Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE WORLD’S DIN” by Peter Hoar (Otago University Press, $NZ45); “NIUE AND THE GREAT WAR” by Margaret Pointer (Otago University Press, $NZ39:95)

I’ll reverse my usual procedure. Most often, I take a long time to reach the point, but this time I’ll begin with a verdict. I found Peter Hoar’s The World’s Din to be an absorbing, entertaining and refreshingly informative book. I have a few very minor qubbles with it, but not so many as to compromise this verdict.

Subtitled “Listening to Records, Radio and Films in New Zealand 1880-1940”, The World’s Din focuses on how New Zealanders reacted to the first sixty years of recorded sound. As Hoar remarks robustly in his Preface: “The real shock of the sonic new happened between 1877 and the late 1930s” (p.8) Furthermore: “The iPod is not a revolution in itself; it is a refinement of the technology that captured, stored and replayed sounds which was developed… during the late decades of the nneteenth century.” (pp.8-9) What this suggests, correctly, is that for all the improvements and refinements of recording technology in the last half-century or so, nothing has equalled in its effect the impact of the earliest sound recording. Between c.1880 and c.1940, the recording of sound changed New Zealanders’ lives in far more fundamental ways than any subsequent advances in sonic technology have done.

Introducing a second theme, Hoar agrees with Peter Gibbons that to really understand New Zealand culture, we have to consider “the World’s place in New Zealand” rather than just “New Zealand’s place in the World”. Histories have been written of the development of a recording industry and a film industry in New Zealand, usually with the assumption that these things were of great cultural significance to New Zealanders. But the reality is that, from the 1880s onward, most recorded music and recorded voices heard by New Zealanders came from elsewhere, and had a hugely greater impact than the local product. Like it or not, an American (and to a much lesser extent, British) soundscape became part of what New Zealanders were and still are.

In what he calls his “Overture”, Hoar shows how resistant intellectuals in Europe and elsewhere (Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno etc.) have been to the concept of recorded sound, which they saw as demeaning or diminishing the “aura” of live performance. This introduces the book’s third theme – the way intellectuals and opinion-makers in New Zealand, too, were often at odds with the general public in matters of taste when it came to recorded sound. The reality, as Hoar sees it, was that recorded sound made it possible to “domesticate” performances (i.e. bring them into the home). Gramophones and radio displaced the piano as the centre of a family’s musical entrtainment. Recordings also meant that musical performances became portable and could be heard in many different venues so that, even by the 1930s and long before transistor radios were invented, portable record players could be taken on outings and picnics, while the same music could be heard at home on the radio and in picture theatres when musical films were being shown.

The World’s Din is divided into three parts

Part One – “Records” - deals in five chapters with the way recordings became an accepted part of life in New Zealand. First there were the fragile cylinders of the 1880s and 1890s, then the switch to shellac discs in the 1900s. By the 1920s, mechanical recording was displaced by electric recording with resultant greater fidelity to the sounds that were being recorded. The domestic equipment for listening to records changed from very fragile mechanisms; to phonographs with their bulky boxes and unsightly, protruding, over-large horns; and finally to cabinets, fitting in more discreetly with traditional living-room furniture. And all the while the methods used to sell recorded sound changed. The earliest phonographs were sold as a marvel of science and later as a tool for education. Hoar sees a dichotomy between what the mass audience wanted to listen to (ragtime, jazz, popular songs) and what educational authorities thought they should be listening to, with educationists concerned that people be encouraged to listen to the “right” music.

Among other things, Hoar lays stress on how recordings meant that people tended to be less passive and still as they listened to recorded music – in other words, they ceased to behave as they had done in live concerts and recitals. They became more active, repeatedly listening to recordings of popular music at home so that they could rehearse the steps and thus seem less inept when they first attempted to dance to the same tunes in a dance-hall. Of course, once electric recording became the norm, there was the new sort of intimate, close-to-the-microphone singing known as crooning, which completely changed the way popular singers delivered live performances.

