’ (p. 27), the frequentlyilluminating cross-fertilisation between fictional and non-fictional texts that she traces in chapter 4dispute this claim. Moreover, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction may be somethingof a critical liability for, as Stevenson argued in ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, ‘the art of narrative isthe same whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or of animaginary series’ (Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, ed. JeremyTreglown, [1999], 193).

The chief shortcoming of Jolly’s book — with the exception of chapter 4 — is that its exclusivefocus on the Pacific non-fiction tends to reinforce the very conventional distinctions (of genre andvoice) that Stevenson was at pains to dismantle in his Pacific writings and, arguably, long before.While Stevenson’s Pacific fiction has been ably discussed by critics, including Jolly herself, itsrelative absence from this book creates something of an imbalance. However, this weakness is offsetby the book’s scrupulous and subtle discussions of the reception of Stevenson’s Pacific writing.

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Although others have travelled over similar ground (for example, Julia Reid has also examinedStevenson’s engagement with late-Victorian anthropology), Jolly is alone in carefully unearthingand exploring the diverse Victorian responses to Stevenson’s Pacific writing. While this receptionhistory may generally confirm that Victorian readers were disappointed by the Pacific non-fiction,Jolly succeeds in presenting a more nuanced account. For example, she shows that reviewers ofIn the South Seas, far from universally dismissing the work, found merit in its ‘literary qualities’ aswell as ‘its significance as a record of anthropological fieldwork’ (p. 63). It remains to be seenwhether her illuminating study will overcome the still lingering ‘indifference if not aversion’ toStevenson’s Pacific non-fiction, but the serious student of Stevenson is indebted to Roslyn Jollyfor her valiant effort.

OLIVER S. BUCKTON

� 2010 Oliver S. Buckton

Body Ornaments of Malaita, Solomon Islands. By Ben Burt, with contributions from DavidAkin and support from Michael Kwa‘ioloa. London, British Museum Press, 2009, andco-published Honolulu, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009, viiþ168 pp., illus., maps, 280illustrations in colour and black and white, bibliog., index. ISBN 978-0-7141-2580-0(pbk) £25stg., ISNB 978-0-8248-3135-6 (pbk) $US38.00.

Ben Burt is an anthropologist who has researched with the Kwara‘ae language group on Malaitasince the late 1970s. He is also a curator at the British Museum. These two parts of his researchhave come together in a remarkable book. Malaita is the most populous of the Solomon Islands,and an island famous for retention of custom, or at least the version of pre-European contactcustoms that survives as kastom. Malaitans, as did all Solomon Islanders, once used quitespectacular body ornamentation. Today, only Langalanga Lagoon Malaitans have continued toproduce shell money in large amounts, and porpoise hunts continue in a few areas, to access theanimals’ teeth for decoration and use as wealth transaction in the Solomon Islands. There is alsoa modern variation, shell money necklaces, which are almost ubiquitous in the islands and soldoverseas as tourist items. The Langalanga Malaitans have turned their shell money andornamentation production into a modern industry, still using old methods, and deserve praise fortheir ingenuity, which has allowed Malaita to remain at the heart of Solomon Islands’ traditionalwealth production.

Several factors led to the desertion of old body ornamentation. Although there were fewcommercial plantations established on Malaita, Malaitans were the main group of SolomonIslanders who worked on overseas plantations in Queensland, Fiji, Samoa and New Caledoniaduring the final decades of the 19th century, and the dominant group of labourers used withinSolomon Islands on 20th-century plantations. Malaitans have carried home huge amounts ofmanufactured goods since the 1870s, which replaced and led to the abandonment of manyornaments. But the main cause for the change was various Christian churches, particularly theSouth Sea Evangelical Mission and the Seventh Day Adventist Mission, both strongly against bodyornamentation, which was equated with the powers of Satan. The other two major denominationson the island, the Anglicans and the Catholics were less fervent in their destruction, but not totallyinnocent. The result has been devastating: today the best examples of Malaita body ornamentationare in overseas museums, and it is these that Burt and his collaborators have used to research thisbook. The supporting authors are important to the text: David Akin, an anthropologist researchingwith the Kwaio, a language area neighbouring Kwara‘ae, has been involved in encouraging theKwaio to continue to manufacture their old ornaments; and Michael Kwa‘ioloa, a Kwara‘ae man,is Burt’s long-term collaborator and co-author of several books.

This present book contains 57 pages of very useful introductory information which positionsMalaitan ornamentation. The Introduction debates the place of body ornaments in Malaitanculture. Although many are astoundingly attractive, they are not art in the Western sense. Theirmeanings can be deduced as visual symbols of relationships of power and status: the patterns areidentifiable, and in many cases new artefacts continue old traditions. Yet there is also an elementof showing off and creating an image. David Akin’s influence, encouraging the east Kwaio to



recommence production, brings to the fore questions of the validity and comparability of newbody ornament forms, against those in museum collections, obtained before there was muchchange on the island. Many of the illustrations are of recent body ornaments, showing both thecontinuation and rebirth of ornamental traditions. Chapter Two looks at the arrival of labourrecruiters, Christianity and clothing, the loss of ornamentation, and reassertion of tradition throughkastom, using photographs to illustrate more than a century of change. Chapter Three begins themore technical section of the book, describing the materials used to manufacture body ornaments,and regional and historical variations. Chapter Four, the major part of the book, is a catalogueof Malaitan ornaments, beautifully illustrated by Ben Burt. The illustrative detail is sufficient toallow Malaitans to follow the Kwaio example and re-innervate the production of body ornaments.

The book is an excellent study of material culture in the Pacific. The details on Malaitan shellwealth are the best I have seen. There is no other book on Malaita, since Daniel de Coppet andHugo Zemp, ‘Are‘are: un peuple melanesien et sa musique (Editions du Seuil, 1978), which is alsolavishly produced and beautifully illustrated. The final trick will be getting this quite expensive(by Solomon standards) book back into the islands, to allow Malaitans and others to appreciatetheir material heritage and hopefully to continue body ornamentation.

CLIVE MOORE

� 2010 Clive Moore

Collective Creativity: art and society in the South Pacific. By Kathryn Guiffre. Farnham,Ashgate Publishing, 2009. 163 pp., tables, diagrams, footnotes, appendices, bibliographicreferences, index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7664-5 (hb), ISBN 978-0-7546-7665-2 (eBook).

