ABSTRACT
This chapter derives from a thus far unpublished narrative on the colonial wars of 1878–9 in New Caledonia. It originally appeared in 1991 in the Journal of Pacific History (26: 213–33), in a special issue of papers given at an Australian National University conference on “France in the Pacific”. It was a companion piece to the 1990 ancestor of Chapter Three—ethnographic history to its historical ethnography, narrative to its abstractions. To conform to the journal’s trademark empiricism I contrived to write in a fairly unreflective, realist style, qualified here with a dose of reflexivity. Even so, the editors, in unconscious parody of Barthes’ “referential illusion”—the pretence that referents are speaking for themselves (1967: 69)—saw fit to purge my expository first paragraph of all explicit traces of authorial presence, leaching much of its intended meaning and predictably contorting its syntax. I have reinstated the original text. The chapter as “actions-oriented” ethnographic history; calls into particular question the unwitting teleology of preordained historical outcomes and categorical polarities. It interweaves narrative and textual critique, with a leaning to story over text.
