Vision and Reality in Pacific Religion: Essays in Honour of Niel Gunson (review)

This collection is a tribute to the scholarship of a prominent Pacific ­historian who was also a caring and well-loved mentor, now retired from the Australian National University. All thirteen contributors were at one stage students of Niel Gunson, and he would be justly proud of their scholarship. His notable contributions to the field of Pacific history are addressed in an excellent introductory essay by Michael Reilly and Phyllis Herda, who also offer concise overviews of the papers. The volume takes us on a long and varied journey, in both time and space: from consideration of indigenous religious precepts, through initial reactions to the Christians' one god, to the consolidation of church institutions that remain integral to Islander lives. It then moves on to the dynamics of a missionary leadership long distrustful of Islander intellectual capacities, the impact of particular missionaries and divergent church philosophies of conversion, and to chapters on the Mormon and Baha'i faiths in the Pacific.

Individual Polynesians feature prominently as historical figures in ­theearlier chapters (by Herda, on ­theHikule'o myths of Tonga; Kieran Schmidt, on the gift of the gods in traditional Sämoa; Hank Driessen, on the Raiatean priest, Tupa'ia; Andrew Hamilton on ideas of God and the introduction of Catholicism in Sämoa; and Reilly, on the role of dreams in the reception of Christianity on Mangaia). All of these contributions share an impressive grasp of the ethnography, and most deal with aspects of traditional societies in the early post-European contact years. Then the focus shifts toward Melanesia and some prominent missionary figures involved in the consolidation of church power there in both the ­nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Andrew Thornley offers a lively account of leadership issues that arose between 1850 and 1880 among Methodists in Fiji, where a strong paternalistic undercurrent ensured that the Fijian ministers "remained largely outside the controlling church structures" (149). This situation of external control persisted until after World War II, with deleterious consequences for Fijian needs and aspirations at a time when nationhood wason the horizon. Ross Mackay describes a similarly conservative situation among Methodists in Papua, where Pacific Islander missionaries were never accorded a status commensurate with their influence on ­village life—especially after the withdrawal of European missionaries ­during World War II—nor were they ever entrusted with positions of authority over their white counterparts. It is disappointing that these two contributors did not engage with each other's papers, because the ­parallels cry out for some insightful discussion.

Diane Langmore's engaging account of the life of Constance (later Paul) Fairhall brings an agreeable change of tone to the volume, first because women are largely absent from the foregoing accounts, and, ­secondly, because Fairhall's was a life of selfless devotion to the betterment of those Melanesians among whom she labored so long. She was humble, undoctrinaire, ecumenically minded, and possessed of "an independence ofmind and spirit that was to enable her to continue to grow intellectually and spiritually throughout her long missionary career" (177). At age fifty-five, after three decades of exemplary missionary service, she took on a newcareer as a social worker in and around Port Moresby. Her story is a timely antidote to the self-interest and racism that characterized so many of her male missionary counterparts, ­featured in earlier chapters. David Hilliard's discussion of the God of ­theMelanesian Mission provides ­fascinating revelations about some very ­modern thinking about issues such asaccommodation and syncretism on the part of certain nineteenth-century churchmen, notably John Coleridge Patteson, and later missionaries Rob­ert Henry Codrington, Walter George Ivens, and Charles Elliot Fox, who sought to understand Melanesian ­religions from within.

Space limits preclude consideration of all the contributions to this volume, but I must mention David Wether­all...