Max Quanchi

Australian readers knew a great deal about the Pacific Islands in the early 20th century. This understanding came from missionary fund-raising campaigns, visiting lantern-slide lecturers, postcards and illustrated books and encyclopaedia but most of all, after the mid-1890s, from heavily illustrated weekend newspapers. These were published in all major cities and offered a regular visual window on ‘the islands’, of which three were Australian colonies shortly after World War I. This paper argues that Australians were well-informed about the potential for settlement, and commercial and economic opportunities. It notes that illustrated newspapers were dominated by ethnographic images of the material culture and lifestyles of island peoples, but that images of wharves, plantations, port towns and colonial infrastructure were provided for those readers who thought the western Pacific should become an Australian or at least a British sphere of interest. Ultimately The Queenslander’s editorial motivation was to alert Australian readers to the economic potential of plantations, trade, mining, travel and settling in the nearby tropics.

ABSTRACT The Contemporary Pacific 17.2 (2005) 475-478 Indo-Fijians of the second girmit (labor migration from India) diaspora, now twice-migrants, have ensured that the histories, cultures, and futures of Indians in Fiji are well known, and Brij V Lal, the editor and contributor of a prologue and five chapters to Bittersweet, has been most responsible for the considerable depth of research and publication on the Indo-Fijian experience. Bittersweet adds an important body of literature to our understanding of the individual and collective memories of Fiji's Indo-Fijian population. Although many of Bittersweet's authors live outside Fiji, reminiscences of mostly rural life in Fiji in the mid and late twentieth century form the central link among all the essays. Surprisingly, as many authors note, a consistent feature of these stories is the close and diverse relationships that existed between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians. In this sense Bittersweet adds as much to the general history of Fiji as it does specifically to the Indo-Fijian community's part in that history. As individual memories of this era are fading, and collective memory has been muddled by conscious political social memory, a wide audience can now be grateful that those who lived in or carried out research in Fiji in this era have found in Bittersweet a platform to tell of their experiences. Not allBittersweet's authors are of Indo-Fijian descent, but all have a story to tell about Fiji. There are many fascinating and illuminating insights in Bittersweet. Seemingly offhand comments and short analytical asides are scattered among longer pieces. These one-line references to people and events, incidental comments on trends, and occasional summative statements remind the reader that Fiji has changed dramatically in the thirty years since the colonial era ended. Memories of school days, marriages, rites of passage,festivals,girmit,coups,and community events are contextualized by the post-independence struggles of Fiji as a nation, and more so by post-coup competitiveness and ethnic divisions in the last fifteen years. Bittersweet's authors are aware of national politics and major historical events, but the stories consistently privilege the personal and local above the national. They do challenge established histories of Fiji's recent past by stressing how ordinary rural life was characterized by varying levels of intimate and dependent relationships between Fijians and Indo-Fijians and between Indo-Fijians and the European colonial enclave that administered the colony and ran CSR (the Colonial Sugar Refinery). But overwhelmingly and repeatedly Bittersweet is a rose-colored story of schoolmates, friends, fellow soccer players, former teachers, revered religious leaders, and the annual cycle of Indo-Fijian religious and community life. It distinguishes between Hindu and Muslim Fiji but more so between life experiences as they were lived differently in Dilkusha, Dreketi, Flagstaff, Nausori, and Votualevu. The twenty-four chapters (one in Fiji Hindi) are arranged randomly, and personal reminiscences are intermixed with straight historical pieces like those by Jacqui Leckie on the Qawa epidemic, Mohit Prasad on the early popularity of multiethnic soccer, Christine Weir on schooling, John Kellyon Indo-Fijianfestivalsasa form of colonial protest, John Connell and Sushma Raj on migrating Indo-Fijians in Sydney, as well as Brij Lal's excellent opening essay, which succinctly surveys the girmit period. The Indo-Fijian diaspora in Australia, the United States, and New Zealand is also covered in three essays. Vijay Naidu's essay "Searching" (chapter 23) comments on recent events and should have been placed after Lal's opening survey as a guide to the themes tackled personally by the following authors. In between these useful academic accounts, Bittersweet offers its real gems—Vijay Mishra's account of the elusive community of "Dilkusha," Praveen and Saras Chandra's quest for the truth behind their great-grandfather's criminal conviction in 1913, Brij Lal's search for stories about his former teacher Mr Sita Ram, Ahmed Ali's reflections on the arrival and survival of Muslims in Fiji, Fiji Times...

... Page 3. Book Reviews 2 2 5 tour-de-force. Yet there is a sense of unfinished business in the failure to illustrate how the political power of the formal state, the wider ide-ologies of imperialism, and the local and the ordinary affected artistic practice. ... philip d. curtin. ...

