1. “Dancing with Memory – Oral History and Its Audiences”
14th International Oral History Conference (Sydney, 12-16 July, 2006).
SUB-THEMES OF PAPER:
Island Stories; Pleasures of Memory; Memory and Trauma.
TITLE OF PAPER:
SEPIA-TINGED MEMORIES AND THE PAIN OF “OTHERNESS”:
GATHERING FRAGMENTS OF FIJI’S COLONIAL MIXED-RACE HERITAGE
"It was morning at ‘Na Qaranikula’; dawn's pale fingers stroked the sky into
wakefulness, and bestowed a soft glow like moonlight over land and sea. …They rested
with gentle hands on the shabby, weatherworn group of buildings clustered on a green
lawn, near a wide beach fringed with coconut palms. Led by the bickering of impudent
mynah birds, the dawn hush was broken by a medley of sounds. Discordant noises issued
from the fowl house, the dogs barked for no apparent reason, pigeons ‘whoo-hooed’
throatily as they sought their breakfast in chilli and lantana bushes; a warm breeze,
laden with elusive spicy scents, stirred the leaves of the hibiscus and croton trees. There
was the sound of wood being chopped. Presently, a thin trail of smoke drifted above the
homestead. From a one-cow bale [byre?], underneath a lean-to shelter, came the
carefree warbling of a tenor voice: (sings) 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm
half crazy, all for the love of you!' Daisy craned her head around to eye the singer
disbelievingly. She shook her horn at him, and went on chewing her cud. Mum and I sat
on a log and listened. We were waiting to assist with the next cow on the list, a refractory
animal called Pansy. The milk swished and frothed into the bucket, while the song
continued. (sings) ‘ It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage....’ (takes a
deep breath). At this juncture, Daisy decided to gag the singer with the end of her tail.
There was a sound of spitting, and a burst of profanity, simple, concise, and descriptive.
'You're a *&%##$@. You old @#%%$*!’ We exchanged shocked glances, mine tinged
with interest. ‘Mum, what's a - what's a %$@#!!*?’ ‘Shhh!’ said Mum, making a cluck-
clucking noise of disapproval. A head, crowned with a lady's russet-coloured felt hat,
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2. shot up from the other side of Daisy, and a pair of hazel eyes under bushy brows
regarded us unabashed. ‘You'd have sworn, too, by Cripes!’ said Dad, spitting again.
‘Now, call Jack and Ted and we'll have a wack at that Pansy!’ That was a typical
morning in our life in Fiji!” (1)
That was Lema Low in March 1999, telling me how a day usually started for her and her
family on their coconut plantation in the Fiji Islands during the late 1920s. She was
reading from her autobiographical book “A Family in Fiji”. (1)
For this oral history interview, Lema and I sat in the living-room of her house in Savu
Savu, which is a little port town on Fiji’s second-largest island, Vanua Levu. Lema was
86 years old at the time.
Rain was falling heavily outside, and the air was a warm and humid fug. Our recorded
interview lasted for over an hour, and I spent most of this time leaning awkwardly across
the small coffee-table that sat between our armchairs, carefully trying to aim my large
broadcast microphone - as unobtrusively as I could - at a spot just below her chin. Sweat
ran freely down my arm and I developed cramps in the wrist, but our conversation was
worth every minute!
Like many of the 21 people I interviewed for the Fiji Oral History Project Part I, Lema
Low had a white male ancestor who had travelled to Fiji in the 19th
century to make his
fortune - and stayed to start a new life. Many of these pioneers and adventurers married
or formed relationships with Fijian women. The children of these early unions were the
first members of Fiji’s mixed-race family dynasties, many of which have endured and
kept on growing to this day.
In Lema’s case, her great-grandfather, a Welshman called Henry Knight, was said to have
built Fiji's first copra oil mill in Savu Savu the 1860s. Lema’s mother, Rosella, was the
daughter of a Fijian woman called Romasi Alewa.
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3. Like Lema, my interviewees usually remembered their Fiji childhood years in the early to
mid-20th
century as bucolic, “Huckleberry Finn” existences. The “pleasures of memory”
were plain to see on their faces as they travelled back in time to simpler, sweeter days.
But life could also be tough – especially for women who married copra planters. Those
romanticised, contemporary images of the palmy old “island planter” lifestyle were
usually only part of the truth.
