A new bumper issue of Environment and Nature in New Zealand is available (Vol 7, Numbers 1-2). This is the first issue published under the editorship of Paul Star.
Archive for November, 2012
ENNZ November 2012
Thursday, November 29th, 2012Living with Fire
Thursday, November 29th, 2012
Living with Fire
People, Nature and History in Steels Creek
(CSIRO Publishing, 2012). ISBN: 9780643104792
Late on the afternoon of 7 February 2009, the day that came to be known as Black Saturday, the Kinglake plateau carried a massive conflagration down the fringing ranges into the Steels Creek community. Ten people perished and 67 dwellings were razed in the firestorm. In the wake of the fires, the devastated residents of the valley began the long task of grieving, repairing, rebuilding or moving on while redefining themselves and their community.
In Living with Fire, historians Tom Griffiths and Christine Hansen trace both the history of fire in the region and the human history of the Steels Creek valley in a series of essays which examine the relationship between people and place. These essays are interspersed with four interludes compiled from material produced by the community.
A deeply moving book, Living with Fire brings to life the stories of one community’s experience with fire, offering a way to understand the past, and in doing so, prepare for the future.
Read a fascinating edited extract in Inside Story.
View photos from the launch at Steels Creek, Victoria on Friday 23 November 2012.
Review: Seabird Genius
Thursday, November 29th, 2012REVIEW: Neville Peat, Seabird Genius: The Story of L. E. Richdale, the Royal Albatross, and the Yellow-eyed Penguin, Otago University Press, 2011, 279 pp, ISBN 978-1-877578-11-3.
Paul Star[1]
One way to approach environmental history is through the lives of those who have studied, spoken up or cared for, a country’s environment. The American journal Environmental History over the last decade contains at least 12 articles and 29 reviews of books which deal entirely with a named conservationist or naturalist. These include studies on John Muir and Aldo Leopold, of course, but many others too. There is a similar opportunity to approach New Zealand’s environmental history in this way, but so far it is not much taken.
Among nineteenth-century figures, we as yet only have some brief essays exploring The Amazing World of James Hector (2008). The ornithologist Walter Buller, whose attitude to native species was even more ambivalent than Hector’s, has been better served with Ross Galbreath’s excellent life of this Reluctant Conservationist (1989), and so has Richard Henry of Resolution Island (Suzanne and John Hill, 1987). As for T. H. Potts, the staunchest conservationist in New Zealand in that century (and the first to suggest that Resolution Island become a sanctuary), there is my thesis about him (1991), but still no published book. There are no biographies at all of such significant players as Thomas Kirk, W. T. L. Travers and F. W. Hutton. Recently there have been symposia about, William Colenso and John Buchanan, as mentioned elsewhere in this issue of ENNZ.
Moving into the twentieth century, my bookshelves have long awaited a biography of the eminent botanist and ecologist Leonard Cockayne. Of equal note is the absence of a life of Guthrie-Smith of Tutira, other than the early and uncritical work with that title (A. E. Woodhouse, 1959). It was much to our loss that the late Geoff Park, who gained a fine appreciation of Guthrie-Smith’s importance, had no time to write fully about him. The first half of Galbreath’s Scholars and Gentlemen Both (2002) describes well the career of Dunedin scientist and politician G. M. Thomson, but more could be written of this man’s role as a conservationist. There are a host of other figures from this time who deserve proper study – Edgar Stead, for instance – but who are largely forgotten, even when there is considerable archival material which relates to them.
Captain Val Sanderson was the longest-serving president of the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society and its most durable activist. There is, however, neither a biography of him, nor a full study of ‘Forest and Bird’, which has been New Zealand’s most significant conservation group for ninety years. Like Potts, Perrine Moncrieff, whose efforts brought about Abel Tasman National Park, has been the subject of a thesis (Robin Hodge, 1999) but not of a published book.
As for those professionals and scientists who gained prominence as conservationists in the mid-twentieth century, a couple of articles on Kenneth Cumberland, by Eric Pawson, have appeared recently, but where are the biographies of Lance McCaskill and John Salmon? What a treasure a life of the latter could be, perhaps written by Guy Salmon, who so powerfully inherited his father’s concern for native forest protection. The biography of the ornithologist and Environmental Patriot Charles Fleming (2005), written by his daughter Mary McEwen, demonstrates what can be done.
