View from Honolulu
The Dancers Are Flying In
A Mix Of Art, Commerce And Government Gives Life To Pacific News
We really have two cover stories in this issue. The cover photo relates to the first, which is Caroline Yacoe’s photo essay on the Melanesian Arts Festival, which took place in Port Vila, Vanuatu in August. Our “hard news” cover story is an overview of the aviation industry in the region. The two are not unrelated.
It is in the realm of the arts, especially the performing arts, that many of the best, good-news stories about the Islands are taking place. Regional government coverage tends to be on the grimmer side, yet not completely so, as the reader might notice in our high tech story on page 19 about a private-public partnership to get email to the rural areas of the Solomon Islands. And there is our page 25 profile of how the government of Samoa is committed to helping the National University of Samoa to flourish as a key driver of national development.
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The aviation industry, though, is what knits us all together in the Pacific. It’s how we get our mail and our catalogue orders; it’s how we visit relatives and send our children off to work or university. Aviation in the region—and throughout the whole world, as a matter of fact—is in daily flux. Ownerships are changing, routes and ticket prices are fluid, and small Island states, like Niue or Kiribati, must find ways to underwrite the routes they need, since no private airline can make money in such small destinations. But this is not always so. Giff Johnson’s profile of the privately-held Air Rarotonga (page 15) proves that segments of the aviation industry can work without government subsidy.
For the singers and dancers and visual artists of Melanesia, the airlines were how they got to the Second Melanesian Arts festival in Port Vila. Some, like the Fiji contingent, arrived late. Others, like Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, with so many problems on the ground, did not arrive at all. The two cover stories intersected in the Solomon Islands’ capital of Honiara where all the government airport workers stopped work, demanding the government pay their back wages. Flights were cancelled; no dancers flew anywhere.
Government is not always the bad news story. As our columnist, Robert Keith-Reid points out, there are movements in the region to go back to the independence-era constitutional benchmarks and revise the colonial models of democracy to fit more closely with local cultures, values and forms of conflict resolution. In Vanuatu, as he points out, the offering of a pig can sometimes stave off crises that would take months of committee work by regional bureaucrats to solve. Papalii Failautusi Avegalio makes similar points in his Island Voices guest column on page 44, in which he describes the failure of the external development models imposed on Fiji in the last five decades.
The arts are flourishing in the Islands. Samoan writer Albert Wendt has a new book out (page 35), and it came to us by airplane. The Lifou Dance Company from New Caledonia is about to perform in Honolulu—and they are not coming by boat. The region cannot live without a healthy airline industry, and the soul of the Pacific cannot live without the arts of dance, song and storytelling.
