Obituary. Ron Crocombe MA (Victoria), PhD (ANU), Professor Emeritus (USP), Pacific Scholar

Copies of emails received, the obituary by USP Vice-Chancellor Rajesh Chandra, a general report and her account of the Auckland church service, at which sons Tata and Kevin spoke, by AUT journalist Pippa Brown, have been stored on the web by MediaFire. Click here to download. For further links, see below. See also PacificMediaWatch blog
NEW. And Pacific Media Centre blog.

For over 50 years Ron's name has been known and respected throughout the Pacific Islands. He first influenced me when, as a masterate student in 1960, I read his critique of NZ policies in the Cook Islands, where he had been a district officer. This writing and his book on land use in Rarotonga, that unravelled traditional and colonial influences, were ground-breaking for their time. We had not long started to question the munificence of colonial rule.

From the Cooks Ron went to PNG where he was director of the New Guinea Research Unit (1962-69) and then to the University of the South Pacific. There he founded the Institute of Pacific Studies to encourage Pacific writers. He wrote The New South Pacific, based on extension lectures: a mix of history, anthropology and Ron, that caused many to rethink their notions on the Pacific. There is much, much more, but I have no doubt that his most important contribution was in helping young Pacific Islanders, who up until then had been fed a diet of European education and values, gain confidence in themselves and their cultural heritage. Today his former students number among the Pacific's leaders and foremost academics. His later writings were among the first to draw attention to the increasing importance of Asia in the Pacific.

Ron never retired. For close to 20 years he commuted between the home he shared with wife Marjorie Tuainekore* in Rarotonga and his ongoing Pacific commitments in various parts of the world. Only a month ago he emailed me expressing dismay on what he took to be my pro-Fiji government stance. It was not the first time we had differed but I'm sorry that our last exchange was not more convivial. He was a man with whom you would occasionally differ, but never stop respecting. His knowledge of the Pacific was encyclopaedic, and his dedication to good Pacific outcomes unmatched. Ron died of a heart attack in a bus to Auckland airport, on the way home from Nuku'alofa, Tonga, where he'd been inducted as a Fellow in Futa Helu's 'Atenisi University. He was 79.

Kua hinga te totara, Haere te kaiako nui, Haere, Haere, Haere

* Marjorie was until recently Director of the Centre for Pacific Studies at Auckland University.

See also David Robie's and Bij Lal's obituaries in Cafe Pacific.

The Way it Was: Australia’s Apartheid in PNG

This is an invaluable reprint of a 2009 article by the esteemed late Pacific academic and commentator Professor Ron Crocombe who spent most of his adult life in the Cook Islands, PNG, Fiji and other Pacific Islands. -- ACW

District Officers or Kiap (Tok Pisin from the German Kapitan)  had immense powers.
  pn77

 MANY of Australia’s colonial and post-colonial policies and practices are a major factor in the problems of Papua New Guinea today, and cause some Papua New Guinean leaders to have serious reservations about their Australian counterparts.

Despite being a colony from the 1890s, Australia ensured that Papua did not get its first high school until international pressure led to its opening in 1955. Very few others were built for a long time in a country of similar size and population to New Zealand.

(-/o+) The Present Fiji Electoral System: Where Some Votes Count Three to Four Times more than others
28 Jan. 2009

Two posts worth looking at are in today's Pacific Media Centre blog feedback.
http://pacificmediacentre.blogspot.com/2009/01/refreshing-view-on-pacific-coverage.html Old Pacific-hand Ron Crocombe has some scathing things to say about the Interim Government (-), to which David Robie responds (o+).

I'll limit my comments (o+) to only one of Professor Crocombe's accusations. He is probably correct is saying that most people will continue to vote along ethnic lines, whatever the system, but he does not say that the present system offers little alternative: 46 of the 71 electorates are Communal electorates in which voters vote according to their ethnicity. The remaining 25 are Open seats.

Neither does he say just how unequal this system (which is based on provinces not population distribution) is. In the 2006 election*, for example, there were on average only 9,437 registered voters in Fijian, 4,607 in General Voter, and 5,373 in Rotuman communal electorates. This compared with 16,065 for Urban Fijan electorates and 10,762 for Indo-Fijians. Urban Fijians and Indo-Fijians were grossly under-represented.