And now a further gap is filled, with the life of a friend and colleague of Fleming. Lance Richdale (1900-1983) disliked being termed an ornithologist, though clearly he was one, and he would have flinched at being called a Seabird Genius (2011). His biography, appearing 28 years after his death, is very much a Dunedin production. It was made possible by donations from Dunedin Forest and Bird among others, and is published by the University of Otago Press in association with both the Yellow-eyed Penguin Trust and the Otago Peninsula Trust. The result is a handsome volume, with illustrations that include many reproductions of Richdale’s bird photographs.
No-one could be better suited than Neville Peat to have written this book. He is himself a conservation activist – at present he chairs the trust behind Orokonui Ecosanctuary, Dunedin’s ‘mainland island’ – and his numerous books on natural history include The World of Albatrosses and The World of Penguins (1991), and Wild Dunedin (1995). What’s more, he is resident on Otago Peninsula, where Richdale conducted much of his field research.
Richdale, born in Marton in 1900, was educated in Wanganui and at Hawkesbury Agricultural College in New South Wales, taught for a while, then moved to the South Island in 1928 as an agricultural instructor to Otago’s schools. Right through until 1959, this position provided the only income for him and his wife and tireless helpmeet Agnes. While he was good at his job, inspiring generations of children – including some that Peat interviewed – what matters most is how he spent his spare time.
Richdale’s significance lies in the persistence with which he observed then described, in extraordinary detail, three bird species which have become iconic for New Zealand: the yellow-eyed penguin or hoihoi, the northern royal albatross or toroa, and the sooty shearwater, muttonbird or titi. Along with kiwi, kokako, kakapo and takahe, these are the birds that now encourage many tourists to visit New Zealand. More specifically, Richdale’s actions – beginning when he camped out night after night in 1937-8 to protect a lone egg from destruction – led in time to the successful establishment of the toroa colony at Taiaroa Head on the tip of the Otago Peninsula. This, trumpeted as the only mainland albatross colony in the world, has become the keystone in Dunedin’s construction of itself as ‘New Zealand’s wildlife capital’.
Peat rightly describes Richdale as a lone pioneer, but could have made more reference to others who worked in similar isolation. What of the relationship between Herbert Guthrie-Smith and Richdale? Peat notes that this ‘Hawkes Bay farmer and naturalist’ told Richdale he was ‘proud that I should have been the means of directing your energies towards bird work’ (p 117). He doesn’t, however, mention Guthrie-Smith’s prior journeys to Stewart Island to observe and photograph its birdlife, as recorded in Mutton Birds and Other Birds (1914), nor the older man’s similar penchant for close study of one location over a long period of time.
Richdale introduced new techniques of study, for he was ‘the first New Zealand researcher to band seabirds systematically, and the second in the world to band penguins’ (p 70). Yet the crux of his approach was, simply, to spend every possible moment in the field, watching birds long enough to know each one individually, noting and timing their every activity. This painstaking labour, followed by an equally intensive writing-up of findings, led to the publication, in the United States, of his most celebrated book, Sexual Behavior in Penguins (1951). Peat describes Richdale’s commitment to his task, and the recognition he eventually gained. Support from the Nuffield Foundation in particular enabled him to continue to synthesise and publish his findings, until his retirement back to the North Island in 1963.
From Peat’s account, it is clear that Richdale early appreciated the role of human agency in the fate of species. Not only did he note albatross ‘eggs stolen or abandoned due to disturbance of the parents’ (p 110), but he also understood the need for positive action as a countervailing force. Of the colony at Taiaroa Head, Peat writes that ‘No seabird population in the world has had so much hands-on management and monitoring for so long, and Lance Richdale was the initiator of it’ (p 251). In the case of titi, he hoped to understand not just the birds, but also the effect of Māori mutton-birding practices (the traditional taking of young birds for food) and ‘whether the annual harvest could be sustained’ (p 150). Though not mentioned by Peat, this set the scene for extensive research into titi harvesting undertaken by Henrik Moller and Otago’s zoology department from the 1990s.
