The Pacific Way: Regional Cooperation in the South Pacific. By Michael Haas. New York: Praeger, 1989. 183p. $42.95.

1990 ◽  
Vol 84 (4) ◽  
pp. 1447-1448
Author(s):  
Beth A. Simmons
2021 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Joanna Siekiera ◽  

Cooperation in the South Pacific region is unique due to the characteristics of its participants. Following the period of decolonization (1962-1980), countries in Oceania have radically changed. Achieving independence gave those nations international legal personality, yet complete independence from their former colonial powers. The following consequence was gaining an opportunity to draft, adopt and execute own laws in national and foreign policy. PICT (Pacific island countries and territories) have been expanding connections, political and trade ones, within the region since the 1960s when permanent migration of islanders and intra-regional transactions began. Migrations along with foreign aid are considered as the distinctive characteristics of the Pacific Ocean basin. Since the 1980s, the regional integration in Oceania, through establishing regional groupings and increasing the regional trade agreements number, took on pace and scope. The MIRAB synthetic measure (migration, remittances, aid, bureaucracy) has been used in analyzing the Oceania developing microeconomies. Last but not least, migration and foreign aid have been retaining the region from a deeper and more effective stage of regionalism.


2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 59-71
Author(s):  
Nataša Potočnik

Robert Dean Frisbie (1896-1948) was one of the American writers who came to live in the South Pacific and wrote about his life among the natives. He published six books between 1929 and his death in 1948. Frisbie was horn in Cleveland, Ohio, on 16 April1896. He attended the Raja Yoga Academy at Point Loma in California. Later he enlisted in the U. S. army and was medically discharged from the army in 1918 with a monthly pension. After his work as a newspaper columnist and reporter for an army newspaper in Texas, and later for the Fresno Morning Republican, he left for Tahiti in 1920. In Tahiti he had ambitious writing plans but after four years of living in Tahiti, he left his plantation and sailed to the Cook Islands. He spent the rest of his life in the Cook Islands and married a local girl Ngatokorua. His new happiness gave him the inspiration to write. 29 sketches appeared in the United States in 1929, collected by The Century Company under the title of The Book of Puka-Puka. His second book My Tahiti, a book of memories, was published in 1937. After the death of Ropati 's beloved wife his goals were to bring up his children. But by this time Frisbie was seriously ill. The family left Puka-Puka and settled down on the uninhabited atoll of Suwarrow. Later on they lived on Rarotonga and Samoa where Frisbie was medically treated. Robert Dean Frisbie died of tetanus in Rarotonga on November 18, 1948. Frisbie wrote in a vivid, graceful style. His characters and particularly the atoll of Puka-Puka are memorably depicted. Gifted with a feeling for language and a sense of humor, he was able to capture on paper the charm, beauty, and serenity of life of the small islands in the South Pacific without exaggerating the stereotypical idyllic context and as such Frisbie's contribution to South Pacific literature went far deeper than that of many writers who have passed through the Pacific and wrote about their experiences. Frisbie's first book The Book of Puka-Puka was published in New York in 1929. It is the most endearing and the most original of his works. It was written during his lifetime on the atoll Puka-Puka in the Cook Islands. It is a collection of 29 short stories, episodic and expressively narrative in style. This is an account of life on Puka-Puka that criticizes European and American commercialism and aggressiveness, and presents the themes of the praise of isolation, the castigation of missionaries, and the commendation of Polynesian economic collectivism and sexual freedom. At the same time, the book presents a portrait of Frisbie himself, a journal of his day-to-day experiences and observations and avivid description of the natives on the island. Frisbie's unique knowledge of the natives and their daily lives enabled him to create in The Book of Puka-Puka an impressive gallery of vi vid, amusing, yet very real and plausible Polynesians. The second  book of Robert Dean Frisbie to appear in print was My Tahiti (1937), a book of -memoirs, published in Boston. My Tahiti is a book of 30 short stories about the author and his living among Tahitians. Again, Robert Dean Frisbie is the main hero in the book and as such the book is autobiographical in a sense as well. This book is a personal record which has charm and distinction as it has sincerity, which is in the men, women and children of Tahiti, and which brings an effortless and unpretentious humor to depict a South Seas idyll and a quiet poise to withstand the insidious romance of the tropical islands, too.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
Joanna Siekiera

This article aims to analyse the legal status of regional cooperation among the South Pacific countries and territories, as not every entity in the Pacific Basin possesses International law features of a state. Regionalisation, as well as regionalism, as illustrated by the example of the South Pacific region, is a new topic to examine, especially in the Polish and European literature. Therefore, this topic does need further and deeper analysis. First of all, both regionalism and regionalisation are international phenomena that were set against the process of globalisation only in the last two decades of the 20th century. Secondly, the Pacific Ocean became more dominant in geopolitics than the Atlantic Community at the beginning of 21st century. There are many publications regarding local cooperation mechanisms worldwide. Most of them, though, concern political and/or economic integration, and neglect the legal aspects of regional integration. The outcome of this article is nonetheless to present the contemporary legal statusof the South Pacific cooperation, though it is at the stage of regionalisation, while not yet regionalism – fully formalised and structuralised just as it is on the other continents.


