...this piece been thrown up in 1903, in Melbourne, where federal parliament was meeting, or in Canberra in the climactic year 1943, the MPs, officials, academics and military men who gathered for the argument would have taken as a given the idea that the Pacific was vital to our security. They would, as the chattering classes always do, have easily jumped into an argument about policy taboos and political failure. Where this title would have puzzled them--a century or sixty years ago--is in the claim of amnesia, the idea that the Australian community has forgotten about the South Pacific.

I'm certainly not claiming that our politicians, diplomats and defenceniks have taken their eyes off the region; that is a rather silly claim that ignores the more serious charge about Canberra--its inability to think new thoughts, to alter failed policies. We are in a hole, and the only response has been to increase the vigour of the digging. Much of our Pacific policy has been reduced to aid policy. And because our aid is going into failing states our Pacific policy is beset by a sense of failure.

In the Australia that lives beyond Canberra, the amnesia about our dynamic and vigorous Pacific history is striking. The colour of our Pacific past is the sharpest of contrasts with this faded popular memory and the almost defeatist mindset in our capital. I was struck last year when a very senior person in the Foreign Affairs Department said Australia's objective in the South Pacific is to "cleverly manage trouble". It clearly defines what we face--trouble--but shows blinkered thinking about our ability to act. Surely, even in the darkest realms of realism, we can aim for more than a mere clever handling of decline into chaos.

I come from a craft proud of punchy, alarmist headlines known as "screamers". Yet to describe a Pacific in crisis, or a slow-motion disaster on our doorstep, is merely to reflect what is becoming a regional consensus, almost orthodoxy. The policy-makers and analysts talk of lawless badlands and failing states, especially when looking at Melanesia. Our predecessors of a century ago or in the midst of the Second World War would be astounded at how acquiescent our policy-makers are about this prospect. They would be equally bemused by the strangely defensive posture Australia has adopted from the day the South Pacific Forum was created three decades ago. Arms-length disengagement or a perpetual posture of "standing ready to help" is now woefully inadequate. The South Pacific may be a slow-motion disaster but it is still a process of collapse that is happening now, and which has profound implications for Australia's interests.

POPULAR AMNESIA

IT'S EXTRAORDINARY how little impact our long colonial experience has had on Australian collective memory. A federal parliamentary report on Papua New Guinea judged that Australians were "diffident colonisers who governed with casual practicality and who departed with alacrity and too little care". However diffident, Australians seem to have forgotten that our colonial role in Papua New Guinea started in 1883 and lasted until 1975. Where today is there any evidence of that association on our streets, in our language, in our cooking, in our understanding of ourselves? There are amazingly few Papua New Guineans in our midst. The 2001 census found only 23,000 people in Australia who'd been born in Papua New Guinea; the Immigration Department estimate is that the great majority of these were born in Papua New Guinea because their expatriate parents were working there in the Australian administration. There are nearly twice as many Fijians in Australia as there are Papua New Guineans.

Of course, part of the trick to being a dynamic, multicultural society is the ability to forget history and move on. So perhaps it's understandable that Australians have conveniently forgotten the ninety-year colonial past in Papua New Guinea and our central role in the Islands. Indeed, Australia sometimes fails to realise that the defining experience for most of our neighbours was not the First or Second World Wars or the Cold War; it was the colonial/post-colonial experience. Thus, at the end of the twentieth century it was possible for an Australian financial institution, when re-badging its banking arm, to decide that it would become the Colonial Bank. Perhaps the image-makers found that Australians associated the name with tradition and sturdy architecture. But what it means in Fiji is that when approaching the tallest building in Suva, you confront a sign on the top proclaiming, "Colonial". Very postmodern perhaps, but with more irony than intended, surely.

While the region remembers much more about our roles than we do ourselves, we are lucky in how well the region knows us. To make the broadest of unprovable assertions, many in the Pacific quite like Australians. We get a welcome there that is more relaxed and natural than any reception we get in Asia. The Pacific finds us arrogant and ignorant sometimes; but they make some allowances for the biggest kid on the block, and often they know us well enough to forgive us. They fly through here on their way to nearly anywhere else. The small middle class--the politicians, bureaucrats and the business people--come here to shop, to have their operations done, to stash their money, to educate their kids, and to follow rugby.

Before this becomes a dark lament about the sad state of the Pacific, it's worth spending a moment to highlight the positives which should both sustain and encourage. The lucky country has won the lottery again--if you had to select a region of the underdeveloped world where you'd have special responsibility, where else would you pick?

The peoples of the South Pacific--inhabiting an environment which can be as harsh as it is beautiful--constitute nations in the true sense of the word nation. They have clear identities of culture, language, ethnicity and history, but the micro-states have economies smaller than an Australian provincial city.

These...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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