Consistently a conservationist as well as an ornithologist, Richdale also joined a campaign to kill feral cats that preyed on titi. In addition, Richdale remained an educationist, both professionally as an employee of the Otago Education Board and through the succession of ‘popular’ booklets on New Zealand’s wildlife, illustrated with his own photographs, that he published privately from 1942. He even wrote a children’s story about Podgy the Penguin (1947).
Neville Peat provides an introduction both to the man and to the birds he cared about. At least in the case of Whero, the islet near Stewart Island on which Richdale endured great hardship observing titi, this book also records the vicissitudes of a particular ecosystem. In a brief postscript, Peat refers to his own visit to Whero, made in 2010, only to find that all its titi had gone. With Seabird Genius, Peat has certainly confirmed Richdale’s place in the pantheon of New Zealand’s naturalists and environmentalists. But he has also conveyed what is so intriguing and important about the birds – and the haunts of those birds – that Richdale studied. This book, then, has double worth as a contribution to New Zealand environmental history, and I welcome it.
[1]Dr. Paul Star is an independent historian and a former post-doctoral fellow with the history department at the University of Otago. He is a research associate in the history programme at the University of Waikato.
Review: Ikawai
Thursday, November 29th, 2012REVIEW: R. M. McDowall, Ikawai: Freshwater Fishes in Māori Culture and Economy, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2011, 832 pp, ISBN 978-1-877257-86-5.
Ian C. Duggan[1]
Bob McDowall was known to every freshwater ecologist in New Zealand, owing to an extremely productive career that included many highly utilised books and journal articles. While environmental historians may have known McDowall best for Gamekeepers for the Nation: The Story of New Zealand’s Acclimatisation Societies, for biologists his major work was New Zealand Freshwater Fishes a: A Guide and Natural History. Within this latter book, McDowall penned a chapter entitled ‘Traditional Māori fisheries’, from which Ikawai: Freshwater Fishes in Māori Culture and Economy found its genesis. Retiring from NIWA in 2000, Ikawai, at close to 800 pages in 38 chapters, was what he described as his ‘retirement’ project. It was McDowall’s final work, completed before his passing in 2011.
The main purpose of Ikawai was to provide a synthesis of written information regarding the knowledge and importance of freshwater fish to Māori, to allow more ready access to this scattered material. In the book, McDowall has trolled through various accounts of written history, and critically examined these works using his own vast biological knowledge of New Zealand freshwater fishes, to make sense of the writings. As McDowall argues, the quality of the information in these writings is variable. This is particularly the case for problems caused by varied nomenclature. For example, although inanga is today applied as a common name for one particular fish species (Galaxias maculatus), historically it has been used for a number of different species, varying among iwi. This, we find, has likely come about due to the name being translocated to New Zealand from Polynesia, with the tag subsequently applied to different fish species. Confounding this, the reliability of material from many sources can not be guaranteed, with some of this information considered ‘mystical and invented nonsense’. By examining the available information through a fish biologist’s eyes, McDowall has attempted to tease apart the fact from the fanciful. In all, McDowall was not shy to heavily criticise authors where he believed their interpretations to be incorrect. Information has been collected from varied, and sometimes obscure, sources. Commonly used writings include texts by Elsdon Best, Herries Beattie and Atholl Anderson, among others, which have been supplemented by snippets obtained from more obscure literature.
Following initial chapters that set the scene, chapters three and four provide overviews of the fish available to Māori. The first of these details species present following Māori arrival, while the latter chapter includes fish introduced by Europeans, which were utilised in the decades following European colonisation. This is followed by fourteen more in depth chapters on different individual fish species, covering topics such as value to Māori, archaeological finds, Māori knowledge of the species, fishing protocols, knowledge of cooking and preservation techniques, and their mention in myths, legends and proverbs. The most extensive among these is a chapter on tuna (freshwater eels), to which almost one hundred pages are dedicated. Such a prominence within the book reflects the disproportionate importance eels had to Māori, being widespread, abundant, of large size, and energy rich, relative to other New Zealand freshwater fishes. Throughout these chapters the coverage of cooking methods commonly left me salivating. One of the most interesting chapters from this section, for me, was that on the lamprey (piharau or kanakana), and in particular the stories of how overeating this species has lead to death through poisoning due to the toxins deposited in their skin. I am sure stories in other chapters will similarly attract the interest of others.
