ABSTRACT

In the region known as Melanesia, histories have been told in men’s and women’s houses, in song and dance, in names passed down through generations, in stories told to children about early heroes, warriors and in the origin of names for butterflies, birds and mist-shrouded peaks. These vernacular histories continue in the present. In the seventeenth century a written record of the region’s past was begun in European languages in books, ships’ logs and published journals. A notable early form this history took was the travelogue, such as the three volumes by Dampier (1697, 1699 and 1703), which were popular but never seen by the subjects being written about. The telling of history became a pictorial narrative when the camera was invented and quickly spread across the region by missionaries, scientists, officials and travellers (Corbey 2010; Quanchi 2007; Wright 2013). Historical publications, usually in the form of academic monographs chronicling the past as a set of key events and changes, mostly focus on Europeans, European interests and Empire, with indigenous histories relegated to the margins. This has changed in a recent wave of islander-centred histories (e.g. Matsuda 2012) and in greater attention to indigenous voice and epistemologies, but the history of the region presented in monographs, film, journals and exhibitions is still mostly a Euro-American preoccupation.