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Quanchi, Max(1998)Australia’s South Sea Islanders: A Call for Recognition.Journal of The Pacific Society, pp. 3-19.

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Journal of The Pacific Societ,y / October 1998 / No. 80 - 81 (Vol. 21, No. 3 - 4 ) ( 3 ) - 182 -

BY

Queensland Unirrersjty of Technology

A ban on the importation into Australia of inden- tured labourers from the nearby Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and other Pacific Islands was one of the earliest Acts of the parlialncnt af the newly federated Common- wealth of Australia.

The Act of 1902 declared that those Islanders al- ready in Australia would be sent home. Between 1906 and 1908, 7068 “Kanaltas”, also known mistakenly as “Polynesians”, were deported and another 194 left voluntarily, leaving behind about around 2500 who were able to claim long residence, property ownership in Australia, personal danger should they return lo their home island; or who went “bush” and hid until the deportation campaign quietened down.

Those deported and those remaining werc the rem- nants of an indenture era between 1863 and 1903 when just over 50,000 Pacific Islander labourers came on three year work contracts to the colonies and later states of Queensland and New South Wales.

Australian South Sea Islanders, as they prefer to be known today, trace their life histories back to perhaps a hundred families and a larger number of single me11 who later married and had families.“)

In the 1970s and again in the 1990s, conscious of attempts being made by state and federal governments to incorporate indigenous and immigrant ethnicity in a nationing process, this small immigrant community

spoke out.

Their call for recognition drew attention to tlie dis- crimination and disadvantage suffered as a black labouring class minority and highlighted the racism underpinning the social, economic and cultural position- ing of both immigrant and indigenous Australians as Australia shifted from an anglo-celtic majority to tlie multicultural or plural society of the present era.

The life histories of 19th and 20th century immi- grants presented in the two recent histories of this small lslander community, Patricia Mercer’s White Australia defied and Carol Gistitin’s Quite a colony, resonate with the experiences of other immigrant communities in Aus- tralia.

South Sea Islanders, as Mercer notes, suffered mis- carriages, died in accidents, lobbied Prime Ministers, submitted petitions, played in racially segregated “All- Black” teams, served in the World War I1 Civil Con- struction corps and were involved in other equally rewarding, tragic or discriminatory experiences. (Mer- cer 1995)

Experiences like these suggest that their lives may not have been different from inany other isolated, mrd, immigrant or indigenous Australians who remained alienated from and unacknowledged by the dominant culturally constituted nation and the politically con- structed state.

( 4 ) -1181-

Henry Reynold’s analysis of the status of Australia’s two indigenous communities, Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, may be tentatively applied to ,Australian South Sea Islanders (Reynolds 1996 155-186) Following his argument, Australian South Sea Island- ers, in relation to the state, were also beyond the pale, ignored and voiceless in the apparatus of state and polity.

Although not a nation within the nation, as Aborigi- nal Australians proclaimed, the South Sea Islander im- migrant community sought incorporation on the basis of a similar record of marginality.

Their call in the 1970s for recognition as a disad- vantaged ethnic immigrant minority was overlooked as European and Asian immigrant communities demanded acknowledgment and South Sea Islanders remained in the background as Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders campaigned for reconciliation, land rights, regional autonomy and federal and state a tance.

It was truly a remarkable turn around, after a gen- eration of rebuttal in the late 1970s, that the Australian government in 1994 formally recognised Australian South Sea Islanders as a discrete immigrant minority and introduced a series of financial packages to alle- viate many of the educat.iona1, employment, cultural and social disadvantages which Australian South Sea Island- ers faced.

The following discussion falls into three parts; an introductory survey of the period from the deportalion era, which left a small residue Islander community ambiguously placed in rural Queensland, a brief account of the lobbying canipaigns of the 1970s and the suc- cessful call for recognition in the 199Os, and finally these e.vents are examined in the context of constructions of ethnicity and the nation being contested in Australia.

3: ili ,I: * :i:

In the 1901-1908 period, “Kanakas” lobbied Parlia- ments and Prime Ministers, addressed Royal Commis- sions, travelled south to distant Melbourne and formed associations i n cities along the Queensland and New South wales coast to coordinate a campaign against de- portation.

This was an era in which anglo-Celtic hegemony was unquestioned. Discriminatory colonial legislation had

already been directed at Chinese and Japanese labourers who were imported or came voluntarily to Australia and the new work-place and immigration regulations of the so-called “White Australia Policy” were iiianifestations of the popular belief that Australia was a nat.ioi1 for “whites”.

Although South Sea Islanders failed in their attempl to rescind the deportation regulations they were able to achieve more huniane treatment and to influence some government policy in their favour.

Clive Moore suggests that these achievements were far more reniarlcable than those of the 1970s and 1990s

pressure groups and suggests that “to organise and speak out for an ethnic minority while policics and opinion were dominated by ‘White Australia’ fervour were achievements indeed. At the t.ime the wider public would never have imagined that ‘coloured’ or ‘black’ people could get organised and speak at the highest level of government”.(2’

After the deportation era, the remaining small South Sea Islander community disappeared from the anglo- Celtic historical record for sixty years living as fringe- dwellers, marginalised from mainstream society, mar- rying into Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Is- lander extended families and dispersing along the eastern Australian coast looking for a home and work.

They remained a fragmenled community. Small clus- ters were spread as they had been during the nineteenth century indentured labour period, across a variety of rural industries and d0niest.k service stretching from Cairns in Queensland’s far north, to the agricultural district of the northern New South Wales coast, two thousand kilometres to the south.

During this period, a trickle of government assis- tance was directed towards Australia’s two indigenous communities, and many South Sea Islanders were forced to rely on support available through these Aboriginal .4ustralian and Torres Strait Islander social security, education, community and other assistance programs.

Faith Bandler, a well known act.ivist for Ahorigine and later Islander rights, lamented that her fellow Islanders accepted being identified as Aborigines in order to obtain government benefits.