McDowell often refers to the lessening importance of freshwater fisheries to Māori in the years following European arrival. Throughout the book he uses this decline in the usage of species, and the causes for this decline, as a central theme. Traditionally among the most important of foods for Māori, McDowell illustrates a move from fish to more easily obtainable Pākehā foods, and a reduction in the availability of fish due to deterioration in water quality and the adverse impacts of introduced fishes. A major surprise regarding this was a chapter I thought on first glance would be the least interesting, and perhaps even outside the scope of the book: that of the impacts of introduced trout in New Zealand. This chapter covers not only the direct biological impacts of this predatory fish on native species, but demonstrated the effects that legal restrictions on fishing for trout (e.g., the requirement for fishing licences) had on Māori. This is well argued, absorbing, and shocking reading. McDowall clearly shows in this chapter how the taking of trout by Māori became a crime, despite this collection occurring within their own lakes, and regardless of the fact that permission was never given for these fish to be released there (e.g., in Te Arawa lakes). Examples are provided of Māori being prosecuted for capturing trout even as by-catch (i.e., incidentally), while in the process of fishing for native species using traditional methods.
Overall, many of the stories contained in Ikawai are enormously interesting, but there are a lot of pages to wade through; at 800 content pages it is encyclopaedic. However, I am not sure the intention of the book was for it to be read, as I did, from cover to cover. There is a fair element of repetition of information between chapters, and the presentation of a lot of similar stories within chapters, as McDowall has seemingly tried to fit every piece of accumulated information into this book. For example, six pages are dedicated solely to the capturing of eels by hand. This can commonly make the book feel laboured, but it does make it extremely valuable in that if something is of interest to the reader, it is not simply condensed. As such, this repetition may be due to an intention for the book to be used as a one-stop resource, where the reader might focus on individual chapters and not on the book in its entirety. Despite this, when read cover to cover, the reader is regularly rewarded with an interesting little gem that helps maintain the interest. Adding interest throughout is the enormous variety of pictures, including both historic and contemporary images. There does seem to be some contradictory material within the book, particularly with the regional importance of freshwater fisheries to Māori. For example, while McDowall argues in the earlier chapters for a greater importance of freshwater fish in the south of New Zealand, where other foods were less easily grown, it is argued later in the book that there was no regionalism in their importance. Unfortunately, a number of typographical errors throughout the book also provide some distraction.
All up, Ikawai is an incredibly valuable book, collating information from an enormous variety of sources that would otherwise have been largely inaccessible. Adding value to the book is that, for the scientific community, the information given provides numerous hypotheses that can be tested. For example, stories of the sources of historic translocations of fish into waters where their natural passage was blocked by waterfalls, such as into Lake Taupō and the Te Arawa lakes around Rotorua, could be tested using modern genetic techniques. Whether reading from cover to cover, or casually browsing, readers will find much in this book that is of interest. I believe it will be an essential part of the library of New Zealand freshwater ecologists for years to come.
[1]Dr. Ian Duggan is a senior lecturer within the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Waikato. His main interests are invasion biology and zooplankton ecology.
New Book: Living with Fire
Wednesday, November 28th, 2012Living with Fire
People, Nature and History in Steels Creek
by Christine Hansen and Tom Griffiths (CSIRO Publishing, 2012). ISBN: 9780643104792
On 23 November 2012, a new book by Christine Hansen and Tom Griffiths was launched in one of the communities that suffered on Black Saturday. Entitled Living with Fire: People, nature and history in Steels Creek (CSIRO Publishing), the book is the result of collaboration with people of the Yarra Valley who survived the firestorm and want to rebuild their lives and sense of community identity.
Eighty residents of Steels Creek and neighbouring areas gathered on a beautiful evening at the Steels Creek Community Centre, the former primary school, to celebrate the completion of the book. Living with Fire is produced in full colour throughout and features local photography and art, historical photos, case studies of how families have rebuilt their homes to live with fire, and an analysis of controversial policy issues arising from the firestorm and the subsequent Royal Commission. Christine and Tom have also written a micro-history of Australian settlement, exploring the deep social and environmental history of the valley over millennia.
