Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2014

This article examines the discursive circulation of stories in journalism and travel writing over the last fifty years that linked leading Western Samoan hotelier Aggie Grey to South Pacific’s iconic Tonkinese, Bloody Mary. Made famous by Juanita Hall in the Broadway musical (1949–1954), and subsequent cinematic adaptation (Joshua Logan, 1958), Bloody Mary first appeared in James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tales of the South Pacific (written 1944–1946, published 1947). The careful marketing and growth of the Aggie Grey brand both before and after her death in 1988, exemplifies the close economic relationship between the development of tourism in Samoa in the post-war years and the American film and celebrity industries, with the hotel in Apia providing accommodation, logistical and catering support to Hollywood productions and film stars from William Holden to Marlon Brando. My examination of an origin myth linking a charismatic historical figure with an iconic fictional character is undertaken not to ultimately suggest any one-to-one relationship between the two, but rather to demonstrate a remarkable persistence of a Pacific romanticism. In what I name as the optics of tourism I join with earlier scholars in suggesting that we must be more attuned to accounting for the affective power of visual media and the ways in which Hollywood plays a continuing complex role in cultural memory, tourism and popular culture.

In this essay I will attempt to account for the failure of state formation on Pitcairn Island by the Bounty mutineers in 1790. I will track the course of the mutiny itself, the settlement on Pitcairn, and the ensuing collapse of the polity. I will list the proximate reasons for this outcome, including gender imbalance, a racially stratified social order and the absence of representative conflict resolution mechanisms. I conclude that the ultimate cause for the anarchic quality of life on Pitcairn is the distinctive contribution of its effectively perfect geopolitical isolation. This historical exemplar should serve as a warning to the would-be founding fathers of the future if the next wave of human colonization commences with the possible establishment of settlements in the even greater isolation of outer space.

Focusing on the 1950s and 1960s, this article is concerned with the role of the Lepers’ Trust Board and its most famous representative, P. J. Twomey, in the formation of unofficial voluntary and philanthropic relationships between the people of New Zealand and the South Pacific. The origins of the Lepers’ Trust Board lie in the charitable outreach of Benjamin Pratt and Pat Twomey to the leprosy patients isolated on Quail Island in Lyttleton Harbour, New Zealand. On Pratt’s death, Twomey continued the work initiated in the 1920s and became known throughout New Zealand and the South Pacific as the ‘Leper Man’. This article draws on the theory of social capital to help explain the diversity and dynamic of philanthropic networks linking the Lepers’ Trust Board in Christchurch, New Zealand, to the leprosy sufferers of the South Pacific. It foregrounds the importance of the marginalized and isolated leprosy communities in providing an ethical and emotional focus for the forging of personal relationships between peoples of New Zealand and the Pacific islands. This article contributes new research and interpretive insights into the history of welfare in New Zealand, arguing that the fundraising activities and donor response to Twomey, and the leprosy-affected people of the South Pacific, became a means of developing a micro-economy of personally and financially invested intra-Pacific networks.

This article examines the challenges facing Pacific peoples from climate change. In particular it posits a framework for discussion around the notion of migration, identity and cultural sustainability that is couched in a repeated pattern of travelling and dwelling, a process that has been part of being a Pacific person for millennia. The article takes the position that evidence from oral tradition, history and contemporary times demonstrates that travelling is part of what it means to be a Pacific person. Climate change migration will be another contributor to this pattern of circular travelling and dwelling; departures and arrivals in the homeland. I examine the idea that the homeland is the pivot point for travelling and returning and as such is always the reference point for identity and nationhood. The future challenges for Pacific development and the impact of migration will be to find solutions from within the history, needs and aspirations of the Pacific peoples themselves; not in accepting the scenario of dependent and homeless climate refugees. This article is the first output from research into the wider challenges of the social impact of climate change migration on nationhood and identity and establishes a framework for thinking about solutions for the future that are informed from traditional ways to mitigate and adapt to challenge and change. I have taken the view that Aotearoa/New Zealand is part of the region and henceforth should be considered as part of the wider conversation of travelling and dwelling across the Pacific.

