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AUSTRALIA AND THE PACIFIC:

THE AMBIVALENT PLACE OF PACIFIC PEOPLES

WITHIN CONTEMPORARY

Scott William Mackay, BA (Hons), BSc

July 2018

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Australian Indigenous Studies Program School of and Communication The University of

0000-0002-5889 – Abstract –

My thesis examines the places (real and symbolic) accorded to Pacific peoples within the historical production of an Australian nation and in the imaginary of . It demonstrates how these places reflect and inform the ways in which

Australia engages with the Pacific region, and the extent to which Australia considers itself a part of or apart from the Pacific. While acknowledging the important historical and contemporary differences between the and Australian contexts, I deploy theoretical concepts and methods developed within the established field of New Zealand- centred Pacific Studies to identify and analyse what is occurring in the much less studied

Australian-Pacific context. In contrast to official Australian discourse, the experiences of

Pacific people in Australia are differentiated from those of other migrant communities because of: first, Australia’s colonial and neo-colonial of control over Pacific land and people; and second, Pacific peoples' important and unique kinships with Aboriginal

Australians. Crucially the thesis emphasises the significant diversity (both cultural and national) of the Pacific experience in Australia. My argument is advanced first by a historicisation of Australia’s formal engagements with Pacific people, detailing intersecting narratives of their migration to Australia and Australia’s colonial and neo- colonial engagements within the Pacific region. This is followed by case studies of two celebrated sites of Australian “Pacificness”: first, a mapping of the involvement of Pacific players in the sport of in Australia; and second, an analytic record of

Australia’s representation at the 11th , held in the in

2012. A Pacific Studies methodology is developed to provide a theoretically sound and empirically informed approach to Pacific research that distinguishes it from current studies in or of the Pacific.

2 – Declaration –

This is to certify that:

(i) the thesis comprises only my original work completed towards the total

fulfilment of degree of Doctor of Philosophy;

(ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used;

(iii) the thesis is fewer than the maximum word limit of 100,000 words, exclusive

of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.

Signed: Date: July 2018

3 – Acknowledgements –

I would like to acknowledge the people of the who are the traditional custodians of the land on which the majority of my PhD research was undertaken. I would like to pay respect to Kulin Elders past and present, and extend this respect to all Aboriginal Australian and Islander people. I acknowledge that

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty has never been ceded.

I dedicate this PhD to my former teacher, mentor, work colleague and friend the late Associate Professor Teresia Teaiwa, and to my late father Eric Mackay. Teresia, as this thesis demonstrates you have had a profound impact on my life. I thank you for your continued belief in me and for opening doors that before meeting you were unimaginable;

I hope I have done you proud with this research. Dad, thank you for instilling in me the values of hard work and humbleness. I love you and miss your presence greatly.

It would not have been possible to undertake this thesis without the love and support of my partner Emily Hodgins. In the words of Kevin Durant, “you’re the real

MVP” of this PhD, Emily. To Leroy (our dog) cheers for being the perfect calming influence during multiple bouts of writer’s block and for putting life into perspective in ways only a pet can.

I would like to make specific mention of my friend Marion Campbell who has mentored me throughout the duration of the PhD. I cannot thank you enough for the time, thought and energy that you have dedicated to the thesis. Special thanks to my supervisor

Philip Morrissey for your guidance. I am also appreciative of the broader academic opportunities that have been made available to me under your supervision.

4 To my Mum, brothers Rick and Andy, cousin Erika, friends Lilly Brown and

Clinton Benjamin and other friends who are too many to name, I am so grateful for your support. You all have been integral in turning this into a reality.

I would also like to thank Amie Batalibasi, Lisa Hilli and other members of

Australia’s Pacific and Aboriginal Australian communities whom I interviewed formally or discussed the thesis with informally. I hope this thesis accurately reflects the multiple voices, experiences and views generously shared.

And finally, I am appreciative of the scholarships granted me by the University of

Melbourne. Without them I would not have been able to undertake this research.

5 – Contents –

Abstract 2 Declaration 3 Acknowledgements 4 Map of the Pacific 7 Abbreviations 8

Introduction 9

Section One: Australia’s Formal Engagements with Pacific Peoples 28

1: Māori and the Colony of (1778-1859) 30 2: and the Colony of (1859-1901) 39 3: White Australia and the Quest for an Island Empire (1901-1939) 57 4: Rupture, Assimilation and Decolonisation (1939-1973) 73 5: Multiculturalism, Self-determination and Regional Aid (1973-1996) 89 6: Pacific Migration to Australia (1996-2015) 108 7: National Security and (1996-2015) 127

Section Two: The Pacific Presence in 146

1: Rugby League’s Origin (1840-1908) 149 2: Racial Inclusion and Exclusion in the Formative Years (1908-1960) 159 3: Consolidating and Commercialising the Sport (1960-2015) 174 4: Browning and White Flight in New Zealand and Australia 191 5: The Pacific Threat to Australian Rugby League 200 6: Pacific Opportunities, Policies and Strategies 214 7: Consequences and Futures 226

Section Three: Australian Arts and Aid in the Solomon Islands 230

1. Introducing FOPA 231 2. The Solomon Islands 243 3: Australia and the Solomon Islands 255 4: RAMSI 2003-2015 264 5: FOPA 2012 279 6: Australia and FOPA 2012 291 7: Indigeneity and Pacific Identity 304

Conclusion 314

Works Cited 321

6 1

1 Map reproduced with permission.

7 – Abbreviations –

AFL Australian League ANU Australian National University, ARL Australian Rugby League ARLC Australian Rugby League Commission ARLIC Australian Rugby League Indigenous Council ASSIUC Australian South Sea Islanders United Council ATSIC Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission BRL Rugby League CPAC Council of Pacific Arts and Culture CTF Combined Task Force DOGIT Deeds of Grant in Trust FAC Arts Council FCAA Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement FCAATSI Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and FOPA Festival of Pacific Arts GLF Guadalcanal Liberation Front IFM Isatabu Freedom Movement MEF Malaitan Eagle Force MRU Metropolitan NPARC Northern Peninsular Area Regional Council NRL competition NSWRFL, later NSWRL New South Wales Rugby (Football) League NSWRFU, later NSWRU New South Wales Rugby (Football) Union NU Northern Union NZRFU, later NZRU (Football) Union PFF Police Field Force PIF Pacific Islands Forum PPF Participating Police Force PRAN Pacific Regional Assistance for QRFL, later QRL Queensland Rugby (Football) League RAMSI Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands RAP Reconciliation Action Plan RFL League RFU Rugby Football Union RSIP Royal Solomon Islands Police SCV Special Category Visa SPC SSGM State and Governance in Program TSC Torres Shire Council TSIRC Torres Strait Island Regional Council TSRA Torres Strait Regional Authority TSRC Torres Strait Regional Council TTTA Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

8 – Introduction –

At the dawn of a new millennium, Pacific Islanders continue a of production and destruction through active participation in and resistance to a tide of forces that have swept our shores: , patriarchy, militarism, , nationhood, development, tourism, literacy, athletics, other forceful modes of modernity, and for us especially, scholarship.1

Over thousands of years Pacific peoples’ extraordinary seafaring abilities and remarkable adaptability to a range of climates and geographies has led to their successful settlement of the islands and atolls of the ’s largest body of water, the . In tracing pre-European Pacific migratory narratives, Kerry

Howe identifies two waves of exploration and settlement agreed upon in academic research: the first occurred approximately 30,000 to 40,000 years ago via the exploratory drives of modern peoples inhabiting the northeastern tip of what was then the -Torres Strait-Australia- landmass of Sahul, island- hopping southeast, settling as far south as the Solomon Islands. The second and more extensive migration began some 5000 years ago, undertaken by departing from ancestral homelands of island southeast Asia (most commonly thought to be but not limited to Taiwan).2

Numerous Austronesian routes were opened up using marine technology unrivalled globally. Some groups are thought to have travelled directly east to the

Northern Mariana Islands and , others southeast to the New Guinea and

Solomon Island archipelagos where engagement with non-Austronesians who settled thousands of years earlier produced significant consequences (genetic and technological) for both peoples. From here exploration and settlement continued

1 Diaz and Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” 316. 2 Howe, The Quest for Origins: Who First Discovered and Settled New Zealand and the Pacific Islands?, 64– 69. Modern peoples are thought to have arrived on the New Guinea-Torres Strait-Australia- Tasmania landmass of Sahul from the southeast tip of the Eurasian landmass, Sunda (now the archipelago of and broader southeast Asia) at least 60,000 years ago.

9 further southeast, with the islands of and inhabited from approximately 3200 years ago. This was followed by expansion northwest into the

Caroline Islands, and east into Fiji, and approximately 3000 years ago, before moving even further east to the Islands and Marquesas (2200 years ago) and /Rapa Nui (1700 years ago). By 1300 AD all inhabitable islands and atolls of the Pacific had been settled; New Zealand (Aotearoa), located at its southern extremity, was the last.3

Epeli Hau’ofa describes the Pacific as “a large world in which peoples and moved and mingled . . . from one island to another to trade and to marry . .

. visit relatives . . . quench their thirst for adventure, and even to fight and dominate”;4 distinct yet fluid Pacific cultural identities developed. European arrival in the Pacific in the sixteenth century and subsequent imperial, colonial and neo- colonial quests by both west and east brought multiple attempts to disrupt this boundless world, dissecting and erecting boundaries to “order”, as Teresia Teaiwa states, “what had previously been fluid”.5 Fragmentation has taken many forms, the most influential being French navigator and naturalist Jules-Sébastien-César

Dumont d’Urville’s racial and cultural dissection of the Pacific into the subregions of Melanesia (dark islands), (small islands) and

(many islands). These categories helped create European, American and Asian colonies in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and over the last 60 years, autonomous and semi-autonomous nation states.

Yet Pacific peoples’ circuits endured, adapted and diversified, with new routes linking them to the geographical edges of what Margaret Jolly calls the “vast

3 Howe, 70. 4 Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” 153–54. 5 Teaiwa, “Militarism, Tourism and the Native: Articulations in ,” 19.

10 liquid expanse” that is the Pacific Ocean, and beyond.6 These routes were carved out by eighteenth and nineteenth-century European sealers, whalers and traders; early to mid-twentieth-century trans-Pacific passenger ships; and late twentieth and early twenty-first-century international airline carriers. At times movements along these routes have occurred against the will of Pacific peoples, as seen during the labour trades of the nineteenth century, or as a result of mining ventures and nuclear testing operations during the twentieth century; the present-day impacts of global climate change are ushering in the twenty-first-century version of forced migration. Movement has also been an exercise of Pacific peoples’ agency and world enlargement, just like that undertaken by their ancestors thousands of years before: a search amidst colonisation and global capitalism for new opportunities, adventures, networks and capital.7

One significant site on these complex circuits is Australia, located on the southwest boundary of the Pacific Ocean and home to Aboriginal for over 60,000 years. In producing a quick snapshot of the multiple and intersecting narratives of Pacific peoples’ visits to and settlement in Australia, I think first of

Torres Strait Islanders who for some 2000 years prior to European arrival engaged in trade, warfare and intermarriage with Aboriginal Australian communities who inhabited the islands of the Strait closest to continental Australia and Cape York peninsular on Australia’s mainland. Māori entered the colony of New South Wales in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on board European ships returning from New Zealand with resources and labour, and 60,000 indentured labourers were brought from the islands of New Caledonia, New Guinea,

Solomon Islands and Vanuatu (collectively known as South Sea Islanders) to the

6 Jolly, “On the Edge? Deserts, Oceans, Islands,” 419; Jolly, “Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea of Islands,” 514. 7 Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” 156.

11 between 1863 and 1904 to work mostly in its sugar industry.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Māori rugby league teams were invited by

Australian administrators to help build the popularity of a developing sport;

Papuan domestic workers (predominantly women) from Australia’s colonial territories of Papua and New Guinea were employed to help the wives of expatriated government officials in the urban centres of Australia’s eastern seaboard; and Fijian were brought to the to aid in the conversion and education of . Spotlighting the late twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, I draw attention to the arrival of

Samoans, Tongans, Cook Islanders, Niueans and Tokelauans, most on New

Zealand passports, in pursuit of geographic and social mobility and family reunion;

West Papuans, illegally, in search of asylum from human rights abuses under the colonial regime of the Indonesian government; and citizens of , Nauru,

Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu to fill labour shortages in regional Australia’s agricultural industries.

Australia’s Pacific communities today are some of the fastest-growing and most visible migrant communities, comprising more than 300,000 people and representing an estimated 1.5% of Australia’s population, and living primarily in

New South Wales and Queensland, with smaller but increasing numbers in the other states and territories.8 The are the only Pacific Islands still formally colonised by Australia;9 jurisdictionally they are part of Queensland, and the overwhelming majority of Torres Strait Islanders live on the Australian mainland. Spaces where Pacific people (mainly Polynesian men) feature most in

8 Using figures from the 2011 Census, I have constructed this statistic to reflect the definition of Pacific people used in this thesis and explained later. 9 is an Australian external territory located in the Pacific Ocean - uninhabited at the time of British colonisation of Australia. I do not include its people or histories in the scope of the thesis.

12 the contemporary national consciousness are sport, art, and popular culture (reality and fictional television series).10

Most Australians misunderstand Australia’s Pacific population as a new phenomenon: the rich and diverse histories of Pacific peoples’ visitation and migration to Australia have long been relegated to the footnotes of Australian history. Marilyn Lake claims that the nation-building work of Australian historiography has consistently narrowed its historical horizons, reified its continental borders, and obscured the dynamic interaction and relationships forged between Australia and Pacific peoples both in the islands and at home.11

This “new phenomenon” is also understood through contradiction: Australia’s

Pacific communities may be celebrated as representing an egalitarian multicultural

Australia but simultaneously they are forgotten and excluded from a nation still governed by white Australian ideals. It seems there is an ignorant assurance underpinning Australian (lack of) knowledge of Pacific peoples: Australian Pacific

Studies scholar Katerina Teaiwa asks in relation to the significant contribution of

Pacific people to the expansion and diversity of Australian popular culture in the twenty-first century; “what do Australians really know about Pacific Islanders beyond the stereotypes of characters such as the reluctant student Jonah from the popular TV show Summer Heights High” and those applied to Pacific athletes dominating Australia’s premier sporting competitions?12

This thesis provides a comprehensive mapping of Pacific peoples’ routes to

Australia, examining the places (real and symbolic) accorded to them within the historical production of an Australian nation and in the imaginary of Australian nationalism. It demonstrates how these places both reflect and inform the ways in

10 Teaiwa, “Ignorance Is Rife about Islander Australians”; Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora.” 11 Lake, “The of an Island Empire: Race, Reputation, and Resistance,” 411. 12 Teaiwa, “Ignorance Is Rife about Islander Australians.”

13 which Australia engages with the Pacific region, and the extent to which Australia considers itself a part of or apart from the Pacific. It argues that in contrast to official Australian discourse, the experiences of Pacific peoples in Australia are marked by “ambivalent kinships” (as Teresia Teaiwa and Sean Mallon term them in a New Zealand context)13 which differentiate them from the experiences of other migrant communities. Framing these distinctions are: first, Australia’s colonial and neo-colonial histories of control over Pacific land and people; and second, Pacific peoples' important and unique kinships with Aboriginal Australians. The thesis places crucial emphasis on the significant diversity (both cultural and national) of the Pacific experience in Australia, and extends its timeframe to the end of the

Abbott Government in 2015. Its argument is advanced first by a historicisation of

Australia’s formal engagements with Pacific peoples, specifically detailing intersecting narratives of migration to Australia, and Australia’s colonial and neo- colonial engagements within the Pacific region. This is followed by case studies of two celebrated sites of Australian “Pacificness”: first, a mapping of the involvement of Pacific players in the sport of rugby league in Australia; and second, an analytic record of Australia’s representation at the 11th Festival of Pacific Arts, held in the

Solomon Islands in 2012.

This introduction considers four topics. The first defines the term “Pacific people/s” as it is used in the thesis, and acknowledges the statistical limitations of

Pacific demographic data. The second articulates the thesis methodology, explaining its engagement with the work of leading Pacific Studies scholars Teresia

Teaiwa and Terence Wesley-Smith; it also details the range of methods used for data and narrative collection and sets out my positionality as researcher. The third part identifies the theoretical concepts deployed, arguing that those established in

13 Teaiwa and Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand.”

14 New Zealand-Pacific Studies are also applicable to identify and analyse the

Australian-Pacific context; it also states my motivations for the research. Finally I present an overview of the structure and content of the thesis.

For the purpose of this thesis, Pacific people/s are defined as all indigenous people with ancestral ties to islands of the Pacific Ocean’s three cultural sub-regions:

Melanesia (Fiji, New Caledonia, , Solomon Islands, Torres Strait

Islands, Vanuatu, ); Micronesia (Federated States of Micronesia, Guam,

Kiribati, , Nauru, , ); and Polynesia

(, , Easter Island, , Hawai’i, New

Zealand, , Samoa, , Tonga, Tuvalu, ). I acknowledge that there are multiple regional identifying terms such as “” (or

“Islander”) and “Pasifika” used both by Pacific and non-Pacific people in Australia.

I am also attentive to the ethnic and national diversity the term Pacific people/s encompasses: there are many different sub-regional (Melanesia, Micronesia and

Polynesia), national and /family identifications used and prioritised. While employing and defending connective and collective terms, I do not assume homogeneity in Pacific people’s cultural traits, values and experiences in Australia or the Pacific more broadly.

The privileging of Pacific people over Pacific Islander, despite its popular colloquial use, is argued on the basis of the pejorative connotations of the term.14

Historically entrenched in negative racial stereotypes by non-Pacific people, the term Pacific Islander has been contested and reclaimed by indigenous people of the region but I believe is inappropriate for use by non-Pacific people because of its racist legacy. The use of Pacific Islander by both non-Pacific and Pacific people in

14 Teaiwa and Mallon, 208.

15 Australia, and other diasporic settings such as New Zealand and the , also privileges Polynesia and neglects Melanesian and Micronesian peoples. This reflects the fact that indigenous people with ancestral connections to Polynesian countries and territories overwhelmingly dominate diaspora populations – for example, Polynesian people comprise 75% of Australia’s Pacific population – but it also maintains the hierarchising approach to culture that Europeans, and at times

Pacific people themselves, have fostered since Dumont d’Urville’s eighteenth- century sub-division of the Pacific. He positioned “copper-skinned” as racially, morally and politically superior to the less civilisable and irrational savages that were “dark-skinned” ;15 and Micronesians, as the name suggests, were frequently imagined as too small and insignificant to give much thought to.16 The term Pasifika, an indigenised transliteration of Pacific, has gained popularity during the twenty-first century in urban centres of Australia, particularly among Australian and New Zealand-born Pacific youth, but it is also predominantly Polynesian-centric.

The terms “Pacific Island” and “Pacific Island people” are also used strategically in the thesis. When applied, these terms, unlike the more general designation Pacific people, purposefully exclude Torres Strait Islanders, Australian

South Sea Islanders and Māori. The last two groups are nominated as “Australians” and “” in national contexts, while they continue to assert their

Pacific identity (Australian South Sea Islanders more so than Māori); the most complex distinction concerns Torres Strait Islanders, who do not always actively articulate their Pacific links, nor are they commonly thought of as Pacific people.

15 D’Arcy, “Cultural Divisions and Island Environments since the Time of Dumont d’Urville”; Keown, Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body; Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade. 16 Distinguishing Polynesia from Micronesia was a perceived “absence of the practice of taboo and also the lack of a common language”. Hanlon, “The ‘Sea of Little Lands’: Examining Micronesia’s Place in ‘Our Sea of Islands.’”

16 For the most part Torres Strait Islanders in Australia identify (and are identified) on political grounds of indigeneity, as distinct from Pacific peoples more broadly in

Australia. It is within this context that Torres Strait Islanders shift in and out of definitions of Pacific people and “Indigenous Australian” in the thesis.

Statistics on Pacific-community demographics in Australia are imprecise or inaccurate. This is because, as K. Teaiwa emphasises, Australia does not recognise

(as do New Zealand and the United States to some extent) “Pacific people as an equity category or community”;17 this likely reflects (and is to some degree responsible for) the lack of importance accorded to Pacific peoples within the

Australian nation. Available statistics have limited accuracy, for such reasons as: ancestry questions in the Australian census give respondents the option of reporting two ancestries, thus enabling double counting; variable inclusions in and exclusions from the category Pacific (i.e. Australian South Sea Islanders, Māori,

Torres Strait Island and non-indigenous Indo-); and the fact that Pacific people sometimes choose not to identify as such, often for strategic reasons.

With no Pacific Studies (or Pacific Island Studies) program at the University of

Melbourne (the existence of an Asian Studies program and an Asia Institute signifies Australia’s regional focus), my thesis has been produced within the

Australian Indigenous Studies and Cultural Studies programs of the School of

Culture and Communication. These disciplines appropriately share institutional histories with contemporary configurations of Pacific Studies: each emerged in part as a result of dissatisfaction with more traditional established humanities and social science disciplines such as history and anthropology, albeit with distinct trajectories. The thesis methodology is framed by T. Teaiwa’s 2010 prescription for

17 Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora,” 110.

17 Pacific Studies research and teaching, stating that it should be “interdisciplinary, account for indigenous ways of knowing, and involve comparative analysis”, key characteristics that “distinguish it from any and all studies in or of the Pacific”.18 In response to “the paucity of publications on the history, rationale, practices, and international relevance of Pacific Studies” and area studies more broadly after

World War II, T. Teaiwa builds on the distinctive features of Pacific Studies set out in Terence Wesley-Smith’s influential 1995 essay, “Rethinking Pacific Islands

Studies”. Identifying what he sees as the three most common and “not necessarily mutually exclusive” rationales that have influenced Pacific research in its broadest sense – pragmatic; laboratory; and empowerment – Wesley-Smith defines Pacific

Studies research and teaching as interdisciplinary and incorporating “indigenous epistemologies and perspectives”.19

Interdisciplinarity is vital to Pacific Studies, because dominant single- discipline approaches have all too often been limited by their tendency to

“disassemble the human world into bits for study, without ever reassembling the totality”.20 By contrast an interdisciplinary approach “acknowledges that do not fall neatly into segments or compartments with labels coinciding with the names of university departments. It sees the connections between political, cultural, economic, social, linguistic, or spiritual phenomena, rather than emphasizing their separateness”.21 Yet frequently within the field of Pacific Studies, self-defined interdisciplinary approaches have been instead multidisciplinary.

There are some fundamental differences, as Wesley-Smith quoting Roland Barthes points out: “To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a ‘subject’

(a theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinarity consists in

18 Teaiwa, “Specifying Pacific Studies: For or Before an Asia-Pacific Studies Agenda,” 112. 19 Wesley-Smith, “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies,” 126–27; 129. 20 Wesley-Smith, 122. 21 Wesley-Smith, 128.

18 creating a new object that belongs to no one”.22 Vilsoni Hereniko provides more specifics for a Pacific Studies context, advocating an integrated approach to interdisciplinarity:

first . . . it puts culture and people at the centre; second, it takes into

account fiction as well as fact, the irrational as well as the rational;

third, it gives voice to the underrepresented; fourth, it draws from

sources that cut across the boundaries of disciplines; and finally, it is

always open and questioning, rather than closed and final.23

Pacific Studies’ commitment to decolonising the academy is emphasised by its inclusion of indigenous voices, knowledges and ways of knowing. This practice is facilitated through the process of becoming interdisciplinary, for it requires “the critical scrutiny of established modes of inquiry”, which are largely ethnocentric.24

Yet T. Teaiwa asserts that Pacific Studies also needs to be critical of empowerment rationales that emphasise “exclusion and domination” and rather to promote an indigenising agenda that seeks empowerment through “mutual exchange and dialogue”.25 A “hallmark of a Pacific Studies approach to indigenous knowledge, and ways of knowing”, T. Teaiwa argues, has to be “the willingness to be critical— that is, to attempt objectivity and to try to examine issues from as many relevant perspectives as possible, however difficult that may be to achieve”.26 This requires that “indigenous violence, corruption, neglect and obfuscation be critiqued as rigorously as the sins of colonialism and imperialism”.27

22 Barthes quoted in Wesley-Smith, 123. 23 Hereniko, “Interdisciplinary Approaches in Pacific Studies: Understanding the Fiji Coup of 19 May 2000,” 75. 24 Wesley-Smith, “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies,” 129. 25 Teaiwa, “Specifying Pacific Studies: For or Before an Asia-Pacific Studies Agenda,” 117. 26 Teaiwa, 117. 27 Teaiwa, 117.

19 The final key characteristic of Pacific Studies, comparative analysis, helps it define itself against broader trends in Pacific research and teaching that, as T.

Teaiwa argues via the work of Howe, have predominantly been “myopic” in scope, concentrating solely on single nations, islands, villages and families.28 To “live up to the Pacific”, Pacific Studies “cannot be about a single ethnicity, a single nation, or a single locality”; rather its work must “reflect a commitment to making comparisons within and across the region”.29 Comparative analysis need not be “routine and predictable”;30 it reaffirms Pacific connections through sameness and difference and unshackles the imagined uniformity of the Pacific experience in emancipatory ways.

Despite their detailed prescriptions, T. Teaiwa and Wesley-Smith do not argue for one authentic form of Pacific Studies. Both encourage practitioners to incorporate within Pacific Studies research and pedagogy a range of methodologies that also embody an empowerment rationale. With this in mind my thesis is also framed by the methodological approaches that Peta Stephenson and Tracey

Banivanua-Mar adopt in their research on Asian and South Sea Islander experiences in Australia.31 Both triangulate intersections among contemporary white Australian, “ethnic” Australian32 and Aboriginal Australian engagements with . This approach challenges conventional research on non- white immigration and settlement in Australia, articulated in isolation from concurrent state violence towards and dispossession of Aboriginal Australians.

This is the result of an “academic division of labour” that reflects problematic

28 Teaiwa, 117; Howe, “Pacific Islands History in the 1980s: New Directions or Monograph Myopia?” 29 Teaiwa, “Specifying Pacific Studies: For or Before an Asia-Pacific Studies Agenda,” 117. 30 Teaiwa, 117. 31 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary”; Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade. 32 In dominant Australian ideology, “ethnic” is used to refer to new arrivals that are of non-English- speaking-backgrounds.

20 governmental tendencies to “treat ‘white-Aboriginal’ and ‘Anglo-ethnic’ relations as mutually exclusive spheres”.33

In reference to narrative and data collection, the thesis employs a range of mixed methods that include primary and secondary source analysis. For example, section two engages heavily in media analysis, specifically a detailed examination of mainstream Australian daily newspapers and their reportage of Pacific player participation in Australian rugby league at elite and youth levels. Section three switches to ethnographic field research. The Festival of Pacific Arts is analysed via observation and face-to-face formal interviews with official artists and administrators at the Festival, approved by and in compliance with the ’s human ethics principles. I am attentive to my identification as a

Pākehā (New Zealand European) male working in the field of Pacific Studies, and my connection to a genealogy of researchers who have all too often participated in what Greg Fry calls “a long-standing Australian practice of ‘framing’ Pacific Island people in three senses: first, drawing geographical boundaries around them for purposes of making generalizations; second, intending to shape the lives of the people so bounded; and third, in the colloquial sense, setting them up for outcomes not of their making”.34 I attempt to redress these practices by sustained critique of white authoritative knowledges, and a commitment to ensuring that Australia-

Pacific narratives are produced within a privileging of Pacific peoples and

Aboriginal Australian voices. I owe a great debt to interviewees, supervisors, academic peers and friends from the respective communities for their continued engagement with and constructive criticism of my research.

33 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 5; Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of in a Multicultural Society. 34 Fry, “Framing the Islands: Knowledge and Power in Changing Australian Images of ‘the South Pacific,’” 306–7.

21 The thesis deploys theoretical concepts developed within the established field of

New Zealand-centered Pacific Studies to identify and analyse what is occurring in the much less studied Australian-Pacific context. As K. Teaiwa points out, there are few scholars who have extensively produced research on or with Pacific communities in Australia;35 the exception has been the small number of academics who have written extensively on Australian South Sea Islander communities (e.g.

Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Patricia Mercer and Clive Moore) and Māori (Paul

Hamer)36. Pacific Studies in Australia has privileged life “in” the Islands and

Australia’s engagements “out there”, pragmatically often framed within a policy context tied primarily to Australia’s regional development (aid) and governance agenda.37 Similarly, Pacific-focused curriculum is rarely prioritised in Australian schools, and the little that is taught does not concentrate on the Pacific diaspora. At a level, the Australian National University is the only institution at present that runs a Pacific Studies teaching program.38 This neglect and forgetting of the Pacific “in” Australia motivate my thesis: new research and knowledges like those produced in this PhD are urgently needed in Australian

Pacific Studies.

The key theoretical concept underpinning the thesis is kinship, “historically

. . . the dominant mode of organising society in the Pacific and provid[ing] many a field of inquiry for social anthropologists and sociologists”.39 In their 2005 essay

“Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand”, T. Teaiwa and Mallon reimagine kinship beyond rigid definitions framed by “” and “lineage”, using

35 Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora,” 110. 36 Those who have contributed invaluable albeit infrequent contributions to research on Pacific Island communities in Australia, including K. Teaiwa, Samantha Rose, Max Quanchi and Clive Moore, Lucy Davies, John Kadiba and David Lakisa help steer and offer insights into the topic of the thesis. 37 Teaiwa, 110. 38 Teaiwa, 109–10. 39 Teaiwa, “ Down Under: Popular Kinship in Oceania,” 203.

22 it as “an analytical and theoretical framework for engaging diasporic dynamics and formations of national identity in New Zealand”.40 They argue that an array of ambivalent kinships mark the Pacific migrant experience in New Zealand, including those traced between:

1. Pacific people and Māori through commonalities of history and

culture;

2. Pacific people and Pākehā, through shared histories of colonial

and post-colonial exchange;

3. the nation of New Zealand and the nations of the Pacific Islands

region, through shared geography and the vicissitudes of global

economic arrangements;

4. Pacific people in New Zealand and in their homelands.41

Across all the identified kinship relations, ambivalence “manifests around issues of precedence, rights and equality”.42 Ambivalence produces a range of encounters and experiences framed by “a denial of kinship . . . an assertion of seniority within the kinship model . . . or the representation of a united ‘happy family’”; gender and generation have their own expression throughout.43 In illuminating their argument, T. Teaiwa and Mallon pay particular attention to sport (rugby union) and the arts (theatre and television). Why? - because they are “areas of high visibility for Pacific people in national cultural life . . . areas in which success is celebrated, [yet] the complex background of cultural politics of each often remains unexamined”.44 This is not to say that other areas of New Zealand social and cultural life in which Pacific people engage are not worthy of attention, rather it is

40 Teaiwa, 204. 41 Teaiwa and Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand,” 207. 42 Teaiwa and Mallon, 207–8. 43 Teaiwa and Mallon, 207–8. 44 Teaiwa and Mallon, 208.

23 in sport and the arts “that there are overt engagements and debates around notions of national identity”.45

There are crucial differences and distinct experiences for Pacific peoples in

Australia compared to New Zealand, including:

1. New Zealand’s cultural link to the Pacific by way of Māori

identification as Polynesian and Pacific people. This is in contrast

to Australia where the majority indigenous group, Aboriginal

Australians, are culturally distinct from Pacific people. However,

like Torres Strait Islanders in an Australian setting and despite

their cultural connections to the Pacific, Māori in New Zealand

often distinguish themselves (and are distinguished) from Pacific

people by way of their political status as indigenous;46 this

position is frequently duplicated in an Australian context.47

2. The colonial projects of each country. New Zealand’s colonial-

indigenous engagements were based on British recognition of

Māori sovereignty in the of Waitangi, signed between

Māori and the British Crown on 6 February 1840 and

outlining the bicultural construction and governance of the

nation. This is markedly different to the ways in which

Aboriginal Australian land and resources were defined by the

British as and claimed under international law

without negotiation or treaty. These historical actions have

shaped relations not only between indigenous and white

45 Teaiwa and Mallon, 208. 46 Teaiwa and Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand”; Te Punga Somerville, Māori Connections to Oceania. 47 Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora,” 111.

24 populations in Australia and New Zealand, but also the

experiences of non-white migrants.

3. The respective countries’ participation in the colonisation of

Pacific Islands. New Zealand’s colonial histories for the most part

centre on Polynesian islands (Cook Island, Niue, Samoa and

Tokelau), whereas Australia’s colonial history has a Melanesian

focus (Torres Strait Islands and Papua New Guinea). Both

countries in partnership with Britain jointly administered the

Micronesian island of Nauru.

Applying T. Teaiwa and Mallon’s generative model, I argue that “kinship” and

“ambivalence” are also key features of the experiences of and attitudes to Pacific people in contemporary Australia. I also adopt their claim of the centrality of sport and the arts in Australian (as well as New Zealand) cultural life, and the high visibility of Pacific peoples within both spaces. Although my thesis does not have the scope for comprehensive comparisons between Pacific experiences in New

Zealand and Australia, it is committed to the principle of comparative analysis as well as interdisciplinary focus, and is indebted to the intellectual pioneers of the field.

The thesis is structured in three parts: Section One, “Australia’s Formal

Engagements with Pacific Peoples”, offers a comprehensive history of the interactions of Pacific peoples with the Australian and state before and after European settlement in the late eighteenth century. There is a focus on Māori involvement in the colony of New South Wales in the early period of settlement, and then on the indentured labour trade that brought South Sea Islanders to

Queensland from the late nineteenth century. Across the twentieth century I map a

25 range of policies and practices – beginning with White Australia, imperial ambition and assimilation and moving to decolonisation, multiculturalism and self- determination – and trace their impact on Pacific people inside and outside

Australia, with continuing attention to Aboriginal Australians. In the twenty-first century I identify immigration, development/aid and national security as the main sites of Australia’s formal engagements with Pacific peoples. This section provides the historical and analytic context for the more specific and detailed case studies that follow.

In Section Two, “The Pacific Presence in Australian Rugby League”, I demonstrate Pacific peoples’ ambivalent place within rugby league in Australia.

Following an historical account of the game (with some attention to and

New Zealand), I provide a contemporary analysis of the ways in which mainstream media and administrators give meaning and at times seek solutions to the expanding twenty-first century Pacific presence within Australian rugby league; I also examine Australian Rugby League Commission (ARLC) and National Rugby

League (NRL) Pacific-specific player and community programs implemented in

Australia, New Zealand and those Pacific Island countries where rugby league is most popular (i.e. Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga). Integral to this section is an understanding of the historical and contemporary place occupied by

Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander players within Australian rugby league: while similarly representing racial difference, their position as Indigenous

Australians frames them in a completely different way, and this complicates understandings of Pacific people within the game.

Section Three, “Australian Arts and Aid in the Solomon Islands”, juxtaposes

Australia’s governmental and military intervention into a Pacific country in the form of its leadership of the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands

26 (RAMSI) from 2003 to 2015 with its participation in the 11th Festival of the Pacific

Arts (FOPA) held in the Solomon Islands in July 2012. Once again combining historical with contemporary analysis, I examine Australia’s engagements with

Solomon Islands, the reasons behind its RAMSI intervention and the ways that intervention played out on the ground in Solomon Islands. Coming nine years after

RAMSI was deployed, FOPA provided for Solomon Islanders a different perspective on Australia – creative, celebratory and crucially showcasing

Indigenous Australians and their arts and culture. Nevertheless, this version of

Australia performed in a Pacific context formally excluded the participation of

Australian Pacific people – yet another site and sign of the ambivalent place of

Pacific peoples within contemporary Australia.

27 – Section One –

Australia’s Formal Engagements with Pacific Peoples

The Australian nation was founded in of empire, an “Island Empire” of the Pacific . . . Curiously, however, our national historiography has been reluctant to acknowledge our constitutive imperial ambition and the long history of exploitation of labour and land that has marked Australian relations with the Pacific.1

Pacific peoples have been visiting and settling on Aboriginal Australian lands for millennia. At least 2000 years ago the indigenous Melanesian people of the Torres

Strait Islands engaged in trade, warfare and intermarriage with the , seafaring Aboriginal Australians who inhabited the islands of the Strait closest to continental Australia (Bedanug [Possession Island], Kiriri [Hammond Island],

Muralug [Prince of Wales Island], Ngurapai [Horn Island] and Waiben [Thursday

Island]), as well as with the Aboriginal Australian communities of Cape York on .2 The longevity and dynamism of these exchanges, which also saw Aboriginal Australians visit and settle on Torres Strait Islander lands, are embodied in aspects of physical, linguistic and material culture shared today. It is less clear if Pacific peoples more broadly engaged with Aboriginal Australians on mainland Australia and neighbouring islands before the arrival of the British. Jared

Diamond contends that evidence of contact with Papuan peoples from mainland

New Guinea and its surrounding islands (the presence in the Cape York area of

Papuan-styled outrigger , drums and fishhooks, as well as the adoption in some Aboriginal Australian communities of various Papuan ceremonial customs, physical features and also possible language influences) is more likely explained through an attenuation of Papuan culture from north to south via a chain of island

1 Lake, “The Australian Dream of an Island Empire: Race, Reputation, and Resistance,” 411. 2 Radiocarbon dating suggests human occupation of the Torres Strait Islands from 2,500 – 3,000 years ago. Carter et al., “ of the Murray Islands, Eastern Torres Strait: Implications for a Regional .”

28 exchanges between Papuans, Torres Strait Islanders and Aboriginal Australians, rather than through direct Papuan contact with Aboriginal Australians or vice versa.3 Archaeological and oral accounts affirm Māori travel north-northwest from

New Zealand to Norfolk Island (today an Australian External Territory) as early as

1350, and Māori oral histories documented in John Hawkesworth’s 1773 official retelling of Captain ’s first voyage (1768-1771) describe visitation to a large distant island in the same direction past Norfolk Island, recorded as Ulimaroa.

While the late-eighteenth-century Swedish geographer and cartographer Daniel

Djurberg identified Ulimaroa as continental Australia, Jan Tent and Paul Geraghty have recently demonstrated that it was most certainly New Caledonia.4

3 Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 315–16. 4 Tent and Geraghty, “Where in the World Is Ulimaroa? Or, How a Pacific Island Became the Australian Continent.”

29 1. Māori and the Colony of New South Wales (1778-1859)

The arrival of Pacific peoples intensified and diversified after 1778, as the British penal colony of New South Wales was established by the often-violent acquisition and settlement of mainland and island Aboriginal Australian lands and became increasingly reliant upon the resources and people of the region. Britain’s search for what was known as the world’s fifth continent, terra australis incognita or the great south land, had led Captain James Cook of the Endeavour to land on the southeast coast of continental Australia at modern-day Kurnell (lands of the

Gweagal people) on 29 April 1770. Vital to Cook’s arrival in Australia was Tupaia, a high priest, artist, scholar, warrior, linguist and navigator from the Society Islands

(modern day French Polynesia). Cook relied not only on Tupaia’s exceptional navigational skills but also his linguistic abilities, and he was called on to help the

British communicate with Aboriginal Australians. While Tupaia had been successful in the role of translator throughout island Polynesia, which shared linguistic similarities to his own , Aboriginal Australian languages were distinctly different.1 The presence of Tupaia and fellow Society

Islander crew member Taiato on Cook’s 1770 voyage along the eastern coast of mainland Australia in 1770 marks the first visit of non-Torres Strait Island Pacific people to continental Australia.

While Cook in 1770 had made a geographically vast claim for the British crown to Aboriginal Australian lands from Bedanug (Possession Island) off the tip of far northeast Australia to the island of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in the south, the New South Wales colony established after the arrival of the on 26 January 1788 was concentrated on the coastal lands of the Nation (Port

Jackson, ) and the Muwinina people (, Tasmania). Located on the

1 Salmond, “Visitors: Tupaia, The Navigator Priest,” 75.

30 southwest edge of the Pacific Ocean, both sites established themselves as major

Pacific ports, linking the colony of New South Wales to regional resources and labour not available or not yet accessible within the colony.2 Up until the 1830s, the main import was food for both New South Wales and Britain, and centred on whale, seal, salted pork, timber, flax and fresh produce, mostly acquired on or off shore island Polynesia (New Zealand, French Polynesia, Hawai’i, Tonga, Cook

Islands and Samoa). The second stage after 1840 acquired sandalwood, copra, bêche-de-mer (trepang), pearl-shell and tortoise-shell from island Melanesia

(Vanuatu, New Caledonia and Torres Strait Islands) which was used to trade with

Asia in exchange for tea and sugar.

An important factor here is the changing legal and unofficial borders of the colony of New South Wales in its early years. Definitive, although frequently shifting, colonial borders were established to the north, south and west; Van

Diemen’s Land became an independent colony in 1825 and was granted responsible self-government and renamed Tasmania in 1856. But the colony’s eastern border remained vague and open to interpretation depending on the politics of the day.

Bill Gammage has shown that the only consistent official position around the colony’s borders until the 1830s was that its eastern boundary included all adjacent islands that fell between the (established) northern and southern borders: thus

New Caledonian, Fijian, French Polynesian and New Zealand islands were all at times claimed by governors and colonial officials without check and for strategic and economic reasons.3

Alongside the flow of regional goods to and from Sydney and Hobart during this period, there were an increasing number of Pacific peoples on board European ships used by sealers, whalers and traders. Travelling freely with a sense of

2 Rose, Quanchi, and Moore, A National Strategy for the Study of the Pacific, 82. 3 Gammage, “Early Boundaries of New South Wales,” 527.

31 opportunism and adventure, or at times through coercion, this Polynesian- dominated presence comprised for the most part male ship employees, revered for their physical abilities, navigational skills, hard work and endearing loyalty; and to a lesser extent females, accorded passage mostly as wives and child-bearers for ship captains and others in prominent positions. Further adding to the diverse mix of

Pacific peoples in the colony were those arriving as a result of Christian and governmental interests within the region. Tracey Banivanua-Mar uses documented first-hand accounts to show that Port Jackson in the 1820s had gained a visible and active Pacific presence: Peter Cunningham hears the Sydney night filled with “wild melody of a [Tahitian] love-song” or “the New Zealand war- dance”, while Robert Burford notes the enrichment that the “fantastic costume” of

Pacific peoples brought to Sydney fashion.4

Māori became the largest Pacific culture on Australian shores up until the

1860s: James Belich states that of the 1000 Māori estimated to have travelled outside

New Zealand between 1788 and 1840 most visited and/or resided in Sydney’s Port

Jackson or Poihākena as they called it.5 Influencing Māori visitation and settlement was the colony’s reliance on and geographic proximity to New Zealand’s resources, whose procurement depended on negotiation and the development of strong kinships with Māori; Banivanua-Mar also identifies Māori interest and investigation into “any potential usefulness of British colonies and agents”.6 This colonial-indigenous engagement (initially involving mainly those from the

Ngāpuhi iwi [], whose land was on the shores of the Bay of Islands region of

New Zealand’s North Island most frequented by colonial ships) was based on

4 Cunningham quoted in Banivanua-Mar, “Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past,” 348; Burford quoted in Banivanua-Mar, 348. 5 Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, 145. 6 Banivanua-Mar, “Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past,” 344.

32 recognition of Māori sovereignty and differed decisively from the concurrent ways in which Aboriginal Australian land and resources were being defined as terra nullius and thus available to be claimed under international law without negotiation or treaty.

Accordingly successive New South Wales governors invited Māori chiefs and their whānau (family) to Sydney to stay for substantial periods of time, offering them philosophical and practical teachings about British ways of life while also gifting goods and technologies including crops, livestock and weapons. Framed by an understanding of the importance placed by Māori culture on reciprocity, it was hoped that such hospitality would translate to Māori welcoming and protecting colonial traders on arrival in New Zealand.7 The desire for strong diplomatic relations with Māori and Polynesian cultures more broadly is further emphasised in the orders by governors from as early as 1805 specifically forbidding ill treatment towards all Māori and Polynesian peoples residing in and travelling to and from

New South Wales on colonial vessels.8 Examples of mistreatment of Māori included forced removal from home, non-payment, and stranding;9 the public ban presumably reflected colonial concern about the impact that instances of Māori mistreatment at the hands of an increasingly racialist society would have on the decisions made about trade by Māori leaders.

Missionaries such as Reverend Samuel Marsden of the Church Mission

Society also attempted to woo Māori as a means to gain a foothold within New

Zealand before the arrival of broader missionary competition. Marsden had been in Australia since 1794 and had grown frustrated by his lack of progress in

“civilising” Aboriginal Australians; envisaging future success unlikely, and also

7 King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, 129. 8 Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 95. 9 Hamer, Māori in Australia: Ngā Māori i Te Ao Moemoeā, 11.

33 influenced by his growing business interests in New Zealand, he began to cultivate

Māori in Sydney, providing accommodation, teachings and work on his farm.10 By

1813 Marsden had established the New South Wales Society for Affording

Protection to the Natives of the South Sea Islands, and Promoting their Civilization, which not only sought to protect all Pacific people and hold the colony accountable for prosecuting those who broke the governor’s orders, but also offered civilising educational opportunities via the establishment in 1815 of the Rangihou Seminary on Marsden’s Parramatta property. Named after Rangihoua - the lands in which

Marsden and his missionaries were accorded safe settlement under chief Ruatara in New Zealand a year earlier - the seminary ran until 1822. It was not for all Pacific children but restricted mostly to the teenage and young adult male sons of important Māori whom Marsden sought to cultivate, and of Pacific Island chiefs.11

Teaching , carpentry, English literacy and numeracy, framed by the

Christian faith, Rangihou was planned to remove Māori children from the corrupting influences of culture, with the hope that such civilising would flow on within the broader hierarchical structure of Māori at home.12

The establishment of Rangihou coincided with the opening of the Black

Native Institution of New South Wales which was sponsored by the

Missionary Society under the direction of Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1810-1821), who unlike Marsden still saw potential for the civilisation of Aboriginal

Australians. Also situated in Parramatta, the Aboriginal-specific school enrolled children of both sexes aged between four and seven. Similarly designed to civilise the next generation with parents only able to visit their children one day a year, it marked the beginning of Australia’s infamous history of state-sponsored removal

10 King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, 141. 11 Banivanua-Mar, “Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past,” 349. 12 Banivanua-Mar, 349; King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, 129.

34 of Aboriginal children from family and culture. While, at Marsden’s insistence, the two institutions did not engage with one another, their forced closures through disease and death were interrelated due to their geographic proximity and helped lead to their merger and relocation to in 1823.13 Named the Blacktown

Native Institution, the new school was run by Marsden’s missionaries and included unspecified mixed-descent children brought from local female orphanages.14

Operational until 1829, the Blacktown Native Institution’s civilising experiment only hardened racial distinctions between Māori/Polynesians and Aboriginal

Australians, as enrolled Aboriginal children came to be deemed the most

“uncivilisable”. Such examples affirmed growing global changes in racial discourse, which through the newly established disciplines of biology and anthropology began to oppose the long-held view of physical and mental difference between human groups as being the result of “the direct but reversible impact of climate and milieu on a single migrating species” in favour of physiological and anatomical evidence which suggested that such difference was “innate, morally and intellectually determinant” and reflective of distinct rather than a common human species.15 This increased dehumanisation of Aboriginal Australians not only gave further weight to the doctrine of terra nullius but was also used to attempt to excuse the violent colonial treatment of Aboriginal Australians in the dispossession of their lands. Between 1788 and the 1830s, colonial settler and Aboriginal relations had swiftly deteriorated from what understands as a mixture of an imperial mission of conquest with wonderment, curiosity and friendship with

13 Banivanua-Mar, 349. 14 Banivanua-Mar, 351–52. 15 Douglas and Ballard, “Preface,” xii; Douglas, “Foreign Bodies in Oceania,” 5.

35 Aboriginal Australia to what James Boyce describes as not “‘war’ . . . but in its most literal sense ‘ethnic cleansing’”.16

It is at this junction of colonial, Pacific and Aboriginal Australian engagements that Māori both visiting and residing in Australia became increasingly aware and fearful of the silent intentions motivating colonial goodwill, alliance building and the link between protection and the forgoing of culture. This was overtly expressed as early as 1814 by Ruatara who, after agreeing to allow

Marsden and his missionaries to settle and preach Christianity on Ngāpuhi land, stated that it was becoming increasingly apparent that colonial motives were to

“enslave or exterminate the Māori”.17 As a result, Māori and other Pacific peoples’ kinships with Aboriginal Australians (which took place within key sites of cultural convergence such as Port Jackson, Parramatta and Blacktown, as well as at sea and on the shores of island Tasmania, New Zealand and beyond through their shared employment on colonial trade ships) often extended beyond cultural and economic exchanges to include the sharing of ideas and strategies in response to colonisation and its many manifestations.18 Such engagements, which developed through a

“common trade jargon” which mixed English and varying indigenous languages

(Aboriginal Australian and Pacific)19 should not be romanticised: for example, there are sporadic accounts of negative Māori attitudes towards Aboriginal

Australians upon arrival in the colony.20 However, built on a shared albeit different

16 Langton, “Ngura Barbagai: Country Lost; ‘They Made a Solitude and Called It Peace,’” 8; Boyce, “Towlangany: To Tell Lies; ‘What Business Do You Have Here?,’” 92. 17 Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century, 143. 18 Banivanua-Mar, “Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past,” 350–51. For histories on Aboriginal Australian involvement on colonial trade ships in the Pacific see for example, Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790-1870; and Prickett, “Trans-Tasman Stories: Australian Aborigines in New Zealand Sealing and Shore Whaling.” 19 Banivanua-Mar, “Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past,” 344–45. 20 See Salmond, Between : Early Exchanges between Maori and Europeans 1773-1815.

36 colonial positioning as “native” and a mutual recognition of each other as sovereign peoples of their respective lands, these relationships were a significant though often unacknowledged part of Māori and Pacific peoples’ experience on mainland and island Australia during the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly prescient in relation to their own impending colonial futures at home.

Māori eventually, and contentiously, ceded sovereignty to Britain on 6

February 1840 via the , resulting in their becoming British subjects and New Zealand being politically included within and governed by the colony of New South Wales (becoming its own distinct British colony on 1 July

1841). Initially at least, Māori were still firmly in control of much of their land and resources, and connections with Australia’s eastern colonies remained frequent and significant. Māori trade was crucial to supply additional food and resources following the influx of migrants in the 1850s to the colonies of New South Wales and (established in 1851) as a result of the recent discovery of gold, in which

Māori also actively participated.

While many Māori at home had little comprehension of the impending impact of the slow burn that was colonisation in New Zealand, Māori in Australia continued to foreshadow it in their writings based on observation and engagement with Aboriginal Australians. Hone Rī, for example, a Māori ship worker in Sydney during the 1850s, wrote:

The Pākehā in New Zealand are going to be numerous in the future.

I listened to the Māori people of Port Jackson, which was a

settlement taken . . . by the English. That town belonged to the

Blacks; Port Jackson was a settlement taken by English. My friends, I

saw the people of Port Jackson just walking around on the paths.

And the Aborigines were indeed the people of Port Jackson formerly.

37 Now, in Port Jackson it is Pākehā alone who are in the town and the

are just wandering around on the mountains. Quite a

number of the islands have been taken thus by the British. Even

though people say New Zealand will not be taken by the English,

you will become victims of the Pākehā.21

Eventually the fate that both Ruatara and Rī envisaged for their people in colonial

New Zealand - as following that of Aboriginal Australians - would eventuate after

1860, even though significant differences remained as a result of the racialised ways in which Māori and Pacific (mainly Polynesian) cultures and land tenure were distinguished from the perceived lack of both in Aboriginal Australian society.

With the onset of multiple civil wars between Pākehā and Māori within New

Zealand over Māori land and resources, from this point on Māori visitation and settlement within Australia significantly decreased across the remainder of the nineteenth century.22

21 Rī translated and quoted by Hogan, “Stories of Travel: He Kōrero Enei Mō Te Haerenga,” 287. 22 Hamer, Māori in Australia: Ngā Māori i Te Ao Moemoeā, 13.

38 2. South Sea Islanders and the Colony of Queensland (1859-1901)

At the same time as the Māori presence in the Australian colonies of New South

Wales, Tasmania and Victoria was diminishing, the colony of Queensland

(established in 1859) saw the arrival between 1863 and 1904 of around 60,000 mostly young, unmarried Melanesian men. Brought by recruiting agents to work as indentured labour mainly within the sugar and to a lesser extent arable, pastoral and domestic service industries, 93% of those who arrived came from the islands of modern day Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands; approximately 6% from contemporary Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia; and less than 1% from the

Polynesian islands of Samoa, Niue, Kiribati, Tuvalu and .1 Collectively the group came to be identified as South Sea Islanders, Pacific Islanders, Polynesians, and/or Kanakas. There has been much robust debate on the Australian-Pacific indentured labour trade: contestation has particularly focused on the level of agency afforded to South Sea Islanders in relation to the boarding of vessels and the signing of indentured labour contracts; the ways in which kidnap, trickery, coercion and free will played out in such movements; as well as their treatment and status upon arrival. Without being able to rehearse the history of this debate, I want to emphasise Banivanua-Mar’s contention that conventional narratives have been poorly framed in their dislocation from “the concurrent pioneering violence of

Australian settler-colonialism . . . [and] the dispossession and removal of Aboriginal people in Queensland, which cleared their lands for European industries”.2 With this critique in mind and in replication of the frame used to identify the spaces available to Māori within the colony of New South Wales in the first half of the

1 Of the nearly 30% who came from the Solomon Islands, approximately 1% came from its Polynesian outlier islands of Santa Cruz and Tikopia. Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in North Queensland, 33. 2 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade, 7–8.

39 nineteenth century, I now map the places accorded to South Sea Islanders in the colony of Queensland during the second half of the century.

The arrival of South Sea Islanders in Queensland has its roots in the transition of New South Wales’ Pacific resource orientation from Polynesia to

Melanesia. From the 1840s to the 1860s and targeting the islands within modern- day Vanuatu and New Caledonia, this was driven by Australian colonial traders’ implementation of a new regional economic model of production, extraction and trade. Influenced by a desire to gain full control of resources and the method, quantity and timing of extraction – something not achieved previously in Polynesia where the terms and conditions regularly relied on local chiefs and landowners - the new model looked to take away the power of indigenous land and marine custodians by establishing colonial island-based trading stations and bringing in cheap, imported labour often with the use of violence through coercion and kidnapping.3 While labour was mostly acquired from surrounding Melanesian islands where resource extraction was taking place, there were also examples of labour from Polynesia and Micronesia.4

Like Fiji and parts of island Polynesia before them, it did not take long for

Vanuatu and New Caledonian natural resources to be exploited without thought of regeneration. Subsequently capitalists, or as Regina Ganter calls them “resource- raiders”5 from Australia’s colonies, explored new economic opportunities within the region, leading them and their best imported indentured labour to the Torres

Strait Islands (West Melanesia) from 1862 in the wake of the discovery of bêche-de- mer and later pearl-shell. Concurrently, in recognising that the region’s natural

3 Ganter, The Pearl-Shellers of Torres Straits: Resource Use, Development and Decline, 1860s-1960s, 17; Shineberg, They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-West Pacific 1830- 1865, 190–98. 4 Tryon, “Linguistic Encounter and Responses in the South Pacific,” 40. 5 Ganter, The Pearl-Shellers of Torres Straits: Resource Use, Development and Decline, 1860s-1960s, 17.

40 resources were becoming less abundant and thus less profitable, attention was also turned to opportunities presented by large-scale arable farming, particularly cotton and sugar which were in high demand during the 1860s as a result of the American

Civil War. Both the fledgling colony of Queensland and the still largely

“unclaimed” Fijian Islands became designated sites for such economic experimentation due to the imagined ease with which the large quantities of land needed for such ventures would be able to be acquired from their . Similar to New Caledonia, Vanuatu and the Torres Strait Islands, cheap imported coloured labour was sought to maximise economic success.

Although the first South Sea Island indentured labourers to arrive in

Queensland came in 1863, around 200 people had already been brought to mainland Australia in 1847 from the New Hebrides (Vanuatu). The men were put to work as shepherds in Monaro and on the within the colony of New South

Wales. The venture was unsuccessful and the men walked off, some reaching

Sydney or Melbourne, others seeking a ship home.6 Notwithstanding this example, importation of South Sea Islander labour into Queensland was approved fifteen years later by conservative, pro-indenture capitalists who “by virtue of their economic ascendency” dominated positions in Queensland’s Legislative Council and elected Assembly.7 The decision met with widespread from the colony’s liberal politicians who paradoxically wanted to construct a colony based on democratic and progressive principles through the exclusion of non-white peoples; a growing labour movement concerned with the effects of imported indentured labour on white labour access, pay and work conditions; and humanitarians strongly opposed to race-based labour systems after the abolition of slavery in the United States. In defence it was asserted that the future success of the

6 Affeldt, Consuming Whiteness: and the White Sugar Campaign, 156. 7 Saunders, “Part Two: ‘The Black Scourge,’” 171.

41 colony of Queensland was dependent on an arable farming industry which could only be constructed by an initial and temporary use of indentured labour from the

Pacific. This claim was underpinned by a range of assertions with varying degrees of plausibility: Queensland’s tropical climate was fatal to European labour, which in any case was understood as both too expensive and in short supply as a result of the colony-wide gold rushes and the end of British convict transportation to the

Australian colonies; Aboriginal Australians were imminently “dying out”, thus rendering any suggestion of a paid and regulated Aboriginal Australian workforce nonsensical; and alternative sources of imported indentured labour from China and India, concurrently an option exercised throughout Australia’s colonies in various industries, was expensive and insufficiently available.8 South Sea Islanders in contrast were thought of as cheap, accessible, able to withstand tropical conditions, and most importantly non-indigenous, therefore easily exportable after their indenture.

The first five years of the Australian-Pacific indentured labour trade operated with little regulation or supervision. The majority of indentured South

Sea Islanders, brought to the colony of Queensland as shepherds, labourers and servants (predominantly women),9 were without formal contracts and thus suffered the almost unrestrained authority of their masters; the few who had contracts were brought under Queensland’s Masters and Servants Act (1861), which regulated treatment, movement and behaviour and made it illegal to abscond, refuse orders and collectively or individually attempt to better their conditions.10 Frequent violence in the forced acquisition of labour and humanitarian concerns about the

8 Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in North Queensland, 1; Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade, 11; 76. 9 Women were a small percentage of the total South Sea Islander population in Queensland (6.2% in 1881 and 8.7% in 1891). Mercer, “The Survival of a Pacific Islander Population in North Queensland 1900-1940,” 10. 10 Mercer, 16.

42 treatment of indentured labourers (both in the colonies and in Britain via its

Aborigines Protection Society, Anti-Slavery Society and Colonial Office) caused the

Queensland government to introduce its first Pacific-specific indentured labour legislation, the Polynesian Labourers Act (1868). The protection provided to indentured South Sea Island labourers across all aspects of the trade from home island recruitment and transportation to employment and living conditions in

Queensland was crucially tied to policies of segregation, confinement, surveillance, and deportation to ensure a White Queensland. Key regulations of the problematically titled Polynesian Labourers Act – less than 1% of South Sea Islanders were from island Polynesia – included the need for employers not only to engage a recruiting agent to source workers but to apply to government officials for approval of the number of labourers desired; the setting of maximum recruiting time periods for agents who were paid by employers up to £9 per indentured South Sea Islander; the fixing of all employees to three-year contracts of indenture in exchange for employer remuneration of an initial pay rate of £6 per annum (which was collectable at the end of contract), accommodation, meals, clothing, blankets, tobacco, soap, medical care and safe passage home on the conclusion of the contract; and an emphasis on labour being recruited and not procured, with the definition of recruitment only to have been satisfied when “labourers have voluntarily engaged themselves and entered into agreements with the full knowledge and understanding of the and conditions” of their contract.11 All contracted indentured labourers were also to continue to be governed by

Queensland’s Masters and Servants Act.

Opposition to the use of South Sea Island indentured labour for racialist, economic and humanitarian reasons continued to grow in the 1870s. Humanitarian

11 Saunders, “Part Two: ‘The Black Scourge,’” 168.

43 protest centred on the violent treatment of South Sea Islanders at home, in transit and within the colony of Queensland. As in the years previous to the Act, South Sea

Islanders experienced physical, sexual and psychological violence and murder in the recruitment and transportation process. This continued even after further

Queensland legislation in 1871 assigning government inspectors on board recruiting vessels; and the introduction of British government legislation via the Pacific

Islanders Protection Acts of 1872 and 1875 (also known as the Kidnapping Act) extending

British legal powers over both Pacific Island natives and British subjects not within the jurisdiction of Her Majesty’s Dominions. Mistreatment under the more regulated controls of colonial Queensland was illustrated by the overwhelming majority of South Sea Islanders continuing to experience what Patricia Mercer argues as “some form of physical or mental violence from Europeans, manifested in beatings, medical neglect, withdrawal of food, deprival of leisure time and even separation of married couples”.12 The South Sea Island mortality rate was three to four times higher than the European rate for the duration of the trade.

The objections of those championing racialist and employment reasons for the trade’s end were heightened by the inability of the Polynesian Labourers Act to live up to assurances that South Sea Island indentured labour would cause no disruption to the broader colonial project of an explicitly white and democratic

Queensland. This came as a result of a growing number of South Sea Islanders who, in either finishing their contracts (time expired) or illegally breaking them due to ill treatment, made the decision not to return home or engage in another indentured contract, but to leave the confines of plantation life and assert their presence socially and economically within growing agricultural service towns like

Maryborough, , , Mackay, Ayr, Ingham and Innisfail,

12 Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in North Queensland, 15.