View photos from the launch at Steels Creek, Victoria on Friday 23 November 2012.
Below is the back cover blurb from the book:
Living with Fire
Late on the afternoon of 7 February 2009, the day that came to be known as Black Saturday, the Kinglake plateau carried a massive conflagration down the fringing ranges into the Steels Creek community. Ten people perished and 67 dwellings were razed in the firestorm. In the wake of the fires, the devastated residents of the valley began the long task of grieving, repairing, rebuilding or moving on while redefining themselves and their community.
In Living with Fire, historians Tom Griffiths and Christine Hansen trace both the history of fire in the region and the human history of the Steels Creek valley in a series of essays which examine the relationship between people and place. These essays are interspersed with four interludes compiled from material produced by the community.
A deeply moving book, Living with Fire brings to life the stories of one community’s experience with fire, offering a way to understand the past, and in doing so, prepare for the future.
Read a fascinating edited extract in Inside Story.
View the research project page.
A Pacific approach to conservation: Chief Roi Mata’s Domain, Vanuatu
Wednesday, November 28th, 2012Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather[1]
By all means take this day out to enjoy the boat trip, the local delicacies at lunchtime, and the snorkelling. But if that’s all you get out of it you’ll have missed the point. As the day progresses, you will begin to grasp a worldview very different from the one that we have acquired through our western, science-based education.
This alternative worldview perceives the natural world as one that is indivisible from the worlds of spirits, ancestors, and the powerful forces of good and evil. Rather than categorising the environment as separate from the spiritual or emotional world, this is a world view that, as one Ni-Vanuatu put it, is ‘horizontal rather than vertical’, i.e. ‘… the world of the spirit is actually part of the physical world, and there is no notion of a spirit world distinct from the material world’.[2] If we can grasp this idea, the concept of protecting the natural environment takes on new dimensions. I will return to this point at the end of this article.
Havannah Harbour is a wide ocean inlet off the east coast of Efate Island, sheltered by Lelepa Island to its west. Smoke from cooking fires sends up isolated plumes into the fringing secondary forest, coconut palms and mountainside vegetable gardens. Vessels of the US fleet, anchored here during the Second World War, are remembered only by older villagers today, but the pale green, well-weathered ‘beach glass’ is testament to the countless Coca Cola bottles that the sailors dumped in the Harbour.
What is much more alive and significant in the minds of villagers from the Lelepa and Mangaliliu communities is the legacy of Chief Roi Mata, despite the fact that he lived and died several centuries ago. Thanks to him, the peoples of East Efate, violent and cannibalistic, were brought to a state of peaceful coexistence. Descendants of those who brought offerings to the great gatherings that he summoned every five years, identify today with those offerings. Our tour leader, Topie, identifies with the octopus; his boat driver, with the coconut.
Today, a roughly oblong-shaped segment of Havannah Harbour, together with the fringing coastal strip behind Lelepa and Mangaliliu villages, comprise a World Heritage Area designated in 2008: the Chief Roi Mata Domain. The account that follows describes my family’s experience of this day tour, a tour that has been carefully developed by the local communities and is under their management.[3]
Oral culture in the islands that comprise Vanuatu, as in other Pacific Islands, has preserved the past in stories told from generation to generation. But storytelling is a fading tradition. Where Chief Roi Mata is concerned, many elements of stories about him have been confirmed by archaeological investigations. But, in contrast to inert artefacts revealed by excavation, memory is still vibrant in the minds of these communities. It is the memory that binds them to each other and to this locality. This is one reason why the site merited World Heritage nomination. It is this vivid consciousness of the past, generously shared with those from elsewhere, that makes this tour a rare and distinctive experience.
Our tour lasted seven hours. Our first stop at 9 am was at the National Museum and Cultural Centre in Vila, where Topie used a recently completed display to explain the background to the Chief Roi Mata Domain. In the 1960s the French archaeologist Jose Garanger excavated the Chief’s burial site on Artok Island. The display in the Museum showed clearly what his excavations revealed. There were two layers of burials, the deepest being that of the Chief and his closest associates. The upper level contains fifty or so bodies, with signs of others beyond the excavated site. Carbon dating takes the burial back to roughly 1600 AD.
