SOUTH PACIFIC WRITERS: THEN AND NOW

A list of writers such as this cannot exist as a discrete entity. There are too many questions raised that must be addressed, if not answered. I’ll try and cover the most glaring. § Notably, my list is of non-pacific Islanders writing about the Pacific Islands. This is because, prior to the formation of the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, in 1967, storytelling among South Pacific island cultures was largely oral. Today, perhaps the most widely known Pacific Island novelist is Samoan Albert Wendt. He is the author of more than two dozen novels and collections of stories and poems, and is a professor of English at the University of Auckland. § My list also stops short of including contemporary writers, Western or indigenous, such as Lloyd Jones, Thor Heyerdahl and Paul Theroux. My aim was to restrict the scope of this story to those authors who laid the foundation for the mythology of the South Pacific geography and culture, the primary elements, absent the complexities that more recent writers appropriately bring to light. § Finally, I ignored the critical role of philosophers in shifting the Western mindset toward acceptance of a tropical paradise. It’s difficult to imagine now, but prior to the idea of the “noble savage,” people “untamed” by civilization were assumed to be barbaric and were feared. But as the idea of the “noble savage” gained currency in the 1700s, explorers’ accounts of warm receptions by remote Pacific Islanders made sense to the collective consciousness and made it possible for novelists to lure readers with descriptions of an otherworldly paradise over the horizon.