Melanesia: Travels in Black Oceania, by Hamish McDonald. Black Inc. 330 pp. RRP $36.99
In the second debate of the Australian federal election campaign, moderator David Speers gently reminded candidates Albanese and Dutton that they were both property investors. Whatever else you say about him, Prime Minister John Howard wasn’t one – but his having grown up in moderate affluence certainly owes something to the fact that his father was.
A scheme to divide up German plantations and parcel them out to WW1 Diggers became mired in scandal. Under the scheme, “willing dummies”, of whom Stan Howard was one, bought up the confiscated plots on the understanding they would be later amalgamated at profit.
Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu believed that geography and climate shape morals. If his philosophy is applied to Papua New Guinea, the tropical climate could be held to blame for a climate of corruption in pre-colonial, then Australian-administered and finally post-colonial times.
There can hardly be anyone more qualified to write at length on social and societal trends in PNG and the small island enclaves of that South Pacific zone nearest to the Australian mainland than Hamish McDonald. A journalist for more than forty years, he has specialised in this neighbourhood, along with its near neighbour, East Asia.
His latest volume is usefully subtitled Travels in Black Oceania to reflect its cultural difference from the British, German, French and Australian metropoles which brought “the Enlightenment” to this region oft depicted by those antipodean Europeans as Paradise.
While he writes with a mix of sharp reportage and personal portraits in a style any novelist would be proud of, McDonald conducts the reader through a vividly realised landscape like the most reliable of travel writers.
Imbued with a sense of adventure and never-flagging wonder, each chapter takes us deeper into the region; one nation, sometimes one island, at a time. En route, general themes of interest emerge and form patterns that give a cohesive picture of Melanesia’s commonalities along with its sub-regional peculiarities.
Three themes stood out for this reviewer: the weevil of corruption instanced above; the coexistence of divergent belief systems we call syncretism; and the population spike, which is already boosting Oceania’s strategic importance, even if it’s some way off being one of the three superstates of Orwell’s 1984.
By 2050, according to McDonald, ‘Australia, with an ageing population of perhaps 40 million, could have a near neighbourhood of nearly 30 million younger Melanesians’.
Even on the well-worn