Lema Lowe’s friend and fellow-Savu Savu resident Jess Jackson, who came from New
Zealand to help run her (Part-European) husband’s plantation as a young bride in the
1950s, remembers:
"Well, it was a shock…… … .. I'd never seen a coconut tree, and the plantation with all
the trees. ….This house wasn't built. This was built many years later. And it hadn't been
finished. I fell through the floor at one stage. They had doors - but they hadn't put the
cement steps [in], we had no water, and I used to ---. My husband made sort of a trolley,
I used to put the copper and all the weekly wash, take the eldest boy on my back, and
wash down at the bridge down there (indicates a small bridge nearby that crosses the
road that bisects the property). And I used to put a net over him; he'd sleep, and spend -
sometimes it would take me nearly all day to do the washing. Had no water, only tanks,
and then if it did not rain, had no water. " (2)
Unlike Lema, Jess had no Pacific Islander heritage; she was one of the nine people in the
oral history project who in Fiji terms would be called “European”; the rest of the people I
interviewed were of mixed-race heritage, or as they say in Fiji, they were “Part-
Europeans”.
Perhaps at this point I should clarify the term “Part-European” as it is used in Fiji. Whilst
the island nation can lay claim to being a cultural and ethnic “melting pot” in the South
Pacific region, it’s vital for most people to be able to place each other’s race, and where
they were born, as precisely as possible. Fiji is by no means alone in this; for example,
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4. most of us are familiar with terms that have been used elsewhere for people of mixed
race, like “Anglo-Indians”; or “Cape Coloureds” in South Africa.
Under Fiji’s electoral system, mixed-race citizens form part of a minority group of voters
that are classified as “General Voters”, or “Others”. In 2001, there were estimated to be
around 18,000 Part-European voters in Fiji. (3). This term “Other” is value-laden and
evokes many meanings; in Fiji, it can signify “Outsider” – even “Outcast”.
The marginalised social and racial status of many of Fiji’s Part-Europeans is a major
theme running through this collection of oral history interviews. Notwithstanding their
happy childhood memories, many of the Part Europeans I interviewed keenly
experienced the pain of their “otherness”. They spoke frankly of racial discrimination –
or the “colour bar” as it was called - and how it had fractured 20th
century Fiji society.
It is often argued that the racial fault lines than run through today’s Fiji are a bitter legacy
of its colonial past – or to quote Indo-Fijian academic Vijay Mishra: “…the colonial
administration in Fiji clung onto race as an immutable and genetic category. In the end
that legacy made it impossible for ethnicity in Fiji to be theorised in anything other than
racial terms…” (4)
A kaleidoscope of other historical and autobiographical themes also emerged from the
rich jumble of stories I gathered for the Fiji Oral History. As well as the “The Pleasures
of Memory”, my interviewees evoked “Memory and Trauma”…and of course, all of
their stories were “Island Stories”.
Whilst their intimate memories of daily life, and the ancestral tales of the Part-Europeans
and Europeans in this oral history are mainly grounded in the Fiji Islands, many other
islands are also part of the pattern of these stories.
This is because many of the first white people to settle in Oceania were already islanders
– they came to Fiji from the British Isles, from New Zealand, and from that great island
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5. continent neighbour, Australia. So as this oral history also reminds us, all these islands
big and small, their people and their histories, have been tied up and entwined through
the last two centuries of political and social change in this region, and the wider world.
Before returning to the racial issues raised by my interviewees, I would like to address
some basic questions about why and how I conducted the Project.
To start with, why did I - and not somebody from Fiji - tackle the task of trying to
document this particular slice of remembered history?
It all started with something a friend said to me when I was living in Fiji in the early
1990s as an Australian Foreign Affairs officer. The late Dorothy Walker, an expatriate
Englishwoman who had lived in Fiji for over 30 years, knew many older members of
Fiji’s long-established mixed-race and European community. And she was passionately
convinced of the need to go out and collect their life stories before it was too late.
“ Well, I must say to you now that Fiji is the most fascinating country. I found it
fascinating, and I still do. When I realised that it had such a young history, I mean from
19 – 1874 [the year when the Deed of Cession was signed, handing control of Fiji to the
British Crown] to 1974 is only 100 years – and during those 100 years, all those people
were born in Fiji, their families came from Fiji. And I just was interested to know more
about them. I felt that the Fijian people have been documented very well indeed, and the
Indians of course, starting with the indentured labourers, they have also [had] their
history documented. But the European[s] and the Part-European[s] have not. And all
those people are getting older. And dying off, and with them dies their history”. (5)
Dorothy passed her fascination with this side of Fiji’s history on to me. Many of the Part-
European and European people she knew, I also knew – because they were elder relatives
of my own friends in Fiji.
