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This is a written version of the Inaugural Brij Lal Memorial Lecture delivered for the Pacific History Association (PHA) conference at Warrnambool on 4 November 2023. It is in memory of Brij V. Lal, who died on 25 December 2021. In November 2009 he, and later his wife Padma Narsey Lal, were banished by Fiji's military regime from their birthplace. This address considers the troubled questions of belonging and banishment in Oceania. The first section explores this in relation to Brij's life, as well as other examples of political exile. The second part considers how other Oceanians might not quite belong because of the circumstances of their parentage or gender, or through the different mental and embodied spaces they inhabited. The lecture concludes by posing questions about how the present is invested in the past, and what the future holds for Oceanians who may be forced, chosen, or persuaded to leave their islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seeking better understanding of the Rarotongan church, training institution, and mission background shaping Cook Islander missionaries to Papua New Guinea in the 1870s, this article surveys Pacific Islanders' methodologies in establishing the Cook Islands Church, before focusing on 1867–77 when James and Jane Chalmers served as London Missionary Society (LMS) missionaries at Takamoa Institution, and Joseph Mullens steered LMS work globally. By exploring church and missionary interactions in church life, general education, the Takamoa Institution, relations with community leaders on societal issues, and on islands staffed solely by Cook Islanders, the article traces Chalmers's understanding of the gospel's missionary nature, of Cook Islanders' competence controlling their own affairs, and of churches supporting local leaders for community independence. With Mullens's wholehearted support, Chalmers promoted such understanding for further mission and Pacific missionary training. The article concludes that during this decade, the Rarotonga church developed a legacy for future generations to embrace and sustain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was the Pacific church leaders during the late 1960s who propelled the idea of recognizing Pacific Islander missionaries not only in the pages of our written history books but also in the heart of the Pacific ecumenical movement. Hence was the decision to construct the Pacific Theological College (PTC) chapel and name it the 'Islander Missionaries Memorial Chapel'. The construction soon became a project symbolic of crafting a new agenda of decolonization led by the Pacific churches, built not only upon the memories of Islander missionaries forgotten by the white-man history but also upon the resilience of its members to create a new story of self-determination for Pacific Christianity. This article briefly articulates the role of the PTC chapel as one of the first symbols of decolonization in the Pacific firmly grounded on recognizing and acknowledging those pushed to the margins by mainstream history and recognizing the role of the churches in political and educational self-determination in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, like the special issue it introduces, presents an attempt to think systematically about the durable and complex relationship between Pacific Island and East and Southeast Asian histories. Settled by people whose languages originally took shape in East and Southeast Asia, the Oceanic Pacific has deep links with Asia. Given that the changes that have unfolded in the Pacific World since the 16th century arise from linkages between the Americas, Asia and Europe which emerged through the creation of a global economic system, it is logical to treat Asia as one of the core contexts for Pacific history. The intensified connections between Pacific Island societies in the 18th and 19th centuries were strongly influenced by Asian economic, political and cultural systems. The decades between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries were a period of complex engagement of Pacific Island worlds with Chinese, Japanese, European, British, American and Southeast Asian influences. World War II, a conflict between the United States and Japan for domination of the Pacific, was a product of these earlier structures and a break with them. Today, Pacific peoples engage with powerful political, economic and cultural influences emanating from East Asia, most notably the People's Republic of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though regularly studied as different academic domains, Asian and Oceanian studies are deeply intertwined not only through longstanding political, economic, immigrant – and colonial – ties, but by questions about common ancestry. From popular commercial DNA testing to historical studies in linguistics, folklore, archaeology, biological anthropology, and sophisticated genome sequencing, deep histories of Oceanian Islander peoples have long been tied to 'origin' traditions and reconstructions of lineages from the Asian mainland, notably through the Austronesian diaspora. From 19th-century linguistic theories and Lapita sites, to 20th-century ABO blood groupings and contemporary mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA assays, scholars have proposed at times conflicting interpretations of Oceania's possible Asian human heritage. These analyses have themselves been consistently challenged by Indigenous genealogical traditions such as Māori whakapapa and Islander assertions of origins based on ancestral and localized narratives decolonized of Western scientific practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filipinos are the second largest Asian migrant group in the contemporary Pacific behind Indians and ahead of Chinese. While Filipinos are prominent in local histories of Guam and Hawai'i, where their populations are concentrated, little is written or known about their presence elsewhere. Pacific connections are similarly neglected by Filipino scholars. This may largely be due to the unobtrusive nature of most Filipino integration into Pacific Island communities. Nor were Filipino Austronesians as isolated from their Micronesian neighbours as is commonly assumed. During the Spanish era, Filipinos travelled all over the Pacific as ships' crew, pearl divers and Catholic missionaries. The United States' takeover of the Spanish Pacific in the 1890s ushered in a century of American domination and provided employment and migration opportunities for Filipino workers across the American Pacific. Today Filipino professionals are increasingly common in nations of the Western Pacific and this trend seems set to continue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US policies of immigrant exclusion evolved from the so-called Asiatic barred zone of 1917 to the Asian 'triangle', but also included people of the Island Pacific. In the latter case, the test for eligibility to enter the United States (US) as a potential citizen was race based. World War II induced pressures by US citizens in the occupying armed forces for marriage to both Asian and Pacific Island women. Internal lobbying in the US plus diplomatic expediency resulted in some post-war relaxation of the ban on Asian immigration via marriage. In New Zealand there was at least one challenge to the extent of the Pacific boundary of the Western Hemisphere wherein greater mobility of migrants was acceptable to the US government. Political Cold War pressure, more than geographic boundaries, proved eventually more potent for potential immigration via marriage but this was too late for most Pacific partners of US servicemen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Missionary' and 'archaeology' may appear incongruous partners within contemporary archaeological practice, but archival, museum and oral sources reveal historical connections. This paper explores two missionaries, active in the western Pacific from 1896 to 1973. Reverends Charles Elliot Fox (Melanesian Mission, Solomon Islands) and Frederick Gatherer Bowie (Free Church of Scotland Mission, Vanuatu) both conducted studies related to the prehistory and migration of Pacific people. Both produced material assemblages, as well as textual and visual documents, and formed ideas influenced by their own networks and self identities. The paper examines their data collection methods and relationships with others, considering particularly how their relationships with Pacific Islanders and with psychologist and ethnologist W.H.R. Rivers influenced the missionary research process. By understanding these aspects of their work, Fox and Bowie can be placed within a broader genealogy of Anglophone missionary archaeology dating back to the late 18th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Fiji's Indian Migrants, K.L. Gillion remarksen passanton five Fijians who travelled with the first batch of Indian coolies from Calcutta to Fiji in 1879. The men were recruited to work astopazes, or menials answerable to the ship's surgeon, aboard the shipLeonidas, in exchange for a passage home. While Gillion fails to dwell on the presence in Calcutta of these Islanders from the South Seas, his provocative aside troubles the popular view of Fijians as sedentary subjects of a colonial policy that discouraged the disruption of traditional life-worlds. It also calls into question the general perception thatgirmitor ‘indentured service’ was an exclusively Indian affair. Although they were not indentured to colonial plantations, the Islanders shared with the coolies the micro-political spaces of the depot, the ship and the quarantine station. They participated in the regimes and regulations of the indenture system. These Fijians unsettle two distinct accounts of history by not conforming to either. They furnish another instance of Islander mobility in the time of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers a review of the 11th Festival of Pacific Arts (FOPA) in Honiara, Solomon Islands, from July 1-14, 2012, which featured a public symposium on cultural rights, ceremonial arts, and traditional music performance.

