Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 376 pp. (Illustrations, maps.) US$45.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-5586-4.
As the title promises, the book delivers. Margaret Pointer presents a clearly structured history of two hundred years of this relatively small island. Though it experienced a series of processes of intensifying contact, common to many parts of the Pacific world, the island is also here in its unique features of geology, cultural expression, and politics. The book does not dwell long on the times before the coming of Westerners, though peppered throughout we get glimpses of an older conceptual world in narratives from oral tradition as well as recorded through the eyes of explorers, whalers, missionaries, traders, and commanders of British warships. Islanders’ interactions with these groups of foreigners comprise the first part of the four-part organization of the book, to be followed by sections on empire, New Zealand administration, and finally, the road to self-government.
In part B we see why this island became initially under British protection. The depredations of the Peruvian slavers seeking workers in 1863 were devastating here, as on many other small islands in the region, though it did not discourage mobile islanders from seeking subsequent overseas work on contract. Add to that London Missionary Society missionaries who were not only effective as church people but also actively concerned with the future of the people. To them and representatives of all the settlements on the island, Britain seemed a likely protector. But wider colonial interests prevailed with a British deal with Germany in 1886 to keep areas of the Pacific neutral and open to all traders, so Britain declined the Niuean petitions. The Niueans, then with an elected king, persisted. Britain’s eventual change of heart, stimulated by the agreement in 1899 to split Samoa between the Germans and Americans with Britain to have small pieces of the islands elsewhere, finally gave the Niueans the protectorate it sought in 1900. Britain soon gratefully handed Niue and the Cook Islands over to empire-aspiring New Zealand, much to the disappointment of the Niueans who knew the relative power of the respective states.
So Niue, encircled by Tonga, Samoa, and the Cooks, with an ocean between it and New Zealand, became the last carriage on New Zealand’s short colonial train after the Cook Islands, placed even further from the engine by the addition of yet another forward carriage, the mandate of Western Samoa as a result of World War One and Germany’s loss of its colonies. As the writer shows so well in part C, New Zealand, while no colonial exploiter, certainly gave the island short shift when it came to effective administration in the interwar years, not aided by the economic depression of the 1930s. World War II, an awakening in New Zealand of a realistic sense of itself and its place in the region under Peter Fraser, along with the influence of the United Nations saw a quickening of all levels of development and welfare support in education, health, and infra-structure.
The island and New Zealand’s department of Island Territories reeled in 1953 under the gruesome murder of the commissioner, Larsen, and severe injuries to his wife as they slept one night. This was no heroic nationalistic revolt but the bitterness of a couple of prisoners who escaped to get revenge for the rough manners of Larsen. It did incline New Zealand to pay even more attention to the island, however.
The book’s final part D addresses the detailed and careful steps to self-government in free association with New Zealand. Leaders, such as Robert Rex and Vivian Young, feature in negotiations. What impresses is the care that both parties displayed in this slow and difficult process, made more complex in that the United Nations delegates seemed to believe that Niue, along with the entire colonial Pacific, wanted to be rid of all hints of colonial association.
The book has many appealing features. The narrative has several one- to four-page inserts that highlight particular people or events, often with ample quotations from the actors. The illustrations are many, well chosen, and enlivening. The maps are clear and orient the reader. It is a beautiful book and a credit to its creator and the University of Otago Press.
While the history is naturally island-centred, it also discusses Niueans abroad: as migrant workers, as soldiers in World War One, and as more permanent migrants to New Zealand, an accelerating flow from the 1960s. In fact, the expanding diaspora believed by the 1970s that it had a major part to play in the island’s political destiny, an opinion not necessarily shared by those who decided to stay and live on Niue. This difference features in the discussions leading to self-government in free association with New Zealand in 1974.
Besides these positives, we are presented with a very readable, clear narrative. The author is even-handed throughout; there is no great Manichean struggle posited with evil colonialism and virtuous and vulnerable islanders cast against each other. Pointer digs behind actions to show us what often-distant factors shaped people on Niue, especially the mental and physical distance between the New Zealand government and the island’s administration until post-World War Two. The tenor of the lives, and the behaviour and motivations of the island’s people and the outsiders involved are all there, with their strengths and weaknesses. The moral failings of a couple of administrators are mentioned but not excessively dwelt on, no more than the shame of the Niuean families of Larsen’s murderers. While not afraid to discuss the reasons why, say, a particular person was respected and another not, Margaret Pointer remains a compassionate historian, well acquainted with the human condition, as well indeed as she is with the island, its robust people, and her myriad sources. Her work is a valuable and accessible contribution to the history of the Pacific region.
Judith A. Bennett
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
pp. 637-639