Book Review

Nicholas Halter remarks in his introduction that, curiously, there has previously existed no comprehensive history of Australian travel writing on the Pacific Islands. His book admirably fills that gap with an examination of 130 accounts (including the images they contained) from the 1880s until 1941. Most were published, but he has also located manuscript travelogues filed away in the archives. The authors range from well-known writers such as Beatrice Grimshaw and Wilfred Burchett to little known ones, including a violinist, a painter, a stockbroker, and a meteorologist, as well as mariners, journalists, and traders. All but fifteen were male, most were relatively young and generally middle class and, it seems, all were heterosexual. The organisation of his chapters around themes—the shipboard experience, Polynesia, Melanesia, commercial interests, issues of health and disease, among others—is complemented by an appendix that provides useful capsule biographies of each writer and diarist (though the book has no index). Titles such as A Winter Holiday in Fiji, Diary of a Trip to the South Sea Islands, A Cruise among Former Cannibal Islands, Glimpses of the New Hebrides, and several bearing the word ‘notes’ testify to the strong desire of travellers, with or without literary pretensions, to describe places they visited and experiences they had. Halter is careful to emphasise that writers each had their own voice, but he makes persuasive collective observations. Most of the writers relied on predictable tropes about the paradise or paradise lost of the Polynesian islands and the ‘savagery’ of the Melanesian islands. Racialist perspectives and indulgence in exoticism characterise almost every work, though several authors spoke out against the exactions of colonialism and Westernisation. Halter discerns different phases in Australian connections with Oceania. The 1880s saw concern about French and German expansion. In one particularly strong chapter, he shows how Australians were fearful of French convicts in New Caledonia. Yet after the end of transportation there in the 1890s, New Caledonia beckoned as an attractive tourist site and the freed convicts and disused penal building were added attractions. Australians remained preoccupied about French designs in the New Hebrides, while some hoped for Australian annexation of that archipelago and of British-colonised Fiji as well. From the 1880s onwards, easier steamship journeys led to increased travel and publications, matched by keen awareness of Australian political and economic stakes in the South Pacific. Interest ran high in the 1920s and 1930s, when travel writing on the Pacific reached its greatest