“1 was saddened by that and I feared they would lose thek identity,” (Moore, Quanchi, Bennett, 1997, 57)

Journal of The Pacific Society / October 1998 / NO. 80 - 81. (Vol. 21, No. 3 - 4 ) ( 5 ) - 180 -

Choosing to be identified as an Aboriginal Australian in order to receive scholarships and housing loans was a denigrating rejection of their own Pacific Islander identity.

South Sea Islanders like Faith Bandler were active contributors to a rising black consciousness in Austra- lia, but eventually Islanders was realised they had to distance themselves from Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander programs if they were to gain recognition as a discrete ethnic minority.

These uncertainties were compounded by conflict- ing identities within the Islander community. Maniage across the three black communities and with the anglo- Celtic or other immigrant communities, with the duality imposed by alternating affirmation and denial of their ethnic identity, detracted from calls for unity in the community against the distant Brisbane based state government and Canberra based federal governmcnt.

In the 1 970s, aftera hiatus lasting sixty years, Aus- tralian South Sea Islanders organised against the state and federal governments, seeking a share of the fund- ing for cultural, social, educational and economic ad- vancement being directed to Aboriginal Australians, Torres Strait Kslanders and recent immigrant ethnic minorities, but from which they, as a long-term black immigrant group were excluded.

The forming of ASSIUC (Australian South Sea Is- lander United Council) signaled the start of an active but brief period of lobbying. In a widely dispersed, open- ended community, the awareness that lobbying could be influential grew out of the 1960s Aboriginal Aus- tralian citizenship campaigns in which many South Sea Islanders played an active part.

This was a period in Australian political history when the power of lobbying became apparent and single- interest groups rushed to create formal, representative and bureaucratic organizations in the cites where de- cisions were being made.

The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATST) campaigned nationally and successfully over the 1967 referendum, and in the early 1970s with Aboriginal Australians having gained a vict0t.y (partially), South Sea Islanders adopted a similar lobbying pathway.

In 1973, ni-Vanuatuan descendent Faith Bandler,

coming out of the campaign for Aboriginal Australian citizenship, had a chance meeting with newly elected Labour Party Prime Minister Gough Whillam at an elec- torate meeting in northern New South Wales. She pointed out that the fuzzy haired supporters at the back of the Labour Party meeting “were all my mob” and that they had several grievances particular to their I>8~uth Sea Islander community.

Faith tells the story that Whitlam replied by throw- ing a question back to her-”Why don’t you form an organization Faith?” (Bandler 1994)

Following informal and formal meetings along the coast, ASSIUC was formed in 1975 and branches were set up in areas of concentrated South Sea Islander popu- lation. The first national conference was held i n Mackay in May 1975. Although there was considerable cover- age in the Maclcay Daily Mercury, in the southern, capital-city based newspapers and media the event passed by virtually without notice.

The aims of ASSIUC were succinct, easily translated into dollars and included along with other more spe- cific demands, action “to get legislation passed which will provide the additional assistance necessary to enable South Sea Islanders to attain quality of life with other Australians”. (Daily Mercury, Mackay, 10 May 1975).

These were aims which resonated in the 1970s with national debates on participation, equity and access, and particularly a rising consciousness that Australia had a complex immigrant ethnic population and that inclusive- ness was preferable policy to assimilation or plurality. Well organised, with educated, articulate .leaders, ac- knowledged in high placed and benefiting fi:oin a national debat.e on ethnicity and multiculturalism, it seemed South Sea Islanders were poised to make sig- nificant gains.

The lobbyists of the 1970s were unified in purpose and clearly cognizant of the mechanisms and intrigues necessary to become a successful lobby group.

There were significant differences from their prede- cessors in the post-1901 deportation era; they were still widely spread from northem New South Wales to Caims in the far north, there were more woinen at the fore- front compared to the mostly single niale membership which had characterised the Islander community during the anti-deportation campaign, leadership was now

( 6 ) -179-

voiced through families and extended cousin-brother relationships and spokespersons were adept at manipu- lating the conventions of print and non-print media and propaganda.

Cultural <and community groups (disguising their po- litical lobbying motivations) found funding was avail- able th.rough state and federal agencies to promote local advancement, and transport and communication between communities spread along two thousand kilometres of coastline was now quicker and more accessible.

There also had been a revival of consciousness inspired by several trips made to the south west Pacific in search of ancestors and family links.

These visits, beginning with a trip in the 1960s made by the father and uncle of Patricia ICruger (nee Corowa), and then Patricia Ibuger’s own trip from Bowen to Tanna in 1970, were a dramatic and inspirational experience for people who had lost contact with their origins for most of the last seventy or more years. (Bennetl, Moore and Quanchi 1996 39-40; Gistitin 1995 93-4; Mercer 1996 314-15)

Noel Fatnowna recalled that as a young man “Malaita could have been on the moan or around the other side of the world. We only knew it was in the Solomon Islands”, (Fatnowna, 1989, 57) He finally visited Mailaita in 1973 and discovered his home land.

More trips followed and then Vanuatu and Solomon Island groups started visiting Queensland. The affirma- tion of Islander-ness was significant in drawing Island- ers together against an imposed or borrowed Austra- lian-ness, and hastened the signing on of members and the formation of committees to campaign for recogni- tion as a discrete cominunity within the nation.

The flurry of community interest and involvenient in the 1970s seemed to bear fruit. A study of the Islanders situation was initiated by the newly elected Labour Party federal Government (1972-75) led by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. But this report, the Interdepartmental Committee report on South Sea Is- landers in Australia, was not released until 1977, by which time a less sympalhetic Liberal-Country Party coalition of conservatives had returned to power. In the same year the report of a Royal Commission into Human Relationships, which had collected evidence in 1975 about the Islanders situation, was also released.’

Neither report had any impact on thc new federal conservative government’s policy or funding. Further obstacles arose when South Sea Islanders, seeking to distance themselves in order to gain separate recogni- lion as a disadvantaged minority, were alienated from the Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander bureaucracy they had helped create in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Fragmentation of the Islander community also OC-

curred with culture and kastonz over-riding the expe- diency of political unity. Family, region, island-of-ori- gin, gender and age differences acted to break up the sense of community being promoted.

