3. Whisky, Quinine and Coconuts

By the 1920s, there were about 650 aliens, white and Asian, scattered throughout the Solomons. They fell into four broad categories - each with its own outlook and interests, each often in conflict with the others. The first was the governmental hierachy of the Protectorate; District Officers, Customs and Post Office clerks, Police and Labour Commissioners, Medical staff; and the rest of a cast of bureaucratic characters replicated in outposts of Empire around the tropical world. At the head was a Resident Commissioner, based in he tiny island capital of Tulagi, and answering to the High Commissioner of the Western Pacific in Fiji. these government officials numbered only about forty.

A larger category, ab0out one hundred strong, were the missionaries: Anglicans, S.S.E.M., Methodists, Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists. They were internally divid3ed on lines of denomination, though some accord in territoriality was reached among the Protestants; and distinguished on lines of class background, national origin and commitment to life-long or short-term service in the Solo9mons. But desp8it their conflicts, all sought a strong though just hand of government protection and looked askance at thee worldly vices of white adventurers and ne'er-do-wells.

At odds with the missions at times, and the government more or less continually, was the commercial sector - the individual planters recruiters and traders, often long-settled, with local roots and island wives and the representatives of the large companies - Burns Philp, Levers, W.R. Carpenter - that dominated the commercial economy. these men of commerce thus ranged in financial status from well-salaried plantation mangers through to independent planters of some means, down to men who were virtually beachcombers - dwellers in leaf huts, owners of tiny cutters which battled about a small island circuit trading on a shoestring. A sub-group were the labour recruiters, successors of the early 'Blackbirders', who earned their living taking their schooners into the island 'passages' and bargaining and cajoling to sign on recruits for plantations. The 'European' (the genetic colonialist term for white expatriates; commercial community was increasingly composed of Australians, preponderantly Queenslanders; rough and ready, typically hard-drinking, hard-swearing, violent and contemptuously racist toward the Solomon Islanders. The conflicts between the 'commercials' and the administration in the Solomons, deeply rooted economically, have been underlain throughout this century by the mutual antipathy between these Australians and the British - seeing each another on the one hand as effete, pseudo-gentlemanly 'Poms', preoccupied with games of status, and on the other as uncultured colonial barbarians. 

The fourth category of aliens in the Solomons, the Asians, were mainly Chinese shopkeepers and tradesmen. Even though some of the Chinese families became relatively prosperous, the Chinese were excluded with racist scorn from the colonial world of Europeans.

All of these expatriates were, it seems, victims of myths. The 'commercials' pursued dreams of the inexhaustible productivity of tropical islands, inhabited by natives whose obvious role in the scheme of things was a labourers for white people; the government officers followed the lure, enshrined in a hundred books, of ruling romantic, tropical outposts, and sought to enact pretensions of higher social status than they enjoyed at home; and the missionaries sought the grace to be earned from bringing fallen beings to God. The Chinese, concentrated in Tulagi's Chinatown, left no known documents of the time, but they, too, must have been led on by myths of a prosperity that might have been possible decades earlier in the Australian gold tons but evaporate for most in the closure and isolation of the Solomons. By the 1920s, mission work had achieved only limited success at great cost, the planters were mainly in debt to the commercial giants, and the administrators' romanticism had been eroded by the harsh realities of spathy, drink and isolation.

Administrators, planters and missionaries, whatever their conflicts, were united as a small band of whites in a hostile and dangerous periphery of Empire. They travelled on each other's boats and recommended servants to each other. Isolated at district station, plantation and mission centre, they were frequently grateful for each other's company however much their interests and personalities diverged. The social life of the pre-Depression Solomons reflected this spirit. Cricket matches were held between 'government' and 'commercial' teams, and even race meetings brought the scattered European community temporarily together. At Tulagi, Elkington's hotel did a good trade all year round from the official and private visitors to the Protectorate Headquarters, and had overflow crowds at six-weekly intervals when the Burns Phip steamer arrived from Australia. 'Old hands' recall Tulagi harbour being crowded with shipping-traders' boats, mission vessels, recruiting schooners, the Malaitan labour gangs' boats and human contact. At these times all accommodation in Tulagi was booked solid, and drink flowed freely in the Club, Elkington's bar, the steamer's smoking room and the 'Chinatown' grog shops.  