The cultural landscape that Kathryn Guiffre explores is set against the backdrop of the socialchanges experienced in the Cook Islands since the 1970s. Cheap air fares have provided theopportunity for frequent travel to and from New Zealand for Cook Islanders, as well as an influxof tourists and settlers with their consumer culture and lifestyle. However, Cook Islanders adheringto more ‘traditional’ cultural norms and values were not easily persuaded that Western ways werebetter. Although tourism has brought economic gain, the tourists’ expectations demanded a rangeof cultural products suited to their lifestyle. The point at issue here is that, while making the newart products to extract profit from the tourist market appealed to many Cook Islander artists,others were critical of the effects of cultural diminution and the loss of collective enterprise.

During her fieldwork on Rarotonga in 2002–03, Guiffre investigated individual artists ofdifferent cultural backgrounds and their responses to local events. Guiffre finds that despite thecontinual influx of tourists, Rarotonga is a largely self-contained society with a relatively highcreative output. She argues that creativity — defined here as ‘a process that takes place between‘‘gifted’’ individuals and their culture’ — is a social phenomenon influenced by the social structureswithin which the creative individual is embedded and where they find their particular position, roleand network. Despite the upheaval caused by the huge influx of tourism, she found that certainaspects of Cook Island Maori culture, such as the ethos of generosity and the importance of mana(moral honour) proved extraordinarily tenacious. Her scrutiny of the art world of Raratongarevealed critical issues regarding ‘culture wars, identity politics, indigenous rights, and post-industrial economics’, and noted how artists vie with each other to sell their works to touristsand collectors.

Guiffre found a surge of artistic activity in Rarotonga in the early 2000s, which is attributedto the return to Rarotonga of several New Zealand-born artist and intellectuals of Cook Islandancestry, who had witnessed the efflorescence of Maori culture and indigenous rights inNew Zealand since the 1970s. She focuses on local tensions and squabbles made public throughletters to the Editor of the Cook Island Times, which highlight the differences between the artists‘Local, Foreign and Foreign Local’ (p. 77).

Guiffre concentrates on ‘the crucial 2002–03 period of the arts explosion’ and offers ‘a detailedpicture of an art world at a critical moment in its formation’ (p. 13), but in doing so she overlooksthe extraordinary cultural resurgence that took place in the Cook Islands from the late 1980s as thetiny nation prepared to host the 6th Pacific Festival of Arts in 1992. This huge event encouraged

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overseas-born Cook Islanders to return and contribute to exhibitions, public art works andcommunity events alongside their relatives. This creative explosion involved men and women of allCook Islands communities, excelling themselves in their art forms of canoe construction andnavigation, building fares, carving and fabricating monuments and sculptures, exquisite formsof weaving with natural fibres and fine needlecraft as well as painting and other forms ofcontemporary art. Performances were specially choreographed, music and songs composed, as wellas oratory, poetry and pageantry.

Art is not always a product for commercial transaction; instead, it may be created to upholdsocial cohesion and pride in place and culture. Twenty-four Pacific countries represented by 2,800participants arrived at the Festival, which took place over 10 days in October with 650performances and the unprecedented arrival of 12 ocean-going vaka (canoes). It cost the CookIslands government $NZ5 million, with a further $NZ16 million for the extensive new culturalcentre. But as the Cook Islands Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Henry said in relation to theseeconomic criteria, ‘Cynics know the cost of everything and the value of nothing’. The GrandOpening Ceremony of the festival on 17 October, for example, featured huge tiki designed byIan George and made with the assistance of other artists for a four-act drama performed byCook Island actors and school children. Also evident was the extent of community support andfundraising for the festival, as well as the island’s top entertainers giving freely of their time.

In the microcosm of the art world of Rarotonga, Guiffre locates several fault-lines currentlyaffecting the way in which Pacific art forms are appreciated and valued. Who determines ‘fine’ artand the criteria to assess the quality of the artist and their artworks? This absence of accessible,informed commentary on the full range of current artistic production skews the critique towards artas a marketplace commodity; for example, it overlooks the social and heritage values of women’sarts such as fine white hats and tivaevae (applique quilts).

The operations of some ‘foreign’ artists and dealers and galleries caused a stir in Rarotonga in2002. Guiffre comments on ‘issues surrounding ethnicity, legitimacy and boundary marking’,referring to a letter to the prime minister from Mike Tavioni and other artists of the Cook IslandsNational Visual Arts Society, in which they expressed a grievance that ‘art galleries and arts andcrafts outlets must be reserved for Cook Islanders only’ and their concerns over ‘foreign-ownedbusinesses’. It was eventually conceded that all artists living on Rarotonga had a right to theircreative practice, but should be aware of sensitive cultural boundaries (pp. 77–96).

Guiffre points out that the reason why the development of the ‘Rarotongan art world’ of high-profile practising artists, galleries and promoters seemed foreign to Cook Islanders was partly dueto the lack of art education in schools until the 1990s (pp. 57–8). This lack of exposure to andunderstanding of the way the global art market operates and individual artists make their careerswas still evolving. The existence of systemic cultural differences may make people feel vulnerableto alienation from the original and sometimes from both cultures. Perhaps in the future therewill be a zone of compromise and hybridity, involving an original and personal fusion betweencultures.

At present, there is a deficiency of clear assessment and critique of the diversity of genres of artcreated across the Pacific region. Little notice is taken of serious issues, including the productionof art as an essential part of community life, moral and ethical considerations such as collectivecreativity and intellectual property rights. The concentration of the art market on that which hasthe highest monetary return, whether hip urban stylists manipulating the latest new media craze orobjects for the bulk turnover tourist art market, disguises the greater diversity of artistic practicesand forms of creative expression produced by master practitioners of traditional cultural styleswhich have been part of the fabric of Pacific Islands societies from time immemorial. The result isthat the narrative about art is reduced to issues of personalities and profitability, individual artistsbecome celebrities and the mutual benefits of collective enterprise are undervalued.

In Collective Creativity, Guiffre draws upon a wider perspective; she unfolds the links betweenpeople whose relationship with their Maori community and heritage and with others shapes theircreative lives. From a scholarly overview of the broad historical, cultural and economic contextsthat shaped today’s Rarotongan society, which still values generosity, reciprocity and extendedfamilies, she shifts focus to that of an active participant in the lively art world of Cook Islanderartists and resident artists and the social networks that influence their creative lives.

SUSAN COCHRANE

� 2010 Susan Cochrane



Telling Pacific Lives: prisms of process. Edited by Brij V. Lal and Vicki Luker. Canberra,ANU E Press, 2008, xivþ301 pp., illus., endnotes, figures, index. Online version,ISBN 978-1-9213-1382-0, http://epress.anu.edu.au/tpl_citation.html. Print version,ISBN 978-1-9213-1381-3, $A24.95.