44 where they established vibrant Kanaka Quarters/Towns. The social response of white communities largely opposed to racial heterogeneity was only exacerbated when Aboriginal Australians and Chinese (themselves displaced by frontier violence and diminished economic opportunities after the gold rushes) engaged with South Sea Islanders in their own spaces. The upshot was an attempt to exclude South Sea Islanders from mainstream social life via bans from public events and spaces such as balls, concerts, racing carnivals, sports clubs, hospitals and libraries.13 Yet no amount of discrimination and persecution could prevent the perception that South Sea Islanders were encroaching on both white employment opportunities and white women who, as Banivanua-Mar emphasises, were seen to represent “symbols of the reproduction of empire”.14

While the Queensland colonial government was committed to ensuring the vested economic interests of those reliant upon indentured labour it was also alert to the fear that “the neat containments of colonialism’s social map” were beginning

“to falter”.15 It also presented itself as addressing increased humanitarian concerns by extending its protection policies of segregation, confinement, surveillance and deportation via the introduction of the Polynesian Labourers Act Amendment (1877) followed by the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1880 and 1884. Introducing minimum standards of living on board ships, bonds to prevent kidnapping, better access to medical treatment and rations, the insurance of safe passage home and the receipt of pay each six months in the company of a government official, legislation also focused on limiting recruitment numbers (including of women), containing employment to within 30 miles (50 kilometres) inland from the Queensland coastline and restricting employment to low skilled jobs within tropical and semi-

13 Mercer, 16. 14 Banivanua-Mar, “Belonging to Country: Racialising Space and Resistance on Queensland’s Transnational Margins, 1880-1900,” 183. 15 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade, 73.

45 tropical agriculture (effectively confining all labourers to the fields as cotton had long proved unviable). With labour split into three distinct legal categories – first contract, time-expired and exemption ticket - it was time-expired

South Sea Islanders who were most heavily monitored, automatically made to re- engage in indentured labour at the conclusion of their contract or be sent home.

While exemption ticket holders (those who had lived in Queensland before 1

September 1879) were excluded from some of this restrictive legislation, the overwhelming majority could not be naturalised as British subjects, vote or own land. Only South Sea Islanders from New Caledonia who were French subjects could apply to be naturalised.16

By the 1880s South Sea Islander protection policies in many ways had come to mirror those enacted throughout Australia’s colonies on Aboriginal Australians.

The forced removal of Aboriginal Australians onto reserves, stations and missions, presented as sites of protection from frontier violence, was an attempt to appease humanitarian concerns but in reality worked to further contain and eliminate the

Aboriginal Australian “threat”, enabling the continued confiscation of Aboriginal

Australian land and the eradication of culture and people. While no formal policy governed such practices in Queensland until 1897 (rather, it was enforced sporadically and informally), policies were officially introduced during this period via the Board for the Protection of Aborigines in the colonies of Victoria in 1869 and

New South Wales in 1883. Aboriginal Australian protection policies were justified through racialist discourse which by the 1880s had not only solidified racial difference as biological, innate and fixed, but was also infused with an evolutionist theory of species, resulting in Social Darwinist policies. The assumed extinction of

Aboriginal Australians further justified segregation by arguing a need to provide a

16 Mercer, “The Survival of a Pacific Islander Population in North Queensland 1900-1940,” 65.

46 humane space for their impending demise. Racial evolutionist discourse was also used both to absolve guilt and rationalise the continued use of frontier violence as

“genetic improvement”.17 This was particularly prevalent in the colony of

Queensland, as seen in its relatively late adoption of protection policies in comparison to other eastern colonies. It is estimated that Queensland’s Aboriginal

Australian population was reduced from 100,000 before contact to less than 27,000 by 1901, largely due to frontier violence.18

Before the 1880s South Sea Islanders had occupied positions of both similarity and difference to those of Aboriginal Australians in the racialist discourses of colonial Queensland. In the recruiting and transportation phase,

South Sea Islanders were depicted as “marauding, cannibalistic savages”, both to justify colonial violence and reduce resistance to uncivilised and irrational savagery.19 Differentiation upon arrival was a means to rationalise the use of South

Sea Islander labour over that of Aboriginal Australians, thus South Sea Islanders were stereotyped as docile, malleable and inoffensive.20 From the 1880s, however, representations of the “lustful, cunning, , and uncontrollable”21 South Sea

Islander were reengaged as a means to defend more extreme containment, segregation, surveillance and policing of South Sea Islanders, both formally and informally. Furthermore, the concept that “lesser races” were preordained to extinction was used to explain excessively high South Sea Island mortality rates as due not to ill treatment at the hands of colonial Queensland but rather as a force of nature.

17 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 39. 18 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship, 31. 19 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade, 75; 28. 20 Banivanua-Mar, 75–76. 21 Mercer, “The Survival of a Pacific Islander Population in North Queensland 1900-1940,” 22.

47 Yet despite severe legislative restrictions, South Sea Islanders not only continued to resist and survive, but also to put down their roots and create

“autonomous communities in Queensland that constantly shifted and adjusted to new or intensifying pressures from the colonial world”.22 It was impossible to completely police (either formally or informally) those South Sea Islanders not on plantations, who increasingly occupied places marginal to town settlements - riverbanks, beaches, islands and marshes - which “resisted the settler-colonial grid” as they were not highly sought after for urban settlement or agriculture.23 While increasing marginality, such sites provided a respite from colonial intrusion, according both privacy and sustenance while producing “communities of exchange and interaction”24 which strengthened kinships with Aboriginal Australians,

Chinese and other coloured minorities who were continuing to eke out existences on colonial society’s margins as they each fought same but different battles. The most significant of these alliances came through -cultural marriages and births, which for Aboriginal Australians became a “resistant act of survival” as reproduction was crucial in a context where “elimination and erasure of Aboriginal people was a state imperative”.25 Such kinships, however, should not be over- romanticised, for there are also documented accounts of violence among South Sea

Islanders, Aboriginal Australians and Chinese. This was either directly mediated by colonial Queensland (as Nic Maclellan illustrates through oral stories of white employers instructing South Sea Islanders to poison waterholes and use clubs to

22 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade, 14. 23 Banivanua-Mar, “Belonging to Country: Racialising Space and Resistance on Queensland’s Transnational Margins, 1880-1900,” 175. 24 179. 25 Banivanua-Mar, 188; McGrath, “The Golden Thread of Kinship: Mixed Marriages Between Asians and Aboriginal Women During Australia’s Federation Era.”

48 kill Aboriginal Australians in the process of taking their lands)26 or a by-product of respective positions of marginality and survival within white Queensland.

Both on and off plantations, unification through common struggle became central to the fostering of a distinct South Sea Island identity. Since cultural identity is a process neither fixed nor final, Banivanua-Mar adopts the work of

Stuart Hall and James Clifford to repurpose a theory of “articulated identities” which understands “cultural adjustment, reinvention, and change in the context of the violent disruptions and discontinuities of colonial contexts”; she argues that cultural maintenance and articulation rather than cultural retention are more useful interpretations of the ways in which commonalities between South Sea

Islanders were forged and distinct identities established.27 Initial connections were specific to island and language group; prominent before arrival, these identities intensified in a colonial context with those from the same island and language groups “adjust[ing], reviv[ing], and nurtur[ing] their social protocols, practices, and traditions”.28 The maintenance of kinships with home was vital to this, facilitated by the arrival of new or recently returned family. As time and movement brought different island and language groups together, a broader pan-identity began to emerge framed by island connections and facilitated by the development of a South

Sea Island pidgin used to communicate with each other, plantation bosses and society more broadly. Yet Banivanua-Mar maintains that while islands provided

“an emotional and practical basis for identity”, it was the shared colonial experiences in relation to “conditions of labour, the increasing insularity, hostility,

26 Maclellan, “South Sea Islanders Unite In Australia.” 27 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade, 103–4; Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”; Hall, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall”; Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations (Autonomy Movement in New Caledonia French Polynesia)”; Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography Literature and Art. 28 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade, 105–6.

49 and sullen prejudice of white towns, and the simmering public violence . . . [that] . .

. served as an additional galvanising force”.29

As many South Sea Islanders had already converted to Christianity in their home islands prior to arrival in Queensland,30 the church offered a refuge of sorts for the fostering of pan-identities, even at the cost of some loss of culture. Anglican and Presbyterian establishments, as well as the Plymouth Brethren-influenced

Queensland Kanaka Mission formed near Bundaberg in 1886, provided a rare space of engagement with European peoples which was not violently hostile, and offered each Sunday an opportunity for education, leadership, and the ability to

“compensate for the loss of the close community attachments back home”.31 It is within this context that many joined the church; Reverend A.C. Smith of the

Queensland Presbyterian Foreign Missions Committee estimated that as of 1892, nearly 75% of all South Sea Islanders in Queensland had received some form of religious instruction.32 Yet when missionaries faced financial difficulties it was indentured labour operators (along with the government) who would come to provide funding, underscoring the “interrelation between secular and spiritual motivations in converting Islanders”.33

The official transition from containment to expulsion of South Sea

Islanders began in 1885 with Queensland Premier Samuel Griffith’s amendment to the Pacific Island Labourers Act banning all recruitment. Griffith used the findings of the 1885 Royal Commission into the recent kidnapping and other illegal procurement of indentured labour from the islands of New Guinea to add weight to

29 Banivanua-Mar, 109. 30 Rose, Quanchi, and Moore, A National Strategy for the Study of the Pacific, 96. 31 Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in North Queensland, 10. 32 This statistic is debatable. The Queensland census in 1901 recorded only 40% of South Sea Islanders belonging to Christian denominations. Mercer, 10. 33 Mercer, 11–12.

50 the decision.34 The initial date for the ban, 31 December 1885, was quickly extended by five years to 31 December 1890 after much protest by sugar plantation owners who at the time of Griffith’s decision were experiencing their most productive year yet. This was extended another ten years with the passing of the Pacific Island

Labourers Extension Act in 1892 after an unexpected economic downturn within the sugar industry.35 With expulsion due to take place around the time the colonies of

Australia were to federate, Griffith campaigned at the Constitutional Convention in

1891 for a future Commonwealth Government to be given the authority to make race-specific laws. This was subsequently agreed upon and later implemented, so that from 1 January 1901 – the date of federation – South Sea Islanders were to be deported from the Commonwealth.36

The sugar industry applauded the delay of the ban, rehashing the line that white labourers were simply unfit to work in the industry, but the colony’s growing nationalist movement intensified their opposition to the legislative reversal. South

Sea Islanders continued to be subjected to levels of surveillance (physical and statistical) previously unseen. As the police mediated the legislation, incarceration rates increasingly became a “measurable manifestation of the specificities of definition, surveillance, and control”.37 South Sea Islanders, like Aboriginal

Australians who in 1897 were placed under full legislative control via the

Queensland Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Act, came to occupy a “disproportionate and highly visible representation in the jails . . . [while incurring] the traumas of incarceration”.38 Significantly (and unlike Aboriginal

Australians), South Sea Islanders were rarely imprisoned for crimes against

34 Saunders, “Part Two: ‘The Black Scourge,’” 155–56. 35 Affeldt, Consuming Whiteness: Racism and the White Sugar Campaign, 167–70. 36 Malbon, “The Race Power under the Australian Constitution: Altered Meanings,” 87; Pritchard, “The ‘Race’ Power in Section 51 [xxvi] of the Constitution,” 44–47. 37 Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade, 99. 38 Banivanua-Mar, 97.

51 property but rather for labour-related crimes, thus reflecting “their constructed status in relation to settler-colonial land and labor needs”.39 With the colony’s non- white-migrant majority Chinese also put under intensifying legislative control, the envisaged end to recruitment and the expulsion of South Sea Islanders from the colony of Queensland in the lead-up to Federation reflected a colony-wide

“explicitly white nationalism” which was attempting to exorcise “blackness and color . . . from the body of the Australian nation”.40

A crucial narrative that intersects Queensland’s Pacific labour trade histories in this period concerns its piecemeal annexation of the Torres Strait

Islands in 1872 and 1879, and its attempted annexation of eastern New Guinea in

1883. In tracing this narrative Steven Mullins begins with the 1868 decision by the

Colonial Office in Britain to grant the colony of New South Wales (rather than

Queensland) jurisdictional control over all islands of the Great Barrier Reef that lay between Queensland’s three-mile offshore eastern colonial border and 154° longitude; this was in relation to control of guano, a natural fertilizer found on islands of the Great Barrier Reef and used in Queensland’s sugar industry.41 This decision caused considerable resentment in the fledgling colony and the

Queensland government appealed to the Colonial Office in 1871 to reverse its jurisdictional order and further to extend Queensland’s coastal jurisdiction from three to sixty miles. In ensuring the application had the best possible chance of success, economic and humanitarian arguments centring on the Torres Strait

Islands (which lay outside Queensland’s northern three-mile offshore border) rather than the Great Barrier Reef were used strategically. Domestically, the economic potential for the Government to profit from the bêche-de-mer and pearl-

39 Banivanua-Mar, 100. 40 Banivanua-Mar, 73. 41 Mullins, “Queensland’s Quest for Torres Strait: The Delusion of Inevitability,” 168–70.

52 shell industries (currently unregulated within the Torres Strait Islands) was manipulated to win cabinet support, despite the fact that those industries were not very profitable at that time. In strengthening its argument to the British Colonial

Office, the Government emphasised the violence and lawlessness of such industries

– specifically the ill-treatment of indentured South Sea Island and Torres Strait

Island labourers – as a significant reason for Queensland jurisdiction.42

On 30 May 1872 Queensland’s appeal was upheld, and the colony was granted jurisdictional control over the Great Barrier Reef and also annexation of

Torres Strait Islands located within the sixty-mile zone. This included Mua (Banks

Island), Badu (Mulgrave Island), Mabuyag (Jervis Island), Warraber (Sue Island),

Iama (Yam or Turtle-Backed Island) and Poruma (Coconut Island). All remaining

Torres Strait Islands, including Boigu (Talbot Island), Dauan (Mt Cornwallis

Island), Saibai, Ugar (Stephen Island), Erub (Darnley Island), Mer (Murray Island) and Masig (Yorke), came under the jurisdiction of the colony of Queensland in 1879 as a result of the Queensland Coast Islands Act, which extended Queensland’s offshore border adjacent to mainland New Guinea’s southernmost point. This enabled policing of marine industry workers who after 1872 had moved outside the sixty-mile jurisdiction in an attempt to escape legislative control. This annexation was facilitated by the British Colonial Office as a compromise to growing calls from all the Australian colonies for Britain to annex eastern New Guinea before the encroaching French or Germans did ( New Guinea had already been claimed by the Dutch in 1824). Alongside fears of a contested border to Australia’s north, there were rumours of New Guinea’s natural wealth and the perceived need to protect Papuan indentured labour. But Britain was not prepared to annex

42 Mullins, 170–71.

53 eastern New Guinea but instead granted Queensland jurisdiction over all Torres

Strait islands and their sea-lanes.43

Queensland was satisfied with Britain’s extension of its borders and its full jurisdictional control over the Strait, but the colony was not so happy with the extra administrative costs. Yet in spite of this, an increasingly concerned and impatient

Queensland Premier, Thomas McIlwraith, ordered the to be erected at

Port Moresby on 4 April 1883 to signify Queensland’s annexation of eastern New

Guinea. This followed information confirming German colonial interest not only in eastern New Guinea but also in the Dutch area to the west. This was not a serious attempt to colonise eastern New Guinea (Queensland barely had the personnel and finances to control the Torres Strait Islands); rather it was a means to force the imperial government to take action. While the move was “immediately repudiated by the British”,44 in 1884 the southeast was declared a British Protectorate following a German claim to the northeast; and in 1888 it was subsequently annexed, becoming a crown colony named British New Guinea.

Queensland’s acquisition of the Torres Strait Islands and Britain’s claim to southeast New Guinea had numerous effects on Torres Strait Islanders and

Papuans. For the estimated Torres Strait Islander population of 3000, their newfound status as British subjects within the jurisdictional political boundaries of the colony of Queensland ironically disabled them from legislative protection against the violence of colonial operators within the bêche-de-mer and pearl-shell industries, despite that having been a point of emphasis in the colony’s arguments for extending its maritime borders. Queensland’s Polynesian Labourers Act of 1868, its replacement the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1880 and their varying amendments did not apply to Torres Strait Islanders as they only concerned Pacific

43 Mullins, 174–76. 44 Stratton, “Two Rescues, One History: Everyday ,” 673.

54 peoples “introduced” to the colony of Queensland; while Britain’s Pacific Islanders

Protection Act of 1872 and its amendment in 1875 only extended to those Pacific people not within the jurisdiction of any civilised power, which the Torres Strait

Islands now were.45 When Torres Strait Islander-specific labour protection legislation was put in place via The Pearl-Shell and Bêche-de-Mer Fishery Act (1881) and The Native Labourers’ Protection Act (1884) respectively, Torres Strait Islanders were defined as “Native” alongside Aboriginal Australians and not under the albeit problematic “Polynesian” definition used for indigenous peoples of the Pacific

Islands within the legislation.

Paradoxically Torres Strait Islanders were, like all Pacific peoples within the colony of Queensland, excluded from the 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act which applied to “Every person who is . . . an aboriginal inhabitant of Queensland”. John Douglas, the government resident and police responsible for all Torres Strait Islanders from 1898 to 1904, was influential in ensuring the Act did not include Torres Strait Islanders. In 1900 in the lead up to Federation Douglas stated: “there is a very great distinction between the natives of the Torres Strait and the natives of Australia . . . The natives of the Torres

Strait are capable of exercising all the rights of British citizens and they ought to be regarded as such”.46 Douglas’s views reflected the economic and political positioning of Torres Strait Islanders in relation to Aboriginal Australians at the time. Economically Torres Strait Islanders were situated above Aboriginal

Australians (yet below South Sea Islanders and Asians) within the Social Darwinist stratified wage labour system of the Torres Strait Islands marine industries; politically Torres Strait Islanders held governmental responsibility over

45 Mullins, “Queensland’s Quest for Torres Strait: The Delusion of Inevitability,” 173. 46 Douglas quoted in Stratton, “Two Rescues, One History: Everyday Racism in Australia,” 675.

55 community affairs through an Island Councils system (established in 1899), a form of autonomy not remotely replicated within Queensland Aboriginal communities.

While British New Guinea was located outside the political jurisdiction of the colony of Queensland, its administrator was subject to the control of the

Governor General of Queensland; this meant that Papuans of British New Guinea came to be viewed in relation to the colony of Queensland as “Native” rather than

“Pacific”. This is evident in the legislative definition of Papuans of British New

Guinea which mirrors that of Torres Strait Islanders as “Native” within The Pearl-

Shell and Bêche-de-Mer Fishery Act of 1881 and The Native Labourers’ Protection Act of

1884. Yet contradiction was the rule for both groups, for Papuans of British New

Guinea remained “Pacific Islanders” under Queensland sugar industry legislation.

Amendment was made in 1886 to the definition of “Pacific Islander” within the

Pacific Islands Labourers Act to ensure that the new status of Papuans of British New

Guinea as British subjects would not create a legislative loophole that would place

Papuan-born South Sea Islanders on mainland Queensland outside the intensely racialised restrictions of the Pacific Islands Labourers Act. Thus the legal definition of

“Pacific Islander” changed from “a native, not of European extraction, of any island in the Pacific Ocean which is not in Her Majesty’s dominions, nor within the jurisdiction of any civilised power” to “natives not of European extraction, of any island in the Pacific Ocean which was not on the eighteenth day of November, one thousand eight hundred and eighty, within Her Majesty’s dominions or within the jurisdiction of any civilised power”. The creation of a unified Australian nation via the Federation of its colonies would only add further ambiguity to the place of both

Torres Strait Islanders and Papuans from British New Guinea within Queensland and Australia.

56 3. White Australia and the Quest for an Island Empire (1901-1939)

Between Federation in 1901 and the outbreak of World War II in 1939 Australia’s engagements in the Pacific were considerably reduced, given the new

Commonwealth’s desire to construct a “White Australia”. The Australian nation was to be built upon the “successes” of Australian colony-building and the

“mistakes” of British, European and American nation-building, by excluding people of colour. Envisaging a workingman’s utopia - economically and politically more democratic and progressive than the world had yet seen – the new nation paradoxically relied upon the exclusion of the overwhelming majority of humanity, apart from white and future immigrants, mostly British.

Stephenson argues that Australia’s boundaries were not only spatial but also racial, with “territory” and “civility” delineating those granted national membership and those not.1 With the dual intention of purifying the nation from the racially inferior and eradicating racial competition, membership of the “imagined community” of the Australian nation was determined as much by exclusion as inclusion.2 The formal execution of such intentions was enabled by section 51 (xxvi) of the

Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (1900) – the founding document of the nation – according the Commonwealth Government the power to make laws with respect to “the people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State”.

While its intention was to allow the Commonwealth Government to enforce its racially exclusive policies across the whole country, it also had the effect of preventing into the future a national policy for Aboriginal Australia.

1 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 36. 2 Irving, To Constitute a Nation: A Cultural ’s Constitution, 33. See Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origins And Spread Of Nationalism for a detailed analysis of the "imagined community" concept as it relates to nationalism.

57 To contextualise the omission of Pacific peoples from the Australian nation it is crucial to provide an overview of the exclusion of the two largest non-white communities, Aboriginal Australians and Asians, who were positioned as threats to civility and territory respectively. Aboriginal Australian exclusion was framed by arguments that “scientifically proved” not only the impossibility of their “civility” but also their inevitable “natural” demise. Section 51 of the Australian Constitution established no federal responsibility for governing Aboriginal peoples but placed it solely in the hands of the newly established states (formerly colonies); section 127 stated: “In reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted”.

Awkwardly British subjects by law yet federally stripped of all rights and privileges associated with that status (including the right to vote in national elections as stipulated in the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act), Aboriginal Australians were wards of their respective states until 1911 (and the states and Territories thereafter); thus they came to suffer segregation, confinement and surveillance via the continued expansion of the protectionist policies of the former colonies. Restricted overwhelmingly to reserves, stations, missions, child institutions and private rural properties as unpaid labour, the everyday lives and movements of Aboriginal

Australians became increasingly controlled in a way that both assumed and aimed to facilitate the “natural” erasure of Aboriginal Australians from the nation.

Asian people, on the other hand, were excluded from the Australian nation in response to their capacity to compete successfully with white Australians for the same limited resources and in the name of keeping the land British.3 Numbering some 30,000 by 1901, the Chinese-dominated Asian Australian population had established themselves both socially and economically as successful and engaged

3 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 40–41.

58 members of Australia’s colonies, which included their commercial and personal kinships with Aboriginal Australians, South Sea Islanders and Torres Strait

Islanders. Within this context Asian peoples were seen to pose a threat to British economic, social and governmental dominance, leading to the construction of exaggerated internalised fears of an “Asian Invasion” or “Yellow Peril”.

Subsequently the idea of Asia as “other” to Australia (following Edward Said’s theorisation of Orientalism) became “an essential element in the invention of the

Australian nation . . . defining the limits and possibilities of Australian nationhood”.4 Legislating Asian exclusion from the nation was the work of the 1901

Immigration Restriction Act, which was designed specifically in response to

Australia’s “Asian problem”. Unable to legislate an outright ban on Asian and broader coloured immigration due to British government opposition, the 1901

Immigration Restriction Act rather forced all non-white arrivals to sit and pass a 50- word dictation test in order to enter Australia. The test was rationalised by concerns among labour unions that local labour was being overlooked in favour of coloured migrant labour due to its cost effectiveness, a position long held in relation to the use of South Sea Island indentured labour. As custom officials were able to give the test in any European language, very few passed (not one person after 1909);5 those who did not were prosecuted under the Act and deported. This policy produced its intended goal, not only stopping further Asian migration but also isolating the existing Asian population (predominantly male and ageing) by making it impossible for their family members to visit or migrate to Australia while simultaneously preventing their own return visits to Asia. The exclusion of Asian peoples in Australia from the Australian Electoral Roll, and their inability to apply

4 Stephenson, 56; Walker, “Survivalist : Australian Responses to Asia, 1980s to the Present”; Said, Orientalism. 5 Nicholls, Deported: A History of Forced Departures from Australia, 28.

59 for naturalisation as stipulated in section 4 of the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act and section 5 of the 1903 Naturalization Act, further illustrates the Government’s desire for the erasure of from the Australian nation.

The omission of Pacific peoples from the Australian nation owed more to concerns for civility than threats to territory. For Torres Strait Islanders, the only

Pacific peoples in 1901 whose lands and seas had been colonised by Australia via their inclusion within the state of Queensland, exclusion from the Australian nation came through their implied positioning as “aboriginal” in the Australian

Constitution. This meant that, like Aboriginal Australians, they could not vote federally, be counted in the national census or be accorded all broader rights granted to their peers. Left under the authority of the Queensland state, it would not take long for Torres Strait Islanders to be brought legislatively under the definition of “aboriginal” at a state level via their inclusion in 1904 in

Queensland’s Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act (1897).6

Martin Nakata asserts that Torres Strait Islander life under the Act was lived at the intersection of the competing and often conflicting interests of government, church and industry, which nevertheless worked in concert to segregate and control.7 Confined to island reserves established in 1912, Torres Strait Islanders were subjected to forced removal and the dispossession of their land. Further discriminatory measures included the construction of prisons and asylums to segregate resistors and the sick; the restricting of employment opportunities to the marine industries; the regulation of personal earnings by way of payment through store credit rather than cash (up to 50% of this payment was taken by the state government and put into an Island Fund to pay for social services); the denial of legal counsel and the right of appeal; the censorship of mail; the setting of night

6 Stratton, “Two Rescues, One History: Everyday Racism in Australia,” 675. 7 Nakata, “Commonsense, Colonialism and Government,” 157.

60 time curfews; and the requirement to apply for permission for travel and for marriage with non-Torres Strait Islanders.8 Torres Strait Islanders were not allowed to vote in State elections, and the indigenous-managed Island Councils lost their previous autonomy. Waiben () established itself as the administrative centre of the Torres Strait Islands at the cost of displacing its traditional owners, the Kaurareg people of Aboriginal Australia.

When permission for travel was granted, it was often for missionary purposes, as indigenous people from the now heavily-Christianised Torres Strait

Islands were employed on mainland Queensland (Mapoon) and Northern

Territory () missions to convert and educate Aboriginal Australians; they were also used by their bosses in the marine industries to make profit for these missions. Notably it was imported Pacific Island missionaries – mostly from the

Loyalty Islands (New Caledonia), Samoa and Niue – who were tasked with

Christianising Torres Strait Islanders.9 Following its arrival in the Torres Straits

Islands from 1871, the London Missionary Society brought the “missiological method” of replacing European with Pacific Island missionaries to more effectively convert indigenous peoples.10 The Methodist Overseas Missions of also used this method and from 1918 actively recruited Torres Strait Islanders to work in the Northern Territory; from 1928 it employed Pacific Island missionaries, predominantly from Fiji. Pacific Island missionaries required a certificate of exemption from the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act to enter Australia, and this was organised between the Methodist Overseas Missions of Australasia board and the federal government.11

8 Nakata, 163–67. 9 Ganter, The Pearl-Shellers of Torres Straits: Resource Use, Development and Decline, 1860s-1960s, 37-38. 10 Kadiba, “The Methodist Mission and the Emerging Aboriginal Church in Arnhem Land 1916-1977,” 103. 11 Kadiba, 106.

61 Torres Strait Islanders constantly resisted life under the Act, as seen in the maritime strike of 1936, which saw 70% of the Torres Strait Island workforce walk off the job in pursuit of better work and living conditions. Lasting four months, the strike was the catalyst for replacing the 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act with the 1939 Torres Strait Islanders Act and the Aboriginals

Preservation and Protection Act - thus giving Torres Strait Islanders the right to be legally identified as “Torres Strait Islander” and not “aboriginal”. Furthermore, it was a “decisive moment when the island communities, belonging to different language groups in the Torres Strait, started to foster a regional identity”.12 Infused through the cultural, economic, religious and political expressions of this Torres

Strait Island pan-identity were Papuan and Aboriginal Australian influences absorbed through previous millennia of contact, as well as those of formerly indentured South Sea Island and Asian labourers who had made the Torres Strait

Islands home since 1862, and more recent Pacific Island missionaries.

South Sea Islander exclusion came via the introduction of the 1901 Pacific

Island Labourers Act. Designed emphatically to put an end to the recruitment and use of South Sea Island indentured labour, the Act simultaneously legislated a ban on the recruitment of South Sea Island indentured labour from 1 April 1904 and the mass deportation of South Sea Islanders from the end of 1906. Any South Sea

Islander wishing to enter Australia from 1 April 1904 came under the jurisdiction of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act. Argued by Australian Prime Minister Edmund

Barton in 1901 as what “Australia demands from us”,13 justification once again centred on barriers to employment for white Australians. Exemption from the

Pacific Island Labourers Act was accorded to the few South Sea Islanders who had

12 Ganter, “Cultural Legacies of a Globalised Past,” 194; Sharp, “Culture Clash in the Torres Strait Islands: The Maritime Strike of 1936.” 13 Barton quoted in Nicholls, Deported: A History of Forced Departures from Australia, 21.

62 lived in Queensland since at least 1 September 1879 (exemption ticket holders), crew employed on ships (mostly those residing in the Torres Strait Islands) or those lucky enough to be granted certificates of exemption from the 1901 Immigration

Restriction Act; however, the minority allowed to stay (like Asian migrants) were not allowed to vote federally nor become British subjects of the nation via section 4 of the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act and section 5 of the 1903 Naturalization Act.

Economic exclusion was enforced by the implementation of additional federal and state polices such as the 1903 Federal Sugar Bonus Bill and the 1913 Queensland

Sugar Cultivation Act, banning South Sea Islander employment within the industry which they had been instrumental in building.

Deportation was enacted swiftly and ruthlessly. By 1908 some 7068 deportations had taken place, followed by a further 194 between 1909 and 1914.14

This left between 1500 and 2500 South Sea Islanders in Australia by the beginning of World War I. The implications of deportation were immense, replicating in reverse the fracturing of families in the southwest Pacific whose men, women and children had been taken illegally to Queensland over the previous decades. The overwhelming majority of South Sea Islanders remaining on the mainland were male, ageing and unmarried, and their position was worse than when they were

“tolerated as a ‘necessary evil’” during the trade’s operation.15 Alienated from health, educational and employment opportunities, most retreated further from their already isolated positions on the coastal fringes (riverbanks and beaches) of the urban centres of Queensland and New South Wales. Eking out an existence on a combination of subsistence farming and fishing as well as seasonal wages provided by both opportunistic and sympathetic white Australian landowners, it was assumed by White Australia that the fate of South Sea Islanders was a

14 Moore, “The South Sea Islanders of Mackay, Queensland, Australia,” 170. 15 Mercer and Moore, “Australia’s Pacific Islanders 1906-1977,” 92.

63 “natural” extinction like that of Aboriginal Australians. For South Sea Islanders living in the Torres Strait Islands (fewer of whom were deported than their mainland counterparts) life experiences varied depending on their island of residence. Despite being legislatively excluded from the 1897 Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, South Sea Islanders living on island government reserves were subjected to the restrictions placed on Torres Strait

Islanders under the Act to a greater extent than those living within the South Sea

Island-specific Anglican mission on Mua (Banks Island) or the colonial administrative centre of Waiben (Thursday Island).16

Unwilling to accept passively the hand dealt by White Australia, South Sea

Islanders protested both individually and collectively via verbal and written submissions, letters and petitions. Political collectives, such as the Pacific Islanders

Association formed in Mackay in late 1901, the Church (specifically the Queensland

Kanaka Mission) and what C. Moore describes as the literate Christian South Sea

Island elite made sustained and articulate protests in response to the Pacific Island

Labourers Act of 1901.17 Such agitation, aided by white Australian missionary and humanitarian groups as well as the Aborigines Protection Society in London, resulted in the 1906 Queensland Royal Commission to Inquire into and Report upon the

Deportation and of Pacific Islanders, and the Sufficiency of Labour for the

Queensland Sugar Industry. The Commission’s findings led to the 1906 amendment of the 1901 Pacific Island labourers Act which expanded the grounds of exemption to include South Sea Islanders who: were born in Queensland; had lived there for more than twenty years; were too old or unwell to obtain a livelihood upon return; were married to a non-South Sea Island British subject (including Aboriginal

16 Shnukal, “Language Diversity, Pan-Islander Identity and ‘national’ Identity in Torres Strait,” 114. 17 Moore, “‘Good-Bye, Queensland, Good-Bye, White Australia; Good-Bye Christians’: Australia’s South Sea Islander Community and Deportation, 1901-1908,” 24.

64 Australians and Torres Strait Islanders); had a South Sea Islander wife and could prove the family’s life would be placed at risk if deported; were registered as a beneficial owner of a freehold in Queensland; had been educated at a Queensland state school. However, exemptions could be rescinded at any time, and South Sea

Islanders were not always explicitly made aware of their right to be excluded from deportation on these grounds.

In 1920 South Sea Islanders were granted, in theory at least, the ability to become naturalised British subjects in the terms of the 1920 Nationality Act, which replaced the 1903 Naturalization Act which had granted this status only to South Sea

Islanders born in Australia (natural-born). But not only was it almost impossible to obtain, it also granted very few of the rights attached to citizenship (e.g., the right to vote federally). Mobilisation against the policies enacted upon them by the state continued to foster distinct South Sea Islander identities and communities. At the same time there was greater intermingling of non-white communities, as South Sea

Islanders subject to deportation from mainland Queensland and New South Wales integrated with Aboriginal Australian communities, and Aboriginal Australians at times tried to pass as Māori to evade their exclusion from the state;18 all this gave rise to ongoing legislative and police action against such connections. By 1934, confusion of identity and racist fears towards South Sea Islanders (as vectors of disease and miscegenation) saw legislation for the state’s right to place any South

Sea Islander on continental and island Queensland under the 1897 Aboriginals

Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act;19 inclusion lasted until the Act was repealed in 1939. Mercer counts “at least forty pieces of discriminatory legislation”

18 Langton and Loos, “Kara Ged: Homeland; ‘The Dawn Is At Hand,’” 343. 19 Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in North Queensland, 251.

65 enacted by the State of Queensland on South Sea Islanders between 1900 and

1940.20

In comparison to Torres Strait Islanders, South Sea Islanders and Pacific peoples more broadly (as well as Aboriginal Australians), Māori occupied a distinct legal status in Australia as the only non-white culture after Federation to be accorded favourable exemption from and inclusion in various foundational

Commonwealth Acts. Examples include exemption from the 1901 Pacific Island

Labourers Act and the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, and inclusion in the

Australian Electoral Roll and ability to apply for Australian naturalisation as stated in section 4 of the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act, and section 5 of the 1903

Naturalization Act. Framing Māori inclusion was an Australian willingness to continue strong diplomatic ties with the colony of New Zealand, motivated by the newly-federated nation’s strong desire for New Zealand to join the Commonwealth

(brief dialogue was also entered into with Fiji on its possible inclusion).21 Such was

Australia’s hope for New Zealand’s inclusion that it specifically constructed section

6 of the Preamble to the Australian Constitution to allow New Zealand to enter into the

Commonwealth of Australia in the future as a state without the need for approval from the other states. Within this context Australia wished to continue free movement to, from and within Australia and New Zealand for British subjects of each country (but excluding Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders). At least at an official level, Māori were positioned as neither a threat to civility or territory, the two key markers of the new Australian nation.

There were concerns, however, about the potential flow-on effect from

Māori inclusion to the indigenous British subjects of Niue and the Cook Islands

20 Mercer, 161. 21 Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 96.

66 who in 1901 when their political administration was transferred from Britain to

New Zealand became same but different to Māori, indigenous British subjects of

New Zealand. These concerns were most overtly expressed in debates over the specific wording of the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act when it was argued that the ambiguity of the initial language used in section 4 referring to New Zealand

“natives” could be interpreted as extending to Cook Islanders and Niueans, as well as potentially other Pacific Islands, since New Zealand at the time was seeking to expand its political control over the region. The Act was amended to ensure it referred specifically to Māori.22 As Paul Hamer says, this reveals not only “an early

Australian antipathy towards New Zealand’s relationship with the Pacific”, but also

“an unwillingness to contemplate Pacific Islanders gaining equal rights with other members of the Commonwealth through that association with New Zealand”.23

Still there were sporadic moments of attempted exclusion of Māori from entry into Australia during the early implementation of the 1901 Immigration

Restriction Act, which were met with vocal opposition from the New Zealand government.24 After World War I Māori were included in an Australian and New

Zealand bilateral agreement to reinstate passport-free travel between the two countries, after passports had been required for travel during the war. While applicable to natural-born British subjects of New Zealand it did not extend to its

Pacific Island natural-born British subjects of Cook Islands and Niue.25 Despite the interest at official levels, Australia’s Māori population remained relatively small until World War II, with little recorded on their presence. Official census data records Australia’s Māori population between 1911 and 1933 increasing from 134 to

22 Hamer, 96–97. 23 Hamer, 97. 24 Hamer, Māori in Australia: Ngā Māori i Te Ao Moemoeā, 13; Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 97. 25 Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 97.

67 197; although Hamer (building on the work of Jeremy Lowe) deduces that these numbers are considerably higher because Australia’s census counted Māori with more than half European heritage as European.26

In contradiction to Australia’s expulsion, exclusion and marginalisation of

Pacific peoples during the initial decades after Federation was a strengthening of its regional governmental and economic engagements. At the forefront was a continuation of its Pacific imperial interest, which featured a more overt and clear- cut mandate in comparison to its nineteenth-century manifestations. Described as an important vehicle in asserting the strength and individualism of the new nation, a marker of its transition from ruled to ruler, Australia pushed for its own version of the United States’ Monroe Doctrine, or as Australia’s first Prime Minister

Edmund Barton stated more bluntly in 1901 an “Island Empire”.27 This desire is no more clearly reflected than in the Australian Constitution’s specific distinction between the Commonwealth Parliament’s legislative power over “external affairs” and “the islands of the Pacific” – made in the belief that much of the Pacific would soon come Australia’s control, thus making Pacific Island affairs not external but internal.28 By the outbreak of World War I, however, Australian hopes of including within its own political jurisdiction Britain’s Pacific Island colonies – British New

Guinea, Cook Islands, Fiji, Niue, New Hebrides (Vanuatu) and Solomon Islands - had only eventuated in the transfer of British New Guinea. Reasons were wide- ranging: Australia’s poor treatment of Aboriginal Australians as well as Polynesian cultural ties to Māori counted significantly in Britain’s decision to grant the Cook

Islands and Niue to New Zealand; and in the case of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu)

26 Hamer, Māori in Australia: Ngā Māori i Te Ao Moemoeā, 14; Lowe, “The Australian Maori Population: Nga Maori Ki Ahiterēria: A Demographic Analysis Based on 1986 Australian and Data,” 4. 27 Barton quoted in Lake, “The Australian Dream of an Island Empire: Race, Reputation, and Resistance,” 411. 28 Wainwright, “Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of Solomon Islands,” 1.

68 there was an unwillingness to offend European powers in the Pacific such as

France.29

Australia’s take-over of British New Guinea was a natural progression from events before Federation. Yet rather than becoming part of a state as the Torres

Strait Islands were of Queensland, British New Guinea was to be an external

Australian Territory, under section 122 of the Australian Constitution which enabled the Commonwealth Parliament to create laws for the government of “any territory placed by the Queen under the authority of and accepted by the

Commonwealth”.30 Section 5 of the Papua Act of 1905 proclaimed that the

“Possession of [British] New Guinea is hereby declared to be accepted by the

Commonwealth as a Territory under the authority of the Commonwealth, by the name of the ”.31 With its name changed so too was the Australian , with an extra point added in 1909 to the Commonwealth to celebrate the

Territory of Papua’s inclusion.32 While all persons of the Territory retained their position as British subjects, Papuans could not enter or reside on the Australian mainland but continued to be subject to the 1901 Immigration Act. Furthermore

Papuans were not accorded elected representatives in the Commonwealth

Parliament which governed their political administration.33 Where exemption from the 1901 Immigration Act was granted, it was often to those Papuans (predominantly women) employed by expatriate officials to accompany their wives back to

Australia and work at home with them as domestics. Yet Lucy Davies argues that their roles shared important similarities to the recently ended South Sea Island labour trade, as domestics were “tied to indentured contracts . . . expelled from the

29 Lake, “The Australian Dream of an Island Empire: Race, Reputation, and Resistance,” 416; Thompson, Australian Imperialism in the Pacific, The Expansionist Era 1820-1920, 6. 30 McDermott, “Australian Citizenship and the Independence of Papua New Guinea,” 51. 31 McDermott, 52. 32 Stratton, “Two Rescues, One History: Everyday Racism in Australia,” 673. 33 McDermott, “Australian Citizenship and the Independence of Papua New Guinea,” 55–56.

69 mainland at the end of their contract, and Australian officials closely monitored their movements on the mainland”.34

The onset of World War I saw Australian forces take possession of the

Territory of Papua’s northern neighbour, German New Guinea, which included the islands of Bougainville and Buka, both of which were culturally, ecologically and geographically connected to the peoples of the Solomon Islands as opposed to

Papuans. Australia was formally accorded administration of German New Guinea in the Treaty of Versailles, and had high hopes of claiming a number of Pacific

Island territories during the post-war peace negotiations, reinvigorating its regional imperial ambitions. However, despite calls by Australian Prime Minister William

Hughes for control of the Pacific south of the equator in the name of greater security,35 Australia was only handed the colonies of German New Guinea and the

Micronesian island of Nauru (the latter to be jointly administered with Britain and

New Zealand). Australia’s “Pacific empire” dreams had all but come to an end by

1920. Papuans in the Territory of Papua retained their existing status, but Papuans in a renamed Territory of New Guinea and also Nauruans did not become British subjects; legally they were placed under the mandate of the League of Nations and not within Britain’s dominions, despite Australia’s administration of them both.36

Access to continental Australia for Papuan people of New Guinea was thus largely available only through employment as an Australian colonial administrator’s domestic help.37

Australia’s colonial occupation of Nauru after World War I did not mark its first engagement with the Micronesian island. It had economic histories tied to

34 Davies, “A Regulated Labour Trade across the Torres Strait: Papuan and New Guinean Domestic Workers in Australia during the Mid-Twentieth Century,” 3. 35 Rose, Quanchi, and Moore, A National Strategy for the Study of the Pacific, 84. 36 McDermott, “Australian Citizenship and the Independence of Papua New Guinea,” 54. 37 Davies, “A Regulated Labour Trade across the Torres Strait: Papuan and New Guinean Domestic Workers in Australia during the Mid-Twentieth Century.”

70 Nauru from 1900 when Albert Ellis, “an Australian turned fiercely loyal New

Zealander”, discovered phosphate rock not only on Nauru but also the island of

Banaba (Ocean Island) of modern day Kiribati (Gilbert Islands).38 Phosphate was extracted by the British Phosphate Commissioners working in the interests of

Nauru’s three joint colonial administrators (Britain, Australia and New Zealand); thus Banaban and Nauruan lands were literally removed, shipped and spread over

Australian soil as fertiliser, ensuring the economic prosperity of “the , Australian investors, Australian mining company employees and their families, Australian fertiliser manufacturers, and Australian farmers”.39 Exploited by a process of “negotiation not fully understood or endorsed”,40 both islands in return experienced catastrophic environmental degradation, resulting in the indigenous population of Banaba being forcibly removed and resettled after World

War II on the Fijian island of Rabi. Australian economic engagements within the region after Federation took place mostly in its territories of Papua and New

Guinea, and broader southwest Melanesian Pacific Islands such as Fiji and

Solomon Islands, focusing not only on resource extraction (gold), but also plantation and production (sugar, copra, timber), shipping (importing and exporting goods), tourism and finance (banking).

This sub-section concludes with an anecdote which encapsulates some of the contradictory attitudes to race and the Pacific which Australia lived out in this period. From 1915-1917, French warships manned largely by soldiers from the

French-Pacific colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia, up to 800 men at a time, visited Melbourne for shore leave. They were enthusiastically welcomed in the city, on account of the French-Australian alliance during World War I, and

38 Teaiwa, “Recovering Ocean Island,” 88. 39 Teaiwa, “Ruining Pacific Islands: Australia’s Phosphate Imperialism,” 376. 40 Teaiwa, “Recovering Ocean Island,” 88.

71 their ethnicity went unremarked in popular reports of the visits, even though they had required an exemption from the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act. Notably some men went absent without leave on arrival, and others deserted completely, yet they were not pursued and subsequent visits were not stopped.41 This story illustrates how both official policy and popular sentiment were malleable under the influence of patriotism, or military and economic opportunism.

41 Leach, “The Day a French Force Came To Healesville and Introduced Us to Our Neighbours.”

72 4. Rupture, Assimilation and Decolonisation (1939-1973)

World War II had multiple implications for Pacific peoples living on continental

Australia, and within Australia’s colonial acquisitions of the Torres Strait Islands,

Papua, New Guinea and Nauru. It also provided another way for White Australia to come to know the region and its indigenous populations through intense battles fought across the Pacific. Australia’s war efforts to defend its own nation-building and imperial projects, its economic and strategic interests in Pacific spaces not under its governance, and also the requirements of the and its allies necessitated both formal and informal military and/or civilian contributions from

South Sea Islanders, Torres Strait Islanders, Papuans and Nauruans. Despite the legislative exclusion of all people “not substantially of European origin or descent” from Australian military service, as enshrined in the 1909 amendment to the

Commonwealth’s 1903 Defence Act, mainland South Sea Islanders enlisted (as they had, albeit to a much lesser extent, during World War I) as a result of acute military shortages forcing defence officials to turn a blind eye to the Defence Act. Those men not enlisted to fight overseas often backfilled white male labour shortages in agricultural, road and rail industries, with many working as part of the Civilian

Construction Corps.1 Backed by trade unions, South Sea Islander women also assisted, with some breaking away from rigid roles as domestics and working as

“cowboys, musterers and general roustabouts”;2 there are also sporadic examples of

South Sea Islander women employed as laundry operators, nurses and as part of the Australian Women’s Land Army.3 A moment of rupture within the severe exclusionary governmental policies and mainstream attitudes expressed in post-

Federation White Australia, World War II exposed first and second generation

1 Mercer, “The Survival of a Pacific Islander Population in North Queensland 1900-1940,” 462–63. 2 Gistitin, “South Sea Islander Women and World War II,” 1. 3 Mercer, “The Survival of a Pacific Islander Population in North Queensland 1900-1940,” 463.

73 Australian-born South Sea Islanders to “new and diverting experiences” that neither they nor their parents or grandparents had experienced previously.4 This simultaneously fostered a geographical repositioning of many South Sea Island communities from the rural peripheries of mainstream Queensland and Northern

New South Wales into urban town centres.

Torres Strait Islanders, too, were encouraged to enlist, as were Aboriginal

Australians (both groups also served in World War I). Adding impetus to Torres

Strait Islander involvement was the targeting of the Torres Strait Islands by the

Japanese due to their strategic importance, a factor that had encouraged

Queensland’s colonisation of the islands in the first place. Japanese air attacks in

March 1942 on Ngurapai (Horn Island), occupied at the time by the Royal

Australian Air Force, saw some 700-800 Torres Strait Island men (out of a total population of approximately 4000) mobilised throughout the Strait under the banner of the Torres Strait Island Light Infantry Battalion. In helping secure both the Torres Strait Islands and Dutch New Guinea, the unit played a crucial part in

Australia’s prevention of Japanese invasion. While the war opened up opportunities and access previously unattainable both nationally and internationally, racialist discriminations still operated. This is seen in Australian

Government decisions such as evacuating only civilians not under the 1939 Torres

Strait Islanders Act from the Torres Strait Islands during the height of Japanese aggression, and paying Torres Strait Islander defence personnel less than white enlistees and denying their opportunities for promotion.5 But as in the 1936 maritime strike, Torres Strait Island soldiers, encouraged by sympathetic white

4 Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in North Queensland, 308. 5 Nakata, “Commonsense, Colonialism and Government,” 169.

74 soldiers and an increasingly inclusive union movement, went on strike in 1943 and

1944, which once again brought about change though not the parity demanded.6

Like the Torres Strait Islands, Australia’s external Pacific Island territories of Papua, New Guinea and Nauru all experienced some degree of attack by the

Japanese in an attempt to take control of the strategic and economic benefits of the

Pacific region. Australia received strong support from its allies, particularly the

United States, but its defence of these Islands relied heavily on their indigenous peoples, both through formal channels such as the Australian-Army-affiliated

Pacific Islands Regiment, which comprised battalions from Papua and New

Guinea, and the voluntary services of thousands of civilians, who in the Territory of

New Guinea alone comprised an estimated 40,000 men and women, including those people the Australians named “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”.7 Many indigenous people were injured or lost their lives: it is estimated that 15,000 Papuans died in the Territory of New Guinea,8 while on Nauru around 400 people were killed while the rest of the population was removed from their land during Japanese occupation, two thirds sent to the island of Chuuk in the Federated States of

Micronesia and the rest forcibly relocated on Nauru. Yet these narratives are not memorialised in the national psyche today when Australia’s participation in both

World Wars is increasingly inscribed as foundational. Selective memories celebrate battles such as Kokoda in the Territory of New Guinea, centralising it as a “nation- defining” moment akin to Gallipoli in its supposed demonstrating of values quintessentially Australian, while simultaneously erasing intersecting narratives within such battles as the execution by Australian Forces in 1943 of between 20 and

6 Nakata, 169; Shnukal, “Torres Strait Islanders,” 9. 7 Banivanua-Mar, “Remember the Pacific’s People When We Remember the War in the Pacific.” 8 Banivanua-Mar.

75 60 Papuans in the Territory of New Guinea for treason.9 Furthermore they refuse to acknowledge Australia’s own colonising claims to Papua, New Guinea and

Nauru land prior to Japanese attempts at colonisation.

The relative loosening of Australia’s race-based policies and social discourses during World War II gave Pacific people living on Australia’s margins comparatively free mobility and engagement with White Australia, as was also true for Aboriginal Australians and other non-white communities. This was quickly reined in after the war through a new direction in national discourse and policy: assimilation. Australia’s shift to assimilation was influenced by the international spotlight on its racialist policies in the wake of the horrors of Nazi Germany; the post-war humanitarian crisis that saw millions of European war-refugees; and a self-realisation that British migration alone could not account for the levels of repopulation urgently needed both to strengthen Australia’s economy and secure its borders from what it deemed the inevitability of future Asian advancement and aggression. Wanting to conform to the newly established United Nations by giving the appearance that it was anti-racism and pro-refugee, Australia also wished to alleviate domestic fears that the nation-building project (which by the conclusion of World War II had created a country of seven million people of which 98% were white) would not be undone. Subsequently it attempted to placate both international pressure and internal concern by opening its doors to migration beyond Britain yet selecting where possible only those non-British Europeans that closely resembled the “white” Australia carefully socially engineered over the five previous decades.

Initially non-British European migration was received relatively well in

Australia following the arrival of those ships which gave passage predominantly to

9 Close-Barry and Stead, “Remembering Australia’s Wars: Hangings of Papua New Guineans by Australian Soldiers in WWII Complicate Our National Narratives.”

76 migrants from the Baltic States, but the increased arrival of “darker” southern

Europeans from Greece and Italy in the 1950s designed to accelerate Australia’s population goals caused increasing concern about the nation-building project.

Proactively the Australian government set out to ease such anxieties by inscribing

“British” culture as “Australian” through the idea of assimilation, and by continuing its hard-line refusal of entry to and expulsion of non-European peoples on the basis of their assumed inability to assimilate. Anna Haebich argues that assimilation was designed to “translate the vision of a modern racially harmonious nation into a lived reality”;10 while Stephenson adds that it was institutionalised to

“contain the threat of mass migration, and to reassert the primacy of core (white)

Australian values”.11 Assimilation was extended to Aboriginal Australians and

Australia’s pre-World-War-II non-white communities in light of the global denunciation of scientific racism and natural extinction following the defeat of

Nazi Germany, thus bringing a gradual end to protectionist policies of segregation and confinement; it championed inclusion, equal opportunity and advancement of all non-white European peoples through their renunciation of identity and culture, particularly language. Assimilation was a continuation of previous White Australia racialist policies, albeit in the form of cultural and not biological determinism, and became a way of protecting Australia’s whiteness and hierarchy of belonging through positioning the Anglo-Australian way of living as “normal, neutral, and desirable”.12

After World War II Torres Strait Islanders were fuelled with optimism following their granting of Australian citizenship alongside Aboriginal Australians via the 1948 Nationality and Citizenship Act (the moment in which Australians were

10 Haebich, “Imagining Assimilation,” 62. 11 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 118. 12 Haebich, “Imagining Assimilation,” 63.

77 no longer defined as British subjects); and by federal and state government’s promises of “unrestricted movement, better wages, houses, education, jobs and services . . . in return for their support of the Australian war effort”.13 Yet while assimilation put an end to overt segregation it largely reproduced the strict government control since Federation. Torres Strait Islanders continued to be subject to the 1939 Torres Strait Islanders Act which despite providing legislative distinction from Aboriginal Australians, for the most part replicated the 1897

Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act. Travel and migration restrictions, however, were loosened, although permits were required. Those who travelled without a permit were “often exiled and denied permission to return” to their families and homelands.14 Three distinct migrations took place simultaneously: two to the Australian mainland and one to the Strait’s administrative centre of Thursday Island (Waiben). In the two migrations to the mainland, the first saw families from Saibai impacted by damage from a series of king tides in 1947 resettle in abandoned World War II army facilities at Island

Point on Cape York. Transformed by the Queensland Government in 1948 to a

Torres Strait Island-specific reserve, two distinct settlements, and Seisia, formed on the reserve as a result of more families arriving from Saibai during the

1950s and 1960s. The second was Australia-wide and male-dominated, facilitated by a dramatic decline in the Torres Strait Island marine industries along with labour shortages in Queensland’s sugar and rail-construction industries and Western

Australian rail-construction industries; they were also motivated by a desire to live

13 Shnukal, “Language Diversity, Pan-Islander Identity and ‘national’ Identity in Torres Strait,” 115. 14 Nakata, “Commonsense, Colonialism and Government,” 171.

78 free of island reserves and of the 1939 Act, which Shino Konishi and Leah Lui-

Chivizhe state “did not make any provisions for Islanders living on the mainland”.15

Dissatisfied with their lack of rights, freedoms and social services (and in the context of what they were being forced to give up in the name of assimilation, specifically indigenous languages),16 Torres Strait Islanders (both those on the islands and on the mainland) again protested seeking change. Insisting that federal governance was required for real change to take place, Torres Strait Islanders in the 1960s strategically attached themselves to the growing Aboriginal Australian protest movement, spearheaded by the Federal Council for Aboriginal

Advancement (FCAA), a group established in 1958 out of the Australian Aborigines’

League. The FCAA gained confidence and from the broader civil and indigenous rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s and vehemently opposed the discourse and policies of assimilation. In imagining a “seamless, unproblematic and inevitable passage from a receding Aboriginal past to an assimilated present of modern suburban domestic life”,17 assimilation replicated that past by continuing the removal of Aboriginal Australian children from their families, and the separation of Aboriginal Australians from white Australians in hospitals and theatres as well as their banning from public schools, bars and recreational areas.

The FCAA demanded integration and self-determination, constitutional change, full voting rights (both federal and state) and land rights. It was renamed the

Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders

(FCAATSI) in 1964 as a result of Torres Strait Islander representation on the

Council.

15 Konishi and Lui-Chivizhe, “Working for the Railways: Torres Strait Islander and Mobility in the 1960s,” 449. 16 Shnukal, “Language Diversity, Pan-Islander Identity and ‘national’ Identity in Torres Strait,” 115. 17 Haebich, “Imagining Assimilation,” 63.

79 Torres Strait Islanders were accorded federal voting rights in 1962 and

Queensland state voting rights in 1965, the same year as they were placed under the

Queensland Aborigines’ and Torres Strait Islanders’ Affairs Act (1965), thus repealing the 1939 Act. Limited local government powers were given back to Island Councils, but Torres Strait Islanders living on reserves remained wards of the state with no control over individual property and wages, able to be moved from one reserve to another at any time at the state’s discretion.18 In 1967 90.77% of the Australian public voted via referendum in favour of constitutional change to remove the word

“aboriginal” from both section 51 and section 127 of the Australian Constitution, thus enabling the Commonwealth government for the first time to create laws for

Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, as well as count them as part of

Australia’s official population. Yet contrary to popular belief, the 1971 national census was not the first to enumerate Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait

Islanders, as both groups had been counted in some form since the first national census in 1911. In the lead up to that census the Commonwealth had clarified section

127 by stating that all “full blood” and “half-caste” Australian Aboriginals were to be statistically recorded, yet only “half-caste” numbers included within Australia’s official population.19 Torres Strait Islander population numbers for Australia’s first three censuses (1911, 1921, and 1933) were recorded under the racial category of

“Australian Aboriginals”; this shifted in the 1947 census when they were counted as

“Polynesian”, followed by 1954 and 1961 categorisations as “Pacific Islander”. This again emphasises the continued contradictions and confusions in the defining of

Torres Strait Islanders within the Australian nation.

18 Donovan, The Reality of A Dark History: From Contact and Conflict to Cultural Recognition, 252-254. 19 Arcioni, “Excluding From ‘The People’: A Reconsideration of Sections 25 and 127 of the Constitution.”

80 Australian South Sea Islanders also aligned themselves with the growing

Aboriginal Australian rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s; despite increased mobility and access to employment, they still found themselves facing many discriminatory from a white population that did not distinguish them from

Aboriginal Australians and/or Torres Strait Islanders. Leading the activist charge for Australian South Sea Islanders was (née Ida Lessing Faith

Mussing). Bandler grew up in northern New South Wales during the 1920s and

1930s as the daughter of a South Sea Island indentured labourer20 and had a brother (Edward Mussing) killed in service for Australia in Burma during World

War II. Following her own stint in the Australian Women’s Land Army alongside her sister Kath during World War II, Bandler lived in Sydney and became increasingly politically active, not only in response to the cause of Australian South

Sea Islanders, but also Aboriginal Australians and broader “black” Australia. A member of the Council for Aboriginal Rights from 1951, and a co-founder of the

Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship from 1956, which also included her sister Kath,

Bandler was secretary of the New South Wales branch of FCAATSI from 1962 to

1973. Recruited by Aboriginal Australian leaders for her ability to talk, persuade, lobby and cajole white Australians, Bandler’s role was “pre-eminent” in “turning the tide of public opinion in favour of Aboriginal rights” and constitutional change.21 Included within “Aboriginal-only meetings and deputations”, Bandler’s position reflected a time when “indigenous” was not yet the preferred term, but

“references to ‘Islanders’ were ambiguous” and “the terms ‘Black’ and ‘Aboriginal’ were used interchangeably, in conjunction with the UN-inspired concept of

20 The last of the South Sea Island indentured labourers passed away in the 1960s. See Mercer, “The Survival of a Pacific Islander Population in North Queensland 1900-1940,” 192. 21 Lake, Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist, 119.

81 minorities”.22 Yet when mistaken as Aboriginal Australian, particularly by white

Australians, Bandler “always corrected such misconceptions, proudly pointing to her South Sea Islander heritage”.23 Uninterested in identity politics, Bandler’s participation in the cause was in the search for universal Australian human rights.

While the distinction of Māori from Pacific peoples more broadly, and indeed from all people of colour, operated largely as status quo after World War II, the Māori Australian experience continued to be met with moments of Australian disquiet. Such anxieties were expressed no more publicly than through threats made by the Minister for Immigration, ; in the context of deporting a Tongan women and her two children in 1948 and when asked about a recently settled Māori ex-serviceman who had married an Australian woman, he stated that

“Within the meaning of the Immigration Act, they [Māori and Tongans] are regarded as the same people, and under existing law and practice, such people will not be permitted to settle permanently in Australia”.24 Facing criticism from the

New Zealand government, the Australian Department of Immigration was forced to retract Calwell’s statement, awkwardly repositioning it as an exercise of the

Immigration Minister’s discretion to decline the entry and settlement of any visitor regardless of race or nationality; and emphasising that New Zealand need not be concerned about the position of Māori within Australia.

Although assuring the position of Māori, Australia maintained its hard-line stance on its policy of exclusion of Pacific Island people with New Zealand citizenship or permanent residency, whose numbers were continually increasing.

With all Cook Islanders and Niueans transitioning from British subjects to New

Zealand citizens via the 1948 British Nationality and New Zealand Citizenship Act, New

22 Lake, 122. 23 Lake, 99. 24 Calwell quoted in Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 98.

82 Zealand citizenship was also accorded to all Tokelauans as a result of their annexation by New Zealand from Britain the same year.25 Also swelling this number were those from the islands of Western Samoa,26 Tonga, Fiji, Tuvalu and

French Polynesia who became New Zealand permanent residents and citizens following their recruitment by the New Zealand government during the 1960s to fill largely non-skilled government-controlled labour shortages following economic booms in its industrial and agricultural sectors. Justification for Australian exclusion centred on a perceived inability to assimilate to Australian life. This is most overtly stated by the Australian Department of Immigration in April 1956 in their explanation of why Māori were and Cook Islanders were not eligible to enter

Australia:

The reasons for the distinction between Māoris and Cook Islanders,

despite their common ancestry, is that the latter unlike Māoris, have

not as a people had a long and continuous membership of a

predominantly European community and could not be expected to

assimilate in Australia easily.27

Refusal of entry based on assimilatory factors continued even after the replacing of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act with the 1958 Migration Act which abolished the dictation test and established a universal visa and entry permit system. This was affirmed in the official justifications of the February 1965 refusal of 21-year-old

Cook Island man Nooroa Tuaiti’s entry to Australia. A resident of New Zealand for three years, Tuaiti sailed from New Zealand to Sydney on the Oriental Queen in

25 Tokelau was annexed by Great Britain in 1916. New Zealand administered it on behalf of Britain from 1926 - 1948. 26 Western Samoa, previously a German colony (1900-1914), was administered by New Zealand from 1920 to 1962 first as a League of Nations mandate, and later as a United Nations trust territory. 27 E.L. Charles, Assistance Secretary, Commonwealth Department of Immigration, quoted Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 100.

83 search of work, asserting his belief that as a New Zealand citizen and a British subject he did not need a passport to enter. Reasons for exclusion given by the immigration officer overseeing Tuaiti’s attempted entry centred on both his

“Melanesian” appearance (despite his being Polynesian) and the argument that

Tuaiti’s three years of living in New Zealand were insufficient to prepare him for

“the European way of life” in Australia.28 Despite continued and increasing pressure by New Zealand throughout the late 1960s, Australia refused to end its policy of discrimination against New Zealand Pacific Island peoples.

