Solomon Islands

The British Solomon Islands Protectorate, proclaimed in 1893 in an attempt to control excesses in the labour trade, covered almost 1,000 Solomon islands, a dozen of them substantial, together hosting a population of approximately 600,000.

Whaling and marine trading expeditions began to visit the Solomon Islands in the early years of the nineteenth century, often as an economic outgrowth of New South Wales, as a result of declining profitability in Atlantic whaling. The peak of Solomons whaling came in the 1840s and 1850s, waning in the 1860s when many American ships were recalled due to the Civil War, and as whale oil became less essential for industry because of easier access to petroleum oil, and technical advances in processing copra for oil. Soon afterwards, Queensland and Fijian recruiting ships began to extend their voyages to the Solomons.

Kwailiu and Orrani serve as examples of the hundreds of thousands of Islander labourers who left their homes to take part in labour migration. Kwailiu was born in about 1866 in east Malaita and educated in the customs of his island. He was recruited twice to Queensland: on the first occasion he was probably kidnapped but the second time he went willingly. Little is known of the first indenture except that he served out his three-year term on a sugarcane plantation. He would have received the statutory payment of £6 a year plus food, accommodation and a limited supply of clothes. On his return to Malaita he married Orrani, and soon afterwards the couple enlisted voluntarily for Queensland. Their kin should have received an ‘enlistment bonus’ of about ten shillings worth of trade goods, and Kwailiu would have received a higher cash payment of around £10, while Orrani would have received £6. They seem to have worked at Innisfail, since their first two children were born there in 1891 and 1893.

By 1895 the family had moved to another coastal town, Mackay, where their next three children were born, and where they lived for the remainder of their lives, working on plantations and farms. Their wages would have increased, as they became more experienced labourers, to around £20 a year (though Orrani always earned less). Oral testimony from the present-day Islander community leaves no doubt that Kwailiu became one of the most important Islander leaders at Mackay, although he never became Christian. His grandfather had been an important leader of his descent group and if Kwailiu had returned home he would have assumed a leadership role. Kwailiu died in 1906 and his widow remarried her kinsman Luke Logomier, who became an Anglican lay preacher. They were typical of the vast movement in Pacific labourers, and their descendants form one of the largest Solomon Islander families in Australia today.⁸

Once the first resident commissioner Charles Woodford arrived, the future of the Solomons was tied to copra, and large-scale production began in 1908. Capital investment was invited but not from one source (as with CSR in Fiji), and there were to be no Asian labourers. While the Solomons were primarily an external supplier of labour for Queensland and Fiji, no internal plantation economy could develop; however, the White Australia Policy ended the movement of Islander labourers to Queensland in 1904 and the movement to Fiji ceased in 1911. This enabled the development of local plantations, and over several decades four large companies dominated—Britain’s Lever Brothers, and three Australian companies.

Missionaries arrived at the same time as government officials, again a different pattern from New Caledonia, Fiji or Vanuatu (where missionaries preceded colonial officials), and the first important activity was pacification, ensuring sufficient peace from previously endemic warfare to create a stable economy. A basic but comfortable malaria- ridden colonial society developed, based around Tulagi, the mission stations and the plantations, linked by inter-island shipping and the steamers from Australia that arrived every few weeks.

Similar to what occurred in New Guinea, the Second World War raged through much of the Solomons, bringing major disruption to the colonial regime and the presence of hundreds of thousands of foreign troops. After the war, the plantations were slow to re-establish, but the economy diversified with cattle, oil palm, rice-growing and fish-canning added.

The war brought other changes, such as Maasina Rule, a nationalist movement. Johnathan Fifi‘i, one of the leaders of this movement, was born on Malaita Island; he received a basic education in church schools before working as a servant on Tulagi for three years before the war, after which he joined the Allies’ Labour Corps. In 1946 he was made one of the ten chiefs of Maasina Rule that battled the British for better treatment. He was imprisoned with other leaders for sedition, released in 1950. Fifi‘i became a school teacher, and in 1952 a member of the local self-government council. In 1973 he was elected to the Governing Council for the protectorate and was later a member of the Legislative Assembly.⁹ A few women also began to gain public positions. The most famous is Lilly Ogatina Poznanski, one of the first women to be sent to study overseas, in New Zealand. She attained national prominence in 1965 when elected to the Legislative Council, its first (and only) woman member. By independence time in 1978, Poznanski was chief administrative officer of a government department, the most highly paid woman in the country. Fifi‘i and Poznanski epitomise the Solomon Islanders who led their nation to independence.

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Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

Solomon Islands

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