To begin with an analogy: the definition of a camel as ‘a horse designed by a committee’ seemsapposite as a description of this book. As a composition, it is diffuse, loosely structured, wide-ranging, disparate in its elements, obscurely focused and inconclusive — but wondrously so, justlike life itself. Indeed, it is from its very lack of apodicticality that the book derives its authenticityand authority. The title and the sub-title are particularly well chosen. Philosophically, they pointto the ad hoc realities recognised in Aristotle’s empiricism and to the centrifugal facts of fluidity anddiversity and plurality as discerned by Heraclitus (but do not allow the inventive extremes ofKant and Berkeley). The only definite limit is that (with one exception, relating to Japanesewomen) the essays they preside over relate to the Pacific Islands, but a similarly scholarlyassemblage for any putative category would surely yield a comparable result.

The book consists of a collection of 19 papers delivered at a conference held at the ANU in 2005on the writing of life stories. The critical noetic residue to draw from them is that there is no one or‘correct’ way to do it. The variety of possibilities, and of realised examples, is limitless. After all,every individual life is sui generis but, although it is suffused with particularities and subjectivities,it is also lived in shared time and space and is conditioned by the broad socio-cultural contextwithin which it occurs; but no more so than in the case of those who presume to observe andcomment on their own lives or on those of others. Hence arise problems of selection and balanceand of relative ‘significance’ in, say, dealing with the person as a singular being or as a memberof a group or class, or as a role-player. And the telling is going to be conditioned not just by theaims and character of the teller, but by the nature of the sources and, possibly, by prevailingconventions. It is a notable strength of this book that it deals not only with problems and processesof telling life-stories, but also deals historically with that topic itself.

Story-telling can be a kind of cultural artefact. It can tend to stress the overriding importancefor the individual of living in the shadow of some mythical being, rather than chronicling thesubject’s experiences and deeds. Niel Gunson notes this possibility in a subtle and perceptiveintroductory essay, one that also extends to the lives of certain explorers and missionaries whoemerge from the telling as iconic figures and not just as actors or as ‘people who were there’. It isa reminder that hagiography is a legitimate form of biography and that, while the practice ofde mortuis nil nisi bonum may not ensure completeness, the result need not be fictitious.

Then follows a set of three chapters relating to Papua New Guinea in which anthropologistspresent stories, not laden with personal minutiae, but richly contextualised, of their indigenoussubjects. Hank Nelson does something similar with a review of literature by and about Australianswho spent time there. For Fiji, Pauline Aucoin puzzles (agonises?) over the ethics of publicisingdetails of other people’s lives, even when the individuals concerned have supplied the information.And Lucy de Bruce turns to her own family history there to explore the status/identity ofPart-European ‘half-castes’ (kailoma); native or not? Another personal reporter, and even more so,is Alaima Talu, who offers an autobiography. Already respected as a historical writer, she explainsthe enigma of how, from being born a Protestant in Tuvalu, she became a Catholic nun livingin Kiribati; it is an individual’s story, but it also illustrates themes and forces that shaped, andcontinue to shape, that protean phenomenon labelled ‘history’.

Then there are instructive chapters on the writing of biographies. Here, with the authorsnecessarily employing the first-person, a further element of autobiography enters the assemblage.Especially instructive here is Elizabeth Wood-Ellem’s account of the creation of — and responsesto — her richly informed and intimately insightful life of Queen Salote (1999). Her ‘mission child’ lifein Tonga, her historian father, her involvement with the Noel Rutherford edited history FriendlyIslands (1977) and her lack of financial gain from the book are all pertinent to the context ofcontingency within which it has its being, and within which it is to be understood. Of related ilk areessays on the making of books about A.D. Patel and William Pritchard, and of writings in processabout other significant figures within the amorphous entity of ‘Pacific History’, including,appropriately, one by Doug Munro on the founder of that academic discipline, ‘Jim’ Davidson.

Space limitations preclude separate comments on all items in this work, but each has aninherent value, and collectively they testify to the worth of singular enquiry. Not everything will bediscovered or explained, but biographers should proceed confidently with St Anselm’s maxim

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in mind — fides quaerens intellectum. For enough can be done to justify the effort required, even formultiple treatments of the same subject. Here, Queen Salote (like Winston Churchill) offers a casein point.

HUGH LARACY

� 2010 Hugh Laracy

Treason on the Airwaves: three Allied broadcasters on Axis radio during World War II.By Judith Keene. Westport, CN, and London, Praeger, 2009. viþ228 pp., illus.,endnotes, bibliog., index. ISBN 978-0-313-35328-4. US$49.95, £34.95stg.

World War II is as popular as it has ever been. Its appeal is not just a result of the high numberof lives consumed or the charred and transformed cityscapes created in this global conflagration.In part, its dark allure lies in the invidious moral dilemmas many people faced. In an engrossingcomparative survey, Judith Keene charts the lives of three individuals who would find themselvescharged with treason for working as radio broadcasters for the enemy. John Amery, CharlesCousens and Iva Toguri were prosecuted for collaboration by their respective British, Australianand American governments at war’s end. In Treason on the Airwaves, Keene describes eachindividual’s family history and their educational and vocational experience, before discussing theirrise to stardom on the Axis airwaves. This is followed by an exploration of their wartimecollaboration and post-war prosecutions. She also nicely describes the structure and workings ofAxis radio propaganda in both theatres.

The son of a prominent British family, the virulently anti-Semitic Amery unsurprisingly comesout the worst in this analysis. Unlike Cousens and Toguri, Amery relished, much to theembarrassment of his family, the opportunity to work with the Third Reich. The troubledschoolboy and failed filmmaker found his true calling as a well-connected stooge for Germanpropagandists. Caught in France at its fall, Amery turned down the possibility of escape to Englandin 1940, throwing his lot in with the Nazi cause. At their expense, he lived the highlife acrossoccupied Europe. At war’s end, in spite of his family’s efforts to have Amery declared insane, he wasexecuted for his crimes. Notwithstanding the heartrending impact this had on his caring andconcerned family, it is hard to disagree with one legal opinion which stated that the defendant’sactions were more a case of ‘moral deficiency or moral defectiveness’ than mental insanity (p. 27).