The Guyanese novelist and critic Wilson Harris defines the word ‘fossil’ in an idiosyncratic sense, to invoke ‘a rhythmic capacity to re-sense contrasting spaces and to suggest that a curious rapport exists between ruin and origin as latent to arts of genesis’ (Harris 1974: 1) – prior to hinting that such a ‘heterogeneous scale’ (Harris 1981: 111) of temporality can be seen to exist within the fictional universe fashioned by Janet Frame. This, in turn, implies that any appreciation of her work’s embeddedness in local (South Pacific) realities must simultaneously take account of the depths of spatiality created by means of her particular aesthetics. This article attempts to address Frame’s strange interest in ghostly vestiges of superseded experience, which she expresses through recurring allusions to subterranean strata of landscape encrypting a sense of ‘epochs and ages gone’– as she phrases this in Living in the Maniototo (Frame 1979: 154). Indeed, her settings beg the question of a ‘native capacity’ (another Harrisian phrase; see Harris 1981: 49) possibly underlying her approach to New Zealand contemporary culture. Intriguingly, she probes the matter through her repeated evocation of reputedly extinct animal species – dinosaur, moa, takahe – which she sees in some cases to be gesturing towards the possibility of resuscitation, as with the tuatara mentioned in Towards Another Summer, and quite in keeping with an aesthetics of excavation subordinated to her quest for occulted forms of being and knowing. As some of Frame’s characters conceive this, it is a matter of realizing that human vision is untrustworthy and must be supplemented through a form of third-eye vision paradoxically inherited in spite of the losses of history.

Treaty of Waitangi Settlements, Nicola R. Wheen and Janine Hayward (eds) (2012) Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 300 pp., ISBN 978 1 9271 3138 1 (pbk), NZ$49.99

Home in the Howling Wilderness: Settlers and the Environment in Southern New Zealand, Peter Holland (2013) Auckland: Auckland University Press, 256 pp., ISBN 978 1 8694 0739 1 (pbk), NZ$49.99

The Making of New Zealanders, Ron Palenski (2012) Auckland: Auckland University Press, 392 pp., ISBN 978 1 8694 0726 1 (pbk), NZ$45

Extra! Extra! How the People Made the News, David Hastings (2013) Auckland: Auckland University Press, 288 pp., ISBN 978 1 8694 0738 4 (pbk), NZ$45

Maori and Social Issues, Tracey McIntosh and Malcolm Mulholland (eds) (2011) Wellington: Huia, 322 pp., ISBN 978 1 7755 0002 5 (pbk), NZ$45

Mana Maori and Christianity, Hugh Morrison, Lachy Paterson, Bret Knowles and Murray Rae (eds) (2012) Wellington: Huia, 356 pp., ISBN 978 1 7755 0012 4 (pbk), NZ$45

Fiona Pardington: The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, Kriselle Baker and Elizabeth Rankin (eds) (2011) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 160 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7809 0 (hbk), NZ$120

Ancestral Lines: The Maisin of Papua New Guinea and the Fate of the Rainforest, John Barker (2008) Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 240 pp., ISBN 978 1 4426 0105 5 (pbk), CAN$24.95

Moa: The Life and Death of New Zealand’s Legendary Bird, Quinn Berentson (2012) Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing, 300 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 1784 6 (hbk), NZ$49.99

Born to a Changing World: Childbirth in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand, Alison Clarke (2012) Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 320 pp., ISBN 978 1 9271 3142 8 (pbk), NZ$39.99

Strong, Beautiful and Modern: National Fitness in Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, 1935–1960, Charlotte Macdonald (2011) Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 256 pp., ISBN 978 1 9271 3140 4 (pbk), NZ$49.99

Diplomatic Ladies: New Zealand’s Unsung Envoys, Joanna Woods (2013) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 286 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7830 4 (pbk), NZ$49.99

Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour, Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon (2012) New York: Palgrave, 280 pp., ISBN 978 0 2301 1656 6 (hbk), US$90

Narrating Indigenous Modernities: Transcultural Dimensions in Contemporary Maori Literature, Michaela Moura-Koçoğlu (2011) Amsterdam: Rodopi, 298 pp., ISBN 978 9 0420 3410 5 (hbk), €66

The Bush Baptist, Paul Burns (2013) London: FeedARead.com, 456 pp., ISBN 978 1 7829 9707 8 (pbk), £9.99