The author discusses his experiences teaching Pacific history and Pacific studies at the university level. He examines the evolving methods of teaching the subjects, particularly the decreasing emphasis upon Eurocentric chronologies of colonialism. The author discusses his focus upon the Pacific area since 1945, annual field work in the Pacific islands, and attending meetings of the Pacific History Association (PHA). He examines how these experiences altered the delivery of his lectures and the design of his courses. The author emphasizes the importance of giving voice to inhabitants of the Pacific islands in his courses as opposed to what he calls a document-based, archive-driven imperialistic approach. He also discusses the significance of exposing students to field work.

A Pacific Islander known only as Tommy Tanna, who was employed as a servant in Sydney in the late 19th century, is widely credited with introducing body surfing to Australia. Along with the better-known Alick Wickham and Duke Kahanamoku, Tanna represents the contributions of Pacific Islanders to the development of Australian aquatic sport and is racialised and mythologised in memory. This paper examines Tanna via the lenses of race and performance. It aims to situate Tanna within the context of other Pacific Islanders in the aquatic ‘show spaces’ of Sydney and the reinvigoration, development and reification of a Nimble Savage stereotype which ascribed aquatic prowess to some Islanders, and to assess his surfing activities as performative of race. This discursive context assists in analysing the ways that Tanna has been represented in varying acts of social memory, which themselves are performative acts that link his contributions with his Pacific origins. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports on using Pacific shipping records to explore cultural contact in Polynesia before 1840. It focuses on the use of Shipping Arrivals and Departures lists for all the main Pacific Island ports, as well as lists of foreign visitors before 1840 at all the main island groups in the study of Pacific maritime history. It notes that the shipping records have been reviewed for the several areas including the Chatham Islands, the Bay of Islands, southern New Zealand, Honolulu, Samoa, and Tikopia.