The road to collaboration and treason for Cousens and Toguri was far more ambiguous.Cousens was a well-known Australian broadcaster in the pre-war period, but volunteered to fightthe Japanese only to be captured with fall of Singapore. In Changi prison, the Japanese soonidentified his potential to their psychological warfare efforts in the Pacific. Keene is best here as sheattempts to get to the bottom of Cousen’s eventual decision to accept a position in Japan. It appearsthat the Australian was convinced, or had convinced himself, rather naively, that he could use hisposition on the radio to improve the lot of prisoners and in some manner undermine the Japanesewar effort. Although he found himself somewhat better housed and feed than compatriot POWselsewhere in Asia, the Bunka camp inmates suffered terribly under the arbitrary and crueltreatment of Japanese guards. If Cousens never carried the stain of active malevolent collaborationthat marked out others at the camp, his naivety and professionalism were put to good use by theJapanese.

Of the three mini-biographies, Keene’s exploration of Toguri, is the most complex andintriguing. A second generation Japanese-American student sent by her family to Japan for sixmonths, Toguri was among some 50,000 Nisei caught when the war in the Pacific broke out. Withher strong English skills and laid-back Californian demeanour, she was fatefully talent-spotted andcoached by Cousens. The author deftly examines how this unfortunate young women becameforever associated with the most famous legend of the Pacific airwaves: Tokyo Rose. Anti-Japanesesentiment on America’s East Coast, the interment of her family, and the problems of her citizenshipare considered by Keene in turn. Treason on the Airwaves documents the appalling treatment Togurireceived from the United States government authorities which resulted in her imprisonmentfor treason.

At times, the comparative nature of the work is slightly uneven. This is most evidenced in howthe families of both participants responded to the wartime collaboration and post-war treatment oftheir respective family member. Treason on the Airwaves makes much of the Amery family’s John-



induced troubles before, during and after the war, but Toguri’s family receives less attention withregard to their personal feelings, while Cousen’s only family response is left to his wife, and this islimited to little more than a single page. This may well be due to the uneven nature of the historicalmaterial which Keene was forced to work with and is only a minor detraction from an otherwiseexcellent monograph.

The uncomfortable question at the heart of the book is how far would anyone collaboratein order to survive. Both Cousens and Toguri were in invidious positions, with which most readerswill doubtless have some sympathy. After all, as Cousens pointed out, many Australian prisoners,whether working on construction projects for the Japanese or employed in radio work, were aidingthe enemy cause in an effort to make it through the war. In the case of Amery, however, it was lessabout surviving than prospering. This is a thought-provoking work, which presents an excellententry point into the use of radio propaganda in Europe and Pacific, the complex nature ofcollaboration and resistance, and the importance of context in comparative historical analysis.

ADAM CLAASEN

� 2010 Adam Claasen

Parliament’s Library: 150 years. By John E. Martin. Wellington, Steele Roberts, 2008.270 pp., illus., endnotes, index. ISBN 978-1-877448-43-0 (pbk). NZ$59.99

K �a Taoka H �akena: treasures from the Hocken collections. Edited by Stuart Strachan and LindaTyler. Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2007. 240 pp., illus., index. ISBN 978-1-877372-40-7. NZ$65.00

New Zealand’s Parliamentary Library, Wellington, and the Hocken Collection, Dunedin, househistorical records of the development of the Pacific region. Events behind the development of eachlibrary and appreciation for source material are a component of both accounts of these institutions.

Libraries existed within two years of New Zealand’s foundation. As a colonial outpost ofEuropean civilisation, libraries were seen as civilising. The General Assembly of New Zealandpassed the Public Libraries Act in 1869 (based on the British Act of 1850) allowing a levy to becollected for libraries. A number of library subsidies acts like this were passed, but were not widelyimplemented until the 1880s. English models were not always appropriate in sparsely settledcolonial provinces such as New Zealand. Desire in colonial New Zealand for libraries relied onendowment, and the preservation of historical records relied on individual initiative.

Foremost was Dunedin-based historian, bibliographer and collector Dr Thomas MorlandHocken (1836–1910). K �a Taoka H �akenamarks the centenary of the Deed of Trust he signed in 1907,which gave to the University of Otago his research collections of books, manuscripts, paintingsand other historical documents relating to the Pacific. Unifying themes to the Hocken Collectionsare the history and culture of New Zealand, the Pacific and Antarctica, with a particular emphasison New Zealand’s South Island where Hocken lived.

New Zealand’s official written documents date from 1840. Hocken’s importance rests in hisappreciating the importance of historical sources ahead of most in his day. Hocken advocated thatoriginal material and primary sources be conserved before they disappeared. By the 1880s, Hockenappreciated that so many early history matters relative to European activity in New Zealand andthe Pacific were all but unknown. Many had been lost.

Hocken’s anxiety over this, and his significance as a custodian of the Pacific region’s past, isdemonstrated by historian John Martin’s book. New Zealand’s Parliamentary Library startedin 1858, four years after the advent of representative government New Zealand. He documents thelibrary’s history to mark its 150th anniversary in 2008. Martin shows how New Zealand’sParliamentary (then known as the General Assembly Library) began as a traditional ‘bookman’s’library. Nineteenth-century English and French literature and Greek and Latin classics featuredprominently in its collection from its earliest days. The library came to hold one of New Zealand’sfinest collections in these subjects; little thought went to the records of the Dominion —highlighting Hocken’s importance.

With New Zealand governed by a unitary system of government, together with the country’srelatively small size, collecting its historical records could have been relatively straightforward.

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Yet only with the Archives Act of 1957 did a proper system of the management and preservationof government archives begin to take shape. Earlier attempts only began in 1926 with the GeneralAssembly librarian Dr G.H. Scholefield (1877–1963), who arranged that government archives behoused in the attic of the General Assembly Library, with himself becoming dominion archivist.A journalist by background, Scholefield respected newspapers as an archival record and himselfbecame a history-collector.

Scholefield’s predecessor as the first Chief Librarian (from 1901) was journalist, enthusiasticbook collector and retired Liberal parliamentarian Charles Wilson (1857–1932). Wilson was askedto report on Hocken’s bibliographic research (which was published in 1909 as A Bibliography of theLiterature Relating to New Zealand). Wilson valued Hocken’s library for its comprehensiveness and useto the historian and student of New Zealand and Pacific history. Wilson hoped the Governmentwould secure Hocken’s collection — the completest collection of New Zealandia in existence — forthe General Assembly Library, which was effectively New Zealand’s de facto national library.Wilson respected Hocken as a bibliographer and scholar. This was unlike James Collier (1847–1925), earlier Librarian of the General Assembly Library (1885–1889), who inspected Hocken’slibrary in around 1888. At one stage, Collier and Hocken planned to publish jointly, but this neverhappened. Collier released his bibliography of The Literature Relating to New Zealand in 1889;Hocken’s Contributions to the Early History of New Zealand appeared in London in 1898.