Alcohol was - except among the missionaries - the universal solvent. Duty on beer, wine and spirits accounted for more than a sixth of the Protectorate's import tax revenue in the 1920s, and many a planter's anxiety about the price of copra was rivalled by his concern for the prompt arrival of his supply of White Horse. Drink, the essential social ingredient, was also a potent factor in the occasional quarrels and fights - between civilians and officers and each other - which set the society gossiping. Significantly, no white man drank or gambled with the islanders or Asians if he wished to continue to enjoy the privileges that went with a white skin.

The health of the European community in the Solomons was appalling. Almost all suffered from recurrent malarial fever that drained strength and left its sufferers vulnerable to other illnesses. The quinine that was the only available antimalarial was cumulatively debilitating, and sometimes pushed malaria into its lethal cerebral form and particularly into blackwater fever, which took a frightening toll of European life in this 'tropical paradise'. The death rate among missionaries was high; and almost no year went by without deaths in the alcohol-sodden and malarial planter community and the ranks of government. Without antibiotics, whites were vulnerable to tropical ulcers, dysentery and other infectious diseases spread by flies and mosquitoes, where sanitary precautions could extend no further than the last European house. In the Solomons climate, so hot and humid that a house post will take roof and grow, bacteria and fungi thrive as if cultured in a laboratory; while Europeans physically maladapted to the tropics, their resistance weakened by malaria and anaemia, wilt and rot. 

The apex of the colonial hierarchy in the Solomons was the Resident Commissioner, overlooking his miniature empire from a high hill on Tulagi. The first Commissioner, C.M. Woodford, was an able naturalist and scholar who at least knew the Solomnons and was committed to his task. But his assistant, F.J. Barnett, who took the active lead in administration from 1915 onwards, and most of his successors, lived in a world of colonialist fantasy, with little knowledge of, or commitment to, the reliti4es of the Solomons. A concern with the niceties of status and protocol, the proprieties of despatches and the rituals of Empire, was more important than the pacification and administration of the still-uncontrolled island interiors.

The Resident Commissioner, responsible to the Governor of Fiji (in his capacity as High Commissioner for the Western Pacific), held virtually total power over his subordinates; he could send them touring, bring them to headquarters in Tulagi and transfer them from one post to another. There were channels of protest, particularly through the High Commissioner; but the ultimate authority, the officialdom of the Colonial Office in London, usually chose to interpret protest in disaffection and to support all actions of the Resident short of outright lunacy. Isolation, the climate and the constant threat of illness in one of the most unhealthy places in the world broke the physical and mental strength of more than a few government officers, no decade down to the present has been without its 'case'.

After the First World War (and hence in the decade before and the years just after the Gwee'able massacre) the Solomons administration was flooded with retired military officers - Captain this and Major that - who brought with them their fading military titles and decorations and their residual fantasies about batmen, regimental silver and parades. As an anthropologist who visited the Tulagi of the 1920s as a research student recalls it,

Even though government of the Solomons was directed mainly to the European community, Parkinson's law and the rituals of Empire had produced a rather clumsy administrative hierarchy. It was a Gilbert and Sullivan world in miniature, a world of caricature colonialists, of whisky, quinine and coconuts. In those spheres where Solomon Islaners were energetically 'administered' - the courts in coastal areas, the periodic inspection of plantations to maintain labour conditions, the mission enclaves - the British administration was legalistic, often to a ludicrous degree. An assassin in a blood feud, whose homicide was culturally legitimate and even a duty, would find himself before a bewigged and unintelligible magistrate, then imprisoned in Tulagi for weeks or months while his crime of breaking an aliens law he had never heard or was reviewed in Fiji, then led to the gallows.

The particular fantasies that pervaded the miniature island world of Tulagi came and went with the changing personnel at the top echelons of government, but they were all of a piece. Old-timers remember the Secretary of Government in the late 1920s, and ex-Wimbledon tennis player whose particular dication was to courts rolled six times a day by detachments of prisoners. The Commandant of Police had a special passion for golf, and kept special watch over the grooming of the fairways from his office on the hill. That the rulers of Tulagi were seldom genuine products of the upper class made their pretensions to the niceties of status, on this far edge of Empire all the more strident.

This curious colonial world was administered - rhetoric about the white man's burden notwithstanding - for profit. And that meant a supply of cheap, if not willing, labour. Brown bodies were made to swear in the tropics; it was for whites to drink, swear and supervise.

The mountains of Malaita had provided a steady and substantial stream of indentured labour for the sugar fields of Queensland and Fiji. But as the internal plantation buildings of the Solomons expanded, and as sophisticated bushmen and coastal middlemen drove harder and harder recruiting bargains, the supply of labour dwindled. A 1919 observer has left a revealing description of the recruiting scene:

 This growing pressure for more plantation labour was an important theme in the Solomons in the years that most concern us here, from 1910 until the world fell into an ice age of Depression.

