Fellow scholars

Books

Fellow scholars make a 'garland’ for Harry Maude

The Changing Pacific: Essays in Honour of H. E. Maude. Ed.

Kiel Gunson. Published by Oxford University Press. $25.

I first met Harry Maude when, as a cadet in the then (British) Colonial Service, I reached Fiji in January 1942. He had already served in the Gilberts, Pitcairn and Tonga, with an ir relevant interlude in Zanzibar, and had a vision, the equivalent of Gordon’s, of the wide reaches of the Western Pacific.

We continued together in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, now the independent states of Kiribati ( = Gilberts in the thirteen-letter alphabet bes

towed by Bingham) and

Tuvalu; we had sequential as sociations with the South Pa cific Commission and, finally, were both at the Australian National University and in Canberra. So for the best part of forty years we have been col leagues and friends our wives as well. The ‘garland of scholarly papers’ as the editor calls them is an appropriate tribute to Professor Maude and

Robert Langdon’s opening

essay ‘Shy Proconsul, Dedi cated Pacific Historian’ aptly portrays the double helix of an unusual career.

It is no easy thing to review a collection of specialist essays.

Professor Spate sets a perspec tive in describing ‘The Pacific’ as a European artefact and the peoples of the littoral and islands as the artificers. With a few exceptions, the essays are concerned with Micronesia

and Polynesia reflecting, in

that order, the principal interests of Professor Maude himself. They are individual

pieces, mainly of anthropology

and ethnology.

Do not expect to find an account of the contemporary

voyages to political indepen

dence but rather a miscellany of traditions, customs and their

survival, adaptation or decay

notes of the music of time

which, along with many others, are now recorded.

As Islanders establish their own scholarly credentials as historians they will accept some as the authentic stuff of

history and question others

always, one hopes, empirically

re-examining the facts, in terpretations and relevance.

Professor Spoehr illustrates part of the historiographical task ahead in an essay on Spain and the Marianas that local events must needs be inter

preted in comparison with

similar events elsewhere. The meaning of‘change’ in the title seems therefore not to be just a further unfolding of the ways and doings of island societies in the past but also preparation for the histories that will inform the present.

Let us now look at the parts of the collection. Dr David Lewis, in from the cold and in the Spoehr framework, con siders the debt of Polynesian and Micronesian seafarers to ancient Asian navigation. Pro fessor Daws tantalises in another dimension the de batable value of psychohistory

in biography, alone identifying

Pitcairn with the Pacific through the execrable Joshua Hill. Because some years of my life were spent in Kiribati, I read the three articles on the maneaba, kinship and the

northern kingdom with special

interest. All were and, even as

they change, will remain sig

nificant in politics, land tenure and administration. Essays on the inhabitants of Mapia, three small coral atolls lying north of Irian Jaya, and on beach combers of the Carolines, the probable homeland of the

Mapians, complete the

Micronesian component.

A case study of depopulation by disease on Aneityum in the New Hebrides last century is one of two contributions specific to Melanesia; and the ‘care, prayer and practice’ by early missionaries in Tonga is

adjudged ‘a draw’ no worse than indigenous medicine in Tongan eyes if it failed and better for the individual and the Christian faith if it suc ceeded. Curiously, the other Melanesian essay dealing with male prestige and the lavish celebration of birth in the off shore villages of Kove, New Britain also finds an antithesis in Tonga. Death and the ob servance of funeral rites, with the major ceremonies accom panying the funeral of Queen Salote at the centre, are used to illustrate aspects of the social structure, acculturation of the young and some weakening of tradition.

Three studies of eastern Polynesia reconstruct land related customs in 18th century Tahiti and record some

equivalents today; and de

scribe the communal ap portionment of food in the Tuamotus and the violence and vice which desolated

Marquesan societies. By con

trast, the transformation of regicide and the killing of social outcasts to propitiate the gods into a masque to mark farewells is described in an essay on Niue. The timeless patience of the Pacific Islanders, at least as much part

of them as quarrels and viol ence, is well accounted in the settlement of a village dispute in Samoa. I often experienced this patience in courts and councils in Kiribati; and there, and once again in Tanna in the New Hebrides, in the settle ment of civil disorders with ori gins in cargo cults.

Two essays have been re served for final comment. On the trail in the highlands ol New Guinea, Professor West considers a parallel from the New World an extension ol the Spoehr thesis. He sees the Australian frontier there as a contact of fits and starts not with settlement as the objective an impingement on a land into which law and order have

only recently and precariously

moved. From a century earlier a quartet of contributors re mind us that Hawaiians were then composing their own his tory and I am sure that Harry Maude and the writers rep resented in this book will wel come their successors -

warmly. Yes, The Changing

Pacific is a scholarly garland

easy enough to read and enjoy and capable of stirring even more curiosity about the artifi cers and the artefact. Reia Cowell