Framing the Islands: Knowledge and Power in Changing Australian Images of "the South Pacific"

Abstract

For several generations Australians have generated powerful depictions of a region they have variously called “the islands,” “the South Seas,” or “the South Pacific.” The most recent characterization is embedded in a forthright salvationist message that warns of an approaching “doomsday” or “nightmare” unless Pacific Islanders remake themselves—just as Australians have had to. Like earlier Australian depictions, the “new doomsdayism” sets up Pacific Islanders for outcomes not of their making. While the images of “the region” and of the potentialities of its inhabitants might at first sight appear to mark a departure from the subordination inherent in the development and security discourses of the cold war era, the underlying preconceptions suggest that it implicitly denies self-determination while claiming to advance it, and promotes superiority and exclusion while claiming to advance equality. At the heart of the new doomsdayism is the assumption of a special right to manage, steeped in old racist assumptions that are the most difficult to acknowledge. The certainty with which the new depiction has been put forward, the evangelical tone with which it has been promoted, and the dramatic and exaggerated imagery associated with it suggest that the answer may lie as much in a changing Australian imagination as in a changing reality “out there.” This is not to deny the existence of significant problems in particular places of the kind described in the general portrait. Nor is it to deny the right of Australians to represent island life. But if Australian knowledge of the South Pacific is to avoid the charge of hegemonic and belittling thought, there will have to be recognition of the subordinating preconceptions that continue to underlie Australian framings of “the islands.”