The situation of Australia’s external Pacific Island territories of Papua, New

Guinea and Nauru, and broader non-New Zealand-affiliated Pacific peoples, remained relatively stable through the 1950s and into the 1960s. Despite the administrative unification of the territories of Papua and New Guinea via the 1945

Papua-New Guinea Provisional Act (later to be the 1949 Papua and New Guinea Act), legal distinctions remained in place. The peoples of the Territory of Papua were accorded Australian citizenship via the 1948 Nationality and Citizenship Act due to their position as British subjects, whereas the peoples of the Territory of New

Guinea were not; for despite the change of their status from a mandate under the

League of Nations to a trust territory under the newly created United Nations, they continued to be deemed not British subjects at birth.29 Their status as Australian

Protected Persons also applied to the peoples of Nauru. While Australian passports were at times given to Australian Protected Persons, this did not equate to citizenship and simply facilitated travel for the few who had the ability to go overseas.30 Whether Australian citizens or Australian Protected Persons, all continued to require permission to enter and reside permanently within

28 E.L. Charles, Assistant Secretary, Commonwealth Department of Immigration, quoted in Hamer, 101. 29 McDermott, “Australian Citizenship and the Independence of Papua New Guinea,” 53–54. 30 McDermott, 61.

84 continental Australia. Permits on arrival were difficult to obtain as the Department of Immigration’s assimilation-framed Australian Citizenship Instructions for indigenous peoples of Papua and New Guinea “gave the Minister the discretion to grant the right of permanent residence to such persons on application if they had been bought up in a European manner, had English as their principal language and were European in outlook”.31 Permanent residency was accorded to all non- indigenous (white) arrivals from Australia’s Territories.

Australia came under mounting pressure from the United Nations to decolonise its Pacific territories, with General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV) and 1541

(XV) of 1960 calling for immediate global action for the elimination of non-self- governing and trust territories, and proposing three ways for territories to free themselves of their colonial status: full independence, integration within another state or “free association” with another state.32 Unwilling to lose the strategic benefits long gained from its administration of Nauru and the newly merged Papua and New Guinea, Australia did its best to ignore the immediate calls of Resolution

1514 (XV) and 1541 (XV), emphasising when challenged not opposition to decolonisation but rather “the right of the colonised to set the pace of political change”.33 Prior to the 1960 United Nations decolonisation Resolutions, Australia’s

Minister for Territories Paul Hasluck had emphasised that indeed it could be some one hundred years before Papua and New Guinea became fit for self-governance.34

When the time was appropriate it was envisaged that the decolonisation of Papua and New Guinea would result in unification with West (Dutch) New Guinea

(formerly a part of the Dutch East Indies from 1824 to 1949), whose independence

31 Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Australian Citizenship Instructions quote in McDermott, 61. 32 Wesley-Smith, “Australia and New Zealand,” 197–98. 33 Wesley-Smith, 198. 34 Wesley-Smith, 197–98.

85 from the Dutch Australia supported. An independent unified New Guinea would act as a close political and economic ally, extending Australia’s geographic security buffer from Asia.35 But in 1962 a newly independent Indonesia (part of the Dutch

East Indies from 1800 to 1949) threatened to use military force to obtain sovereignty of West New Guinea if its Dutch coloniser did not transfer it diplomatically. Fearful of the possible consequences of an Indonesian/Dutch war on its Territory’s border and more significantly of the consequences of Indonesia’s communisation,

Australia (in line with world opinion more broadly) reversed its policy. This led to the New York Agreement of 15 August 1962, which effectively handed colonial control of West Papua to Indonesia without the agreement of its indigenous people.

Economic development dominated Australia’s colonial involvement in

Papua and New Guinea under Minister of Territories , with the issue of decolonisation addressed merely symbolically via the creation of the House of Assembly of Papua and New Guinea in 1964. Replacing the Legislative Council which had been in place since 1951 as a result of the administrative unification of the territories, it problematically reproduced the Australian-dominated representation that the Council established. Australian interests had long controlled Papuan resources and industries such as gold, coffee, copra, rubber and cacao, and this only intensified following a 1964 report by the increasingly influential World Bank, challenging Australia both to be more active and to centralise Papua and New Guinea’s economic development. As a result Australia trebled its annual grant to its territory, totalling almost $100 million by 1970,36 pinpointing mining as the key to Papua and New Guinea’s prosperity. In full knowledge of potential copper and gold deposits on the island of Bougainville that

35 Umetsu, “Australia’s Actions towards Accepting Indonesian Control of Netherlands New Guinea,” 46. 36 Wesley-Smith, “Australia and New Zealand,” 213.

86 could underwrite the entire Papua and New Guinea economy, in 1969 Australia granted Conzinc Riotinto of Australia (CRA) a mining lease on the lands of the indigenous peoples of Bougainville, who did not wish to be part of Papua and New

Guinea or Australia, let alone be told they did not own what was under their soil.

Intensifying Bougainville resistance and demands for independence coincided with calls for sovereignty on mainland Papua New Guinea by a small, emerging, influential western-trained indigenous political elite agitated by Australia’s entrenchment within Papua and New Guinea’s governance and economy. Facing continued international pressure via the United Nations, Australia surveyed its available options to grant either independence, integration or free association.

While understanding that the last two were the most appropriate for its strategic interests, it decided against them, as either would have allowed “Papuans and New

Guineans [2+ million] equal access to federal political institutions, to the social welfare benefits enjoyed by other Australian citizens, and to any part of the

Australian continent”.37 Reluctantly, Australia’s only option was immediate independence and it turned its attention in 1972 to influencing the soon-to-be- independent Papua New Guinea’s Constitutional Planning Committee to ensure that its Constitution did not radically depart from the political structures Australia had set up or jeopardise its economic ventures, a goal it would soon achieve.

In the case of Nauru, Australia (and indeed its co-sharing colonial partners

Britain and New Zealand) did not wish to concede control of the country’s lucrative yet increasingly depleted and finite phosphate deposits, so they lobbied Nauruans to relocate, as the indigenous peoples of Banaba had been persuaded to do from

1945. Relocation options for Nauru’s population of an estimated 6000 centred on mainland and island Australia, with the most serious resettlement option put

37 Wesley-Smith, 199.

87 forward in 1964 being Curtis Island (Aboriginal land of the Gurang peoples), just off the northern Queensland coast.38 Nauruan leaders opposed the proposal, unwilling in particular to accept Australia’s demand that relocation would require Nauruans to become Australian citizens and be subject to Australian governance and laws.

This was non-negotiable, as Australian governance up until this date had continually undermined and disregarded the rights of Nauruan people; this was especially clear in the aftermath of the devastation caused by both the Japanese and United States during World War II, with Australia expediently restoring its mining plant while deferring reconstruction of Nauru’s housing, health care and education.39 Set on securing sovereign independence and supported by the United

Nations, Nauruans demanded a sustainable independent future, in the form of ownership of the country’s phosphate and $A 90 million compensation for the rehabilitation of mine-effected land. Australia, New Zealand and Britain were not united in their views on these demands, but eventually agreed to grant independence to Nauru on 31 January 1968 and reluctantly to sell the assets of the

British Phosphate Commission to the Nauruan people (Nauru Phosphate

Corporation). Compensation for environmental degradation was not agreed upon and never paid.40

38 Wesley-Smith, 218. 39 Pollock, “Nauruans during World War II,” 103. 40 Wesley-Smith, “Australia and New Zealand,” 218–20.

88 5. Multiculturalism, Self-determination and Regional Aid (1973-1996)

The election of a Labor government on 2 December 1972 marked the official dismantling of over seventy years of race-based policy in favour of an ideological shift towards a practical application of the discourses of multiculturalism and self- determination. In addition to impacting on Aboriginal Australian and non-British

European migrant communities, both policies would also significantly affect Pacific peoples in Australia and the island Pacific. In building on the discourse and policies of integration (a sort of proto-multiculturalism that began to replace assimilation from the mid-1960s), multiculturalism as a discourse advocated ethnic pluralism, tolerance and diversity, while legislatively ensuring that the government catered for the interests of a “plurality of different—but equal—cultures”, rather than furthering the interests of one.1 Marking the beginning of a new national narrative, multiculturalism reconfigured the Australian story as one “that begins with a progression from the ‘bad old days’ of the ‘White Australia’, and ends with a triumphalist arrival at an enlightened and culturally diverse Australia”;2 in rhetoric at least, multiculturalism was illustrated by Immigration Minister ’s now famous 1973 Family of the Nation speech which asserted that all Australians “no matter how diverse their origins, beliefs, wealth or ability” possessed an inalienable right to membership in the family of the nation.3 In challenging normative assumptions of what constituted the Australian way of life, by rhetorically asking whether it was “the lifestyle and values of the suburban housewife in Moonee

Ponds” or rather “the Italian travel agent in Carlton, the Turkish car factory worker, the Slavic Orthodox priest, or the Aboriginal in Lake Tyers”, Grassby reimagined the nation as a blend of all ethnicities (a new term to replace race emphasising

1 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 147. 2 Stephenson, 147. 3 Grassby quoted in Stephenson, 160.

89 societal difference as cultural and not biological); he stressed that the “overall attachment to the common good need not impose a sameness on the outlook or activity of each member, nor need these members deny their individuality and distinctiveness in order to seek a superficial and unnatural conformity”.4 With broad bipartisan support from the succeeding governments of

(1975-1983), (1983-1991) and (1991-1996), multiculturalism was discursively inserted into migration, health, welfare and education policies, underpinned by the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act, which outlawed all forms of discrimination on the basis of race and identity.

For all Pacific Island people with New Zealand citizenship and those from

Commonwealth countries living in New Zealand with permanent residency, the new multicultural Australia brought to an end over 70 years of exclusion from the

Australian nation. This was made possible via amendments to Australia’s long- standing special immigration relationship with New Zealand, enabling from 15

March 1973 under the newly named Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement (TTTA) passport-free entry into Australia for an indefinite period for all New Zealand citizens and citizens of Commonwealth countries living in New Zealand with permanent residency. Significantly, accompanying although not officially connected to the TTTA legislation, were bi-lateral agreements ensuring on-arrival access to many of the social services accorded to citizens and Commonwealth- affiliated permanent residents of the respective countries as well as voting rights.

Introduced at a time when the livelihoods of many New Zealanders were increasingly uncertain due to sweeping reforms of the New Zealand economy through privatisation resulting in the loss of thousands of jobs – predominantly in the manufacturing industry which employed the majority of New Zealand’s Pacific

4 Grassby quoted in Stephenson, 160.

90 Island and Māori workforce - the opportunities presented by the successful economies of Australia’s eastern states, coupled with access to welfare and social services, life-style factors and the introduction of affordable air-travel, enticed many New Zealanders to migrate to Australia (mainly Sydney and Brisbane).

Australia’s almost non-existent Samoan, Tongan and Cook Island-born populations increased from a combined total of less than 1500 in 1976 to an estimated 20,000 by 1996, and its Māori population increased from a minimum 862 in 1966 to somewhere closer to 60,000 in 1996.5 The total New Zealand-born population in Australia increased from 52,485 in 1966 to 291,388 in 1996.6

This was “the high-water mark in the history of access to and rights in

Australia for New Zealand citizens”;7 both Māori and New Zealand Pacific Island peoples soon became a central yet not formally stated reason for growing

Australian resentment towards the TTTA and a range of other Australian-New

Zealand bilateral social security and voting policies. Through to 1996 Australia made a series of unilateral changes including the requirement from July 1981 for all citizens from either country to carry a passport when travelling between New

Zealand and Australia; the exclusion of New Zealand permanent residents from

Commonwealth countries from the TTTA; the removal in 1984 of the right of New

Zealand citizens residing in Australia to vote in Australian federal elections unless they were Australian citizens or had registered prior to 25 January 1984 (the states and territories soon followed); the creation in 1986 of a six-month stand-down period upon arrival into Australia for New Zealand citizens wishing to utilise the

5 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “1976 Census of Population and Housing, Australia”; Hamer, “Māori in Australia: An Update from the 2011 Australian Census and the 2011 New Zealand General Election,” 2. 6 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “1966 Census of Population and Housing, Australia”; Australian Bureau of Statistics, “1996 Census of Population and Housing.” 7 Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 106.

91 Australian welfare system; and the establishment in September 1994 of a Special

Category Visa (sub-class 444) (SCV) which transitioned New Zealand citizens living in Australia from exempt non-citizens with permanent residency to SCV holders without permanent residency but still able to reside in Australia indefinitely, access the same social security as Australian permanent residents and Australian citizens, and sponsor non-New Zealand family members for a permanent visa.8

Grounds for such changes were officially explained via contradictory economic arguments, which simultaneously accused New Zealand of exporting an unemployment problem all too willing to “sponge off the generous and unwitting

Australian taxpayer”, while “displacing locals in the labour market . . . steal[ing]

‘Aussie jobs’”.9 An ideological split saw members of the Australian Liberal Party and its supporters most vocally expressing the argument of New Zealanders rorting

Australia’s welfare system, while constituents and supporters of the Australian

Labor Party (including unions) pushed the case that New Zealanders were unfairly putting Australians out of Australian jobs. So for example, the Liberal MP and future Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer, claimed in 1986 that pregnant single New Zealand women were travelling to Australia to give birth before returning to New Zealand just so they could live off the welfare benefits for parents of Australian-born children, and a 1988 Liberal Party survey stated that

“hostility towards Kiwi dole bludgers ‘romped in’ as the issue of greatest concern to

Queensland voters”.10 In 1992 Labor MP and former Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and also Immigration, Local Government, and Ethnic Affairs, , declared that the TTTA was “an anachronistic hangover” and that the New

8 See Faulkner, “The Unequal Treatment of New Zealanders in Australia” for more in-depth insight into the complexities and problems of the Special Category Visa (sub-class 444) (SCV). 9 Mares, “New Zealand’s ‘Bondi Bludger’ and Other Australian Myths.” 10 Mares.

92 Zealanders being employed in “close to 190,000 jobs . . . should go back to work in

New Zealand [and leave] jobs in Australia for Australians”.11

Unofficially, however, issues of race were at the centre of change. New

Zealand Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, pointed out to Australia in 1973 that the total number of New Zealand Pacific Island people eligible to utilise the new bi-lateral agreements was minimal in relation to the total population, but also reassured it that most of those entitled “had roots in New Zealand, and an affinity for

Polynesian society”, thus were similar to Māori.12 During the 1970s there were sporadic instances of raids conducted on New Zealand Pacific Island peoples recently arrived in Australia and suspected of illegal entry or overstaying;13

Australia publicly expressed concern at the London Privy Council’s decision in 1981 to accord New Zealand citizenship to all Western born between 1924 and

1948 and their descendants (more than 100,000 people), a decision controversially ignored by the New Zealand government to the relief of Australia;14 and former

New Zealand National MP Anthony “Aussie” Malcolm, responsible for New

Zealand immigration between 1977 and 1984, stated that Australian ministerial counterparts had told him that reservations about bilateral immigration and social security arrangements with New Zealand were specifically in reference to Māori and Pacific Island immigrants.15 These examples illustrate that Australian policy changes were as much about the type (“race”) of New Zealanders entering Australia as about the numbers (“economic”). And although the changes complied with multicultural Australia’s 1975 Racial Discrimination Act as they technically applied to all New Zealanders, the specifics of the changes (for example, extended stand-

11 Holding quoted in Mares. 12 Kirk quoted in Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 107. 13 Hamer, 108. 14 Hamer, 109. 15 Hamer, 109.

93 down periods for social security access and denying the vote) set out to deter New

Zealand citizens of lower-socio-economic status from migrating to Australia, many of whom belonged to New Zealand’s Pacific Island and Māori populations.

Australia also refused to replicate on its own territory New Zealand’s

Pacific-Island-specific immigration and residency agreements. There were no special arrangements even with its former colony of Nauru, and when Papua New

Guinea gained independence on 16 September 1975 all Papuans with Australian citizenship were stripped of it. Entry to Australia was only possible through a small number of specific schemes such as educational scholarships for higher-degree study, for religious engagements and with family reunion visas. Fiji’s first Prime

Minister Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara in 1971 labelled as “racist” Australia’s refusal to approve a temporary Guest Worker Scheme for Pacific workers.16 Successive

Australian Parliamentary enquiries on the region produced reports in 1978 and 1989 which rejected Pacific Guest Worker Schemes on the basis that “the skills workers would gain may not be useful in the Pacific, along with (un-named) social problems such a scheme would cause in the Pacific, the vehement opposition of trade unions and the high potential for Islanders overstaying their visas”.17 Arguing that it was not a reincarnation of its racialist past but instead a true reflection of multiculturalism and racial equality, defenders of the Australian immigration policy claimed that it did not preference people of specific countries (apart from its historical obligation to New Zealand) or race.18

Australia’s blunt opposition to Pacific-Island-specific immigration policies was a continuation of its non-reciprocal relationship with its regional partners; it

16 Mara quoted in Connell, “‘Emigration from the South Pacific: An Australian Perspective.’ In Immigration: A Commitment to Australia.” 17 Rose, Quanchi, and Moore, A National Strategy for the Study of the Pacific, 90. 18 Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 110.

94 wished to exercise influence and control decisions made by its former colonial territories and its Pacific neighbours more broadly, motivated by economic and security interests for itself and its allies. The Australia, New Zealand, United States

Security Treaty (ANZUS) of 1951 had solidified the United States as Australia’s key global ally; during the period of Pacific decolonisation and Cold War hostility between the 1970s and 1980s Australian policy on the region became one of

“strategic denial”. Designed to halt the encroachment of the Soviet Union into the

Pacific, strategic denial centred on giving significant financial aid to newly independent Pacific Island countries that were now, as Stewart Firth asserts, “free to make their own decision about friends and enemies”.19 The mechanism for this was the Whitlam government’s establishment in 1974 of Australia’s first international aid agency - the Australian Development Assistance Agency, later renamed AusAID. Pacific Island peoples collectively and rapidly became recipients of the greatest amounts of aid per capita in the world, thanks largely to Australia.20

The only exception was Nauru, whose government from the time of its independence through to the 1990s was the sole owner of the Nauru Phosphate

Corporation and which became briefly one of the wealthiest countries in the world.21

Intergovernmental regionalism also became an effective mechanism for asserting political control over the region more broadly. Australia is not only the principal funder of individual nations but also of the regional South Pacific Forum, established in 1971 and renamed the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in 1999. Since this intergovernmental organisation was intended in part to facilitate Pacific countries’

19 Firth, “Strategic and Nuclear Issues,” 308. 20 Firth, 308. 21 Nauruan diets were significantly transformed as a result, contributing to widespread obesity and diabetes. In 1981 40% of Nauru’s population had been diagnosed with noninsulin dependent diabetes mellitus. See Pollock, “Nauruans during World War II.”

95 independence from their former colonial powers, the inclusion of Australia and

New Zealand in the PIF was controversial; and it continues to be so, given

Australia’s preoccupation with the maintenance of the PIF as a means to secure its national objectives in the region as opposed to concern with its institutional efficiency.22

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Pacific’s strategic importance dwindled along with United States interest in the region; this created a power vacuum which Australia believed it should fill. But there was also a new threat to the region, no longer external but “internal in origin—in the form of political instability in the island states”:23 there had been unrest in New Caledonia in 1984-1985; in Fiji in 1987; in Vanuatu in 1988; and ongoing violence in

Bougainville from late 1988, the result of intensifying protest at Papuan New

Guinea rule and the land and resources taken by the majority-Australian-owned

Panguna copper mine. The Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Gareth Evans, suggested direct Australian military force in 1989 to put an end to current and future unrest in the region. This was a direct contradiction of Australia’s new regional policy of “constructive commitment” which in 1988 replaced its Cold War era policy of “strategic denial”. Emphasising “regional partnership, not dominance”,24 it was to signify a new beginning for Australia’s engagement in the wake of its direct and indirect implication in the regional unrest; lawsuits were also lodged against the Australian government or companies by the peoples of

Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) in 1971, Banaba (Kiribati) in 1976, Nauru in 1989 and Ok Tedi (Papua New Guinea) in 1996. In acknowledging that the one-size-fits- all and Australia-knows-best nature of its strategic denial approach had failed to

22 Herr, “Regionalism and Nationalism,” 288. 23 Firth, “Strategic and Nuclear Issues,” 309. 24 Evans and Grant, Australia’s Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s, 31–32 quoted in Peebles, Pacific Regional Order, 48.

96 create independent nations in the image of the west and thus to secure the Pacific it had envisaged,25 constructive commitment offered more respect for the sovereignty, complexity and difference of the countries and peoples within the region.

In 1993 the Keating Labor government created Australia’s first Pacific- specific Ministry of Development Cooperation and Pacific Island Affairs, led by

Gordon Bilney. Australia’s constructive commitment, however, was further contradicted not only by individual bilateral clashes which led to events such as

Vanuatu’s expulsion of its Australian High Commissioner in 1992, but from 1993,

Fry claims, by an emerging neo-colonial “doomsdayism” discourse, informed by

World Bank neoliberal economics, which asserted that the region was “on a path to a future nightmare of overcrowding, poverty, mass unemployment, serious environmental degradation, and a decline in health standards” if Pacific Island countries did not aggressively “open economies to the global market, effect structural change, jettison where necessary customary land tenure and inappropriate traditions, and connect with the dynamism of Asia”.26 As a result, the continuation of Australian aid to now heavily-aid-dependent Pacific Island countries and funding of the PIF transitioned from the unconditional largesse of the Cold War era and became tied to fulfilment of the new policies. This hardened into a “them and us” discourse, once again disconnecting Australia from the region

(despite the fact that Australia was experiencing the same problems assumed to be crippling the Pacific Islands at the time).

Papua New Guinea’s independence in 1975 came to have an important impact on Torres Strait Islanders as it ignited discussions between Australia and

25 Firth, “Strategic and Nuclear Issues,” 309. 26 Fry, “Framing the Islands: Knowledge and Power in Changing Australian Images of ‘the South Pacific,’” 306.

97 Papua New Guinea about whether changes should be made to their borders in the

Torres Strait. In a “demonstration of good will” the Whitlam government proposed to accept Papua New Guinea’s formal request for the border to be shifted to “the more ‘equitable’ line of the 10 degree parallel”.27 As most Torres Strait Islands were above this line, Whitlam’s offer drew strong opposition from the people of the affected islands who, while they acknowledged strong kinship ties to the coastal peoples of Papua New Guinea, argued that “contemporary Torres Strait Islanders were now the product of many generations of separate historical, political, cultural, economic and linguistic development”.28 Furthermore, Whitlam’s proposal was in direct contradiction to his government’s advocacy for Aboriginal Australian and

Torres Strait Islander self-determination, which centred on acknowledging and according self-governance and land rights, and this position was supported strongly by Torres Strait Islanders, 50% of whom by the mid-1970s had left their island homes for either mainland Australia or the Torres Strait Island’s administrative centre of Waiben (Thursday Island). A grassroots Torres Strait

Islander Border Action Committee was formed, bringing the issue into the national media. With the Queensland government supporting the Torres Strait Islander position,29 the Australian government was forced to negotiate with the Papua New

Guinea government a treaty “recognising Australian sovereignty over islands and cays traditionally owned by Islanders”.30 Signed in 1978 but not enacted until 1985, the Torres Strait Treaty also established a Protected Zone stretching from latitudes

9° south to 10°30’ south, allowing all coastal Papuans and Torres Strait Islanders

27 Shnukal, “Language Diversity, Pan-Islander Identity and ‘national’ Identity in Torres Strait,” 116. 28 Shnukal, 117. 29 Queensland state government’s undisclosed motives for support were later Nakata found out to centre on – “its interest in the potential of sea-bed mining (including oil deposits) in the region”. Nakata, “Commonsense, Colonialism and Government,” 175. 30 Shnukal, “Language Diversity, Pan-Islander Identity and ‘national’ Identity in Torres Strait,” 117.

98 residing within it passport- and visa-free movement for traditional activities and the maintenance of historical kinships.

The border issue of the 1970s, irrespective of the final outcome, left many

Torres Strait Islanders disillusioned with federal governance, which they had fought hard for in the decade leading up to the 1967 referendum. The symbolic exclusion of Torres Strait Islanders from the title of Whitlam’s newly established

Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs and National Aboriginal

Consultative Committee (despite them having representation on both bodies) was also disheartening; but most significant was a perceived federal bias “towards policies formulated for and by Aborigines which [did] not recognise the quite different position of Torres Strait Islanders”.31 The federal government’s power to make laws for Torres Strait Islanders, however, forced a reluctant Queensland government to abolish the last of its Torres Strait Island-specific protection policies. Queensland’s 1971 Torres Strait Islanders Act and its 1974 amendment (which repealed the 1965 Aborigines’ and Torres Strait Islanders’ Affairs Act) still legislated for state management of property owned by Torres Strait Islanders residing on reserves, unless an individual lodged a formal request otherwise; and maintained control over who was allowed to reside on or visit a reserve. The federal government passed the 1975 Torres Strait Islanders (Discriminatory Laws) Act to override such policies, causing significant tension between the Queensland state and the federal government.32 Queensland itself eventually removed all reference to these laws when it brought Torres Strait Islanders under yet another act in 1984, titled the Community Services (Torres Strait) Act. Promoted as the first non- protectionist Act, it granted increased yet still limited local government powers to

31 Scott, “Torres Strait Independence: A Historical Perspective,” 13–14 quoted in Kehoe-Forutan, “Turning Succession into Self-Governance in the Torres Strait,” 182. 32 Donovan, The Reality of A Dark History: From Contact and Conflict to Cultural Recognition, 258-260.

99 Island Councils, while establishing an Island Coordinating Council to help administer broader regional governance in dialogue with the state. At the same time the Queensland government began transforming former Torres Strait Island government reserves (island and mainland) into Deeds of Grant in Trust (DOGIT).

DOGIT land was granted by the state to Torres Strait Islanders collectively “in fee simple in trust”. Placed in the trusteeship of Island Councils, the DOGIT initiative was a watered-down form of land rights. It allowed Torres Strait Islanders to make decisions and undertake actions in regard to the management and use of DOGIT land, but did not allow its sale nor grant ownership rights over minerals, petroleum and forests on DOGIT land. The Queensland government at any time could surrender, cancel or compulsorily acquire DOGIT land.33

The unwillingness of both the Queensland state and Australian federal governments to provide the self-governance and full land rights sought by Torres

Strait Islanders throughout the 1970s and 1980s ignited a Torres Strait Island nationalist identity. Those Torres Strait Islanders on mainland Queensland were more exposed than their island kin to the political discourses of self-determination and land rights articulated by Aboriginal Australians and Australian South Sea

Islanders, and the concurrent decolonisation efforts of their Pacific Island neighbours. Expressing itself “in calls for political separation and independent management of . . . ancestral lands and sea territories and in an increasing array of national symbols”,34 articulations of Torres Strait Island nationalism from 1976 to

1992 include the 1976 formation of the Torres United Party in by mainland Torres Strait Islanders Carlemo Wacando and James Akee; its subsequent submission to the United Nation Special Committee of Twenty-Four

33 Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines, “Leasing Torres Strait Islander Deed of Grant in Trust Land: A Manual for Trustees,” 1. 34 Shnukal, “Language Diversity, Pan-Islander Identity and ‘national’ Identity in Torres Strait,” 113.

100 on Decolonisation requesting an inquiry “into an Islander case for sovereign status as a separate nation”;35 Eddie Koiki Mabo’s parallel yet differing 1976 call at a

Whitlam-led Border Treaty meeting for the Torres Strait Islands to have an autonomous status within Australia;36 and Mabo’s refusal throughout the 1980s and early 1990s to accept land rights granted in the form of the DOGIT system. In 1987

Magani Malu Kes (People of the Torres Strait Water), a mainland Torres Strait

Island organisation, was established to “assert and obtain recognition for a separate

Torres Strait Islander identity and negotiate separate dealings from Aborigines with the federal government”;37 in 1987 and 1988 members of the Island

Coordinating Council sought an arrangement with the federal government to give

Torres Strait Islanders a similar political status to that of Australia’s trust territory, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands; and in 1992 a Torres Strait Island flag was created, and given legal recognition by the Australian Federal Government in 1994 and the status of a “” in 1995.

Undoubtedly the most important process in these decades of Torres Strait

Islander political and legal activism was the Mabo case. Asserting that the land and resources of his home island Mer (Murray Island) were not the government’s to grant via the DOGIT system, Eddie Koiki Mabo sought a declaration from the High

Court of Australia that the annexation of Mer by the Queensland government in

1879 had not extinguished native title in respect of its lands and waters, challenging the notion of terra nullius and the acquisition of all land in Australia by the Crown since British arrival. The historic 1992 Mabo and others v Queensland (No 2)

35 Sharp, “Torres Strait Islanders’ Case for Independence: Underlying Issues,” 3 quoted in Kehoe- Forutan, “Turning Succession into Self-Governance in the Torres Strait,” 177. Wacando also submitted a legal challenge of the Queensland government’s 1879 annexation of his home island of Erub (Darnley Island). 36 Stratton, “Two Rescues, One History: Everyday Racism in Australia,” 677. 37 Scott, “Torres Strait Independence: A Historical Perspective,” 14 quoted in Kehoe-Forutan, “Turning Succession into Self-Governance in the Torres Strait,” 180.

101 judgement of the Australian High Court recognised for the first time that native title had survived annexation by the Queensland government, rejected the doctrine of terra nullius and determined that native title to land was protected by common law. Given that the Torres Strait Islander activism of this period was to some degree formed to gain same but different rights from those claimed by Australian

Aboriginals, it is important to emphasise that the Mabo decision applied to all

Australian land, and has been hailed as the most significant victory for Australia’s

Indigenous peoples in the twentieth century.

Not all programs were unanimously supported: Torres Strait Islanders held a range of views, with some harbouring strong attachments to the nation (Australia) and or even the crown (royalists) before their own family, island or pan-Torres

Strait Islander identities.38 And even when there were shared goals there were differences of method, ranging from long-utilised island-based tactics of negotiation and patience to the assertive and radical demands of mainland activists. The latter groups were sometimes resented by their island kin for wanting to make all decisions affecting the Torres Strait Islands yet unwilling to return home during tough times.39 Such points of difference were overtly expressed during Expo 88, the largest event of Australia’s 1988 Bicentennial celebrations, when Torres Strait Island protest and celebratory performance were simultaneously on display to the nation and the world.40 Yet individual and collective Torres Strait Islander action during the 1970s and 1980s was successful in putting the Torres Strait Islands on the political and media agenda both nationally and internationally and in forcing substantial state and federal political concessions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The two most significant

38 Kehoe-Forutan, “Turning Succession into Self-Governance in the Torres Strait,” 184. 39 Kehoe-Forutan, 184–86. 40 Kehoe-Forutan, 186.

102 developments at a Federal level were the creation of the 1993 Native Title Act, forming a Native Title Tribunal to “make decisions, conduct inquiries, reviews and mediations, and assist various parties with native title applications;”41 and the establishment of the Torres Strait Regional Council (TSRA) in 1994, the first Torres

Strait Islander-specific Commonwealth representative body, and part of the

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) set up by the in 1990 as a cornerstone of self-determination designed to give

Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders community-elected representation within the decision-making processes of their affairs.

In the same period Australian South Sea Islanders, excluded from the discourse and policies of self-determination, were fighting for recognition and rights within the Australian nation, things they thought they had gained previously as a result of political activism undertaken with Aboriginal Australians and Torres

Strait Islanders during the 1960s in a movement of collective black rights. But they were not included in subsequent rights and assistance given by the federal government to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders: Lake contends that this omission emphasised to Australian South Sea Islanders that “Black Power meant not the empowerment of Blacks in general . . . but recognition of the special status of Indigenous Australians”.42 The new dichotomy of indigenous and non- indigenous, in which “culture, not colour, formed the basis of the new politics of emancipation”, disrupted previous conflations of “Blackness and Indigeneity”.43

Australian South Sea Islander leaders such as Faith Bandler, who thought of

Australia as home to “three Black minorities”, were caught unaware of “the

41 Anti-Discrimination Commission Queensland, “Torres Strait Islander People in Queensland: A Brief Human Rights History,” 52. 42 Lake, Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist, 156. 43 Lake, 157.

103 centrality of Indigeneity to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ claims”.44

Excluded also from the discourse and policies of multiculturalism directed at recent migrants, Australian South Sea Islanders resorted to claiming the services and financial assistance accorded to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait

Islanders at state and federal level by ironically having to “disavow their identity at the very time other ethnic minorities were being encouraged to retain theirs”.45

Australian South Sea Island responses were various and constant, appealing to the Commonwealth for official recognition as a culturally distinct and discriminated against Australian community which deserved urgent social assistance, particularly in the areas of housing, education, health and legal services, but also representation within the decision-making processes of government. Early lobbying at a group level came via the Australian South Sea Islanders United

Council (ASSIUC), founded in 1972 by Robert and Phyllis in Tweed Heads,

New South Wales, with later branches established throughout northern New South

Wales and coastal Queensland in 1974, and the first national ASSIUC conference held in Mackay in May 1975. Individual actions again came from Faith Bandler, who was initially associated with ASSIUC but distanced herself from growing internal politics, preferring to use her now public profile to focus on “approaching political leaders on a personal level and writing submissions”.46 In response to Bandler’s activism, the Whitlam Labor government in August 1975 established an

Interdepartmental Committee to table a report based on the following terms of reference:

1. To estimate the numbers of South Sea Islanders in Australia and

examine their demographic distribution.

44 Lake, 167. 45 Lake, 173. 46 Lake, 166.

104 2. To assess the economic and local characteristics of the Islanders

and to decide if they are in any way disadvantaged as a group,

relative to other groups in the Australian community.

3. To evaluate their special needs if any, and to recommend

appropriate forms of government assistance to meet their

needs.47

Despite the incoming Fraser government’s commitment to seeing through the report published in 1977, it ignored its findings, which stated that 37% of Australian South Sea Islanders lived below the poverty line and a further 12% lived close to it (in comparison to a national average of 12.5%). The government saw no need to include Australian South Sea Islanders in Indigenous policy and service delivery, nor to establish Australian South Sea Island-specific policies, services and funding. C. Moore and Mercer argue that the reasons centred on the legal definitions of Indigeneity, and the precedents that could be set for other immigrant groups.48 The same year the Fraser government rejected the recommendations of

The Royal Commission on Human Relationships Report, for which Bandler had written a submission on behalf of all Australian South Sea Islanders. In a sub-section under the title “Aboriginals” (and not “Migrants”), the report concluded:

South Sea Islanders suffer many of the disadvantages which affect

Aboriginals. They are regarded by white peoples as if they were

Aboriginals with all that this implies in terms of discriminatory

attitudes . . . action should be taken to extend to them eligibility for

benefits now available to Aboriginals.49

47 Lake, 166. 48 Moore and Mercer, “The Forgotten Immigrants: Australia’s South Sea Islanders, 1906-1993,” 234– 35. 49 Evatt, Arnott, and Deveson, “Royal Commission on Human Relationships: Final Report, Volume 5,” 81.

105 Simultaneously and paradoxically, Australian South Sea Islanders were in

November 1975 recognised by the Queensland government as a “distinct ” and accorded a place within its Aboriginal and Islander Commission the following year via the appointment of Noel Fatnowna as a Special Commissioner for Pacific Islanders.50 Yet with Fatnowna resigning in 1983, disillusioned with “the

State government’s machinations”, the position was left unfilled and the following year Australian South Sea Islanders were excluded from the Commission’s reincarnation, the Aboriginal Co-ordinating Council.51 This was changed once again in 1988 when Australian South Sea Islanders were given full access to programs offered by the Queensland Department of Community Services, which at the time primarily provided for the specific needs of Aboriginal Australians and

Torres Strait Islanders – a decision which brought resentment from the respective communities, concerned that “Islanders were consuming resources that should only have been for Indigenous Australians”.52

Despite all the changes at a state level, federally Australian South Sea Island exclusion remained a constant throughout the 1980s. Yet so too did the work of

Bandler despite the demise of ASSICU. Contending that issues of money and power lay behind the lack of support from the Aboriginal Australian and Torres

Strait Island communities, Bandler never give up her own long-time support of their grievances, nor held them responsible for the plight of Australian South Sea

Islanders; she emphasised that state and federal governments were solely accountable for such injustices.53 Bandler’s position as vice president of the Evatt

Foundation, a non-profit educational and research institution, led to it sponsoring a research project to document the contemporary plight of Australian South Sea

50 Moore and Mercer, “The Forgotten Immigrants: Australia’s South Sea Islanders, 1906-1993,” 236. 51 Moore and Mercer, 236. 52 Rose, Quanchi, and Moore, A National Strategy for the Study of the Pacific, 96. 53 Lake, Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist, 182.

106 Islanders and to historicise the roots of Australian South Sea Islander disadvantage and exclusion. Released in 1991 and titled Australian South Sea Islanders: a Report on the Current Status of South Sea Islanders in Australia, the report made emphatic linkages among Aboriginal Australian, Torres Strait Island and Australian South

Sea Island histories through shared experience of forced removal from land and culture. This is the context in which Bandler began “to construe the South Sea

Islanders in new terms, as a ‘dispossessed’ people, reflecting the change in discourse in Aboriginal Affairs”.54 The report gained the support of trade unions, and was commended to both state and Commonwealth governments by members of the Legislative Council and the president of the Law Reform Commission; its publicity led not only to a reactivation of the dormant ASSICU but also to the

Commonwealth government’s decision to refer the report to the Human Rights and

Equal Opportunity Commission, who would then produce their own findings to the government. Titled A Call for Recognition, the report tabled in the federal parliament in May 1993 affirmed the findings of the Evatt Foundation report. In

1994 the Commonwealth Government officially recognised the estimated 10,000 to

20,000 Australian South Sea Islanders as a distinct cultural group of Australia which faced systemic disadvantage, and also announced Australian South Sea

Islander-specific funding and services.55

54 Lake, 183. 55 Moore and Mercer, “The Forgotten Immigrants: Australia’s South Sea Islanders, 1906-1993,” 239.

107 6. Pacific Migration to Australia (1996-2015)

The policies of multiculturalism and self-determination implemented from the election of the Whitlam government in 1972 to the end of the in 1996 largely privileged symbolic as opposed to practical structural change. This reflected a state that positioned itself as the neutral arbiter of a diverse range of equal cultures while implementing a core-periphery model with Anglo-Celtic culture at the core and a plurality of ethnicities and indigeneity on the subordinate periphery.1 These forms of multiculturalism and self-determination allowed enough cultural difference to be expressed by individuals and groups and claimed by the nation, so that “the omnipotence of white Australianness” would be neither acknowledged nor challenged.2 The celebration of lifestyles in the private domain

(cuisine, dance, song, clothing) masked the status quo of scarce non-Anglo-Celtic

“life chances in the public domain”.3 Yet even in the celebration of cultural difference and its enrichment of Anglo-Australian monoculturalism, “ethnic” and

“indigenous” culture was highjacked and represented by the dominant Anglo-

Celtic culture as static and homogenous “as if neither race, class, sexuality nor gender difference characterised these groups”, where in reality each was dynamic and redefined by each generation.4 Additionally Ghassan Hage points out that both were problematically seen in isolation from one another, with Aboriginal

Australians thought of as “totally unaffected by multiculturalism” and “ethnics” as having “no Aboriginal question about which to worry”.5

1 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 147; Stratton, Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia, 12. 2 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 147. 3 Stephenson, 161; Jayasuriya, “Australian Multiculturalism in Crisis: Towards a New Paradigm,” 7. 4 Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 162. 5 Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, 24 quoted in Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 5.

108 In 1996 the newly-elected Liberal Coalition government problematised both discourses but for ideologically different reasons. Deploying a discourse of Anglo-grievance, it saw multiculturalism and self-determination as privileging minority groups (migrant and indigenous) at the expense of the

“everyday Australian” (the Anglo-Celtic). At odds with the egalitarian values of

Australian society, both discourses created a culture of shame and an erasure of the nation’s British roots in their assertion of the birth of a “new Australia”. Howard vocalised his concerns as early as 1988 when leader of the opposition, via the release of the Liberal party’s , One Nation and One Future policy.

Outlining its position on multiculturalism (including immigration) and self- determination in relation to Australian nationalism, the document explicitly stated that “cultural and racial diversity, as well as the provision or allowance for such difference in policy was inimical or anathema to national unity”.6 Howard consistently repeated these calls up until his election in 1996: his 1988 support for limiting Asian migration and his lack of support for a Treaty with Aboriginal

Australians and Torres Strait Islanders; his 1989 opposition to Prime Minister

Hawke’s motion to the House of Representatives that it give “unambiguous and unqualified commitment to the principle that, in determining the composition of the immigration intake, race or ethnic origin never be among the criteria”;7 his 1991 statement declaring that “Australia made an error in abandoning its former policy of encouraging assimilation and integration in favour of multiculturalism”;8 and his

1995 electoral campaign message that under a “the views of all

6 Howard quoted in Stephenson, “Beyond Black and White: Aborigines, Asian-Australians and the National Imaginary,” 189. 7 Hawke quoted in Stephenson, 191–92. 8 Howard quoted in Stephenson, 190.

109 particular interests will be assessed against the national interest and sentiments of mainstream Australia” (i.e. Anglo-Celtic).9

Howard’s emphasis on national unity and equality and their exclusion of multiculturalism and self-determination demanded an alternative solution, which was for all citizens to be given the same individual rights and for Australia’s assimilationist past and British origins to be reasserted. Mainstream (Anglo-Celtic) support for the growing popular discourse of Anglo-grievance was emphasised not only by Howard’s election as Prime Minister in 1996, but also by Pauline Hanson’s election as the MP for Oxley in Queensland. Campaigning on an even more hard- line racist agenda than Howard (which led the Liberal party to retract its original endorsement of her), Hanson won the safe Labor seat with an electoral swing of

22%, the largest against the government in any electorate.10 Originally taking her parliamentary seat as an Independent, the following year she founded Pauline

Hanson’s One Nation party.

After he came to office, Howard abolished key agencies such as the Office of

Multicultural Affairs and the Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population

Research established by the Hawke government in 1987 and 1989; he restricted access to unemployment benefits and the Adult Migrant English Program for new migrants; he slashed funding to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity

Commission and ATSIC; and he amended the 1993 Native Title Act further restricting the rights accorded to Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders in the initial Act. Throughout Howard’s four consecutive terms in office (1996-2007) he dismantled ATSIC in 2005 (not including the TSRA) and replaced it with the non-community-elected advisory committee, the National Indigenous Council; he further amended the Native Title Act in 2007; and he suspended the 1975 Racial

9 Howard quoted in Stephenson, 197. 10 Stephenson, 204.

110 Discrimination Act in 2007 as part of the Northern Territory Intervention into the lives of Aboriginal Australians.

Howard’s actions indicated more than his preference for assimilation; they were also a function of the Liberal Party’s increasing commitment to neoliberalism, a process begun under the Labor governments of Hawke and Keating.

Reconfiguring people’s relationship with the state along purely economic lines, neoliberalism emphasised individual entitlements and responsibilities over the notion of public means to achieve greater economic growth, prosperity and freedom. The social policy changes outlined above intersected with the 1996 passing of the Workplace Relations Act which “severely curtailed the rights of unions to take industrial action . . . increased employers’ abilities to fire employees without union recourse . . . [and] enabled workers to negotiate their own contracts with employers without union participation”; the incremental implementation of a work for the dole scheme from 1997; and the 2005 Amendment to the Workplace Relations

Act commonly known as WorkChoices.11 Australia’s immigration program, too, became overwhelmingly dominated by economic rather than humanitarian factors.

Howard’s policy reversals saw self-determination removed completely from government rhetoric and policy and replaced by practical reconciliation; multiculturalism, however, was kept in an effort to democratise and deracialise

Anglo-Celtic nationalism (although increasingly it was replaced by “citizenship”, with the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs renamed the

Department of Immigration and Citizenship in 2007). The privileging of difference via multiculturalism was argued to have had detrimental effects both domestically and globally, and was connected to a range of violent or terrorist acts from the beginning of the twenty-first century at home and abroad. Re-establishing

11 Stratton, Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia, 13.

111 Australian citizenship as a contractual agreement to an assimilatory Anglo-Celtic

Australian nationalism was vital if Australia was to protect “our way of life”, as

Howard saw it.12 He rigorously tightened Australia’s borders via the 2001 Pacific

Solution, and also implemented the 2007 Australian Citizenship Amendment

(Citizenship Testing) Act, requiring prospective citizens of Australia to sit and pass a test in English, on the traditions, values and institutions of Australia and the responsibilities and privileges of Australian citizenship. It is no coincidence that the celebration of Australia’s two leading nation-building public holidays – Australia

Day and – was intensified under Howard and used effectively to promote his assimilatory nationalism.

After Howard’s defeat in late 2007, the incoming Labor government of Kevin

Rudd performed important symbolic acts such as issuing a national apology to the thousands of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders impacted by generation policies; signing the United Nation’s Declaration on the Right of Indigenous

Peoples, which Howard had refused to do; abolishing the National Indigenous

Council in favour of a community-elected National Congress of Australia’s First

Peoples; and establishing the Australian Multicultural Advisory Council to provide advice on multicultural affairs policy and programs. Nevertheless for the most part it continued Howard’s discourse and policy on Anglo-grievance; citizenship; border control; assimilation and practical reconciliation - all in a neoliberal framework. So too did the subsequent Labor government of Julia Gillard and the Coalition government of . Following Howard and via his self-proclaimed title of

“Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs”, Abbott centralised Indigenous Affairs into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and slashed $550 million to

Indigenous Australian programmes; he sidelined the community-elected National

12 Howard quoted in Koleth, “Multiculturalism: A Review of Australian Policy Statements and Recent Debates in Australia and Overseas,” 32–33.

112 Congress set up under Rudd and established his own self-selected Indigenous

Advisory Council, thus marginalising the process of self-determination. Finally, the

Department of Immigration and Citizenship was renamed the Department of

Immigration and Border Protection; citizenship was now openly defined not by who is inside the nation but who is kept out.

Pacific peoples were also impacted by these policy changes and in turn were responsible for further changes. From 1996 to 2001, Pacific Island populations with access to Australia through New Zealand migrated at a faster rate than populations from any other Pacific Island nation; and Australia’s Māori population increased from an estimated 50,000 to 72,956.13 Pacific Island New Zealand citizens were defined as “queue jumpers”, inauthentic New Zealanders possessing little of the skill sets (social and economic) required of all other immigrants and taking advantage of Australia’s “unfair” immigration policies in favour of New Zealand;

Māori were defined as “dole bludgers”. Both groups faced more scrutiny than any other cultural group emigrating freely to Australia from New Zealand as New

Zealand citizens.

New Zealand’s decision in 2000 to grant an amnesty for Pacific Island and other over-stayers who had lived there for a substantial period and had genuine community connections, and to create a new streamlined Pacific-specific immigration scheme (Pacific Access Category) enabling 1500 Pacific Island peoples annually to migrate to New Zealand (while still according New Zealand citizenship to all Cook Island, Niue and Tokelauan peoples) was followed closely by Australia’s

26 February 2001 amendments to its citizenship laws relating to New Zealand

13 Hamer, “Māori in Australia: An Update from the 2011 Australian Census and the 2011 New Zealand General Election.” 24.

113 citizens.14 While still enabling free movement between the countries and residency within Australia, all New Zealand citizens arriving after that date were denied access to many of Australia’s social security provisions, denied pathways to

Australian permanent residency and therefore Australian citizenship, and banned from sponsoring non-New Zealand family members for permanent residency in

Australia.15

While economic factors (i.e. the “number” of New Zealanders: census figures state that Australia’s New Zealand-born population increased by over

60,000 between 1996 and 2001 from 291,388 to 355,765,16 the largest number of any national immigrant group) were used routinely to justify Australia’s unilateral changes to its bilateral relationship with New Zealand, race (i.e. the “type” of New

Zealand citizen) was once again a central factor. This is evident in the Minister for

Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Philip Ruddock’s statement in September

2000 in the wake of New Zealand’s over-stayer policy announcement that Australia could possibly review the TTTA,17 and the more blunt assessment by a Ruddock spokesperson in November 2000 of New Zealand’s Pacific immigration policies that they unfairly allowed people “unfit” for Australian immigration to enter the country by obtaining New Zealand citizenship.18 However, Prime Minister Howard, on the day of the immigration policy announcement, labelled any suggestion that such changes were specifically designed to deter Pacific Island people as

“preposterous, even offensive”.19

14 Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 112. 15 Spinks and Klapdor, “New Zealanders in Australia: A Quick Guide.” 16 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “2001 Census of Population and Housing, Australia”. 17 Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 112. 18 Hamer, 111. 19 Howard quoted in Hamer, 112.

114 Australia’s 26 February 2001 policy change effectively split New Zealand citizens residing in Australia into four distinct groups:

1. Australian citizens – those accorded Australian citizenship who

do not have to renounce their New Zealand citizenship, and are

the only New Zealanders eligible to vote in federal, state or

territory elections.

2. Australian permanent residents – those granted permanent

residency through acquiring permanent visas who have the same

social security as Australian citizens once the mandatory two-

year stand-down period is completed, and are able to apply for

Australian citizenship after living in Australia for two years

(extended to four years in 2007), at least one of those years as a

permanent resident.

3. Protected Special Category Visa holders – those who migrated to

Australia between the introduction of SCVs in September 1994

and 26 February 2001; not classified as Australian permanent

residents but accorded the same eligibilities as Australian

permanent residents and Australian citizens, while also not

having to apply for and be granted a permanent visa (Australian

permanent residency) before applying for Australian citizenship.

4. Non-protected Special Category Visa holders – those arriving in

Australia after 26 February 2001, eligible to live and work (pay

taxes) in Australia indefinitely, but ineligible to access the

majority of Australia’s social security measures or to sponsor

non-New Zealand family members for permanent visas; apart

from the very small number qualified to apply for Australian

115 permanent residency through high-skill or family reasons, never

able to obtain Australian permanent residency and thus

citizenship.

Despite all this the 21 February 2001 decision did little to halt the flow of

Pacific Island New Zealand citizens and Māori. Australia’s Pacific Island populations with ancestry from countries with citizenship and/or immigration arrangements with New Zealand swelled in 2011 to populations of 55,843 Samoan;

25,096 Tongan; 16,193 Cook Island Māori; 3,143 Niuean; 1,655 Tokelauan; and 677 I-

Kiribati;20 Australia’s Cook Island, Niuean and Tokelauan populations all outnumbered the total populations of the respective Islands themselves. 37,279

Māori migrated from New Zealand to Australia between 2002 and 2011, with

Australia’s Māori population in total increasing from 72,956 in 2001 to 128,434 in

2011.21 Migration in this period was impacted by an unstable New Zealand economy

(which historically in times of recession has brought greater vulnerability to the lives of Māori and New Zealand Pacific Island peoples than any other group) combined with the resource boom of the mid-2000’s in the states of Queensland and . At the peak of the boom in 2008 Māori represented 28.1% of the total New Zealand population to migrate to Australia that year.22 Family ties are also a crucial reason for the increase in numbers of Māori and Pacific Island New

Zealand citizens moving from New Zealand, as kinship groups expand within

Australia.

While there are no exact statistics for the number of Māori and Pacific

Island New Zealand citizens on non-protected SCVs in comparison to those not, it

20 Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Border Protection, “The People of Australia: Statistics from the 2011 Census.” 21 Hamer, “Māori in Australia: An Update from the 2011 Australian Census and the 2011 New Zealand General Election.” 22 Hamer, 27.

116 is reasonable to assume that all but a very few of those who migrated after 26

February 2001 (the majority of Pacific Island New Zealand citizens living in

Australia) are part of the estimated 240,000 plus New Zealand citizens living in

Australia as of 2013 on non-protected SCVs.23 This is backed up by annual figures such as those for the year July 2011 to June 2012, when only 140 (0.02%) of the 62,932

New Zealand citizens to arrive in Australia entered on permanent Australian visas.

The implications of living on a non-protected SCV are significant. As of 2015, these people are excluded from unemployment and sickness benefits or youth allowance; emergency and public housing; Australian citizenship for children born in Australia until of 10; student and trade support loans; Australian

Government Disaster Recovery Payment and Disaster Recovery Allowance; the

2013 National Disability Insurance Scheme; and the 2014 Job Commitment Bonus for Young Australians. Significantly they are included in the 2014 amendment to section 501 of the Migration Act, which states that anyone who is not an Australian citizen and has served a 12-month jail sentence or is “not of good character” may be sent to detention centres or deported.

While such policies impact on all non-protected SCV holders (plus all protected SCV holders in the case of more recent denials of access to student and trade support loans, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the Job

Commitment Bonus and inclusion within the amendment to section 501 of the

Migration Act) they most severely disadvantage those of lower socio-economic status, a group which includes most Māori and New Zealand Pacific Island people in Australia. Their economic vulnerability has only increased recently with the

23 Burton-Bradley, “New Zealanders, Australia’s ‘Underclass.’”

117 Global Financial Crisis of 2007/2008 and the downturn in Australia’s mining boom.24

It is not surprising, then, that Māori in particular have often led the mobilisation of New Zealand-citizen grievances about their political positioning in

Australia, while also providing information to the many non-protected and protected SCV holders unaware of their rights and ineligibilities in Australia. The establishment of community groups such as Iwi n Aus reflects this.25 Yet the lack of voting rights in Australia, combined with the low voter participation of Australian- based New Zealand citizens in New Zealand national elections, hinders efforts for change. Current protests have been sensationalised by Australia’s conservative media, as illustrated by the 13 January 2014 episode of Channel Nine’s A Current

Affair which exclaimed: “They’re coming to Australia for our jobs . . . Now they’re fighting en masse to rewrite our welfare rules. Should you pay so they can stay?”26

This was at the same time as a 13 December 2012 joint study of Trans-Tasman issues by the Productivity Commissions of Australia and New Zealand stated that since

“Howard’s changes to the migration rules in 2001 New Zealanders living in

Australia cost the Government $1 billion annually but contributed tax revenue of

$2.5 billion”.27 As Hamer points out in analysing the same episode, A Current Affair’s interview with Gary Hardgrave (a Liberal MP at the time of the 26 February 2001 changes) exposed yet again that objections to migration are all too frequently race- based rather than economic: “The idea of not giving them [New Zealand Pacific

Island people’s] access to these benefits”, Hardgrave says, “was to say ‘Hey, don’t

24 Burton-Bradley. 25 Erina Morunga and Filipa Payne established Iwi n Aus in 2013. The Māori word “iwi” refers to an extended kinship group, tribe, nation, and or people. The organisation focuses on improving the collective wellbeing and rights of all New Zealand citizens in Australia (see www.iwinaus.org). 26 Mares, “New Zealand’s ‘Bondi Bludger’ and Other Australian Myths.” 27 Burton-Bradley, “New Zealanders, Australia’s ‘Underclass.’”

118 come’”.28 Academic Bob Birrell has also gone on radio to express concern at the number of Pacific Island New Zealand citizens continuing to migrate to Australia:

“People are reluctant to point the bone at people who’ve come from the islands for fear of being dismissed as racists . . . I do think there is a good case to control that flow on the basis of skills and whether or not they’re needed in Australia.”29

These comments stand in for common arguments that do not reflect reality.

2011 Australian census figures state that Pacific Island-born peoples, like New

Zealand-born peoples, have higher labour force participation and lower unemployment levels than Australia as a whole.30 And while the Australian government has continued not to introduce overtly race-specific New Zealand-

Pacific Island policies, it declined in its 2014 response to the 2012 joint report by the

Productivity Commissions of Australia and New Zealand to implement the recommendations of the report which called on the Australian government to allow New Zealand citizens residing in Australia access to its social security payments and services, as well as voting rights.31

While Māori and Pacific Island New Zealand citizens in Australia occupy an awkward marginalised place of settlement without benefits or citizenship, for

Pacific Island peoples without New Zealand citizenship, entry for temporary and permanent settlement continued to be difficult after 1996. There was minimal population growth among Pacific peoples of Pacific Island countries and territories not accorded the special arrangements we have been considering: for example,

Australia’s Papuan New Guinea-born population (Indigenous and non-Indigenous)

28 Hardgrave quoted in Hamer, “‘Unsophisticated and Unsuited’: Australian Barriers to Pacific Islander Immigration from New Zealand,” 113. 29 Birrell quoted on Pacific Beat, “Academic Wants Tighter Rules on Kiwis Migrating to Australia.” 30 Ash, “Should Australia Fear Pacific Migrants? Analysing the Real Impact of Pacific Migration on Australia.” The 2011 Australian Census stated that the unemployment rate for Pacific Island-born people in Australia was 5%. The level for Australia as a whole was 5.6%. 31 Flitton, “New Zealand Challenges Joe Hockey Over Rights for New Zealanders in Australia.”

119 increased by a mere 2,000 people over a 15 year span from 1996 to 2011 (24,373–

26,787),32 while the 15,460 people identifying as (Indigenous) Papuan New Guinean in 2011 numbered some 500 less than the 16,193 identifying as of Cook Island ancestry33 - this despite Papua New Guinea being Australia’s closest geographic neighbour and a former colony with a total population of over 7 million people in comparison to the Cook Islands’ 17,794 in 2011.34 The number of people in Australia identifying as being of “Fijian” ancestry – loosely assumed to be those of indigenous Fijian (iTaukei) heritage – was recorded in 2011 as 23,770, less than those identifying as Samoan (55,843) and Tongan (25,096), whose countries also have significantly smaller populations than Fiji.35

Barriers to immigration for Pacific Island peoples not New Zealand citizens continue to reflect Australia’s lack of interest in Pacific Island-specific immigration policies; its broader immigration policy focus after 1996 favoured migrants with economic and skills capital over family reunions. This disadvantages Pacific Island peoples as a result of colonial policies of dividing access to education on ethnic lines, thus fostering educational disparities between indigenous and non- indigenous peoples throughout the Pacific. Policy changes severely limit immigration via family reunion for brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, grandchildren, aunties, uncles, nieces and nephews of sponsors (who must be

Australian citizens, Australian permanent residents, or New Zealand protected

SCV holders), but the door is still open (although the process is expensive and lengthy) to partners and children of sponsors.

32 Victorian Multicultural Commission, “The Papua New Guinea-Born Community in Victoria”; Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Citizenship, “Community Information Summary, Papua New Guinea-Born.” 33 Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Border Protection, “The People of Australia: Statistics from the 2011 Census.” 34 Cook Islands Government, Statistics Office, “Cook Islands 2011 Census of Population and Dwellings: Main Report.” 35 Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Border Protection, “The People of Australia: Statistics from the 2011 Census.”

120 Other limited pathways for entry are via study or training; skilled work

(including for sporting and religious purposes); and post-Howard, non-skilled seasonal work visas. Student/training visas are typically offered to accompany

Pacific Island-identified Australian government-funded scholarships and training programs: the Australia Awards Scholarship is one example, offering full time undergraduate or postgraduate study scholarships at participating Australian universities and Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions. These scholarships, however, are not available to residents of the Cook Islands, Niue and

Tokelau due to their status as New Zealand citizens, as well as to Pacific Island peoples who are dual citizens of Australia, New Zealand or any developed country.36 Another example is the Kiribati Australia Nursing Initiative, which ran from 2006 to 2014. Established ostensibly to assist Kiribati in dealing with the severe environmental and societal implications of global climate change, the

Nursing Initiative sought to open up migration opportunities to Australia through nursing; to build and foster Australian Kiribati communities necessary to support and integrate greater numbers of Kiribati migrants in the future; to generate remittances to assist family in Kiribati; and to improve Kiribati’s health care system through those graduates who decided to return home to work. The ’s scepticism about climate change and global warming was reason enough for it to abandon the program at the end of its eight-year pilot period.

Unlike family reunion visas, which offer permanent residency, student/training visas are temporary, lasting approximately the duration of the course; a pathway to permanent residency and citizenship is possible but not guaranteed. Pursuing this option requires time, money, business sponsorship and often the pastoral and financial support of permanent Australian-based kin.

36 Commonwealth Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, “Australia Awards Scholarships.”

121 Non-New Zealand-citizen Pacific Island people who migrated directly from home on skilled work visas after 1996 have mostly used the Temporary Work

(Skilled) visa (subclass 457), introduced during Howard’s first year as Prime

Minister; or the Temporary Work (Long Stay Activity) visa (subclass 401), used specifically by those wishing to migrate for sporting or religious employment; or the Temporary Work (International Relations) visa (subclass 403), applicable to those in governmental positions - all of these require the sponsorship of an

Australian-government-approved sponsor. Australia’s Working Holiday visa

(subclass 417) does not apply to any Pacific Island nations. The 457 visa quickly became Australia’s most-granted temporary skilled-work visa, but Pacific Island peoples consistently make up a low proportion of its total recipients: in the year

July 2007 to June 2008, for example, Pacific Island citizens comprised 1.6% of the

134,228 people granted 457 visas globally.37 For Papuan New Guinea 457 visa holders, who along with Fijian citizens made up the overwhelming majority of this

1.6%, mining became the number one occupation: from mid-2010 to mid-2012 employers in the mining industry sponsored almost 75% (238) of the 327 Papuan

New Guinea citizens holding 457 visas.38 Introduced initially as a temporary mechanism to fill skill gaps, under the the 457 visa increasingly came under public attack as a way for Australian businesses to employ cheap overseas labour. Pacific Island 457 visa holders became implicated: ABC television’s

7.30 Report program on 28 May 2013 used six Papuan New Guinea diesel fitters working on 457 visas at the Japanese-owned Boggabri Coal Mine as a spotlight on this “rort”. Colin Filer argues that the show represented the Papuan New Guinea workers “as a threat to the livelihoods of upstanding white citizens in the coal

37 Bedford and Hugo, “Population Movement in the Pacific: A Perspective on Future Prospects,” 66. 38 Filer, “Are Papua New Guineans Stealing Australian Jobs at the End of the Resource Boom?”

