The Melanesian arc running from New Guinea to Fiji is also an arc across Australia, the geography loaded with history and strategic weight. Australia’s life in Melanesia is studded with dreams and dreads that occasionally burst through a fog of forgetfulness.
Australia wants an intimate relationship with Melanesia — an influence that serves interests — but no longer makes the ownership claims of an era when the mindset was imperial and the aim colonial. When Canberra pays attention to Melanesia these days, it offers partnership rather than paternalism, even if it still has a nervous edge.
Anxieties and ambitions about the Pacific Islands helped create the Commonwealth of Australia. As the six colonies debated federation, the economic benefits were well understood, and so was the sense of national identity. Yet common interests and sentiment alone didn’t guarantee action. Getting six states to agree — still a mighty task — was truly a “series of miracles.” The urgency in the federation debate was the fear of foreign powers in the South Pacific.
In his magisterial history, The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901–1924, published in 2009, Neville Meaney argued that security concerns about the Islands meant geopolitics was a determining condition of federation:
The threat of Russian raiding cruisers operating out of Vladivostok, the menace of French, German and more vaguely American aspirations in the South Pacific Islands, and finally, by the 1890s, the fear of a southward advance of China and Japan following in the path of their unwelcome migrants, all these considerations taken together produced during the last three decades of the nineteenth century a new sense of strategic vulnerability and prompted the first moves towards the creation of an Australian defence and foreign policy and with it a federal union.
Pacific fears and Asian anxieties are tacit elements of the creation document of the Commonwealth, the constitution proclaimed in 1901. The section on the powers of the new parliament includes these clauses, in this order, on the right to make laws for:
• the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws
• immigration and emigration
• the influx of criminals
• external affairs
• the relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific
The external/foreign affairs power in Australia’s birth certificate is reinforced with a direct reference to the Islands. Yet since 1901 we’ve gone for long periods ignoring the constitutional injunction to play a special role in the neighbourhood. Perhaps a nation with its own continent can be self-centred. And perhaps the Islands are pacific in the dictionary sense: “of peaceful disposition, not belligerent, characterised by peace, calm, tranquil, quiet.”
The lucky country gets lucky again. We can embrace vibrant societies with wonderful cultures in places the rest of the world wants to visit on holiday. Melanesia has strong societies with weak states, yet the pacific Pacific made the smoothest transition from colony to independence of any region in the world. And in this century, Melanesia is going to get bigger in ways Australia won’t be able to overlook.
Demography is destiny, and as Inside Story contributor Hamish McDonald observes in his new book, Melanesia: Travels in Black Oceania, Melanesia’s multiplying population, especially in Papua New Guinea, promises “a new balance of power and influence in the region.”
As one of the leading Australian foreign correspondents of his generation, McDonald usually turned from Asia to Melanesia only when crisis headlines blared “in reaction to political shocks such as the military coups in Fiji, the Kanak unrest in New Caledonia and the crises of government in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Island.”
While scrambling for news, McDonald was captured by Melanesia’s magic: “The crowds in the markets, the election rallies, the peace ceremonies enveloped me in a mix of wood smoke, sweat and coconut oil.” He went to explore the towns on foot: “I’d come across docks busy with small, rusty ships loading people and freight for remote settlements, river landings where people and their belongings boarded dinghies and canoes, dusty transport terminals where villagers headed home from town and school on battered buses and trucks.”
McDonald decided he wanted to get on those buses and board the boats to get an “eclectic immersion” in Melanesia. His book was originally conceived as an account of a single journey from the eastern edge in Fiji to the western margin in Indonesia’s Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), listening along the way to “local voices about the transition from customary life to modernity.”
The single journey was sunk by time, visas, funds and border closures during the Covid-19 pandemic. The book was commissioned six years ago, so this might be the missed deadline of Hamish McDonald’s career. Always, he writes, there were more places to be explored. The reader gets the benefit of travel informed by deep reading of history.
Geography guides the book — and its chapters — as McDonald plunges into Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and West Papua. The journey is flavoured by the diversity that Melanesia expresses in 1200 language groups. The language point matters most in PNG; I call this the difference between the de Gaulle and the Somare challenges. France’s president lamented, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” PNG’s first prime minister had a bigger test: “How to unite a country with 850 languages?”
