Selo! Selo! Bigfala Canoe

Selo! Selo! Bigfala Canoe, 26 minutes, VHS (PAL and NTSC), color, 1998. Directed and coproduced by Randall Wood, coproduced by Gabrielle Jones, Axis Productions, SBS Independent, and the Pacific Film and Television Commission. Available from Axis Productions, 33a Logan Road, Woolloongabba, QLD 4102, Australia. A$100 including air postage and handling.

"Sail Ho!"--that welcome or warning cry sparked by the first glimpse of a ship sailing up over the horizon--is an old nineteenth-century term in Bislama, Vanuatu's Pidgin English. It once signaled the arrival of whalers, labor recruiters, missionary vessels, and trading ships at Vanuatu's ports and passages. Today, the sail has been superseded by global shipping and air connections and, as this film depicts, the occasional cruise ship. This is a documentary of the first visit, in 1997, of the Fair Princess sailing out of Sydney to Lamen Bay, Epi Island. The cruise business is a competitive one and operators, such as P&O Holidays, attempt to enhance their offerings with the addition of a little cultural tourism to the usual mix of onboard eating, drinking, dancing, and gambling.

The filmmakers used two crews--one cruising in comfort, we might suppose, on the Fair Princess--and the other camped out at Lamen Bay during the month before the ship arrived. The film has no voice-over narration. Rather, scenes and voices from Epi (subtitled in English) and from the Fair Princess are effectively edited together and juxtaposed to tell the story. This story, at heart, is a moral tale about the consequences of what is nowadays called globalization. The film focuses on misunderstandings and problems that this touristic encounter generates--the troubles and conflicts that follow when the global invades the local. It also teases out some of the perceptions that Epi Islanders and cruising tourists have of one another. (The filmmakers, however, favor island voices over Sydneysiders.)

P&O Holidays offered to pay $5,000 for the rights to offload its 1,000 or so cruisers at Lamen Bay. For the money, the locals would provide various sorts of entertainment and cultural experiences. The deal, made first it seems with a local leader, incited considerable interest in this rural hinterland where cash is scarce. Although the Australian dollar circulated in Vanuatu until the early 1980s, people since have forgotten its value. There was much confusion about just how much A$5,000 was worth in local vatu--was it 500,000 or 5 million? Considerably disappointed to learn it was the former figure, people wondered if they could also demand a head tax from visitors, but backed down when the P&O agent brought up the original umbrella site license payment.

Nonetheless, villagers hoping for a windfall formed a committee to oversee preparations for the visit. Women wove mats and baskets and gathered food to prepare. Men spruced up outrigger canoes to sell rides to tourists. The local pastor preached, "God gave us the Fair Princess" and the necessity of hard work to obtain wealth. One entrepreneur ordered 1,200 bottles of beer for his thatched bar. And, notably, numerous dance groups formed. Epi Islanders took it for granted that tourists would pay to see kastom (custom) of which dance nowadays is the epitome. They organized some fifteen sites for dance performances by men, women, and schoolchildren. P&O's agent, who flew to the island to meet the ship, shocked them when he requested that these be reduced to only three.

On board the Fair Princess, the captain (who "understands the natives are friendly") looks forward to the upcoming encounter with "Polynesian culture." The happy cruisers dance too--jiggling to aerobic exercise--parade about in plastic grass skirts, and hoot at a male strip show. They feast on shrimp cocktails and wear fancy dress. A boozy tourist jokes to the camera that, when he arrives at Epi, he plans to go get circumcised at the "circumcision dance."

The Fair Princess drops anchor. Its tourists are lightered ashore, welcomed by...