122 mining communities of Northern New South Wales”.39 Not once did the program consider the number of Australian citizens who work within the Papua New

Guinea resource sector and generally get paid twice as much as their Papuan New

Guinea counterparts with the same qualifications.40 As a result of such outcries the

Australian government introduced labour market testing from 23 November 2013, forcing employers seeking to use the 457 visa to demonstrate that they have attempted to recruit suitably qualified and experienced Australian citizens and

Australian permanent residents first.

These temporary visas open up a chance of acquiring permanent Australian residency and citizenship. Steven Ratuva articulates his concern about this facilitation of “brain drain from the region”, when Australia’s skilled immigration focus intersects with its regional aid policies that rarely prioritise local capacity- building in the Pacific Islands to fill the voids.41 Skilled and non-skilled Australians are imported to work in the Pacific Islands and paradoxically paid for with AusAID money designated for Pacific Island peoples, thus continuing to cultivate a culture of dependency on Australia. The “unbalanced terms of benefits” in this problematic arrangement are further aggravated as “Pacific Islanders tend to migrate permanently and their countries lose immensely, while for Australian experts their contracted terms in the Pacific are usually for a couple of years before they return home with the aid money used to pay for them”.42 Ratuva claims that these kinds of reasons reinforce Australia’s “predatory image” within the Pacific.43

39 Filer. 40 Filer. 41 Ratuva, “Australia’s New Assertiveness in the Pacific: The View from ‘the Backyard,’” 95. 42 Ratuva, 95. 43 Ratuva, 95.

123 Pacific Island leaders lobbied for non-skilled seasonal visas from at least the early 1970s but they were opposed by Howard throughout his years in office. As late as 25 October 2005 at the PIF meeting held in Port Moresby, Howard stated:

[W]e have had some long standing reservations about the concept.

We apply an open, non-discriminatory immigration policy and

people from the Pacific Island area come in increasing numbers. We

have always had a preference for permanent settlement or

permanent migration.44

It took till 2008 for a Rudd Labor government to introduce the Pacific Seasonal

Workers Pilot Scheme with the aims of filling unskilled labour shortages in

Australia’s horticultural industry and of contributing to “economic development in those nations by diversifying the sources of remittances and helping individuals to develop skills which they can take home with them”.45 Implemented over a two- part trial period, phase one operated from November 2008 to November 2009 within the Swan Hill/ area of Victoria and Griffith in New South Wales with a of 100 workers; while phase two, in operation from November 2009 to

June 2012, expanded geographically and had a cap of 2400 workers. Limited originally to citizens of Vanuatu, Kiribati, Tonga and Papua New Guinea – representing countries from each of the Pacific Islands sub-regions of Melanesia,

Micronesia, and Polynesia, with Kiribati chosen also for reasons related to global climate change – citizens of Nauru, Samoa, Solomon Island and Tuvalu were included during the final stages.46 All workers were initially guaranteed six months work at a minimum of 30 hours per week; from December 2010 they could also sign

44 Howard quoted in Australian Government, “Media Release: Joint Press Conference with the Prime Minister of New Zealand the Hon MP, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.” 45 Lewis, “Neighbourliness and Australia’s Contribution to Regional Migration Strategies for Climate Displacement in the Pacific,” 98. 46 Doyle and Howes, “Australia’s Seasonal Worker Program: Demand-Side Constraints and Suggested Reforms,” 6.

124 contracts comprising five month’s work at a minimum 35 hours per week, or four month’s work at a minimum 38 hours per week.47 Family members were not permitted to accompany successful recipients.

Despite variable rates of uptake by Approved Employers, the Gillard Labor government on 18 December 2011 decided to roll out an ongoing Seasonal Worker

Program following the end of the pilot on 30 June 2012. Continuing with its main provisions in place but adding four new trial sectors – aquaculture, cotton, cane and accommodation - the Seasonal Worker Program allowed a maximum of 12,000

Pacific Island peoples 21 years of age and older from the countries listed above to enter on a stream of the Special Program Visa (416) for the period 2012 to 2016.48 As of 31 May 2015 6,288 people had been granted a Special Program Visa (416), varying from 14 weeks to six months in length.49 However, unlike family reunion, student/training and skilled work temporary visa holders, those arriving as part of the Seasonal Worker Program have next to no chance of transitioning to permanent residency - once again putting into question reciprocity and power imbalance in Australia’s regional engagements.

Since the introduction of Australia’s Pacific-specific seasonal work scheme in 2008, few have illegally overstayed their residency stipulations. There are disincentives such as not being able to return in subsequent seasons, and also the chance of excluding one’s home community from access to the scheme. Non-New

Zealand-citizen Pacific Island people arriving in Australia after 1996 - despite the fact that most initially have temporary visas – have low rates of over-staying. A

2009 Department of Immigration and Citizenship document states that in the financial year ending June 2008, less than 5% of Australia’s estimated 48,500 illegal

47 Doyle and Howes, 8. 48 Doyle and Howes, 9. 49 This number includes 263 people from Timor-Leste (East Timor). Doyle and Howes, 10.

125 over-stayers were citizens (indigenous and non-indigenous) of Pacific Island countries.50 In highlighting illegal Fijian over-stayers (iTaukei and Indo-Fijian) in

Griffith in 2003 and 2004 (prior to the introduction of the seasonal work scheme),

Mark Schubert emphasises how towns such as Griffith which are geographically isolated from the nearest Department of Immigration offices and have an agricultural-based economy in high need of unskilled workers, are perfect spaces where detection is minimised and work plentiful.51 Schubert’s case study demonstrates that Pacific Island workers have a much longer involvement in seasonal agricultural work in Australia than the Seasonal Workers Program.

50 Bedford and Hugo, “Population Movement in the Pacific: A Perspective on Future Prospects,” 66. 51 Schubert, “Griffith’s Transnational Fijians: Between the Devil, the Deep Blue Sea...and Their Pastors,” 135.

126 7. National Security and Indigenous Rights (1996-2015)

Along with policing Pacific migration to Australia, Australian governments in the twenty-first century have increasingly seen the Pacific itself as the site of threats to national security. The “Pacific Solution”, introduced from 26 September 2001 and influenced by the Tampa Affair of August 2001 and the terrorist acts in the United

States on September 11 2001, was designed to stop the large number of refugees arriving in Australia by boat and applying for asylum. It was the symbol of

Howard’s 2001 election campaign rhetoric: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”. The Pacific Solution required an amendment to the Migration Act (Migration Amendment [Excision from Migration

Zone] Act 2001) to excise from Australia’s migration zone islands targeted by asylum-seeker boat arrivals: , Ashmore and Cartier Islands and

Cocos (Keeling) Islands. In July 2005 Australia drastically extended its excision from the Migration Zone to include the Territory, Queensland islands north of latitude 21° south, Western Australian islands north of latitude 23° south and Northern Territory islands north of latitude 16° south. This reclassification meant that people entering Australia at such places without legal authorisation were ineligible to submit a valid visa application unless the Minister for Immigration made a personal intervention into the case. Crucially, unauthorised arrivals were sent to Australian-funded detention camps on Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea (hence the title Pacific Solution) to ensure that they did not set foot on Australian soil within the migration zone: any asylum seeker who did had to be treated as an unlawful non-citizen, be detained and given the right to apply for a visa to stay in Australia.1 It was the Australian Defence

Force’s responsibility to ensure no boats carrying asylum seekers landed within the

1 Stratton, “Two Rescues, One History: Everyday Racism in Australia,” 678.

127 migration zone; and the Howard government’s policy was that those found to be refugees would only be resettled in Australia as a last resort.

In this context it is worth considering the case of Pacific Island peoples arriving illegally in Australia by boat seeking asylum. They are estimated to make up less than 1% of the total 69,455 asylum seekers who arrived in Australia from 1

January 1976 to 31 December 2013.2 The main Pacific cultural group seeking asylum are West Papuans, over 100 of whom have arrived since Indonesia took control of

West Papua in 1962: the largest number to arrive at once came in January 2006, when 43 people reached Cape York by boat, travelling directly from Indonesia.3

This event, occurring at the heart of Howard’s Pacific Solution, created a diplomatic crisis for the Australian government who had long appeased Indonesia by being silent about, and even at times participating in, state violence against West

Papuans.4

The 43 West Papuan people to arrive by boat in continental Australia in

January 2006 were exempt from the Pacific Solution, for “they entered . . .

Australia’s migration zone and could not, therefore, be subjected to Australia’s extra-territorial processing regime according to the terms of legislation in place at the time”.5 The decision to grant them visa applications followed by three-year temporary protection visas caused outrage in Indonesia and led to the recalling of the Indonesian ambassador from Australia. Attempting to reassure Indonesia that it was not interfering in Indonesian domestic affairs and that such a case would not happen again, the Australian government set out to introduce more hard-line policies, including increasing its border surveillance and protection and promising

2 Refugee Council of Australia, “Economic Migrants or Refugees? Analysis of Refugee Recognition Rates for Boat Arrivals, 1976-2015.” 3 Neumann and Taylor, “Australia, Indonesia, and West Papuan Refugees, 1962-2009.” 4 See Maclellan, “West Papua’s Forgotten Asylum Seekers”. 5 Neumann and Taylor, “Australia, Indonesia, and West Papuan Refugees, 1962-2009,” 14.

128 to return Indonesian asylum-seekers to Indonesia or indeed Papua New Guinea if that is where they had come from.

The major effects of the Pacific Solution on Pacific countries, however, were felt in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, whose aid-dependency forced them into hosting Australian refugee detention centres. Papua New Guinea had struggled to be truly independent since 1975, given continued Australian influence over its economic and political affairs and its consequent indebtedness to the Australian government. Nauru, however, had been genuinely independent at least for its first two or three decades; that changed at the end of the phosphate boom in the 199os, after years of financial mismanagement by successive governments of the trust funds established with the mining revenue.6 Nauru’s sudden need for financial assistance could not have come at a better time for an opportunistic Howard government “looking for a place to dump asylum seekers beyond the administrative and judicial protections of Australian law”.7 Nauru and Papua New

Guinea were each given $US 10 million in return for an initial intake of 700 and 216 refugees respectively; Nauru was promised an additional $US 5 million worth of diesel fuel to counteract persistent power blackouts, provided it met conditions not only for the taking of further refugees, but also for a now familiar AusAID neoliberal formula that prioritised privatisation of industry and public sector reform as best practice for economic growth, government efficiency and the ending of corruption. Labelled by Australia as “burden sharing”, this deal was alternatively defined by Nauru Independent MP, Anthony Audoa, as “prostitution”.8

6 Teaiwa, “Ruining Pacific Islands: Australia’s Phosphate Imperialism”; Maclellan, “What Has Australia Done to Nauru?” 7 Maclellan, “What Has Australia Done to Nauru?” 8 Audoa quoted in Teaiwa et al., “Turning the Tide: The Need for a Pacific Solution to Counter Conditionality,” 3.

129 Australia’s bilateral relations with both Papua New Guinea and Nauru changed dramatically during the second half of 2003 following its orchestration of a

Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) in response to Solomon

Island government requests to help put down civil unrest disrupting the country since late 1998. Deployed on 24 July 2003, the Australian-led PIF police, military and governmental “cooperative intervention” involving some 2,220 soldiers, police and civilian officials sought to rebuild what it termed a “failing state”, defined by poor governance, low state capacity and stagnant economic development and explained as a consequence of the weakness of “modern” (i.e. western, neoliberal) institutions vis-à-vis “traditional” (i.e. indigenous) ones.9 Prime Minister Howard had previously shown a lack of interest in the Pacific (outside of the Pacific

Solution), defined by his abolition of the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs and

Development in 1997, his absence from three of the first six PIF meetings (1998,

1999, 2001), and his failure to make one bilateral visit to a Pacific Islands country apart from Papua New Guinea.

Australia’s motivations for its abrupt policy reversal on the Solomon Islands were not primarily humanitarian but strategic and self-serving. After 9/11 the US claimed that failing states were the biggest threat to global security, as they put in danger not only their own inhabitants but also governments and citizens of external states.10 International interventions, previously multilateral and aimed at peace building, humanitarianism and development, were redirected to unilateral

(at times pre-emptive) actions, the denial of sovereignty and the securitisation of development (as in Iraq).11 Without police, military and governmental state- building intervention in Solomon Islands, Australia too could become a terrorist

9 Hameiri, “The Trouble with RAMSI: Reexamining the Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands.” 10 Hameiri, “Risk Management, Neo-Liberalism and the Securitisation of the Australian Aid Program,” 360. 11 Fry and Kabutaulaka, “Political Legitimacy and State-Building Intervention in the Pacific.”

130 target; hence the need to move to a securitisation and risk management approach in Australia’s aid program to Solomon Islands.12

Once in Solomon Islands, Australia began to articulate Papua New Guinea and Nauru also as moving from “failing” to “failed” states, part of what it termed

“the arc of instability” across the Pacific; as a consequence Australian aid policies towards both countries moved to a securitisation and risk management approach.

Australia negotiated with Papua New Guinea an Enhanced Cooperation Package, implemented in September 2004 as an interventionist state-building policy deploying Australian police, senior public servants, judges and lawyers inside

Papua New Guinea: Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer stated that this would ensure “a functioning police force, a court system that can administer the law, a government that can generate revenue and manage budgets based on need and affordability, and an immigration system that protects border integrity”.13

Australia pursued even more radical interventionist policies in relation to Nauru, which included negotiating with the Nauruan government for the movement of all

Nauruan citizens to Australia with Australian citizenship (an option previously turned down in 1964); a move to another island; or Australian management of a project to rebuild Nauru as a sovereign self-sustaining state.14 Negotiating the third option, in May 2004 Nauru surrendered to Australia its police and financial sectors and accepted Australian secretaries of the departments of education and health.

Australia’s influence over the Nauruan state was further strengthened by its parallel involvement in the PIF’s Pacific Regional Assistance for Nauru (PRAN), implemented in 2005 under the Biketawa Declaration at the request of the Nauruan

12 Hameiri, “Risk Management, Neo-Liberalism and the Securitisation of the Australian Aid Program.” 13 Downer quoted in Fry and Kabutaulaka, “Political Legitimacy and State-Building Intervention in the Pacific,” 7. 14 Fry and Kabutaulaka, 8.

131 government. Australian Greg Urwin had filled the role of Secretary General of the

PIF from August 2003, breaking a 30-year principle that the Secretary should be a

Pacific Island citizen: this was crucial in legitimising Australia’s solo interventions into Papua New Guinea and Nauru, and its control over RAMSI and PRAN. It also allowed Australia to assert in the PIF a new regional order with obligations to good governance and economic management which would mitigate regional security concerns.15 A Pacific Plan endorsed by PIF leaders in 2005 was designed to give practical effect to this through its focus on “deepening and broadening regional cooperation and integration in four key areas: economic growth, sustainable development, ‘good governance’, and security”.16

Australia believed that its new Pacific interventionism could achieve political legitimacy among host societies by offering compliance with international law and local government, and securing regional and international community support;17 in practice, however, it quickly raised opposition from those communities most affected by it. In Solomon Islands, grievances were directed at

Australia’s unilateral dominance of what was supposedly a multilateral cooperative intervention. There was resistance to specific state-building policies that marginalised Solomon Island communities and interest groups; failed to uphold its repeated rhetoric of partnership, capacity building and the eradication of aid dependency; neglected reconciliation and peace-building processes; and lacked an exit-strategy. In Papua New Guinea, there was protest at the Enhanced

Cooperation Package’s according of immunity from Papua New Guinea laws for intervening Australian police officers (similar immunity policies applied for

RAMSI in Solomon Islands). While the Papua New Guinea government agreed to

15 Fry and Kabutaulaka, 9. 16 Fry and Kabutaulaka, 9. 17 Fry and Kabutaulaka, 22–23.

132 the provision, the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in

May 2005, leading to the immediate withdrawal of Australian police and bringing the Enhanced Cooperation Package intervention to an end after eight months.18

When Rudd was elected Australian Prime Minister in December 2007,

Howard’s hard-line interventionist approach to the Pacific was softened. Attentive to both regional and domestic critiques, within his first four months in office Rudd had created an Australian Government Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island

Affairs; dismantled the Pacific Solution by closing Nauru’s detention facility

(Manus Island in Papua New Guinea had not been used since 2004); and produced a Port Moresby Declaration which specifically outlined Australia’s commitment to pursue new bilateral aid programs called Pacific Partnerships for Development, which emphasised both host country development ambitions and the United

Nations Millennium Development Goals; to face the shared challenges of climate change; and to improve Australia’s standing within the PIF, which from May 2008 no longer had an Australian as Secretary General because of Greg Urwin’s sudden resignation due to illness. In June 2009 the Rudd government established another parliamentary inquiry conducted by the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign

Affairs, Defence and Trade into Australia’s relations with the Pacific (the first since

2003 and the fourth in total). All these changes signified what Australia declared to be “a new era of cooperation with the island nations of the Pacific”.19

Rudd’s new era did not achieve much beyond the symbolic during his two and a half years as Prime Minister, and the situation regressed after his departure in June 2010. The succeeding Gillard government negotiated RAMSI’s gradual exit from Solomon Islands between July 2013 and June 2017 and reintroduced the Pacific

Solution in August 2012, again allowing offshore processing of asylum seekers in

18 Patience, “Cooperation between Australian and Papua New Guinea: ‘enhanced’ or Enforced?” 19 Australia Government, “Port Moresby Declaration.”

133 Nauru and Papua New Guinea. In October 2012 it launched its “Australia in the

Asian Century” White Paper, strategically positioning Australian twenty-first century regionalism within Asia, as a means to take advantage of the economic opportunities presented by the rise of China particularly in the context of a stagnant United States economy. As in the past, Australia’s Pacific identity was evoked only for its own unilateral benefit: evident, for example, in Gillard’s 2012 lobbying of Pacific Island nations to vote for Australia to be granted a seat on the

United Nations Security Council for the two-year period 2013-2014.

When Abbott was elected Prime Minister in September 2013 he swiftly abolished the Australian Government’s Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island

Affairs. On the issue of West Papua and continued Indonesian human rights abuses, Abbott emphatically repeated that Australia held unequivocal “respect for

Indonesia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.20 This stance contradicted the

Australian government’s position on Papua New Guinea’s occupation of the now

Autonomous Region of Bougainville (established in 2000), when in May 2015 it announced without the consent of the Papua New Guinea government that it was establishing a foreign mission in Bougainville in the lead up to a referendum on its independence from Papua New Guinea set tentatively for 2019. Australia quickly backed down following Papua New Guinea government protest at this infringement on its sovereignty, and the plan was also criticised by some

Bougainvilleans who questioned Australia’s motives, particularly in relation to the now defunct Panguna copper mine, the source and site of previous violence. As a climate-change sceptic, Abbott’s inaction on that issue led PIF member countries

20 Lamb, “Abbott Stresses ‘respect for Indonesian Sovereignty’ after Asylum Talks.”

134 (excluding New Zealand) at the September 2015 PIF Forum in Papua New Guinea to threaten Australia’s removal from the PIF.21

Torres Strait Islanders have also expressed frustration at the Australian government’s lack of action on climate change, as its low-lying island communities in the twenty-first century have increasingly experienced the direct impacts of sea level rise. The Climate Change Strategy Report 2010-2013 of the TSRA explicitly warned of the future impacts of climate change on the Torres Strait (land and sea), emphasising that its vulnerability needed to be “fully appreciated by governments and policy makers”.22 It made direct connection to the United Nation’s Declaration on the Right of Indigenous Peoples, which commits Australia as a signatory to protect indigenous peoples’ rights to life, water, food, health, culture and a healthy environment.23 A 2010 Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References

Committee Inquiry into the administration and management of health issues, law and order, conservation, biosecurity, climate change, border protection and economic development in the Torres Strait Islands, titled The Torres Strait: Bridge and Border, also recommended urgent Australian government action on the issue.24

Yet federal and state commitments have focused on short-term fixes such as funding the construction of sea walls, as opposed to significantly reducing carbon emission.25

As the title of the 2010 Senate Inquiry into the Torres Strait Islands suggests,

Australia’s territorial border through the Torres Strait and the terms of the Torres

Strait Treaty with Papua New Guinea are increasingly important, particularly since

21 Cochrane, “Pacific Islands Forum: Australia May Be Asked To Leave Group Unless Action Taken on Climate Change.” 22 Torres Strait Regional Authority, Environmental Management Program, “Torres Strait Climate Change Strategy 2010-2013,” iii. 23 Torres Strait Regional Authority, Environmental Management Program i. 24 The Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, “The Torres Strait: Bridge and Border.” 25 Freri, “Federal Funding For Sea Walls in Torres Strait Islands.”

135 the Pacific Solution was first introduced in 2001. With the Treaty facilitating the legal movement of thousands of eligible Papua New Guineans annually without passports or visas to and within Australia’s jurisdiction over the Protected Zone

(61,700 movements were recorded in the year 2013-2014),26 mainstream media (not

Torres Strait Island-led) propagates the view that Australia’s relatively porous northeast border through the Torres Strait will be used more frequently by illegal immigrants to enter Australia by way of Indonesia (including West Papua) or

Papua New Guinea if nothing is done to control it.27

Torres Strait Islanders have also been active in fighting state and federal governments since 1996 for land and sea rights, as well as wages, savings reparations and compensation. Land and sea rights have been sought via the 1993

Native Title Act, and native title has been found to exist in most Torres Strait Island

DOGIT communities since 1993, as well as in approximately 44,000 square kilometres of sea area. Claimants under the Native Title Act must prove continuous connection to land or sea, and the Act does not accord ownership or full rights over that land or sea; it confers certain rights only on a case-by-case basis. These include the right to hunt, fish and conduct ceremony, to influence decision-making processes in regards to development, and to share native title country with other interested people or parties; freehold title and most leases over land extinguish native title completely under the Act without compensation. It is worth noting that native title experiences have been more complicated and less productive for

Aboriginal Australian compared to Torres Strait Island claimants; describes the Act as “demonstrably obstructive” for Aboriginal Australians, the

26 Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Border Protection, “Annual Report 2013-14,” 139. 27 Wordsworth, “Torres Strait Looms as a New Route for Asylum Seekers Escaping PNG.”

136 result of differences in colonisation, non-indigenous land tenure and government policies.28

The struggle for wage and savings reparations and compensation has been taken up in alliance with Aboriginal Australians and in response to the Queensland

Government’s control, underpayment and expenditure of both groups’ wages and savings under multiple state Acts from 1897 to 1984. In 1996 seven Aboriginal

Australian Elders from Palm Island won a federal court case over the Queensland

Government, stating that the underpayment of award wages was a breach of the

1975 Racial Discrimination Act.29 This was the catalyst for a broader apology to

Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders by the Queensland Government, and the establishment of the Under Wages Compensation Scheme (1999-2002) and the Indigenous Wages and Savings Reparations (2002-2010). In 2015 the newly elected Labor State Government, in response to community concerns about eligibility, access and fund allocation issues in previous schemes, established a

Reparations Scheme to address those objections.30

Governance of the Torres Strait Islands remains complex, involving local, state and federal governments as well as various agencies. At a local government level the Island Council system was reconfigured in 2008 following a series of

Queensland government reviews. The 15 outer island Councils amalgamated to create the Torres Strait Island Regional Council (TSIRC), and the two mainland

Councils of northern Cape York (Bamaga and Seisia) merged with the three neighbouring Aboriginal Councils of Ijinoon, New Mapoon and Umagico to form the Northern Peninsular Area Regional Council (NPARC); this repealed the 1984

28 Foley, “The and the Native Title Act.” 29 Anti-Discrimination Commission Queensland, “Torres Strait Islander People in Queensland: A Brief Human Rights History,” 29–30. 30 Stolen Wages Reparations Task Force, “Queensland Stolen Wages Reparations Taskforce Report: Reconciling Past Injustice.”

137 Community Services (Torres Strait) Act. The Torres Shire Council (TSC) represents the inner islands of the Strait (land of the Kaurareg Aboriginal people) including

Muralug (Prince of Wales Island), Ngurapai (Horn Island) and Waiben (Thursday

Island). Waiben remains the administrative centre of the Torres Strait Island region and the TSIRC operates from there despite having no administrative control over the island. The dual responsibilities of TSIRC and NPARC are to fulfil local government obligations in compliance with the 2009 Queensland Local Government

Act; and as trustees of DOGIT land to administer it in accordance with the state’s

1991 Torres Strait Islander Land Act, 1994 Land Act, and Commonwealth 1993 Native

Title Act.

At the State level, the Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Partnerships has provided leadership over policy, coordination and monitoring, and the delivery of services to Torres Strait Islanders since 2001. A key legislative responsibility of the Department is the overseeing of the 2003 Torres Strait Islander

Cultural Heritage Act whose main purpose is “to provide effective recognition, protection and conservation of Torres Strait Islander cultural heritage”. Federally, the TSRA survived the 2005 abolition of ATSIC and continues to be the leading

Commonwealth representative body for Torres Strait Islanders (and Aboriginal

Australians) living in the Torres Strait (outer and inner islands). While the TSRA also represents those residing in the northern Cape York communities of Bamaga and Seisia, it does not directly represent mainland Torres Strait Islanders living outside these communities. As of the 2011 census 89% of people who identified as being of “Torres Strait Islander origin” (46,829) lived on the Australian mainland

(excluding Bamaga and Seisia communities) in comparison to 5,787 who resided in

138 the “Torres Strait Indigenous Region”.31 The TSRA’s key functions include formulating, implementing and monitoring programs; developing policy proposals; and assisting, advising and co-operating with Federal, State, Territory and Local governments. Framing TSRA governance is a recognition and focus on maintaining

“the special and unique Ailan Kastom of Torres Strait Islanders”.32 The TSRA in

2015 is an Agency within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet; the

Minister has “powers of direction” in relation to the TSRA.

Discussions and debates about self-determination, self-governance and independence continue among Torres Strait Islanders both in the Strait and on the mainland. This is influenced by the significant socio-economic disparities between

Torres Strait Islanders and white Australians, produced by problematic political discourses and policies that govern all Indigenous Australians in a broad sense, and the “proliferation and overlap of governing and administrative bodies” that administer the Torres Strait Islands region specifically.33 A 1997 Australian House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Affairs’ Report, On Greater Autonomy for Torres Strait Islanders, put forward a number of possible forms of autonomy for the region and outlined the moves necessary to achieve it. Yet little came of it: elected representatives of the TSRA,

TSIRC, TSC and NPARC, known as “the Coalition”, in 2013 began dialogue with local community and State and Federal governments on the desire to implement a

“One Boat” governance model for the Torres Strait Islands and the mainland communities of Bamaga and Seisia. “One Boat” seeks to replace the TSRA, TSIRC and TSC, and remove Bamaga and Seisia from the NPARC, in favour of a single

Torres Strait Island governance body; its objective is to “improve transparency,

31 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “2011 Census of Population and Housing, Australia.” 32 Torres Strait Regional Authority, “Annual Report 2010-2011,” 85. 33 Kehoe-Forutan, “Turning Succession into Self-Governance in the Torres Strait,” 187.

139 accountability and efficiency in service delivery and eliminate inter- agency/governmental duplication, stakeholder misalignment and waste”;34 its aim is to be implemented by 2020. Yet this is not the final goal of “the Coalition” but rather the first step towards being granted Territory Government status, similar to the Northern Territory or Australian Capital Territory.

The Federal government has yet to formally endorse the “One Boat” proposal, reflecting its broader reluctance to engage in self-determination initiatives beyond the symbolic. Aboriginal Australians simultaneously have been met with resistance in their continued demand to enter into a Treaty with the

Federal government, whose priority since 2010 has been constitutional change to acknowledge Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the

Australian Constitution by way of referendum. No matter what form of self- governance or independence is sought by Torres Strait Islanders (and there continue to be individuals and groups that campaign for full political independence from the Australian state) they are asking critical questions about the potential impact of any successful move for recognition on economic self- sufficiency, service delivery, socio-economic disadvantage, the impacts on mainland Torres Strait Islanders and the precedent set for Australia’s other indigenous group, Aboriginal Australians. Nakata has drawn attention to the

“myriad of complex relationships which represent a vast array of intersecting historical interests” for Torres Strait Islanders;35 my analysis has been designed to demonstrate the history and effects of the divided status of Torres Strait Islanders as culturally Pacific peoples and politically Indigenous Australian.

34 Torres Strait Regional Authority, “Media Release No. 558: Torres Strait Leaders Forum Meeting 6 May 2014.” 35 Nakata, “Commonsense, Colonialism and Government,” 173.

140 The place of Australian South Sea Islanders within the Australian nation continues to be one of marginalisation. Formal recognition by Commonwealth and state governments has largely failed to translate into the appropriate action for change sought by the community. In 2000 Queensland formalised its 1975 recognition, extending its acknowledgement of Australian South Sea Islanders from a distinct cultural group to one whose disadvantage was produced by “unjust treatment . . . prejudice and racial discrimination”;36 New South Wales followed in

2013, the year that marked the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the first South Sea

Islanders in Queensland and the 166th anniversary of those who first arrived in New

South Wales. Australian South Sea Islander-specific initiatives from state and

Commonwealth governments - including the implementation of a community development project to improve access to government services; the granting of tertiary education scholarships and public sector traineeships; and the development of curriculum on Australian South Sea Islander history and culture for Queensland primary and secondary schools - have made little change to the socio-economic position of Australian South Sea Islanders. Nor have they improved mainstream Australian awareness and knowledge of the Australian

South Sea Islander community’s significant economic contribution to the country

(today Australia’s raw sugar industry is one of the largest in the world, yielding almost $2 billion a year),37 and their unique cultural status within the nation.38 A

2014 Queensland Government community survey report revealed that Australian

South Sea Islanders in comparison to non-Australian South Sea Islanders have a lower chance of attaining an education level above a Certificate III or IV and a

36 Queensland Government, “Queensland Government Recognition Statement, Australian South Sea Islander Community.” 37 Sugar Australia, “Industry Information.” 38 Flanagan, Wilkie, and Luliano, “A History of South Sea Islanders in Australia.”

141 higher chance of having a below Year 12 education, and a higher unemployment rate (11.2% compared to 6.1%).39

The 2011 Australian census recorded 3,661 people who identify as having

Australian South Sea Islander ancestry: 79% live on Queensland’s east coast, mostly in the urban centres of Mackay, Rockhampton, Brisbane, Townsville and .40

It is argued, however, that this figure is significantly undercounted, with the number thought to be anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000; it is estimated one- third also have Indigenous Australian heritage.41 Australian South Sea Islanders continue to share a unique cultural kinship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait

Islander communities expressed through solidarity and at times tension. Inter- marriage rates remain high between the cultural groups, while anxieties still exist in relation to identity politics and the “wrongful” claiming by some members of the

Australian South Sea Island community of an Aboriginal Australian or Torres

Strait Islander identity as a means to access certain Indigenous Australian-specific programs and entitlements. At Wantok 2012, a national Australian South Sea Island conference held in Bundaberg on the 2oth anniversary of the Human Rights Equal

Opportunity Commission’s Call for Recognition report, an apology ceremony was facilitated by a visiting Vanuatu Chief, acknowledging the wrongs done by South

Sea Island indentured labourers used by white Australians to kill Aboriginal

Australians; such stories had been passed down to him by his grandfather.

Maclellan also recounts stories of Aboriginal Australian child orphans being taken to Vanuatu as an act of apology by South Sea Islanders implicated in the colonial

39 Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Multicultural Affairs, “The Queensland Australian South Sea Islander Community Survey 2014.” 40 Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Multicultural Affairs, “Australian South Sea Islanders’ 150th Anniversary,” 1. 41 Rose, Quanchi, and Moore, A National Strategy for the Study of the Pacific, 96; Moore, “Australian South Sea Islanders and Their Kin Connections to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians,” 1. Moore estimates that 50 to 60% of Torres Strait Islanders have Australian South Sea Islander ancestry.

142 killings of their parents; descendants of those children live today in the Shefa province of Vanuatu.42

Although Australian South Sea Islanders understand their political status as non-indigenous, their aspirations to future (self)-governance continue to align more closely with those of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders than with Pacific and other non-indigenous ethnic communities in Australia. The

Australian Human Rights Commission reports that following formal recognition by the Commonwealth government in 1994 as a distinct cultural group that faced systemic disadvantage, this line of thought has raised “unrealistic expectations” for the establishment of “an equivalent body to ATSIC . . . which would include the associated funding and community power”.43 In more recent times there have been calls by community members for a formal apology from the Commonwealth government for its past treatment of Australian South Sea Islanders (specifically its recruitment and deportation policies), similar to that given in 2008 to Aboriginal

Australians and Torres Strait Islanders affected by former child removal policies.

Accompanying this hope is also the possibility of implementing a program comparable to Link-Up, an Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander service established “to help reconnect and reconcile families and communities”.44 An Australian South Sea Island-specific service, with bilateral support from both Australia and individual Pacific Island nations, could provide descendants of those who remained in Australia and those who returned to their home Islands the resources and support necessary to find and reconnect with kin; there are many descendants already active in establishing new relationships or maintaining existing kin links. Significantly, in 2013 the Vanuatu government

42 Maclellan, “South Sea Islanders Unite In Australia.” 43 Flanagan, Wilkie, and Luliano, “A History of South Sea Islanders in Australia.” 44 Maclellan, “South Sea Islanders Unite In Australia.”

143 amended its Constitution to allow for dual citizenship, thus enabling Australian

South Sea Islanders with ancestral ties to Vanuatu to apply for and obtain Vanuatu citizenship while keeping their Australian citizenship; prior to 2002, Australian citizens who became citizens of another country automatically forfeited their

Australian citizenship.45

Wage reparations are also sought from the Queensland government for its misappropriation of the Pacific Islanders’ Fund, which existed from 1885 through to the early 1900s. Established among other things to “ensure that the money due to deceased Islanders was returned to their families . . . the Queensland government . .

. seldom returned the full wages to the families of the deceased Islanders and profited largely from their deaths” to the total of £120,000, equating to millions in today’s money.46 In the past Australian South Sea Islander advocacy movements

(collective and individual) have been numerous and at times born out of conflict with one another, but 400 community members at Wantok 2012 made a unanimous decision to establish one unified national body to advocate on behalf of the entire community in Australia and those descendants of indentured labourers who live throughout the Pacific. The Australian South Sea Islanders—Port Jackson organisation was elected to fulfil this roll. (née Neehow), the wife of the late Eddie Koiki Mabo and of Australian South Sea Islander and Aboriginal

Australian heritage (unlike her Torres Strait Islander husband), is its patron and eminent leader.

45 Graue, “Queensland Woman Reclaims Vanuatu Citizenship on Behalf of ‘Blackbirded’ Great- Grandparents.” Raechel Ivey was the first Australian South Sea Islander to obtain dual citizenship in 2014. 46 Moore, “The Pacific Islanders’ Fund and the Misappropriation of the Wages of Deceased Pacific Islanders by the Queensland Government,” 1.

144 This section has mapped Pacific peoples’ routes to Australia and detailed their diverse (cultural and national) experiences with the Australian continent and state both before and after European settlement in the late eighteenth century. It has emphasised and analysed the ambivalent places (real and symbolic) occupied by

Pacific peoples within the historical production of an Australian nation and in the imaginary of Australian nationalism. Crucial to this historical and contemporary analysis has been a comparative examination of the places accorded to Aboriginal

Australians, and an identification of how these have informed Pacific peoples’ experiences and their kinships with Aboriginal Australians in Australia. A careful analysis of Australia’s colonial and neocolonial histories of control over Pacific lands and peoples is woven through the narrative; this too reveals how the places of

Pacific people in Australia are also informed by the ways in which Australia engages with the Pacific region, and the extent to which Australia considers itself a part of or apart from the Pacific. Although Australia is considered to be geographically part of the Pacific region, my analysis indicates that this identification has rarely featured in any meaningful national self-imaginings.

Furthermore, framing Pacific migrations to Australia and Pacific places within the nation via an understanding of both Australia’s formal engagements with

Aboriginal Australians and neighbouring Pacific Islands emphasises my argument that the Pacific experience in Australia is ambivalent and distinct from the experiences of other migrant communities. This section provides the historical and analytical context for the more specific and detailed case studies that follow. The following sections of my thesis explore the meanings of Pacific heritage and Pacific futures at the heart of two crucial sites of contemporary Australian identity: sport and the arts.

145 – Section Two –

The Pacific Presence in Australian Rugby League

The greatest game of all . . . Our mission is simply to bring people together and enrich their lives . . . This is a field where everyone is welcome to join and where nobody need ever leave.47

For over a century rugby league in Australia has occupied a central position in the lives of predominantly white working-class communities in New South Wales and

Queensland, identifying itself with the imagined egalitarianism of the nation more broadly. However, while historically synonymous with blue-collar affiliations forged through labour and trade union movements, today rugby league in

Australia, defined by the fully-professionalised National Rugby League competition (NRL), is a billion-dollar industry. Corporatisation, media broadcasting and commercialisation from the early 1980s have seen significant growth in participation, support, administration and sponsorship. Not just national but regional expansion of the sport is illustrated through the introduction of a New

Zealand-based club in the in 1995; a Papua New Guinea-based team within Queensland’s premier State competition in 2014; and the planned inclusion of a Fiji-based team within the New South Wales premier State competition. In 2015, 177,950 Australians were registered as rugby league players, while 267,465 people were fee-paying members of the NRL’s sixteen clubs;48 over

3.4 million people attended NRL, State of Origin and International fixtures, while the sport provided the three most watched television shows on Australian television for the same year. Such is the television, mobile and digital interest that in 2015 the Australian Rugby League Commission (ARLC), the governing body for rugby league in Australia, signed a five-year media rights agreement worth 1.8

47 Australian Rugby League Commission, “The Game Plan 2013-2017.” 48 Australian Rugby League Commission, “NRL Annual Report 2015,” 52–55.

146 billion dollars with the Nine Network, and beginning in 2018.49

The NRL is one of Australia’s most financially lucrative sporting competitions, rivalled only by the Australian Football League (AFL).

The effects of intense professionalism on elite rugby league in Australia over the past 30 years have not been simply economic but also social and more specifically racial. The sport has transitioned from one which provided incomes to its players comparable to other professions to one where players are able to make disproportionate amounts of money for themselves and consequently their clubs and the governing body. Simultaneously it has moved from a sport historically occupied by white working-class Anglo-Australian men to one increasingly represented by a growing Aboriginal Australian presence from 1980, followed by increasing Pacific participation from 1995.

This section maps the involvement of Pacific players in rugby league in

Australia, particularly at the elite level, the NRL competition: first, by way of an historical account of their involvement in the game. Then I provide a contemporary analysis of the ways in which mainstream media and rugby league administrators give meaning and at times seek solutions to the expanding twenty-first-century

Pacific presence within Australian rugby league; and an examination of ARLC and

NRL Pacific-specific player and community programs implemented in Australia,

New Zealand and those Pacific Island countries where rugby league is most popular (i.e. Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga). While rugby league appears to mark a celebrated site of Australia’s Pacific engagements, closer analysis reveals the ambivalence that everywhere shadows the place of Pacific peoples within the Australian nation. I argue that Pacific players are individually celebrated and collectively claimed as representing the vision, mission, values and uniqueness

49 Australian Rugby League Commission, 7. The media rights agreement excludes radio rights. More than nine million people follow Australian rugby league social media sites.

147 of rugby league across all levels of the sport today; yet simultaneously they are invisible, or visibly presented as a threat to the style, rules, culture and economics of the sport, as well as to team success.

148 1: Rugby League’s Origin Story (1840-1908)

Rugby league in Australia is simultaneously connected to and disconnected from the histories of the sport in its birthplace, England, and its other antipodean centre,

New Zealand. While there are clear differences in the trajectory of rugby league in each of the three geographic settings, at its roots the sport has longstanding connections to working-class values and philosophies. Established in northern

England in 1895, rugby league’s origin story is found in the sport of rugby union and its intersection with the political and economic structures of nineteenth- century England; intense industrialisation left little opportunity for working-class participation in leisure activities, thus leaving rugby union and sport in general as the preserve of the elite.1 Rugby union was codified within newly-formed public

(fee-paying independent secondary) schools from at least the 1840s; its ethos and rules reflected the broader ideological underpinnings of the bourgeoisie in mid- to late-nineteenth-century England. A philosophy of “Muscular Christianity” ensured that the sport provided a space where young men could gain the character and skills necessary for serving government, trade and God both at home and throughout the expanding British Empire; rugby union was not about winning or spectatorship, but about playing the “right way”.

Until the 1870s the sport quickly spread into broader society as public school alumni attended university or moved into the workforce. This brought about a democratisation of rugby union, defined by the creation of football (rugby union) clubs affiliated to towns and based on civic pride, and by the establishment in 1871 of a national administrative body, the Rugby Football Union (RFU), to oversee its development. An increasingly self-confident and assertive working-class from

England’s industrial north attached itself to the sport but expressed attitudes

1 Blackledge, “Rationalist Capitalist Concerns: William Cail and the Great Rugby Split of 1895,” 36.

149 different to those articulated in the public schools, universities and bourgeois clubs of the south. Rather than a means to enforce a moral code, the sport was seen increasingly as an amelioration of the mundane reality of working-class life.

Through spectacle, it provided a rare space for both player and spectator to express self and community identity through their connection to club and team.

Remuneration, financial and otherwise, was critical to this process, as it was the lifeline which enabled working-class participants to afford time away from work to play sport; it also provided a means of gaining status and money otherwise unobtainable for this class in the political and economic systems of late-nineteenth- century England.2 Still within a rigid class stratification, the codification and democratisation of rugby union after 1870 provided a rare space for class mobility.

The RFU’s ambivalence towards working-class participation in its sport soon began to show. Northern working-class dominance in club competition coupled with a large representation in the English national team challenged the southern middle-class hold on rugby union. Competition, spectacle, large crowds, parochialism, gate-takings and player remuneration underpinned working-class dominance. The RFU decided to enforce regulations to consolidate its control both on and off the field: in 1886 it introduced strict amateur regulations which banned all remuneration, both monetary and otherwise. As most working men were unable to afford unpaid time away from work for play, travel or injury, these policies effectively attached amateurism to class as a means to contain the social groups who played the sport.

Previously amateurism within rugby union had operated relatively loosely.

The term simply defined those who played the sport for “love”, while a professional was someone who was paid; after 1886, however, the concept of amateurism

2 Light, “‘Ordinary Working Men ... Transformed into Giants on the Rugby Field’: ‘Collective’ and ‘Individual’ Memory in Oral Histories of Rugby League,” 68.

150 developed a clear class referent. The terms “amateur” and “professional”

“designated, not merely the sportsman’s technical relation to his sport, but more significantly the type of man that he was”.3 Fundamental to the attributes of an amateur was the new concept of the “gentleman”, which had not long formed as a means to differentiate the traditional ruling class from the industrial bourgeoisie who were closer to the working-class; these class designations evolved in the context of growing class struggles in the late 1880s and early 1890s.4 In contravention of the amateur regulations, many (middle-class) players and administrators continued to profit from the sport, while working-class players and clubs who also attempted to benefit received lengthy suspensions and expulsions from competition. This form of “shamateurism” emphasised the fact that it was not payment that was of concern to the RFU but who was being paid.

An attempt by clubs in north Yorkshire to find a middle ground with the

RFU and legalise remuneration for players who had to take time off work for play and travel (referred to as “broken-time”) proved unsuccessful in 1893. After a further tightening of amateur regulations by the RFU in 1895, a decision to disband was made by 21 Northern England rugby union clubs at the George Hotel in

Huddersfield on 29 August 1895, the day of rugby league’s inauguration as a distinct sport. Administered by the newly established Northern Rugby Football Union – more commonly known as the Northern Union (NU) and today as the Rugby

Football League (RFL) – the new sport was defined by clear class and geographical referents.

The NU took little time in distinguishing itself from the RFU. Off the field it immediately introduced “broken-time”, followed by full professionalism in 1905.

On the field, distinctions were gradually established over the sport’s first decade,

3 Blackledge, “Rationalist Capitalist Concerns: William Cail and the Great Rugby Split of 1895,” 42. 4 Blackledge, 51.

151 with changes to traditional rugby union rules such as increasing the points awarded for tries, abandoning the lineout, decreasing the number of players on the field from 15 to 13 and introducing the “play the ball” rule instead of the traditional ruck and maul. Each modification was designed as a way of reducing stoppages in the sport and creating what the NU deemed a more exciting alternative for spectators than offered by rugby union. More excitement meant more spectators and in turn higher gate-takings; this money could then be used to attract and pay the best sportsmen available. The RFU welcomed both the split and the subsequent rule changes, as it increasingly assured rugby union’s difference from rugby league. Within this context Tony Collins challenges the popular narrative of rugby league’s creation story as a class rebellion when the brave industrial workers of northern England stood up against the lack of rights afforded their people within rugby union; he argues that rugby league was created by the RFU’s sustained and aggressive pursuit of exclusionary policies designed to ensure that working-class

Northerners eradicated themselves from rugby union.5

Rugby league came to Australia within a decade of its creation, as a result of a flow of people and culture among England’s north, New Zealand and Australia’s eastern seaboard throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries; it was fostered by intensive migration and visitation from the imperial centre and return travel (permanent and temporary) for governmental, economic, religious, familial and sporting purposes. As in England, Australia’s rugby league origins lie within rugby union and the dissatisfactions felt towards the sport’s governing bodies. But Australia’s increasingly popular self-image as an egalitarian society distinct from the “motherland” ensured that the initial split in 1907 did not occur

5 Collins, Rugby’s Great Split: Class, Culture and the Origins of Rugby League Football. The biggest winner from the split within rugby union was association football (soccer). Player and supporter exodus from rugby union established association football as Britain’s most played and popular sport, a position it has strengthened since.

152 along distinctly class lines: only after World War I would class become a signifier of the respective sports.

Rugby union in the colonies of New South Wales and Queensland became a

“definitive descriptor of colonial masculine identity” and was one of the main sites of imperial values and influence.6 It was first played in Sydney in the 1860s and its growing popularity led to the codification of the sport through the establishment of the Southern Rugby Football Union (SRFU) in 1874, renamed in 1892 the New

South Wales Rugby Football Union (NSWRFU, later NSWRU). For its first twenty years at least rugby union in New South Wales did not replicate the RFU’s war on professionalism, gate-takings, coaching, competition and excessive competitiveness; instead the ideals of the RFU were loosely and pragmatically adapted to the unique social, cultural and environmental climate of the eastern mainland Australian colonies.7 Only after the 1895 split in England did the New

South Wales and Queensland administration begin to mirror the ideologies of the

RFU. The hardened stance in England was seen to compromise the emerging egalitarian nature of rugby union and to contradict the values of soon-to-be- federated Australia. Rugby union’s alternative form was well-known in England’s southern colonies, as readily accessible British newspapers covered the split from its beginning and tours to Australia in 1899 and 1904 by the British rugby union team increased curiosity about the players’ perspectives of the “other” sport. Yet it was New Zealand that fast-tracked rugby league to Australia.

Rugby union in New Zealand has a similar narrative to Australia, except for one major difference: it was able to cement itself as the national sport (something more difficult in Australia because the strength of different sports in different

6 Horton, “Rugby Union Football in the Land of the Wallabies, 1874-1949: Same Game, Different Ethos,” 1611. 7 Horton, 1616.

153 colonies was maintained after Federation). Introduced in 1870 by young men who had returned to New Zealand from schooling in England, rugby union quickly grew in prominence and was an integral tool in the early stages of nation-building.

Mark Falcous argues that post-frontier masculinity built on “manual labour, rurality, settler pragmatism and ingenuity” was waning; New Zealand made the transition from settler frontier to fledging nation at least partly through the promotion of rugby union as an effective way to revitalise this hyper-masculinity and transfer these attributes to society more broadly.8 The most successful example of this process was the decision of the New Zealand Rugby Football Union

(NZRFU, later NZRU) formed in 1892 to sanction a national tour of the British Isles,

France and the United States in 1905: supported by the New Zealand government, the national team – the All Blacks – displayed an overwhelming dominance over all its opposition bar Wales. The team’s success was met with “patriotic fervour” on their return home in 1906,9 so that it might be said that the “New Zealand rugby nation predated, and in part facilitated, the emergence of the New Zealand nation itself”.10 Rugby union in New Zealand was given patronage far greater than any other sport, both signifying and reproducing the dominant value systems of the state.

Yet there is also another little-known story from this tour, which involves off-field player dissatisfaction, and subsequent conversations with officials in

English rugby league. In contrast to the £10,000 profit made by the NZRFU, players received little money on tour, and some returned with no money or employment.

This frustration was exacerbated when members of the team saw firsthand the

8 Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary of New Zealand Aotearoa,” 426. 9 Collins, “Class, Commercialism and Community in the Origins and Development of the Northern Rugby Football Union, 1857-1910,” 285. 10 Fougere, “Sport, Culture and Identity: The Case of Rugby Football,” 131 quoted in Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary of New Zealand Aotearoa,” 426.

154 financial support offered by the newly functioning NU. The sport’s financial remuneration combined with its exciting new on-field rules made the idea of bringing rugby league to New Zealand a feasible proposition. Influential All Blacks such as George Smith (also well known in Australian sporting circles through his success as an athlete and jockey) shared his desire to bring rugby league south with like-minded entrepreneurs upon his return in 1906. One such opportunist was New

Zealand postal clerk, Albert Henry Baskerville, who played rugby union at a club level and wrote the popular 1907 book titled Modern Rugby Football: New Zealand

Methods; Points for the Beginner, the Player, the Spectator. With the support of Smith,

Baskerville became the public face of the venture to bring rugby league to New

Zealand. After successful negotiations with the NU in 1906, it was decided to send a professional team to tour England and play NU clubs through 1907 and 1908. It is estimated that no less than 160 of New Zealand’s approximately 200 international and provincial New Zealand rugby union representative players applied for a place on the proposed tour.11

This New Zealand rugby league team travelled to Britain via Australia; in anticipation of their arrival in Sydney, entrepreneur James Joseph Giltinan,

Australian Labor Party member Henry Hoyle and Australian cricketer Victor

Trumper met with disgruntled New South Wales rugby union players to offer rugby league as a new football alternative. After much discussion a collective decision was made on 8 August 1907 at Bateman’s Hotel to establish the New South

Wales (NSWRFL) and select a professional New South

Wales “All ” team to participate in a three-game series against the visiting

“professional All Blacks”12 at Sydney’s Royal Agricultural Ground over eight days

11 Haynes, From All Blacks to All Golds: New Zealand’s Rugby League Pioneers, 37. 12 The official team name was the “New Zealand All Black Rugby Football Team”, but became more commonly known on tour in Britain as the “All Blacks”, the name used for the New Zealand Rugby

155 in August 1907. Despite widespread condemnation by the respective rugby union bodies, the media and prominent conservative figures in both countries, the rebel series took place successfully. The threat of life bans by the unions did not deter players from either country signing up to play, with the games attracting some of rugby union’s best players, including New South Welshman Herbert Henry “Dally”

Messenger, arguably the greatest player at the time. Similarly, despite the negative press coverage, the three-game series drew crowds as large as 20,000 people. The games were played under traditional rugby union rules because rugby league’s rulebook had not yet reached New Zealand or Australia, but the financial success of the series gave Giltinan, Hoyle and Trumper the confidence to establish a

Sydney-based rugby league competition the following year, thus firmly planting the roots of rugby league in Australian soil.

The class dichotomies that produced were blurred when it made its competition debut in Australia through the NSWRFL and

Queensland Rugby Football League (QRFL, later QRL) competitions in 1908 and

1909. Andrew Moore states that while there was an unwillingness by the NSWRFU to address the widening schism in the sport, unlike the RFU in England it did not induce the split of 1907-1908: the players achieved this themselves.13 In England pre-existing clubs were brought into a new competition, but in New South Wales clubs for the most part had to be formed from scratch, and it was the players who established them. Decisions to leave were not made on class lines but as a result of multiple individual, group and club grievances directed at both the NSWRFU and the Metropolitan Rugby Union (MRU), the NSWRFU’s sub-administrator for all

Union team. Today the team is most commonly referred to and remembered as the “All Gold’s”, a name bestowed on the team at the time by proponents of amateur rugby union to draw attention to the team’s financial orientation. The team were also known as “The Phantoms”. 13 Moore, “Jimmy Devereux’s Yorkshire Pudding: Reflections on the Origins of Rugby League in New South Wales and Queensland,” 30.

156 Sydney city clubs and competitions. These included refusal to renumerate all players financially for uniforms, travel and injury – hard to accept when rugby union’s sporting counterparts in , , rowing, cycling and all obtained various forms of payment; professionalism had existed in Australian sport since the 1840s. Also in dispute were rugby union’s stance on paid coaching, which positioned it as a violation of amateur status; the MRU’s neglect of rugby union outside its premier competition; and the inability of successful clubs not already in the premier competition to be promoted into it.14 Decisions to play rugby league were not always made as a rejection of amateurism: some players switched merely for the opportunity to try a new sport or to continue playing with old teammates, and many of them also refused payment in an attempt to keep their amateur status, in the hope of remaining eligible to compete in individual amateur sports such as athletics. Yet with the definition of an amateur no clearer in Australia than it was in

England, decisions on eligibility were inconsistent across sports and largely made depending on the politics of the day.15

The NSWRFL had to provide a genuine alternative which met the needs of those disillusioned by rugby union. For clubs, it offered the promise of an independent income through entitlement to half the gate-takings of any games in which they played; this luxury was never available in rugby union, as the MRU and

NSWRFU collected all the profits from gate-takings. For players, rugby league promised “broken-time” payments similar to those in England, with compensation given to players for time off work caused by injuries and tours, giving them up to £1 per week. It also added individual incentives by promising tours of Britain, like the one which the players on the professional All Blacks tour benefited from

14 Little, “The ‘Hidden’ History of the Birth of Rugby League in Australia: The Significance of ‘Local’ Factors in Sydney’s Rugby Split.” 15 Nielsen, “‘Oh Error, Ill-Conceived’, The Amateur Sports Federation of New South Wales, Rugby League and Amateur Athletics.”

157 financially. The tours also afforded the possibility for those who performed well to be selected and paid to represent NU teams in Britain.16 The NSWRFL initially comprised eight Sydney-based clubs (Balmain, Cumberland, Eastern Suburbs,

Glebe, Newtown, North Sydney, South Sydney, Western Suburbs) and one

Newcastle-based team; Cumberland and Newcastle exited within the first two years of competition, and the Annandale club joined in 1910.

16 Evans, A Short History of Rugby League in Australia, 15.

158 2: Racial Inclusion and Exclusion in the Formative Years (1908-1960)

Rugby league quickly rivalled and eventually overtook rugby union as the number one form of football in Sydney, partly because of the popularity of the New Zealand

Māori rugby league teams (the “All Māoris”) which toured Australia in 1908 and

1909. Pacific involvement in rugby league in Australia was Māori-centric up until the 1970s, reflecting the external and internal exclusion of non-Māori Pacific peoples from the Australian nation, as we have seen in Section One.

The erosion of pre-European games, physical activities and contests through colonisation and acculturation meant that rugby union quickly became the principal domain in which Māori and Pacific peoples in British and New

Zealand colonies participated in colonial sport. While rugby union became integral to New Zealand nationalism, in relation to Māori it governed the emerging nation’s broader myth of “harmonious ‘race relations’ between settler and tangata whenua

[Māori]”,1 and in the process the construction of a limited and homogenised

Pākehā imagery of Māori masculinity.2 Māori access to and success within rugby union served three functions for Pākehā: first, to bring Māori into favour with New

Zealand’s colonial public, who had become increasingly hostile towards Māori as a result of civil wars in the mid-to-late-nineteenth century; second, to perpetuate stereotypes of Māori savagery congruent with Pākehā constructions of Māori masculinity defined by “the ‘physical’ Māori man prototype”; and third, to illustrate to the homeland and indeed the world that “the existence of the Māori sportsman provided evidence that New Zealand’s colonial system had enlightened and assimilated its savages”.3

1 Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary of New Zealand Aotearoa,” 438. 2 Hokowhitu, “Tackling Māori Masculinity: A Colonial Genealogy of Savagery and Sport,” 262. 3 Hokowhitu, 265.

159 Yet Māori involvement in rugby union in its formative years also provided a degree of agency, no better expressed than through the creation of the 1888/89 New

Zealand Natives team. Established by Joe Warbrick (one of two Māori selected in the first private New Zealand representative team which toured the colony of New

South Wales in 1884) and aided by Englishman Thomas Eyton, the team operated free from the controls of the administering provincial unions (the unified NZRFU was not created until 1892). Embarking on a fourteen-month tour through New

Zealand, Australia, Egypt and the British Isles from June 1888 to August 1889, the

Natives played a total of 107 official games, while also playing Australian rules football and association football (soccer) on their return home via the colonies of

Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Initially thought by New Zealand and

British rugby union administrators to be a “racialised spectacle showcasing ‘full- blooded’ Maori”, the team was also composed of Māori with mixed heritage and five Pākehā players.4 This caused much concern within New Zealand because “a full-blooded Maori team was less dangerous to the representation of the colony because their failings (if that were to have eventuated) could be explained by their inherent savagery, but a mixed team dominated by Māori was not a good look for a burgeoning colony because it indicated a failure of imperial ideology”.5 In contradiction of popular histories that credit Eyton with the idea to include non-

Māori players, Brendan Hokowhitu claims that it was rather Warbrick who thought it essential for success against the British and subsequent regaining on the international stage of the mana (respect) for Māori that had been stripped by colonisation.6 This “ironic counter-narrative of assimilation, where Pākehā are integrated into an indigenous team to showcase the talents of Maori” disrupts the

4 Hokowhitu, “Māori Rugby and Subversion: Creativity, Domestication, Oppression and Decolonization,” 2318. 5 Hokowhitu, 2318. 6 Hokowhitu, 2317.

160 popular narrative which credits the success of the tour to colonisation and rugby’s assimilatory and egalitarian features. Now visible are Māori political subversiveness and entrepreneurial creativity, defined by tino rangatiratanga

(sovereignty).7

After the tour Fredrick and William Warbrick (two of the five Warbrick brothers from Ngāti Rangitihi who played in the Natives team) moved to the colony of Queensland where both were selected for Queensland from 1891-1894, with

William captain of the team.8 They were arguably the first players of Māori ancestry to represent an Australian colony in competitive team sport; before this

Māori participation in Australian sport was largely via individual aquatic sports

(true too for Pacific peoples more broadly). Such was the impact of Pacific peoples on Australian sporting beach culture during the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries that Pacific names such as Tommy Tanna, Alick Wickham and

Duke Paoa Kahanamoku remain synonymous with the sports of competitive bodysurfing, swimming, diving and surfing in Australia. Yet, as Gary Ormond argues, Pacific people’s successes over white Australian participants in aquatic sports were consistently explained through a “naturalised” unfair advantage. For example, the victory of an otherwise unidentified “Kanaka” named Cooper in a

300-yard race at Sydney’s Domain Baths in 1855 prompted the sporting media to inquire into why no one saw fit to complain about the result, “given the advantages provided by [Cooper’s] ‘unequal’ abilities as an Islander”.9 Such examples draw attention to nineteenth-century understandings of racial difference as biological and fixed; and require us to ask to what extent they are still operative today.

7 Hokowhitu, 2317–18. 8 Mulholland, Beneath the Māori Moon: An Illustrated History of Māori Rugby, 8. 9 Osmond, “The Surfing Tommy Tanna,” 183.

161 Joining the Warbrick brothers in the 1893 and 1894 Queensland rugby union teams was Frank Ivory, who Colin Tatz believes most likely to have been the first

Aboriginal Australian to represent the colony of Queensland in rugby union.10 Like

Māori in New Zealand and Pacific peoples in Britain’s Pacific Island colonies,

Aboriginal Australian participation in colonial sport initially came almost exclusively through cricket on account of its “civilising” qualities. However, access to colonial sports, particularly team-based, became far more restricted for

Aboriginal Australians as the nineteenth century progressed, with an intensification of overt violence, segregation and confinement. At the time when the Warbrick brothers and Ivory were included in the Queensland representative rugby union team, the colonial government was enacting the most brutal policies against not only Aboriginal Australians but also Australian South Sea Islanders.

This not only makes Ivory’s selection all the more remarkable, but illuminates the ways Māori were imagined in comparison to South Sea Islanders and Aboriginal

Australians.

Māori dominance of New Zealand rugby union was quickly reined in during the 1890s and 1900s following the founding of the NZRFU in 1892.

Frustrated and disillusioned by the NZRFU’s restrictive amateur ideologies, many

Māori in 1908 turned to opportunities promised by rugby league. Influenced by the

“professional All Black” rugby league team currently in Britain, and inspired by the political resistance and entrepreneurial creativity of the Natives rugby union team in 1888 and 1889, a Māori rugby league team was established in 1908 for a tour of

Australia; this is the moment of Māori inclusion in the sport both in New Zealand and Australia.

10 Tatz, Obstacle Race: Aborigines in Sport, 224-25.

162 With rugby league still to debut in New Zealand, the tour was organised by

All Black winger Arapeta Paurini Wharepapa (commonly referred to by his English name Albert Asher) and left New Zealand billed as a rugby union tour. It was only upon arrival in Sydney in June 1908 that a switch from rugby union to rugby league was articulated: this was likely not accidental but a long-thought-out and well- disguised plan that had been months in the making between Asher and the

NSWRFL.11 This duplicity (or strategy) meant that the team incurred significant economic and political penalties both during and after the tour. Contestation of gate-takings by tour promoters and withholding of money owed to the Māori team by the NSWRFL led them to cut short their tour in protest. In debt and without a boat fare home, the team decided to form a rugby union team in the style of the

1888/89 Natives team, hoping to secure additional players from Māori residents of

Sydney.12 Yet with strong opposition from both the NSWRFL and the NSWRFU, both the organised rugby union game and post-game concert were a financial disaster, further deflating the Māori team’s effort to clear their debts and return home. Fortunately the imminent Australian rugby league tour of the British Isles

(financed out of the £1200 that the NSWRFL made from the Māori tour)13 forced the creation of an acting NSWRFL administration for its duration. Not long after the Australian touring party’s ship had left Sydney (where they were given an emotive send-off by the Māori team), the acting administration approved the payment of the Māori team’s boat fare home.14 Upon arrival in New Zealand the players not only had to face that their tour had been a financial disaster, but also to endure the political ramifications of their disregard of NZRFU amateur policies - which meant that they returned home broke and with life bans from rugby union.

