Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2017

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Pan American World Airways’ (Pan Am) decision to establish regular air service between the United States and the South Pacific in the 1930s forced Australia and New Zealand to reconsider their position within the Empire and challenged their understanding of the Asia-Pacific. Technological improvements were outpacing the imperial system. The Pacific was no longer a British lake and America threatened to dominate the new and vital air links so valuable to the isolated Dominions. Furthermore, Pan Am was not prepared to proceed at the slow gentlemanly pace that had previously characterized imperial relations. The opening of the air routes to the South Pacific led to diplomatic and military interests in previously all but ignored atolls and reefs in the South Pacific, which thrust New Zealand into the forefront of imperial relations. New Zealand responded to the opportunities and challenges posed by Pan Am’s decision to begin operating a trans-Pacific service with considerable diplomatic finesse and sought to ensure that its own interests were preserved without offending the mother country. Pan Am’s operations also challenged Anglo-American relations when at the time Britain could ill-afford to offend Washington. In a period that witnessed the rise of fascism in Europe and an expansionist Japan in Asia, the Royal Navy and the United States Navy were facing off over an uninhabited atoll in the South Pacific. Britain’s high-risk diplomatic tactics over Canton Island thus exposed not just a trans-Pacific air link but endangered the Anglo-American relationship and threatened to upset a significant Pacific ally. This article is the first to make use of unrestricted access to the archives of Pan Am and places the establishment of Pan Am’s South Pacific operations into an imperial context.

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In 1890 Robert Louis Stevenson embarked upon his third Pacific Island cruise aboard the SS Janet Nicoll. During the next four months, the travel writer made several stops in the Cook Islands, including the atoll of Penrhyn or Togarewa (now Tongareva), where he learned about Penrhyn’s leprasorium. This article examines two of Stevenson’s rarely examined pieces concerning Penrhyn and discusses Stevenson’s engagement with leprosy in the Pacific, its aetiology and effects, with respect to Polynesian cultural habits and customary practice, and to the colonial discourse on contagion. In his article ‘A Pearl Island: Penrhyn’ (New York Sun), Stevenson hypothesized that a single Hawaiian leper had escaped from Kalaupapa and reached the shores of Penrhyn. Stevenson’s lament about the insidious Hawaiian leper’s effects on the local population was accompanied by his photographic illustration of Penrhyn children who, throughout the course of the article, came to embody the inevitable destruction of a Pacific population. Just as Stevenson’s vivid account of his family’s visit to Penrhyn is woven around the presence of the singing girls, the photograph depicting them serves as a launching point for my discussion of Stevenson’s representation of leprosy in both ‘A Pearl Island: Penrhyn’ and in the related essay entitled ‘Talofa, Togarewa!’ (‘Goodbye, Togarewa!’). The latter was conceived for publication in the London Missionary’s Samoan-language magazine O Le Sulu Samoa (Samoan Torch). In both ‘A Pearl Island: Penrhyn’ and ‘Talofa, Togarewa!’, the singing girls function as narrative prompts for Stevenson’s detailed account of the link between leprosy and the Hawaiian Islands, but they – over the course of both texts – also become symbols for all that is destroyed (youth, innocence, joy, morality and bodily and spiritual health) through lethal contagion.

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This article looks at the visual representation of space within Dead Calm (1989) and The Ferryman (2007), both productions set on yachts in the Pacific. The former is an Australian thriller, starring Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill, whilst The Ferryman is a New Zealand demonic possession film, starring Kerry Fox and John Rhys-Davies, which engages with mythological beliefs. Despite the different approaches to horror within the two films, they both depend on isolation, with the tension in these films occurring at the junction between the agoraphobia provoked by the vastness of the open water, and the claustrophobia caused by the close confines within and upon the boats. Both films are also notable for their use of doubling, featuring a ‘good’ boat and its darker twin, as well as a reliance upon legend and metaphor. In The Ferryman, the aim of the antagonist is to cheat Charon, the ferryman of Greek myth, while the visuals of Dead Calm turn the ‘bad’ yacht into an Underworld into which Neill must descend to save his wife. The discussion considers the Gothic use of space as a narrative and stylistic device, with the struggle to control space becoming the means to overcome the isolation of the sea.

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A former professor of English, Peter Dane spent the last years of his life as a poet and environmentalist in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. In his poetry, unlike that of many (post) modern writers, this revolutionary traditionalist celebrated form and beauty as a means of realizing and contemplating the limited and contingent, yet potentially transcendent and universal liberty of the arts. In his portrait poetry, the transcendental ‘beyond’ is ‘firmly rooted in the everyday’. I argue that according to Dane’s portrait poems, a poet is not a genius by dint of their superior skill or of their calculating or knowing mind, but on the strength of living the tension between the human experience of transience and the intended but never fully obtainable telos of art, which is not perfection but ‘its own indicative stillness [...] and a stillness beyond it’. Assisted by Walter Benjamin’s and Lawrence Venuti’s theories, this article also looks at Dane’s renderings of German poetry into English. For Dane, translation of poetry does not consist primarily in the accurate rendering of propositions or poetic devices but in invoking those ‘transcendent moments’ that touch and alter our being. Based on readings of Dane’s poetry about Michelangelo and August Kekulé and Dane’s translation of Novalis’ poem ‘Wenn nicht mehr Zahlen und Figuren’, this article analyses, contextualizes and celebrates Dane’s transcendental poetry.