In K �a Taoka H �akena, 200 items within the Hocken Collection, dating from the 17th centuryto the present day, are illustrated. The importance of each selected item is briefly detailed. In thispresentation, focus rests on the item itself. Displayed one to a page — somewhat in the mannerof an exhibition — the highlighted objects provide a general introductory background toNew Zealand’s history.

Some 26 contributors, many who work with the Hocken Collection (as curator, archivist orlibrarian), add to the book, which opens with an introduction to Hocken and his collections.Historian Rachel Barrowman puts the man and his collecting interest into context, and StuartStrachan, Hocken Librarian since 1985, explains how the collection developed after his death.Ensuing chapters illustrate aspects of the collection.

Hocken hunted for and preserved material he could trace dating from the earliest Europeanhistory in the region. The book acknowledges Hocken’s foresight to keep this from disappearingfrom view. In the century after his death, benefactors expanded Hocken’s collections, and theirgenerosity is also noted. By contrast, New Zealand’s General Assembly Library started as a smallcollection of reference works. Established as a copyright deposit library in 1903, the library grew toone of the largest parliamentary libraries of the Commonwealth in terms of its holdings. Added to itwere contemporary legal, sociological and philosophical works, serial collections and significantruns of newspapers and periodicals. Servicing parliamentary members and their staff andcommittees assumed greater importance in the library’s focus, particularly since 1968.

The evolution of these facets, steered by different personalities and through changingexpectations, are charted chronologically by Martin. He chronicles the progress and history of theinstitution as a responsive collection and shows how, in serving Parliament, the library hascontributed to New Zealand’s political and cultural heritage. A useful time chart and bibliographyrelating the history of New Zealand completes Martin’s volume. As windows into the collectionsthat they illustrate, let alone for the insight they offer into appreciation for historical record in thePacific region, both books are highly recommended.

EILEEN CHANIN

� 2010 Eileen Chanin

Possession: Batman’s treaty and the matter of history. By Bain Attwood with Helen Doyle.Melbourne, Miegunyah Press, 2009. xviþ416 pp., illus., maps, endnotes, index. ISBN978-0-522-85114-4. A$54.99.

As an Australian living in New Zealand, I am constantly reminded that ‘race relations are betterin New Zealand’ — my students remind me, my colleagues remind me, my friends remind me,strangers on the bus remind me. For the most part, their claims rest on the fact that Maori havea treaty — the Treaty of Waitangi — and Aboriginal people do not. Thanks to Bain Attwood’sstunning new book, the reasons for this are now clear. Timing was everything. John Batman, acting



on behalf of the Port Phillip Association, made his treaty at the very time when the government ofNew South Wales was trying to formulate a new conception of its sovereignty, the territorial limitsof which, it transpires, were in considerable doubt. In purporting to purchase land off the Kulinin Port Phillip in 1835, Batman forced the government’s hand. Thereafter, the territorial limitsof New South Wales, and hence Britain’s sovereignty, was extended to embrace every part of thecontinent, excluding Western Australia and South Australia (previously, this had been limited tothe 19 counties surrounding the first settlement at Port Jackson). Aboriginal people becamesubjects of the Crown at the same time, a change in status that Attwood claims was understood asextinguishing their sovereignty.

Explaining how, just a few years later, the British could enter into a treaty with Maori whichacknowledged Maori sovereignty and rights to land, Attwood points to three main reasons.First, the nature of the earliest British colonisers: in the case of New Zealand, these were made up ofscattered individuals and private groups who needed to negotiate with Maori for access to land.Australia, by contrast, was settled by a well-armed military force which could take as much land asthe government wanted. Second, and following on from this, Attwood argues that one ‘cannotdisentangle the way the British treated indigenous sovereignty and rights from the way theyperceived the strength of the indigenous people. One was a function of the other’ (p. 96). Here, theargument rests on the perception of Maori military strength versus Aboriginal weakness in termsof their interactions with the settlers. According to Attwood, the British ‘recognised Maori titlein large part because it saw this move as a means by which it could manage land transactions’(p. 96). He explains that, whereas in New Zealand it was believed that Maori could help disciplinethe settlers, no one in New South Wales conceived of this possibility, because ‘they did not perceiveAboriginal people as having such power since the impact of Aboriginal resistance on settlerexpansion in that colony had been relatively limited’ (p. 96). Third, Attwood notes thathumanitarians had actually come to oppose treaties in this period, seeing them as antithetical toindigenous interests. That a treaty was struck between the British government and Maori in 1840despite such misgivings reflects the circumstances of New Zealand’s early settlement (the Treatyof Waitangi was seen as the most expedient way to prevent settlers from entering into privateagreements with Maori). Attwood’s treatment of this issue opens up important questions about theracialised perception of Aboriginal weakness relative to Maori strength — for, as he notes, evenin Van Diemen’s Land where Aboriginal people fought a bitter battle for their land, they were stilldenied sovereignty — however this is beyond the scope of this already impressively large study.

Possession is much more than a history of Batman’s treaty — it is an argument about the legalbasis of British settlement in Australia. The story of the treaty gives Attwood the perfect vehicle fordiscussing this poorly understood aspect of Australia’s history, since much of the confusion stemsfrom the artificial nature of the reasoning employed to justify British occupation in the wakeof Batman’s treaty. This theme of invented histories is continued in Parts 2 and 3 of the book whichdocument the construction and deconstruction of the ‘Batman legend’. In Part 2, the focus shifts toanother aspect of the Batman story; his mythical pronouncements on the location of Melbourne —‘this will be the place for a village’ — and consequent reduction in status of the treaty. Althoughreduced to a mere ‘curiosity’ (much like Aboriginal people), the treaty never entirely faded fromhistorical remembrance. Part 3 brings the story up to the present, exploring the various uses towhich the treaty has been put by Aboriginal activists and others in recent times.

The book is meticulously researched, beautifully written and superbly presented. Specialmention must be made of the decision not to indent long quotes; although unconventional,it encourages one actually to read (rather than skip over) important — and in some casesquite astounding — primary material and, as such, enhances the overall impact of the work.Also commendable is the extremely high quality of the book’s non-textual material. Over70 illustrations, including many fine full-colour historical paintings, are reproduced and theirsignificance discussed. It is a measure of Attwood’s diligence as a historian, as well as hiscommitment to representing a faithful picture of the past, that a painting of George Robinson,rather than Batman, appears on the front cover; although many paintings and sketches of Batmanexist and are included in the book, no-one can say for certain whether any depict his actuallikeness. Likewise, no-one can say for certain whether Batman’s treaty was genuine, and yet itremains the case that it represents the only attempt — whether real or duplicitous — to treat withAboriginal people, and hence recognise, on some fundamental level, their sovereignty as well astheir proprietorial rights to the land. Whether Kulin ‘chiefs’ signed the document or understoodwhat they were signing matters little if the significance of the treaty is understood to lie in the

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thinking of those who orchestrated it (the members of the Port Phillip Association), and those whorepudiated it (the New South Wales government and the British Colonial Office). Attwood pealsback the layers of doubt and duplicity to reveal a fascinating story of possibility — the possibilityof race relations being different in Australia had Batman’s treaty been allowed to stand.