The planters, at least in their rhetoric and fantasy, saw the Solomons as an agricultural goldmine whose riches lay beyond their reach because the strong brown bodies they needed were in such short supply. One of the leading planter spokesmen of the time, now a retired octogenarian, reflected back on those days:

The Solomons planters pressed the government for changes that would force or entice more Malaitans into plantation labour: a native head-tax would force Solomon Islanders to work for cash, reduction in recruiting licence fees, longer periods of indenture, permission for recruiters to trade. The Planter's Gazette, published in the 1920s, was an amazingly slick propaganda instrument; and strings were being pulled as well from the direction of the Sydney Stock Exchange. The ice of the planter community was often aimed at the extravagant posturing of the British in tiny Tulagi and Fiji. The often rather effete gentlemen who filled the higher rungs of government were an easy target, especially where the planters' income provided the revenue for the trappings of status and Empire. When the Fiji-based High Commissioner's elegant ship, heavily financed by Solomons tax money, came to Tulagi to take the Resident Commissioner on tour, Planter's Gazette commented: "The White Elephant Pioneer ... arrived and gave R. C. Kane a fifteen-gun salute. Chinatown was prodigiously impressed'. (The Planter's Gagette was equally cynical about the humanitarian sentiments expressed by Tulagi officialdom: '(Administration) officials invariably fall back on the pre-historic and exploded shibboleth that they are here to look after the interests of the natives'.)

Levers, the largest commercial interest in the Solomons, and a worldwide political and economic force, sought a global solution: the importation of Asian labour. They pushed first for Javanese, then Indians, and eventually for Chinese. Spokesmen for Levers, regarding India as the Empire's natural labour pool, as did many colonial capitalists, sent a barrage of letters to London on the subject. They made continual reference to the systems of Fiji, Kenya and British Guiana and to the declining population of the Solomons. H.E. Meek, Levers' Australian manager, went to India to investigate the possibilities of Indian migration, elaborate schemes were drawn up designed to ensure the highest standards of treatment. Levers continued to press the question long after it had become clear that the Indian government would no longer permit the emigration of the sub-continent's people as servile labour. By 1923 Levers were r3equesting permission to import two or three hundred Chinese, this time pointing to the examples of Nauru, Samoa and Ocean Island. By the end of the decade the Company, in desperation, began investigating the possibility of importing labourers from Mauritius. The argument was couched in terms of the decline of the Solomonese 'race' and crude pseudo-genetics:

 The local planters had a limited view of the vast worldwide economic system which controlled their destiny, and which was beginning to crack long before the great Depression. They saw the cyclical drops in prosperity in local terms:

And they saw in the periodic rises in copra prices the hope of continuous prosperity, and hence saw local and piecemeal measures as solutions to worldwide problems. The early history of the colonial Solomons was one of small men with myopic vision.

The whites in the Solomons were totally dependent on Solomon Islanders black men carried every bag, built every house, crewed every boat, cooked every domestic meal. Every European was surrounded by Melanesian servants and labour3ers. (Jonathan Fifi'i, a Kwaio leader who has served as a cook in pre-war Tulagi and worked for years around government stations, reacted with surprise and wonder when he went to California in the 1960s: he had never seen white men work.)

Europeans treated their labourers and servants with a mixture of racist contempt and paternalism, depending on their temperaments, backgrounds and circumstances. Brutal treatment of islanders by planters was common and is clearly remembered by old ex-plantation workers today. However this usually stopped short of killing or maiming: an assault which resulted in an islander being seriously injured or killed was likely to come to the notice of the District Officer or the Inspector of Labour and to bring a punishment (usually a fine, but possibly expulsion from the Protectorate). More usually, ill-treatment would be of the kind reportedly entered in the diary of San Cristobal planter: 'Belted that black swine Tohoni today. Bread a failure - when will that bloody animal learn to cook!'

More common than brutally were indifference and extreme paternalism. Few published accounts of life in the islands in the early decades of this century are innocent of episodes which describe the behaviour of a loyal servant - house boy, mission teacher, boss-boy or police constable. The astonishment expressed at the loyalty and capability of the servant concerned proceeded from the widely held, ethnocentric attitude that islanders, of whatever age, were somehow infantile. The use of the term 'boy' is an indication of this of course, but the point is made quite explicit by such people as S.G.C. Knibbs, government surveyor in the Solomons in the 1920s: 'In the child the native discovers one of his own mentality, for he, Peter Panlike, never really grows up, but remains mentally young throughout his life. A young plantation manager came to the same conclusion about his Malaitain labourers. 'My first impression of them was as big brown children, and this I finally decided was as near to the truth of their essential difference as one could ever get'.  