These averages hide even further inequalities. The rural Fijian electorates of Bua, Kadavu, Lau, Namosi and Serua each had less than 7,000 registered voters, while more urbanized Ba West had 15,348, and Nadroga/Navosa 19,044.


It should be noted that the former over-represented electorates are among the least "developed" and most prone to influence by chiefs and church ministers. In contrast, the latter under-represented electorates produced two multi-ethnic Fijian parliamentary leaders ousted by racist-driven coups: Dr Timoci Bavadra, Fiji's first Labour Party leader (ousted by the "Rabuka" coup in 1987) and Adi Teimumu Vuikaba Speed, Deputy PM in the Mahendra Chaudhry Labour-led government (ousted by the "Speight" 2000 coup).

It is, of course, an over-simplification to equate patterns of voting with geographic areas, but there is some relationship.

So if each person's vote is to be of equal importance -- as the UN requires -- you wouldn't recommend the Fiji system, whatever its ethnic predispositions.

And this is not even taking into account the one in five voters who in 2006 either did not vote (many because their name was not on the roll) or had their vote declared invalid (because the system is too complicated for many to understand.)

I wonder if Forum leaders are aware of these inequalities, and whether they would tolerate them in their counties.

* For 2006 (and earlier 1999, 200o) election results, see www.elections.gov.fj/results2006.html) and for full analysis by Prof. Robbie Robertson, see pp 360-383 in Walsh: Fiji: an Encyclopaedic Atlas, advertised on this blog site.

Fiji: How Democratic was the old Communal Voting System?

Tabua (whale's teeth). Highly valued culturally.

With the Fiji Elections due on 14 November and the strong likelihood of accusations that it will not be a democratic election, despite the presence of international observers, this could be a good time to recall just how democratic the electoral system was that it replaced. The way Fiji was before the 2006 Coup. (*All figures are based on the 2006 election.)

1. Each voter had two votes, one for a Communal electorate, the other for an Open electorate. 46 of the 71 electorates were Communal, in which voters voted according to their ethnicity; the remaining 25 were Open electorates where every voter voted irrespective of ethnicity.  Both were geographically based.

pn869. Pacific Reseacher, Adrienne Kaeppler (1935-2022)

Research work on the Pacific was particularly active in the 1960s and 1970s. I was fortunate to have been living, working and researching in Tonga during the 1960s. 

Anthropologists such as Jack Golson, Roger Green and Les Groube were researching the recently "discovered" Lapita pottery,  long-distance canoes voyages and Polynesian languages  (Thor Heyerdahl had earlier sailed a balsa raft from Chile to French Polynesia thus establishing the possibility of an east-west occupation of thePacific.)   Harry Maude was chronicling  Gilbert and Ellice Islands culture. His son Alaric was researching Tongan land use patterns, and population geographers such as Peter Pirie and myself were tracing internal migration patterns in Tonga and later Fiji.** 

I can remember the hours Alaric and I spent on our knees on his lounge floor as we sorted  1956 Census cards into piles of males, females, where born, and so on.  The cards had been lost but I found them in a large box in the PM's garage, chewed on a little by silverfish. 

 Amid this array of reseachers was anthropologist Dr Adrienne Kaeppler, an American with degrees from the University of Hawai'i with a special interest in the intangible knowledge that material culture holds, as well as the role of music, dance, poetry, and the visual arts in reflecting and constructing social and cultural systems. 

I knew Adrienne while I was teaching at Tonga High School. She helped revive old Tongan dances on the verge of being lost, and passed on her enthusiasm to my senior students. (See photo above). She died last week, aged 86.  R.I.P., Adrienne. You will long be rembembered by those who knew you.

To read more fully of Adrienne's immense contribution to Tonga and the Pacific, read this article in Matangitonga.  You will be inspired by how some people really  "can make a difference."

-- ACW

** Other researchers about this time include Cyril Belshaw, Raymond Firth, Rusiate Nayacalou, Tony Hooper, Judith Hunstman, Janet Davidson,  and a little later Ron and Margorie Tuainekore Crocombe, Grant Anderson, Ray Watters, Roger Frazer and .... There were so many.