Part Two comprises four chapters on radio. In New Zealand, it was “wireless telegraphy” until the 1920s. It was mainly in morse code and it was heard via headphones. “Wireless telegraphy” was seen as a government monopoly for official and military communications and for shipping news. Hence there was strict control of who could own or make transmitters or receivers. All civilian transmitting and listening was forbidden during the First World War when military signalling became the sole use of radio. There was a network of (code-sending) government radio transmitters from Kaitaia to Invercargill. It was of military significance that when New Zealand troops took over Samoa in late 1914, they captured the big German transmitter in Apia. During the war, there was much training of radio operators by the armed forces. Many of those so trained later became involved in public radio broadcasting. By 1922, with the war safely over, regulations were relaxed and many amateurs were transmitting on crystal or valve sets. By that date, there were radio stations in all of what were then the four main centres (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin), doing regular broadcasts of music and spoken word, but only for a very limited number of hours each day.

This book does not dwell on the organizational side of radio, and how the tax-subsidised YA stations co-existed with the private “B” stations, which were not allowed to carry advertising until a major reorganization in mid-1930s allowed for fully commercial stations. Instead, Hoar is concerned with the way radio changed patterns of domestic life. The most obvious fact is that, unlike the recordings which preceded them, radio created a mass audience listening simultaneously to the same sounds. Hence radio created a sort of imaginary, or “mythic”, community. With New Zealand’s total population a mere one-and-a-half million c.1930, radio licences grew from c.30,000 in late 1920s to over 200,000 by the mid-1930s. In other words, nearly every home had a radio. Inevitably, there was an ongoing debate in the press about whether the chief purpose of radio should be entertainment, or Reithian cultural uplift on the BBC model. Hoar gives an account of the first attempt by the broadcasting authority to survey tastes in the early 1930s. The survey showed that more people wanted entertainment (recorded American and British music) rather than cultural uplift. Hoar also gives an account of some of the radio personalities who became as familiar as household words (such as Maud Basham, known as “Aunt Daisy”), of the anxiety over sports broadcasts undercutting actual attendance at sports events, and of the great influence of children’s programmes.

And so finally to the three chapters which make up the final part, concerning film. Wittily but truly, Hoar remarks that “It is a cliché to write that it is a cliché that silent film was never silent.” (p.156) He devotes a chapter to the early, not often successful, attempts to synchronise sound with silent moving images, usually by playing phonograph recordings as films were screened. In the 1890s and early 1900s, when films were most often part of a vaudeville show, this was also the era of the live performer singing or reciting to the moving images. Then in the 1910s, after movies ceased be part of a vaudeville show, and especially once dedicated cinemas were built, live sound-effects and reciters were displaced by cinema orchestras or cinema pianists. By this stage, most films told stories rather than simply showing the marvel of moving pictures; so appropriate moods had to be encouraged by the accompanying live music. Of course there are anecdotes here about the travails of cinema pianists trying to keep up with the changing moods suggested by rapidly changing sequences in films.

When the talkies reached New Zealand after 1929, different technologies presented themselves, but the cumbersome system of film-synchronised-with-disc rapidly disappeared in favour of sound-on-film – the soundtrack – which could always be relied on to synchronise image and sound. It was immediately clear that in New Zealand, American films were far more popular with the mass audience than films from any other source. Of course this raised fears about the “purity” of spoken English as New Zealand moviegoers picked up American idioms and some pronunciations from the Hollywood films they preferred. At first the New Zealand government imposed a quota on exhibitors, whereby 20% of the films they showed had to be British. But this met with resistance from the mass audience and the quota system was dropped. At this point I have to note that Hoar fails to mention the quota system at that time in Britain itself, which also forced British exhibitors to show a high percentage of British-made films. The notorious result was the “quota quickies”, cheaply-made British films of inferior quality, churned out solely to meet the government’s quota. It was probably these sorts of films that New Zealanders were rejecting.

I said at the beginning of this review that I had a few minor quibbles about this book. Here they are.

Sometimes I think Hoar is a little too hard on those educationists who organised music appreciation programmes for schools, consisting mainly of classical music (Beethoven et al.) and hearty patriotic songs. Hoar tends to see this as little more than an elitist attempt to belittle popular taste. Personally, I see something heroic in dedicated groups gathering around a gramophone in some small culturally-starved New Zealand town in the 1920s, to discuss the music of Elgar or Schumann as conveyed, 4-minute side by 4-minute side, on breakable old 78rpms.