Although the majority of nineteenth century inden- tured labourers had been from Vanuatu, with others mostly from the Solomon Islands, family and specific island allegiances ran across this. These family, lun and island-of-origin identities added to the problems caused by the distance between centres of South Sea popula- tion spread aloiig a long coastline.

At the same time historians were re-writing the history of the labour trade in the Pacific Islands and it was being shown that Islanders had been willing par- ticipcmts in the labour reserve, signing on for Queensland knowing the dangers but well aware of the benefits. (Moore 1992; Munro 1993, Moore and Mercer 1993, Munro 1994/5; Moore 1995)

This removed froin Australia’s South Sea Islanders one of the main planks of their argument that they had been victims of a cruel and unjust plantation labour system. They had argued, and it was an accepted paradigm in early texts, curricula and the media, that they were slaves, had been mistreated and contributed to Australia’s economic prosperity without reward.

If accepted that they were, as Moore, Munro and others showed, active agents in their own indenture in the recent ,past, then Islanders lost political ground by not being able to use the victim tag to gain the sym- pathy of present-day Australian voters and parliaments.

In the 1970s and through to the 199Os, national Is- lander organizations struggled against regional differ- ences, reflected in the emergence of small, short-lived local groupings. Unity collapsed under the impact of personal and family allegiances. The few newsletters which circulated within the Islander community in this

Journa l of The Pacific Society / October 1998 / No.80 - 81 (Vol. 21, No. 3 - 4 ) ( 7 1 - 178 -

period did not bridge this widening gap.(31 This complex mix of competing identities, geogmphic

dispersion, and marginality meant the promises of the 1970’s lobbying were not realised.

In the next decade South Sea Islanders were again forced to rely on government support through Aborigi- nal Australian and Torres Strait Islander programs, or if rejecting that denigrating submission, slipping through the social security net into a state verging on underclass. They tried to assert agency, failed and now had only a victim status to cling to.

In the 198Os, community leadership, organization and action atrophied and there was lit,tle that could be claimed as positive. Forced to the fringe, inany Island- ers lacked avenues which other Australians enjoyed in order to improve their standard of living.

The 1980s was an era of disillusionment. (Mercer 1996 fn 63,324) ASSlUC state branches disappeared and as Carol Gistitin notes “Islanders had little choice but to retreat into anonymity”. (1.995 36) Writing in the 19SOs, Clive Moore reflected on the rebuttal of $e 1970s and asked, “is it too much to hope that the 1980s will see their claims come to fruition,” (Moore 1985 343).

They did bear fruit, but not until the 1990s when a new set of dynamic social and political parameters affected policy and opinion i n Australia.

The seriousness of the Islanders situation came under notice at the start of the 1990s because of the conver- gence of several significant national events. The first was the creation of a Ministry for Pacific Island Affairs by a federal Labour Party government which returned to power between 1983 and 1996.

Although this Ministry was aimed at a greater presence in the neighbouring western Pacific region, Mr Gordon Bilney’s appointment was a comforting sign that Australia was at last acknowledging its connections with the Pacific Islands.

More significant was an unexpected attack on the so-called prosperity of the Australian way of life - an attack which shocked the full spectrum of society - when it was belatedly discovered that Australia had a huge homeless children problem, an large underclass (in a supposed lucky country), a drug-use rate of unexpected proportions, widespread lailure in Aboiiginal Australian health and housing programs and an enibarrassing and

tragic record of Aboriginal Australian deaths in’custody. Coincidentally with the sudden awareness that policy

and action was needed on all these fronts, ASSIUC reformed initially in Mackay in 1990 and then nation- ally. This rebirth was also given impetus by an aware- ness among Islander leaders that Australian governments were now under pressure Lo respond to calls for assis- tance from disadvantaged, ethnic and other minority groups in society.

A network of local branches was re-established. The most important catalyst occurred when a link was made with the Evatt Foundation in Sydney, an independent social and political research organization with a record of supporting indigenous and humanitarian causes.

‘At the same time in central Queensland the Rockhampton South Sea Islanders Co-operative Asso- ciation was formed by a group with strong church and Vanuatu links, leading the next year to the forming of a Capricornia South Sea Islanders Association. (Gistitin

The convergence of these national and local actions, and the personal efforts of Faith Bandler, convinced the Evatt Foundation to commission a census, interview, consultation and fact-finding trip along the coast. This had a dual impact, renewing enthusiasm along the coast for coniinunity action, and down south, malting public the fact that on nearly all socio-economic indicators, Islanders were a disadvantaged community, suffering from both government neglect and racial discrimination.

The Evan Foundation report was published in 1991. The federal Labour Party government which had re- turned to power in 1989, responded immediately and conmiissioned a major report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC).

By the end of 1992 this had been published, and although it took until August 1994 for the report to be tabled in -parliament, in the intervening period a paclc- age of funding schemes, cultural grants and federally funded community projects were agreed upon.

1995 91-2)

The shape of this package was partly in response to a meeting convened by the Queensland government’s Bureau of Ethnic Affairs a t the request of the Queensland and northern New South Wales Islander community.

The two day ‘summit’ meeting, held in Mackay in

( 8 ) -177-

October 1993, was attended by thirty community representatives. Discussion ranged over fifteen agreed upon issues and a needs-analysis-scrategies document was drafted.

Little that was noted in this ‘wish-list’ was even- tually implemenled, but the angst, the deep probing by South Sea Islander leaders and community representa- tives into existing bureaucracies and agencies and the demand for advancement that permeated its strategies was compelling evidence.

The federal government, worldng to draft a response to the HREOC report, could sense that at the summit there was a “genuine show of strength and determina- tion in pursuing coinmon goals.” (Mackay Summit 1993, 1) In August 1994 the HREOC report and the federal government’s package of funding and policy directives were tabled in parliament by the Attorney General.