We were to visit the burial site later, but first we were driven thirty minutes out of Vila to the west coast of Efate Island, where we boarded one of the local fibreglass motor boats known as ‘banana boats’. According to the local legend, when the Chief died, his village, Mangaas, was abandoned and declared tapu, and that was where we were headed. For ten minutes we sped south along the coast through crystal clear waters, then slowed to nose cautiously between banks of coral up a narrow channel. At the back of a narrow white beach was a dark opening between huge trees. Beyond was the site of the old village, abandoned five hundred years ago.
Clearly, from Topie’s narration and behaviour on the site, it is a powerful location for him. With great reverence he introduced us to several significant stones. Two, perhaps half a metre high, marked the entrance to the village, and off to the side was a small rounded boulder where visitors had traditionally left offerings to the Chief.
Piles of chunky coral marked the old village walls. The village site as a whole, overshadowed by the forest, only takes a few minutes to traverse, but is imbued with legend. Another small rounded boulder is an ‘ordination stone’ on which the Chief sat while anointing the heads of others.
Special stones, the homes of certain potent spirits, were a common medium … Spirits do not change over time, individual ones living as long as people’s memories, so it is not surprising that they reside in stones. In the middle of everything in the bush, which grows and dies, only stone does not change under the eye of man. (MacClancy 2002, p. 26).[4]
A huge, ancient banyan tree, Topie told us, is the very same tree that had formed the sheltered meeting place of the community in the Chief’s time. Clearly, this abandoned village site had an immanence that is very real to Topie, and we became cautious while moving around, avoiding touching the stones that held such memories and retained such presence. Aware by now of the vivid presence of the past around us, we emerged onto the beach, climbed back into the boat and set out across sparkling blue water – accompanied by the occasional silvery flying fish – to the Chief’s burial site on Artok Island.
A few days earlier, as our aircraft had made its approach from the west to Bauerfield Airport outside Vila, we had noticed Artok Island off the coast to our left. Known colloquially as ‘Hat Island’, it is unmistakeable because of its wide ‘brim’ just above sea level, and, in the middle, its steep-sided, flat-topped crown. The burial site is small, only a few metres from the beach, marked only by a few low, irregular headstones, that of the Chief being singled out by a pile of large shells.
It was hard to imagine the grief-stricken, ritual events that took place at the burial. The men who lie in the upper layer are believed to have drunk themselves into a stupor – possibly aided by one of the archipelago’s many local poisons – and to have been voluntarily buried alive, together with some of their wives, whose demise may have been less than willing.
Somewhat subdued, we climbed back into our boat and headed for a small column of smoke back on the opposite shore at the village of Mangaliliu, where village women had been preparing our delicious lunch. We had passed a couple of fishermen earlier in tiny dugouts with slender outriggers, and one had grinned at us as he held up his morning’s catch.
Two kinds of fish were on the menu, caught that morning, together with the local version of dolmades (taro paste wrapped in island cabbage), steamed purple yams, and a bowl of grated pawpaw mixed with fresh coconut, washed down with fresh lime juice.
Our spirits restored, we changed into swimmers in a little toilet, donned our snorkels and masks and for an hour or so enjoyed exploring the varied colourful corals and fish just off the beach. The villagers have been re-establishing a colony of huge clams. Fortunately they were deep enough not to threaten our toes! Some were dappled brown and cream, but others glowed in psychedelic shades of purple, blue or emerald green.
The last site on our tour was undoubtedly the most striking. Chief Roi Mata died in Fels Cave on Lelepa Island opposite our lunch spot. Ferried across the Harbour, we clambered up a narrow path between outcrops of uplifted coral to reach breath-taking, vertical outcrops of creamy rock. Tens of metres high, and horizontally banded, the rock had been sculpted by the elements into wave-like forms that every few metres jutted out in vertical, knobby buttresses.