Again, Hoar is very judgmental of international recording companies in the 1920s who recorded and marketed music by Maori performers as a way of currying favour with New Zealanders. Hoar comments:  “This was not philanthropy or ethnomusicology, it was a quite ruthless commercial strategy designed to maximise market reach and corporate profits.” (p.83) In other words, as chronicled by Hoar, such recordings were a commercialisation and bastardisation of real Maori music. But isn’t this criticism like the elitism which Hoar elsewhere condemns? After all, weren’t popular and non-traditional songs, sung by Maori performers, the equivalent of popular and non-classical music of the sort Hoar elsewhere champions? On top of which, when have recording companies not indulged in “ruthless commercial strategies designed to maximise market reach and corporate profits”?  I won’t labour the point further, except to note that the Maori performers who are most esteemed now, and most listened-to, do not work in traditional styles, but in genres borrowed from elsewhere (pop, rock, hip-hop, rap etc. etc. etc.). Maybe in 2118, somebody will comment on the cultural inappropriateness of this.

To conclude with a more trivial quibble – I’m surprised that Hoar doesn’t say more about the strange popularity of wrestling in New Zealand in the 1930s, as conveyed by radio.

That is enough of my quibbles, however. This is a delightful, well-written and enlightening book – a pleasure to read.

Nostalgic and discursive footnote, which is only marginally related to the book under review: I have for a long time been interested in the impact of recorded sound upon the way we think (see my posting from about four years ago Vita Longa Technologia Brevis) and have often enjoyed listening to recordings from the earlier part of the twentieth century. My late mother was born in 1912, and therefore was a teenager in Auckland in the later 1920s. [For the record, I am the youngest in a large family and was born when my mother was nearly 40 years old – so I’m not as old as her birth-date might make me sound.] She had a very good recall of the things she enjoyed when she was young. Among much else, she remembered the time in the late 1920s when guitar-strumming Italian-American Nick Lucas was the idol of her set. So of course I got a big burst of second-hand nostalgia when Peter Hoar began his “Overture” by showing how he enjoyed hearing Nick Lucas’s 1929 hit “Tiptoe Thru’ the Tulips” on various formats. Might I add that one can find easily on Youtube a clip of Lucas performing this in the early talkie Gold Diggers of Broadway. Indeed, one can easily find many things on Youtube. When Peter Hoar mentioned how the Croatian-Maori jazzman Epi Shalfoon made a promotional short talkie for his band in Rotorua in 1930, I immediately rushed to my computer and watched that very short on Youtube.

My mother also recalled – as Hoar does – how often the musical selections played by pianists for silent films were inappropriate to what was being shown on screen. She recalled watching the original King of Kings, a silent movie about the life of Christ, and at the crucifixion scene the pit pianist was playing “Fur Elise”, which was presumably the only “serious” classical music he knew. Further to silent-cinema pianists, the talented Birkenhead pianist Ted Lanigan (“Teddy” to his family) mentioned by Hoar on Page 179, was my wife’s grandfather. My wife tells me that even in later years, Teddy refused to have a radio in his house as he believed it killed conversation and destroyed live home performance.

A final memory of my own. When I was a young film-reviewer, a much older film-reviewer told me that, back in the 1930s, his New Zealand-born father gave up watching talking films because he simply could not understand American accents. Of course we are now more fully-attuned to English-language accents other than our own. But perhaps it was not only cultural snobbery that made some New Zealanders wary of American talkies in the period Peter Hoar covers.

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Two-and-a-half years ago, I reviewed on this blog historian Margaret Pointer’s Niue 1774-1974 subtitled “200 Years of Contact and Change” (in doing so, I inadvertently used as an illustration a photo of Rarotonga, which caused comment from some readers). Pointer lived on Niue for much of the 1990s, when her husband was New Zealand high Commissioner there, and she has maintained strong contacts with the island ever since. In 2000 she wrote Tagi Tote e Loto Haaku: My Heart is Crying a Little, an account of Niue’s unhappy involvement in the First World War. Niue and the Great War is an expansion of that earlier book, drawing on much added new research and illustrated with many more archival photographs and reproductions.

As Niue and the Great War explains, missionaries who came to Niue in the nineteenth century were all from the London Missionary Society, so there was an homogeneity of protestant religion on the island and as much loyalty to the Briish Empire as was possible for a Polynesian people.