The HREOC report had begun by stating that South Sea Islanders were “the only race of people in this country’s history to be subjected to mass deportation” and that “they have not been recognised as a discrete ethnic and cultural group by Australian legislators and policy makers”. (HREOC 1992 2).

In his speech to parliament when tabling \he docu- ment in August 1994, the Atlormy General chose his

. words carefully, noting that some. were “brought against their will. In other words they were treated no better than slaves. That is the ugly truth or the matter”. (Hansard 1994, 397)

The decision to cornmission the Evatt Foundation and H E O C research was clearly victim-driven. Yet having attracted aclcnowledgement and influenced pow- erful policy makers, the Islanders were now manipu- lating their oppressors and forging an accommodation of their own shaping.

The government package promised a “boost for South Sea Islander culture” including funded trips by Austra- lian South Sea Islanders back to their homelands, a national schools curriculum package, a traveling histori- cal exhibition, the funding of two community liaison offers, a scholarship and educational support scheme, a departmental research project to gather data on the corninunity (embarrassingly not available despite the army of bureaucrats and quasi-government agencies which monitor housing, health, education, employment,

social security and poverty in Australia)’ and the res- toration of two Bundberg buildings with heritage ties to the recruitment era.

The community was also declared to be a “distinct ethnic group” and a high-need “access and equity” group.

In October 1994 the federal government formally and publicly launched the “Call for Recognition” package of benefits and other policies and shortly after a trav- eling exhibition on Australian South Sea Islander cul- ture and history was launched at the Australian Mari- time Museum, Sydney and later at the Queensland Museum iu Brisbane.

The exhibition subsequently traveled along the east- ern coast and will possibly be shown in Vanuatu and the Solonion Islands. Several Islanders voiced disap- proval of the guest lists at the Sydney and Brisbane functions, claiming that the selection of a “chosen few”

from the Islander community was an insult to the unrepresented majority.

A Mackay group called “Concerned members of the South Sea Island Community” wrote an open letter calling for unity within the 1sland.er community and between Aborigine, Torres Strait Islanders and South Sea Islanders.

The writers demanded that care be taken to repre- sent Islander families accurately by always iiialcing it clear “on whose behalf the statements were being made”.@)

These sentiments, in a climate of largesse and in- creasing competition between ethnic groups for govern- ment funding and support, reflect the divisions which returned to characterise the South Sea Islander commu- nity in Australia. Older loyalties surfaced and the al- legiance to island-of-origin, extended family and geo- graphic locality, tended to challenge attempts for a single voice from a discrete united Islander community,

By the time the government response to the HREOC report was tabled in parliament, the revitalised ASSIUC ceiiwd executive was again failing to attract member- ship from what is a relatively a small community and it was being challenged by small groups and comnit- tees formed in opposition and reflecting localised in- terests.

The history of Australian South Sea Islanders related

Journal of The Pacific Society / Oct,ober 1998 / No. 80 - 81 (Vol. 21, No. 3 - 4 1 ( 9 j - 176 -

above is little known by other Australians. School books repeat the now contested slave trade-sugar plantation version of South Sea Islander’s early involvement and the print media continues to ignore both the historio- graphical debate about kidnapping and the Islanders wider contribution in the pastoral, agricultural and

industrial economy of Queensland. For example, a recent atlas commissioned by the

Queensland government acknowledges that most came to Australia voluntarily but still highlights ‘blaclcbirding’ (Wadley 1996 31) and a new text book and atlas by a Queensland educational publisher only had references to a “slave trade” in Queensland removed after this writers protest as one of the co-authors. (Cousens 1996

186)

The kidnapped-voluntary indenture dichotomy sur- faced in the cooperative curriculum writing venture funded as a rcsuh of the federal government’s 1994 policy package. The question of whether Islanders should be portrayed as voluntary indentured workers, or as kidnapped slaves of the Australian capitalist economy, caused strains between the mostly non-islander text book writers and the wider South Sea Islander community. (More 1997)

The idea to develop curriculum materials for schools which would allow students to study Islaiider history and culture had been initiated by a coinmi ttee formed in Mackay in 1992. A group of local teachers had been worried that a package of materials on Aboriginal history and culture, “Harmony in between”, which was being introduced in Maclcay schools, would further marginalise Islander history.

They wanted to introduce- a parallel set of materials on ‘South Sea Islander history and culture. Over the next two years the group lobbied politicians, state and fed- eral education authorities, gathered the support of Senator Margaret Reynolds and findly with support from the Queensland Education Department, won funding in August 1994 for a $150000 national curriculum writing project.(j]

The management committee of the project, represent- ing the Education Department, regional Islander groups, teacher associations and universities, held its first meeting in Brisbane in September 1994. It subsequently meet several times either in Brisbane or by teleconfer-

encing facility. It was from the start a brilliant concept, marrying

Islander voices with educators, curriculum developers and university scholars and the results deliionstrate the value of this collaborative strategy.

The writing process was not without dispute as Is- landers questioned the process of writing, noticeably centred in Brisbane, laclcing Islandel teacher represen- tation and indeed flawed by over-centralised control of the development stages and a lack of consensus within the Islander community as to who should serve on the management commit,tee.

The main point of debate, however, was over the ‘history’ that should be conveyed in the materials. The Townsville Community Reference Group reviewed the materials and insisted that the text book contain a rebuttal of the authors interpretation on the question of slavery. Their insertion in the text reads, “This does not acknowledge the truth of history. It favours the testi- mony of white historians and not the oral history of the elders”. (Moore, Quanchi, Bennett, 1997,37)

The writers took the view that history, as everywliere, was a contested, texted domain. On the crucial point of nineteenth century kidnapping, the writing team agreed that the majority of Islanders had not been Icid- napped. This denial of victim status annoyed South Sea Islander committee members and regional respondents who were invited to critique the early drafts of-the material.

