Anna Naupa on Vanuatan heritage

This interview with Anna Naupa was recorded for the Pacific Stories website produced in 2005.

Anna Naupa is a Ni-Vanuatu writer and historian.

Pacific Stories is a co-production between Film Australia’s National Interest Program and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Presented by Vika and Linda Bull, the project explores the geography, history and culture of the South Pacific.

www.abc.net.au/pacificstories

Area of study 2, Nation, race and citizen 1888–1914
In Australian History, students are introduced to the challenges facing the new nation at the time of Federation. There was a widely accepted notion of egalitarianism and a focus on national identity. Links to VCE Australian History also includes the debates during the first decade of the new century about who could and who could not belong to this new society.

An important focus in this area is the question of who was to be included or excluded in this new society and why .On the one hand this meant creating a white Australia… expelling non–Europeans such as the Kanakas from the nation.
Also applicable to Unit 4: Area of Study 2

Between 1863 and 1904 about 60,000 Pacific Islanders were transported to Queensland, where they toiled to create the sugar plantations of the far north. Some of these islanders moved there willingly on the promise of income, whilst others were kidnapped from their island homes. Pacific Islanders were ‘recruited’ from various islands including the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides) and the Loyalty Islands of New Caledonia. This human trafficking is euphemistically known as ‘blackbirding’.

Anna Naupa gives her view of how ni-Vanuatu interact with Queensland South Sea Islanders of Vanuatuan heritage who travel to Vanuatu to retrace their lineage. She explains: ‘Everyone in Vanuatu can give a story about an ancestor who’s been blackbirded or labour-recruited — choose your term.’

Naupa explains how the period when ni-Vanuatu were transported to North Queensland — either voluntarily or against their will — is still fresh in the minds of many in Vanuatu because of oral tradition. There are stories about the kidnapping of labour as well as stories about people who wanted to leave freely. She also speaks about there being both good and bad plantations in Queensland.

Australian South Sea Islander associations help members to connect with distant relations in Vanuatu and every year people travel to Vanuatu to explore their connections. People from Vanuatu visit Australia often as guests of Australian South Sea Islander associations, which promote opportunities for members to learn about their cultural heritage.

According to Naupa, people in Vanuatu are very welcoming to Australian South Sea Islanders who visit Vanuatu to reconnect with their heritage because they are often long lost relatives. She recounts an example from her own family of an eighty year old woman from Queensland who was trying to retrace her heritage before she died and who knew she was from the village of Erromango in Vanuatu.

‘She went down to Erromango trying to find people, and when she met my great
aunts, they cried and cried because she looked exactly like one of their dead sisters. And they had not known that she existed, and she was almost their age too. So you know it’s like piecing together a cultural puzzle for this region, and it’s very touching.’

*Ni-Vanuatu are people of Melanesian background who live in Vanuatu.

1. Using data from the video clip and other sources, to what extent was the issue of indentured Pacific Islander workers a matter of debate in the formation of the White Australia policy? In what ways did the situation challenge ideas about nationhood?
2. Using the video clip, analyse and evaluate the use of ‘oral tradition’ as a source of historical evidence. How important do you think oral tradition is in other parts of Australian history that you have studied? How useful or reliable is oral evidence in the study of history?
3. Analyse the vision of nationhood expressed by a range of people about the time of Federation. What were the arguments presented for and against the use of Kanakas in Australian cane fields?
4. What is ‘compensation’? Do you think compensation should be paid to descendants of people who were recruited to work on the Queensland cane fields?

Go to Pacific Stories Learning for Interactive Compass Map with facts about the Pacific region.

For interview transcripts, books and references for this Digital Resource go to Pacific Stories, choose Sugar Slaves, select INDEX, and go to MORE INFORMATION.