In 1914, the total population of the island was 4000. Recruiting for the war was encouraged by the Niuean parson Uea, who was happy to serve as chaplain. Recruiting on Niue was also encouraged by the prominent New Zealand Maori leader Maui Pomare. As a member of the New Zealand government, Maui Pomare was humiliated that so few of the Waikato Maori wanted to enlist when war broke out, as Waikato people still had fresh memories of war in New Zealand and the confiscation of their land. Pomare therefore saw Niueans as potential members of a combined Maori regiment.

In the event, about 150 Niueans were recruited, and they were brought to Narrow Neck on Auckland’s North Shore for basic training. Almost at once there were problems. Very few of the recruited Niueans spoke English, none had military experience and few had even worn shoes. Nevertheless, they became part  of the 3^rd. Maori reinforcements and sailed off for Egypt in February 1916. Then the biggest problem hit. Coming from an isolated Pacific island, quarantined by nature from the wider world, Niueans has little resistance to common ailments to which Euopeans (and, by this stage, New Zealand Maori) were immune. In Egypt, a disproportionately large number of them fell ill with measles, pulmonary conditions and especially dysentery, which they feared. Trained strictly as a non-combatant, trench-digging pioneer force, 60 Niueans were sent to the Western Front in France, but they were very susceptible to pneumonia. They were withdrawn after only a couple of months and were sent back to New Zealand, after first being transferred to Hornchurch in England.

Many of them still spoke very little English, and they took comfort only from an elderly missionary’s wife who spoke their language. In military circles there was some controversy over why they were not stationed in Egypt, where the climate was more congenial to them; but on the whole it was seen as a humane move to return them to New Zealand, and thence to Niue. As Margaret Pointer notes, a few other Niueans enlisted separately from those in the pioneer corps. A couple even saw combat. One served at Gallipoli and one died of wounds after Passchendaele. By the end of the war, 24 of the total of 160 who had served were dead. Unlike Samoa, Niue [partly because of its isolation and the difficulty ships had anchoring there] was spared the influenza epidemic that swept the world. But the diseases contracted by the Niuean recruits were long remembered with horror on the island.

Essentially Niue and the Great War is a sad little footnote to the huge world conflict, and a reminder of the ways old empires regarded their subject peoples.

Margaret Pointer’s purpose has much to do with factual accounting. After her main text, she includes lists naming every single Niuean who served in the First World War, giving rank, serial number and village of origin. Obviously part of the book’s aim is to be a memorial. It is also generously illustrated with archival photographs, which tell at least half the story.

Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“NIUE 1774-1974: Two Hundred Years of Contact and Change” by Margaret Pointer (Otago University Press, $NZ50)

I confess to my tardiness in reviewing Margaret Pointer’s excellent and well-illustrated Niue 1774-1974. The book was published in March of last year (2015) and has for too long been in my “to do” pile before at last, in my recent summer holidays, I got around to reading it.

            Like me, you probably have to look up Niue on a map. It is north of the Kermadecs, south of Samoa, between Tonga and the Cooks, and somehow connected to New Zealand. Its people are Polynesian. It is small, and with a resident population that is diminishing as more Niueans become permanent residents of Auckland and environs. There was once a politician called Robert Rex who was associated with it.

            That, in one short paragraph, is about as much as I, in my ignorance, knew about Niue before opening Niue 1774-1974.

Margaret Pointer’s husband was New Zealand High Commissioner on Niue in the late 1990s and she lived on the island with her family for five years. She has made a number of return visits in the course of researching her book. She describes her first sighting of the island in the 1990s as she saw it from a plane: “No looming volcanic peaks, no sparkling azure lagoon, no tiny atolls, just one large piece of flat rock less than half the size of Lake Taupo.” (Introduction, p.13). We are at once made aware of the island’s isolation and smallness, both of which have been factors in the Niueans’ development. In a popular and accessible style, but with a wealth of solid research behind it, Niue 1774-1974 sets out to tell the island’s story from first European contact to the achievement of internal self-government and independence.