This view of the islanders was not confined to technicians and planters; one District Officer wrote of the prisoners in his gaol who had been set to work at an extensive concreting job (no gentle task in the climate of the Solomons) that ... Solomon Islanders love to play; with them almost anything, even the hardest work, can be turned into a riotous game'. The view led logically to Knibbs' pronoucement that 'Kindness, yet firmness, is necessary in dealing with one's servants'.

The missionaries even the more sophisticated ones, were paternalistic toward the wild heathen savages they sought to turn into tame Christian children:

The racist assumptions of planters, missionaries and officials need no documentation. They preferred light skins to dark, facial leatures which approximated to the European; and when Melanesians displayed intelligence and imagination, these qualities they often attributed to a supposed admixture of European (or Polynesian) blood. However there also seems to have been a sexual dimension to these man-master, adult-child relationships. More than one missionary left the field as a result of his inability to control homosexual feelings, similar circumstances lay behind some incidents of ill-treatment of labourers by overseers or palnters. The writings of men who spent time in the Solomons in the 1920s suggest this sexual response of white men to black:

It was 'Malatamen' who constituted the bulk - some 79 per cent - of the labour force, not only on plantations but as stevedores, domestic servants, boat crews and the rest. 'Melaitamen' worked while Europeans watched; and they inevitably outnumbered the whites a dozen or a hundred to one. It is not surprising that Europeans, surrounded by men whose treachery and violence had been legend for decades, and totally dependent on them, created elaborate stereotypes, exchanged tales and focused their wits and resources on keeping the Malaitans at bay and 'in their place'. The Malaitans, proud, contemptuous of European weakness and totally fearless, in turn worked out strategies for manipulating, enraging and - if they could - destroying those overseers they did not respect. They goaded white plantation overseers, provoked them into rage and violence, then retaliated - once a European had been pushed beyond the bounds of violence permitted by law - with bloody beatings, or worse. The Malaitans needed the steel tools, trade goods, and illicit guns and ammunition money could provide, but though exploited in real terms, they exacted a hard price. So, too, did their senior kin at home, who levied larger and larger 'beach payments' as reward for indenturing their sons and younger brothers.

Small wonder that the 'Malaitaman' became a stereotype savage in the European mythology of the Solomons. It was this imagined savage who was to be the antagonist after the 1927 massacre.

The lurid reflections of a popular writer in 1942 summarize the stereotype:

By the 1920s, European settlers in the Solons lived enmeshed in contradiction. They tried to sustain the myth of tropical prosperity, of islands where food and profits grew on trees.

Yet the physical drains of disease and drink, and the economic drains that left planters perennially in debt, made this myth of prosperity an increasingly bitter and frustrating irony. Another contradiction that loomed large was the complete dependence of the white settlers for their personal comfort and the success of their ventures on members of a race they disparaged. The supreme irony lay in the paradox that their most reliable source of labour was an island then regarded as the wildest place in the British Empire. 

4. Malaita

Malaita's reputation for wild savagery and treacherous murder had grown over many decades before the British flag was precariously planted at a first government outpost in 1909. By that time a few mission enclaves had been established on the coast and on the lagoon islands. But the island on a whole was uncontrolled, subjected only to occasional and futile punitive shellings. The contempt felt by the Kwaio of the central mountains toward these peripheral and fumbling challenges to their sovereignty was shared by their cultural cousins to the north-west and south-east.

When the government did establish an administrative post on the north central coast, maximally accessible to Tulagi, the first steps were predictably colonists: erection of a suitably elevated house for the District Officer and the necessary amenities of administration, notably police barracks and gaol. A parade ground for police formation was cleared with a tennis court soon to follow.

The government post was built as Rarasuk on the slopes above a sheltered harbour, across from a 'salt3water' village on a tiny islet. The administration eventually adopted the name of the islet, 'Aoke, for the post. 'but the Europeans in the Solomons have been as inept at spelling the local languages as at learning them: until this day the government station remains misspelt as 'Auki', as well as misnamed.

