ABSTRACT
Honiara is a name in the Ghari language for the area of land west of Point Cruz on Guadalcanal Island. Naho-ni-ara means ‘facing the Ara’, the place where the southeast winds meet the land. The main village sites were Matanikau (or Mataniko) to the east and Kakabona to the west of Point Cruz. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, with little compensation or permission, the Honiara area was divided into several coconut plantations. In June and July 1942 it was briefly a Japanese base, and from August 1942 to 1945 the area became a huge American military garrison, replete with hospitals, movie theatres and a complex road system leading out to major airfields (Figure 1). Some of the heaviest fighting on Guadalcanal in 1942 took place in what is now central Honiara, with the Matanikau River a ‘no-man’s land’ for several months. At war’s end, the military base passed to the British as the site for a new capital to replace the 1897-1942 protectorate headquarters on Tulagi in the Nggela (Florida) Islands, which had been destroyed. The possibilities were good: several airfields existed, the area abutted extensive plain land, and its lower rainfall meant less prevalence of
malaria. What was ignored was that Honiara had no natural port and only a narrow area of coastal flat land. In addition, the rivers in the area are capable of flash floods, and Guadalcanal Plains are also flood prone. This was very clear in April 2014, when heavy rain brought devastating floods to Honiara, made worse because the river systems and hills behind Honiara have been denuded of forests through gardening.
