Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self (review)

This is a handsomely made book. It is a delight to hold and to behold. Sadly, however, on consideration of the text it evokes echoes of Hans Christian Andersen's fable of The Emperor's New Clothes. It has style, but substance is more notional, and subjectivity and relativity outweigh content and objectivity. The late Greg Dening (1931–2008) produced a number of distinctively reinterpretive works relating to the Pacific, most notably one on Captain William Bligh and the Bounty (Cambridge, UK, 1992), but nothing as indulgently self-referential as Beach Crossings.

The primary geographical focus of Dening's scholarly expertise is the Marquesas Islands, in association with other Polynesian groups. So it is here, too, but the prevailing subject of discussion is a topographical feature invoked as a metaphor of protean application for the significant shifts of bearing that can occur amid the uncertainties and ambiguities of the human condition; that is, "the beach." This is the site at or through which a person putatively crosses from one world or from one state of being to another.The result of Dening's musings is an extended literary essay, rather than a work that fits within any other genre.

Dening's archetypal "beach crossers" are two European seamen and a missionary who came ashore in the Marquesas around 1800 and who adapted to life there until they returned to their own societies, profoundly influenced by their experiences. Later, he discusses Herman Melville, who had similar adventures, and the indigenous people of the islands. The Polynesians, the ethno-cultural group to which the Marquesans belong, were so labeled in 1832 by the navigator-ethnographer Dumont d'Urville. For Dening, tracing their movements from an Asian homeland, they become the "Sea People of the West" who settled on widely scattered islands in the great ocean where they also become people of the land; or, in the case of the Marquesans, as Dening styles them, "Enata Fenua."Their voyaging is presented as a series of "crossings," and one of them, Tupaia from Tahiti, who visited England with Captain James Cook, is offered admiringly as an example of an indigenous "beach crosser." The Europeans are generally less favorably represented.

Indeed, despite the vast amount of existing critical research that qualifies traditional romantic stereotypes of the South Seas, Dening tends to present the islanders as noble savages, as occupants of an oceanic paradise. In addition, his avuncular storytelling style of literary escapism is jarring, especially in referring to New Zealand through the silly poetic neologism Aotearoa.

Dening, an ex-Jesuit, also writes extensively, but not in sharp detail, about his own life and his intellectual and emotional engagement with the subject of his research and writing, so that the book emerges primarily as a personal memoir. He has much to say about his own "beach crossings," but skimmingly, with little depth or substance. He presents his life as an integral part of a continually unfolding historical drama, in which the author is one of the actors.

All in all, then, this is a work that philosophically smacks more of Heraclitus and Berkeley than of Aristotle and Aquinas. It is a wondrously sustained exercise in literary creativity, but is deficient in scholarly gravitas.