Embedded in the rock face were crumbs of black, sparkling cinder. This outcrop consists of tuff, a lithified form of volcanic ash. The cave entrance is partly blocked by a rock fall dating from a major earthquake in 2002.
Entering, we found a huge cave with a floor that sloped down to the back of a vast, cathedral-like space. Swiftlets darted in and out, and we spotted a small colony of bats, but there were no droppings on the floor, and the air was sweet. It felt utterly different from the limestone caves that we had visited elsewhere.
Many past occupants and visitors had left their marks, including one of the first missionaries to the then New Hebrides; an American general; and, three thousand years before them according to carbon dating, someone who had stencilled a hand. There were other marks; mysterious rows of chiselled spots in pairs; half moons and what Topie felt might have been a representation of the sun; small outlines of such creatures as a whale, a chicken, a head with a stylised pointed headdress, and a small outline of a person. From this magnificent cave, according to legend, the body of Chief Roi Mata was taken to Mangaas and then to Artok Island for burial.
As we sped across Havannah Harbour back to our waiting minibus, we took our last look at the extensive stretches of steep, forested coasts. Tourism is a vital part of Vanuatu’s economy, and a few kilometres further up the coast from this World Heritage site we recognised a couple of enterprises that we had visited a few days earlier: a little waterside bar, and a locally owned set of simple overnight cabins. A few days after this tour, we set off for a day’s sail in a trimaran from a small, newly excavated private harbour some kilometres north of the World Heritage designated area. This coast is ripe for the sort of exploitation that will alter its pristine nature, especially after featuring in the American, French and Australian versions of the Survivor reality TV series. World Heritage designation of this site, primarily for its cultural significance, has the potential to continue to protect the biosphere associated with it.
For the site to continue to be recognised as a World Heritage site, any development will need to be compatible with its cultural values. It is intriguing to consider the tapu declared 500 years ago as a precursor to today’s international heritage designation. And it is good to realise that the biological and geological environments have benefited from the contemporary initiative taken by the two local communities, determined to maintain the values and places that had been precious to them for centuries. For example, the tapu on resettlement or use of Artok Island after the Chief’s burial there has protected species endemic to the island, including rare lizard and cycad species for the last 500 years! And, through their commentary throughout the tour, the guides are sharing a worldview that is second nature to them, but that gives pause for thought to tourists from non-Pacific cultures.
However, the Vanuatu government still has to devise, enact and enforce the legal codes that could facilitate such protection. The twin pressures for development (to benefit local landowners, although this is a complex and contested issue) and tourist dollars (contributing significantly to the national budget) will pose a continual challenge and opportunity. In the case of the Chief Roi Mata Domain, Topie emphasised that the community has a strong desire to participate in preparing the necessary legislation rather than having it imposed upon them, i.e. in his words, they want the procedure to be driven from the bottom up, not from the top down.
Income from the Chief Roi Mata tour is managed by the two communities involved, Lelepa and Mangaliliu. It consists entirely of ticket takings. There is no government subsidy. In addition to the boat driver and the women who provide lunch, it supports eight guides, four from each of the two villages, two men and two women from each. The tour runs, when there are bookings, every day except Sunday. Access to these heritage sites is strictly controlled. For up to date telephone numbers to arrange a tour, contact the Vanuatu Tourism Office in Port Vila. And hope for as calm and sparkling a day on the water as we had!
[1]Since graduating from University College London, Elizabeth Teather has researched and taught in universities in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. She visited Vanuatu in 2006 and 2011. Now retired, she lives in Canberra.
[2]P 128 in A. G. Singo, ‘Vernacular Educational Ideas from Pentecost, Vanuatu’, pp. 128-130, in Konai Helu Thaman (ed.) Educational Ideas from Oceania, 2nd edition, Institute of Education, University of the South Pacific, 2009.
[3]For a detailed academic account of the establishment of Chief Roi Mata’s Domain, see M. Wilson, C. Ballard and D. Kalotiti, ‘Chief Roi Mata’s Domain. Challenges for a World Heritage property in Vanuatu’, Historic Environment 23(2), 2011. See also http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1280
[4]J. MacClancy, A Short History of Vanuatu, Vanuatu Cultural Centre, Port Vila, 2002 (first published 1980), p. 26.