Margaret Pointer neatly divides her text [liberally sprinkled with “break-ins” of stories with particular significance] into four sections. First, the island before any European settlement. Then the island coming gradually under British control and into the orbit of the British Empire in the late nineteenth century. Then the years from 1903 to the 1960s, when Niue was under New Zealand administration. And finally the shift towards independence.

The account of early contacts makes it clear the Niue was one of the last places in the Pacific in which Europeans took an interest. This was partly because, almost completely surrounded by a forbidding rocky reef, the island offers no safe anchorage; but partly, too, because the island had gained a reputation as one of the more savage and inhospitable places in the Pacific. It seems that, despite the smallness of Niue, there were mutually antagonistic clans on the island, frequently at war with one other. “The missionaries soon learned that every district of the island was separate from, and often hostile to, every other district and – as whalers had noticed – as soon at the ship drifted along the coast, canoes that had approached them from one area returned home rapidly before canoes came out from the next.” (Chapter 3 p.55) The islanders’ very first encounters with Europeans came when James Cook called there, on Resolution, in 1774. But both Cook’s attempts at greeting the natives ended badly with exchanges of stone-throwing and musket shots. Probably nobody was hurt, but Cook withdrew rapidly and Pointer remarks “There is an element of frustration and bad temper in his diary comments about the landing on Niue, especially regarding his decision to name the place Savage Island.” (Chap. 1 p.32)

The name Savage Island was itself a deterrent to further European interest, and it seems that it was not for fully another fifty-plus years before outsiders touched on the island - a Yankee whaler looking for fresh water in 1828. Only in 1849 (by which time most other Pacific islands had been mapped, explored or claimed by the British or the French) did a British naval vessel call on Niue. There was one widespread story of a shipwrecked crew having been murdered and eaten by islanders, but the detail of cannibalism is almost certainly fictitious. Niueans did not eat red meat. Fish and taro, yam and coconuts were their diet. Once Yankee and British ships began to visit, Niueans were eager to gain metal fishhooks as trade items, as they were so much more reliable than the bone and wooden hooks upon which they had had to rely for centuries. Europeans introduced pigs in the 1850s, but Niueans refused to eat them, and kept them only for barter when passing ships wanted provisions. Also, unlike most Polynesian peoples, Niueans did not practise tattooing. They were surprised by the tattoos that were sometimes sported by European sailors.

It was not explorers and passing whalers or naval men who changing Niuean society, however, but Protestant missionaries. Coming from the evangelical London Missionary Society, one missionary visited, but did not land on, the island in the 1830s. LMS-taught Samoan “native mission teachers” were landed on Niue in early 1850. They had an immediate impact and prepared the way for the first European missionary to set foot on the island in 1857. In some parts of the Pacific, prolonged early contacts with Europeans led to population decline as new diseases were introduced. Paradoxically, the population of Niue increased under the impact of missionaries as the newcomers preached against clan warfare and infanticide. Margaret Pointer suggests that, as in all Pacific missionary history, there have been debates concerning how much the initial acceptance of Christianity was a matter of being attracted to the material advantages Europeans had to offer. [See my earlier postings on The French Place in the Bay of Islands, Entanglements of Empire, Outcasts of the Gods? etc.]

When she settles into the second part of her history, Margaret Pointer has to concentrate on what amounts to the prolonged “rule” of the missionaries, and the tension that developed with other outside influences. As late as 1860, there was no single European resident on Niue. The first was the formidable LMS missionary William George Lawes in 1861. Pointer notes:

 “At the outset… Niue was something of an LMS ‘laboratory’. Where else did an English missionary settle to spread the word and not have to contend with other Europeans behaving badly? No idle, blaspheming sailors waiting for the next vessel, no traders tempting the locals into debt, no merchants offering the demon drink, no beachcombers or other arrivals seeking the pleasures of the flesh. No other missionary society attempted to establish itself on Niue in the nineteenth century.” (Chapter 5 p.90)

Up until the 1890s, Lawes and his extended missionary family were the only resident Europeans on Niue. Pointer stresses that the Lawes clan were respectful of local culture, hardworking and benevolent; but they did impose a moral code involving regularised Christian marriage, seemly dress and a prohibition of alcohol; and they suggested punishments (administered by the separate villages) for those who infringed the code. The influence of this code remained very strong until the mid-twentieth century, and was to come into conflict with later forms of governance. In the Lawes’ time, the village of Alofi and its church became the centre of island activity. But the island’s society began to change with the arrival of traders and the copra trade. By the 1890s, many young Niuean men were going off to indentured labour elsewhere. There were shocking experiences, such as groups of Niueans being kidnapped by Peruvian ships to work as forced labour collected guano. Single men were often indentured for guano digging on distant (and barren) Malden Island. Couples were sometimes indentured as labour in copra plantations in Fiji and elsewhere. By the early 1900s, about a tenth of Niue’s population was always away working elsewhere in the Pacific.