RANI KERIN

� 2010 Rani Kerin

Blood Brothers: the ANZAC genesis. By Jeff Hopkins-Weise. Auckland, Penguin Books (NZ),and co-published Adelaide, Wakefield Press, 2009. 346 pp., illus., maps, endnotes, index.ISBN 978-0-14-301118-7 (pbk), $NZ40.00; ISBN 978-1-86254-838-1 (pbk), $A34.94.

Jeff Hopkins-Weise’s Blood Brothers: The ANZAC genesis makes an important contribution toour understanding of the 19th-century history of both Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa.The recurring conflicts between settlers and Maori in New Zealand brought calls for support fromsettler communities in New Zealand; calls readily answered by their trans-Tasman cousinsin Australia. From minor episodes in the 1830s, through the more substantial conflicts in Northlandin the 1840s, to the large wars of the 1860s, New Zealand settlers consistently looked to the longer-established and larger colonies of Australia for support: logistical, financial, military and emotional.Military support from Australia came in the form of British regimental garrisons, from Royal Navyand colonial sailors and ships, and eventually from Australian colonial volunteers and militarysettlers. The numbers were large, with Hopkins-Weise postulating a maximum nearing 3,000during the height of the Waikato War in 1863–64 (p. 236). Just as significant may have beenthe role of Australia as commissariat, or as a staging base for imperial forces, or as a source forhumanitarian relief for European settlers adversely affected by the fighting. The fightingin New Zealand during the 1860s even provided the spark for some early military manufacturingof armoured river gunboats in Sydney. Taken as a whole, Australian assistance was crucial tomilitary successes, however partial, which paved the road for settler domination in New Zealandby the 1870s.

Given the scale and impact of Australian support during the NZ conflicts, it is surprising thatthese efforts and events have fallen through the cracks in both popular and historical knowledge.Though imperial and colonial contingents were launched with much fanfare, there were fewexamples of such prominent returns. Imperial troops either did not return to Australia or, if theydid, were soon withdrawn from the colony. (The last British regiment departed by 1870.)Australian military settlers and volunteers either stayed in New Zealand or filtered back toAustralia. There was not the triumphant parade of conquering heroes to mark the episode in publicconsciousness in Australia, and almost no public memorials or acts of remembrance to sustaina connection to a fading past. Historians have done little to recall these events. The author arguesthat the constraints of the national lens are partly to blame: Australian historians have neglectedwhat they see as a New Zealand event, while New Zealand historians have paid only passinghomage to what was an Australian sidelight to their own main event. When historians have lookedat the shared military experience of the two dominions, the magnetic power of ANZAC has stoppedtheir gaze from sliding back before 1915. Hopkins-Weise has resurrected a genuinely significantforgotten part of the shared Australian and New Zealand experience.

Blood Brothers has many strengths. The author explicitly avoids the well-known details of thevarious battles with the Maori, focusing solely on the efforts in Australia to respond to calls for aidand the roles and experiences of Australian contributions. This provides him the room to explorethe complex and varied efforts of the individual Australian colonies, something he reconstructs fromthorough research in a wide range of repositories across Australia and New Zealand. Hopkins-Weise more than succeeds in making his case that the Australian engagement and support of theirfellow colonists across the Tasman was large and crucial to the British and settler achievementsin conflict with the Maori. The most important contribution that Blood Brothers makes to theexisting literature, however, is in revealing how important events in New Zealand were toAustralian colonists. In every colonial settlement and town in Australia, new developments werethe subject of vigorous and passionate public discourse. Hopkins-Weise has made particularlyeffective use of colonial newspapers, especially letters to the editor, which demonstrate a sincereengagement. More than just talking about these events, Australian colonists were active in



soliciting funds for humanitarian relief, pressuring imperial officials to send forces, recruitingmilitary settlers for New Zealand and organising volunteer militia forces to defend themselves in theabsence of British garrisons. Sometimes, these debates also involved voices raised in opposition tomilitary settler schemes which seemed designed to seduce valuable settlers from their own colonies,or of the stripping of British garrisons in Australia to reinforce New Zealand (thereby leaving themexposed and vulnerable). The story was not a simple one, and the author explores its diversityeffectively. What emerges from his analysis is an important revelation — there was, in fact,an Australian ‘homefront’ to the New Zealand wars.

The shortcomings of Blood Brothers are few. One is the decision to structure the book withfrequent subtitles. Perhaps stitching together the episodic and disparate stories of five colonies in anumber of crises/wars across more than three decades required such devices. However, it disruptsthe flow of the narrative and leads to some repetition, especially in the introductory and concludingchapters. The major conceptual shortcoming is the leap embodied in Hopkins-Weise’s subtitle,The ANZAC Genesis. He claims that the ‘experience of World War I and its aftermath can in fact besaid to have capitalised on the foundations laid down in the previous century’: that the Australianrole in the New Zealand Wars was the ‘true genesis’ of their martial kinship (p. 244). This back-dating of ANZAC is ultimately unconvincing. First, in order to make that point, the author wouldhave to establish that the mid-19th-century events he chronicled were noted and important toAustralian and New Zealand officials and soldiers of the Boer and Great Wars; something he doesnot do. Indeed, the author’s successful argument for why the events slipped from popular memorysuggests that such a connection would have been most unlikely. Secondly, Hopkins-Weise argueseffectively for a strong sense of imperial British citizenship and identity evident in Australianvoluntarism and contributions during the NZ wars. While there may have been imperial vestigesin the ANZAC traditions born in the Great War, the great power and longevity of ANZACmythology rests on the different lineage of budding nationalisms. Essentially, the ANZAC genesisargument oversteps the evidence and period examined by the author.

Despite these mechanical and conceptual shortcomings, Blood Brothers is very good at whatit covers. Hopkins-Weise is to be commended for an important contribution to the historiographyof Australian colonial and military development, as well as to the literature on the settler–indigenous conflicts of Zealand/Aotearoa.

SCOTT SHEFFIELD

� 2010 Scott Sheffield

The Prophet and the Policeman: the story of Rua Kenana and John Cullen. By Mark Derby.Nelson, Craig Ponton Publishing, 2009. 142 pp., illus., endnotes, index. ISBN 978-1-877517-11-2. NZ$39.99.