11 Coffey and Wood, 100 Years: Māori Rugby League 1908-2008, 11–13. 12 Coffey and Wood, 23–24. 13 Coffey and Wood, 24. 14 Coffey and Wood, 25.

163 Māori continued to play a pivotal role in the development of rugby league in Australia (and at home in New Zealand) in 1909. The NSWRFL, one year after the first Māori tour had reached its controversial conclusion, was in financial trouble following an economically disastrous tour of Britain during the second half of 1908 and turned to New Zealand and particularly Māori to promote and reinvigorate its embattled fledging sport. While a New Zealand national team was sent to Australia in June 1909, prominent Māori players such as Albert Asher preferred to focus on the Māori tour, which was to follow the New Zealand tour.

Accompanied by chiefs Hone Taonui Hetet of Te Kuiti and Hekemaru Kaiāwhā and David Barclay (the interpreter of the New Zealand House of Representatives), the 1909 Māori team featured nine of the players from the 1908 tour, including

Asher’s brother Te Keepa Pouwhiuwhiu (Ernie Asher) and the Parkere (Barclay) brothers, Hauāuru (Frank) and Punga (Glenn). Mākereti (Maggie) and Murai (Bella)

Papakura (sisters to player Riki Papakura) accompanied the team as guides.15

The first game at Sydney’s Agricultural Showgrounds saw the return of

Australia’s greatest player, , who had been absent for over a year due to injury, pitted against the new face of southern rugby league, Albert Asher; the Māori team won 16-14 in front of a crowd in excess of 30,000. More significantly for the NSWRFL, the game raised £1100, relieving the financial crisis which had plagued the current NSWRFL season.16 While the 1909 Māori team would win only five of its ten games, its competitiveness and style had an enduring impact on the sport. The team is credited with introducing the bump or the dropping of the shoulder in the tackle, challenging previous tactics of eluding defenders by running through and not around them; this tactic was only possible by selecting bigger, more explosive forwards who through their hard-running direct play laid the

15 Coffey and Wood, 40–42. 16 Coffey and Wood, 45–48.

164 platform for the back line to capitalise on, tactics heavily relied upon today.17 Also a result of the competitiveness and style displayed on the 1908 and 1909 tours was the subsequent selection of Māori players to Australian club and national teams. Peter

Moko from the 1908 Māori team is claimed to be the first Māori and Pacific person to play first-grade club rugby league in Australia, representing the Glebe club in the NSWRFL in 1909; Glen Barclay one year later represented the North Sydney club in five first-grade games.18 The same year also saw Albert Asher and Riki

Papakura selected as the only New Zealand representatives in the Australasian team that successfully defeated the 1910 British team in Australia.19

Aboriginal Australians had comparatively little access to rugby league.

George Green, playing for the Eastern Suburbs club from 1909 and moving to

North Sydney in 1912, is popularly thought of as the first Aboriginal Australian first- grade NSWRFL representative.20 This identification however has been challenged.

A. Moore argues that although Green often identified publicly as Māori or

Polynesian and did not claim to be Aboriginal Australian – a political tactic used at times throughout the White Australia era by Aboriginal Australian players to both enhance inclusion and minimise racism – he was in fact of Afro-Caribbean ancestry, with his father a mariner from St Kitts in the West Indies.21 Similar questions have been asked about the heritage of Green’s North Sydney teammate

Paul Tranquille, also identified as a pioneering figure in Australia’s Indigenous rugby league histories. A. Moore again states that assumptions about Tranquille’s indigeneity have been based largely on skin colour, and he identifies his father as a

17 Fagan, The Rugby Rebellion: The Divide of League and Union, 235; Borell, “He Iti Hoki Te Mokoroa: Māori Contributions to the Sport of Rugby League,” 44–45. 18 Coffey and Wood, 100 Years: Māori Rugby League 1908-2008, 35. 19 Coffey and Wood, 59–60. 20 In 1995 Green was selected in the Aboriginal and Islander Sports Hall of Fame. In 2008 the Australian Rugby League Indigenous Council (ARLIC) established the George Green medal, awarded to the best new Indigenous Australian talent of the season. 21 Moore, “The Wrong Man”; See also Little, “Rugby League’s Indigenous Pioneers: Aboriginal Sportsmen in South Sydney Before World War II.”

165 Mauritian man who arrived in Australia via Canada.22 Charles Little identifies

George Reynolds as another contender for the first Aboriginal Australian to play in the NSWRFL first-grade competition, representing the Annandale club in 1913 followed by the South Sydney and Glebe clubs. Little argues that while media references to Reynolds throughout his career did not often mention his skin colour, on some occasions he was referred to as “Darky” Reynolds and “the representative from La Perouse”, a well-known Aboriginal Australian community in South

Sydney.23 As with Green and Tranquille, questions about Reynolds’ Aboriginality emphasise the complexities of identity politics in early twentieth-century Australia, where concepts of “colour” do not seem to have any specific ethnic or national reference but rather ascribe difference from the mainstream.

Māori prominence on the Australian rugby league subsided after

1910, as rugby league in New Zealand struggled to establish itself in the context of the NZRFU’s relentless and ruthless crusade against a sport which Māori favoured.

Desperate to maintain the presence of Māori players within the amateur power structures of rugby union, the NZRFU (aided by Māori proponents of rugby union amateurism, predominantly those educated within British-styled Māori boys’ boarding schools) argued that the most effective way to retain Māori within rugby union was to institutionalise their participation, which previously had been achieved autonomously, as demonstrated by the 1888/89 Natives tour.24 Thus an

NZRFU-affiliated all-Māori amateur rugby union team was established in 1910.

Sent to play games in Australia in 1910 and more significantly throughout New

Zealand in 1911, the team was received by the Pākehā mainstream as “loyal’ and “of

22 Moore, ! A Social History of North Sydney Rugby League, 89-90. 23 Little, “Rugby League’s Indigenous Pioneers: Aboriginal Sportsmen in South Sydney Before World War II,” 104. 24 Falcous, “Rugby League in the National Imaginary of New Zealand Aotearoa,” 439.

166 a superior class”, proselytising to Māori the amateur ideals of rugby union.25 After

1910, the NZRFU’s “ostracism, stigmatisation, exclusion and disdain for rugby league”26 not only monopolised the sports space, limiting rugby league’s access to mainstream New Zealand, but also influenced Māori involvement through attaching specific racial and class characteristics to individual sports.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 sealed rugby league’s preeminent football position in New South Wales when the NSWRFU decided not to play during wartime, but subsequently it hardened class divisions between the two sports. The NSWRFU’s decision to suspend its competitions aligned with a predominantly protestant, conservative, pro-empire line of thought, that sport during wartime was an unhealthy distraction from the war effort; rugby union officials argued on a moral basis that you could not be at home playing sport while your countrymen were off fighting and dying for your country. Rugby league, however, aligned itself with more marginalised thinking which saw sport as providing both relief from and funding for the war effort. This was a view shared by large numbers of the working-class community who were predominantly

Catholic and less fervent for the British war cause.27 Therefore, rugby league did not suspend its competition during the war, as rugby union did. This upset supporters of rugby union, including the mainstream press, who accused the

NSWRFL of being unpatriotic and labelled its players “shirkers” for not enlisting.28

Rugby union’s player numbers suffered immensely as a result of its self-imposed suspension during wartime; as a result it hardened its amateur stance to ensure its difference and ultimately its survival, becoming a sport played primarily in

25 Falcous, 440. 26 Falcous, 435. 27 Nielsen, “‘Oh Error, Ill-Conceived’, The Amateur Sports Federation of New South Wales, Rugby League and Amateur Athletics”; Noonan, “Offside: Rugby League, the Great War and Australian Patriotism”; Evans, A Short History of Rugby League in Australia. 28 Noonan, “Offside: Rugby League, the Great War and Australian Patriotism,” 2202.

167 Sydney’s wealthy north-eastern suburbs. After the war rugby league’s popularity grew exponentially, although its prominence was still restricted to the states of New

South Wales and Queensland.

Social divisions entrenched through and after World War I increasingly defined the cultural identity and philosophy of those playing, administering and supporting each sport. Loyalty to rugby union or rugby league was based on issues of “national loyalty, political affiliation, class, sectarianism, parochialism, sporting ethos and amateurism”.29 Rugby league was increasingly aligned with the ideologies of the working class and affiliated with the labour movement, which too had emerged from England’s North and travelled to Australia at the end of the nineteenth century. Although this relationship today is largely symbolic and imaginary, Australian rugby league supporters are still painted as “working class, state-school educated and anti-establishment Labor voters”.30 While the dichotomies used to explain the histories of the sport are useful, they can be equally problematic as they silence multiple individual and structural variations on the sport’s narrative.

Māori engagement in Australian rugby league after World War I continued to wane, reflecting the NZRFU’s continued opposition to Māori and New Zealand public participation in the sport. This is no better illustrated than by the NZRFU’s response to the announcement of a Māori rugby league tour of Australia in 1922, its first since 1909. Coached by former New Zealand Māori and New Zealand representative forward, Puhipi James (Jim) Rukutai, who a year earlier had become the youngest New Zealand national coach at the age of 33 (a record still in place today), the NZRFU in reply organised a parallel New Zealand Māori rugby union

29 Horton, “Rugby Union Football in the Land of the Wallabies, 1874-1949: Same Game, Different Ethos,” 1620. 30 Horton, 1618.

168 tour in a bid for Māori loyalties. The intensity of the battle to secure players for each tour meant that one Māori rugby league player, William Tapsell, went missing moments before boarding the ship to Australia – presumably pressured at the last minute by the NZRFU not to participate.31 Upon arrival in Sydney, the largely inexperienced team (only nine of the 27 players had played rugby league the previous year) struggled to compete at the level of previous Māori teams. Speaking to the Press Association in Sydney, coach Rukutai stated his frustration at the

NZRFU, whom he believed had put obstacle after obstacle in front of him and his team, even telling players that “the league game would pollute their minds” and that “if they played rugby league they would lose their jobs”.32

In spite of the Māori team’s lack of success, its captain Huatahi Turoa

Brown Paki performed so well that the St George club signed him for the 1923

NSWRFL season. Despite a successful first season, the death of his grandmother and two sisters during this period forced Paki to return to New Zealand and he never came back to Australian club football.33 Apart from Paki, there was barely any Māori involvement in Australian club rugby league until the 1960s. This was largely the result of policy agreed between the NZRFL and rugby league administrators in Australia and Britain, whereby the signing and transfer of New

Zealand club players to Australian or British clubs could proceed only if approved by the NZRFL – consent which was rarely given. This did not stop Australian scouts from attempting (without success) to woo Māori players to move to

Australia, as clubs attempted to expose loopholes within the policy. For example, on the 1956 Māori tour of Australia senior Māori management became increasingly upset with the targeting of players such as George Turner and Andrew Berryman

31 Coffey and Wood, 100 Years: Māori Rugby League 1908-2008, 71–72. 32 Rukutai quoted in Coffey and Wood, 76–77. 33 Coffey and Wood, 82.

169 by Australian clubs. Tour manager Ernie Asher contended that Māori and New

Zealand rugby league would never grow in the way in which Australian league officials wished it to, if its players were to be continually poached by overseas clubs.

There is no known record of any members of Australia’s small Māori population

(estimated to have increased between 1911 and 1961 only from 134 to 449) participating in NSWRFL competitions during this period.

While very little has been written on the histories of Pacific Island peoples in rugby league in New Zealand, some early connections can be made through analysing Māori participation in the sport. There was strong support by Māori for

Pacific Island participation, illustrated through the widening of the criteria for selection in the New Zealand Māori team to include “any player who can justly claim to have any . . . Polynesian blood in their veins”.34 George Mitchell is thought to be the first Pacific Island non-Māori representative in the New Zealand Māori team. Born in Rarotonga, Cook Islands in 1914, Mitchell had a Samoan mother and

English father. He played in the 1937 New Zealand Māori team that won a famous victory over Australia and went on to represent the New Zealand national team on their tour of the in 1939; his brother Alf had represented New

Zealand earlier in 1935.35 Another Samoan, Dave Solomon, also played in the New

Zealand Māori team in 1939; Dave and his brother Frank were two of the earliest known rugby union players of Pacific Island heritage to be selected for the New

Zealand All Blacks, although Tongan Walter Batty is thought to have been the first in 1928. While Māori welcomed Pacific Island peoples within the Māori team, representation was controlled so that Māori players would substantially outnumber their guest players:36 we can see a similar strategy here to the one

34 Coffey and Wood, 137. 35 Coffey and Wood, 138. 36 Coffey and Wood, 138.

170 previously discussed in relation to the 1888/89 Native rugby union team selection of

Pākehā players.

In this period, too, we see the first Australian South Sea Islander participation in the NSWRFL, with the selection of Walter Mussing in the St.

George Dragons first-grade team from 1945 to 1947. Previously a member of the

Eastern Suburbs Tigers club which competed in the Brisbane Rugby League (BRL), a breakaway competition independent of the QRFL, Mussing was the brother of

Australian South Sea Islander political rights leader, Faith Bandler (née Mussing).

Described by fans and media as a “mercurial footballer” who after the game would be “rushed by up to five hundred fans, vying for his autograph”,37 off the field

Mussing was an “outspoken critic of class and racial inequalities”.38 Australian

South Sea Islanders were routinely not selected in the NSWRFL, QRFL and BRL competitions, let alone in elite Australian team and individual sports; this continued up until the post-White-Australia period of the 1970s. Even where relatively more free access was offered within New South Wales and ’s lower levels – its city junior39 and country competitions – participation was not from within mainstream clubs but rather from “All Black”40 teams, self-formed and sustained with Aboriginal Australian players.

From 1908 until the indigenous rights movement of the 1960s, Aboriginal

Australians too were rarely included in rugby league. Representation was predominantly confined to all-Aboriginal Australian reserve and mission teams, and broader Aboriginal Australian-dominated rural and urban All Black teams,

37 Hewison, Crossed My Mind: A Boy in Hurstville, 197. 38 Lake, Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist, 19. 39 “Junior” is not a reference to age, but describes competitions below the NSWRFL first-grade competition. 40 The use of “All Black” as a descriptor for Australian sporting clubs references the racial composition of the teams. The world’s most famous and first known “All Black” team, the New Zealand national rugby union team, was not named in reference to race, rather inspired by the colour of the team playing jersey.

171 and there is only rare record of Aboriginal Australian selection in mainstream clubs across all levels. Notable inclusions at an elite level include Walter Slockie’s selection in the St. George Dragons NSWRFL first-grade team of 1925; Glen

Crouch’s inclusion in the Coorparoo (later renamed Eastern Suburbs Tigers) and

Wynnum Manly Seagulls first-grade BRL teams from 1922 to the 1930s, as well as his selection within the Queensland representative team of 1925; Arthur Currie’s selection in the 1937 New South Wales Country representative team; and brothers

Dick and Lin Johnson’s inclusion not only within multiple NSWRFL first-grade teams during the 1930s and 1940s but also New South Wales Country, City and

State representative teams throughout this period.

The story of Frank Fisher defines the convergence of sporting and governmental exclusion of Aboriginal Australians throughout the first half of the twentieth century: captain of the Barambah Reserve (Cherbourg) all-Aboriginal-

Australian team in the South Burnett district competition of south-eastern

Queensland throughout the late 1920s, 1930s and 1940s (Barambah was so dominant that they were eventually excluded from the competition),41 Fisher was on two occasions selected for the Wide Bay representative team that took on the touring

British Lions in 1932 and 1936. Jim Brough, the 1936 British Lions captain, described

Fisher as the best player his team had encountered. He was subsequently offered a contract by English club Salford, but an application to travel to England was denied by the Queensland state government under the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of Sale of Opium Act 1897.42

Arguably the most prominent All Black rugby league team with a significant

Australian South Sea Islander presence was the Tweed Heads team established in

1930 as a result of the consistent refusal of non-white players by the local Tweed

41 Tatz, Obstacle Race: Aborigines in Sport, 194. 42 Evans, A Short History of Rugby League in Australia, 149.

172 Heads District Rugby League clubs.43 The team quickly asserted itself throughout the 1930s as “the best club team on the North Coast”, renowned for their “sterling reputation for exciting play”.44 After playing under different names such as the

Chinderah, Fingal and Tweed Heads All Blacks, the team disbanded in 1958, winning the premiership in its final year.45 The success of the team depended on

Australian South Sea Island and Aboriginal Australian players, including Mussing,

Slockie and Currie, whose impact was felt in their visits to Sydney in the mid-1930s to play with the NSWRFL’s St. George club (who subsequently contracted Slockie and Mussing); the team is also claimed to have had a pivotal influence on the establishment of Australia’s best-known All Black sporting club today, the Redfern

All Blacks of inner city Sydney.46 Thought to have played their first South Sydney

Juniors Association competition game in 1944, the Redfern All Blacks, along with the La Perouse All Blacks, provided a new pathway within the sport at a junior level for Aboriginal Australians in rugby league’s urban centre, Sydney.

43 Barnett, For the Love of the Game: Ten Legends of Queensland Rugby League, 186. 44 Barnett, 186. 45 The Far North Coaster Online Magazine, “Murwillumbah Brothers To Hold 50-Year Reunion.” 46 Skene, “Redfern All Blacks - Keeping the Ball In Motion”; Barnett, For the Love of the Game: Ten Legends of Queensland Rugby League, 187.

173 3: Consolidating and Commercialising the Sport (1960-2015)

Before 1960 and in spite of its professional classification, rugby league in Australia was essentially a “paid pastime rather than a full-time job”.1 The NSWRFL and the

BRL ran competing city-based first-grade competitions, while junior and country competitions developed and fed players to the city clubs. In the NSWRFL, money made by first-grade clubs was used mainly to strengthen its junior district competitions, as the “residential rule” provided that clubs could only select players that lived within their zone. Eligibility for local players was a minimum one-year residency; while for country, interstate and international players it was 28 days.2

This changed when the “residential rule” was disbanded from the 1960 season and licensed Leagues clubs with gambling machines were made legal in New South

Wales from 1956: poker machines provided revenue to New South Wales clubs in the city and country at a level never previously seen. Sydney NSWRFL clubs in particular were able to pay substantial wages to players, lessening the need for the game’s elite players to supplement their football earnings through part-time employment; they also began to lure more players from country New South Wales, interstate and overseas, aided by the relaxing of previously rigid district zones.

Revenue and resources once available for junior district competitions were redirected to individual players outside the clubs’ long-standing geographical borders.

Queensland’s ban on poker machines meant that Brisbane-based clubs were not able to compete with the money offered to players by NSWRFL first- grade clubs. Many of Queensland’s best players crossed the border into New South

Wales, marking the beginning of the end for Queensland’s premier competition,

1 Cottle, “City Money and the Boys from : in New South Wales - A Political Economy of Immiseration,” 132. 2 Macdonald and Borland, “Professional Sports Competitions in Australia,” 306.

174 the BRL, as a competitive alternative to the NSWRFL. At the same time, British rugby league – long defined as “inherently superior” and hence attracting many of

Australia’s top talent, to the dismay of its administrators – was in a state of decline.3

With Sydney rugby league clubs now able to match the financial benefits offered by British clubs along with large international club transfer fees, a number of

British players came to Australia with the blessing of both their own cash-strapped clubs and the British RFL; this was the beginning of a shift in the international balance of power in rugby league from Britain to Australia.4 The securing of elite

New Zealand players, however, was still difficult, although the NZRFL did release a handful of players at the end of their careers: New Zealand and Māori representative William (Bill) Sorenson, for example, was granted clearance to take up a player-coach role with the Glen Innes club in country New South Wales for the 1963 season. While he played for the New Zealand Māori team, Sorenson was not Māori but Tongan, thus making him likely the first Pacific Island New Zealand- resident or citizen to enter the Australian rugby league landscape.

In New Zealand, sport had rapidly become one of the few entry points into mainstream life for Pacific Island people arriving after World War II as part of the

New Zealand-incentivised Pacific Island economic migration plan. Numbers of elite Pacific Island players, however, did not increase until the 1970s, when an overlap of New Zealand international and Māori games meant that top Māori players were increasingly unavailable for the Māori team. Pacific Island players on the fringe of elite representation replaced them, so that in the 1970s and early 1980s the Māori team provided many Pacific Island players with an important space for playing at an elite level and pushing for international selection. Along with Bill

3 Collins, “From Bondi to Batley: Australian Players in British Rugby League 1907 - 1995,” 78. Acute decline in the traditional industries from which British rugby league had historically drawn support, such as mining and textiles, was a key reason for this. 4 Collins, 77–78.

175 Sorenson, some of New Zealand’s most prominent Pacific Island rugby league players came through this system after 1960, including Oscar Danielson (Samoan),

Dennis Williams (Samoan), Eddie Kerrigan (Samoan), Dave and Josh Liava’a

(Tongan), Dane, Dave and Bill Jr. Sorenson (Tongan), Fred Ah Kuoi (Samoan),

James Lueluai (Samoan), Steven Jeffery “Dick” Uluave (Tongan) and Joe Ropati

(Samoan). The policy of selecting non-Māori Polynesians for the New Zealand

Māori team continued until 1986, when a reimagining of the

(established in 1975 and previously competed for by New Zealand Māori, Papua

New Guinea and Australian State and Territory teams excluding New South Wales and Queensland) saw additional Pacific Island nations replace Australian State and

Territory teams. Pacific Island players had the opportunity for the first time to play for the team of their national cultural heritage.

Apisai Toga from Fiji was the first Pacific Island player not recruited via

New Zealand; he was signed in 1968 by the St. George Dragons, the most prominent

NSWRFL club in signing players of colour, and brought to Australia after playing two seasons for the Rochdale Hornets in England. Contracted to the Rochdale club by its chairman Arthur Walker, Toga was one of a number of rugby union players from Fiji who moved to Britain and converted to rugby league, after Walker witnessed the Fijian rugby union team play in Australia in 1954 while on tour himself as manager of the British rugby league team.5 Joined at St. George in 1969 by his brother Inosi Toga, Apisai died tragically in 1973 at training one evening as the result of tetanus poisoning from an unattended coral injury acquired while home in Fiji during the off-season. Apisai played 103 games for St George (65 in first-grade) over five seasons; Inosi continued to represent the club until the end of the 1974 season.

5 Dewey, Jr., “Pacific Islands Rugby: Navigating the Global Professional Era”; Steere, “Fiji’s Coming Home!”; Swettenham, “Fantastic Fijian Four Created Buzz of Excitement At Rochdale Hornets.”

176 Sorenson and the Toga brothers came to Australia in the 1960s, during the period when Pacific Island peoples were being deported from Australia on the grounds that non-Māori Pacific people could not assimilate; no doubt these men enjoyed a special status as elite athletes with links to a well-established club. This period also saw a small but growing number of Aboriginal Australians and Torres

Strait Islanders involved in the rugby league landscape at an elite level, with the gradual lifting of state protections after World War II and social policies implemented in response to the 1967 referendum. Players such as Bruce Olive, Ron

Saddler, John Ambrum, George Ambrum, Lionel Morgan, Kevin Yow Yeh, Eric Pitt,

Arthur Beetson and Eric Sims defined the Indigenous Australian presence. While little is written on the Australian South Sea Island presence during this period, it is likely that players such as John Ambrum, George Ambrum, Kevin Yow Yeh and

Lionel Morgan were of Australian South Sea Islander heritage, even though they identified at the time and are celebrated today as Indigenous Australians.6 Like the

Green, Tranquille and Reynolds cases discussed earlier, such ambiguities of identity here reflect a continued broad use of terms like “Aborigine/Aboriginal”

(which encompassed a general coloured “Other”, excluding Māori, other

Polynesians and Asians) and “Islander” (which did not distinguish between those of

Torres Strait Island and Australian South Sea Island ancestry). This categorical blurring was not necessarily clarified after 1967, when governmental constructions of a new national-identity dichotomy of “indigenous” and “non-indigenous” forced

Australian South Sea Islanders who were neither indigenous (referring to

Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders) nor non-Indigenous (equating mostly to white Australians) to identify as “indigenous” in order to receive some form of political rights and social service access within Australia.

6 Godwell, “Aboriginality and Rugby League in Australia: An Exploratory Study of Identity Construction and Professional Sport,” 49.

177 While Aboriginal Australians, Torres Strait Islanders and Australian South

Sea Islanders were given access to rugby league at an elite level throughout the

1960s and 1970s, broader political changes both inside and outside the sport did not reduce the racism experienced on and off the field. Players and fans alike subjected players of colour to verbal and physical : in Queensland Lionel Morgan was not only verbally abused but recalls waking up in Ipswich hospital after being tackled across the sideline and set upon by multiple members of the Ipswich team; a similar incident on a return visit to Ipswich put him in hospital again after being punched by a supporter.7 The personal toll that racial discrimination could have on players is tragically illustrated in the life of Kevin Yow Yeh. He moved to Sydney to play with the alongside Redcliffe teammate in 1966, but the two players could not have had more contrasting careers. While Beetson went on to establish the most successful sporting career of any Indigenous

Australian up to that time, including becoming the first Indigenous captain of an

Australian national team, Yow Yeh would play only two seasons with Balmain before abruptly quitting the sport in 1968. Seven years later on 27 June 1975 at the age of 34, he died in suspicious circumstances while in custody in a Mackay prison.

In recalling his sudden exit from the sport, Beetson states that the anger, alcohol dependency and isolation which preceded it resulted from the relentless racial vilification that Yow Yeh endured and witnessed: “Kevvie hated how some blacks were treated back then. I really think his biggest problem was coming to grips with how some people thought blacks were inferior”.8

Informal exclusionary policies operated at all levels of rugby league into the

1970s. The overlooking of Aboriginal Australian players by talent scouts and selectors lead to the establishment of the New South Wales Aboriginal Rugby

7 Jackson, “Pioneers’ Pride Lives on, Despite All the Bruises.” 8 Lane, “Beetson Recalls the Rage That Afflicted a Star.”

178 League tournament in 1971, held annually since then. Founded in Sydney by members of the Newtown-based United Rugby League club, the event typifies much of Aboriginal Australia’s involvement on the fringes of rugby league, in isolation from mainstream Australia. Yet Heidi Norman argues that the

Knockout carnival from the outset subscribed to an atypical form of activism. It was organised not only to showcase Aboriginal Australian sporting talent within a culturally appropriate and safe setting, but more significantly to demonstrate that

“kinship and family relations are central to how [Aboriginal Australians] organise and how cultural practice and historical association interact in a dynamic process”.9

While largely ignored by mainstream rugby league administrators, fans and the wider media, the Knockout tournament continues to be successful and relevant, and is arguably the most important contributor to the advancement of Aboriginal

Australian participation in rugby league.

By the 1970s revenue generated by the poker machine industry could no longer fund the increasing wage bill, so corporate sponsorship was introduced to generate substantial new revenue for the fully-professionalised NSWRFL clubs. In the early 1980s the NSWRFL was incorporated and renamed the New South Wales

Rugby League (NSWRL), while signing a lucrative sponsorship deal with Winfield through its parent company Rothmans, which over its twenty-two-year tenure became the most valuable in Australian sport.10 The competition was renamed the

Winfield Cup, teams and stadiums were marked with corporate insignia, and team merchandise become a marketable product for raising revenue: thus NSWRL premier clubs transitioned from essentially non-profit enterprises into corporate

9 Norman, “A Modern Day : Towards a History of the New South Wales Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout,” 170. 10 Colman, : The Inside Story, 19.

179 bodies.11 Sponsors and investors took control of NSWRL clubs both directly and indirectly, as their investments were increasingly necessary for the signing of players and coaches.12 In 1982, for the first time since 1909, the NSWRL expanded its first-grade competition outside metropolitan Sydney, bringing in clubs from the strong New South Wales-country League areas of Canberra and Illawarra; this was followed in 1988 by expansion into Newcastle and the Brisbane and Gold Coast-

Tweed areas. This expansion outside New South Wales finally eliminated the

BRL’s ability to compete with its rival NSWRL. The was the first privately owned team in the NSWRL, completing its transformation from “football and trophies and tradition” to “profits and percentage points and market shares”.13

This accelerated the demise of some of NSWRL’s oldest clubs, with Newtown, the oldest club in Australia, forced out of the competition in 1983 due to its poor financial position. Thus the NSWRL was no longer a competition in which clubs played simply because they always had; it was now about economics, so that clubs had to apply each year for entry to the based on financial considerations.

Central to rugby league’s entry into the new and lucrative world of corporate sports was the wider transition of elite sport into the world of corporate entertainment. While rugby league was first televised in Australia in 1961, and the

1967 NSWRFL was the first football grand final in Australia to be televised live, it was not until the 1980s that the sport’s audience shifted from the stadiums into television. Until 1983, Channel Seven was the sole commercial TV host of the NSWRL (ABC broadcast to country areas) and of the restructured and commercially reinvigorated annual New South Wales vs. Queensland state

11 Cottle, “City Money and the Boys from the Bush: Country Rugby League in New South Wales - A Political Economy of Immiseration,” 132. 12 Cottle, 134. 13 Colman, Super League: The Inside Story, 25.

180 representative games, established in 1980 and known as the .

Described as “the greatest shot in the arm any Australian sport had ever enjoyed”,14

State of Origin grabbed a national following in a way that club rugby league could not. Before its rebranding, state representative football between New South Wales and Queensland had become largely non-competitive because of the influx of

Queenslanders into the NSWRL competition who were then selected for New

South Wales to play against their former state team. The advent of Origin changed all this, as its rules stated that players were to represent the state in which they played their first senior game of football over the age of 16; state and national selection from then on would come solely from the NSWRL competition. From the outset, club friendships were put on hold for 80 compelling minutes as Australia’s elite rugby league footballers for the first time were pitted against each other.

Central to the excitement was not just the sport itself but its broadcast, particularly the exuberant television commentary of Rex Mossop. Mossop’s call of Origin in its formative years helped captivate an ever-expanding national audience, substantially increasing the economic value of rugby league’s television rights.

Kerry Packer’s Channel Nine subsequently brought the rights of State of Origin in

1983 and held them until 1989, before Channel Ten brought them back at an amount it could not afford. Thus in 1991 Channel Nine regained the rights to Origin and then the rights to the NSWRL Winfield Cup in 1992.

The evolution of rugby league and its teams and players into lucrative commodities was significant not only for Pacific players but also peoples of colour more broadly. Points of difference – and specifically race - became marketable and thus economically desirable.15 From an international players’ standpoint, signings increased substantially (a result also of player challenges and subsequent changes

14 Colman, 19. 15 Cottle and Keys, “The Blindside Flick: Race and Rugby League,” 7.

181 to Australian, New Zealand and British transfer rules) but so did who was signed.

The dominance of white British players gave way after 1970 to a steady flow of New

Zealand signings, with the relatively high percentage of Pacific people playing elite rugby league in New Zealand reflected in those who moved to Australia. Oscar

Danielson (Newtown), Henry Tatana (Canterbury-Bankstown and St. George),

Dane Sorenson and his brother Kurt Sorenson (Cronulla Sutherland and Eastern

Suburbs) all took up full-time contracts with NSWRL clubs during the 1970s, while the 1980s saw numbers increase as the desirability of Britain was eclipsed by the money and lifestyle offered by Australian rugby league. Pacific players such as

Balmain’s Olsen Filipana (Māori/Samoan); North Sydney’s Fred Ah Kuoi

(Samoan), Mark Graham (Māori) and (Māori); Eastern Suburbs’

Dean Bell (Māori) and Hugh McGahan (Māori); and Newcastle’s Sam Stewart

(Māori) and (Māori) all had significant impacts on the NSWRL during the 1980s.

In this period Papua New Guinea too became a site of interest for NSWRL clubs. Rugby league had been brought to the formerly separate Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea by Australian miners, soldiers and governmental administrators as early as the 1930s, and Papua New Guinea became the only country in the world to declare rugby league its national sport. With its own histories of racial exclusion, it was not until the late 1960s that teams and supporters began to include substantial numbers of Papuans; and only in post- independence Papua New Guinea did the country’s indigenous peoples begin to control the sport’s administration and its elite indigenous players gain wider opportunities and exposure through the establishment of a national team (the

182 Papua New Guinea Kumuls).16 While the team was often uncompetitive, selection by the Kumuls gave players yearly chances to test themselves against the world’s best players representing Australia, New Zealand and Britain. Individual international performances by Dairi Kovae, Arnold Krewanty and Bal Numapo in the late 1980s resulted in their selection for the 1988 Rest of the World exhibition teams that took on both Australia and Great Britain, and also their signing to

NSWRL clubs. Kovae signed with the in 1988 before joining the in 1989 alongside Krewanty, and Numapo joined

Canterbury-Bankstown the same year; however, all three were given little playing time and had left the competition by the end of that year.

The main beneficiaries during the 1970s and 1980s of the economic capital accrued in the eyes of the mainstream Australian league public through racial difference were Indigenous Australians. Allowed only sporadic representation within the NSWRL first-grade competition before 1970, by 1987 they represented

9% of players in Sydney’s thirteen first-grade and reserve grade teams (while comprising of only 1.2% of the New South Wales population at the time).17 The financial and corporate appeal of State of Origin became the main stage for showcasing and promoting Indigenous Australian talent in the late 1980s and early

1990s. While still epitomising the working-class values and state parochialism that rugby league in Australia was attached to, State of Origin also gave mainstream

Australia the televised visibility of previously unseen Indigenous Australian sportsmen. The state and subsequent national selection of Indigenous Australian players such as Colin Scott, Tony Currie, and for

Queensland, and , John Ferguson, and Larry Corowa for New

16 Foster, “From Trobriand Cricket to Rugby Nation: The Mission of Sport in Papua New Guinea,” 751–53. 17 Tatz, Obstacle Race: Aborigines in Sport, 207.

183 South Wales was good publicity but also paved the way for the doubling of the number of Indigenous Australian players in the NSWRL competition by the early

1990s to 20%, a number that Tatz asserts was even higher in Queensland’s premier competition during this period.18

A significant contributor to Indigenous Australian football during the 1980s was , , Queensland and Australia representative and captain; despite openly claiming his Australian South Sea Islander heritage

(Vanuatu and Solomon Islands) Meninga was often mistakenly identified as

Aboriginal Australian. During his professional playing (1979-1994) and later coaching career (1997-present) Meninga would become an active voice against racial discrimination directed towards both Indigenous Australian and Pacific players by fans, players, coaches and administrators. In his pre-NSWRL days

Meninga was involved in a well-documented post-game physical altercation with a fan of the Wynnum-Manly team who racially vilified him while he was playing for

Brisbane Souths in Queensland’s BRL. Such experiences illustrate a replication in the 1980s of past racism and are retold by many players of this period, whether

Aboriginal Australian, Torres Strait Islander, Australian South Sea Islander or

Pacific more generally. Olsen Filipana, a New Zealand representative of Māori and

Samoan ancestry who moved to Sydney in 1980 to take up a contract with the

Balmain Tigers in the NSWRL expressed in 2015 the shock he felt on arriving in

Balmain at the overt racism not only of the fans but his own teammates who deliberately set out to hurt him. Filipana stated that he was amazed at the resilience of his teammate Larry Corrowa (of Aboriginal Australian and Australian South Sea

18 Cottle and Keys, “The Blindside Flick: Race and Rugby League,” 8; Tatz, 207.

184 Island ancestry) who had long dealt with such racism; Filipana stated that he had never experienced anything like it during his playing days in New Zealand.19

The introduction of public relations, advertising and promotional experts in the 1980s secured Queen of Rock Tina Turner as the sound of Australian rugby league from 1989-1995; her song Simply the Best became the sport’s anthem in what was arguably the most successful advertising campaign in Australian sports.20

Around 1990 rugby league became sexy; the crowds and television audiences grew and diversified accordingly and the NSWRL logo, teams and players appeared on breakfast products, calendars and clothing apparel. Central to the sport’s marketing and profiting heavily from it was the Rupert Murdoch-owned company

News Limited, who held the licensing rights to the NSWRL throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Mike Colman states that the NSWRL went from a sport discussed in New South Wales and Queensland in working-class bars and factory floors to expand into conversations in schools, hair salons and supermarkets.21

These conversations echoed across the Tasman and into the homes of everyday New Zealanders via the introduction of televised coverage of NSWRL games in 1989 and an intensification of mainstream media commentary following the high-profile signing (more commonly referred to as poaching) of some of New

Zealand rugby union’s highest profile amateur players in the early 1990s, including

All Blacks John Schuster (Samoan) and (Māori). As in Australia, the early 1990s is a significant period in New Zealand rugby league as it marks an accelerated transition from a sport played and supported nationally by a Pākehā,

Māori and Pacific Island blue-collar working class, to one played at an elite level predominantly in Australia and supported by a broader mainstream demographic.

19 Skene, “The Forgotten Story of . . . , the Polynesian Who Tamed .” 20 Colman, Super League: The Inside Story, 18. 21 Colman, Super League: The Inside Story.

185 A growing list of elite New Zealand players in the NSWRL combined with a rapidly growing New Zealand support base both at home and in Australia

(reflecting the large numbers of New Zealanders migrating to Australia’s eastern seaboard after the signing of the Trans-Tasman Travel Agreement [TTTA] in 1973) encouraged the league’s administrators to expand its commercial product into New

Zealand itself by establishing a NSWRL team in ; it was announced in

1992 that a privately-owned Auckland-based team independent of the NZRL would enter the competition in 1995. The Auckland Warriors, along with the Western

Reds (), (Townsville) and the South Queensland

Crushers (Brisbane) represented the boldest expansion of the NSWRL yet. In response to separate 1992 reports by the Premiership Policy Committee of the

NSWRL and Dr G. Bradley which recommended reducing the number of Sydney clubs in favour of a national/international expansion to grow the sport’s economic and supporter base, the Australian Rugby League (ARL), a previously separate entity that administered the Australian national team, took over the NSWRL competition and renamed it the ARL from the 1995 season. With no clubs initially excluded, 1995 marked the largest competition in Australian first-grade rugby league history, with 20 teams competing.

Māori symbolism was adopted by the New Zealand-based club through its franchise name Warriors and its logo of a tekoteko, and Pan-Pacific themes were mobilised in the club’s on-field entertainment of Cook Island drumming; this acknowledged the large Pacific Island and Māori presence within the team and its supporter base. Philip Borell states that of the 28 players to represent the Auckland

Warriors in their inaugural season, 23 were of Māori and/or Pacific Island heritage;

186 these proportions have remained consistent throughout the club’s history.22 The early fortunes of the Warriors were hampered by limited success on the field and internal financial difficulties resulting in early ownership changes. In 1997 the

Warriors joined the Super League, a break-away competition which folded after one season. The Super League was set up by News Limited amid major legal and administrative disputes with the ARL over TV rights; in 1998 a compromise was reached by both parties through a joint partnership between the ARL and News

Limited, which created the NRL.

Despite the settlement of this dispute, the NRL continued to be unpopular because of its aim to cut the number of teams in the competition from 20 to 14 by

2000. While the exit of unsuccessful expansion teams in (Rams), Gold

Coast (Chargers), Hunter Valley (Mariners), Perth (Western ) and South

Queensland (Crushers) disappointed those who believed in the nationalisation of the game, the introduction of the in 1998 and their subsequent success demonstrated what could be achieved with the right personnel. More contentiously, the exit or merger of many of Sydney’s oldest clubs angered many within the rugby league community: the economic realities of the new game saw first the merger of the St. George and Illawarra clubs in 1999 as the St. George

Illawarra Dragons; in 2000 foundation clubs Western Suburbs and Balmain merged as the West Tigers; North Sydney merged with Manly-Warringah the same year to become the , later disbanded as Manly reformed itself independently in 2003 on the demise of North Sydney. South Sydney was excluded from the competition altogether for the 2000 season, before re-entering in 2002 after much public protest and high-profile financial backing; Gold Coast lost their team in 1998 but were granted a new team in 2007, the Titans.

22 Borell, “He Iti Hoki Te Mokoroa: Māori Contributions to the Sport of Rugby League,” 82–83.

187 Despite a difficult inauguration, the Auckland Warriors (renamed the New

Zealand Warriors in 2001) increased opportunities for New Zealand youth within the sport, both in New Zealand and Australia. Although the club did not perform well in its early years, the individual success of players like Hitro Okesene

(Samoan), (Māori) and Joe Vagana (Samoan), foundation players with no prior exposure to club rugby league outside New Zealand, alerted Australian scouts, player agents, coaches, administrators and audiences to the wealth of talent in New Zealand rugby league. From the late 1990s there was an influx to Australia of many young rugby league players, as well as converts from rugby union which gained professional status globally in 1995. There were more talented players than could possibly represent the one New Zealand professional rugby league team or its five professional rugby union teams, so many players moved to Australia, either being scouted and signed prior to leaving or of their own free will (both individually and with families). Many were signed as young teens, coming via scholarships to high schools with rugby league academies connected to NRL clubs

(a new phenomenon). Most of those New Zealand citizens chasing their rugby league dream to Australian cities like Sydney and Brisbane (and to a lesser extent

Melbourne, Newcastle, Canberra, Townsville and the Gold Coast) were of Māori and Pacific Island heritage.

Following the waves of economic migration from New Zealand to Australia across the 1970s into the 1990s, the Pacific presence within Australian rugby league after 2000 was increased by children brought to or born in Australia by parents of such migrations, and who came through the sport at age-group level predominantly in suburban Sydney and Brisbane. There was also continued yet sporadic representation of Australian South Sea Island players, and an increasing but comparatively small number of Pacific players arriving direct from Pacific

188 Island nations, predominantly Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea. For these countries, too, interest in the Australian rugby league product came as a result of increased accessibility to televised games, which in the twenty-first century increasingly showcased Pacific talent, fostering fandom and fuelling hope of sporting migration to a country otherwise difficult to enter. In 2012 the

Australian Rugby League Commission (ARLC) was restructured as a new national body to streamline the governance of the sport across all levels; this brought to an end fourteen years of governance by an NRL Partnership between News Limited

(now News Corp Australia) and the ARL. The ARLC supported the inclusion of a

Papua New Guinea-based club team, the Papua New Guinea Hunters, in the QRL’s premier competition, the ; it has also been in discussion with a

Fiji-based team to join the NSWRL premier competition, the NSW Cup, in the near future.

In the two decades since the inception of the , Pacific people’s representation in Australian rugby league has increased sharply. For example, at an elite level the number of contracted NRL players of Pacific ancestry rose from an estimated 5% in the early 1990s to 35% in 2008 to 42% in 2015; the NRL

Under-20 National Youth Competition, introduced in 2008, had by 2014 38% of its player contracts filled by young Pacific men; and the NSWRL under-18 (SG Ball) and under-16 () competitions from 2007 to 2010 had an average of 27.8% of Pacific-ancestry players.23 Subsequently, Australian state (New

South Wales and Queensland) and national representative teams have also increased their Pacific representation. At an age-group level, David Lakisa traces an increase in Pacific player selection in the Australian schoolboy team from none

23 Lakisa, “The Pacific Revolution: Pasifika & Māori Players in Australian Rugby League,” 8–10; Australian Rugby League Commission, “NRL Annual Report 2015,” 70.

189 between 1972 and 1989, to 13 from 1990 to 1999, and 47 in the decade 2000 to 2010;24 at the elite state level, the New South Wales State of Origin squad, for example, has gone from infrequent individual Pacific player appearances throughout the 1990s to 25% of the squad of Pacific ancestry by 2014. A 2011 National Ethnicity Report stated that 4.2% of the total registered rugby-league-playing-population nationally

(all age and levels) were of Pacific ancestry; Lakisa challenges the accuracy of this figure and estimates it to be anywhere between 10% and 20% (in comparison

Australia’s Pacific communities comprise an estimated 1.5% of Australia’s population).25 Out of all NRL-contracted players of Pacific heritage in 2015, 52% were New Zealand-born and 37% Australian-born; only 11% were born in the Pacific

Islands.26

Indigenous Australian representation receded as a percentage of the total participants in the sport at an NRL club level, from above 20% in the early 1990s to around 12% in 2014.27 Selection in national and state (Queensland more than New

South Wales) representative teams has remained around the 20% mark, with the dominant Queensland team which won eight State of Origin series from 2006-2013 and the 2013 Australian World Cup team having a strong Indigenous presence, including , Johnathon Thurston, and . At an under-20

National Youth Competition level Indigenous Australian participation has kept just under 10% since its establishment in 2008, while the NRL Annual Report 2014 records the number of Indigenous Australians at 5.8% of the total number of registered players nationally (all ages and levels).28

24 Lakisa, “The Pacific Revolution: Pasifika & Māori Players in Australian Rugby League,” 9. It is not clear whether Lakisa includes Australian South Sea Islanders in this statistic. 25 Lakisa, 10. 26 Ng Shiu and Vagana, “An Unlikely Alliance: Training NRL ‘Cultural Warriors,’” 1. 27 Australian Rugby League Commission, “NRL Annual Report 2014,” 66. 28 Australian Rugby League Commission, 66.

190 4: Browning and White Flight in New Zealand and Australia

In this sub-section I detour via rugby union in New Zealand to establish an academic framework for analysing contemporary Pacific people’s experiences in

Australian rugby league. There are some crucial differences: rugby union is the national sport of New Zealand whereas in Australia rugby league’s popularity is largely restricted to New South Wales and Queensland; and Pacific people have a significantly different political status in each nation. Nevertheless, the theoretical terms and understandings established by scholars of New Zealand rugby union usefully direct the under-researched field of Australian rugby league.

Pacific peoples in New Zealand rugby union have long been represented ambivalently, reflecting portrayals of Pacific migrants more broadly;1 as we have already seen, Māori have their own unique and uniquely ambivalent place within the sport and the nation. At the heart of the construction of these representations are mainstream media, for whom daily reportage of “New Zealand’s game” is of national importance. Nothing is too trivial for comment, whether it is the bodies that play the game, its style and on-field rules or the economics of the code; thus

Pacific peoples’ presence within New Zealand’s national sport has been insistently reported.2 The “browning” of New Zealand rugby was first nominated in 1987 by

Spiro Zavos, an Australian-based, New Zealand-born journalist and writer, who used a piece titled “The Browning of the All Blacks” to describe a not-too-distant future in which Pacific Island players would dominate the ethnic composition of the New Zealand national team.3 Browning is often discussed positively as a reflection of the ways in which the sport “brings a diversity of people together in a

1 Teaiwa and Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand.” 2 Teaiwa and Mallon, 212. 3 Zavos, “The Browning of the All Blacks.”

191 way unlike any other activity in New Zealand cultural life”;4 Andrew Grainger,

Mark Falcous and Joshua Newman contend that the discursive representations of rugby “routinely assert ethnic diversity ‘on the pitch’ as proof positive of successful assimilation, cooperation, and wider racial harmony beyond it”.5 Yet simultaneously, browning is negatively articulated as the central cause for Pākehā exit from rugby union, particularly at a youth level, referred to in John Matheson’s symmetrical coinage as “white flight”.6 The discourse of white flight argues that young Pākehā boys are being driven away from rugby union not so much by the increasing alternatives that once-marginalised sports such as association football

(soccer) provide, but more as a result of their inability to compete with, and their fear of being injured by, more physically developed Pacific boys of the same age.7

In terms of racialised stereotypes, Pacific players are argued to hold a “natural” advantage from an early age through their physical development compared to

Pākehā boys. What makes their size even more of an asset is their “innate” athleticism and instinctive abilities. It is thus deemed inevitable that the sport’s traditional player base – Pākehā males – will soon be made obsolete at all levels of the sport.

T. Teaiwa and Mallon argue that there is “a strong element of sensationalism verging on panic about the ‘dominance’ of Polynesian players”.8

Pacific people’s participation in the sport is certainly increasing, but the idea that it is producing a soon-to-be-complete erasure of the sport’s Pākehā presence is absurd, scaremongering and factually baseless. The idea is influenced by the rise of

4 Teaiwa and Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand,” 212. 5 Grainger, Falcous, and Newman, “Postcolonial Anxieties and the Browning of New Zealand Rugby,” 267. 6 Matheson, “What’s the White Answer?” quoted in Teaiwa and Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand.” 7 Teaiwa and Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand,” 213–14. 8 Teaiwa and Mallon, 214.

192 black athletes in the US over the past forty years, and the commodification of athletes’ bodies along with the increasing corporatisation, mediatisation and commercialisation of American sport over the same period. What makes ideas of browning and white flight easily accepted and rarely challenged, as Grainger states, is their reliance on an ideology of naturalisation that constructs “social relations as natural and unchangeable”, thus “permitting statements that could otherwise be interpreted as racially-motivated” to be seen as biological and common sense.9 The argument utilises selective small-sample anecdotal evidence to paint a desired picture while making no mention of “the continued predominance of Pakeha in coaching, management and in the national team”.10 It is no surprise that responses justifying the need to keep Pākehā in rugby union rely on the same discourses, with

Pacific players unlike their Pākehā counterparts “accused of lacking discipline and mental toughness and of being difficult to coach in strategic play”.11

The primary reason why media and public discourse are heavily invested in the idea of white flight and the discomforting prospect of Pacific men being the sole representatives of New Zealand rugby union is linked to a broader fear of what

Hage calls a “discourse of Anglo decline”.12 This “specific genre of White discourse has long historical roots, and reasserts itself in calls for both tighter controls on immigration, resentment of (so-called) ‘race-based’ political policies, and in an attempt to realign New Zealandness with whiteness”; thus despite claims to the contrary, “race sits at the centre of the white-flight discourse – even if it is never

9 Grainger, “The Browning of the All Blacks: Pacific Peoples, Rugby, and the Cultural Politics of Identity in New Zealand,” 133–34. 10 Teaiwa and Mallon, “Ambivalent Kinships? Pacific People in New Zealand,” 214. 11 Mallon, “Conspicuous Selections, Pacific Islanders in New Zealand Sport,” 296. 12 Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, 179 quoted in Grainger, Falcous, and Newman, “Postcolonial Anxieties and the Browning of New Zealand Rugby,” 270.

193 acknowledged”.13 Furthermore, white flight encompasses more than “race, Pakeha, and rugby”, just as browning not only disrupts whiteness but also invades Pākehā masculinity – which sits above rugby union as the most valued symbolic marker of

New Zealand nationalism.14 Rugby union has an entrenched place as New

Zealand’s national sport and signifies and reproduces the dominant value systems of the nation; thus it is a symbolic battleground in the control and defence of the national space as both white and masculine.

The Pacific presence in rugby league in Australia is also regularly discussed and explained in such terms. Daniel Lane’s 15 July 2006 Sydney Morning Herald article “Islanders in Junior Leagues, It’s a Really Big Issue” states: “Forget new rules, expansion teams and codes of conduct - the biggest influence on Australia’s rugby codes has been the influx of Pacific Islanders”, who have the “perfect body shape” for rugby league.15 The sport today “looks very different”, stated influential former

Australian rugby league player and coach, and now broadcaster, journalist and administrator Phil Gould in 2011, referring to its Pacific presence;16 the dominance of Pacific players in the sport is attributed to their innate physical, athletic and instinctive abilities. One media figure behind the use of such language in an

Australian setting is Spiro Zavos who, twenty years after “The Browning of the All

Blacks” opinion piece, wrote an article for Australia’s leading online sport opinion website The Roar titled “The Browning of the Wallabies”, in reference to the Pacific presence in the Australian national rugby union team.17 Talking on ABC Radio’s

The Sports Factor in 2007, Zavos reiterates his early explanations of Pacific browning in New Zealand to explain its arrival not only in Australian rugby union but also

13 Grainger, “The Browning of the All Blacks: Pacific Peoples, Rugby, and the Cultural Politics of Identity in New Zealand,” 120–21; 134. 14 Grainger, 121. 15 Lane, “Islanders in Junior Leagues, It’s a Really Big Issue.” 16 Gould, “Crunch Time for Juniors’ Weighty Issue.” 17 Zavos, “The Browning of the Wallabies.”

194 rugby league. He states that the “Polynesian” presence can be described as “a body type, which is big and chunky” combined with “fast twitch muscles”, which create

“an explosive element in them”.18 These are the natural physical attributes which

Roy Masters articulates as giving Pacific players “the ideal body shape for a sport in which collisions are endemic, where big hits are akin to casual conversation”.19

With such innate and desirable athletic attributes it is no surprise that NRL scouts and recruiters, as St. George Illawarra chief executive Peter Doust pointed out in 2007, target Pacific communities “because their kids are bigger and have more inherent strength”.20 This is backed up by one of the sport’s most prominent recruiters, former Melbourne Storm and recruitment manager

Peter O’Sullivan, who has spent years scouring the football fields of New Zealand for Australian rugby league’s “next big thing”. As O’Sullivan stated, “They are just made for rugby league . . . It’s their pure athleticism. They are naturally bigger, stronger and faster than Australians and suited to our explosive game”.21 NSWRL

Development Officer Frank Barrett expands: “Genetically, the Pacific Islanders and

Maori kids are built to be very good footballers . . . They’re big, fit, have tremendous hand-eye co-ordination and they have big hands that allow them to really grip the ball”.22 To complement their physical and athletic prowess, Barrett believes, Pacific players are said to “come from a tough, hard culture and that has bred them for a physical game like rugby league”;23 Zavos refers to this as the “warrior culture” where sport is the embodiment of attributes synonymous with warfare.24 In an

Australian rugby league context, then, browning takes on much of the language

18 Zavos quoted on O’Reagen, “Polynesian Power Play.” 19 Masters, “Demographic Equaliser: The Next Generation.” 20 Doust quoted in Masters. 21 O’Sullivan quoted in Cadigan, “NRL’s Island Talent.” 22 Barrett quoted in Lane, “Islanders in Junior Leagues, It’s a Really Big Issue.” 23 Barrett quoted in Lane. 24 Zavos quoted on O’Reagen, “Polynesian Power Play.”

195 and meaning of the more famous story of Pacific peoples within rugby union in

New Zealand.

Drawing on scientific racialist discourses from the nineteenth century, these popular explanations silence the more nuanced historical and contemporary conditions that produce Pacific over-representation in these sports. Motivations for

Pacific people to play rugby league have always been different from reasons driving white Australian players. Pacific participation at an individual level extends beyond factors like enjoyment, fitness, health, comradeship and geographic and social mobility. Consciously or not, it continues to be informed by motivations that have long framed Pacific involvement in Australian rugby league and colonial sports more broadly: that is, as K. Teaiwa and Fa’anofo Lisaclaire Uperesa argue, the ability of sport to help “reinstate a [Pacific] male efficacy perceived to be lost through colonialism, migration, minority status in the diaspora, and class status”;25 and to provide the opportunity, as Vince Diaz argues in relation to Pacific people’s participation in American Football, to “beat the colonizer at his own game”.26 At the collective level, Pacific participation is influenced by a desire to increase the economic status of family and kinship networks, while enhancing the cultural status within the Australian nation of the Pacific community more broadly. Pacific players overwhelmingly attribute the support of family and wider kinship networks, in combination with their (predominantly Christian) faith, as the reason for their success; as a result, collective welfare often takes precedence over individual aspirations.27 The obligation of Pacific players to enhance the economic and cultural well-being of their families differs significantly from any prioritising of

25 Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora,” 116; Uperesa, “Fabled Futures: Migration and Mobility for Samoans in American Football.” 26 Diaz, “Tackling Pacific Hegemonic Formations on the American Gridiron,” 97 quoted in Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora,” 112. 27 Lakisa, Adair, and Taylor, “Pasifika Diaspora and the Changing Face of Australian Rugby League.”

196 family by white Australian players. Influencing this difference are the centrality of kinship obligation and reciprocal giving to the cultural and economic base of

Pacific social systems and communities; the disparate levels of socioeconomic disadvantage experienced by the respective communities; and Pacific people’s lack of access to other spheres of Australian life that provide social and cultural capital.28

The precarity of rugby league as a career makes it very difficult for some players to fulfil the expectations and obligations they have internalised, along with external pressures from family. Despite popular belief that the NRL brings untold wealth and , the reality for the overwhelming majority is very different.

The average career of an NRL player begins in the semi-professional NRL under-20

National Youth Competition: here the average salary of players in 2012 was

$12,500.29 Transition from the Youth Competition is tough: only 20% are successful in gaining an NRL contract.30 For the one in five that do make it, their career on average lasts 43 games usually spread over three to four years:31 the average annual salary of an NRL payer in 2015 was $244,000.32 The salary scale varies drastically, with the elite few earning around $1 million a year, while those at the bottom end of the spectrum earn the NRL’s minimum wage of $80,000, the average full-time yearly wage of adults in Australia.33 Injury and form are the two biggest determinants of career length.

The ARLC and NRL have been quick to claim, celebrate and promote the collective presence and individual talents of its Pacific players, as they accrue for

28 Lakisa, Adair, and Taylor; Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora.” 29 Andon and Free, “Media Coverage of Accounting: The NRL Crisis,” 23. 30 Barrowclough, “Rugby League : Is the NRL Doing Enough For Its Young Players?” 31 National Rugby League, “Beyond The Tryline.” 32 Schmook, “The Money in Australian Sport Is in the AFL.” 33 National Rugby League, “The Salary Cap”; Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Average Weekly Earnings, Australia, Nov 2015.”

197 these governing bodies the much needed economic and social capital required to succeed in the world of professional sports. While it is difficult to measure accurately, the influx of Pacific players into the NRL has contributed substantially to the being a billion dollar industry today; its players are so often the embodiment of what makes the competition “great” (thus living up to the

ARLC’s The Greatest Game of All 2013-2017 marketing slogan). Think of West Tigers’ half ’s “magic flick pass” that helped secure them the 2005 NRL grand final;34 Queensland’s “engag[ing] the afterburners and blast[ing] off, grabbing the ball in an AFL special before acrobatically slamming it down” to score and help win the 2008 State of Origin series for Queensland over New South

Wales in the deciding game three;35 or 2013 premiership-winning Sydney Rooster’s back-rower ’ “brute strength”, “power” and “athleticism” that has made him arguably the most dynamic player of the contemporary era.36 Pacific success is marketed and profited from in a way that is unique: at the centre of this marketability are the innate, hence unreplicable, abilities that enable Pacific players to do things in the sport that no other players can. This repeats the current configuration of “the sports-media complex in the US where Pacific, African

American and Native American sportsmen are commodified and consumed as racialized and hypermasculine spectacle”.37

Socially, the sport’s Pacific presence provides positive proof of the success of its community program initiatives focused on social cohesion and inclusiveness, and player welfare and education programs. This is a contemporary example of

34 Australian Associated Press, “Tigers Roar to NRL Title.” 35 Lutton, “Folau’s AFL Training Pays Off.” 36 Walshaw, “Sonny Bill Williams Puts On Another Stellar Performance As Sydney Roosters Destroy West Tigers.” 37 Tengan and Markham, “Performing Polynesian Masculinities in American Football: From ‘Rainbows to Warriors,’” 2414 quoted in Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora,” 116.

198 rugby league’s long-standing self-bestowed egalitarian image which simultaneously aligns itself with the imagined values of the nation and differentiates it from other Australian sports. Since its inception in 2012, the ARLC has projected an image of itself with social inclusion at the core of its function. The

ARLC and NRL acknowledges Australia as “a nation of diverse cultures and beliefs” and claims that “rugby league can play a pivotal role in developing tolerant, cohesive communities”.38 One of the primary objectives of its constitution is to

“promote and encourage either directly or indirectly the physical, cultural and intellectual welfare of young people in the community and, in particular, the

Rugby League community”.39 This is affirmed through its five-year strategic plan

Game Plan 2013-2017, which opens with the proclamation that “There is a place on the field for everyone”. The sport’s mission is “to bring people together and enrich their lives”, and central to achieving this is the value of Inclusiveness which involves “engaging and empowering everyone to feel welcome in our game; reaching out to new participants and supporters; promoting equality of opportunity in all its forms, and; respecting and celebrating diversity in culture, gender and social background”.40 The NRL Community (formerly known as NRL

One Community) administers community-specific social objectives, while responsibility for players (current and retired) belongs to the NRL Welfare and

Education team.

38 NRL One Community “Multicultural Programs.” 39 Australian Rugby League Commission, “How the Commission Works.” 40 Australian Rugby League Commission, “The Game Plan 2013-2017.”

199 5: The Pacific Threat to Australian Rugby League

For all the celebration of individual Pacific success and collective integration, the mood is not always so positive. There is only a thin line between Pacific players celebrated and valued, or feared and ostracised. There is always a distrust of “too much” browning: with the boxes comfortably ticked for a culturally diverse and inclusive sport and premier competition, which reflects broader national aims, thoughts insidiously turn again to how to “control” Pacific numbers. The sport’s gatekeepers in White Australia view the prospect of the Pacific presence further disrupting and eventually taking over the Australian rugby league space as both real and concerning. The hypothesis that it is “inevitable” that the NRL will be soon be “dominated by players with Tongan, Samoan or Maori blood” is based on what is assumed to be occurring throughout age-group levels, the NRL’s future player base.1 It is alleged that Pacific youth are playing rugby league at numbers much higher than at the premier level, while more worryingly record numbers of white

Australian youth are exiting.