This came to a fine point when debate centred on the use of the phrasing “came to Australia” or “brought to Australia’’, the former was judged to be denying Is- landers the harsh treatment and discrimination they suffered - the latter being preferred because it stressed the slavery story line. Other respondents queried the mention of “bachelor families” claiming it suggested the mostly single male Islander population had lived in ho- mosexual relationships. Others wanted to remove ex- tracts in which Islanders were recorded by scribes speaking in “pidgin English” before the 1906 Royal cornniission into labour in the sugar industry.

It womed Islander respondents when reviewing the material, that this depicted Islanders as uneducated and having difficulty conversing with Europeans. That Is- landers needed to be seen as victims in the past in order

to gain political advantage in the present was not a discourse readily entered into by Island community members of the committee or by regional respondents.

The final draft of the school text books reflected the presumed consensus of Islander community opinion, which was appropriate as the project had originated in that community, had been pursued by that community through to funding and publication, and as nationally distributed set of curriculum materials should rightly be reflective of Islander community attitudes.

The difficulty with this resolution was that it was never cleu to the management committee whether the assumed community opinion represented the voices of a few with access to the management committee, or was derived from a wider community consensus.

The underlying principle for Islanders throughout was that they wanted to tell their version of the past and that if certain Islander or non-Islander teachers, edu- cators or scholars had contrary ideas they could be heard but not allowed to prejudice the telling of the “Island- ers as victims” story.

The issue was in the end unresolved and the ma- terials distributed with a warming that all versions of the past are open to challenge, and that teachers and students need to be aware of the contested domains they enter.

The announcement of the federal government’s pack- age of benefits was a remarkable turn around in the long campaign for recognition, which it could be ar- gued, began with the anti-deportation campaigns of the 1902-08 period. Success, finally in the 199Os, was due to South Sea Islanders efforts but they had the advan- tage of a receptive federal Labour Party government, and benefited by an overflow effect from campaigns to convince Australians that reconciliation was needed with Aboriginal Australians to atone for past sins.

The Evatt and HREOC reports also attracted pub- licity in a legislative climate that had just seen Mer (Murray) Islanders in the Torres Strait granted ‘native tenure’ and recognition as the original landowners of their islands, over-turning the terra nullis principle that had allowed Europeans to alienate land in Australia for over 200 years.

These internal changes were in a climate affected by the International Year of Indigenous peoples (1993)

and growing public interest in the fate of indigenous South Africans emerging out of apartheid and of Maori in Aeteoroflew Zealand seeking to re-define the inean- ing of the Waitangi Treaty and to put into place ben- efits arising from the “Sea Lord” judgement over fish- ing rights and Maori entitlements.

All this occurred in a national ferment which saw other immigrant communities in Australia emerging to run their own radio and television programs, participate in a plethora of so-called multicultural fiestas and fes- tivals and proudly and vocally proclaim their dual Australian-Laotian, Australian-Maltese or other dual national identities.

4 s other immigrant minorities benefited from in- creased government and cominunity support, the time was also opportune for South Sea Islanders to claim and be rewaded with a place in constructions of the nation. The South Sea Islanders effort in the 199Os, after several decades of failure, was ultiniately one of the most successful lobbying campaigns in Australian political history.

However, media response to the gains by Islanders demonstrated that long-held niytlis about slavery and kidnapping would not fade away.

The major Brisbane daily newspaper responded to the HREOC report with a headline - “Forgotten people” - but the bulk of the supporting story was about battle- ships on recruiting trips, whippings in the fields and individuals who had been “bought and sold’’.

A suburban Brisbane newspaper used the headline - Blackbird descendents - built followed it with a byline calling on Australians to remember there was “a black slave trade here”.

In Mackay The Daily Mercury offered a more balanced response, highlighting the discrimination that existed because of Islanders skin colour and calling for further action to be talcen so the report did not just “sit there”.

As the government paclcage was being put together in response to the HREOC report, the Minister for Pacific Island Affairs, Gordon Bilney, visited the Solomon Islands where he announced that the govern- ment would take part in “an act of reconciliation with Australian South Sea Islanders and the countries of their ances tors’’.(6)

Journal of The Pacific Society / October 1998 / No. 80 - 81 (Vol. 21, No. 3 - 4 ) (11) - 174 -

This grand international reconciliation gesture, per- petuating a victim status, never eventuated because the Minister was quietly made aware that the gesture was inappropriate given the historical circumstances of Islander agency in their involvement in the labour trade.

Meanwhile in Australia, the success to happily cel- ebrated by South Sea Islanders along the Queensland coast, passed virtually un-noticed by the state and national media, and therefore by the vast majority of the Australian population located in southern states and capital cities.

The narratives of South Sea Islander life histones in Australia are contextualised for much of thc twen- tieth century by social and political changes from which South Sea Islanders could not benefit.

In the nineteenth and again in the twentieth centu- ries, Australian South Sea Islanders were not aclcnowl- edged as a distinct ethnic community and in the eurocentric and racist manner of the day were consid- ered “blacks” and categorised along with Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, denying them both their Pacific Island identity and full Australian citizenship.

This situation was further confused after the depor- tation era by inter-marriage, the lack of any obvious unity, smallness of population and geogmphic isolation in niral and coastal Queensland, with the majority living far CO the north of Brisbane the state capital, and nearly completely cut off froin the Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne nexus which dominated Australian social, political and economic life.

Patricia Mercer notes succinctly in White Australia defied, that they were a small group of Australians who “lived an isolated, semi-rural existence, clustering mostly in virtually self-contained communities within the sugar growing districts”. (1996 304.)

Any chance of recognition or inclusion in a prob- lematic Australian national identity was obscured by the Australian media practice of associating leading South Sea Islanders with the indigenous Aboriginal commu- nity. In the 1960s the most prominent writer to emerge €ram the South Sea Islander community, Faith Bandler, was usually identified as a Aborigine spokesperson for the black Australian community in their struggle for citizenship,

Australia’s most famous national and international rugby league player, Mal Meninga, a hero to South Sea Islanders, was regularly described as an Aboriginal Australian.