So in 1998 I decided to make a start on documenting a small slice of their history.
Perhaps surprisingly, I encountered no opposition from the families I approached to the
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6. idea of an “outsider” from Australia interviewing them about their lives. On the contrary,
most were quite willing to talk to me – maybe it was because I was from somewhere else,
somewhere “beyond the reef”, and was therefore seen as an unbiased, neutral observer.
Another undeniable fact was that up to that time, nobody else in Fiji had tackled such a
project; and still to my knowledge, no other oral history of this size (it consists of 30
hours of taped interviews) has been conducted on the subject of Fiji’s old-established
mixed-race and white families. So I concluded that someone had to do it, and that
someone might as well be me!
I designed the Fiji Oral History as a multi-purpose project; it was intended both to
preserve oral heritage, and also to be a catalyst for further such work in Fiji, by Fiji
people.
First and foremost, it was designed as a resource for the interviewees themselves, to
preserve their personal histories and memories for their families for posterity. So at the
conclusion of the project, a copy of each interview tape was mailed to its subject, with a
transcript.
In addition, following ethical oral history practice, I asked all the interviewees to specify
on a “Condition of Use Form” what - if any - degree of public access they were prepared
to allow to their interviews. Most agreed to allow public access to the interview
transcripts, on the condition that if researchers or historians wished to quote from the
interviews, permission should first be sought from themselves or their families.
Secondly, the project was designed in collaboration with the Museum of Fiji, to
complement the Museum’s archival and conservation programs. For example, a number
of oral history interviews I collected in Fiji’s first capital, Levuka, provided an
“intangible heritage” resource to support a planned application to UNESCO by the
Museum and the National Trust of Fiji that Levuka be nominated as a World Heritage
Site.
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7. Thirdly, the “Fiji Oral History Part I” is so called because it is intended to serve as the
inspiration for further oral heritage projects to preserve the histories of other minority
ethnic and cultural communities in Fiji, like the Rotuman and Chinese communities.
And finally, because I am a journalist, it was designed as an “oral history media” project.
All interviews were recorded as broadcast-quality audio material, to form the basis of
future radio documentaries. I have held some preliminary discussions with the ABC and
other major broadcasters, and still hope to make this next stage of the project a reality
when time and financial resources permit.
Because of the multiple objectives of the project, I was able to attract valuable support
and sponsorship from a range of key organisations in Fiji and regionally. As well as the
Fiji Museum, they were: UNESCO’s Office for the Pacific; Telecom Fiji; Air Fiji; Air
Pacific; the Australian High Commission in Suva; the Australian Government’s (sadly
now defunct) Australia-South Pacific Cultures Fund; the Research School of Pacific and
Asian Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Professor of
History Brij Lal, and Mr Ewan Maidment of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau deserve
special thanks; and the Social History Unit of ABC Radio National.
How did I select the participants? And how did I go about the interviewing process?
I undertook about a year’s background research, studying archival source material,
including documents held by the National Library of Australia and the Australian
National University; as well, I spoke to a wide range of Part European and European
family members and their friends, seeking to identify the best and most likely candidates
for interview.
At the end of this process, I had a preliminary “short list” of over 100 names!
Availability, and willingness to participate, narrowed this list down to 21 people.
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8. I tried to select as broad a representative sample of Part European and European male and
female interview subjects as possible, from a range of socio-economic backgrounds. It
was important for the project to reflect (at least in microcosm) the almost-formal
“pecking order” that had existed within Fiji’s mixed-race community. Social status was
based on wealth, and on the original social standing of one’s white ancestors. For
example, some Part European families, who were descended from members of the British
aristocracy, lorded it over their poorer “Kai Loma” cousins. (6)
In the end, my financial resources, and the time I could afford to spend travelling to
conduct interviews (around 6 months from late 1998 to mid-1996), dictated the final
shape of the project, and the number of people to whom I spoke.
I designed a “generic” list of chronological questions to draw out the subject’s key life
memories, as if I was conducting a series of biographical feature articles.