In reference to browning at a youth level, the focus is on specific teams from particular geographic locations where Pacific communities are most dense; this creates the illusion that the Pacific presence is all consuming. Much of this discourse, as in the New Zealand rugby union example, relies on anecdotal evidence, biased sample-sizes and comparisons to the rise of the black athlete in the US over the past four decades. For example, in his 2007 comparative article which argues rugby league in Australia is “headed the same way” as American football (where within one generation the “racial composition” of the National

Football League [NFL] changed from “2:1 white to black” to “1:2 white to black”),

Masters singles out an Under-16 NSWRL Balmain team in which “only two of the

1 Lane, “Islanders in Junior Leagues, It’s a Really Big Issue.”

200 Balmain players were white” as proof that it is happening here.2 Similarly in 2011

Gould used his own estimated figures, also focused on inner-city Sydney, to make the same argument: “I wouldn’t be surprised to find that of all the kids registered to play rugby league in Sydney metropolitan area, say over the age of 10, the percentage of young players of Islander or Maori background is much higher” than the “more than 45 per cent” that comprise the NYC (National U20 competition). He states that: “In some regions or teams the domination could be as high as 80-90 per cent.”3

The anecdotal statistics given above are not explained solely through increased Pacific participation; they are argued to be heavily assisted by a white

Australian exit from the sport at age-group levels that is “at an all-time high”.4 This mass exodus – both child and parent induced – is explained by the same arguments about white flight from New Zealand rugby union. Pacific youth are posited as having the physique and athletic abilities of their much older NRL idols; in turn this forces supposedly much smaller white Australian youth to leave rugby league because of their inability to compete or participate safely. Examples of the negative impacts of Pacific players on competition at junior rugby league level are littered throughout Australian mainstream media, with Lane stating in 2006 that “the emergence of bigger, faster and stronger players with islander roots [makes] it difficult for smaller [white Australian] players to compete”; and Neil Cadigan in

2008 describing the “intimidation of the ‘caucasian’ kids” by the “early-mature

[Pacific] boys”.5 Like browning at a youth level, anecdotal evidence both validates and normalises these statements. This is exemplified by stories such as the one told by former player, media commentator and coach : “The other week I

2 Masters, “Demographic Equaliser: The Next Generation.” 3 Gould, “Crunch Time for Juniors’ Weighty Issue.” 4 Gould. 5 Lane, “Islanders in Junior Leagues, It’s a Really Big Issue”; Cadigan, “NRL’s Island Talent.”

201 saw a [Pacific] kid playing for Blacktown City under 10’s and he was 96 kilos” … “It wasn’t a contest and it can’t be fun for him or the [white Australian] kids playing against him”.6

The unenjoyable, no contest depiction of the white Australian experience in rugby league at a youth level is accompanied by the more serious concern that it is no longer a safe space for their participation. In discussing the issue in 2006,

NSWRL Development Officer Frank Barrett stated that “it breaks my heart to see a

[white Australian] kid weighing 35 kilos get flattened by an [Pacific] opponent who weighs 80 kilos”.7 This fear is said to be experienced not only by white Australian boys who turn up to their games on Saturday mornings in dread of who their opponents may be, but also their parents. Journalists Nick Walshaw and Amy Dale state that while “Sydney parents” have no problem enjoying the Pacific presence at

NRL level, they “are far less impressed when poor Johnny is trampled beneath a set of size 10 boots” belonging to a child of Pacific heritage.8 Amy McNeilage reiterates this: “It’s not just the children sizing up the opposition as they run out onto the field each weekend. Every week at their child’s Saturday morning rugby league game, parents stare from the sidelines at the opposing team”. This “confronting experience” is affirmed by one Blacktown parent who states: “If one of those big boys lands on your tiny son, he’s definitely going to get hurt”.9 This fear seemed to be realised when mainstream media reported in April 2013 the death of 15-year-old

Jake Kedzlie, the grandson of rugby league legend . Kedzlie died as a result of a head injury sustained after a collision in which his head made contact with an opposing player’s knee in a tackle during an Under 16s rugby

6 Geyer quoted in Lane, “Islanders in Junior Leagues, It’s a Really Big Issue.” 7 Barrett quoted in Lane. 8 Walshaw and Dale, “Islanders ‘too Big’ for League.” 9 McNeilage, “Little Dave Tackles Goliath: Children’s Teams Are Weighing in on the Stature of Players.”

202 league game in Toormina, south of . Known “not only for his small stature but for his tough and fearless playing style, often against much larger players”,10 Kedzlie’s death was affirmed by mainstream media as the tragic realisation of the dangers faced by White-Australian youth within the sport today.

At the same time Sports Medicine Australia spokesman and sports doctor Rob Reid described it as “one of the rarest things to happen in sport”.11

Unable to play a competitive game and under a very real threat of injury, white Australian youth are increasingly told (mostly by their parents on the advice of the media) that they have no options within rugby league but to quit or better yet never play at all. As early as 2006 Lane stated that “anecdotal evidence suggests non-islander parents are pulling their sons out of both codes because of concerns for their safety”.12 Gould reiterated this call five years later:

I suspect a lot of six-year-olds drag their parents down to the local

park to register them for rugby league to play with their

schoolmates. However by nine or 10, many kids, or most likely their

parents, are disillusioned with their rugby league experience. By this

age, the massive difference in the physical development of the

Polynesian kids is really starting to take effect.13

It is argued that the decision to leave rugby league is made all the easier because of the alternatives on offer from what are perceived as more contact-friendly (non-

Pacific) team sports, such as association football (soccer) and Australian rules football (AFL). With this in mind, the introduction in 2012 of professional teams into Sydney’s multicultural western suburbs from the elite competitions of both sporting alternatives - the AFL ( Giants) and the A-League

10 McNeilage. 11 Reid quoted in Corderoy, “Accident That Killed Teen Was a Freak Occurrence.” 12 Lane, “Islanders in Junior Leagues, It’s a Really Big Issue.” 13 Gould, “Crunch Time for Juniors’ Weighty Issue.”

203 (Western Sydney Wanderers) - can be seen not only as an opportunity to attract more diverse cultures, including Australia’s Pacific communities, to their sports, but also an attempt to win over the apparently disillusioned white Australian youth from rugby league’s traditional working-class heartland.

Justification of concern for white flight and the perceived change in the cultural demographic of rugby league in Australia is vindicated through “non- racialised” discourses that are rooted paradoxically in the same egalitarianism that celebrates Pacific participation within the sport, and portray what rugby league would look like if white Australians were no longer to participate. As we have seen, rugby league in Australia was built on an imagined egalitarianism and fair go attitude not afforded by rugby union. While this is challenged when the sport’s often-silenced non-white (Pacific and Indigenous Australian) histories are reinserted into the national narrative, it is still the image portrayed by the ARLC,

NRL, its clubs and their legions of white Australian fans today. The ARLC’s mantra that “there is a place on the field for everyone”, used to give the illusion that cultural minorities are integral to rugby league, is simultaneously and ironically used to validate concerns about white flight. Proponents of white flight argue that the sport cannot portray such an image when its traditional player base – White

Australia – no longer has access. This is particularly directed to a junior level, where rugby league’s objectives are quite different from an elite level: junior rugby league is about promoting the sport as a healthy and socially enabling activity for all, and Pacific youth are seen to be disabling this.

Proponents of white flight have sought solutions since the mid-2000s to the supposed mass exit of white Australian youth from the sport and the supposed attack on rugby league’s egalitarian underpinnings. As NSWRL Development

Officer Frank Barrett stated in 2006, a solution is needed that will “ensure the 13-

204 year-old Anglo-Saxon kid isn’t pushed out of the game because of his size”. If they can be retained until “after their growth spurt - the puberty years – it becomes a more level playing field”, he concludes.14 Rule changes at the youth level, such as shortening the metres a defensive team has to retreat after a tackle, have been seen as an attempt to negate the impact “bigger” Pacific youth can have on offense, and subsequently to keep white Australian youth within the game, but the real solution to the crisis is said to exist in implementing weight restrictions. New Zealand rugby union is used to legitimise the potential success of weight restrictions: with the

NZRU operating both restricted and open competitions from under-8’s right through to senior competition, the New Zealand model is promoted as providing “a greater chance of more of the people of European extraction coming through”, states New Zealand sportswriter Richard Becht.15 Sound bites like this have many people within Australian rugby league believing that the introduction of weight restrictions is the obvious answer to making the game safer and more competitive, and thus retaining white Australian youth. Yet while weight restrictions have been trialled within Australian rugby league, a permanent shift from age to weight restrictions has not yet occurred.

While I am not able here to enter a full debate on the pros and cons of weight restrictions and their effectiveness in making rugby league in Australian both safe and competitive, it is important to acknowledge that there are negatives associated with weight restrictions in New Zealand rugby union, including the physiological effects it has on those younger heavier players forced to play against more physically and mentally mature older participants. There are also alleged cases of youth engaging in strict dietary and training regimes, which include the

14 Barrett quoted in Lane, “Islanders in Junior Leagues, It’s a Really Big Issue.” 15 Becht quoted on O’Reagen, “Polynesian Power Play.”

205 use of saunas to make weight-limits.16 More significantly, it seems to be overlooked by proponents of white flight in an Australian rugby league context that weight restrictions were in existence in New Zealand rugby union long before the white flight debate began there in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

While egalitarian discourse affirms the right to fight for the retention of white Australians within rugby league’s youth and adult amateur competitions, vindication of fighting for its place within the sport at an elite level comes through subtle yet effective promotion of the unique “value” of and “need” for white

Australians within the sport. Rugby league in Australia has been great for over 100 years because of well-known but ill-defined attributes belonging to white

Australian but not to Pacific players, who are ascribed innate physical and cognitive shortcomings attributed to their biology and culture. It is argued that while size, strength and athleticism (Pacific attributes) might win out at age-group level, much more is required to succeed on rugby league’s highest stage. Thus large numbers of Pacific players at NRL, State and International level are subtly portrayed as both damaging to a team’s chance of success and to the sport as a product.

When team performances are worse than hoped in the NRL, Pacific players are often identified as scapegoats. When the Canberra Raiders defeated the New

Zealand Warriors 32 – 6 in Round 6 of the 2012 NRL Premiership, the Warriors had only two wins out of six in their 2012 season. In response to their loss, former New

South Wales and Australian representative lead his weekly Fox

Sports online NRL wrap up on 9 April 2012 with the headline, “Warriors back to jungle-ball . . .”.17 While of course Kimmorley did not explain what he meant by the

16 Neville and Gregor Paul, “Crash Diet Rugby Boys.” 17 Kimmorley, “Brett Kimmorley’s NRL Round Six Review: Warriors Back to Jungle-Ball, Cronulla Learning How to Win.”

206 “jungle-ball” reference, it is not too difficult to uncover its racial connotations. For many supporters of the NRL in Australia, the New Zealand Warriors have long come to represent what typically happens when too many Pacific players represent one team; this is a sentiment shared by those across the ditch in New Zealand.

Always the club with the largest Pacific representation in the NRL, the Warriors are a team defined by their “flair” and “razzle dazzle”, yet fall short of being premiership contenders due to their inability to clearly “think” and “apply” the analytical and tactical nous needed in pressure situations – hence their history without a premiership title so far.

After another not-so-promising start to their 2013 season, Chris Rattue writing for on 3 April 2013 challenged the all-too-familiar explanations by Australian (and indeed New Zealand) media for the New Zealand

Warriors’ failings. Titled “Erratic players come in all colours”, Rattue’s opinion piece argues:

Every time this erratic NRL club falls in a hole, you dread what’s

coming – namely racism . . . The basic line, and I’ve heard this almost

since the inception of the club in 1995, is that players with white skins

are tough in any situation, while brown skins equal flat-track bullies

who can’t do the hard yards when the going gets tough. In other

words, erratic brown-skinned players reflect cultural weakness,

while erratic white-skinned players are just white-skinned players.18

While I would challenge Rattue on his statement that the club is “erratic” (since the creation of the NRL in 1998 the New Zealand Warriors have appeared in the grand final as many or more times than nine of the other fifteen clubs as of the end of the

2015 season), I do agree with his assertion that the all-too-familiar narrative of the

18 Rattue, “Erratic Players Come In All Colours.”

207 New Zealand Warriors continues to centre on their ethnicity, unpredictability and ultimately failure. The Australian viewpoint is to worry that the Pacific style of rugby league that has defined the New Zealand Warriors is infiltrating Australian clubs, compromising the future of the game.

In recent times this charge has also been levelled at the , who after the New Zealand Warriors have had one of the strongest representations of Pacific players within the NRL and are located geographically near a large population of Pacific people. Over the six year period from 2010 to 2015 the Eels finished 12th, 14th, 16th, 16th, 10th and 12th out of 16 clubs, and went through four different coaches (including one of Pacific heritage – [Māori]).

Implicit in the claims of failure from fans and commentators alike is that the team is a product of too much browning. The problem is seen as systemic, with the club’s affiliated youth teams said to include excessive numbers of Pacific representatives; it is implied that too much time and resources are being directed to Pacific players who show early success and potential because of their physicality but who mentally will never pass the grade at the sport’s highest level. This is a far cry from 2009, when a not-too-dissimilar Eels team which included ten Pacific players in its 28- man squad (at the time, second only to the New Zealand Warriors) made the NRL grand final. Daily Telegraph journalist Dean Ritchie described them as the

“Polynesian powerhouses” with “remarkable footballing talent” and “a special and unbreakable bond” attributed to their “humble islander upbringing”;19 NRL chief executive proclaimed the team “an example of how the different cultures can work well together”.20 My aim here is not to pinpoint reasons why

Parramatta have consistently underperformed since their 2009 grand final loss to

Melbourne Storm (who were later stripped of the title because of salary cap

19 Ritchie, “Polynesian Players Making History at Parramatta.” 20 Gallop quoted in Ritchie.

208 breaches), but simply to illuminate the discourse that legitimates concern over browning and white flight by continually scapegoating Pacific players.

Team failure is not only defined by the cognitive shortcomings of Pacific players, it is also inferred from their physical deficiencies. While the Pacific body is feared and revered in its ability to do things that can singlehandedly win games in ways that non-Pacific bodies cannot, it is simultaneously limiting, particularly when there are “too many” Pacific players in one team. At an elite level the sport requires a level of physical fitness and a work ethic not naturally attributed to the

Pacific body. Pacific bodies are pigeonholed as big, explosive and most effective in short bursts; they are best attuned to a game where there are many stoppages and they are able to conserve more energy and dictate a more combative style of play.

The white Australian body, on the other hand, is defined as having the “engine” to put in the “hard yards” and play for long minutes at a sustained level of effectiveness. It is believed that if you can get the right mix (preferably a white

Australian majority) between the two, while also including a couple of Indigenous

Australians, you are on your way to building a successful team. If you go the other way and have “too many” Pacific players you are in trouble.

This was brought up by Masters in reference to international rugby league in his 13 October 2006 Sydney Morning Herald article “Polynesians are a , but

Stuart wants change for true test of endurance”. Masters stated that many in the

Australian rugby league community believed that the Pacific-dominated New

Zealand national team’s inability to compete with Australia came from its incapacity to contest “high intensity, end-to-end games”. With international rugby league seen as requiring a level of stamina and endurance higher than club level,

Masters extended that New Zealand’s historically poor record against Australia was

“widely argued” as “proof” that the “explosive skills” of the “Polynesian” New

209 Zealand players were “not suited” to the more orthodox style of rugby league.21 He states that Pacific-dominated teams like the New Zealand national team have tried to change their style of game from one fast-paced and reliant on endurance to one where there are multiple stoppages allowing time for rest and more emphasis on physicality. Masters believes that proof of the success of such changes was seen in the few times when New Zealand beat Australia before 2006, most notably its 24-0 victory in the 2005 Tri-Nations final. These victories, Master argues, have “tended to coincide with stop-start games”.22

This strategy seemed to be acknowledged by the NRL’s 2006 proposal to change the interchange rule, which dictated how many players a team could have on its bench and how often they could interchange with any of the thirteen players on the field during an 80-minute game. Since 2001 the rule had been that teams were allowed to make a maximum of twelve interchanges between the thirteen players on the field and the four on the bench; previously there had been no limit.

The new proposal was to reduce the number of interchanges from twelve to ten, on the logic that it would make for a more exciting, free-flowing spectacle as big forwards would no long dominate because their forced increased work rate would tire them out towards the end of games; as a result it was thought that the game would open up for the smaller, quicker players, bringing them back into prominence.

For proponents of white flight this was welcome news, yet for others it was seen as a subtle form of racism in which the NRL was attempting to negate the

Pacific advantage, and subsequently their presence within the code, by emphasising a game more suited for smaller, fitter, white Australian players.

Masters believed that “the ugly nimbus of racism hovers above the game, with

21 Masters, “Polynesians Are a Cracker, But Stuart Wants Change For True Test of Endurance.” 22 Masters.

210 moves to reduce the number of interchange players being branded as thinly disguised discrimination”.23 Medical doctors were at the heart of opposition, first concerned about the impact of the rule change on injuries as players spent more time on the field fatigued, and also arguing that “a reduction in interchange [was] a thinly veiled counter to the influx of Polynesian players”.24 What is confusing about this argument is that in affirming a “non-racial” stance it relies on a racial stereotype; it argues for the rule change not to go ahead based on racial assumptions that Pacific bodies would be disadvantaged by it.

When the rule change reducing the number of interchanges from twelve to ten came into effect at the beginning of the 2008 NRL season, there was no sudden exit of Pacific players from the sport; like all players they adapted and the game went on. Pacific-dominated teams continued to experience success: in the 2011 season, for example, NRL grand final day saw all three grand finals at NSW Cup,

NYC (Under 20s) and NRL level involve New Zealand-based Pacific-dominated teams. For the main event – the NRL grand final - thirteen of the seventeen players selected for the New Zealand Warriors were of Pacific heritage. In 2013 eight of the seventeen NRL grand final champion Sydney Roosters team were of Pacific heritage.

While “not enough” White Australian players are imagined as detrimental to team success at NRL, State and International level, equally concerning is the impact that “too many” Pacific players at elite level will have on the style of the game. With the NRL once seen as an arena where white working-class men showcased their skill, endurance, mental fortitude and courage, the NRL is now presented as the Pacific man’s game of power, strength and flair. While the dynamic makeup of the new game is an NRL marketer’s dream, paradoxically for

23 Masters. 24 Masters.

211 the rugby league purist and white flight proponent, who include many of the game’s influential media personalities, the game’s skills have suffered. The argument is that as their numbers have increased, Pacific players have taken over positions on the field deemed most influential and most reliant on attributes Pacific players do not possess. Gould states:

Our skill positions in rugby league are suffering because of a change

in the kind of game played and because players [white Australian]

with these body types are not persevering through the current junior

league pathways and into the representative teams. The traditional

five-eight is all but dead in our game. There is a shortage of

halfbacks and very few stars on the horizon in these skilled

positions.25

In lamenting a golden era where (white Australian) players ran and controlled key positions on the field with both skill and poise, Gould is articulating that this is no longer the case, because of browning and white flight within the code. The solution he inadvertently implies is a need to return to positional segregation based on race.

Positional segregation or stacking has long been documented in American professional and amateur sports, particularly baseball and football; the discourse argues that white players in team sports have historically occupied central, decision-making positions, while non-white players have operated on the fringes in more rudimentary roles. In applying it to an Australian rugby league context and in reference to Aboriginal Australians during the NSWRL seasons of 1987 and 1988,

Christopher Hallinan argued that almost 60% of Aboriginal Australian players during this period played in the centre or wing position (roles which traditionally require speed and saw less of the ball) compared to 11% (four players) who held

25 Gould, “Crunch Time for Juniors’ Weighty Issue.”

212 down the key positions of , half back, five-eight or .26 Similarly in a

British rugby league context and in reference to the game’s black athletes, Collins found that in the years 1984 to 1994, out of the combined 152 appearances made by thirteen black athletes for the British national rugby league team, 68% were at the wing or centre position. Alternatively, and critically, only one black athlete during this period represented Britain at the influential decision and playmaking positions of scrum-half, hooker and five-eight.27 Jonathan Long, Ben Carrington and Karl

Spracklen made similar findings in their 1995 examination of the broader English

Rugby League premier club competition.28 While to my knowledge no positional analysis has been conducted officially in relation to Pacific players in the NRL, it seems likely that they too have been placed on the field with regard to their racial qualities, although in a wider range of positions from the traditional centre and wing positions to the forward positions of prop, second row and lock; yet here they are still not visibly represented to the same extent as in the key decision-making positions mentioned above. This is particularly true in the skilled positions of halfback and five-eight, where comparatively few Pacific players have received the opportunity to play at NRL level: Stacey Jones, , , Benji

Marshall, and more recently , and are the most prominent of a select few. So as it is evident that white Australians still dominate skilled positions, it is also demonstrable that there has been no loss of skill or opportunity for white Australian players in these positions. So it does not follow that browning and white flight have ended or even reversed positional segregation; or that the game is suffering as a result.

26 Hallinan, “Aborigines and Positional Segregation in Australian Rugby League,” 74–75. 27 Collins, “Racial Minorities in a Marginalized Sport: Race, Discrimination and Integration in British Rugby League Football.” 28 Long, Carrington, and Spracklen, “‘Asians Cannot Wear Turbans in the Scrum’: Explorations of Racist Discourse Within Professional Rugby League.”

213 6. Pacific Opportunities, Policies and Strategies

While the Pacific presence at NRL club level makes many in the sport uncomfortable, reaction is diluted because clubs no longer represent their geographical locations as solidly as they once did. Corporatisation and commercialisation of rugby league put an end to the era where players were only eligible to represent the club in the district where they lived; clubs have since been disbanded, rebranded, amalgamated and created, redefining club attachments for fans and players alike. Yet one space where geographic policies operate strongly is at the sport’s unofficial pinnacle, the annual State of Origin series. Here, then, is where fear of the Pacific presence is expressed most crudely.

Although the ARLC and NRL officially acknowledge international rugby league and selection in the Australian national team as the sport’s highest honour, the State of Origin series is the apex of rugby league commercially and in the eyes of mainstream fans. Given Australia’s dominance in league, the standard of play is typically much higher in games played among the best

Australian players than in games played between Australia and other national teams. Monetary rewards are commensurately higher: in 2014 State of Origin players received approximately $30,000 for each of the three games in the series, significantly more than the $10,000 per game given to those who represent tier one countries (Australia, New Zealand and England) in international games.1

Pacific representation within the New South Wales and Queensland State of Origin teams has increased along with the Pacific presence in NRL clubs. The increase, however, has happened much more slowly, with both Origin teams over the past decade having only two or three players of Pacific heritage: this number has been kept down not by player ability but rather by strict eligibility rules which

1 Burgess, “Samoan Players Are Being Paid Less Than 10 Per Cent of What Kiwi and Aussie Players Will Earn.”

214 do not apply at club level. From its inception in 1980 through to 2012, eligibility for

Origin was based on the state where the player had played their first senior game of football over the age of 16. Created at a time when there were few overseas-born players, no real consideration was given to establishing policy about their participation in Origin. The general rule came to be that if a player had lived in

Australia for three years and had not previously represented New Zealand or Great

Britain (Australia’s two major international rivals), nor wished to, they came under the same rules as everyone else. Overseas-born players from tier 2 and 3 countries

(Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga) could play both for their country of heritage and in Origin; all Origin players who played for Australia but also had heritage to a tier 2 or 3 country could decide to play for them instead of Australia at a World Cup (in an attempt to strengthen the tournament). In 2013, the ARLC tightened Origin’s eligibility laws. The new criteria stipulated that to qualify to play for Queensland or New South Wales in the State of Origin series players had either to be born in that state or have lived there since before their thirteenth birthday; the previous rule that an Origin player could not represent New Zealand or Great

Britain was maintained.2

Although this was not stated officially, the 2013 amendment was informed by the increasing Pacific presence in Origin. Pacific players were imagined to disrupt parochial loyalties, and mainstream media fostered hysteria that their numbers in Origin would soon replicate if not surpass their club-level numbers.

While nothing could be done about the comparatively small number of Australian- born Pacific players (or those who had lived in Australia since they were young children), policy focused on how to restrict the majority who had moved from New

Zealand or the Pacific Islands to New South Wales or Queensland as teenagers for

2 A “father-son” rule was also introduced allowing a player to represent the state their father played for no matter their residency status.

215 rugby league purposes. Labelled as “inauthentic” New South Welshmen and

Queenslanders, calls for their exclusion intensified in 2012 following the selection and attempted selection by New South Wales and Queensland of three previously unselected New Zealand-born Pacific players. New South Wales selectors named

James Tamou, a New Zealand-born Cook Island Māori who moved with his family to Australia when he was thirteen. Tamou had never represented New Zealand but had trained with the team in 2011; he had also previously played for the New

Zealand Māori team.3 Queensland selected Ben Te’o, a New Zealand-born Samoan who moved to Australia at the age of seventeen. Te’o too had never represented

New Zealand at the elite level but had done so at age-group level. Queensland also attempted to select New Zealand-born Samoan , who moved to

Australia at age sixteen. Kasiano had signed a letter of intent with the New Zealand team but was close to switching allegiances to Australia in order to play Origin, before intense media condemnation reaffirmed his commitment to play for New

Zealand.

Following the selection and attempted selection of Tamou, Te’o and

Kasiano, Australian rugby league media ran with headlines such as “Will the growing number of Polynesian players dilute the spirit of State of Origin?” and

“Kiwis and Polynesian players were never meant to play Origin”.4 The journalistic language used in this controversy conformed to the rhetoric analysed so far, projecting imagined futures where few if any white players represented New South

Wales or Queensland and predicting dire consequences for Origin. For example,

Paul Kent of The Daily Telegraph speaking on the TV program NRL on Fox stated:

3 Jackson, “‘He’ll Always Be A Maori. But New Zealand Should Have Moved Faster.’” 4 Hile, “Will the Growing Number of Polynesian NRL Players Dilute The Spirit of State of Origin?”; Ritchie, “Former NSWRL Official Bob Abbott Says Kiwis and Polynesian Players Were Never Meant to Play Origin.”

216 What happens in five or ten years’ time when there’s so many

Polynesian kids coming through rugby league at the moment. You’ve

got one little kid who is playing halfback for Queensland, he looks

around, and suddenly he’s got 12 [Pacific] players there who all

rightfully should be playing for New Zealand. What does that do for

whatever that little magical element is that makes Origin work?5

There were sound bites from past administrators and players condemning the

“loose” eligibility criteria and the motives of non-Australian-born Pacific players for participating in Origin. Former NSWRL vice-president and co-founder of the

State of Origin concept, Bob Abbott, argued that “the suggestion that NZ or

Polynesian players can play in this competition is invalid . . . It was always about

NSW against Queensland”.6 Ex-Queensland great emphasised money as an explanation for why Pacific players wanted to play Origin, and saw it as an insult to the competition that the desire to represent New South Wales or

Queensland could be influenced by economics. “They’re [Pacific players] making a decision for money,” Tallis asserted. “I made a decision because I’m a

Queenslander”.7 Tallis’ comments were all the more interesting because he is of

Australian South Sea Island heritage (and was named in Australian rugby league’s

Indigenous team of the century), emphasising once again ambivalence around the status of Australian South Sea Islanders as Pacific migrants.

This public outcry was effective in changing State of Origin’s eligibility laws; the intense identity politics framing this debate within rugby league evoke comparisons to Australia’s historical and contemporary fears of its growing Pacific

5 Kent quoted in Hile, “Will the Growing Number of Polynesian NRL Players Dilute The Spirit of State of Origin?” 6 Abbott quoted in Ritchie, “Former NSWRL Official Bob Abbott Says Kiwis and Polynesian Players Were Never Meant to Play Origin.” 7 Tallis quoted in Hile, “Will the Growing Number of Polynesian NRL Players Dilute The Spirit of State of Origin?”

217 population and to the range of ad hoc policies introduced overtly and discreetly in an attempt to appease such concerns. State of Origin games, a marketing device extending back only to 1980, were defended as an inalienable tradition of national identity and origin. Yet just as the new policy is only a smokescreen for the real concerns about Pacific presence in rugby league, so it will only be temporarily effective: Pacific players in the game are increasingly Australian-born (37% as of

2015).

Representations which frame Pacific people as a threat to Australian rugby league are partly the consequence of a lack of Pacific representatives in media and administrative positions, and the low level of engagement of those who occupy such positions with Pacific players and communities. Pacific people make up 42% of NRL-contracted players but less than 2% of its non-playing workforce (coaches, managers, administrators etc.).8 I am unaware of any rugby league journalists employed by Australia’s major mainstream media who are of Pacific heritage.

There is no shortage of Pacific people qualified for off-field roles in rugby league; rather the White Australia establishment has an unconscious need to control a sport that for over a century has been central in reflecting and creating many of the ideals of the imagined nation.

At a club level (coaching, management, scouting, recruitment) there is a hesitation to incorporate Pacific cultural practices into everyday operations. Club administrators have little understanding of the “cultural and situational complexities” of their Pacific players,9 who are pressured into assimilating to

“traditional” club culture. Symbolic acceptance of Pacific culture is as far as clubs will go: as Newcastle recruitment manager Keith Onslow stated in 2008, “we have

8 Ng Shiu and Vagana, “An Unlikely Alliance: Training NRL ‘Cultural Warriors,’” 1. 9 Lakisa, Adair, and Taylor, “Pasifika Diaspora and the Changing Face of Australian Rugby League,” 356.

218 to understand [Pacific] culture and the big part religion plays in their life but not make too many concessions. You can’t have one rule for Islander boys and one for others”.10 A common strategy of club recruitment managers is to identify talented

Pacific players at fifteen or sixteen years of age and place them in high schools with rugby league academy systems to accelerate not only their on-field abilities but also the process of acculturation.11

At an organisational level, ARLC and NRL decision-makers have not been proactive in prioritising and funding Pacific-specific programs that appropriately reflect player representation and community support for rugby league in Australia from Pacific people. Programs focusing on Pacific player welfare, and on Pacific cultural-awareness training for non-Pacific administrators and players, have relied on the persistence and resourcefulness of the few Pacific administrative staff employed by the NRL, on Pacific players (past and present) and community members. The establishment of the NRL Pasifika Cultural Engagement Program in

2010 illustrates this.

In 2008, captain (Fijian) during a game against the Parramatta Eels was called a “fucking monkey” by an Eels fan; after the game Civoniceva called for more to be done administratively to address racism within the sport. The NRL agreed to establish an anti-racism campaign but did not follow through with it. So a group of senior Pacific players (including Civoniceva) along with newly-appointed NRL Education and Welfare officer (a former NRL, New Zealand and Samoan international player) began discussing ways to empower individual Pacific players and the collective Pacific presence within the sport.12 The result was the NRL Pasifika Cultural Engagement Program

10 Onslow quoted in Cadigan, “NRL’s Island Talent.” 11 Cadigan. 12 Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora,” 121–22.

219 which “highlights the significance of educating young men, and the sporting industry, on the importance of understanding, engaging and developing Pacific cultures within rugby league”.13

Between 2010 and 2014 it implemented a broad range of projects in partnership with members of Australia and New Zealand’s Pacific community, including artists, scholars and practitioners. Its first project was Body

Pacifica which ran from June to August 2010 at Sydney’s Casula Powerhouse Arts

Centre; it encouraged players to use “their status and popularity to promote Pacific art, culture and tangible and intangible heritage” via “a diverse program of exhibitions, live performances, workshops, digital displays and sales of a very successful calendar”.14 Body Pacifica fostered “a much-needed public display of

Pacific pride”; the next initiative was to “deepen the historical and cultural knowledge” of both Pacific players and non-Pacific players and administrators.15

To achieve this the Program partnered in late 2010 with Dr. Jioji Ravulo of the

University of Western Sydney to develop and implement a NRL Pacific Cultural

Awareness Training workshop for all players and administrator of the fifteen

Australian-based clubs.16

Also in 2012 the Program began collaborating with the State and

Governance in Melanesia Program (SSGM) at the Australian National University in

Canberra (ANU), which resulted in the development of an ANU NRL Pacific

Studies Cultural Leadership Camp held the same year in Sydney. Its purpose was

“to empower NRL elite Pasifika athletes and ex-athletes to become leaders in their

13 Ng Shiu and Vagana, “An Unlikely Alliance: Training NRL ‘Cultural Warriors.’” 14 Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora,” 122. 15 Teaiwa, 124. 16 Ravulo, “Developing Diversity Awareness and Practices in the National Rugby League (NRL): Progressive Player Participation and Club Collaborations.”

220 respective clubs, communities and rugby league”.17 Following the success of the inaugural Camp, SSGM and ANU helped the Program implement: the 2012 Leaders of the Pac conference for elite junior Pacific athletes in New South Wales; an eight- week online Pacific Studies course in 2013 for Pacific players and non-Pacific staff; a second Leadership Camp in 2014 focused on mental health and facilitated by the New Zealand-based Le Va group, a Pacific-run initiative that specialises in

Pacific people’s health and well-being; and the NRL Pasifika Academic Influence

Award launched in 2014. During this period Vagana, along with past and present players and community members, also established the NRL Pasifika Advisory

Council.18

The Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander rugby league community have also been influencing and contributing to these initiatives. While similarly representing racial difference, this community - through their political status as Indigenous Australians - are accorded a different place within the sport, symbolically at least, and deemed integral to twenty-first-century imaginings of

Australian rugby league. Formalising the importance of Indigenous Australians within the sport is the NRL’s Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP), a strategic document that details an organisation’s vision for reconciliation between

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The NRL RAP (the first from a national sports organisation) was launched in 2008 to coincide with Australian rugby league’s centenary and Prime Minister ’s national apology to the thousands of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders impacted by former government policies, specifically the stolen generations. A key objective was the establishment of an Australian Rugby League Indigenous Council (ARLIC),

17 Ng Shiu and Vagana, “An Unlikely Alliance: Training NRL ‘Cultural Warriors,’” 1. 18 Teaiwa, “Niu Mana, Sport, Media and the Australian Diaspora”; Ng Shiu and Vagana, “An Unlikely Alliance: Training NRL ‘Cultural Warriors.’”

221 comprised solely of eight Aboriginal Australian and/or Torres Strait Island community representatives (including two women) and governed by a Charter of

Operations, to oversee the implementation of the NRL RAP.

Since the introduction of its first RAP, the NRL in dialogue with the ARLIC has created an Indigenous Players Advisory Group to give Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander players – who comprise 12% of contracted NRL players – more direct involvement in the game’s decision-making processes about how

Indigenous Australian players are to be represented and their communities connected to rugby league. It has established an annual All Stars game between an

Indigenous Australian and a “best of the rest” team; implemented an “Indigenous

Round” in the NRL competition, in which one specific week of competition is dedicated to celebrating the contribution and recognising the status of Indigenous

Australians in rugby league and Australian life more broadly; and delivered

Indigenous Australian-specific community education and employment programs

(i.e. the School To Work program). It is also committed to increasing the number of

Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander players contracted by NRL clubs to 15%; to ensuring Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander businesses are prioritised by the NRL for the supply of goods and services; and to increasing administrative employment to 5%.19 Crucially, Indigenous Australians have had representation at the sport’s highest level - the ARLC – since its inception in 2012 via the appointment of Professor Chris Sarra as one of its Commissioners.

Nevertheless the experiences of Indigenous Australians within the sport are still ambivalent. Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander players still face overt racism: the most reported example in recent years is the decision of Timana

Tahu (also of Māori ancestry) to walk out of the New South Wales State of Origin

19 Australian Rugby League Commission, “NRL Annual Report 2014,” 66.

222 team in 2010 after the assistant coach referred to him as a “black cunt”.20 permeates at a governance level, demonstrated in the immediate sacking of ARLIC chairman Percy Knight by ARLC chairman John

Grant in 2013 after Knight publicly stated: “There is rampant racism within the

NRL’s administration and it is very toxic”.21 These examples indicate a longstanding but continuing uneasiness over Indigenous Australian participation in Australian rugby league; previously overtly expressed it is now masked and complicated by symbolic and practical policies of “inclusion”.

When the ARLC and NRL have prioritised its Pacific presence, their focus has been on communities in the Pacific Islands rather than those in Australia and

New Zealand. This is exemplified by its three-year $2.4 million Pacific Strategy launched in August 2014. Centred on Pacific Outreach, it aims to

strengthen Rugby League in the region and build stronger business

and community business and community ties in the Pacific Islands.

Specifically the strategy focuses on game development; player

welfare; commercial and corporate opportunities; supporting

education; social and community outcomes; and strengthening the

Rugby League bodies in each nation to build the international

game.22

The Strategy also receives funding from the Australian government as part of a

“sports for development” model. An initial contribution of $500,00o was designated specifically to expand the NRL’s League Bilong Laif (League for life) program beyond Papua New Guinea (where it was first implemented in 2013) and into Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. League Bilong Laif is a $3.5 million three-year

20 Webster, Riccio, and Badel, “Inglis Racial Slur Is Unacceptable.” 21 Webster and Badel, “Powerbrokers’ Racism Row Threatens to Mar NRL All Stars v Indigenous All Stars Showpiece.” 22 Australian Rugby League Commission, “NRL Annual Report 2014,” 68.

223 Department of Federal Affairs and Trade-funded and NRL-administered school- based sport for development program, with a focus on promoting respect, gender equality and the importance of education.23 The NRL Pasifika Cultural

Engagement Program has been involved with Pacific Outreach but is wary of a sport for development/diplomacy agenda. Dr. Roannie Ng Shiu of SSGM (and member of the NRL Pasifika Advisory Council) is particularly critical of the way sports diplomacy uses athletes to publicise projects as a result of their high public profile, yet rarely involves them in design and implementation or gives them relevant information to make an informed choice on whether or not to support a particular project.24 In August 2015 the SSGM in partnership with the Pacific

Community (SPC) – formerly the South Pacific Commission (1947-1997) and

Secretariat of the Pacific Community (1997-2015) – delivered a three-day NRL

Leadership and Development in the Pacific training workshop at SPC headquarters in Noumea, New Caledonia. The SPC is an international development organisation owned and governed by 26 country and territory members. Led by Ng Shiu, the workshop involved current and former Pacific players (including two women) as well as NRL administrators, and focused on improving participants’ knowledge of development issues and their leadership capacity.25 The NRL and SPC since have officially partnered, with NRL Pacific athletes becoming SPC ambassadors in the region.

23 National Rugby League, “PNG Program Creating Positive Change”; Commonwealth Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, “Sport for Development in the Pacific.” The Australian government in addition to its Pacific Island-focused sports for development partnership with the NRL also has a $29 million Pacific Sports Partnership (PSP) program that is implemented across nine Pacific Island countries – Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu. Thus forms part of its broader Australian Sports Diplomacy Strategy. 24 Ng Shiu, “Sports Diplomacy In the Pacific: Developing Pacific Rugby League Elite Athletes for Diplomacy and Development,” 1. 25 Ng Shiu, “Sports Diplomacy In the Pacific: Developing Pacific Rugby League Elite Athletes for Diplomacy and Development.”

224 Without entering into an extensive evaluation of the Pacific Strategy, there are legitimate questions to be raised about why Pacific Outreach has become

Australian rugby league’s cornerstone Pacific program with significant funding and government support. Considering that 89% of contracted Pacific players are

Australian and New Zealand-born, I believe that Pacific Outreach reflects general

Australian misconceptions that “the Pacific” only exists in the Islands and not in

Australia; there are no specific programs and funding for Australian Pacific communities except under broad “multicultural” programming. I am also critical of the decision to partner with the Australian government in a context that risks making NRL Pacific Strategy an arm of Australian governmentality in the region.

The consequences of such government partnerships with sport and the arts are the subject of my final section on the Festival of the Pacific Arts; but first I conclude this section with a consideration of some of the personal consequences for individual Pacific people of their involvement in the game and culture of

Australian rugby league.

225 7: Consequences and Futures

On the first Sunday of October 2011, Alex Elisala lined up for the North Queensland

Cowboy’s under-20s team in the 2011 National Youth Competition grand final, held as the curtain raiser to the NRL grand final where nearly 82,000 filled Sydney’s

Stadium Australia. Unknown to those outside his team, Elisala began the game with a fractured sternum received in the team’s victorious semi-final a week earlier.

In spite of the pain, Elisala played with determination and heart to amass twenty tackles and direct his team diligently from the hooker position – only for his team to suffer a heartbreaking one-point extra-time loss to the New Zealand Warriors.

Years earlier Elisala, who is of Samoan heritage, migrated with his family from New

Zealand to Australia and was raised in Woodridge, south of Brisbane. He was later brought to Townsville in the state’s north, where he spent the second half of his high school years at Ignatius Park College and participated in its rugby league development program. Like many before him, Elisala made the transition to professional rugby league at the conclusion of high school through his selection in the North Queensland under-20s team in 2010. After three successful years and 69 games, including the 2011 grand final and selection in the 2012 Queensland under-

20s state representative team, Elisala was rewarded with a North Queensland

Cowboys NRL contract in 2013, while also being selected for the Samoan national team the same year.

Almost a year to the day from Elisala’s National Youth Competition grand final debut, Mosese Fotuaika lined up for the West Tigers under-20s team against the Canberra Raiders in the 2012 National Youth Competition grand final. Like

Elisala, Fotuaika left it all on the field that day, scoring a try in his team’s 46-6 victory. Fotuaika’s parents emigrated from Tonga to New Zealand and settled in

Gisborne on the central east coast of the North Island where Fotuaika was born.

226 The eldest of ten children, he grew up playing rugby union like most youth in New

Zealand, before making the shift to rugby league at the advice of a visiting rugby league scout. The family soon left New Zealand for Australia to ensure that

Fotuaika, then fifteen, had the best chance of succeeding in his designated career path. Fotuaika spent his final high school years at Keebra Park State High School on the Gold Coast, a high school which, like Ignatius Park College, had its own specialist rugby league program with strong ties to NRL clubs. After excelling for

Keebra Park during his high school years, in 2011 at the age of nineteen Fotuaika signed a contract with the West Tigers, moving to Sydney to play for the club’s under-20 team in the National Youth Competition. After two successful seasons with the Under-20 team, including grand final success in 2012, Fotuaika was rewarded with a West Tigers NRL contract for the 2013 season.

By May 2013 both Elisala and Fotuaika had committed suicide, and their rugby league careers and their lives were over. Unfortunately their stories do not exist in a vacuum: since their deaths, there are documented accounts of a number of Pacific players committing or attempting to commit suicide.1 While it is not my intention to investigate or speculate about the personal tragedies of these young men, I have kept them in mind as I have undertaken the historical and contemporary analysis of Pacific peoples within rugby league in Australia: they represent the personal costs of the larger injustice and exploitation on which the game currently depends. So while I acknowledge that it is rarely possible to establish single or direct causes for suicide, here I am identifying a network of contextual rather than personal factors. The mental health of the sport’s Pacific athletes has come under increasing media spotlight as a result of these documented

1 See for example: Massoud, “These Are the Seven Reasons That I Am Alive Today. They Saved Me from Ending It All, Says ”; Leader, “Rugby League Mourns Loss of Melbourne-Born Player Hayden Butler”; Garry and Healy, “Winterstein Family Hit by Tragedy Following Sudden Passing of 19-Year-Old Francis.”

227 suicides and attempted suicides, yet explanations almost always focus on individual and family expectations unique to Pacific players, and their intersection with the economic insecurity that frames all rugby league professional careers.

Although these are integral components, my argument is that explanations can be sought beyond individual circumstances and within broader community and indeed national contexts. No sustained attention has yet been paid to the place accorded Pacific peoples more generally within Australian rugby league (the objective of section two) and within the Australian nation (the objective of this thesis).

It is commonly asserted that the Pacific presence in Australian rugby league (like that within the nation itself) is new. It is not. Pacific peoples’ connections to

Australian rugby league are as old as the sport’s origins; its gatekeepers in White

Australia have conveniently silenced these histories (along with other racial narratives, specifically those of Indigenous Australia). This has been done in favour of the story of rugby league as the source of egalitarian class values. The selective, repetitive and predictable nature of Australian rugby league histories replicates the construction and reproduction of Australian histories more broadly. Although today’s “Pacific Revolution” is celebrated as a site of Australia’s “Pacificness” and proof of rugby league and the nation’s egalitarian and multicultural ideals, the narratives presented throughout this section show a different reality. The sport is wracked with ambivalence: Pacific players are both celebrated and feared; isolated individuals carry the burden and pay the price of what limited success is available;

Pacific people have difficulty in occupying positions within the sport other than as

(structurally disempowered) players. Along with the pressures that all elite athletes face, Pacific players in the NRL are also challenged about their right to represent

228 their club or country, at the same time as they form a site for both the construction and contestation of Australian national identity. My analysis of the Pacific presence in Australian rugby league intersects with the more formal engagements between

Pacific peoples and the Australian nation articulated in section one, and offers an insight into cultural changes in Australian society and in the way it represents itself to the Pacific and the world.

229 – Section Three –

Australian Arts and Aid in the Solomon Islands

We are living in a culture that is raising a generation of Pacific Islanders who feel kind of lost at the moment and they’re coming up against institutions that have no labels for them. We’re trying to break these down . . .1

From 2 to 13 July 2012 I attended the 11th Festival of Pacific Arts (FOPA) held in the

Solomon Islands. I analyse FOPA as a site in which Australia’s complex and often contradictory engagements in the Pacific are illuminated. The Australian-led

Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), still on the ground during FOPA nine years after it had been deployed and long after it had worn out its welcome, had created an informed and primarily negative representation of

Australia in the country. In contrast, Australia’s 2012 Festival delegation, comprised solely of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander (Indigenous Australian) artists, marked a productive disruption to the dominant imagining of Australia in the Solomon Islands and the Pacific more broadly. My section begins with an overview of FOPA, moves to an investigation into the policies and outcomes of

RAMSI, and concludes with an ethnographic and theoretical account of the politics of FOPA, as they illuminate historical and contemporary relations among

Indigenous Australians, white Australians and Pacific peoples within Australia and in the region more broadly. My analytic focus is on the official exclusion of

Australian Pacific artists from the Australian delegation to FOPA.

1 Jacob Tolo, “Music from the Pacific – Panel Discussion” (Australian World Music Expo, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, November 18, 2012).

230 1: Introducing FOPA

Established in 1972, the Festival of Pacific Arts has become the region’s leading arts and cultural event, consistently attracting between 2000 and 3000 formal participants from up to 27 Pacific countries and territories. Originally put together by the South Pacific Commission (SPC) – now the Pacific Community – as a means by which “traditional arts and cultures” in the Pacific could be safeguarded and revived, the two-week quadrennial Festival operated by the SPC-convened Council of Pacific Arts and Culture (CPAC) has broadened its scope to incorporate more contemporary forms of cultural and artistic expression.1 Today’s FOPA program includes traditional and contemporary performing and visual arts (e.g. music, dance, theatre, film, painting, photography); ; weaving; tapa-making; wood, stone and bone carving; jewellery; ; floral acts; costume pageants; and healing arts; culinary arts; philatelic arts; traditional money; oratory arts; storytelling; musical instruments; traditional boat-building and navigational crafts; vernacular architecture; indigenous games and sports; and symposiums, debates and workshops.2 Although a competitive spirit runs through some of the performance aspects of the Festival, FOPA is not structured on competition, as are other prominent Pacific festivals such as Polyfest held annually in Auckland, New

Zealand. Rather than a space to compete, FOPA’s emphasis is on providing a platform for individual Pacific countries and territories to speak with a unique cultural and artistic voice, while fostering the consolidation of a collective Pacific voice and identity.3 Such objectives situate the cultural and artistic fields as transferable to and not mutually exclusive from the political. Furthermore, the hosting of the Festival is seen as an empowering and creative platform from which

1 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, “Evaluation of the Festival of Pacific Arts.” 2 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, 25. 3 Stevenson, The Festival of Pacific Arts, Celebrating 40 Years, 6.

231 Pacific countries and territories are able to affirm new national political representations and strengthen regional affiliations.

Writing about the Festival has been sporadic despite its longevity, its prominence on the international stage and the range of people who participate

(organisers, artists, delegation officials, cultural practitioners, government officials, media and scholars). For the observer, FOPA provides a snapshot of the diverse cultural and artistic practices of the Pacific in one location, and a space to engage with artists and cultural practitioners about issues relating to Pacific arts and broader cultural, political, economic and social debates. The small group of academics who have covered the Festival over the past four decades have contributed to debates on authenticity, tourist art, cultural borrowing, intellectual property rights and the relationship – sometimes conflict – between the traditional and contemporary arts.4

FOPA’s origins lie in a broader context of enhanced political decolonisation and regionalism in the Pacific after World War II. Whether accorded full or partial political independence, Pacific nations sought to break free from their colonial history by restoring previously disrupted cultural practices as symbols of a new national identity. Identifying and promoting cultural commonalities was seen as integral to nation building, by undoing the cultural and linguistic fragmentation brought about by the creation of colonies, whose boundaries paid no attention to the historical cultural and political of the Pacific.5 Cultural heritage, it was argued, could act as a rallying point for diverse groups and agendas, nationally and regionally, to strengthen the cultural and political identities of the radically changing independent Pacific. The initial proposal to construct a regional cultural

4 Stevenson, 8. In 2016 the first edited collection book on FOPA was published, “The Festival of Pacific Arts: Celebrating Over 40 Years of Cultural Heritage”. I contributed to a chapter in the book based on this section of the thesis. 5 Wesley-Smith, “Altered States: The Politics of State Failure and Regional Intervention,” 41.

232 festival came in 1965 from the newly formed Fiji Arts Council (FAC), who had their own national ambitions of preserving, developing and promoting art in soon-to-be- independent Fiji. Later that year the proposal was taken to the SPC’s 6th South

Pacific Conference in Lae, Papua New Guinea, and further developed. At the time the SPC was the principal intergovernmental regional organisation, as the Pacific

Islands Forum (PIF) was not formed until 1971. An SPC-sponsored regional cultural festival was proposed as a productive response to the feared loss of “traditional arts” in the region and to “help preserve and develop various local art forms, as well as providing the occasion for Pacific Islanders to meet, share and celebrate their cultural heritage”.6 After five years of planning and negotiation it was decided at the 9th South Pacific Conference in 1970 (the same year Fiji gained independence) that the SPC would establish and oversee a Pacific arts festival in Fiji in 1972.

The SPC with the Fijian government established a national organising committee to design and implement the Festival, led by Fiji’s Minister of Social

Services, Jonati Mavoa. The Festival was directed by white Australian singer, director, film producer and author Victor Carell; his wife Beth Dean, an American ballerina, concert dancer and choreographer, assisted in the direction and production. Officially titled the South Pacific Festival of Arts, the inaugural Festival ran over two weeks from 6 to 20 May 1972 and featured 1100 artists from fourteen

SPC member countries and territories. The Festival’s artistic components included dance and music performance, along with films, plays, poetry, art, handicrafts and indigenous games. A Festival theme was implemented: Fight against the disappearance of traditional arts in most Pacific countries; Protect them from being submerged by other cultural influences; Start a process of preservation and development of the various local art forms. Festival themes - often a convergence of politics and arts,

6 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, “Evaluation of the Festival of Pacific Arts,” 23.

233 engaging with both tradition and modernity - have been adopted by each host nation since, along with the construction of a Pacific village as the focal point for the Festival’s activities.7

Following the success of the inaugural Festival, FOPA’s future viability was assured by the SPC and made a permanent quadrennial fixture at the 12th South

Pacific Conference in Apia, Samoa, later in 1972. In January 1975 the SPC established the South Pacific Arts Festival Council (later renamed the Council of

Pacific Arts and Culture [CPAC]) to define and oversee the objectives, structure, participation and hosting rights for future FOPAs. CPAC’s initial objectives for

FOPA centred on the need to create a regional Pacific cultural arts festival which provided regular opportunity for all Pacific peoples to meet, share and encourage the development, conservation, continuance and display of the evolving cultures of the Pacific region. Specifically, its aims were to:

• Encourage the preservation and revival of traditional arts and

cultures of the Pacific;

• Encourage new forms of cultural activities suited to the needs of

the Pacific;

• Encourage greater awareness of the cultural richness of the

Pacific throughout the world;

• Foster a greater sense of unity throughout the Pacific to promote

excellence in arts; and

• Promote the development and use of ethnic languages.8

In the four decades since the initial objectives were established, they have been revised once, at the 15th CPAC meeting in Noumea, New Caledonia in May

1998 on the recommendation of CPAC’s Executive Board. The revised objectives

7 Stevenson, The Festival of Pacific Arts, Celebrating 40 Years, 6. 8 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, “Evaluation of the Festival of Pacific Arts,” 24.

234 attempted to address up-to-date Pacific issues along with criticisms of the Festival aimed at FOPA’s under-representation of women, youth and contemporary forms of artistic practice. FOPA’s 1998 revised statement of intent reads:

We, the indigenous peoples of the Pacific, assert our cultural

identity, rights and dignity. We do so, mindful of our spiritual and

environmental origins, through our dynamic art forms and artistic

history and traditions. As indigenous peoples, we share the following

objectives:

• Encourage awareness of a collective voice;

• Foster the protection of cultural heritage;

• Explore the creation of dynamic new arts;

• Cultivate global awareness and appreciation of Pacific arts and

cultures;

• Promote our traditional languages;

• Value the wisdom of elders;

• Support the aspiration of our youth;

• Advocate a culture of peace through dialogue with the cultures of

the Pacific;

• Promote cultural development within the social, economic and

political development of our countries, and;

• Encourage the indigenous peoples of the Pacific to continue their

efforts for recognition.9

Although CPAC has not revised FOPA’s objectives since 1998, in 2010 the

SPC – who although long superseded by the PIF as the region’s preeminent inter- governmental organisation still leads the way when it comes to addressing cultural

9 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, 26.

235 matters in the Pacific region – commissioned an independent report in consultation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO) titled Evaluation of the Festival of Pacific Arts. In assessing

“the impact of FOPA, for the purpose of developing strategies to make use of the festival for promotion, ratification and implementation of [UNESCO’s] 2003

Convention on the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage”,10 the report produced terms of reference from which to judge the effectiveness of past and future Festivals in accordance with CPAC’s objectives. They are:

• The specific contribution that FOPA makes to safeguarding,

preserving, protecting and promoting intangible cultural

heritage regionally and nationally.

• The specific contribution FOPA makes to building regional and

international cooperation and cultural networks, as well as

demonstrating the importance of intangible cultural heritage.

• The effectiveness of FOPA in passing on a sense of the

importance of intangible cultural heritage to the younger

generations.

• How FOPA might implement point one more effectively, with

particular emphasis on the media, including the Internet.

• The extent to which FOPA contributes to the full inclusion of

women in Pacific cultures.

• The economic, social, and cultural benefits devolving from FOPA

nationally and regionally.

10 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, 9.

236 • How FOPA can contribute to greater awareness about the links

between culture and sustainable development nationally and

regionally.

• The extent to which FOPA contributes to poverty reduction

through the creation of cultural goods for the elite and village

sectors of the market.

• The efficiency of the organizational set-up of FOPA,

acknowledging that each festival is to be examined on its own

merit and its own context.

• The incidence of sponsorship and support by state and private

interests.11

Participation at FOPA is reserved to one delegation per CPAC member country and territory: as of 2012 CPAC has 27 member countries and territories, and all except Hawai’i, Norfolk Island and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) are full members of the SPC. Delegations are selected, managed and sponsored by the principal arts funding and advisory bodies or personnel of country and territory governments.

Each delegation (excluding the host nation) is capped at 150 participants, but few countries send this number because of financial constraints; at times some countries and territories cannot attend at all due to a lack of funding. Additional funding avenues for national delegations have included bodies such as UNESCO, while community fundraising has also been critical for attendance. For the most part delegations are comprised solely of indigenous artists from the respective countries and territories, although some national selection committees have included non-indigenous and indigenous diasporic cultural groups wanting to assert their connection to the nation, region and Festival. Early more trivial

11 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, 17–18.

237 examples include the bi-cultural delegations of Australia and New Zealand at the first three South Pacific Arts Festivals; since 2000 both Fiji and New Zealand have made more engaged yet also contentious attempts to construct a delegation that represents a broader national and regional cultural image. Fiji, for example, has included Indo-Fijian and Chinese-Fijian artists, while New Zealand has selected artists from its burgeoning Pacific Island communities.

Non-CPAC member countries have on occasions participated in FOPA, following approval from the host country or territory in consultation with CPAC.

Yet in most cases non-CPAC member applications to participate have been declined: early examples include an indigenous Alaskan group who applied to participate at the 3rd FOPA in Papua New Guinea in 1980, and an indigenous group from Canada representing the areas of Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) and

Vancouver who applied to participate in the 4th FOPA in French Polynesia in 1985.12

More recently Indonesia, despite being refused permission to participate at the 9th

FOPA held in Palau in 2004, controversially arrived unannounced with a delegation consisting solely of West Papuan participants. With the politically- disputed Indonesian province of West Papua culturally linked to the Pacific and

West Papuans sharing longstanding connections with its closest Pacific neighbours to the north in Palau, the group received special permission to perform at the last minute. Jane Freeman Moulin states that the act was a propaganda exercise by the

Indonesian government to demonstrate to the rest of the Pacific that “all was well” in the embattled province, promoting a united Indonesia.13 Barbara Glowczewski and Rosita Henry state that performances by the West Papuan participants brought

12 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, 25. 13 Freeman Moulin, “Oltobed a Malt (Nurture, Regenerate, Celebrate). The Ninth Festival of Pacific Arts in Koror, Palau, 22-31 July 2004,” 515.

238 an uncomfortable feeling to the Festival, particularly when West Papuan dancers incorporated the waving of small Indonesian into their performance.14

Taiwan (Republic of China) has been the one non-CPAC country consistently invited to FOPA, beginning in 2000 when it was approved to send 80 indigenous artists to participate at the 8th FOPA in New Caledonia; previously

Taiwan had applied unsuccessfully to attend the Festival as early as the 5th FOPA in

Australia in 1988. Taiwan’s attendance has continually been debated, with critics questioning both the “Pacificness” of the delegation and the motives influencing the Taiwan government’s desire to participate and provide substantial funding.15

Taiwan’s inclusion is formally justified via the cultural connection (genetic and linguistic) of its indigenous peoples the Amis (also known as Pangcah) to the many

Pacific cultures that share a common Austronesian ancestry. It is increasingly believed that Taiwan is the original departure point of the second and more extensive wave of Pacific exploration and settlement that began 5000 years ago and ended only 700 to 800 years ago when New Zealand became the last islands in the

Pacific to be settled.16 Yet for most Pacific people, for whom this relatively new position is neither known nor claimed, Taiwan is more recognised as an Asian country of the Pacific Rim with a non-indigenous majority (nearly 98% of the total population) whose governmental (development/aid) and economic engagements in the region conjure up predominantly negative ideas of self-interest and the facilitation of government corruption. As of 2012, only 23 countries in the world maintain formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan through recognition of its independence and the legitimacy of its claim as the Republic of China to rightful

14 Glowczewski and Henry, “Dancing with the Flow: Political Undercurrents at the 9th Festival of Pacific Arts,” 214. 15 Freeman Moulin, “Oltobed a Malt (Nurture, Regenerate, Celebrate). The Ninth Festival of Pacific Arts in Koror, Palau, 22-31 July 2004,” 515. 16 Howe, The Quest for Origins: Who First Discovered and Settled New Zealand and the Pacific Islands?

239 governance over Mainland China (People’s Republic of China); six of these are

Pacific Island nations: Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Solomon Islands,

Tuvalu.

FOPA hosting rights are distributed by CPAC using a process of rotation and the principle of equality in accordance with the “Pacific Way”.17 Recently there has been a focus on ensuring FOPA rotates evenly among Melanesian, Micronesian and Polynesian countries and territories. Both the motivation to apply and the decision to award FOPA hosting rights are influenced by political arguments about decolonisation, independence, nation-building, cultural revitalisation, peace- building, regional isolation and a reimaging of Pacific identity. Early Festivals in

Fiji (1972), Papua New Guinea (1980) and more recently Palau (2004) used the event to help accelerate nation-building as a result of varying forms of independence.

Palau’s successful bid for the 9th FOPA in 2004 was based on using the Festival to promote and celebrate its newly-gained independence from the United States.

Seeking “a Pacific Way model to deal with the scaling down of US Aid under the new conditions attached to independence”, Palau used the Festival as “a platform for testing the sustainability of Palau as a sovereign nation within a Pacific solidarity network”.18 Palau was the first Micronesian country or territory to host the Festival, after it had been running for 32 years; this was part of a political move by CPAC to ensure that the Festival encapsulated a more inclusive Pacific. This had begun at the 3rd FOPA in Papua New Guinea in 1980, when a northern Pacific

17 Fiji’s first Prime Minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara in his 1970 UN General Assembly speech, first coined the “Pacific Way”. While ambiguous in its initial application, it quickly gained wider political currency, claiming a post-independence Pacific identity “based on broadly shared social and political values” and “strong anti-colonial resonance”. Lawson, “Postcolonialism, Neo-Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism and the Pacific Way’: A Critique of (Un)Critical Approaches,” 2. Ron Crocombe in 1976 surveyed the uptake and usefulness of the “Pacific Way”, concluding that while it satisfied the “psychological and political needs” of the region both in respect to dealing with the colonial past and neo-colonial present, its limitations were in its privileging of the Anglophone speaking “South Pacific” – specifically Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Crocombe, The Pacific Way: An Emerging Identity, 1. 18 Glowczewski and Henry, “Dancing with the Flow: Political Undercurrents at the 9th Festival of Pacific Arts,” 214.

240 presence was infused through the participation of Guam and Hawai’i after the first two FOPAs in Fiji in 1972 and New Zealand in 1976 were attended by “South Pacific” countries and territories only.

Hosting rights for FOPA are used in a variety of ways to create and assert a shared Pacific indigeneity. The decisions to host the Festival in the French territories of French Polynesia (1985) and New Caledonia (2000) were designed to reconnect those territories culturally to the region in the face of a dominant French colonial identity. Peter Brown contends that New Caledonia’s hosting of the 8th

FOPA in 2000 was a political statement of distance from its French colonial history and an assertion of a new indigenous-centred, pan-Pacific-focused future both culturally and politically, following the signing of the Noumea Accord in 1998 and its establishment of a roadmap to independence.19 The 4th FOPA had been scheduled for 1984 in New Caledonia but was cancelled due to civil unrest fuelled by independence struggles; the Festival was moved to French Polynesia the following year. The 2008 FOPA was held in American Samoa, partly to contest US colonial power but also to highlight a broad represented in this instance by Samoa, American Samoa and a Samoan diasporic group from San

Diego in the USA. A final example concerns the decision to host the Festival in the settler-colonial states of New Zealand in 1976 and Australia in 1988. Apart from the obvious economic and logistical advantages, it can be argued that these were early initiatives to enable both countries to reconnect culturally (via their Māori,

Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander populations) with a region where colonial, neo-colonial and economic relationships had historically dominated.

