Polynesians Are Not All Alike

The Month's New Reading

With Judy Tudor

The late Betty Macdonald, who became famous for her jtory of life on an American chicken ranch, also wrote a less known number called Anyone Can Do Anything. It was, as well as a book, a motto, and one that, slightly paraphrased, is now being done to death by writers of things Pacific. We refer, of course, to the fact that Anyone can now be an Expert Dn the Pacific.

iE experts are, in fact, so thick around these parts, that we cid ers—those who’ve been in the iness of expertise for 20 years or -have now been driven to the ex ne point of inferiority complexity, thing short of a visit to the psy itrist and a dose of tranquilising s is indicated every time another le of Pacificana lands on the edi al table. fake the people most responsible the Pacific Islands Monthly: en we are not visiting the Islands mselves, we each spend about 60 irs per week pruning, hashing, eezing and bashing at things Paci for the edification of our panting ders. But we realise that this is enough.

Vs we totter off each evening, ex isted and red-eyed, into the public nsport system of metropolitan iney, we remind ourselves and one >ther that we should be doing >re: Writing A Book about the :ific; dispensing expert opinion to io all other expert opinion. We ke up sweating at night, screaming.

Mi, well, as the poet said, C’est •vie. Or sic transit gloria mundi. len we do come to write A Book, ’ll no doubt do what every other jert does —go down to the Public irary, soak up everything pre »usly written on our chosen sub t, whether Afghanistan; or the Sig icance of Sex in Syria; or maybe ;rifle about Life Amongst the Mad jllahs of Mogadishu; and then me up with a brilliant piece, Com :te with detailed index, footnotes d bibliographies, naturally.

Which brings us to Aristocrats of ? South Seas by Alexander Russell. far as we can see, Mr. Russell esn’t claim to be an expert, exactly, is just that he has been interested the South Pacific since he was a y in Scotland and began collecting imps. He migrated to New Zealand jen he was 30, began growing fruit

in Nelson, stood unsuccessfully for Parliament, then became chairman of a semi-governmental agricultural body. He has been in Australia since 1949 and is at present research and development officer for the Aus tralian Institute of Management, Sydney.

None of this background unfits him for writing a history of the ancient Polynesians, but for the life of us, we can’t see that it particularly quali fies him for it, either—except in that, as we said in the beginning, Anyone Can Do Anything, if deter mined enough.

The theme of his narrative is that, at the time the Pacific was dis covered by Europeans in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the Poly

nesians were already scattered into several well-defined branches. All Polynesians were not alike, he says, as most writers on the subject try to make out.

The Samoans and Tongans dif fered considerably from the Tahi tians and Hawaiians; and the Maoris of New Zealand were like none of these. They all had a common de

nominator# in some far-away ancestor but their characters, social structure, habits, culture and even temperament differed widely. He attempts to show how this came about and in doing so becomes involved in the theory of Polynesian migration.

These days there are just as many theories on Polynesian migration as there are experts on the Pacific. It’s an open season for theories and any one so inclined can just weigh in with their two-bits worth, pick on a theory and stick to it.

Russell picks on Samoa as being the original Pacific Hawaiki and from there, about the seventh cen tury AD he thinks, they began to hive off, first into Tahiti and Hawaii (a colony in Tonga already having been in existence before that date).

In Hawaii that particular stream seems to have come to the end of the line; but from Tahiti, pioneers moved off into the Marquesas and from the Marquesas and Tahiti into the Cook Islands and, finally, NZ.

In most of the islands into which the migrants moved they found others before them. Variously de scribed as darker than the Poly nesians and lighter than the Poly nesians, they were, anyhow, workers in stone as the original Samoan Poly nesians were not, and they were ab sorbed by the migrants.

Whether they were Caucasian in origin or inhabitants of South America it is hard to say, and Mr.

Russell wisely does not commit him self. They were, at all events, one of the factors contributing to why the early European discoverers found different kinds of Polynesians in dif ferent parts of the Pacific—cannibals in NZ and the Marquesas, orators and politicians in Samoa, a highly specialised form of religion in Tahiti and a reverence for royalty in Hawaii.

The author of this book has ob viously read a great deal about Poly nesia, absorbed it and made it his nobby. The book itself is all he has *ead, in pre-digested form, plus his )wn interpretation of signs and por ents. Although his theories are un ikely to convince another expert vho is already commited to some thing else, they may be of interest or ise to the uncommitted.

No one can ever say with certainty vhat was going on in the Pacific in hose endless centuries before Euro jeans began to look for the Great south Land and incidentally dis overed the Polynesians (and other slanders). No one can say that it lidn’t all happen just the way Mr. lussell describes it.

(Aristocrats Op The South Seas,

’ublished by Robert Hale Ltd. 25/-.)