Under the impact of missionaries, there had developed a “Fono” or island council at which many village chiefs met together for general discussions and decision-making. There was a “king” for some years, but he was chosen from among the chiefs and the office did not last long. Sometimes the locals, encouraged by missionaries, sent petitions requesting that Niue become a British protectorate. But in the 1880s and 1890s, as the British and Germans jockeyed for influence in that part of Pacific, it was agreed the Niue would be “neutral” territory.

Finally the island did become a British protectorate in mid-1900. In the same year the imperialist Richard John Seddon visited Niue. Australian federation was looming and Seddon wanted to enhance New Zealand’s status by expanding its boundaries in the Pacific. In October 1900, Lord Ranfurly formally annexed Niue – with approval of Niuean chiefs – to the British Empire, not to New Zealand. But by a piece of diplomatic trickery, it was then agreed that New Zealand’s boundaries now included all the Cook Islands and Niue. Hence Niue was now de facto annexed to New Zealand. This caused much consternation among Niueans, as the annexation seemed to make them subordinate to Rarotonga. Only in 1903, when a group of New Zealand parliamentarians visited, was it agreed, to the Niueans’ satisfaction, that the island would be administered directly from Wellington, and not through the Cook Islands. Thenceforth, there was on Niue a residence for a New Zealand official.

In her long section on the sixty-odd years of New Zealand administration, it is clear that some enduring laws were very much of their age. Alcohol remained absolutely forbidden to the indigenous people, but acceptable for Europeans. European ministers could marry both indigenous and European couples, but indigenous ministers could marry only indigenous couples. Margaret Pointer does not dwell on this, but there is a slight whiff of apartheid to these and other laws and customs, although there was no ban on interracial marriage, which happened often enough considering the tiny size of the island’s Palagi population.

Regrettably for New Zealand’s reputation, it is clear that the administration of Niue tended to attract neither the most ambitious nor the most qualified New Zealand officials. Scandal (hushed up at the time) engulfed the first resident commissioner, Christopher Maxwell, who lasted only a few years. Maxwell broke the Suppression of Immorality Ordinance Act, which he had signed into law, by having an affair with a married native woman. The second resident commissioner Henry Cornwall lasted ten years (1907-17), but he too got into trouble and was eventually confronted over the fact that he had impregnated at least one native woman and seduced others and yet had passed, in court, judgment on men who had done similar heinous things.

We might now also pass different judgements from the patriotic ones that were passed at the time on the 125 young Niuean men served for New Zealand in the First World War. Like other non-white troops, but unlike at least some New Zealand Maori, they were not used as combat troops. Instead they  “carried supplies, loaded and unloaded vessels, stood guard, manned ammunition dumps, dug trenches and built duckboards, served food and cleaned latrines.” (p.194) In France the Niueans, out of their tropical climate, were put into the front line to dig trenches. Most of them quickly contracted pneumonia, were invalided out, and came back – permanently sick – to Niue within a year. Because shipping stopped there so rarely, Niue was spared the lethal “influenza” plague that visited Samoa (and New Zealand) in 1918-19, but the story of the Niuean soldiers is still a tragic instance of an indigenous people’s involvement in a war that was not theirs.  

After New Zealand had taken over the former German colony of Samoa, Niue became an even less desirable posting for New Zealand officials seeking work in the Pacific. Most preferred Samoa or the Cook Islands, which had more direct communications with the outside world (although Niue did get its first radio link with New Zealand in 1924). In 1921, there was the notorious case of a murder trial being ineptly conducted by the resident schoolteacher when the resident commissioner was absent and there was no qualified official to second him.