Inevitably FOPA has become increasingly more expensive to attend and also to host. The Festival’s budget comprises allocated SPC funds, host government

19 Brown, “New Caledonia: A Pacific Island or an Island in the Pacific? The Eighth Pacific Arts Festival.”

241 funds and money from intergovernmental and bilateral government donors,

NGOs, and to a lesser extent corporate sponsors. For the duration of FOPA, however, there is overwhelming reliance on the local community and international volunteer workers. CPAC assists host countries and territories to establish a

National Festival Organising Committee which it and the SPC oversee. Yet host countries and territories at times have been critical of CPAC, emphasising isolation in the planning and implementation stages.20 The cost of providing the necessary infrastructure, such as venues for performance, cultural displays and exhibitions, is further increased by the responsibility placed on the host to provide accommodation, food, local travel and other hospitality-related expenses for all participants, in accordance with the “Pacific Way”. FOPA is unique - and consequently economically challenged – in offering free attendance. There have been occasions when admission to certain events has been charged (in New

Caledonia in 2000, for example) but in general this policy means that host countries cannot fund the Festival through ticket sales.

The 11th FOPA was held in Solomon Islands in July 2012, nearly nine years after the Australian government led a Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon

Islands (RAMSI) to intervene in what was termed a “failing/failed” state. My analysis now takes a detour to examine how and why RAMSI was sent to Solomon

Islands in 2003 and what the country looked like nine years later when it hosted

FOPA. From this perspective I then return to a detailed analysis of the politics of the 11th FOPA, with particular focus on Australia’s delegation.

20 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, “Evaluation of the Festival of Pacific Arts,” 34.

242 2: The Solomon Islands

The Solomon Islands is an independent nation in the southwest Pacific comprising over 900 islands and atolls divided into the nine political provinces of Choiseul,

Western Province, Isabel, Central Province, , Guadalcanal, Rennell and

Bellona, Makira and Ulawa, and Temotu. Honiara, on the island of Guadalcanal, is the country’s capital and economic hub. Its closest regional neighbours are Nauru to the northeast; Vanuatu and Fiji to the southeast; New Caledonia to the south;

Australia to the southwest; and Papua New Guinea to the west. Humans have inhabited the Solomon Islands for approximately 30,000 years: the first arrivals were non-Austronesian (Melanesian) peoples, followed over 25,000 years later by

Austronesians (Polynesian). With a population of over 500,000, 94% of Solomon

Islanders identify as indigenous to its Melanesian islands and 4% to its Polynesian islands. Amongst its indigenous Melanesian majority there is great cultural and linguistic diversity, reflected in over 60 living languages and their multiple dialects.1 From European contact, both Pidjin (English) and English have become the lingua franca of choice in addition to native language(s). The 2% that make up the country’s non-indigenous population are mostly of British, white Australian,

Chinese, Kiribati and Bougainville ancestry: their presence is largely a result of the lure of economic opportunity presented by Solomon Island resources, labour and development pre-and-post colonisation; British governmental administration following political colonisation from 1893; European and Australian Christian missionary arrivals; battles fought in the Solomon Islands during World War II; the

British government’s Gilbertese (Kiribati) re-settlement scheme of the 1950s and

1960s; the fleeing to the Solomon Islands of upwards of 9000 Bougainvilleans during the Bougainville conflict of 1988 to 1997; and the post-July 2003 Australian-

1 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 13.

243 government-led RAMSI. Granted independence on 7 July 1978, Solomon Islands is governed under a unique expression of the Westminster political system, one that has morphed with customary governance to function via complex state-oriented patronage networks with an emphasis on individual politicians as opposed to political parties.2 The country’s economic system, while transitioning to a waged economy, is still dominated by a subsistence economy. Economic development has mostly centred on natural resource extraction (fisheries, logging, palm oil, gold) by a few large-scale, foreign-owned British, Australian and Asian companies. The continued enforcement of the 1912 government ban on freehold-land sale to non-

Solomon Islanders has meant that 87% of Solomon Island land is still held by customary owners; lease is thus the way in which outsiders secure economic opportunity.3

In late 1998 an active period of civil unrest began in the Solomon Islands, played out primarily on the island of Guadalcanal between members of its indigenous peoples and migrants indigenous to the neighbouring island of Malaita.

Mobilised under the respective banners of the Isatabu Freedom Movement (IFM) and the Malaitan Eagle Force (MEF), the overwhelming majority of Solomon

Islanders, including many indigenous peoples of Guadalcanal and Malaita, did not directly involve themselves in the unrest; however, all were impacted. By its conclusion in July 2003, the civil unrest had brought nearly five years of sporadic violence, murder, rape, destruction of property and forceful eviction - as well as the fall of two Solomon Island Prime Ministers; a bankrupted state; an ineffective and untrustworthy national police force; the near collapse of Guadalcanal’s waged economy with key export industries closed (Gold Ridge Mine, the Solomon Taiyo fish cannery, Guadalcanal Plains Palm Oil Limited); and the mass exodus of foreign

2 Hameiri, “The Trouble with RAMSI: Reexamining the Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands.” 3 Hameiri, 420.

244 nationals, NGOs and tourists. In total an estimated 35,000 Solomon Islanders were displaced, with 22,000 Malaitans forced to return to Malaita.4 Shahar Hameiri places the number of intentional deaths at some 200 people, although there are no official figures;5 John Braithwaite et al., states that the figure of 200 is possibly too low because of early political pressure to downplay the number of Malaitan deaths to halt further Malaitan retaliations. Archbishop Adrian Smith who worked on the

Missing Persons Committee during the conflict believes that the figure could be in excess of 400.6

It is commonly asserted that the tipping point from tension into physical conflict was the provocative speech made by the Premier of Guadalcanal Province

Ezekiel Alebua on 30 November 1998 at a ceremony for handing over customary land in the Lunga area of Guadalcanal, previously confiscated by the Solomon

Island government. Alebua set out a list of demands which included the requirement that settlers from other islands (directed particularly at Malaitans) pay respect to their Guadalcanal hosts; the payment of rent to the Guadalcanal

Province for the use of Honiara as the national capital; and the demand for $SI 2.5 million compensation from the Solomon Island government for the deaths of 25

Guadalcanal people murdered by Malaitan settlers over the previous 20 years.7

Malaitans had long been familiar with economic migration, as they comprised the overwhelming majority of Solomon Islanders in indentured labour in Queensland,

Torres Strait Islands, Fiji and Solomon Islands more broadly; increasingly they had made Guadalcanal their home during World War II as they were employed by the

US to work in their military operation whose main base was on the island. After the

4 Hameiri, 410; Bennett, “Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands - Though Much Is Taken, Much Abides: Legacies of Tradition and Colonialism,” 11. 5 Hameiri, “The Trouble with RAMSI: Reexamining the Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands,” 410. 6 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 20. 7 Kabutaulaka, “Beyond Ethnicity: The Political Economy of the Guadalcanal Crisis in Solomon Islands,” 3; Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 23.

245 war many stayed while others continued to arrive, as a result of a lack of employment following the destruction of the country’s plantation industries during the war, and the lure of construction project and commercial development opportunities on Guadalcanal in the wake of the British decision to build a new national capital in Honiara, the island’s (and country’s) first real urbanised town.8

This process continued after independence, as the Solomon Island wage economy centralised on Honiara and its surrounding districts, and Malaitans were significantly over-represented in the logging, fisheries, plantation and mining industries, and in the public sector (governance and police).

Alebua’s demands were rejected by the Prime Minister Bartholomew

Ulufa’alu, himself Malaitan. Not long after Alebua’s speech, a group of young

Guadalcanal men from the island’s Weather Coast (the region of Guadalcanal most cut-off and neglected by the Solomon Islands government) known as the Isatabu

Freedom Movement (IFM) and led by Harold Keke attacked and destroyed properties of Malaitans residing in northwest Guadalcanal. The group expanded their weaponry on 10 December 1998 through raiding the Yandina police armoury in the Russell Islands (west of Guadalcanal), disintegrating their relationship with the largely Malaitan-dominated Royal Solomon Islands Police (RSIP) and its paramilitary wing, the Police Field Force (PFF). Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka states that several Guadalcanal men were collecting arms as early as 1996: some arms were licensed while others were old World War II artillery.9 Homemade guns were also built, with the alleged assistance of Bougainville refugees living in Honiara,

8 Bennett, “Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands - Though Much Is Taken, Much Abides: Legacies of Tradition and Colonialism,” 5–8; Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 18–20. 9 Kabutaulaka, “Beyond Ethnicity: The Political Economy of the Guadalcanal Crisis in Solomon Islands,” 2–3.

246 who had recently experienced their own civil conflict.10 The attacks in late 1998 initiated widespread harassment of Malaitans on Guadalcanal by the IFM throughout the first half of 1999; Prime Minister Ulufa’alu again refused to implement another set of formal demands from the Guadalcanal Provincial

Government on 4 February 1999. C. Moore suggests that Premier Alebua could have been at the centre of this initial stage of violence providing both funding and weapons.11

Malaitan resistance in this period came predominantly through the

Malaitan-dominated RSIP, leading to numerous intense and fatal confrontations with the IFM. Braithwaite et al., argues that the ruthless tactics employed by the

Malaitan-dominated police force possibly fuelled a view from the Guadalcanal side that the RSIP were enacting state ethnic politics.12 The Solomon Islands government, however, largely played down the crisis during its first six months, with the Minister of State Alfred Sasako stating that most of the troublemakers

“appear to be young people who do not take it seriously, but who want a bit of fun and adventure”.13 Yet all this changed following the declaration of a national state of emergency on 15 June 1999 by Governor General Sir Moses Pitakaka following more murders. Kabutaulaka states that by that date at least 50 people had been murdered and more than 20,000 predominantly Malaitan peoples forced out of

Guadalcanal settlements (the majority from areas surrounding Honiara).14 On this same date Prime Minister Ulufa’alu for the first time requested outside assistance from the Commonwealth Secretariat, the central institution of the Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth appointed former Fijian Prime Minister Major-

10 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 24. 11 Moore, Happy Isles in Crisis, 104–6; 222. 12 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 25. 13 Sasako quoted in Kabutaulaka, “Beyond Ethnicity: The Political Economy of the Guadalcanal Crisis in Solomon Islands,” 3. 14 Kabutaulaka, 3.

247 General Sitiveni Rabuka (who was instrumental in Fiji’s political coups of 1987) as the Secretariat’s special envoy to assist with negotiations, joined by Ade Adefuye from Nigeria.

The envoys quickly brokered the 28 June 1999 Honiara Peace Accord in partnership with the State and civil society groups such as the Red Cross, Solomon

Islands Christian Association, Women for Peace and the Taisu (Melanesian

Brotherhood), a religious order belonging to the (Anglican) Church of Melanesia.

This was followed by the 12 August 1999 Panatina Agreement which upheld the

Honiara Peace Accord after it was disrupted by a violent shoot-out between IFM and RSIP which led to the death of three IFM members. Yet with no IFM signatures to the Accord or Agreement, the violence and displacement continued unabated in a country with no national army, a complicit police force (75% Malaitan and 3%

Guadalcanal),15 and an out-of-depth Commonwealth-Secretariat-led Multinational

Police Peace Monitoring Group, comprising 20 unarmed civilian police personnel from Fiji and Vanuatu sent on 25 October 1999 to oversee the implementation of the peace accords. The Honiara Peace Accord managed to exacerbate tensions through the government’s decision to make large compensation payments to both sides.

Braithwaite et al., states that “the justice and integrity of this distribution” became

“a new source of grievance in both Malaita and Guadalcanal”;16 it also accelerated the country’s ever-deepening debt.

Increasing Malaitan dissatisfaction with the responses and protection offered by the state following the Peace Accord lead to many Malaitans marching to parliament in December 1999 demanding more action and support from the state, including additional compensation as a result of the damage caused by the

IFM. However, as with previous demands made solely on behalf of one ethnic

15 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 26. 16 Braithwaite et al., 26.

248 group, Prime Minister Ulufa’alu refused compensation. Judith Bennett believes that his refusal painted Ulufa’alu as unsympathetic to his fellow Malaitans’ cause, further inflaming Malaitan grievances.17 Following this refusal the Malaitan Eagle

Force (MEF) was formed; the group was an expansion and consolidation of a recently-formed group of Malaitan men operating under the name Red Cobra in

Honiara. Its aims were to defend Malaitan interests against the IFM, which the government had been unable to do. This transitioned the conflict into its second phase.18

The conflict escalated in early 2000 with the rise of the MEF. Much of their violence was in retaliation for previous atrocities resulting in the murder and rape of a number of Guadalcanal men, women and children. In May 2000, Rabuka returned in an attempt to mediate another peace deal, the failed Buala Agreement.

The MEF, in collusion with Malaitans in RSIP, on 5 June 2000 protested against the state’s inaction with the heavy-handed alternative of taking over the RSIP armoury in Honiara, delivering them most of the country’s high-powered weapons and putting the Prime Minister and Governor-General under a form of house arrest.19

Disorder spread to Gizo, the capital of the Western Province, where locals set out to forcibly evict Malaitan settlers from their island; their cause was aided by the arrival of 40 men associated with the Bougainville Revolutionary Army in an act of reciprocity for the assistance given by peoples of Western Province to their ethnic brothers and closest neighbour during Bougainville’s recent conflict. Prime

Minister Ulufa’alu resigned on 14 June 2000: it is alleged that prominent lawyer and former finance minister, Malaitan Andrew Nori (who would become the public

17 Bennett, “Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands - Though Much Is Taken, Much Abides: Legacies of Tradition and Colonialism,” 11. 18 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 21. 19 Moore, Happy Isles in Crisis, 4.

249 spokesperson of the MEF), funded the coup.20 This all took place against the backdrop of Ulufa’alu’s unsuccessful request to Australian Prime Minister John

Howard a few months earlier for the intervention of Australian and multinational security forces. The MEF held office until the national parliament was summoned under duress on 30 June 2000; an interim government was formed and Manasseh

Sogavare from Choiseul Province was elected Prime Minister.

While removing its Commonwealth Multinational Police Assistance Group on 5 June 2000 in response to the MEF takeover, the Commonwealth Secretariat simultaneously established a four-member conciliation commission (Australia,

Botswana, Malaysia, New Zealand) led by Australian Foreign Minister Alexander

Downer to facilitate a peace deal. Both the Commonwealth and PIF continued to argue that member countries were not to intervene in each other’s affairs but to provide diplomatic solutions. Many attempts at brokering peace were made by the

Commonwealth conciliation commission from June to September on board

Australian and New Zealand navy vessels now stationed in Solomon Island waters.

Yet once again they failed: July 2000 represented the “bloodiest days” of the conflict,21 with both the MEF and IFM respectively consolidating their strongholds over Honiara and Guadalcanal more broadly during the second half of 2000. With no likelihood of a return of foreign nationals (governmental and NGO) who had left

Solomon Islands in the aftermath of the MEF takeover, nor tourists, nor the reopening of major export industries, it was clear that little was to change for

Solomon Islands under any new government.

Peace talks eventually made their way to Australia under the

Commonwealth Secretariat’s conciliation commission in October 2000. Held over three days in Townsville, Queensland, the negotiations took place on the condition

20 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 27. 21 Fraenkel, The Manipulation of Custom: From Uprising to Intervention in the Solomon Islands, 96.

250 that for the first time they were to be attended only by members of the MEF and

IFM and government officials.22 In total 143 people attended, with academic

Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka from Guadalcanal heading negotiations on behalf of the IFM and Nori for the MEF. On 15 October 2000 an Agreement was signed in which the Solomon Island government offered to grant amnesty to all involved in the conflict on the condition that all weapons and ammunition were surrendered within a 30-day period; agreed to pay compensation to those who had lost their property or seen it demobilised; and put in place measures ensuring better ethnic equality within its police ranks. As required under the Agreement, an International

Peace Monitoring Team comprised of Australia, New Zealand, Cook Islands and

Vanuatu was deployed to impound weapons surrendered under the disarmament program. An indigenous Solomon Island Peace Monitoring Council was also established to “monitor and enforce” the agreement, by having a presence especially on Guadalcanal and Malaita, encouraging communities to reconcile and former militants to hand in their weapons.23

While Townsville created what Kabutaulaka calls “a permanent albeit imperfect ceasefire” between the IFM and MEF, its terms and implementation fostered unrest within Guadalcanal and Malaita communities, adding further complexity to what had previously been understood as a conflict between two island groups.24 The meeting was rushed and offered only the weak implementation of quick fixes without examining let alone solving the root causes of the conflict: examples include the passing of an Amnesty Act which saw only a few mostly homemade guns returned and no apologies given; an assumption that both the IFM and MEF were united through clear chains of command and

22 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 49. The decision not to invite the United Nations to the Townsville peace talks was unusual. 23 Kabutaulaka, “Australian Foreign Policy and the RAMSI Intervention in Solomon Islands,” 292. 24 Kabutaulaka, 292.

251 therefore able to implement the Agreement effectively (IFM spearhead Harold

Keke did not attend or agree);25 the rorting by politicians and IFM and MEF members of compensation funds; and the absorbing of members of both the IFM and MEF into police ranks as special constables or police reserves.26 Excluded civil society labelled the Townsville Peace Agreement “a militants’ charter”,27 while the rest of the country was left wondering why once more it was having to pay for conflict and an unstable peace.

The Sogavare government relied on the Taiwan government to provide funds for its compensation payments, as many of its bilateral aid donors either stopped aid or began delivering it directly to NGOs because they feared that a corrupt government would not disperse aid effectively. It is estimated that the majority of the 269 compensation payments made between October 2000 and May

2001 costing $SI 18.8 million came from a Taiwanese bank of $SI 25 million.28

Yet this was not a new bilateral arrangement: Solomon Island diplomatic ties with

Taiwan have been strong for most of its post-independence history, beginning with the establishment of a Taiwanese embassy in Solomon Islands in 1983 and subsequent recognition of Taiwan’s independence and the legitimacy of its claim as the Republic of China to the governance of Mainland China (People’s Republic of

China). While trade and investment formally framed Solomon Islands’ relationship with Taiwan, political motivations were central, focused on a mutually beneficial exchange that saw Solomon Islands give formal diplomatic recognition to Taiwan in exchange for significant and largely unconditional aid funds.29 It is within this

25 Kabutaulaka, “A Weak State and the Solomon Islands Peace Process,” 13. 26 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 38. 27 Fraenkel, The Manipulation of Custom: From Uprising to Intervention in the Solomon Islands, 101. 28 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 47; Bennett, “Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands - Though Much Is Taken, Much Abides: Legacies of Tradition and Colonialism,” 11. 29 Kabutaulaka, “Milking the Dragon in Solomon Islands,” 138.

252 context that Sogavare ensured that money would continue to flow, threatening a

“shift of recognition to Beijing” if Taiwan bowed to international pressure and stopped aid.30

In late 2001 the Sogavare government asked Australia to send in armed police officers to support the continuing disarmament program and the quelling of routine violence, in order to restore much-needed public confidence in the police, particularly in light of the upcoming election on 5 December 2001. Australia denied the request but sent $A 3 million of financial aid to assist in strengthening both

Solomon Island police and Commonwealth Secretariat peace monitoring services over the election period.31 Many international and regional organisations as well as national governments (including the Commonwealth of Nations, PIF, European

Parliament, International Republican Institute, , New Zealand) sent observer groups to monitor the election. The new parliament elected Allan Kemakeza from

Western Province as Prime Minister on 17 December 2001, just four months after he was sacked for corruption from his posts as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for National Unity, Reconciliation and Peace; he had signed a compensation cheque to himself for $SI 800,000.32

The Kemakeza government had no more answers than its predecessors.

Violence remained particularly fierce on the Weather Coast of Guadalcanal where

Harold Keke and his followers, having split from the IFM and formed the

Guadalcanal Liberation Front (GLF), took control. Keke ultimately came to face 24 murder charges, but the harsh geography of the region made it almost impossible for him to be captured.33 The Commonwealth Secretariat’s International Peace

Monitoring Team left on 25 June 2002, with as little success as the Townsville Peace

30 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 48. 31 Kabutaulaka, “A Weak State and the Solomon Islands Peace Process,” 17. 32 Kabutaulaka, 18. 33 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 39–40.

253 Agreement which had expired in October of the same year. The often under- acknowledged and under-valued indigenous Solomon Island Peace Monitoring

Council remained, working with civil society groups towards securing an open- ended peace. The state drifted closer to bankruptcy with Solomon Island debt in mid-2003 amounting to $A 352 million, a figure three times the amount of its annual budget. By 2002 borrowing or foreign aid had come to fund 60% of the nation’s budget.34

Continuing to prioritise compensation, the state did not pay back any interest owed on debts since 1999 and also fell short in its delivery of education, health, transport and broader social services, and its payment of government employees.35 While propped up by a strong subsistence economy, all Solomon

Islanders were indirectly affected by the unrest; this was only compounded by the continued closure of all major industries on Guadalcanal. With no internal solution available to the government, Prime Minister Kemakeza made calls for assistance to the United Nations twice in September 2002, but because of Solomon Islands’ diplomatic recognition of Taiwan, China would veto any Security Council resolution to assist. In mid-April 2003 assistance was sought directly from

Australia, as it had been previously by Prime Ministers Sogavare and Ulufa’alu. In a stark reversal of its long-standing and clearly-expressed position, Australia accepted Solomon Islands’ call and established a Regional Assistance Mission to

Solomon Islands (RAMSI) codenamed Operation Helpem Fren.

34 Bennett, “Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands - Though Much Is Taken, Much Abides: Legacies of Tradition and Colonialism,” 11. 35 Kabutaulaka, “Australian Foreign Policy and the RAMSI Intervention in Solomon Islands,” 293.

254 3: Australia and the Solomon Islands

Australia has long yet often forgotten histories of engagement with the Solomon

Islands. Beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century with transient appearances by whalers from its colonies, Australia’s presence was maintained from the 1870s through indentured labour recruiters who would procure (recruit or coerce) young Solomon Islanders (mostly males) and sell their labour services to employers in mainland Queensland’s sugar industry and in the Torres Strait

Islands marine industry. Mercer estimates that nearly 30% of South Sea Island indentured labourers brought to mainland Queensland during the indentured labour trade period from 1863 to 1904 were from Solomon Islands (with the overwhelming majority from Malaita).1 Along with indentured labour recruiters from Australia’s colonies came missionaries of multiple denominations, including members of the Queensland Kanaka Mission who in 1907 established the South Sea

Evangelical Mission. After Federation in 1901, Australian engagement centred first on a failed attempt to convince Britain to allow Australian annexation of the then

British Solomon Islands Protectorate, as part of its own attempted replication of the

United States’ Monroe Doctrine. This was followed by predominantly economic engagements before World War I and in the following decades by Australian companies such as Burns, Philp & Co Ltd (who had their roots in the trade of indentured South Sea Islanders) and Vanikoro Kauri Timber Company, who became major players in the Solomon Island copra and commercial logging industries. World War II brought Australian military personnel to Solomon Island shores, as the strategic importance of islands such as Guadalcanal resulted in some of its fiercest battles being played out there.

1 Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Islander Settlement in North Queensland, 33.

255 In the two decades after Solomon Island independence in 1978, Australian governmental engagements focused on bilateral aid packages, as well as on the

Solomon Island connection to Papua New Guinea’s Bougainville conflict; its economic engagements increasingly centred on finance (banking) and mining ventures, with long-term investments via the opening of the Gold Ridge mine on

Guadalcanal by Australian mining companies Ross Mining N.L. and Delta Gold

Limited in 1998. In line with the non-reciprocal nature of Australia’s relationship with Solomon Islands, Solomon Islanders have been given little access to

Australian residency after the indentured labour period of the late nineteenth century. This is reflected in the 2011 Australian census figures, which count just

1,405 people identifying as of Solomon Island ancestry.2

Australia’s relationship with Solomon Islands became active and controversial when it led RAMSI into the country on 24 July 2003. Until this time

Australia had officially adhered to a regional policy framework of “constructive commitment”, which represented political and economic interference as neo- colonial and unhelpful to strengthening national sovereignty in recently independent Pacific Island nations. So what influenced Australia’s decision to reverse its position on Solomon Islands in the period between Australian Foreign

Minister Alexander Downer’s January 2003 assertion that intervention into

Solomon Islands would be “folly in the extreme” as “foreigners do not have the answers for the deep-seated problems afflicting Solomon Islands”3 and his emotive speech on 26 June 2003 justifying the need to intervene because Australia “will not

2 Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Border Protection, “The People of Australia: Statistics from the 2011 Census,” 60. 3 Downer quoted in Kabutaulaka, “Australian Foreign Policy and the RAMSI Intervention in Solomon Islands,” 287.

256 sit back and watch while a country slips inexorably into decay and disorder”?4 The answer is complex, extending beyond humanitarian readings of intervention

“focused on the suffering of Solomon Islands people, and the duty of care of

Australia to act as a good neighbour given its relative richness in resources and stability”5 or a conscious effort to reverse a history of Australian policy failure within the Pacific.6 Rather it is framed by Australia’s broad foreign policy commitments as a member of the US’s post-9/11 “coalition of the willing” in its

“global war on terror”, and the ideological linking of state failure to terrorism.7

Kabutaulaka contends that in order to understand the sudden change in

Australia’s policy on Solomon Islands “one must examine not only events in

Solomon Islands but also the nature of Anglo-American security policies, as well as

Australia’s collaboration with the United States and Great Britain in the war against international terrorism”.8 Fry reiterates this point in asserting that the “key explanation for change lay in the prime ministerial intervention in policy around questions of domestic and alliance politics to do with the war on terror”.9 This is revealed in the timing, construction and legitimisation of Australia’s Solomon

Island policy reversal. Pacific intervention emerged as a strategy for the Howard government to extricate itself from its electorally unpopular commitment of troops to the war in Iraq while still maintaining its active support of United States foreign policy. This is confirmed by noting a convergence in Australia’s bilateral relations with both the United States and Solomon Islands during the three months from mid-April to mid-July 2003: the vast majority of Australia’s military personnel were

4 Downer quoted in Hameiri, “Risk Management, Neo-Liberalism and the Securitisation of the Australian Aid Program,” 361. 5 Fry, “‘Our Patch’: The War on Terror and the New Interventionalism,” 75. 6 Dobell, “Australia’s Intervention Policy: A Melanesian Learning Curve?” 7 Kabutaulaka, “Australian Foreign Policy and the RAMSI Intervention in Solomon Islands”; Fry, “‘Our Patch’: The War on Terror and the New Interventionalism”; Fry and Kabutaulaka, “Political Legitimacy and State-Building Intervention in the Pacific.” 8 Kabutaulaka, “Australian Foreign Policy and the RAMSI Intervention in Solomon Islands,” 283. 9 Fry, “‘Our Patch’: The War on Terror and the New Interventionalism,” 73.

257 withdrawn from Iraq in the same week in April that Howard received a request from Kemakeza for direct assistance to Solomon Islands. Abruptly Australia began to use post-9/11 United States discourse defining a “failed” state to explain Solomon

Island unrest and to justify its intervention.10

Developing the work of Simon Chesterman, Michael Ignatieff and Ramesh

Thakur, Sinclair Dinnen argues that “building or rebuilding functioning states capable of providing citizens with a guaranteed level of physical and economic security has become one of the most pressing policy challenges in international relations today”;11 yet as Wesley-Smith contends, “there is nothing new about state failure”.12 State collapse and reconfiguration are a continuous feature of the international system, with the Cold War decades following World War II as the principal exception. Wesley-Smith explains that while “many new members were ill-equipped to meet even the most basic expectations associated with conventional notions of sovereign statehood”, during the Cold War era “superpowers, as well as former colonial powers, international organisations and the newly independent regimes themselves . . . [were] united in their commitment to state maintenance - and prepared to use whatever diplomatic, economic or military means necessary to achieve it”.13 When both the level and rationale of international aid and development changed at the end of the Cold War, many newly independent states began to falter: this was defined by the imposition of radically new political and economic roles under Structural Adjustment Programs that promoted neo-liberal global agendas. Significant human rights and humanitarian disasters in Somalia,

Haiti, Cambodia, Bosnia and Kosovo initiated the widespread use of the term

10 Kabutaulaka, “Australian Foreign Policy and the RAMSI Intervention in Solomon Islands”; Fry, “‘Our Patch’: The War on Terror and the New Interventionalism.” 11 Chesterman, Ignatieff, and Thakur, Making States Work: State Failure and the Crisis of Governance; Dinnen, “Dilemmas of Intervention and the Building of State and Nation,” 2. 12 Wesley-Smith, “Altered States: The Politics of State Failure and Regional Intervention,” 38. 13 Wesley-Smith, 38.

258 “failing” or “failed” states during the 1990s and resulted in large-scale multilateral international interventions framed by global norms of peace-building, humanitarianism and development in agreement with the government of the affected state.

This approach changed after the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11

September 2001 and the subsequent assessment that “failing/failed” states posed more of a threat to United States national security than militant ones.14 Failed state discourse and the associated imperative for external intervention was justified less by the threat that such states posed to their own people (the humanitarian imperative) than by the threat posed to governments and citizens of other states

(the security imperative). As a result, external intervention came to “encourage unilateralism, urgency and the ‘securitisation of development’”, where unilateralism and urgency produced pre-emptive intervention and the denial of sovereignty (as seen in the 2003 United-States-led intervention into Iraq).15 As for the “securitisation of development”, Hameiri argues that “the state again came to be seen as important to development after years of economists claiming it was the problem”; rather than being dissolved into markets, states needed to be rendered secure against terrorist threats.16

Australia’s application of failed state discourse can be mapped on to these global developments; in addition a home-grown doomsday discourse began to define the Pacific region from an Australian economic and governmental perspective. First articulated in 1993 by prominent Australian economics journalist and Pacific commentator Rowan Callick, the Pacific was envisaged as “on a path to

14 Hameiri, “Risk Management, Neo-Liberalism and the Securitisation of the Australian Aid Program,” 360. 15 Fry and Kabutaulaka, “Political Legitimacy and State-Building Intervention in the Pacific,” 24. 16 Hameiri, “Risk Management, Neo-Liberalism and the Securitisation of the Australian Aid Program,” 363.

259 a future nightmare of overcrowding, poverty, mass unemployment, serious environmental degradation, and a decline in health standards” if it did not open itself up to structural adjustment.17 The Australian Minister of Pacific Island

Affairs, Gordon Bilney, along with the Australian media, took up this line.18

Australia adopted post-9/11 global strategies in signing up for the United-

States-led military intervention into Afghanistan from October 2001, and from

March 2003 for the United-States-led “coalition of the willing" in its war on Iraq.

Closer to home, in September 2001 the Australian government implemented the

Pacific Solution for asylum seekers arriving by boat as refugees largely from those conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq; and anti-terrorist sentiment intensified following the 12 October 2002 Bali bombings in which 88 Australian nationals lost their lives.

In December 2002 Howard declared that Australia would attack terrorists in neighbouring countries thought to be threatening Australia; this was directed primarily at Asian countries rather than towards the Pacific.19 While at this stage

Australian Pacific policy was still governed by the idea of “constructive commitment”, Pacific Island countries were increasingly nominated as part of an

“arc of instability”, involving unrest in Solomon Islands from the late 1990s; civil war and autonomy for Bougainville throughout the 1990s; the 2000 coup in Fiji; tensions in Vanuatu in 2002 involving the government, police and military; independence for East Timor in 2002; continued instability in Papua New Guinea; economic issues in Nauru; and West Papuan struggles for independence from

Indonesia.

17 Fry, “Framing the Islands: Knowledge and Power in Changing Australian Images of ‘the South Pacific,’” 306. 18 Fry, 316–17. 19 Fry, “‘Our Patch’: The War on Terror and the New Interventionalism,” 80.

260 While there were a few journalists and think-tanks (nationally and regionally) who discussed Solomon Islands as “failing/failed” before 2003,20 intersecting events that year (Solomon Islands’ formal request to Australia for assistance, and Australia’s large-scale withdrawal of troops from an unpopular Iraq war) saw that designation become part of official Australian policy. Howard first applied the term “failing/failed” state to Solomon Islands in a statement to

Parliament on 25 June 2003 where he outlined for the first time the strong possibility of Australian intervention. The speech followed a two-month period of private discussions with the US, Solomon Islands and New Zealand about the possibility of Australia leading an intervention involving armed forces into

Solomon Islands. Support from the Australian parliament and public was secured with humanitarian justifications which positioned Solomon Islands as “our patch” and “special responsibility”, and Australia as “a good Pacific neighbour . . . helping a very small country that really does need help and has cried out for assistance”.21

But significantly Howard was also labelling the “failing/failed” state of the Solomon

Islands a “haven potentially for terrorists”: “forget about any other country for the moment – it is in Australia’s interest that the Solomons not fail. That’s why we’re going to get involved and that’s why we have significantly changed our policy”.22

Adding weight to Howard’s new securitisation and risk management approach to Australia’s aid program in Solomon Islands was Elsina Wainwright’s

June 2003 report, Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of Solomon Islands – prepared for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the same think-tank to label the Solomon Islands a “failing/failed” state in its 2002 Beyond Bali strategic

20 See for example Roughan, “Pacific First: A Failed State!”; Borgu, “Beyond Bali: ASPI’s Strategic Assessment 2002”; The Economist, “The Pacific’s First Failed State?” 21 Howard quoted in Fry, “‘Our Patch’: The War on Terror and the New Interventionalism,” 75. 22 Howard quoted in Fry, 74.

261 assessment report.23 Arguing that there was no “evidence to suggest that Solomon

Islands can pull itself out of a fatal dive towards state failure”, it advocated a repeal of Australian policies “characterised by generous aid and a hands off approach” in favour of a two-phase Australian-led multinational intervention with Solomon

Islands’ agreement, focusing first on “solving the immediate short-term problems of violence and corruption” and second on “building Solomon Islands’ capacity for effective government, by helping to build new political structures and security institutions, and helping to address underlying social and economic problems”.24 It was to be a detour from the unilateral pre-emptive state intervention which

Australia had been involved with in Afghanistan and Iraq, and had threatened to enact upon Southeast Asian countries in 2002.

While Howard was initially planning an Australian–New Zealand cooperative intervention force, he was persuaded of the greater political legitimacy of a regional mission involving Pacific Island personnel,25 and of making use of the

PIF’s Biketawa Declaration of 2000 (constructed in response to government overthrows in Fiji and Solomon Islands) which guaranteed the principle of non- interference in individual PIF states’ domestic affairs but allowed collective action in response to a security crisis in a member state. There was little overt opposition to Australia’s plans from Pacific Island countries, who had long been seeking

Australia’s more active involvement in regional issues.26 Australia’s consultation processes were also extremely rushed: it was less than a month between the time

Australia informed PIF countries that there was a regional need to intervene in

Solomon Islands and the signing of the multilateral Regional Assistance Mission to

Solomon Islands treaty between Australia, Solomon Islands and fellow PIF

23 Borgu, “Beyond Bali: ASPI’s Strategic Assessment 2002.” 24 Wainwright, “Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of Solomon Islands,” 1–4. 25 Fry and Kabutaulaka, “Political Legitimacy and State-Building Intervention in the Pacific,” 5. 26 Kabutaulaka, “Australian Foreign Policy and the RAMSI Intervention in Solomon Islands,” 290.

262 member states (New Zealand, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa and Tonga) on 24

July 2003.27

Finally, it is important to note that while the “war on terror” was pivotal in

Australia’s change of discourse and policy towards Solomon Islands, longstanding geopolitical rivalries with Asian countries such as China, Taiwan and Indonesia over control of the Pacific region also played some part. For while Australia was refusing to help the Solomon Islands, Asian countries began to step in. As we have seen, Taiwan was sending aid for compensation payments (seen within Australian policy circles as fuelling poor governance); and Australia also received intelligence which indicated that the Solomon Islands government early in 2003 had approached the Indonesian government to intervene.28 The “Indonesian factor” for

Australia (especially after the Bali bombings in 2002) was inextricably linked to the threat of terrorism: at a moment of troubled diplomatic and economic relations between Australia and Indonesia, Howard is unlikely to have countenanced the idea of a predominantly Muslim country taking on the responsibility of fixing a

“failing/failed” Pacific state.

27 All PIF members later signed the treaty. 28 Fry, “‘Our Patch’: The War on Terror and the New Interventionalism,” 78.

263 4: RAMSI 2003-2015

Operation Helpem Fren was activated within hours of the signing of the RAMSI treaty on 24 July 2003. Implemented with what RAMSI Special Coordinator Nick

Warner called an explicit policy of shock and awe, RAMSI’s arrival was a dramatic spectacle, with “helicopters dropping troops in visible locations, landing barges crashing onto the beach loaded with troops when the landing could have been more efficiently transacted at the wharf, and so on”.1 In total some 2200 RAMSI personnel arrived in Solomon Islands during the first week of operation including a military Combined Task Force (CTF) of 1800, a Participating Police Force (PPF) of

350 and a smaller contingent of officials. While PIF member states (particularly

New Zealand) were represented in the CTF and PPF components, it is estimated that of the total initial representation over 1700 were Australian.2

From its inception, RAMSI was positioned as a medium- to long-term project with a wide-ranging mandate organised around three pillars: law and justice, machinery of government and economic governance. Described by Iris

Wielders as “not quite a peace operation, but more than a development assistance programme”,3 RAMSI sought to combine security and development objectives as follows:

• Ensure the safety and security of Solomon Islands;

• Repair and reform the machinery of government, improve

government accountability and improve the delivery of services

in urban and provincial areas;

• Improve economic governance and strengthen the government’s

financial systems;

1 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 51. 2 Braithwaite et al., 51. 3 Wielders, “The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands in Global Perspective,” 135.

264 • Help rebuild the economy and encourage sustainable broad-

based growth, and;

• Build strong and peaceful communities.4

Encompassing three phases, the intervening mission first focused on the restoration of law and order in line with RAMSI’s law and justice pillar. This was followed by a stabilisation of government finances phase and concluded with a state-building phase which answered RAMSI’s economic governance and machinery of government pillars respectively.5 RAMSI’s first and second phases were largely implemented during its first year of operation, while its state-building phase had a much more open timeline (still in action at the time of the Solomon

Islands’ hosting of FOPA in July 2012). Described as “the most comprehensive whole of government strategy towards a fragile state . . . to date”, the approach was directed from Canberra through an interdepartmental committee with a lead role assigned to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.6 Overseen by a Special

Coordinator’s Office based in Solomon Islands and headed by an Australian diplomat, each of RAMSI’s three pillars was executed by a highly visible police and military presence, with Australian public servants working in advisory positions within Solomon Island government departments; all pillars had their own leaders who met weekly under the Chairmanship of the Special Coordinator.7 With

Australians dominating the mission’s leadership and personnel, and hence its

4 Dinnen, “RAMSI Ten Years On, From Post-Conflict Stabilisation to Development in Solomon Islands?,” 204. 5 Fraenkel, “The Teleology and Romance of State-Building in Solomon Islands,” 405. 6 Patrick and Brown, Greater than the Sum of Its Parts? Assessing “Whole of Government” Approaches to Fragile States, 87 quoted in Dinnen, “RAMSI Ten Years On, From Post-Conflict Stabilisation to Development in Solomon Islands?,” 205. 7 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 76.

265 funding, it is estimated that at the time of the July 2012 FOPA, Australia had spent in excess of $A 2 billion on RAMSI.8

RAMSI was legally bound by the Facilitation of International Assistance Act

(known as the Facilitation Act) passed unanimously by the Solomon Islands

Parliament on 17 July 2003 and endorsed by Australia and the PIF via signing of the

24 July 2003 RAMSI treaty. RAMSI was required to operate through Solomon

Island national laws and government authorities, with RAMSI personnel accorded immunity from Solomon Island laws in relation to actions taken while on official duties; RAMSI-assisting countries could claim authority in any criminal or disciplinary action regarding their own personnel; the Special Coordinator and the head of the PPF had to be Australian citizens and the head of the PPF had to also be the Deputy Commissioner of the RSIP; and no fixed exit date was mandated for the mission. The Facilitation Act was also an accountability mechanism which included provisions for the Solomon Island parliament annually to review, maintain or revoke RAMSI, which was also accountable to Australian and New Zealand taxpayers who funded the intervention.9

Phase one’s restoration of law and order was tasked to the PPF with a focus on “the restoration of law and order in the capital Honiara, the deployment of the

PPF across the country, and the collection of illegal weapons and disarmament of militants”.10 Security and logistical support was provided by the CTF who deployed close to 2000 men in RAMSI’s early months, a number which quickly diminished in the absence of local resistance to the PPF mandate. Assuming an executive policing role, the PPF (comprised mostly of Australian Federal Police) pushed aside

8 Estimated at $2.6 billion in real terms between 2003 and 2013. Allen and Dinnen, “Beyond Life Support? Reflections on Solomon Islands after the Regional Assistance Mission,” 8. 9 Wielders, “The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands in Global Perspective,” 138; Anderson, “The Limits of RAMSI,” 6. 10 Wielders, “The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands in Global Perspective,” 137.

266 the RSIP who “had been too heavily compromised by its activities during the conflict years, not least owing to its complicity in the June 2000 coup.”11

Subsequently RAMSI reviewed the RSIP and many of its police officers were removed from the force and a number arrested and charged with criminal misconduct. Complementing police and military personnel in achieving the law and justice pillar’s objectives was an Australian civilian deployment who worked in and with the Solomon Islands High Court and Court, the Office of the

Director of Public Prosecutions and the Office of the Public Solicitor. Largely successful in its objectives - for example, by the end of 2003 over 3700 weapons had been removed from the community and regular policing and justice procedures had resumed - RAMSI’s first phase secured popular support. Its opponents - those in rural areas most affected by civil unrest and most alienated by the state - asked why RAMSI had not intervened earlier.

Phase two’s stabilisation of Solomon Island government finances was tasked to expatriates in pivotal positions such as accountant-general, under-secretary of finance and commissioner of inland revenue; RAMSI’s ability to improve revenue collection and management, establishing investor confidence and enabling the repayment of debt arrears and the routine payment of public servant salaries, meant that this phase was also relatively well received internally.12 But the third phase - state-building or nation building, with a specific focus on fundamental economic and political reform - was, as RAMSI Special Coordinator Nick Warner stated at a February 2004 press conference, “what we really came here to do”.13 For while disarmament and a return to law and order provided the “circuit breaker” to quell immediate unrest, rebuilding the “failing/failed” Solomon Islands state was

11 Morgan and McLeod, “Have We Failed Our Neighbour?,” 405. 12 Nanau, “Intervention and Nation-Building in Solomon Islands: Local Responses,” 150–51. 13 Warner quoted in Fraenkel, “The Teleology and Romance of State-Building in Solomon Islands,” 399.

267 crucial to achieving long-term peace and prosperity.14 Framed by the internationally-accepted neoliberal formula for state-building, the intervention’s main economic focus was (as a 2004 Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and

Trade [DFAT] report puts it) “budget cuts (‘right sizing’), the privatisation of all state owned enterprises (‘as soon as possible’) and the registration and commercialisation of land (because ‘customary land ownership places serious constraints on the growth of new higher value private sector activities’)”.15

Politically, its machinery of government goals did not extend as far as constitutional change but focused on electoral reform, public service repair and reform, and the strengthening and accountability of what it deemed corrupt institutions. The project was based in Honiara and implemented by RAMSI civilians who took up further in-line and advisory positions within the Solomon

Islands’ government, including the Auditor-General’s Office, the Electoral

Commission and Parliamentary Support Services, as well as the offices of the ombudsman and the Leadership Code Commission.16

Frustration and outright opposition to RAMSI’s state-building project were expressed publicly in the violent riots that took place primarily in Honiara, but also in Auki the provincial capital of the island of Malaita, on the 18 and 19 April 2006 following the first national election to take place during the RAMSI era. Snyder

Rini was subsequently appointed Prime Minister by the parliament, though he was accused of gaining his position through bribery, specifically the use of local

Chinese and Taiwanese government money. Protestors viewed Rini’s election as

14 Hameiri, “The Trouble with RAMSI: Reexamining the Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands,” 431. 15 Commonwealth Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Economic Analytical Unit, “Solomon Islands: Rebuilding an Island Economy,” 135 quoted in Anderson, “The Limits of RAMSI,” 12. 16 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 76; Fraenkel, “The Teleology and Romance of State-Building in Solomon Islands,” 407.

268 “an unwelcome continuation of the previous corrupt government”:17 as deputy

Prime Minister in the last parliament Rini and Prime Minister and close associate

Kemakeza (both from Western Province) had been “implicated in allegations of serious maladministration and corruption during that term”.18 RAMSI’s lack of investigation into Rini and Kemakeza’s dealings made it vulnerable to accusations of protecting an illegitimate government in order to get its economic, governance and police reforms passed. In this context and with the PPF’s provocation of protestors outside parliament in Honiara on the day of Rini’s appointment,

Chinese-owned businesses and PPF personnel and property were targeted as protest turned into rioting. An unprepared PPF, supported by members of the RSIP and a much scaled-back CTF (approximately 50), were unable to control the riots, so that within 24 hours much of Chinatown was burnt to the ground, 36 Australian police officers were injured (none of the RSIP were targeted despite their involvement), PPF number-plated vehicles were torched, Chinese-owned businesses were graffitied with anti-RAMSI sentiments, and a newly elected Prime

Minister was forced into hiding.19 It would take the arrival of additional defence and police personnel from Australia to restore law and order. The riots demonstrated popular resentment at the small Chinese business class who had benefited from RAMSI contracts and at aid workers and other foreign personnel in the country with lucrative ties to East and Southeast Asian corporations.20 On 26

April 2006, one week after being appointed Prime Minister, Rini resigned in the

17 Fry and Kabutaulaka, “Political Legitimacy and State-Building Intervention in the Pacific,” 6. 18 Morgan and McLeod, “Have We Failed Our Neighbour?,” 420. 19 Allen, “Dissenting Voices: Local Perspectives on the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands,” 199; Morgan and McLeod, “Have We Failed Our Neighbour?,” 412; Kabutaulaka, “Westminster Meets Solomons in the Honiara Riots,” 96; Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 62. 20 Hameiri, “The Trouble with RAMSI: Reexamining the Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands,” 433.

269 face of mounting public opposition, to be replaced by Manasseh Sogavare, a previous Prime Minister during the years of unrest (June 2000 – December 2001).

The riots were more than a protest at RAMSI’s lack of action on government corruption and its failure to arrest corrupt officials (commonly referred to by the public as “big fish”). Rather they were a reflection of multiple state-building grievances produced by RAMSI’s inability to engage productively with the many complex communities and interest groups that define and shape the Solomon

Islands. Many of the grievances centred on Australia’s complete dominance of

RAMSI decisions and operations, despite it being a multilateral cooperative intervention; on RAMSI’s failure to implement the rhetoric of partnership, capacity building and the eradication of aid dependency, because it was using so many

Australian civilians in government and police positions and contracting all significant projects to Australian companies; and finally on RAMSI’s neglect of reconciliation and peace-building processes and its lack of an exit strategy. All this exacerbated rather than addressed wealth disparity, provincial and cultural disconnection and the marginalisation of Solomon Island peoples from important political and economic processes, and eroded the sovereignty of the Solomon

Islands’ state. RAMSI’s lack of community engagement was criticised from the beginning when it decided to house police and military staff in a segregated compound on the far edges of Honiara, as well as establishing white suburban enclaves and resort hotels for those civilians occupying bureaucratic roles. The PPF were deeply isolationist, refusing to learn Solomon Islands Pijin or consume locally produced foodstuffs, patrolling from the comfort of their air-conditioned cars rather than on foot (particularly after the murder of a PPF officer in December

270 2004);21 the high rotation of RAMSI military and civilian officers, particularly in rural and outer island posts, only exacerbated this. The April 2006 riots highlighted concerns about RAMSI’s communication with the Solomon Island population: the

PPF could not converse or negotiate in Solomon Island Pijin with protestors stationed at parliament; and it lacked intelligence on protest plans despite being in circulation at a grassroots level some days before.22 The use of terrorist-style arrest and search tactics by RAMSI against Solomon Islands’ most disaffected communities – the communities privy to such intelligence - only further disabled the PPF.23

Not all PFF officers were disconnected and disliked: Pacific Island officers gained respect and popularity for their efforts to mix with the public (the same reason the CTF were preferred to the PPF); New Zealand officers were viewed as somewhere between Australian and Pacific Island officers.24 But there was a distinct shortage of Pacific Island presence in the PPF: of its 387 officers in July

2005, 294 were from Australia, 31 New Zealand, 13 Fijian, 12 Tongan, 10 Papua New

Guinea, 9 Samoa, 5 Kiribati, 5 Vanuatu, 4 Nauru, 2 Cook Islands and 2 Tuvalu.25

This reflected the entire intervening mission, with virtually no administrative (in- line and advisory) or broader leadership representation from Pacific Island countries. A 2005 PIF Eminent Persons’ Group Review documented public displeasure towards Australian unilateralism, stating, “we heard concerns that

RAMSI has a minimal regional identity and is perceived as a predominantly

Australian assistance mission . . . not a regional mission”. It called for RAMSI to be

21 Allen, “Dissenting Voices: Local Perspectives on the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands,” 197. 22 Allen, 197–98. 23 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 62–63; Allen, “Dissenting Voices: Local Perspectives on the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands,” 199. 24 Allen, “Dissenting Voices: Local Perspectives on the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands,” 197. 25 Nautilus Institute, “Participating Police Force (PPF).”

271 made more “accountable to the Secretary General of the Pacific Islands Forum

Secretariat”.26 It was not coincidental that an Australian, Greg Urwin, had filled the role of Secretary General of the PIF since August 2003, ending 30 years when the position was customarily held by a Pacific Island citizen. Australia had pursued this change not only to ensure control of RAMSI but also to assert a new regional order centred on its Solomon Island blueprint, where norms of good governance and economic management were imposed as a means to alleviate unrest and hence security concerns within the Pacific.

RAMSI’s partnership and capacity-building principles, then, were called into question by actions that undermined Solomon Island sovereignty while fostering dependence at government, police and grassroots levels. Cooperation with government and consultation with the population were replaced by a “RAMSI knows best” mentality, with an “us/them” divide reinforced in trivial ways from the infamous sign on the bathroom door of the Finance Ministry stating “RAMSI

Personnel only”27 to more consequential actions such as RAMSI’s direct intervention to stop a Solomon Island government-approved public servant pay increase in January 2004;28 in the same month it refused to intervene in the decision by RAMSI-contracted Australian company, Patrick Defence Logistics, to drastically cut the pay rates of its local workers (many by more than half, from $SI

70 to $SI 32 a day).29 The frequent placement of RAMSI personnel into key

Solomon Island government and policing positions was highlighted by the appointment of Australian Shane Castles, an Australian Federal Police Officer, as

26 Pacific Islands Forum Eminent Persons Group, “A Review of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands’,” 10 quoted in Fry and Kabutaulaka, “Political Legitimacy and State-Building Intervention in the Pacific,” 28. 27 Fraenkel, The Manipulation of Custom: From Uprising to Intervention in the Solomon Islands, 173; Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 57. 28 Wielders, “The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands in Global Perspective,” 141. 29 Fraenkel, The Manipulation of Custom: From Uprising to Intervention in the Solomon Islands, 179.

272 the new Police Commissioner of the RSIP in April 2005, meaning that both the PPF and RSIP were now run by Australian officers.30 Capacity-building rhetoric did not meet reality, with in-line officers and advisors in government and police often preferring to do the job themselves (using a time-efficiency argument) rather than training local staff. Thus, like many international interventions, RAMSI did not build local capacity but deflated it:31 weitim olketa RAMSI bae kam stretem (wait for

RAMSI to come and fix it) became a commonly-heard phrase in Honiara offices and on the streets. Aid dependency increased rather than diminished, and aid money itself largely flowed back to Australian companies and individuals rather than to Solomon Island peoples.

Solomon Island sovereignty was also infringed by the ways in which some members of RAMSI took advantage of the immunity provision of the Facilitation Act which gave them protection from prosecution if they committed a crime against

Solomon Island laws. Gordon Leua Nanau claims that RAMSI officers were known to participate in illegal activities such as prostitution and the purchasing of black market alcohol, including kwaso, an illegal homebrew.32 Lawyer and former MEF leader, Andrew Nori, launched a legal case against the Solomon Island government and RAMSI, arguing that the Facilitation Act was unconstitutional; the chief justice of the Solomon Islands High Court dismissed the case in April 2006.33 Operating as a form of shadow government, RAMSI seemingly wielded power beyond that stipulated in its mandate: yet elected governments are not simply puppets of their shadows, as “those with formal state power use those with shadow . . . power, just as the latter use the politicians to deliver their specific interests”.34 This is apparent in

30 Wielders, “The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands in Global Perspective,” 141. 31 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 57. 32 Nanau, “Intervention and Nation-Building in Solomon Islands: Local Responses,” 157. 33 Allen, “Politics of Disorder: The Social Unrest in Honiara,” 50. 34 Braithwaite et al., Pillars and Shadows: Statebuilding as Peacebuilding in Solomon Islands, 141.

273 the relationship forged between Prime Minister Kemakeza and RAMSI: Kemakeza went out of his way “to accommodate the presence and demands of the regional mission . . . appreciating, no doubt, that RAMSI provided his administration with a legitimacy that it patently lacked among ordinary Solomon Islanders”.35 So despite being widely accused of corruption, whose elimination was a key priority of

RAMSI, Kemakeza became the first Prime Minister since Solomon Islands’ independence to survive a full term in office.

RAMSI neglected reconciliation processes and prioritised the rebuilding of the state over addressing the causes of and finding a resolution for conflict: this naturally intensified questions about Australia’s motives for intervening in

Solomon Islands and its lack of an exit strategy. It was also in contravention of the

Biketawa Declaration which requests regional intervention to “constructively address difficult and sensitive issues including underlying causes of tension and conflict (ethnic tension, socio-economic disparities and lack of good governance, land disputes and erosion of cultural values)”.36 In this case Kabutaulaka identifies complex causes for unrest:

Policies of the British colonial administration and, after

independence, the failure of successive governments to address

important socioeconomic and political issues: nation-building, land

ownership, large-scale resource development, the distribution of

development benefits, urban growth, internal migration and

settlements, inappropriate and inadequate education, and poor

economic growth.37

35 Dinnen, “Dilemmas of Intervention and the Building of State and Nation,” 20. 36 Wielders, “The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands in Global Perspective,” 143. 37 Kabutaulaka, “A Weak State and the Solomon Islands Peace Process,” 4.

274 Hameiri specifically identifies policy changes in 1997 and 1998 affecting Solomon

Islands’ “complex and dense patronage networks” that until then had operated relatively successfully (although not perfectly) by “mitigat[ing] the effects of highly uneven economic development”.38 Designed to improve the capacity of the state apparatus to perform certain tasks away from the lures of corruption, ironically they destabilised the country’s coalitions of interests and created unrest. RAMSI preferred to respond to unrest through the problematic and simplified lens of global “preexisting theoretical and empirical knowledge on state failure and state building”.39 Linking unrest to poor governance, low state capacity and stagnant economic development, Solomon Islands’ “state failure” was identified as “a measurable condition and as an ahistorical phenomenon”, rectifiable via the strengthening of a centralised liberal democratic state with institutions and practices that facilitate neoliberal economic development.40 Yet as the April 2006 riots attested, RAMSI’s approach was unsuccessful on its own terms and was largely rejected by the population. RAMSI was exposed not as a regional mission with humanitarian motives and Solomon Island sovereignty at the forefront of its agenda, but as a unilateral intervention centred on Australian national interests framed by a risk management, securitisation of aid approach designed to help counteract the supposed threat of international terrorism. Once again Australia had followed its historical tendency to engage in the Pacific on behalf of a larger global power to the West, rather than for the benefit of its Pacific neighbours.41

Sogavare’s election as Prime Minister following Rini’s nine-day rule caused an automatic rupture in bilateral relations between Solomon Islands and Australia.

38 “The Trouble with RAMSI: Reexamining the Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands,” 413; 423. 39 Hameiri, 411; Nguyen, “The Question of ‘Failed States’: Australia and the Notion of State Failure.” 40 Hameiri, “The Trouble with RAMSI: Reexamining the Roots of Conflict in Solomon Islands,” 410; Fry and Kabutaulaka, “Political Legitimacy and State-Building Intervention in the Pacific,” 26. 41 Fry and Kabutaulaka, “Political Legitimacy and State-Building Intervention in the Pacific,” 26.

275 A vocal critic of RAMSI, in his first week in office Sogavare made clear his mandate to reclaim Solomon Islands’ sovereignty and establish an exit-strategy for RAMSI.

With his cabinet composed of like-minded anti-RAMSI politicians including

Charles Dausabea and Nelson Ne’e who had been detained by RAMSI for their alleged part in inciting the riots, Sogavare quickly launched a commission of inquiry into the April riots whose terms of reference included the role of the RSIP and PPF and the circumstances surrounding the detention of Dausabea and Ne’e, specifically whether it “was reasonably justified and not politically motivated”.42

When Solomon Islands’ attorney-general Primo Afeau challenged the terms of reference, Sogavare accused him of being influenced by the Australian government and removed him from office. Australian High Commissioner Patrick Cole protested Sogavare’s move and was declared persona non grata on 12 September

2006; this resulted in Australia imposing visa restrictions on Solomon Island politicians wishing to enter Australia. Fuelling further tension, Sogavare accused the Australian government of attempting to derail the commission of inquiry by legal action launched against his nominee for inquiry chair, Sydney-based judge

Marcus Einfield, in relation to issues regarding speeding offences, and against his nominee for attorney-general, Australian lawyer Julian Moti, in reference to child allegations in Vanuatu. In a series of events from late 2006 Einfield was replaced as inquiry chair; Prime Minister Sogavare’s office was raided by

RAMSI in relation to the Moti case; and Sogavare declared Australian RSIP

Commissioner Shaun Castles an “undesirable immigrant” while he was on leave in

Australia, thus preventing his return although he had 20 months left on his contract. Australia’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, reiterated that RAMSI

42 Solomon Islands Government, “Establishment of Commission of Inquiry into April Civil Unrest, Press Release”; Dinnen, “Dilemmas of Intervention and the Building of State and Nation,” 21.

276 was a “take it or leave it package” and that the Sogavare government would not be allowed to “cherry pick” selected parts of the mission.43

Sogavare could not go as far as revoking RAMSI – it is unlikely he had the necessary parliamentary support – but he continued with his mandate of reframing its agenda by setting up a commission of inquiry into the 2006 riots with revised terms of reference and a new chair; by eventually appointing Moti as attorney- general despite continued efforts to have him deported to Australia to face trial; by persuading parliament to agree to a review of the controversial Facilitation of

International Intervention Act; and initiating discussion of a future Truth and

Reconciliation Commission. Although he was replaced as Prime Minister in

December 2007 by Derek Sikua, Sogavare’s 19-month rule significantly changed

RAMSI’s future direction and initiated the beginning of its drawdown. The election of Kevin Rudd as Australian Prime Minister in the same month that Sogavare lost his job ended 12 years of Howard government and made RAMSI’s end inevitable too. Rudd improved relations not just with Solomon Islands but other Melanesian countries such as Papua New Guinea and Fiji; while there was no dramatic change in policy, new consultative arrangements were put in place, such as the establishment of a “triumvirate group” with senior officials from the Solomon

Island government, the PIF and RAMSI; support and funding for the creation of a

Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2009; and the creation of the 2009

Solomon Islands – Australia Partnership for Development, promising closer collaboration in reaching agreed-upon development goals.44 When Danny Philip was elected as Solomon Islands Prime Minister in August 2010 he insisted upon a five-year exit strategy for RAMSI and the strengthening of the RSIP. Now the

43 Downer quoted in Fraenkel, “The Teleology and Romance of State-Building in Solomon Islands,” 412. 44 Dinnen, “RAMSI Ten Years On, From Post-Conflict Stabilisation to Development in Solomon Islands?,” 206–7.

277 language used by both the Solomon Islands and Australian governments (who also had a new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard) began to focus on drawdown and transition. Internationally, the 2008 election of United States President Barak

Obama reconceptualised intervention policy, the global financial crisis in the same period brought a new focus on austerity, and the rise of China, by 2012 the world’s second-largest economy, again shifted the international power balance. By the end of 2015, RAMSI’s military component had ended and its civilian programs had become the bilateral responsibility of Australia and Solomon Islands; only its police-building program remained, comprising 150 PPF officers who were to leave by mid-2017, when RAMSI’s mission was formally marked for completion after 14 years.45

45 Fraenkel, “The Teleology and Romance of State-Building in Solomon Islands,” 412.

278 5: FOPA 2012

The 11th FOPA took place in Solomon Islands over 12 days in July 2012, eight years after the country was first awarded the right to host the event at the 20th meeting of

CPAC in July 2004. The Solomon Island government’s application to hold the 2012

Festival, designated for a Melanesian host, coincided with the one-year anniversary of the arrival of RAMSI; its submission was framed by a long-term goal that envisaged the hosting of the Festival as a way to assert future peace and prosperity.