As Melanesia’s giant, New Guinea occupies half the book, with chapters on PNG, Port Moresby, Bougainville, Western Province, the Highlands and the Sepik. The chapter on West Papua was hindered by Indonesia’s refusal to give McDonald a visa to enter the troubled province; instead, it is based on his research and previous visits in 1976 and 2013.
McDonald mixes in much history as he records the places he sees and the Melanesians met along the way. The writing is less the knowing view of the foreign correspondent and more the eager eyes and ears of a traveller seeking what’s around the next bend. The journalist embraces the geography, not the geopolitics. As he notes, Melanesian politics is highly localised and based on the “haphazard ascendency of ‘big men.’” He goes out to meet those men in their villages — and the women who really make Melanesia work.
McDonald is paddled around jade-green waters in a dugout canoe in Malaita; he sits cross-legged on a woven mat in a village council house in Fiji (the headman barks “Sit properly!” when the visitor tries to ease cramped legs); in Vanuatu he meets a wiry eighty-seven-year-old man who recalls the wars of his boyhood, proclaimed by conch shells and drums, and describes seeing “a man killed with a club, and the elders take the body away to be dismembered and eaten”; he relies on Kanak hospitality to hitch-hike on the one main road of an island in New Caledonia (“You’ll always get a lift”); and he rides a truck outside Rabaul with a woman who is heading to market with ten bags of buai (betel nut) — in the contest for Melanesia’s most-popular drug of choice, the divide between chewing betel nut and drinking kava is bridged by beer.
Except for West Papua and New Caledonia, Melanesia has had about a half century free of colonial masters. (Fiji became independent in 1970, PNG in 1975, Solomon Islands in 1978, and Vanuatu in 1980.) McDonald observes that Melanesians are still discovering themselves, and each other:
Fijians identify as Melanesian when it suits their diplomatic aims, as more broadly Pacific or Oceanic at other times, and, deep in their hearts, as a unique chosen people. The ni-Vanuatu share a kava culture with Fiji and Tonga and more recently with the Kanaks. The betel-nut habit starts north in the Solomons and extends through Bougainville into Papua New Guinea. Delegates from Vanuatu, the Solomons and Papua New Guinea can chat in their mutually intelligible versions of Tok Pisin at regional gatherings… With hundreds of language groups and many cultural exceptions, generalisations need to be ventured warily. However, attachment to traditional land, a communal language and identity, and memory of ancestors are fundamental to most Melanesian communities. Western-style justice has barely replaced traditional payback and compensation in many places.
McDonald gives little space to the challenge China is mounting to Australia’s self-proclaimed position as the partner-of-choice in Melanesia. History, geography, religion and culture mean Australia would have to play a strong hand very badly to lose to China. He quotes the view of the Canberra strategist Allan Behm that China can’t match Australia’s soft power in “Jesus, beer, and football.” The Islands worry about Australia as a post-Christian society and pity our poor singing, but many ties bind. One of my lines is that only two nations are so extraordinary as to make rugby league a creed — PNG and Queensland.
Beyond Pacific power politics, Australia’s great advantage is with Pacific people. As McDonald observes: “In Australian strategic policy circles, public discussions have rarely advanced an alternative approach to hard military power: a deeper investment in the Melanesian arc, whose people could conceivably outnumber Australians within a few decades, to ensure a belt of resilient, friendly nations.”
Populations that seemed threatened with extinction in the 1920s, McDonald notes, have rebounded. He quotes an estimate that PNG’s population is 12.5 million, about four times what it was at independence. Population, though, is one of PNG’s many mysteries — a UN study using satellite imagery estimated it actually has seventeen million people.
Melanesia is on the march, and the people of Australia’s arc will want more from Australia. As McDonald concludes: “The population of Melanesia will steadily catch up with that of Australia. The trickle of Melanesians coming into Australia will build into a significant flow back and forth. With wise statesmanship, the region could be embraced as a source of strength and renewal. It could be the way Australia decolonises itself.” •
Melanesia: Travels in Black Oceania
By Hamish McDonald | Black Inc. | $36.99 | 336 pages