1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-146
Author(s):  
Marie Bopp

Review of After Moruroa: France in the South Pacific, by Nic Maclellan and Jean Chesneaux. Melbourne/New York: Oceania Press. This is an up-to-date review of French social, political and enviromental, politics in the region during the past two centuries that should certainly teach, or at least challenge, any expert's knowledge on the issue. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terry M. Brown

For three months in 1906, John Watt Beattie, the noted Australian photographer – at the invitation of the Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson – travelling on the church vessel the Southern Cross, photographed people and sites associated with the Melanesian Mission on Norfolk Island and present-day Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. Beattie reproduced many of the 1500-plus photographs from that trip, which he sold in various formats from his photographic studio in Hobart, Tasmania. The photographs constitute a priceless collection of Pacific images that began to be used very quickly in a variety of publications, with or without attribution. I shall examine some of these photographs in the context of the ethos of the Melanesian Mission, British colonialism in the Solomon Islands, and Beattie’s previous photographic experience. I shall argue that Beattie first exhibited a colonial gaze of objectifying his dehumanized exotic subjects (e.g. as ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’) but with increased familiarity with them, became empathetic and admiring. In this change of attitude, I argue that he effectively transcended his colonial gaze to produce photographs of great empathy, beauty and longevity. At the same time, he became more critical of the colonial enterprise in the Pacific, whether government, commercial or church.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kayvan Etebari ◽  
James Hereward ◽  
Apenisa Sailo ◽  
Emeline M Ahoafi ◽  
Robert Tautua ◽  
...  

Incursions of the Coconut rhinoceros beetle (CRB), Oryctes rhinoceros, have been detected in several countries of the south-west Pacific in recent years, resulting in an expansion of the pest's geographic range. It has been suggested that this resurgence is related to an O. rhinoceros mitochondrial lineage (previously referred to as the CRB-G biotype) that is reported to show reduced susceptibility to the well-established classical biocontrol agent, Oryctes rhinoceros nudivirus (OrNV). We investigated O. rhinoceros population genetics and the OrNV status of adult specimens collected in the Philippines and seven different South Pacific island countries (Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea (PNG), Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu). Based on the presence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (snps) in the mitochondrial Cytochrome C Oxidase subunit I (CoxI) gene, we found three major mitochondrial lineages (CRB-G, a PNG lineage (CRB-PNG) and the South Pacific lineage (CRB-S)) across the region. Haplotype diversity varied considerably between and within countries. The O. rhinoceros population in most countries was monotypic and all individuals tested belonged to a single mitochondrial lineage (Fiji, CRB-S; Tonga, CRB-S; Vanuatu, CRB-PNG; PNG (Kimbe), CRB-PNG; New Caledonia CRB-G; Philippines, CRB-G). However, in Samoa we detected CRB-S and CRB-PNG and in Solomon Islands we detected all three haplotype groups. Genotyping-by-Sequencing (GBS) methods were used to genotype 10,000 snps from 230 insects across the Pacific and showed genetic differentiation in the O. rhinoceros nuclear genome among different geographical populations. The GBS data also provided evidence for gene flow and admixture between different haplotypes in Solomon Islands. Therefore, contrary to earlier reports, CRB-G is not solely responsible for damage to the coconut palms reported since the pest was first recorded in Solomon Islands in 2015. We also PCR-screened a fragment of OrNV from 260 insects and detected an extremely high prevalence of viral infection in all three haplotypes in the region. We conclude that the haplotype groups CRB-G, CRB-S, and PNG, do not represent biotypes, subspecies, or cryptic species, but simply represent different invasions of O. rhinoceros across the Pacific. This has important implications for management, especially biological control, of Coconut rhinoceros beetle in the region.


1959 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman J. Padelford

The growth of international cooperation in the South Pacific region has been one of the remarkable developments in regional collaboration in the post-war era. During the past twelve years, three multilateral arrangements have come into existence bearing upon South Pacific affairs. These are the six-power South Pacific Commission (SPC), the three-power Australian—New Zealand—United States Mutual Security Treaty (known as ANZUS), and the Southeast Asian Collective Defense Treaty Organization (SEATO).


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