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Terence Bayler, 1930–2016

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Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521–1898, Rainer Buschmann, Edward Slack Jr and James Tueller (2014) Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 200 pp., ISBN 978 0 8248 3824 9 (hbk), US$47

Dumont d’Urville: Explorer and Polymath, Edward Duyker (2014) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 664 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7870 0 (hbk), NZ$70

Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, David Armitage and Alison Bashford (2014) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 392 pp., ISBN 978 1 1370 0163 4 (pbk), £21.99

Outcasts of the Gods? The Struggle over Slavery in Māori New Zealand, Hazel Petrie (2015) Auckland: Auckland University Press, 456 pp., ISBN 978 1 8694 0830 5 (pbk), NZ$45

Beyond the Imperial Frontier: The Contest for Colonial New Zealand, Vincent O’Malley (2014) Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 284 pp., ISBN 978 1 9272 7753 9 (pbk), NZ$49.99

From Alba to Aotearoa: Profiling New Zealand’s Scots Migrants 1840–1920, Rebecca Lenihan (2015) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 316 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7879 3 (pbk), NZ$45

Promoting Health in Aotearoa New Zealand, Louise Signal and Mihi Ratima (eds) (2015) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 324 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7882 3 (pbk), NZ$45

Book of New Zealand Words, Dianne Bardsley (2013) Wellington: Te Papa Press, 336 pp., ISBN 978 1 8773 8584 1 (hbk), NZ$44.99

Hocken, Prince of Collectors, Donald Jackson Kerr (2015) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 424 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7866 3 (hbk), NZ$60

The Lives of Colonial Objects, Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla (eds) (2015) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 376 pp., ISBN 978 1 9273 2202 4 (pbk), US$50

From Samoa with Love? Samoan Travellers in Germany 1895–1911: Retracing the Footsteps, Hilke Thode-Arora (ed.) (2014) Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 224 pp., ISBN 978 3 7774 2239 8 (hbk), US$55.00

The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labour and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network, Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers (2015) Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 240 pp., ISBN 978 0 8248 4002 0 (hbk), US$50

Living Kinship in the Pacific, Christina Toren and Simonne Pauwels (eds) (2015) New York: Berghahn Books, 274 pp., ISBN 978 1 7823 8577 6 (hbk), US$120

Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific, Jeffrey Carroll, Brandy Nalani McDougall and Georganne Nordstrom (eds) (2015) Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 308 pp., ISBN 978 0 8248 3895 9 (pbk), US$29

The Fitzgerald Brothers’ Circus: Spectacle, Identity, Nationhood at the Australian Circus, Gillian Arrighi (2015) Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 262 pp., ISBN 978 1 9250 0358 1 (pbk), AUD$44

The Critic’s Part: Wystan Curnow Art Writings 1971–2013, Christina Barton and Robert Leonard (eds) (2014) Wellington: Victoria University Press, 512 pp., ISBN 978 0 8647 3932 2 (hbk), NZ$80

The Adventures of Jonathan Dennis: Bicultural Film Archiving Practice in Aotearoa New Zealand, Emma Jean Kelly (2016) New Barnet: John Libbey Publishing, 200 pp., ISBN 978 0 8619 6722 3 (pbk), £20

The Deepening Stream: A History of the New Zealand Literary Fund, Elizabeth Caffin and Andrew Mason (2015) Wellington: Victoria University Press, 304 pp., ISBN 978 1 7765 6036 3 (pbk), NZ$40

Maurice Gee: Life and Work, Rachel Barrowman (2015) Wellington: Victoria University Press, 543 pp., ISBN 978 0 8647 3992 6 (hbk), NZ$60

The Conch Trumpet, David Eggleton (2015) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 124 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7893 9 (pbk), NZ$25

Heartland, Michele Leggott (2014) Auckland: Auckland University Press, 120 pp., ISBN 978 1 8694 0808 4 (pbk), NZ$27.99

Edwin’s Egg & Other Poetic Novellas, Cilla McQueen (2014) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 264 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7813 7 (pbk), NZ$39.95

The White Clock, Owen Marshall (2014) Dunedin: Otago University Press, 94 pp., ISBN 978 1 8775 7863 2 (pbk), NZ$25

Whale Years, Gregory O’Brien (2015) Auckland: Auckland University Press, 100 pp., ISBN 978 1 8694 0832 9 (pbk), NZ$25