In the interwar years, the influence of the resident LMS missionaries was still very strong, but was beginning to weaken as government primary schools began to supersede missionary schools. A handful of Seventh Day Adventists took up residence on the island in the 1920s, and in the 1950s Mormons and other denominations arrived, causing the old evangelicals to lose their monopoly on religious belief. Missionaries had managed to chase away the first attempt to introduce movies in 1915. But by the 1930s there was electric lighting on the wharf at Alofi and dances were held there to recorded music provided by visiting ships. Niueans, says Margaret Pointer, swung to Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington “much to the consternation of the LMS, who complained of ‘the dangers arising from these imported customs… the Niueans not yet [being] ready for experiments in promiscuous dancing.’ ” (Chapter 11 “The Interwar Years”, p.224)

Niue did not directly contribute to forces in Second World War, although there were some young men who were willing to enlist. Indeed some came to New Zealand specifically to do so. One long-serving resident commissioner (again blotting the copybook of New Zealand administration) left with a huge and embarrassing pile of unpaid debts and clear signs of embezzlement. Then there was a big conflict between the old-style LMS missionary who was so deeply opposed to work on the Sabbath that for a number of years he virtually wrecked the island’s banana trade, because there were only limited times that ships could arrive to pick up the island’s produce. If they arrived on a Sunday, the crop of bananas could not be collected and was left to rot on the wharf, as there was no harbour allowing ships to anchor overnight. This problem was solved only when the old zealot was replaced by a more accommodating minister.

The biggest jolt that New Zealand administration of Niue ever received came in 1953. Hector Larsen, a forthright, outspoken, but capable resident commissioner, was murdered in his home at night by an intruder, with his wife and children barely escaping the same fate. In the ensuing trial (and condemnation to death) of the three prison escapees who committed the murder, a political storm blew up in New Zealand about inadequacies of the administration of justice in Niue, and the fact that New Zealand personnel sent to Niue were often poorly trained and ill-prepared for the administrative work they were meant to do. New Zealand was implicitly criticised for its failure to prepare Niue for the greater autonomy it should have been enjoying under new United Nations initiatives. Of Larsen’s murder, Margaret Pointer argues: “It has to be blamed on a systemic failure going back 50 years. It has to be seen within the context of successive New Zealand governments’ administration of Niue – their neglect, lack of understanding, oversight. It has to be seen within the context of colonial administration generally, and the administration of a small and isolated island in particular. The system of administration that had been allowed to evolve in Niue meant that Hector Larsen was let down by the New Zealand government. There were warning balls, some sounding back decades.” (Chapter 13 “An End to Complacency”, p.272)

            Logically, the fourth and last section of Niue 1774-1974 deals with the island’s road to (a sort of) independence. Robert Rex, beginning as a capable translator, emerged as the logical leader for an independent governing body. The cyclone disaster that struck Niue in 1959 oddly contributed to the move towards independence by showing some weaknesses in local organization, even though much necessary help was sent to Niue from New Zealand. By the 1960s there was a strong move towards internal self-government while sustaining links with New Zealand. By the time independence was achieved in 1974, the island was much more open to the world, with an airfield having been constructed and full communication links in place.

And it is at this point, forty years ago, that Margaret Pointer ends her story. Perhaps she thought it was not for a Palagi to chronicle the island’s political history over the last four decades. Even so, it does leave thing hanging in the air somewhat, and I wish her “Afterword” could have been longer and more comprehensive.

As you have probably gathered from my above simple summary of the book’s contents, I found Niue 1774-1974 interesting and very informative reading. While being aware that the island and its community are tiny, the book shows a very strong awareness that, for the island’s inhabitants, each event that it records was momentous. The island, in effect, was once (but is no longer) a world unto itself.

I must record a few minuses. Only in her brief afterword does Margaret Pointer note that Niue’s population is now merely somewhere between 1200 and 1500 people. Although it is mentioned elsewhere in the text, there is far too little on the impact of emigration, and the resident population’s decline from a maximum of about 4,500. We hear virtually nothing about the larger Niuean population that now lives in New Zealand. Because of this major demographic fact, I do not buy Pointer’s final vision of the unchanging and eternal island. Yes, the eternal waves may crash on the reef and the coral may endure (if climate change lets it) but this “eternity” of Niue is true only if you ignore the huge change that has happened to its people in the last two centuries.