For the first three years, the Auki station was under the command of a young Englishmen, T. E. Edge-Partington, with scholarly aspirations as ethnologist and an initial enthusiasm to begin imposing the Pax Britannica on this wild island. But although he established friendly relations with the lagoon dwellers nearby, and uneasy detente with the Kwara'ae-speaking bush people who bartered with them at the market on the station grounds, much effort was spent securing the perimeter of the station against real and imagined threats. Sentries patrolled constantly to defend 'Auki' against raids, a situation that prevailed for a decade. The police available to Edge-Partington, some thirty to forty, under command of F. M. Campbell, were at first ill-equipped and ill-trained Western Solomon islanders, many of them raw recruits. Though they were supposed to have been 'stiffened' by the addition of recruits from Tana (the New Hebrides equivalent of Malaitans, stereotypically wild, tough cannibals but stout plantation workers) they remained an ineffectual force even when their firepower for exceeded that of the Malaita ramo. (By this time cartridges for the old 'Snider' rifles were being smuggled into Malaita by pious Anglican converts from nearby Gela Island, adjacent to Tulagi, and sold for as much as 3 pounds per cartridge; small wonder the ramo had a reputation for bad aim because they shot only at point-blank range...}

Edge-Partington knew that he could make an impact on the endemic blood feuding only by making swift punitive strikes against killers and their kin gr9oups. When an Anglican missionary's cook was killed on the north-east coast, he sent a detachment of police around the island to arrest the murderers. The police were routed in disarray. Throughout 1911 Adge-Partington was engaged in a liverly correspondence with his superior, F.J. Barnett, the Acting Resident Commissioner. The former urgently requested more and better-trained police, and repeating rifles, to stage effective strikes against known assassins who were raiding mission stations with impunity. The latter reprimanded Edge-Partington for inadequately documented investigation, and warned against heavy punitive measures. (Barnett lived in a world of gentlemanly fantasy about Malaita, and thought its strongmen could be encouraged by Christian example and scrupulous justice into giving up their wild ways).

Edge-Partington was scarcely more impressive. Displaying little of the keen insight into Malaitan social rules and lore which later distinguished. Bell from the ruck of District Officers, Edge-Partington regarded the market held at Auki between the bush and saltwater people as a 'nuisance' which littered the beach, and he resolved to end it. Although he criticized overseers who worked their labourers too hard, he offered no leniency to Malaitains who absconded from such 'drivers', preferring to sentence them to prison terms so that he could make use of them around the district station.

Officially rebuked for his punitive action, and frustrated by pious idiocy from above. Edge-Partington smouldered and went back to patrolling the perimeter and improving the tennis court. When the High Commissioner from Suva visited the Protectorate late in 1911, he observed that

'Received news from Dr. Deck of a murder, the usual weekly occurrence, at Darra. Let 'em all come', wrote Edge-Partington in the station journal in mid-1911. And after noting another murder, he added, 'Above information entered, but is I suppose useless, as usual being prohibited from doing our duty'. It was in this frustration that Edge-Partington responded to news at Daniels' murder by the Kwaio at Utu later that year: 'Boat returned from Tulagi with answer to official despatch re murder of Mr. Daniels. Prohibited from going ton punitive expedition by Acting R. C. Hope some more get murdered. Shall not budge'. Edge-Partington must have got only partial satisfaction when he was attached to the punitive expedition by HMS Torch at Uru, since the High Commissioner and Resident Commissioner presided over the raid and he was towed along behind the Torch as a strategic pawn.

Even if his superiors had reinforced his police and supported his punitive strikes, Edge-Partington would have faced a seemingly insurmountable task of pacification. Some 40,000 Malaitains, politically fragmented and fiercely independent, speaking a dozen languages and dialects, scattered through a hundred miles of rugged mountains, were more than two Europeans and a squad of ill-trained police with only a whale-boat for transport could have taken on lightly. The naval force on call from Fiji when the Resident Commissioner needed to protect or avenge the lives of Europeans was useless at an aid to pacification and ongoing administration. It was traditional blood feuding and the almost daily assassination of Malaita Christians that had to be stopped if Malaita was to be incorporated into Empire.

That the Malaitans were a free and sovereign people following their own customs in their own land was apparently never noticed, certainly never acknowledged.

wrote Sir Frederick May in 1911.

Edge-Partington had resigned in frustration, and two inept and uncommitt4ed successors hd paraded the police and tended the tennis court, when the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 sent shock waves to the Solomons. Britons and Australians hurried to enlist for God and Counhtry, and administration of the Solomons was thrown into turmoil. When the Auki post was vacated, a new man was needed to pick up a task scarcely yet begun...