Mark Derby’s The Prophet and the Policeman, arising out of his work for the Waitangi Tribunal,is a well-research, readable and timely study of two significant characters in New Zealand’s racerelations history. The book details the events of 1916, when police under the personal commandof Commissioner John Cullen mounted a military-style raid on the isolated community of theTuhoe tribe led by Rua Kenana. Kenana’s main offence, in Pakeha eyes, was his steadfast beliefin Maori sovereignty and his publicly declared criticism of the standard colonial policy of two laws:‘one for settlers and another for the natives’.

The account of the battle of Maungapohatu (the ‘capital’ of Rua’s abortive rebellion)in Richard Hill’s excellent history of policing in New Zealand (The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove,1995) and other previous work provides a useful introduction to this final clash of the country’s‘Maori Wars’. Derby book, in placing the raid as pivotal biographical events in the careers of twovery different men, extends this understanding. Cullen’s confrontational tactics, contrasted withRua’s mysticism and emergence as a respected Indigenous leader, reveal much about the clashof two cultures — Maori and Pakeha — in New Zealand.

From an Australia perspective, The Prophet and the Policeman is interesting for a number ofreasons. It spells out the commonalities of the British Empire — specifically the divide and ruletactics, the employment of Irish as colonial police and the growing disquiet among the emergentpopulation of Europeans who were less inclined to accept indiscriminate violence towards

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Indigenous people — as well as the differences between Australia and NewZealand, both inhistorical and contemporary terms.

Queensland, like many other parts of the British Empire, received a police system based on theIrish model, often staffed by ex-Irish officers and effectively as unpopular as the force Britainestablished in her first colonial possession across the Irish Sea. The first Commissioner of Policeappointed in Queensland, David Seymour, was an Anglo-Irish officer in an army regiment destinedfor the New Zealand wars during the 1860s. After a brief appointment as the Governor’s aide-de-camp, he took up the offer of a ‘safe’ post in Australia. Seymour appointed numbers of Irish-bornpolice, and many were, like John Cullen, ex-Royal Irish Constabulary officers.

Many Queensland police, like some of their New Zealand counterparts, had little hesitationin breaching their own laws and rules. Aboriginal people, as British subjects, were entitled to thefull protection of Her Majesty’s servants, yet this rarely happened on the frontier. Indigenous rightsin Australia, as in New Zealand, were frequently ignored or trampled in the European quest forland, resources and control of native peoples. There were many similarities between the policingof the two areas, and Cullen might have felt quite at home in Australia.

By contrast, New Zealand experienced a different race relations history from Australia, andThe Prophet and the Policeman demonstrates the contemporary importance of this dissimilarity.Because nothing remotely resembling a treaty was ever signed between colonists and Aboriginalpeople in Australia, there has been no great haste to resolve the enormous damage that colonialismdid to Indigenous society. Australians generally see no need for any form of enquiry into historicaldispossession, and are only tentatively beginning to accept the possibility that any violenceaccompanied the European invasion of the continent.

If Australia, like New Zealand, had a national body like the Waitangi Tribunal, historians andscholars could begin the work of retrieving incidents from Australian colonial history. There aremany such events worth closer investigation because they have enormous implications for ourunderstanding of contemporary national and Indigenous society. The Prophet and the Policemanreminds us that discrimination against Indigenous people in former colonies has both historical andcontemporary dimensions, as the parallels between the 1916 ‘battle’ and a 2007 ‘anti-terrorist raid’against Tuhoe show. In New Zealand, as in many parts of Australia, human rights and criminaljustice are still skewed in the coloniser’s favour.

In writing this book, Mark Derby has explained in detail one small aspect of New Zealand’scolonial history that informs current and future debates over race relations. As he reminds us,police ‘anti-terrorist’ operations are not new, and have (and should) always be open to scrutinyand public debate. This book is a valuable contribution to a better understanding of colonialas well as national history.

JONATHAN RICHARDS

� 2010 Jonathan Richards

Mata Toa: the life and times of Ranginui Walker. By Paul Spoonley. Auckland, PenguinGroup (NZ), 2009. 288 pp., illus., table, endnotes, index. ISBN 978-0-14-301989-3(pbk). NZ$40.00.

With Mata Toa: the life and times of Ranginui Walker, the New Zealand sociologist Paul Spoonleyoffers a timely addition to biographies of 20th-century M�aori intellectuals. One of those is thatwhich Walker himself wrote about the mid-20th-century M�aori politician, leader and intellectualApirana Ngata, also published by Penguin in 2001. Walker made clear that that biography,He Tipua: the life and times of Sir Apirana Ngata, would be a record of a public life lived in the pursuitof justice for M�aori. So, too, does Spoonley, explaining in the introduction that, ‘The story ofRanginui Walker is as much a story of a country as it struggled, and partially succeeded, in moreadequately recognizing the rights of M�aori as the indigenous people of Aotearoa’ (p. 13). Thechallenge for Spoonley, as for Walker, is to show us how this individual life story intersects withand can even represent that broader history.

Unlike Walker, Spoonley is dealing with a living subject and therefore with a very recent past.He assures us that he has had the full support of Walker and his family in writing the biography.Spoonley’s effort to establish objectivity and provide us with a straightforward narrative, first,of Walker’s life as a part of the emerging M�aori activism of the 1970s and, second, of the struggle



of ‘a country’ as it came into a new understanding of its past and present is an admirable one.But that effort tends to overwhelm the possibilities for understanding the man and his milieu. I wasnot left with a full sense of what makes Ranginui Walker tick, why he cares about what he does,and how he has sparked anger, sympathy, shame and denial, in those who have received hismessage, often forcefully expressed.

Historians of 1970s M�aori activism have usually focused on the twin demands for the recoveryof land and language. As Spoonley tells us, Walker became committed to the revival of M�aorilanguage as an adult, an interest first sparked when studying at the College of Education and thenfurther pursued at the University of Auckland, where he was eventually to become the head of theM�aori Studies department in 1993. Walker supported the land rights movement through itsdevelopment from the mid-1970s, though he did not become centrally involved in land issues untilthe 1990s when he began to work on the Treaty of Waitangi claim of his tribe, Te Whakatohea.In addition to the pursuit of language revival and land rights, however, Walker was also involvedin the particular issues facing urban M�aori, including crime and gang problems, especially throughhis long-standing involvement in the Auckland District M�aori Council.