Even in districts where South Sea Islanders were a significant population, they were excluded from the conquest and celebratory histories written about local sugar mills and pastoral districts, appearing only in token photographs as sugar cane field workers or standing before their bladey-grass residences and cook-house~.(~)

In national identity debates since the 1970~‘~) anglo- Celtic identities have been in retreat, suiyendering to the pervasive claims of Aboriginality and to a lesser de- gree, western and soutliern European and Asian immi- grant identities.

Discussions on Australian national identity in this period had become dominated by acquiescence to the centrality of indigenous Australian culture, but the de- scendents of Pacific Islanders, who were claiming to be Australia’s third indigenous community, were rarely if ever considered in this debate.

This exclusion and rebuttal occurred despite a series of texts, films and biographies which highlighted as- pects of their 130 years of marginality. These books and television documentaries were greeted warmly by the few academics familiar with this history, and by Islanders, but the impact on the attitudes and opinions of the wider reading and viewing public was probably minimal.

With Clive Moore’s Kanalta; a lzisrory of Melanesian, Mackay (1984.), Carol Gistitin’s Quite a colony; South Sea Islanders in Central Queensland (1 995) and Patricia Mercer’s White Australia dejied (1 993 , the histones of this community had been well In addition to Faith Bandler’s autobiographies and fiction Wacvie, Marani, Turning the tide and Welou my brother, Mabel Edmunds published No regrets and Hello Jolzniiy and Noel Fatnowna published Fragments of a lost hetitage.

Australian South Sea Islanders also featured in a series of radio and television documentaries starting in the active lobbying days of the early 1970s - “The Is- landers” on Bill Peach’s Australia on ABCTV (1975), “Forgotten People” in the Big Country series on ABCTV (1978), “The Forgotten people” on ABC radio (1978, released as book, Moore 1979), “ICidnapped” on SBSTV

(1989), “Return to Vanuatu” on Dateline on SBSTV (1993) “Australian biographies; Faith Bandler” on SBSTY (1994) and ‘‘Sugar Slaves” on The Big Picture on ABCTY (1955). However, achowledgement arising from this exposure was minimal.

The impact may be judged by reference to the flood of histories and descriptive accounts published during the 1988 bicentenary of European invasion/settlement. Islanders were overlooked with the exception of an entry in the officially commissioned The Australian people; an encyclopedia of the nation, irs people and their ori- gins.“”’ (JUPP 1988 722-27)

Although most Australians had heard of “Kanakas,” individual Islanders rarely achieved prominence.

When Noel Fatnowna was appointed inaugural Com- missioner for Pacific Islanders by the Queensland government in 1977-1983, Faith Bandler was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Macquarie University in 1994, Me1 Meninga captained Australia and retired from a glorious rugby football career and Baden Choppy became a hockey medallist for Australia at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, their achievements were widely publicised in the Islander community, but their South Sea Islander origins were either unknown to commen- tators or ignored in the state and national media.

In the regions where South Sea Islanders live, nu- merous church and mission groups have publicly coni- memorated the anniversary of their founding or the building of early chapelsIi1) and in the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations in Mackay, home to a large South Sea Islander community, a visiting Solomon Island group re-enacted the landing of a cargo of indentured labourers along the Pioneer River. This was a rare acknowledg- ment of the significant role South Sea Islanders played in Mackay ’s founding and subsequent development as a key city in rural and coastal Australia.“z’

At Rockhampton in the annual Capricornia street pa- rade a local South Sea Island Cultural Committee float won fxst prize, prominently displaying the slogan “South Sea Islanders: Australia’s forgotten people” and there have been campaigns more recently to conserve heri- tage sites linlccd to South Sea Islander history such as the Homebush Hall, Yeppoon’s wagon trail, the old sea wall at Rockhampton and “Kanaka” sections of cem- eteries at Joskeleigh and Bundaberg.

This was overdue acknowledgment of the heritage value of many Queensland buildings and sites. In the Illustrated Register of the Nalional Estate, a seminal and world recognised inventory oT “things worth keep- ing” in Australia, (Australian Heritage Commission 1981) not one of the 6600 items included aspects of South Sea Islander’s Australian heritage.

In the face of this indifference, the restoration of the Homebush Hall was a typical Islander and local com- munity effort, restored with a mixture of local fund- raising and State government grants, overseen by the South Sea Islander Trustees of the initially derelict building.

In an editorial on the re-opening of the hall, The Daily Mercury in Mackay regretted that racist attitudes had surfaced during recent elections in the district but claimed that South Sea Islander heritage was increas- ingly valued in a multicultural Australia. On the posi- tive side, recently Islanders have been acknowledged in national indigenous reconciliation campaigns, shar- ing space with Abariginal Australian and Torres Strait Islanders i n locally published material such as the Mackay City Council’s “Coming together” pamphlet released in 1994.(13)

These signposts in the local, state and national arena, impressive in terms of what some Australian South Sea Islanders have achieved in recent years, were not vis- ible outside their own community and were not dra- matic enough to change policy, practice or levels of public awareness.(’4) These minor gains in terms of recognition were swamped in radio, television and print media by constructions of multicultural Australia, Aboriginal Australia and particularly debates about Mabo, Wik, native title and local autonomy for the Torres Strait Islands.

In 1989, the Torres Strait was described in the media as “our rebel islands” (The Age, Melbourne, Feb 1 1989). This campaign attracted exceptional media attention when it culminated in 1992, after a ten year court battle, in the granting of native title to Australia’s original and indigenous landowners, usually referred to as the “Mabo” decision, (Loos and Maba 1996)

The sovereignty question continued with the federal government calling for submissions in August 1996 for a Parliamentary inquiry into “greater autonomy for the

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Torres Strait Islanders”. In 1996, the High Court of Australia passed judgement on the potential for extin- guishment of native title throughout Australia in i n- stances where it conflicted with pastoral leases, lcnown now as the “Wik” decision.

The small Islander community lacked newsworthiness against these more radical, indigenous Torres Strait Islander and Aboriginal Austrahan campaigns and events.

