{"content":[{"text":"Book Reviews Section","bbox":{"left":0.117638,"top":0.044832,"width":0.17198199999999997,"height":0.016779000000000002}},{"text":"Beaglehole and Gilson were not seriously involved in political developments in the Pacific \n Islands. In contrast, the early career of Harry Maude (1906-2006) was within the British \n colonial service as District Officer in the southern Gilbert Islands, where he was responsible, \n at the age of 23 and with very little contact with more senior officials, for the wellbeing of \n 10,000 people spread over a vast area. He revelled in the place and people. After a spell in \n Suva during World War II and in Sydney with the embryonic South Pacific Commission he \n changed career and joined Davidson at the ANU in 1957. After many years as an actor in \n Pacific affairs, Maude then had to establish his academic credentials. Like Gilson, he was \n appointed to an academic position without a PhD: a marked difference from current practices. \n He spent the next few years on careful archival research into Spanish exploration in the \n Pacific, the coconut oil trade and the Tahitian pork trade, and Pitcairn Island, and proved his \n academic worth. But further ‘participant involvement’ was confined to a strong role in the \n establishment of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau and to writing about some of his earlier \n experiences, particularly the re-location of Gilbertese on the Phoenix Islands in 1937.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.091044,"width":0.746361,"height":0.24329399999999995}},{"text":"It is Brij Lal’s combination of academic history writing and direct constitutional involvement \n which most closely mirrors that of Davidson. After study at the University of the South Pacific \n and the University of British Columbia, Lal gained a scholarship to the ANU to write a PhD \n thesis on the origin of the girmityas, the Indian indentured labourers brought to Fiji to cultivate \n sugar. He subsequently taught at USP and the University of Hawai’i, then returned to Canberra \n and the ANU, where he has been ever since. During this time his research interests \n encompassed both girmitya history and contemporary Fiji politics. In 1995 he was appointed \n to the Fiji Constitution Review Commission; if the report produced by Lal, Tomasi Vakatora \n and Sir Paul Reeves had been accepted in toto as the new Constitution for Fiji the subsequent \n politics of Fiji might have been different. But the Commission’s recommendation that two \n thirds – the highest figure the framers dared suggest - of the seats in the lower house of \n Parliament should be elected on a common roll, rather than communal rolls, was rejected by \n the existing government, and racial politics ruled again. The two subsequent Fiji coups – in \n 2000 and 2006 – demonstrate that Fiji’s political ills are far from solution, and Lal’s expulsion \n from Fiji in 2009 for allegedly breaking his visa conditions shows that the role of a participant \n historian can be politically fraught and even dangerous.","bbox":{"left":0.117636,"top":0.352407,"width":0.746505,"height":0.2781429999999999}},{"text":"In some ways, Munro’s book reads like an anthropological study: that of a tribe of which I am \n glad to be a member. So many of the names and places are familiar. Alongside the serious \n discussion is a truly delightful amount of tribal gossip, with reminders of the Coombs Tea \n Room and the prehistory of various feuds evident in the corridors of the ANU many years \n later. Whether this will be seen as a positive by all readers is not so clear, but for those within \n the tribe it is a treat.","bbox":{"left":0.117646,"top":0.648619,"width":0.746354,"height":0.10389999999999999}},{"text":"It is something of an irony that this book, largely a celebration of the ANU Research School of \n Pacific History, is published just as the ANU Pacific history tribe is in apparent decline, and \n the fulcrum of Pacific historical studies is moving, to other universities such as Deakin and \n Queensland within Australia, to New Zealand, to the University of the South Pacific (which \n does not get a very good press in Munro’s account) and the University of Hawai’i. It is also \n moving to incorporate more Pacific scholars, a trend Munro prefigures with the inclusion of \n Lal.","bbox":{"left":0.117646,"top":0.770589,"width":0.746341,"height":0.12132399999999999}},{"text":"262","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.938468,"width":0.029393000000000002,"height":0.01677899999999999}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}