ABSTRACT
First a word of explanation. I am not an anthropologist, an historian or a political scientist. I came to my subject in a round-about way which needs a short explanation. I have spent my academic life as a literary critic, a teacher of literature and a literary historian. One of my subjects of research was (and still is) the Australian poet RD FitzGerald, who, as well as being a significant mid-20th century Australian poet, practised as a surveyor all his working life. He spent the middle 1930s in Fiji surveying boundaries for the Native Lands Commission, and in the 1980s, through my research for an edition of his work I read a number of books on Fiji of the 1930s, and particularly what informed the official policy on land holdings. One of the books I read was the second edition of George Kingsley Roth’s Fijian Way of Life, published by Oxford University Press in Melbourne in 1973. I remembered it because it was redolent in style and tone of the kind of colonial administrative writing I had experienced when I taught at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the 1960s. That style is discursive, lucid, jargon-free and humane.