The success of the 1990s lobbying can judged against a broader canvas, and while indeed successful, any gains were greatly overshadowed by what were seen to be more significant “national” assertions of identity. The South Sea Islander’s marginality was evident in media concentration on the so-called Australian nation, said to be explicit or implied in the songs of Aboriginal rock band Yothu Yindi and Torres Strait Islander singer Christine Anu, or the Aboriginal flag-carrying of ath- lete Cathy Freeman(I5).

Calls for a stronger Asian-Australian alignment pushed the status of Australia’s South Sea Islanders further to the fringe of debates and in the nationing of Australia and the association of images and symbols with national character and future prospects, South Sea Islanders remained an invisible, or at best, an ignored minority.

Graeme Turner suggests the form of “nationalism” which prevailed in Australia was “incapable of incor- porating and is therefore implicitly hostile to the multiplicity of identities and histories currently compet- ing for representation within the discourses of nation- ality”. (1992 10)

To borrow David Lloyd’s phrasing, this was a re- jection or contestation in which an ethnic community asserted a minority discourse (involving its traditions, histories and separateness) against the wreight of a dominant state formation which threatened to destroy it. (1994 221-238 and 20)

In a critique of Benedict Anderson’s argument about nationalisms, Renato Rosaldo asked for acknowledgment that marginalised minorities suffer actual discrimination, because for “historically subordinated groups, questions of social justice and full citizenship in national com- munities are not academic but matters of sheer survival”. (1994 252)

The South Sea Islander story in Australia is indeed

a record of survival as an ethnic immigrant minority sought an audience and inclusion in a dominant anglo- Celtic nation state.

The link between identity, ethnicity and constructing a nation has been the subject of a number of mono- graphs and symposia in Australia and Although the structures, models and processes offered in these debates inform my analysis and the brief account offered here, application is discontinuous be-

cause Australian South Sea Islanders do not form an homogenous ethnic minority and are not being defined by colonial boundaries, occupational categories, shared beliefs, or a common culturc or kastonz. They are not an original indigenous community.

Their identity, relying on a Lamarckian “acquisi.tion of essential characteristics” (Linnekin and Poyer 1990 9) is modified by transportation and divorce from islands of origin, and in the post-deportation era as a black labouring class, by marginality and partial immersion in a dominant anglo-Celtic polity and society. South Sea Islanders were not state-less, being under the protection of the British empire before 1901, and later the Com- monwealth of Australia, but they were nation-less.

Potential incorporation as a community into the ill- defined Australian national identity or Australian way of life (White 1979; White 1981; Hocking 1990; Nile 1994) was confused and mediated by South Sea Island- ers being categorised as Aboriginal Australians and Tolres Strait Islanders.

Two further elements of incorporation are relevant. Islanders remained in a government and management structure similar to Aboriginal Australians and Jeremy Beckett’s description of Aboriginal Australians in Aus- tralian society as a “unitary minority managed through specialized institutional structures that can properly be ternied colonial” (Beckett 1989 119), also applies to Islanders.

In recent times both Aboriginal Australians and South Sea Islanders have been incorporated into the state through government action. Beckett takes the colonial relationship one step further, referring to a liberal, solicitioiis “welfare colonialism”. Aboriginal Australians, and extending the model to Islanders, have not been exploited or repressed by this welfare colonialism, but have gained a new, less discrete identity.

This incorporation, or welfare colonialism, is a state strategy for “managing the political problem posed by the presence of a depressed and disenfranchised indig- enous population in an affluent and liberal democratic society”. (Beckett 1989 122) This incorporation, both the seeking to manipulate it and the seeking to deny it, is central to understanding the complex dynamics through which Islanders emerged to claim a small space in what is called Australia.

Identity as a South Sea Islander in Australia, deter- mined by island-of-origin differences, multiple ances- try, anglo-Celtic hegemony and competition from black cousin-brothers in the wider indigenous comniunity, does not fit notions or models of nationing primarily because Australian South Sea Islanders remained citizens of the state, and did not seek separatism or threaten to frag- ment the dominant policy or society.

They were not an “entrapped nation” (Falk cited in Reynolds 1996 xiiij nor did their grievance lead them to challenge (he dominant culture, state or nation.

Australian South Sea Islanders might want to change the advertising slogan on the cover of Henry Reynold’s recent book from “Three nations, one Australia” to read “four nations”, but they were not a large enough nor recognised entity nor were they indigenous Australians. Their campaign has similarities to that of Solomon Island contemporaries, the Santa Isabel Islanders, who sought to define their position internally (,on-island) as a discrete cultural entity and externally (off-ishndj to position themselves advantageously against the colonial- driven construct or state known as the Solomon Islands.

As Geoff White notes in his study of Santa Isabel, “narratives of the past do pragmatic work as cultural tools building both self-understanding and socio-poBti- cal realities”.(I7) (1991 240) Rosaldo (1994 242-3) notes that similar internal-external motivations affect the Ilongot of northern Luzon in the Philippines, who do not regard themselves part of the nation state, but who also have been drawn into and seek to benefit from the non-llongot Filipino nation as consumerism, develop- ment and capitalism encroach on their lands.

Santa Isabel Islanders, Ilongot and Australian South Sea Islanders have negotiated this contested domain - asserting their identity and maintaining a degree of sepa- rateness against an imagined national comlnunity and

encroaching assimilationist trends, while still seelung 1.0

benefit from what the state and nation can provide.

Islanders managed to achieve, albeit briefly and tenu- ously, inclusion in an imagined nationality and achieved equity and social justice while maintaining difference and ethnic identity. Their experience exemplifies the ideal state argued for by Rosaldo as excluded or marginalised groups negotiate inclusion in national imaginings and “reforge the national community in ways that allow for mutual recognition of socially significant differences of gender, sexual orientation and race”. (Rosaldo 1994 240 and 251)

Amid the clamouring of other ethnic, minority and immigrant groups in the contested space that is Aus- tralia, Soutli Sea Islanders briefly repositioned thern- selves as a district culturally constituted group with the imagined nation and gained recognition and aclcnowl- edgement for their contributions to the nation. For the descendents of a small dispersed community of black immigrant workers, that was quiet an achievement. Maintaining that unified, community position now that their brief appearance on the national political stage is over is the next challenge.