These questions drew out vivid and poignant tales of daily life in early to mid-20th
century Fiji - and what it had been like to live through major historical events like World
War I, the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, the 1930s Depression, World War II , and Fiji’s
first military coup in 1987. Their stories are often funny, or poignant; sometimes even
shocking… but always fresh, real and immediate, as caught in their mind’s eye.
The Fiji Oral History questionnaire template was also designed to collect as many
ancestral tales and genealogical details as possible, going as far back in time as people’s
family records, and their memories, allowed.
The only initial obstacle I had to overcome with some of the participants was puzzled
embarrassment. They assumed only “famous people” made records of their lives.
“What do you want to talk to me for?” they would say. “I’m not a VIP, I haven’t done
anything interesting!” In their humility, these interviewees were often the most
interesting of all.
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9. Earlier in this talk, I mentioned that interviewees talked frankly about the racial fault
lines that still run through Fiji society – those hairline cracks and larger chasms that are
the legacy of its colonial post.
Let me give you a taste of what they told me. First, a man whose Part-Fijian mother could
not “pass (for) white” describes a typical childhood incident in Suva in the early 1940s:
“I went to a white school, and I can remember walking up the street one afternoon, soon
after I started school, with my white friends, and my Mother was walking down the street
to see her sister. And I snubbed her. That was the reality of the thing. Because the kids
were willing to call me a ‘bloody native’ at the drop of a hat”. (7)
Another echo of this “colour bar” came from a part-European businesswoman,
remembering her childhood in the 1940s and 50s:
“…Definitely there was a white hierarchy, no two ways about it. In Lautoka, they didn’t
even let them live together (Part-Europeans and whites). And no sugar town allowed
Part-Europeans to live in what they called the ‘European area’…if a (white) single man
married a Part-European, he lost his job.” (8)
It was just as well I went to Fiji when I did. Today, I suspect a project like this would be
much harder to undertake. Demoralised by Fiji’s troubled political undercurrents, many
people are less willing to talk openly. And sadly, since 1999 at least ten of the
interviewees have died.
I hope I do not sound presumptuous when I confess that I have mourned every one of my
interviewees who has gone, even though I cannot claim to have been more than a passing
acquaintance for many of them. I am still humbled by the precious gift that they gave me
so generously, the gift of their life stories.
A number of key academic institutions have recognised the value of the Fiji Oral History
Part I: Part-Europeans and Europeans as a fresh anecdotal history resource. Through an
arrangement between the ANU’s Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, and its network of partner
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10. institutions in Australia and overseas, copies of the collection on CD are held in the
archives of the University of California (San Diego), the University of Hawaii, the
University of Auckland, New Zealand’s Turnbull Library, the Mitchell Library in
Sydney, the National Library of Australia, the Library of the University of the South
Pacific, and the Museum of Fiji.
Finally, I believe it would be wrong to imagine that this oral history is only about the
past, about some sepia-tinged other world where “they did things differently.” It has
lessons to teach us all about the origins of the polyglot reality of Fiji life today.
After all, George Speight, the front-man for Fiji’s 2000 coup, is a Part European, as are
many of the country’s influential business and community leaders. Fiji is truly the most
ethnically and culturally complex country in the South West Pacific, and this project
helps us to better understand how the country’s present, and its future, are being woven
from the twisting, shining strands of its pre-colonial and colonial past.
Footnotes & Bibliography:
1. “A Family in Fiji” by Lema Low. Published 1962.
2. Interview with Jess Jackson, The Fiji Oral History Part 1: Part- Europeans and
Europeans, 1999.
3. “Thoughts on Fiji’s Third Coup d’Etat” – Paper by Mere Tuisalalo
Samisoni, in “Coup – reflections on the political crisis in Fiji”. Pandanus Books,
2001.
4. “Race, Speight and the Crisis in Fiji” – Paper by Vijay Mishra in “Coup –
reflections on the political crisis in Fiji”. Pandanus Books, 2001.
5. Interview with the late Dorothy Walker, The Fiji Oral History Part 1: Part-
Europeans and Europeans, 1999.
6. “Kai Loma” is a Fijian term for mixed-race people, and in the past it generally
referred to Part-Europeans of lower socio-economic status.
7. Interview with Rodney Acraman, The Fiji Oral History Part 1: Part- Europeans and
Europeans, 1999.
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11. 8. Interview with Judy Zundel, The Fiji Oral History Part 1: Part- Europeans and
Europeans, 1999.
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