The lives of Pacific Islanders during World War II can be described through a combination of documentary and oral history. This article reviews the experiences of the people of Chuuk (formerly 'Truk') in the Central Caroline Islands during the Pacific War. Chuuk served as headquarters for the Japanese Imperial Navy's Fourth Fleet and, later, rear area headquarters for the Combined Fleet. When the Japanese military shifted to defence in mid-1943, troops fortified the island, resulting in the confiscation of land and relocation of the Chuukese. From late 1943 to August 1945, Chuukese experience was shaped by Allied bombing, intensive labour demands from the Japanese garrison, and severe food shortages. After surrender, Chuuk was occupied by a minimal US Navy presence. The war and its aftermath shaped modern Chuuk through permanent changes in its resources, economy and political role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the presence, absence, and shifting connotations of the term ‘race’ and the idea of human classification in representations of indigenous Oceanian people by navigators, naturalists and artists on 18th-century British and French voyages. These ambiguous usages signified hardening European attitudes to human difference, as the holistic, ‘environmentalist’ explanations of the natural history of man lost ground to the differentiating physicalism of the new sciences of biology and physical anthropology. However, by correlating the generation of ideas with particular embodied encounters, I question the presumption that voyagers’ representations of indigenous people were entirely determined by preconceptions derived from received knowledge and prevailing discourses. I suggest instead that indigenous behaviour and demeanour left latent countersigns in the language, tone and content of such travel literature and art — on which the emergent metropolitan science of man drew heavily to justify its deductions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this and a companion article (in preparation, in which we focus on the perspectives of Pacific islanders), we analyse previously overlooked cultural and historical influences upon Iberian explorers in the Pacific. We concentrate here on the Lusitanian navigator, Pedro Fernández de Quirós, during his visit in 1606 to the island of Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu, where he attempted to found a settlement that he named la Nuebla Hierusalem . By returning to original accounts, which have hitherto been incompletely reproduced, inadequately contextualised or poorly translated, we address shortcomings in existing treatments of Quirós and also attempt to bridge divergent Lusitanian, Spanish and Anglo-European perspectives. In particular, we challenge an enduring Anglophone stereotype of Quirós as ‘a man in the grip of religious mania’ by analysing the influences on his thought and behaviour, and by placing these in their historical contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the notes and document of missionary surgeon Gregory Warner during his assignment in Tahiti from May 1807 to October 1810. Revelation of the culture and way of life of the pacific islanders; Overview of the sea travel adventure; Description of the geography, flora, fauna peoples of Tahiti; Sexual behaviors; Practice of infanticide; Pagan mythology and religion; Physiology and health.

The images of Fiji (and the Pacific generally) that were both employed and consumed at the international exhibitions of the late-19th and early-20th centuries — together with the stereotypes associated with such representations — exhibited a continuity that can be traced back to earlier accounts and displays of Pacific Island peoples. While attempts were made at later exhibitions to shift the focus of displays away from tales of ‘savagery’ and ‘cannibalism’ to those of ‘progress’, ‘civilisation’ and even ‘modernity’, the apparent popularity of Fiji's displays — as evidenced in contemporary accounts — remained firmly located in the appeal of the already existing ‘idea’ of Fiji. This article focuses on the representation of Fiji at two British imperial exhibitions: the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, and the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, and demonstrates that the ‘idea’ or ‘knowledge’ of Fiji that audiences brought to the exhibitions, and despite the best efforts of display organisers — usually representatives of the colonial administration — to reposition Fiji within the minds of the metropolitan audience, visitors — as always — saw what they wanted to and in so doing reconfirmed their ‘knowledge’ of Fiji. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five-hundred people were forcibly removed from the Tokelau atoll of Fakaofo in February 1852 and shipped to Uvea at the instigation of the Bishop for Central Oceania. How did this come about? Accounts of the event, from a Marist Father's first-hand journal entries to recent Tokelau narratives, tell different stories. Together, they reveal a history of intrigue, a glimpse of what really happened and why, and an intriguing history of a story in which the 'real' event came to be elided. The virtual loss of this episode of Tokelau history — in both Marist and Tokelau accounts — can be partially traced and the reasons for its loss explained by considering later histories and changed attitudes and intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a paper which provides a selective overview of history writing in and about the French Overseas Territory of New Caledonia. The tensions experienced by New Caledonia since the late 1960's, and particularly during the 1980's between the pro-independence Kanak movement and large sections of the Caldoche community may have significantly decreased during the 1990's, but the present problems faced by New Caledonia have been postponed rather than solved. This paper also proposes a thematic commentary on New Caledonia's historiography.

Few Pacific historians examine island communities as part of wider spheres of indigenous interaction. Indigenous relations with Europeans receive the lion's share of attention, while ongoing and new interactions between local communities tend to be neglected. As a result, European influence is perhaps exaggerated. This paper examines the Western Caroline Islands in the century prior to the imposition of modern colonial rule. It argues that the history of this period is best understood as a series of interactions between four distinct, yet interconnected worlds. When a regional perspective is adopted, the Western Carolines become a more dynamic place, with Europeans just one of many groups of outsiders to influence communities. Indigenous history becomes more prominent, and inter-island contacts become an important part of that history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]