Notes

1 I am grateful to Dr Clive Moore for several suggestions regarding substance and evidence cited in this paper and for allowing access to archival and other material in his possession. 2 110) and Bennett, Moore and Quanchi (1996, 71) 3 A study of 160 years of Aboriginal Australian newspapers (Rose 1996) revealed chat Aboriginal com- mentators, and opinion leaders, suprisingly echoed mainstream, anglo-Celtic opinion about appropriate government policy and advancement, rather than a radical, alternative indigenous voice. There were no equivalent South Sea Islander newspapers, however, this trend is evident in the few occasional and short-lived South Sea Islander newsletters which were neither overtly political nor asserted a radical or uiiified plat- form. Newsletters in the 1990s such as Nuise Bloizg Bimi (Rockhampton), Yunii Tok (Sydney) and Wnntok (Mackay) carry both community and political news, but

See, Moore (1989 274-911, Mercer (1996 76-

J o u r n a l of The Pacif ic Society / October 1998 / No.80 - 81 (Vol . 21, No. 3 - 4 ) (15) - 170 -

refrain from provocative editorial comment. 4 Letters to the Editor, Australian, June 12 1991. A letter appeared with the similar text and pseudonyms in the Maclwy Meimry, June 7 1991, signed by Beryce Boah and Gaye Miller, presumably the authors of the Australian letter. 5 The Queensland Education Department’s contri- bution of $AUD75000 was on a 1.1 basis with the federal government see, National Aboriginal and T o m s Strait Islander Education Policy (NAEP) Islander sub- committee, Correspondence Mar 10 1992-Dec 16 1993. (Mrs Cynthia McCarthy kindly provided this material); Papers and Correspondence, Austruliaii South Sen Is- lander Curricubrn Project Manageinent Committee, 1994-1996, (held by the author, a participant in the man- agement committee and the writing team). The follow- ing paragraphs are based on the recollections of the author as a participant in the events oullined. 6 See, Courier-Muil, Brisbane, June 12 1993; The Daily Mercury, Maclcay, 23 July 1993; Tlie Age , Melbourne, Sept 21 1993; Sydney Moriiirzg Herald, Sydney, Sept 21 1993. 7 South Sea Islanders fare no better in pictorial histories. Two photographs appear in Cannon’s best selling Australian collection (1983 92) and seven in Waterson and French’s Queensland collection (1987 26- 9 and 189). 8 This debate shows no sign of abating. The holding of an “Identities, ethnicities, nationalities” conference at Latrobe University in July 1994, a “Nationalism and national identity” Summer School conference at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU, Canberra in February 1996, and an “Indigenous rights and political theory” conference in July 1997 at the Research School of Social Sciences, ANU, are typical of the scholarly interest. 9 To this date there is no historian from within the South Sea Islander community, though the auto- biographical works of Noel FaLnowna and Faith Bandler may be considered in this category. 10 The entries on South Sea Islanders in Jupp

(1988) were written by Kay Saunders and Clive Moore. 11 Typical examples of small celebratory pamphlets include, South Sea Evangelical Church in tlze Solomon Islands Celebrates 100 yrs, Brisbane, South Sea Evan- gelical Mission (SSEM) (8 pages); Messengers of Grace,

to celebrate the centenary of the establislzmertr of the Kanaka Mission at Childers, Qld, 1st January l S 9 3 , Brisbane, Kenmore Christian College (8 pages); Andrew C and Kennedy R, A conzmunity history of the Hoinebiish Mission hall 1 S92-1996, Mackay, ASSIUC (76 pages). 12 The proposal for a re-enactment attracted both favourable and negative responses with Aboriginal groups wanting to use the occasion to demonstrate over federal and state political issues, and South Sea Island- ers wanting to malce their point against “white Austra- lians” who had ignored the Islander’s role in local history; this minor controversy may be followed in the The Dnily Mercuiy (Maclay) Sept 21 and 22 1987, Oct 7 1987, May 7, 9 and 10 1988; the Courier-Mail (Brisbane) May 6 1988. 13 The text mamed oral testimony of elders with narralive background material from scholarly worlcs. This pamphlet illustrates two recent trends in Australia - the increasing popularity of history/public history, and the merging of traditional and modern dynamics in community and social politics. 14 Prior to 1995 there was no university subject devoted to the study of Australia’s South Sea Islanders. This was partly corrected when I began teaching an undergraduate course “HUB627 Australia and the Pa- cific Islands” in which a third of the subject matter was on South Sea Islanders in Australia. 15 A South Sea Islander popular rock band, sports star, public figure or actor has yet to claim national attention, claiming space in the nationing process in the way that singer Christine Anu, for Torres Strait Island- ers, land rights lawyer Noel Pearson, athlete Cathy Freeman and rock band Yothu Yindi, for Aboriginal Australians, represent their past possession of Ausualia and present struggles for recognition. Ironically, Island- ers in the open labour market or escaping deportation, who moved to the Torres Strait, inter-marrying with Torres Strait Islanders or the large Pacific Islander community that had migrated there in the 19th century, thereby gained the Australian citizenship denied their compatriots who stayed as “kanakas” in Queensland. 16 There is little evidence that Australian South Sea Islaiiders feel a common purpose with Maori, Native American, Inuit or other indigenous disadvantaged minorities, or have tried to establish a link with their

(16) -169-

campaigns. This is unusual given an irregular but noticeable coverage of international indigenous move- ments in national, Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra newspapers and the ethnic television broadcaster, SBSTV. 17 White follows this by noting that “narrative reconstructions of the past are a central, probably universal, mode of self-representation”. (p, 240) Choiseul and New Georgia communities in the Solomon lslands have also demonstrated similar internal-external moti- vations and assertions of identity.

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END

Max Quanchi is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

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