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Chapter Ten Contemporary Local and Regional Shipping
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165 chapter ten Contemporary Local and Regional Shipping This chapter provides an account of local and regional shipping from the 1960s onward. Many political, technological, and significant social changes in the maritime sector of the islands have taken place within this period. The first part of the chapter deals with local shipping, which is the lifeblood of islands where some communities have depended on inordinately small quantities of cargo being delivered to their beaches (figure 10.1). It would be impossible to examine the changes that have, and still are, taking place within this and other practices over several island territories. On the other hand, generalizations for the Pacific as a whole would result in distorted pictures of specific places. For these reasons, Fiji has been selected for a case study, taking two comparative cross sections in time from the period 1960 to 2007. Fiji does in fact embody many of the interisland seafaring activities found in several archipelagos. It also shows the beginning of a social revolution in shipboard relations that will spread to other island territories. The second related topic in this chapter is regional shipping. Since World War II there has been a greater awareness of Oceania as a geographic region. Despite ethnic and cultural differences, Pacific people express recognition of common components in their maritime heritage, experiences of colonization, types of resources, and the unity of the ocean. From his point of view as a Pacific islander, Epeli Hau‘ofa emphasizes that “it may be time that we think much less about geographic and cultural divisions, and much more about our region as comprising places where we can feel at home because of our greater networks of human connections .”1 No doubt, it was thinking along the lines of renewing links across a common ocean space that brought about consensus at the Pacific Forum toward approving the concept of a jointly owned regional shipping line. 166 Chapter 10 Local Shipping in Fiji, 1960–1980 As elsewhere in the Pacific, the islands of the Fiji Archipelago in the post–Second World War period experienced the gradual withdrawal of stores related to merchant companies. Small villages then depended on ageing Chinese shopkeepers, a few Indo-Fijian shops, and local cooperatives . These were served by cutters owned mainly by part-Europeans and other nonindigenous citizens of the towns, plus a few provincial vessels and numerous smaller Fijian-owned craft. Ownership of vessels by race is shown in table 4 for 1965. The six European-owned ships—of the well-known companies Burns Philp, Morris Hedstrom, and W. R. Carpenter—usually had part-European captains, chief engineers, and supercargoes and Fijian sailors. The vessels were steel hulled and diesel powered, including the Ratanui (250 gross tons, or GT) and Altair (137 GT), and all were around twenty years old in 1965. The part-European sector comprised wooden cutters owned mainly by four firms in Suva. At this time they had their business premises in the corners of warehouses. One of the largest of their ships was the forty-eight-year-old Melanesia (30 GT). Indian and Chinese craft were Figure 10.1 Very small quantities of cargo were landed at places with few road connections. Here, sailors from New Ireland unload the punt of the Ninsa II on the east coast of Bougainville. The consignment includes a bundle of old newspapers to be used for smoking local tobacco. (Photograph by the author, 1973) [54.89.127.249] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:57 GMT) Contemporary Local and Regional Shipping 167 similar and usually linked with small trade stores. The eight wooden auxiliary cutters and schooners under ethnic Fijian ownership ranged from about 5 to 40 tons; the largest and youngest was the two-year-old Yatu Lau (40 GT), owned by the province of Lau. There were also numerous unregistered craft, especially those owned by individual Fijians and village communities in the Yasawa Islands on the west of Fiji. These were crewed informally, and passengers were expected to lend a hand during the sevento twenty-four-hour runs to and from the port of Lautoka. On all ships the cargoes from port towns included bags of flour, rice, and sugar and cases of tinned meat, fish, milk, beer, biscuits, tea, cigarettes , and tobacco, as well as bulky consignments of clothing, household goods, hardware, items of furniture, and on-deck drums of kerosene. Inward cargo comprised mainly copra. In addition, according to climatic and soil conditions, as well as time...