Endorsed by RAMSI, the Solomon Island’s application was justified by Minister for

Culture and Tourism Alex Bartlett as follows:

Since the country has recovered from the effects of the past four

years of internal conflicts, the Government recognizes the

importance of hosting the Festival in this country because it will

bring all the Pacific Cultures to celebrate, cultivate and promote

peace and unity in diversity together in the 21st century.1

Given only eight years to plan and implement, the 11th FOPA was continually challenged by political instability, including the turnover of six

Solomon Island Prime Ministers between 2004 and 2012. At the time of the Festival,

RAMSI was beginning its drawdown and transition to a non-specified exit date but in the ninth year of intervention it was still very much entrenched, a scenario not imagined at the time of the Solomon Islands’ government’s bid. Only after a SPC- funded scoping report, conducted in 2009 by Rhoda Roberts, leading Australian festival director and head of Indigenous programming at the Sydney Opera House, did any momentum begin to develop; despite the implementation of a National

Festival Organising Committee, progress continued to be slow due to a lack of funding and consistency in government policy. Media reports as late as January

1 Bartlett quoted in Council of Pacific Arts and Culture, “Report of Twentieth Meeting of the Council of Pacific Arts.”

279 2012 document the possibility of the forced relocation or cancellation of the

Festival.2 SPC Director General Dr Jimmy Rodgers stated six months out that it would be impossible to relocate the Festival in the same year, so it provided intensive support and strict deadlines for the National Festival Organising

Committee during its final six months, including the outsourcing of primarily volunteer positions to Australia and New Zealand, with the support of both governments. Solomon Islands’ close bilateral government donor Taiwan was the first country to offer financial support donating $SI 10,000,000 towards preparation.3 Intergovernmental and bilateral government donors, NGOs and corporate sponsors also contributed, including RAMSI, PIF, Australian High

Commission, New Zealand High Commission, Fiji Government, New Caledonia

Government, Vanuatu Government, World Health Organisation (WHO), Seventh

Day Adventist Church, Solomon Airlines, Westpac Banking Corporation and ANZ

Banking Group Ltd.4

The official Festival Opening Ceremony took place on schedule on 2 July

2012 at Lawson Tama Stadium in Honiara in front of a crowd of approximately

20,000 people. A total of 19 CPAC countries and territories attended, including the host nation Solomon Islands; as for the past three Festivals, Taiwan was there with the approval of the National Festival Organising Committee and CPAC. While it is difficult to give an accurate gauge of the total number of official participants, the

Festival’s Official Closing Program listed the number of registered participants at

2103.5 Few delegations sent close to the 150 participants allowed for each team: only

Fiji, Guam, New Caledonia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The number of

2 Pacific Islands News Association, “Too Late to Move Pacific Arts Festival: SPC.” 3 Pacific Islands News Association, “Failing to Host Pacific Arts Will Be Disappointment for Solomon Islands: Dr Rogers.” 4 Solomon Island National Festival Organising Committee, “11th Festival of Pacific Arts: Official Closing Programme,” 20. 5 Solomon Island National Festival Organising Committee, 5.

280 countries and territories in attendance equalled the second lowest, with Cook

Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Northern Mariana

Islands, Pitcairn, Tuvalu, Tonga, and Wallis and Futuna absent from the 27 CPAC member countries and territories. The two most notable absentees were Tonga and

Cook Islands: Tonga’s decision not to attend was out of respect for the passing of its

King, the late George Tupou V, who died on 18 March 2012. Cook Islands’ absence was economic: the Cook Islands Ministry of Cultural Development stated there were insufficient funds in its budget to send a team. The Cook Islands Arts Council questioned this reasoning on the grounds that the government had four years to plan and allocate funds for the event and questioned the government’s decision to allocate $130,000 to send a Cook Island delegation to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in London the same year.6 Financial costs were also cited as the reason for other

CPAC-member countries and territories who did not attend. The Solomon Island delegation numbered 500 formal participants from the nine provinces; the

Solomon Islands’ Kiribati community was also represented, with their participation centring on Kiribati Independence Day on July 12. Many more Solomon Island artists, predominantly crafts men and women participated unofficially on the fringes of the Festival.

The original Festival theme put forward to CPAC in July 2004 was Pacific

Cultures Together Celebrating, Cultivating and Promoting Peace and Unity in Diversity.

The aim was to use the Festival to challenge mainstream imaginings of the

Solomon Islands and the wider Pacific at the turn of the twenty-first-century, but this was completely revised by the National Festival Organising Committee, arguably to draw attention away from RAMSI’s continued presence at the time the

Festival was held. Committed instead to focusing on the region’s environmental

6 Reeves, “Lack of Funds for Cook Islands Arts Festival Delegation Slammed, Government Criticized for ‘Poor Planning’ with 4 Years to Prepare.”

281 challenges, and specifically climate change, the new Festival theme was “Culture in

Harmony with Nature”. The National Festival Organising Committee stated:

The theme highlights two important terms – Culture & Nature. We

believe these two are the cornerstones to our own very existence.

The attachment of our people to our environment has certainly

brought about a harmonious coexistence for hundreds of years, until

the first boats landed on our shore . . . Globalization has either

detracted or detached this important link leading to a dilemma of

issues like climate change, sea level rise, and natural disasters. These

are either causes, or impacts of a state of disparity in our relationship

with our environment. An imbalance in this regard can be

catastrophic as seen in what we sometimes call the “Wrath of

Mother Nature” . . . For this reason, this Theme has been chosen, and

using the Festival as a podium, we then call on the Pacific family and

the world beyond our shores, to join hands in the fight to preserve

our environment from the impacts of climate change, and to

maintain our cultural values and heritage as our strength to

reconnect ourselves more harmoniously with our natural world.7

In support of the theme, the Solomon Islands’ government led a multi-million dollar clean-up of the streets of Honiara, aided mostly by local schools. Pollution is a major problem in urban settlements in Solomon Islands, and it was hoped that this theme could be a real catalyst for change, especially as delegations have faced criticism in the past for their lack of engagement with the Festival theme. A key recommendation of the 2010 Festival of Pacific Arts Evaluation Report was for artists and performances to address more closely the Festival theme so that the artistic

7 Solomon Island National Festival Organising Committee, “Festival of Pacific Arts 2012.”

282 and cultural goals of the Festival are achieved more effectively.8 Past themes were broad and ambiguous – and 2012’s “Culture in Harmony with Nature” was really no different – but certain elements of the Festival managed successfully to curate artistic practice in innovative ways to engage with the theme. This was best showcased at the FOPA Film Festival where some of the region’s best feature films, documentaries and short films were screened. Addressing the diverse environmental issues important to the people and cultures of the Pacific, each delegation’s curators successfully incorporated films that addressed the theme in ways that opened up dialogue post screening, analysing the environment and some of the tensions between traditional and contemporary culture.

The organising committee set out a program to encapsulate a broad range of cultural and artistic practice. The program included dance, music, theatre, oratory and storytelling, oral chants, handicrafts and weaving, carving, culinary arts, tattooing, healing practices, canoeing and navigation, indigenous games, children’s arts, fashion show, visual arts exhibition, film festival, photography exhibition, stamp exhibition, floral art, poetry, Pacific Island literature, tapa making, fire walking and pre-history and history exhibitions. There were symposiums and workshops on cultural rights, creative economy, film, literature and youth. CPAC also conducted the 25th meeting of the Council of Pacific Arts and Culture where

Guam was reaffirmed as the host for the 12th FOPA in 2016 and Hawai’i endorsed for the 13th FOPA in 2020. While traditional practices dominated, many delegates, especially from settler-colonial states like New Zealand and Australia, wove an overtly contemporary context into their cultural practices and art forms.

The layout of the Festival mirrored previous FOPAs with the creation of a large central village as the focal point, and satellite venues acting as hubs for

8 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, “Evaluation of the Festival of Pacific Arts,” 12.

283 outreach to communities outside Honiara and the island of Guadalcanal. The

Festival village was located on the grounds of Solomon Islands’ College of Higher

Education’s Panatina campus, on the western edge of Honiara. Divided in two, it comprised a Solomon Island village to the west and a Pacific Island village to the east; both had large performance stages. The Pasifika stage, located in the heart of the Pacific Island village, was the Festival’s centrepiece for performance and attracted daily crowds of more than 10,000. The Lakeside stage, on the edge of the man-made lake in the Solomon Island village, acted as a low-key alternative to the

Pasifika Stage. The infrastructure and production (sound and light) at the two main stages exceeded the quality of past Festivals; this was made possible by hiring international-quality staff from the Sydney Opera House’s production team.

Around the edges of the two main stages were housing artist demonstrations, displays, performance and workshops. Each delegation, international and provincial, had their own huts which audiences could visit freely and engage informally with artists. This was an alternative space for artistic exchange outside the two main Festival performance spaces, which constructed clear boundaries between audience and artist through raised stages and security personnel.

Similarly the huts humanised the often-faceless spaces of the National Art Gallery and photo exhibition by giving visitors a chance to exchange knowledge with visual artists.

There were many events in Honiara outside the Festival village. A visual arts exhibition, including a philatelic/stamps exhibition, at the purpose-built

National Art Gallery did not open until the fourth day of the Festival because construction was still taking place. Across the road, the National held multiple events, with its auditorium hosting the Film Festival, drama, theatre and multiple workshops and forums. More symposiums and workshops were held at

284 the Mendana Hotel and the Solomon Islands’ College of Higher Education’s

Panatina campus. The National Museum’s display galleries were used for prehistory and history exhibitions, and Pacific stories, novels, biographies, journals, stage, film and radio scripts. An outdoor stage was also erected on the grounds of the National Museum to host oratory, storytelling, poetry and other performances.

The University of South Pacific’s main building housed the media and photography components of the Festival, while the National Archives held the archive photography exhibition. Point Cruz Yacht Club hosted the canoeing and navigation delegates, while the Telekom Recreation Centre played host to the traditional games component. Lawson Tama Stadium hosted the Opening and

Closing ceremonies, but was deemed unfit to stage most of the local contemporary music and dance groups which were moved to the main Festival village. Many individual country performances took place in consulates, hotels and nightclubs around Honiara.

Satellite venues operated in Doma (west of Honiara), Auki (Malaita

Province), Tulagi (Central Province) and the islands of Gizo and Saeraghi (Western

Province). Provincial programs predominantly showcased local performers with daily visits from international delegates travelling from Honiara by air and boat.

Given the intensity of international delegates’ schedules, most spent little time in satellite provinces outside their allocated performance slots. For example, international delegates performing at Auki on the island of Malaita travelled by boat for three hours from Honiara in the morning, prepared and performed at the venue within two hours of arriving and caught the last ferry back in the afternoon.

With such tight scheduling and the emphasis on the main Festival village and performance spaces in Honiara, overnight stays in satellite regions were not possible. The lack of time to converse and exchange cultural and artistic practices

285 with international artists and performers was seen by those in satellite areas as a major shortcoming of the Festival.9

While it is hard to get accurate numbers for visitors, both national and international, they seem to be much higher than for previous FOPAs; the National

Festival Organising Committee estimated that over 200,000 people participated, visited or watched the event over the 12-day period.10 Domestic tourists made up the overwhelming majority of visitors, as little is done to market the Festival on a regional and global scale: very few visited the Festival as international tourists only.

The majority of international visitors were families of Festival participants or unofficial participants attending as employees, volunteers, government officials, aid workers, journalists, photographers, academics, students and religious groups.

There was a small but noticeable group of cultural tourists and artefact collectors from Europe and the United States, who brought a personal sense of uneasiness to the vibrant atmosphere of the Festival. Crowds of more than 20,000 visited the main Festival village each day, with so many travelling to Honiara from other parts of the island that its population during the two-week Festival increased from

90,000 to 110,000.11 Large domestic numbers were also recorded at satellite venues, assisted by the declaration of public holidays in, for example, Western Province so that people could attend in Gizo and Saeraghi. While the ban on admission fees meant that the Festival was unable to recoup its mounting costs, it did enable thousands of domestic visitors to attend. People under the age of 18 made up a high percentage of the crowd, with the Festival coinciding with school holidays to secure a large youth presence. Yet despite all this, many Solomon Islanders were still excluded from the Festival. Concentrated in Honiara, the Festival’s hub was

9 Solomon Star, “Visitors Should Be Made to Taste Malaita: Dausabea.” 10 Solomon Island National Festival Organising Committee, “11th Festival of Pacific Arts: Official Closing Programme,” 5. 11 Solomon Island National Festival Organising Committee, 5.

286 inaccessible due to high transportation costs or just a lack of any transportation at all. Similarly, satellite venues were in urban centres which rural people could not easily reach. Disparities in access to the Festival were seen to reflect broader social inequalities associated with the past conflict and RAMSI’s inability to resolve them.

The Festival was most accessible through the sights and sounds of local television, radio, newspaper and Internet. Solomon Islands Broadcasting

Corporation’s public radio services offered the most comprehensive daily accounts of the Festival, while One Television Solomon Islands broadcast daily highlights; yet even media access was restricted by limited radio and television signals throughout Solomon Islands. Similarly the Solomon Star and Island Sun newspapers provided daily commentary yet with limited distribution. The Internet is also restricted in reach and access throughout Solomon Islands, and many Pacific countries and territories, but this was the first FOPA where the Internet, particularly social media networks such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and personal online blogs, played a vital role in the distribution and exchange of information and experiences, connecting the Festival to its largest external audience. The Festival’s official website also provided a live stream of the events on the Pasifika and Lakeside stages at the main Festival village.

Economic problems plagued much of the event, affecting local organisers, contractors and participants. The National Festival Organising Committee did its best to screen the majority of controversies from the public spotlight during the

Festival, but national media ensured that grievances were circulated. Satellite venues were most affected by mismanagement and lack of funds, and satellite hosts threatened boycotts throughout the Festival. One week before the Festival was due to open, the Auki Festival committee announced they were cancelling festivities at the purpose-built Forest Lakes Festival village because the National Festival

287 Organising Committee had failed to pay them $SI 6 million; an emergency cabinet meeting released $SI 2.5 million just days before the opening of the Festival in order to stop threats by unpaid construction workers, including the burning down of the Festival site.12 In the event, the Auki site did not open until the second week of the Festival and ran for only four days. The satellite venue at Tulagi in Central

Province also threatened to close after the first week because it could no longer provide food for its large contingent of local performers. Central Province received the lowest funding ($SI 600,000) and was left thousands of dollars in debt after promised additional funds of $SI 400,000 for catering costs did not eventuate.13 At a participant level, three panpipe groups Hiona, Waru and Inamuri from Are’Are region in Malaita province, refused to play at the Opening Ceremony because they had not received 50% of their total pay as agreed with the National Festival

Organising Committee, nor, in the three weeks they had been in Honiara for rehearsals, had they been assisted with food or accommodation costs (only with transport).14

Financial fallout from the Festival continued after the closing ceremony with both contractors and performers voicing frustration at outstanding debts; up to thirteen businesses and individuals staged protests in early August outside the

National Festival Organising Committee office in Honiara. With a complete lack of transparency from the Government about how Festival money was being received and expended, Sogavare, former Prime Minister and now opposition member for the East Choiseul, expressed concern about the government decision to pay each of its parliamentarians $SI 100,000 (a total of $SI 5 million) to use personally in assisting their respective constituents participating in the Festival; he specifically

12 Palmer, “Auki FOPA Venue Gets Green Light.” 13 Kakai, “We Still Need the Money: Zimbo.” 14 Mamu, “Panpipers May Boycott.”

288 wanted answers on the lack of accountability of the money spent, and why it was being taken from the Chinese-funded Millennium Development Fund and not the allocated Festival funds.15 In August the Solomon Island opposition demanded that the government convene Parliament to discuss how it was going to pay Festival debts.16

Many workers were still left unpaid at the end of 2012, sparking continual protests and work strikes. Over 300 health workers boycotted their employment duties in December 2012, after the government’s refusal to pay their duty allowances of more than $SI 1 million. Similarly, contractors, shell money decorators, security personnel, landscapers and caterers all held protests in front of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s building the same month, demanding a total payment of close to $SI 16 million in unpaid wages. On Tuesday 19 December 2012 upset workers threatened to destroy and burn down the Ministry of Culture and

Tourism’s office, drawing a quick response by the Solomon Island Police.17

Despite these challenges, artists, visitors and administrators alike hailed the

11th FOPA as an overwhelming success: aesthetically it showcased a bold and bright

Solomon Islands. While the social impacts on nation and region building are much harder to quantify, the Festival was defined by the enthusiasm and participation of its population; never before has a FOPA been attended and supported by a host country on the scale that the Solomon Islands delivered. Similarly the Festival will be remembered for the magnitude of its production: it accelerated FOPA towards a more western-styled festival; the perceived benefits of such a move will be debated into the future. The infrastructural benefits post-Festival are too difficult to quantify. Improvement of roads, street lighting and the general beautification of

15 Solomon Star, “Sogavare Slams $5m Advance.” 16 Palmer, “Third Call For Parliament Meeting.” 17 Marau, “FOPA Workers Turn on Ministry of Tourism Over Unpaid Bills.”

289 Honiara Township were expected to galvanise Solomon Islands’ non-existent tourism industry. While the Festival’s village was dismantled after FOPA, to the dismay of many who thought it could be maintained and used to attract similar events in the future, remaining satellite venues in Doma and Auki offered hope that the performance infrastructure created for the Festival could be turned into future tourism opportunities, if the Solomon Island government provided assistance. No official tourism data has been released post-Festival by the Solomon

Islands government or SPC/CPAC to verify the extent to which such opportunities have been realised. As far as the Solomon Island cultural industry is concerned, the

Festival provided momentum in bringing its arts to the national, regional and world stage. Most importantly, such a level of national attention required the

Solomon Island government to maintain and increase support for cultural industries into the future. While there are many inside the Solomon Island arts community who are still yet to see tangible benefits from government promises made, at the very least FOPA has enabled local artistic networks to expand and strengthen considerably.

290 6: Australia and FOPA 2012

Australia has had a strong engagement with FOPA, participating in each Festival since its inception in 1972 and hosting the event in 1988 in Townsville, Queensland, as part of Australia’s Bicentennial celebrations. Its location in the heart of the sugar industry was a symbolic acknowledgement of Australia’s cultural connection to the

Pacific by way of its Australian South Sea Island communities. Australia’s FOPA delegation is managed by the Australia Council for the Arts (Australia Council), the principal arts funding and advisory body of the Australian government. Apart from early constructions of bi-cultural delegations – for example, the inclusion of the

Sydney-based Old Tote Theatre Company as part of the 1972 delegation and Circus

Oz in 1980 – Australia Council takes the view that Australia’s participation at FOPA is solely an indigenous (Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander) representation of Australian culture and art. For the 1988 Festival all members of the Board of Directors of the FOPA Advisory Committee were indigenous;1 the

Festival is one of few official spaces where Australia is represented only by indigenous people. The Australian External Territory of Norfolk Island sends an independent delegation to FOPA, reflective of its status as a CPAC member in its own right.

Australia sent a delegation of 50 participants to the 2012 FOPA, the largest number ever to represent Australia at the Festival (43 attended the previous

Festival in America Samoa in 2008). 35 identified as Aboriginal Australian and 13 as

Torres Strait Islander; 32 were male and 18 female. The delegation was put together by Australia Council’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board, with cultural and artistic leadership from its chair, Narungga, Wirangu and Wotjobaluk woman, Lee-Ann Buckskin; Torres Strait Island Board representative Leo Akee;

1 Cochrane Simons, "The Fifth Festival of Pacific Arts," 300.

291 and Executive Director of the Australia Council Aboriginal and Torres Strait

Islander Arts Division, and woman Lydia Miller. A curatorial consortium consisting of prominent Aboriginal Australian artists and curators,

Marilyn Miller, , and Nadine McDonald-Dowd, was selected in partnership with the Queensland Theatre Company to curate the artistic and cultural composition of the delegation. As an official Australian government representation, political leadership at the Festival was from the

Australian Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Affairs, Richard Marles.

Sponsorship was provided mainly by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, with all State Governments acting as partners along with the Torres

Strait Regional Authority (TSRA), the Torres Strait Island funding arm of the

Australian Federal Government.

While anchoring its identification to the “oldest living culture in the world”, a title specifically privileging the Aboriginal Australian contingent of the delegation and one that has the respect of indigenous peers throughout the Pacific region, the 2012 Australian delegation did not wish to fit preconceived notions of

Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Island culture and art as traditional or static. Its objectives for two weeks in the Solomon Islands, Buckskin asserted, were to raise an international awareness of the “strength, vibrancy and dynamism of

Indigenous culture”.2 In the lead up to the Festival, delegation curator Vernon Ah

Kee affirmed in the 2012 Autumn edition of Australia Council’s magazine Arts Yarn

Up that it was important to construct a delegation that valued but was not limited to more traditional forms of culture. “Australia is a first-world country and most of us live technological lives,” Ah Kee stated. “Our art demonstrates that reality

2 Buckskin quoted in Australia Council, “Solomon Islands 2012 Festival of Pacific Arts: Australian Delegation Programme,” 3.

292 alongside our traditional roots”.3 Such objectives matched broader recommendations made by the SPC-sponsored independent evaluation of the

Festival in 2010, emphasising the need for contemporary arts “to be promoted and implemented into the program to reflect the increasing dynamism of the region”.4

The curatorial team sought to select a delegation that expressed depth and diversity in artistic practice but, as fellow curator and Kuku Yalanji and Waanyi woman Marilyn Miller stated, also illuminated “regional difference” not only between Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, but also within the respective cultural groups.5

Giving itself the best chance of achieving such objectives, Australia sent one of the most artistically diverse, professional and well-funded delegations in the

Festival’s 40-year history. Reflecting the diverse communities and artistic practices throughout Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait Islands, the delegation’s performing artists comprised Aboriginal dance troupe Yuggera; the internationally acclaimed Chooky Dancers of ; Tjupi Band of , led by Sammy Butcher, founding member of influential 1980s Australian country/rock group the Warumpi Band; Torres Strait Island’s Arpaka Dance

Company (consisting of twelve of the thirteen Torres Strait artists representing

Australia at the Festival); dance, song and storyteller Gamillaroi man

Dhinawan; leading Australian country singer/songwriter Noonuccal and Goenpul man Adam James; and pop, jazz and folk songstress woman Jess Beck.

Joining Beck were two members of her band, bass player Curtis Argent and guitarist James McKendry; selected under Beck’s application, Argent and

McKendry were the only non-indigenous participants in the Australian delegation.

3 Ah Kee quoted in Arts Yarn Up, “11th Festival of Pacific Arts: Traditional Meets Contemporary,” 3. 4 Leahy, Yeap-Holiday, and Pennington, “Evaluation of the Festival of Pacific Arts,” 10. 5 Marilyn Miller, personal interview, Honiara, Solomon Islands, 11 July 2012.

293 Australia’s visual artists were equally diverse: leading glass artists, Arrernte woman Jenni Kemarre Martiniello (also an award-winning writer and poet and attending her second FOPA) and woman Lyndy Delian; multi-skilled

East Arrernte artist Peter Sharrock; Tiwi Design represented by Douglas

Warlapinni, Gordon Pupangamirri, Maria Josette Orsto and Romolo Tipiloura; sisters Glenda Nicholls (feather crafter) and Marilyne Nicholls (weaver) from Swan

Hill, Victoria; sculpture and installation artist Vicky West, a Trawulwuy woman from Tasmania; filmmakers Maramanindji woman Penny Smallacombe and Yaegl woman Pauline Clague; digital artist Jenny Fraser, a descendent of the Yugembeh clan of the Bundjalung Nation; and photographer Wayne Quilliam. The sole

Torres Strait Island visual artist was multi-medium artist (painting, printmaking, collage, sculpture and carving) Ait-Koedal and Dhoeybaw woman, Sharon

Phineasa.

Enhanced state support allowed the sending of an equally high calibre management and support team which along with Australia’s heads of delegation and curatorial team already mentioned included a Festival coordinator (Eliorah

Malifa), project coordinator/tour manager (Sophia Sourris), production manager

(Mick Jessop), digital content coordinator (Rowena Taylor) and medical officer

(Elizabeth Elliot); delegation members such as the Tjupi Band and Tiwi Design brought additional personal management. There were three members from

Australia Council’s Emerging Indigenous Mentorship Program (EIPM): Gudjala woman Lara Croydon; woman Lydia Fairhall; and Dharug woman Louana

Sainsbury. All worked closely under the guidance of the head of Indigenous programming at the Sydney Opera House, Bundjalung woman Rhoda Roberts, and

Market Development and Indigenous Program Officer at Australia Council,

Wiradjuri woman Merindah Donnelly. The aim of the mentorship was to develop

294 new skills and knowledge in festival production through balancing cultural integrity with the demands of the market, with each emerging producer to contribute regularly to the delegation website, providing daily blogs featuring personal insights and interviews with the Australian delegation throughout the event.6 Australia’s digital presence comprised curated iPads connected to the internet, displaying content from Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Island delegates as well as broader Indigenous Australian organisations and individuals;

Australia was the only delegation to embrace new technology and provide digital access and information to local and international audiences.

Selected artists were encouraged to speak to the Festival theme of “Culture in Harmony with Nature” through their artistic practice. One artist who skilfully brought the theme to life is Vicky West, whose sculpture and installation pieces use a range of natural materials including kelp and natural plant fibres. In discussing her connection to and use of kelp (only kelp washed up on shore, never directly harvested from the natural resource), West states:

My relationship with kelp is a continuation of my ancestors’

traditional cultural practices . . . The old people created water

carriers from the kelp - these vessels played an essential role in the

survival of Tasmanian Aboriginal people and culture over thousands

of year . . . kelp for me is a metaphor for survival, it is a precious

cultural resource, and its environment is under threat due to global

warming and other environmental threats. The decline of kelp

forests, as with land forests, is a mirror of the larger global situation

which ultimately places all of our survival in question.7

6 Donnelly, “Welcome to the Blog from Australia Council’s Indigenous Program Officer.” 7 West, “Latitude, Where Science and Culture Meet.”

295 The works of Glenda and Marilyne Nicholls, which also utilised materials from the natural environment (Glenda, bird feathers and Marilyne, the fibres of fresh water plants) exhibited a similar aesthetic.

On arrival in the Solomon Islands the Australian delegation demonstrated their commitment to immersion and reciprocation with fellow participating artists, and also the Solomon Island communities on whose land the delegation had been invited to perform and exhibit. Beyond artistic and cultural exchange, it encouraged dialogue on shared social and political issues affecting indigenous peoples in the Pacific, both within and outside formal performance and exhibition spaces.8 The official Opening Ceremony set the tone for the Australian delegation’s engagement with Solomon Islands’ peoples throughout the Festival, when it gifted the Aboriginal Morning Star Pole and the Torres Strait Island Dhari (headdress) to the Solomon Islands’ government in front of 20,000 people at Honiara’s Lawson

Tama Stadium. In the brief address to official delegates, fellow participants and the crowd, there was particular emphasis on the genealogy of Torres Strait Island

Arpaka Dance Company member Francis Solomon, who was linked to the

Solomon Island province of Malaita through his Australian South Sea Island ancestry; this established connections on which both cultural groups could build over the two-week Festival. The assertion of kinship through shared genealogy, indigeneity and colonial histories took on a special importance for a delegation such as Australia’s, comprised mostly of Aboriginal Australians who do not fit within cultural categories typically defined as “Pacific” (Melanesian, Micronesian and Polynesian) and Torres Strait Islanders who are genetically Melanesian but experience a unique ambivalence in their Pacific identifications. Previous

Australian delegations, such as the 2008 team that travelled to Pago Pago in

8 Australia Council, “Media Release: Record Delegation of Indigenous Artists for FOPA.”

296 America Samoa, have acknowledged the awkwardness of their participation, with the group’s “uniqueness” in a Pacific context feeling at times both special and isolating.9

Language played a crucial part throughout the Festival in affirming

Australia’s connections not only with the Solomon Islands but also with those participating in the Festival from throughout the Pacific. Australian management and artists constantly referred to “brothers and sisters”, in Australian FOPA press releases, delegation programs, formal speeches and informal conversations. Such language marked a sharp disjunction from the less than fraternal political rhetoric often used between Australia and its Pacific neighbours, particularly in Solomon

Islands where terms such as “failed state”, “terrorism” and “our patch” had become synonymous with Australian imaginings of the country. In many ways the

Festival’s formal and informal language use enacted a response to the seminal works of pre-eminent Pacific artists and scholars, Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau’ofa, who in constructively and creatively re-imagining the region call from an island perspective for more engagement with and inclusion of “our oppressed aboriginal brothers in Australia”.10 Similarly, references were commonly made by Australian artists to belonging to an “island” nation; Aboriginal Australian performers in particular often referred to themselves as representing the “Big Island” or the

“largest island in the Pacific”. Nowhere was this asserted more strongly than during the delegation’s “Australia Presents” showcase, held in front of a crowd of thousands at the Festival’s conclusion. With the entire delegation on stage, the group finished their collaborative one-hour set with a version of the Warumpi

Band’s “”. The audience’s familiarity with and positive reception of the song emphasised not only the importance placed by the Solomon Islands and

9 Moylan-Coombs and Tamou, “Festival of Pacific Arts.” 10 Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania,” 57; Hau’ofa, “The Ocean in Us,” 401.

297 the Pacific more broadly on an “island identity”, but also challenged conventional imaginings of Australia that traditionally view it as an arid continental landmass where its indigenous populations live “”.

It is worth digressing for a moment to consider the complex and contested symbolics of this song. “My Island Home” was written in 1985 by Neil Murray (the only white Australian member of the Warumpi Band) to capture the life experience

0f fellow band member George Burarrwanga who had moved from Elcho Island off the Arnhem Land coast to Papunya in the central desert. The song remained relatively unknown until it was recorded in 1995 by , a former backing singer for the Warumpi Band and of Torres Strait Islander ancestry, who had made her life and career in Sydney. Anu was invited to perform the song at the

Sydney 2000 Olympics Closing Ceremony, but on this occasion it had a new verse referencing Australia as the “island home” and dropping the personal pronoun

“My” from the title. It is in this version and with these sentiments, as patriotic nostalgia for a unified Australian homeland, appropriated from the Torres Strait islands and from Indigenous Australians, that the song has become immensely popular in the mainstream. George Burarrwanga attempted to return the song to

Elcho Island by recording it for his 2000 solo album Nerbu, sung in Gamatj and retitled Ronu Wanga. It also has a Pacific version, having been performed in 1988 by

Tahitian musicians Bobby & Angelo with some lyrics translated into Tahitian (reo

Tahiti).11 Consciously or not, the Australian delegation’s performance of “My Island

Home” at the end of FOPA recalled the 2000 Olympics Closing Ceremony with its complex intermixture of official meaning and creative expression; it also focused the ambivalence over whose “island home” was being celebrated, an issue very much in the air over the whole Festival.

11 Stratton, “Whose Home; Which Island?: Displacement and Identity in ‘My Island Home.’”

298 More personal kinships between the Australian delegation and the

Solomon Islands’ participants and public were forged through revisiting shared colonial histories. Of particular interest were histories connected to pre-and-post-

Australian Federation policies on the Australian-Pacific indentured labour trade and the strong alliances, including inter-marriage, that emerged as a result between

Aboriginal Australian, Torres Strait Island and Australian South Sea Island communities (nearly one third of whom are of Solomon Island heritage). Such links were strongly emphasised through the story of Torres Strait Island Arpaka Dance

Company member Francis Solomon, first highlighted at the Opening Ceremony and reiterated by Australian delegation support member and blog writer Merindah

Donnelly.12 The Festival allowed Solomon to retrace the footsteps of his grandfather, Sam Solomon, who 150 years ago had left his home of in the Province of Malaita on board an indentured-labour-recruiting ship, went to work on mainland Queensland’s sugar fields and then relocated to the

Torres Strait Island of Mua and married a Torres Strait Islander woman. The surname “Solomon”, Francis stated, was given to Sam when he arrived in

Queensland, in reference to his cultural heritage. In retelling Solomon’s family histories and his journey as the first member of his Torres Strait Island family to visit their ancestral home of Langa Langa lagoon, Donnelly emphasises shared injustices committed against indigenous peoples of Australia, Solomon Islands and the Pacific more broadly, but also their collective resilience. Donnelly writes:

Whether it’s through similar oppressive colonial struggles, trade, the

tradition of sea faring and navigation, the stomps of our feet as we

dance or the chants of our stories – there is a Pacific Islander

people’s connection that is beyond our conscious capacity to

12 Donnelly, “Arpaka - The Dawning of a New Day.”

299 understand. Once glimpsed it results in a feeling of unity and

belonging immemorial.13

Such stories and language were most effective in disrupting the negative impression of Australia imprinted on the people of the Solomon Islands by RAMSI.

Positive engagement was notable as crowds supported the Australian delegation en masse: daily activities at Australia’s Festival and group performances on the

Festival’s main stages in Honiara and at the satellite venues were some of the best attended and received of the whole Festival. The Tjupi Band’s headline performance on the evening of Friday 6 July 2012 attracted arguably the largest crowd for a single performance at the Festival, with an estimated 10,000 people.

Performing their own distinctive form of “new wave” desert reggae,14 singing in both Luritja and English, the band became instant audience favourites, as they reasserted the significance of reggae music in a global Black culture, linking their homeland in the Central Australian desert to the salt waters of Guadalcanal where they were guests. The one-hour performance drew Marley-esque hysteria in a uniquely Solomon Island way, hypnotising a crowd seated with little movement but an intensity of observation and voice: the central Australian desert became the centre of the Pacific that evening.

In some instances the active engagement of Solomon Island peoples with

Australian delegation artists brought new meanings to their works. Peter Sharrock illustrated this through his retelling of an afternoon during the second week of the

Festival spent constructing a sand sculpture: “I did a sand sculpture with a turtle in it and I was talking to the locals, and from what the locals were saying and believe the turtle actually comes from Australia to the islands and then back to Australia,

13 Donnelly. 14 Australia Council, “Solomon Islands 2012 Festival of Pacific Arts: Australian Delegation Programme,” 14.

300 so it’s a shared animal, they connected with [the sculpture].”15 Similarly Australian delegation curator Marilyn Miller emphasised the importance that support and recognition by Solomon Islanders had on the group individually and collectively:

I was talking to a local Solomon Islander here on the road when he

asked where I was from, I said Australia, and he said Aboriginal? I

said yeah, our whole delegation is Aboriginal. He said we are very

pleased to have Aboriginals here because we recognise you are the

traditional custodians, you are the first people. So I think specifically

for our close neighbours there is that understanding as Aboriginal

Australians, we are the first people, for us we are the oldest culture

in the world, and here with our close neighbours there is recognition

and appreciation of that.16

These examples are all the more significant because such responses were not automatic; people who did not know about the Indigenous composition of the delegation initially expressed disapproval of Australia’s involvement. This was manifest at the Opening Ceremony when Australia was greeted with applause, but also pockets of boos and mocking of RAMSI. For the delegation on the field the applause drowned the opposition, but it was clear to hear for those perched high on the stadium’s southern hill and terraces. The dissent was awkward and uncomfortable to witness, but it was not an orchestrated protest at the Aboriginal

Australian and Torres Strait Islander artists participating in the Festival. Rather it was an unrehearsed and automatic response to “Australia”, a word that for many

Solomon Island people has very specific connections to the political policies of

RAMSI – a position confirmed by those Solomon Island people I engaged with during the Festival.

15 Peter Sharrock, personal interview, Honiara, Solomon Islands, 12 July 2012. 16 Marilyn Miller, personal interview, Honiara, Solomon Islands, 11 July 2012.

301 There was a similar response at the Opening Ceremony to the indigenous delegation representing Taiwan whose political engagements in Solomon Islands, like those of Australia, evoke disquiet. Joining local critiques of the Taiwanese presence at FOPA was Sea Shepherd, an international, non-for-profit, marine wildlife conservation organisation, present at the Festival. A spokesperson for Sea

Shepherd wrote on the Taiwanese delegation:

Despite the distance, the Taiwanese are no strangers to the Solomon

Islands, or the Pacific region in general. As a matter of fact, upon our

arrival here we encountered three Taiwanese long liners anchored

right outside of Honiara Port. Strangely the Taiwanese delegation

present themselves as native people of the Pacific. More ironic, the

Taiwanese are some of the largest consumers of shark fin soup and

also one of the biggest shark finning groups, despite the fact that

shark finning was banned in Taiwanese waters as of last year.

Taiwan is able to remain involved in the fin industry by placing their

long liners in several Pacific nations, like those we encountered

when we first arrived . . .17

While these comments appropriately highlight the adverse effects Taiwan has had on Solomon Island and Pacific fishing stocks, they fail to understand that the

Taiwanese delegation was an indigenous cultural representation of Taiwan with strong genealogical links to indigenous peoples throughout the Pacific; and one composed of people who, while representing the “nation”, are marginalised by the

Taiwanese state.

Of course the Australian delegation to FOPA was an official representation of the Australian government: for example, it performed at a private event hosted

17 Sea Shepherd, “The Pacific Arts Festival Opens With a Focus on the Environment.”

302 by the Australian High Commissioner to Solomon Islands, Matt Anderson. But unexpectedly, the 2012 Festival was able to provide an alternative space outside the governmental for a freer Solomon Island understanding of Australian identity and significance. Across the Festival both the artists and officials of the Australian delegation offered a tacit challenge to the locals’ informed and persuasive yet highly partial understanding of Australia. For Solomon Islanders who had suffered nine years of RAMSI-led governance, Australia was a post-colonial, pro-American global power. As the Festival built on old connections and established new alliances Australia was brought into a different focus as a political power within the

Pacific, with a strong indigenous culture and enduring Pacific relationships.

303 7: Indigeneity and Pacific Identity

Yet for all the productive disruption and re-imagining of both Australia and

Australian indigeneity that the 2012 Festival was able to facilitate, re-presentation was constrained by time, reach, and more significantly, the scope of representation.

The most pertinent limitation for the purposes of my argument here was the official Australian government decision not to allow members of Australia’s Pacific arts community to participate in Australia’s official delegation. While acknowledging the complexities and sensitivities surrounding Australian

Indigenous cultural politics and representation in Australia, I contend that in the case of the Solomon Island FOPA, the decision to exclude Australian-Pacific artists from the delegation limited the scope and dynamism of Australia’s Pacific cultural and artistic representation, while dismantling the Festival’s capacity to cultivate any meaningful sense of a regional identity and voice. Influential political decisions about how Australia represents itself to the region are not confined to the governmental sphere, as RAMSI illustrates, but also affect Australia’s cultural representation. While Solomon Islanders’ enthusiasm for Australia’s FOPA delegation allowed them to reach a different view of the country than that afforded them by RAMSI, from an analytic perspective the similarities may be more apparent than the differences. Both RAMSI and the Festival are instruments of

Australian governmental policy, with their agenda and funding set by the government of the day. This is not to say that the Australian delegation participants were agents of government, far from it. Their artistic performances and practices belong to themselves and their communities; but the fact that they receive public funding and government endorsement begs an interpretation and analysis attentive to the way the delegation might unwittingly advance a politics of

Australian-Pacific relations with a longer history. Here I am trying to explore the

304 vexed question of representation and control; whose meanings are being presented, and how do the spheres of politics and culture interact?

Australia’s Pacific community (including Australian South Sea Islanders) made repeated requests through letters, emails and phone calls to the Australian

Minister for the Arts, Simon Crean, the Australia Council and its Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Arts Board, CPAC and the SPC for official inclusion in FOPA.

The Australia Council’s continued and considered refusal shows that such decisions are not made accidentally or incidentally, but can be traced to the ways in which Australia constructs the cultural component of its national symbolism.

While Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders were for a long time excluded from the national imaginary, today Indigenous Australia is vital to its construction. On the other hand, Australia’s growing Pacific communities are not thought to be integral to representations of Australian culture, despite their increased social visibility; ironically, they are excluded from participation as

Australians even in a “Pacific” festival.

Disrupting the official Australian government position and reflecting a more open stance to Festival participation, the Solomon Islands’ National Festival

Organising Committee decided to invite Australian-Pacific artists Amie Batalibasi and Lisa Hilli to participate at FOPA not as official delegates but as special guests of the Festival. Before the Festival they had both been active on behalf of Australia’s

Pacific communities in requests for inclusion in the Festival. The only other non- official-delegation special guests invited by the National Festival Organising

Committee were two Japanese artists: keyboardist and composer Junichi

Matsumoto and dancer Mos Mao Arcata. They had been invited only one month before FOPA began, following the visit of Solomon Island Prime Minister Gordon

Darcy Lilo to Japan for the 6th Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting (PALM6). The

305 Japanese government had recently funded the new $SI 80 million Auki market and jetty project, whose facilities were opened and used during the Festival; it was the biggest project in Malaita since independence.1

Batalibasi, a Melbourne-based filmmaker of Solomon Island heritage, produces documentary films that emphasise storytelling about human rights, social justice issues and cultural diversity; she also shares her film-making skills with diverse communities (recent migrant, refugee and Aboriginal Australian) through community-based workshops enabling people at a grassroots level to tell their own stories through film. Born in Australia, Batalibasi grew up in the rural Queensland town of Rockhampton where her father was a migrant from the Solomon Island village of Lilisiana in Auki on the island of Malaita. Batalibasi also has strong links to the Australian South Sea Island community, as two of her great grandfather’s brothers were brought to Queensland as indentured labourers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her most acclaimed short documentary films produced prior to the Festival included The Game (2007), Made in Australia

(2007), In the Driver’s Seat (2008), Tides of Change (2010), Pacific Stories (2011), and

Pacific Stories – Harmony on the Murray (2012).

Visual artist Papua New Guinean-born Lisa Hilli creates works of art that span media such as photography, video art installation, filmmaking and weaving.

Using her arts practices to gain knowledge about Pacific cultural histories and customs, as well as explore the complexity of diasporic identity, Hilli interprets what she inherits through contemporary culture and materials. Born to a Papua

New Guinea mother and European father in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea in 1979,

Hilli came to Australia at the age of two with her family and went to school in

Brisbane before moving to Melbourne at the age of 19 to pursue an art career. Her

1 Kakai, “Auki Market Opens for Vendors Today.”

306 most acclaimed works before FOPA include the photographic series Familiar Yet

Unfamiliar (2005), Afrophobia (2007) and the multilayered video installation Just Like

Home (2010). Hilli worked with Batalibasi on the first Pacific Stories community film project in 2011 and is also a co-facilitator and founding member of the Pacific

Women’s Weaving Circle (PWWC), an initiative of local Melbourne Pacific artists to provide a forum for artistic collaboration, community connection and an avenue to reconnect with traditional arts and crafts within a supported environment.

Central to Batalibasi and Hilli’s invitation by the Solomon Island National

Festival Organising Committee was their involvement in a collaborative film project titled Wantok Stori, aimed at connecting Pacific communities in the

Australian state of Victoria with young people in the Solomon Islands through community discussion and film training. Supported by Solomon Islands Ministry of Culture, One Television Solomon Islands, Solomon Islands Victorian

Association, Multicultural Arts Victoria and Youthworx, funding for Batalibasi and

Hilli’s participation came from Australia Council, Solomon Islands Ministry of

Youth, RAMSI and community and individual contributors. Using social media website Facebook, Batalibasi and Hilli hosted online discussions exploring the

Festival theme – “Culture in Harmony with Nature” – and what it meant to Pacific

Island youth in Victoria, Australia and in the Solomon Islands. Ideas and issues that were raised included globalisation, identity, diversity, climate change, social change, relationships between generations, Kastom and tradition, knowledge systems, respect and social relations; they were explored through multiple media such as poetry, song, visual art and story. Following online discussions Batalibasi and Hilli selected a group of Solomon Islands-based youth interested in film- making, and travelled to the Solomon Islands in April 2012 to teach film and help create a short film incorporating the Festival’s theme. Within two weeks the young

307 Solomon Island film enthusiasts learnt basic filmmaking skills through the mentorship of Batalibasi and Hilli and created the short film “Wea Nao Mi?”, exploring social and cultural change in Solomon Islands. Premiering at the FOPA

Film Festival, it received a great reception from the Solomon Island public and abroad; after the Festival it was launched online with educational resources so it could be used in schools and communities. It is not too much to say that this project helped kickstart a virtually non-existent national film industry.

Batalibasi and Hilli also showcased their other works at the Festival. In addition to a screening of their collaborative 2011 Pacific Stories community film project, Batalibasi screened her award-winning short Tide of Change (2010), which documents her family’s village of Lilisiana on the island of Malaita and the impacts of rising sea levels on her community and the inevitable future challenges. In an extension of her work with the Pacific Women’s Weaving circle, Hilli delivered two weaving workshops to Solomon Island women graduates of Sistas Saave, a New

Zealand-funded program designed to empower and re-imagine the lives of young

Solomon Island women through informal education opportunities aimed at developing skills so they can earn income, acquire leadership and gain knowledge in reproductive health and parenting. Specifically focusing on the coiling weave, a style of weaving taught to Hilli on a visit to Elcho Island by Aboriginal Australian

Master Weaver, woman Mavis Ganambarr, Hilli taught the women to make earrings and necklaces. These workshops operated outside the official Festival program.

Yet despite their involvement in the film component of FOPA and Festival activities more broadly, both artists stated that while they came away empowered and respected by their peers, their experiences were diminished by the lack of

308 official Australian recognition and the inability of other Australian Pacific artists to encounter what they had over the two-week period. Hilli states:

In terms of my own personal experience it was an emotional blow

for me because I was there working with Solomon Islanders,

basically planting the seed for a film industry in Solomon Islands,

because they don’t have one, they don’t have any arts funding for

education, no film, no photography, nothing . . . it was such a

moment of pride but also so sad. It was like yes, this is what I have

missed out on, all this cultural practice in the Festival, it was

incredible, it was so overwhelming . . . at the same time I was just a

nobody . . . I was constantly asked at the Festival where I was from, it

was like oh ok, you must be from the Australian delegation? But

actually I wasn’t, I was kind of walking around the Festival where I

presented a film with young people but wasn’t actually recognised as

an artist of Papua New Guinea or Australia. I was kind of in this no

man’s land.2

Post Festival, Batalibasi and Hilli continued to push the issue of exclusion as bigger than just their individual right to go to the Festival and exhibit; they saw it as part of a broader platform campaigning for Pacific representation, and protesting its silencing from an official Australian governmental position. This motivated their decision, made along with other Australian Pacific artists ineligible to travel to the Solomon Islands and participate at the Festival, to use the 2012 Australian

World Music Expo (AWME) held annually in Melbourne to articulate their frustrations and outline future possibilities. The one-hour forum on the issue comprised a panel of Hilli, Australian-born Samoan and Native American Mexican

2 Lisa Hilli, personal interview, Honiara, Solomon Islands, 7 July 2012.

309 artist Lia Pa’apa’a, Australian-born Samoan musician Charles Wall aka Bobby Alu,

Samoan-born designer and arts co-ordinator of Melbourne’s Blak Dot Gallery,

Jacob Tolo and New Zealand-born Samoan vocalist, poet and spoken word performer Grace Vanilau. Rejection by the 2012 FOPA was seen to reflect what K.

Teaiwa describes as Australia’s continual failure to recognise a Pacific population

“visibly contributing to the expansion and diversity of Australian popular culture.”3

Such a view too often places the Pacific as “out there” in Australia’s “backyard”, not as part of the imagined nation. In his AWME address on the Festival snub, Tolo affirms this:

We are living in a culture that is raising a generation of Pacific

Islanders who feel kind of lost at the moment and they’re coming up

against institutions that have no labels for them. We’re trying to

break these down, I think it came to a head when FOPA didn’t invite

us . . . I think a lot of us see FOPA as this amazing place where we can

make cultural exchanges and make a difference and meet other

artists, traditional and contemporary, and I think we are missing out

on a lot of that, I think that is what we are fighting for.4

Yet despite the growing mobilisation of Australian Pacific artists with a commitment to inclusion in future FOPAs, decisions on what possible representation may look like are still in their infancy; proposals raised by artists include the possibility of plural or diverse representation under one Australian banner; separate Australian Pacific and Indigenous Australian delegations; a distinct Australian South Sea Islander delegation; and or even representation of

Pacific country or territory of cultural heritage. Batalibasi states:

3 Teaiwa, “Ignorance Is Rife about Islander Australians.” 4 Jacob Tolo, “Music from the Pacific – Panel Discussion” (Australian World Music Expo, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, November 18, 2012).

310 I am very much still deciding how we should be represented at the

Festival in terms of whether it’s together [with Indigenous Australia]

or multiple delegations . . . Feelings around this issue are always

evolving and changing . . . whichever way it happens the most

important thing for me is that Australian Pacific Islander artists can

be included in a way that is respectful to the Indigenous delegation.

In acknowledging the first peoples of Australia we can represent

traditional and contemporary Australian Pacific art and culture

together in solidarity.5

Fellow Australian Pacific artists echo these comments, emphasising that any final decision by Australia Council, CPAC or the SPC must be made in consultation with and endorsed by Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Island communities. Tolo says that “we can’t be taking spaces from Indigenous communities first, and that is what we want to put forward . . . in New Zealand the Pacific Islanders are invited by the Indigenous communities . . . I think that model works well”.6 Yet Hilli contends that it is not as simple as just adopting the New Zealand model, because there is “a completely different cultural dynamic” in Australia.7 While the New Zealand model has been effective in allowing New Zealand Pacific Island artists access to

FOPA, it has not always fostered harmonious relationships between Māori and

Pacific Island peoples within the delegation; the group’s Pacific Island presence at times feels both isolated and marginalised by its much larger Māori contingent (as was conveyed to me informally by a Pacific Island member of a previous New

Zealand FOPA delegation).

5 Amie Batalibasi, personal interview, Honiara, Solomon Islands, 7 July 2012. 6 Jacob Tolo, “Music from the Pacific – Panel Discussion” (Australian World Music Expo, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, November 18, 2012). 7 Lisa Hilli, “Music from the Pacific – Panel Discussion” (Australian World Music Expo, Arts Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, November 18, 2012).

311 Members of the 2012 Australian FOPA delegation formally and informally interviewed for this research have expressed either support for or indifference to including Australia’s Pacific communities in the invitation to future Festivals, but there is still no response from Indigenous Australians at any official level. While the Australian government position is clear and shows no signs of changing, it is still uncertain whether Indigenous Australia will support actively or passively the respectful demand by Australian Pacific people for official inclusion in future

FOPAs. This issue thus remains a test case of what forms of recognition Australian

Pacific peoples as a distinct community are to be granted within the Australian state at the level of governance and within the national imaginary.

This section has dealt with two exemplary forms of Australian engagement in the

Pacific: one top-level, governmental, militaristic, neo-colonial and interventionist; the other cultural, artistic, grassroots, participatory and public. Yet despite their obvious differences both RAMSI and FOPA have much in common and both provide a cause for celebration and a site for resistance, for those directly affected by them and for those able to offer an after-the-fact critique. Most significantly, each reveals deep and continuing contradictions in the ways Australia positions itself in the Pacific and as a Pacific nation. It is clear that Australia’s cultural and artistic representation at FOPA circulated a version of the country as far more than a post-colonial Pacific power; the Festival thus contests conservative political orthodoxies and fosters alternative futures. Nevertheless, even in this relatively open space official Australian policies intervened in the form of the exclusion of

Australian-Pacific artists; this limited the scope and dynamism of Australia’s representation and its inclusive regional voice. Most importantly, however, it brings to light unexpected commonalities between political and cultural

312 engagements in the region. Government policies in both spheres, exercised via

RAMSI and FOPA, demonstrate and enforce particular and limited notions of the

Pacific and Australia’s place within it. My case studies in this section show crucial fractures in notions of “Indigenous” and “Pacific”, or “colonial” and “citizen”, even

“nation” and “region”. Questions of inclusion and representation go to the heart of individual and national identity, which are determined by processes that continually operate and will be continually disrupted, at the level of personal experience and academic critique.

313 – Conclusion –

In Australia, the Pacific Islands community is a key part of our national fabric, making a valuable contribution to our multicultural society. It is one of our proudest boasts that Australia is the, I would say, most successful multicultural nation on earth.1

As I draw this thesis to a close, a new Australian government policy document on the Pacific and Pacific people has been released by current Australian Prime

Minister (who replaced Tony Abbott in September 2015). The

Pacific-specific policy detailed in the November 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper titled “Opportunity Security Strength” is outlined under the broader term “Indo-

Pacific”. Defined as “the region from the eastern Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean connected by Southeast Asia, including India, North Asia and the United States”, the Indo-Pacific (as one political commentator put it) represents a “new way of viewing Australia’s (enlarged) neighbourhood”.2 It develops from the often-used bridging term “Asia-Pacific”, a way in which Australia ensures a foot in both camps.

Yet as T. Teaiwa cautions in a more general context, the coupling of “Asia” and

“Pacific” has too often produced a “highly unreflexive category” that fails to acknowledge the “glaring discrepancies and inequalities between Asia and the

Pacific”. In such imaginings the Pacific has become merely “a vague kind of suffix to Asia, negligible in population size and only significant as space across which

Asian, American, and other rim countries’ trade and power politics can be negotiated”.3 The newer term “Indo-Pacific” leaves the Pacific in an ancillary position, while more closing specifying the regions of Asia to which it is attached, significantly in a way which de-emphasises China, now no longer just a part of Asia but the subject of policy in its own right.

1 Bishop, “Australia in the Pacific.” 2 Earl, “Economic Diplomacy Brief: The First Indo-Pacific Budget Is Really All About China.” 3 Teaiwa, “Specifying Pacific Studies: For or Before an Asia Pacific Studies Agenda,” 118.

314 When it is focused explicitly on the Pacific Islands region, the Foreign

Policy White Paper argues for a “step-change” in Australia’s involvement.

Committed to “more ambitious engagement” that identifies and implements practical responses to economic, security and development challenges in the

Pacific, its three key priorities are:

1. promoting economic cooperation and greater integration within

the Pacific and also with the Australian and New Zealand

economies, including through labour mobility;

2. tackling security challenges, with a focus on maritime issues; and

3. strengthening people-to-people links, skills and leadership.4

The policy specifies the establishment of a Pacific Labour Scheme allowing workers from some Pacific Island countries (restricted to Kiribati, Nauru and

Tuvalu initially) to take up non-seasonal “low and semi-skilled” temporary work in rural and regional Australia for two to three years maximum (in parallel to the already established Seasonal Worker Program); an increase in funding and focus on ensuring that Pacific educational and training institutions “provide the skills and qualifications needed by Australian workers”; the creation of an Australian

Pacific Security College “to deliver security and law enforcement training at the leadership level”; improved capacity of the Australian Federal Police’s Pacific

Police Development Program; and additional investment in climate change and disaster mitigation initiatives. Particular attention is paid to Papua New Guinea: ensuring “a stable and prosperous Papua New Guinea” is designated as “one of

[Australia’s] most important foreign policy objectives”.5 Funding for these policies was allocated in the 2018-2019 Australian Government Budget released in May 2018.

While Australia’s foreign aid budget of $4.2 billion is at its lowest ever proportion

4 Australian Government, “2017 Foreign Policy White Paper: Opportunity Security Strength,” 99. 5 Australian Government, 99-105.

315 of the total budget (0.23%), it allocates its largest ever aid commitment of $1.3 billion to the Pacific region.

The key motivator framing Australia’s commitment to “step up” in the

Pacific is fear of China’s increased economic and strategic engagements in the region that challenge not only its own interests but also those of its closest ally, the

United States; this is central to the decision to cut its aid budget to regions across the world excluding the Pacific. China’s relationship with a number of Pacific

Island countries has grown substantially stronger in recent years, with significant sums of money on loan for infrastructure and other forms of development (some of these projects are detailed in the thesis). Of particular concern is the perceived threat of China forging security ties with Pacific Island nations, thus spreading

Chinese military expansionism beyond the islands and atolls it has recently claimed and militarised in the South China Sea and onto Australia’s “doorstep” in the Southwest Pacific Ocean. There is a great paradox in Australian uneasiness about Chinese expansion, given that the strength of Australia’s economy is so dependent on the growth of China’s. While China’s economic development may be desirable to Australia, its military expansion is not.

This fear of China and the consequent policy of “stepping up” in the region is evidenced in the Australian government influencing the Solomon Islands government to reconsider the deal it had struck in 2016 with the Chinese company

Huawei to build high-speed undersea telecommunications cables between

Solomon Islands and the Australian mainland; in early 2018 the Solomon Islands government granted the contract to the Australian government in partnership with

Australian communications company Vocus. It is argued that Solomon Islands’ change of mind was influenced by senior Australian government officials, including spy chief Nick Warner (the first Special Coordinator of RAMSI), who

316 asserted that the Australian government was unlikely to permit Huawei to connect the cable on the Australian mainland due to its alleged links to the Chinese government (Huawei had previously been prevented by the Australian government from working on the construction of Australia’s National Broadband Network).6 It is estimated that over $100 million has been allocated in the 2018-2019 Australian aid budget for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to help pay for the project, which also includes Papua New Guinea.

Most recently, and following reassurances that it would not allow China to establish a military base on its territory, Vanuatu has also received agreement from the Australian government to consider its request for assistance in building its own high-speed undersea internet cable.7 Other Pacific states which have come into focus in the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper and subsequent budget include

Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu, neighbouring independent nations with large sea territories in the northern Pacific. Aside from these three countries being granted sole access to the Pacific Labour Scheme for its first year, a security memorandum has been signed with Tuvalu and Nauru, who have also been given use of

Australian testing services to improve the quality and reliability of pharmaceuticals; and a diplomatic mission is being constructed on Tuvalu. It could be argued that with United States control over the Micronesian region to the west of these three nations, Australian influence over Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu is useful in widening a strategic shield from China over the Pacific Islands.

These recent developments are worth stressing here because they strongly reinforce the conclusions of this thesis. An intensification of the status quo, the

Pacific policy “step-change” describes a Pacific to which Australia belongs yet

6 Doran and Dziedzic, “Deal to Be Inked for Solomon Islands Undersea Internet Cable Australia Stopped China Building.” 7 Graue, “Federal Government Flags Willingness to Help Vanuatu with High-Speed Undersea Internet Cable.”

317 defines itself against. Confined to foreign policy, Australia’s Pacific discourse continues to be framed not by any meaningful concern for the welfare of the region, its people or their individual countries and territories, nor by Australia’s historical obligations or cultural connections through its own populations. Rather it foregrounds its own national interests (and those of the United States) in both strategic and economic terms. In this imagining the Pacific is an abstract space, highly valued “on a global capitalist map of significance” only for its “between-

Asia-and-America-ness”.8 When policy turns briefly to Pacific peoples inside

Australia via the introduction of a Pacific Labour Scheme, this too is framed by power imbalances and Australian self-interest. Highly regulated conditions define who can enter (i.e. the policy is country-specific and workers’ family members are not included), where they can work and how long they can stay for. In such an approach to Pacific immigration there is repetition (albeit with distinction) that dates back 150 years to the Australian-Pacific indentured labour trade.

In a New Zealand context, Howe makes the argument that historically

“Pakeha New Zealanders never regarded themselves as ‘Islanders’ or as of the region, but as members of a self-constructed, advanced nation-state whose origins and subsequent external interests lay well beyond the Pacific Ocean. New Zealand was thus only incidentally in the Pacific”.9 The debate is out on whether New

Zealand has meaningfully deviated from this position (and in any case it is not in the scope of the thesis); nevertheless (while always careful to keep in mind the distinct differences in context between the two settler-colonial states), I keep returning to Howe’s contention in articulating a summation of Australia’s Pacific worldview past and present. A rhetoric of connection and inclusion is championed

8 Teaiwa, “Militarism, Tourism and the Native: Articulations in Oceania,” 9; Connery, “Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years.” 9 Howe, “Two Worlds?,” 50-51.

318 by the current Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s statement that opens this conclusion: Bishop positions Pacific people in Australia as “a key part of

[Australia’s] national fabric” and a “valuable” contributor to the “most successful multicultural nation on earth”. My work explicitly challenges this claim.

This thesis has studied the Pacific presence within Australia via narratives of historical development and contemporary culture. It contrasts governmental and national discourses of Australia and the Pacific with the lived experiences and opportunities of Australia’s Pacific communities and focuses on sport and art as complex sites of Pacific participation in and exclusion from ideas of “Australia”. As

I stated at the outset, the ambivalent places (real and symbolic) accorded to Pacific peoples within the historical production of an Australian nation and in the imaginary of Australian nationalism reflect and inform Australia’s contradictory engagements with the Pacific region: its self-positioning as both part of and apart from the Pacific. That is why a thorough analysis of Australia’s colonial and neo- colonial histories of control over Pacific lands and peoples is woven through the thesis including the comprehensive case study of Solomon Islands in section three.

Knowledge of Australian foreign policy in the Pacific is pivotal in understanding how Pacific people have come to Australia and the difference in their respective access and status within the nation.

Throughout my analysis I have emphasised the diversity of Pacific people and peoples in Australia and contended that difference in access to and status within Australia is structured by:

• Different historical and contemporary relations between Pacific nations

and Australia;

• The ability to access New Zealand citizenship;

• Legal definitions of indigeneity in Australia (Torres Strait Islanders);

319 • And whether Pacific people living here are Australian-born or not.

I have argued that the experiences of Pacific peoples in Australia are differentiated from those of other migrant communities because of Australia’s colonial and neo- colonial histories of control over Pacific land and people; and Pacific people’s important and unique kinships with Aboriginal Australians. Crucial to my argument whenever appropriate has been a comparative examination of the places occupied by Aboriginal Australians and an articulation of how this has informed the experiences of Pacific people in Australia.

Finally, the thesis has made its argument through close attention to sport and the arts because both are central components of Australian cultural life and public spaces where national identity politics play out in their rawest forms; and both are forums where Pacific people in Australia are most visible. The rugby league field and the arts festival as institutions celebrate Australia’s Pacific engagements and identity; yet on closer analysis both disclose the ambivalence that continually shadows the place of Pacific peoples within the Australian nation. As my case studies have demonstrated, these sites intersect with more formal relations between Pacific peoples and the Australian nation, further laying bare profound and long-standing contradictions in the ways Australia positions itself in the Pacific and as a Pacific nation. The Pacific “in” Australia is a highly under-researched and devalued area of academic inquiry. This thesis has argued for its importance, reinterpreting old and contributing new knowledges urgently needed in the field of

Australian Pacific Studies.

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Unpublished Interviews

Batalibasi, Amie. Interview by Scott Mackay. Tape recording. Honiara, Solomon Islands. 7 July 2012.

338 Hilli, Lisa. Interview by Scott Mackay. Tape recording. Honiara, Solomon Islands. 7 July 2012. Miller, Marilyn. Interview by Scott Mackay. Tape recording. Honiara, Solomon Islands. 11 July 2012. Sharrock, Peter. Interview by Scott Mackay. Tape recording. Honiara, Solomon Islands. 12 July 2012.

339

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Mackay, Scott William

Title: Australia and the Pacific: the ambivalent place of Pacific peoples within contemporary Australia

Date: 2018

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/219354

File Description: Australia and the Pacific: The Ambivalent Place of Pacific Peoples Within Contemporary Australia

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