The breadth of Walker’s commitments may be less well known to a public more familiar withhis column-writing and media commentary. What may also come as a surprise to some readers isthe story of Walker’s conservative upbringing near Opotiki; his decidedly un-political youth; andhis marriage to Deirdre Dodson, the daughter of British immigrants, whom he met at teachers’college. The apparent contradictions between Walker’s conservatism (including, for instance,a scrupulous attention to fisheries regulations) and his radical critique of settler colonialism and callfor M�aori emancipation provide a central dynamic tension in the narrative. The wider politicalmeanings of this tension, and the costs for Walker himself, however, are not explored.

Spoonley’s second task is to show how Walker’s story also represents the struggle of a countryto achieve a new, postcolonial, understanding. That Walker’s personal story can represent sucha national awakening (read, ‘biculturalism’) is itself a fascinating proposition. Is it, ultimately,his ‘inherent’ conservatism and his intimate knowledge of cross-cultural communication that hasmade him more able to gain a representative national status? An answer to this question is not to befound in the narrative, however. Perhaps this is because Spoonley decided that such analyticalefforts were too far outside the ambit of a biography. Or perhaps he does not actually see sucha question as curious.

By not addressing this problem, Spoonley leads us into some very murky waters. What are we tomake of a summary statement like this: ‘[Walker] was to contribute to significant changes in manyspheres of the state, often as the ‘‘M�aori expert’’ and always with a declared emancipatory agenda,one that sought to distance the state from its colonial past and deliver a more equitable, biculturalfuture’ (my emphasis) (p. 150)? Unlike Ngata, Ranginui Walker was never a member ofparliament nor has he ever been a civil servant (although he did work on an accreditation processfor M�aori educational institutions for the New Zealand Qualifications Authority in the early1990s). It is unclear why we should believe that he really cared or cares about how the state mightdistance itself from its colonial past. What Spoonley does show is that Walker is deeply committedto a notion of civil society and to the arts of persuasion and logical discourse that such acommitment requires. That is no small contribution to the field of M�aori history. But there is amissed opportunity to show us in a richer, more emotionally textured, or even more analyticallysharp way how Ranginui Walker and the transformation of Aotearoa New Zealand are mutuallyentailed.

MIRANDA JOHNSON

� 2010 Miranda Johnson

Meaningful Inconsistencies: bicultural nationhood, the free market, and schooling in Aotearoa/New Zealand. By Neriko Musha Doerr. Herndon, VA, Berghahn Books, 2009. xiiiþ228,tables, map, references, index. ISBN 978-1-84545-609-2. US$90.00.

Neriko Musha Doerr’s book, Meaningful Inconsistencies, explores how a bilingual education unitbecame a focus for the construction of various subjectivities, hegemonies and counter-hegemonieswithin a New Zealand school community during a period of intense free market reform. She isparticularly concerned with the ways in which schools create and reproduce ‘regimes of difference’

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by differentiating students according to ethnicity, ability, and cultural and linguistic backgrounds.To that end, Musha-Doerr, a Japanese-born PhD student at Cornell University, spent ninemonths in a New Zealand school interviewing Maori and Pakeha students, their families andteachers. She also looks at their responses to the free-market phenomenon of internationalfee-paying Asian students. During her fieldwork, Musha-Doerr was frequently confronted with theway in which Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders constructed their understandings of her as aJapanese woman doing an American PhD and much of her argument is filtered through this lens.In this respect, the book is as much about her experience in the field as it is about the researchcommunity.

The fieldwork for this book was conducted in 1997–98, and this fixes the study in an interestinghistorical moment, but it also has the effect of freezing the attitudes and practices underinvestigation within this period. This is discussed briefly (p. 90), but the thesis was not written asa primarily historical account and, given that significant changes have taken place in theeducational domain since that time, the work is somewhat dated. Indeed, despite attempts toupdate the bibliography, many of the key arguments relating to Maori education are based onsources that show signs of age. For example, much has been written in the area of kaupapa

Maori (philosophies based on Maori cultural practices and beliefs) educational research andMaori–Chinese relationships in schooling contexts (an area examined in the book) since the 1990s,but little of this literature is taken into account.

Part of the problem is that the central aims of the research seem rather fluid. For example,to show her gratitude to the school community and hoping to provide information that might beof value to the staff, Musha-Doerr included interview questions that were suggested to her byvarious teachers at the school (p. 94). This led her to an investigation of ‘tracking’ systems, eventhough the bilingual unit was a mixed-ability environment, and after a discussion with anotherteacher, she also introduced interview questions about self-esteem (p. 95). Thus, in chapter four,there is an extensive exploration of ‘tracking’ systems within the wider school that is curiouslydisconnected from the discussion in chapter six about the mixed-ability practices in place in thebilingual unit and their relation to attitudes about Maori educational underachievement. Theintent of the study is also unclear in chapter two where, in order to expand on her potentiallypromising conceptual framework about the way that nationhood might be perceived as a range ofcompeting ‘regimes of difference’, Musha-Doerr uses census categories to illustrate the Crown’schanging perception of race between 1840 and 2006. Brief reference is made to Maori protest insome regions about the collection of this statistical data, but Maori perspectives are not activelysought and neither is serious consideration given to why these categories changed. In this respect,the official record stands as the focal point of the analysis in this chapter, but it is not clear how thisinformation relates to the fieldwork that was conducted with members of the site community inthe 1990s. It could be the case that the initial research questions changed during the courseof the study, but the challenge for researchers is to tie new ideas into a coherent frameworkfor investigation.

Much of the book is concerned with the hegemonic construction of regimes of difference, andthere are some unintended ironies here. The author uses a great many Maori terms and phrasesthroughout the book and frequently mentions her commitment to learning the Maori language.However, terms that are in common usage in New Zealand English are frequently substituted withAmerican terminology (e.g. dissertation, candy), but these hegemonies remain unexamined.For example, in New Zealand ‘streaming’ refers to the way that schools sort students into abilitygroups, but the American term ‘tracking’ is substituted, the author explains, for ‘purposesof clarity’ (p. 114). Standard American spelling is used throughout. The book is squarely aimed atan American audience, but the reluctance to use educational and colloquial terms that arecommon in New Zealand while making frequent use of Maori phrases (some of which aremisspelled, e.g. p. 25) gives the impression that the Maori language is being deployed as a ‘badgeof belonging’ — a nod to American readers that the author has assumed a mantle of culturalauthority. This impression is reinforced by the author’s description of correcting a Pakeha teacher’spronunciation of Maori words in the classroom (p. 159). The book is a fascinating, but ultimatelyfrustrating, study of bilingual classrooms in New Zealand.

JOANNA KIDMAN

� 2010 Joanna Kidman



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