ABSTRACT This is the first time that the histories of South Sea Islander indentured labourers have been subjected to analysis using a conceptual framework based on “the linguistic metaphors of the vertical and horizontal social world” (p.19), a social world the author admits has been already evocatively reproduced by a long line of scholars. She starts with the physical violence of recruiting and in some instances of kidnapping or ‘blackbirding’ but then leaps into matters of agency, resistance and consciousness and the legal, political, economic and philosophical infrastructure which she calls “administered violence” (p.180) and which existed despite an “obscuring discourse” of race. This analysis reads very well and is strong on methodology and theory, but in the end the reader is left a little confused by what is a long theoretical essay in search of evidence. The evidence presented is relevant and eye-catching on some occasions, such as the labourers’ demand for sewing machines to take home, the hundred Indigenous Australians and white women who were married to labourers in 1906, or the unnamed labourer who wanted repeatedly to leap overboard and who had a case of unsound mind dismissed in the Maryborough court. But there is not enough of the daily life of the labourer in the fields, mills, pastoral properties or at home in their camps or in town on Sundays. The analysis is rich in possibilities, but weak in creating the very vertical and horizontal depth and breadth of lives and communities the author relies upon, and particularly the way the working lives of indentured workers changed dramatically over the four decades of the labour trade. The distinction between vertical and horizontal worlds, histories and analogies is referred to several times but not fully explained. The author does isolate three periods of altered acceptance, rejection and legal definition (p.73); an arrival period, the mid-1880s as a time of rupture and the end of the 19th century when race determined the shape of Australia, but these are not pursued at length and the legalistic and linguistic violence, around which the thesis is structured, is not contextualised by changes over time. Banivanua-Mar notes she is not denying the conclusions reached by the founding scholars of the labour trade - Scarr, Corris, Moore, Saunders or the regional and personal histories of Gistitin, Mercer, Fatnowna, Bandler and Edmond. (p.45) But she calls these speculations and seeks to decolonise histories of the labour trade by reading “against the layers of racialized discursive filters” (p.180). This worthy objective becomes hard to follow when the author lapses into sentences like - “Race displaced the violence it authorised onto the discourses that authorised it.” (p.183) The final sentence in Violence and Colonial Dialogue continues with similar obscure phrasing by suggesting that a labourer’s silence in court, or distress at being shipped to an unknown port were “subtle but expressive and with an ambiguity that eludes authoritative designation despite the clarity of their physical resignation”. (p185). More worrying is the simple error at the opening (p.19) of denying duality, or rejecting a colonizer versus colonized confrontation and relationship but then positing a similar duality in the final stage – in which slavery, oppression, exploitation and kidnapping on one side are opposed on the other side by survival, resistance, agency and pride. (p.185) The six chapters start with incidents of violence in the western Pacific, including once again a retelling of the notorious Carl massacre of 1871 (and it is mentioned a further ten times), but the crew’s behaviour on board a Fiji recruiting vessel bound for Levuka is not shown to be relevant to language, regulation, demeanour, court decisions, workplace conditions or acts of physical violence in Queensland during the same period or over the next thirty years. Other already well known tales, anecdotes and facts are presented as evidence of linguistic and legal violence, and as the author admits there is not a lot of new material to be uncovered. Despite this there are 72 pages of endnotes and references. Primarily this is a book desperate to spin a now familiar story around a contemporary and trendy platform. However, my copy of the book...

ABSTRACT This is the first time that the histories of South Sea Islander indentured labourers have been subjected to analysis using a conceptual framework based on “the linguistic metaphors of the vertical and horizontal social world” (p.19), a social world the author admits has been already evocatively reproduced by a long line of scholars. She starts with the physical violence of recruiting and in some instances of kidnapping or ‘blackbirding’ but then leaps into matters of agency, resistance and consciousness and the legal, political, economic and philosophical infrastructure which she calls “administered violence” (p.180) and which existed despite an “obscuring discourse” of race. This analysis reads very well and is strong on methodology and theory, but in the end the reader is left a little confused by what is a long theoretical essay in search of evidence. The evidence presented is relevant and eye-catching on some occasions, such as the labourers’ demand for sewing machines to take home, the hundred Indigenous Australians and white women who were married to labourers in 1906, or the unnamed labourer who wanted repeatedly to leap overboard and who had a case of unsound mind dismissed in the Maryborough court. But there is not enough of the daily life of the labourer in the fields, mills, pastoral properties or at home in their camps or in town on Sundays. The analysis is rich in possibilities, but weak in creating the very vertical and horizontal depth and breadth of lives and communities the author relies upon, and particularly the way the working lives of indentured workers changed dramatically over the four decades of the labour trade. The distinction between vertical and horizontal worlds, histories and analogies is referred to several times but not fully explained. The author does isolate three periods of altered acceptance, rejection and legal definition (p.73); an arrival period, the mid-1880s as a time of rupture and the end of the 19th century when race determined the shape of Australia, but these are not pursued at length and the legalistic and linguistic violence, around which the thesis is structured, is not contextualised by changes over time. Banivanua-Mar notes she is not denying the conclusions reached by the founding scholars of the labour trade - Scarr, Corris, Moore, Saunders or the regional and personal histories of Gistitin, Mercer, Fatnowna, Bandler and Edmond. (p.45) But she calls these speculations and seeks to decolonise histories of the labour trade by reading “against the layers of racialized discursive filters” (p.180). This worthy objective becomes hard to follow when the author lapses into sentences like - “Race displaced the violence it authorised onto the discourses that authorised it.” (p.183) The final sentence in Violence and Colonial Dialogue continues with similar obscure phrasing by suggesting that a labourer’s silence in court, or distress at being shipped to an unknown port were “subtle but expressive and with an ambiguity that eludes authoritative designation despite the clarity of their physical resignation”. (p185). More worrying is the simple error at the opening (p.19) of denying duality, or rejecting a colonizer versus colonized confrontation and relationship but then positing a similar duality in the final stage – in which slavery, oppression, exploitation and kidnapping on one side are opposed on the other side by survival, resistance, agency and pride. (p.185) The six chapters start with incidents of violence in the western Pacific, including once again a retelling of the notorious Carl massacre of 1871 (and it is mentioned a further ten times), but the crew’s behaviour on board a Fiji recruiting vessel bound for Levuka is not shown to be relevant to language, regulation, demeanour, court decisions, workplace conditions or acts of physical violence in Queensland during the same period or over the next thirty years. Other already well known tales, anecdotes and facts are presented as evidence of linguistic and legal violence, and as the author admits there is not a lot of new material to be uncovered. Despite this there are 72 pages of endnotes and references. Primarily this is a book desperate to spin a now familiar story around a contemporary and trendy platform. However, my copy of the book...