This collection of slides and photographs was taken by Robert Norton on his first research trip to Fiji, which took place during the 1966 Legislative Council elections campaigning.

The general Legislative Council elections were held in late 1966, just over a year after the first constitutional conference in London, and five years after the British government announced its plan to prepare Fiji for self-government.

The indigenous Fijian leaders were initially very anxious about this objective, viewing it as a threat to the protection they believed the Fijians had enjoyed under the colonial government’s policies, based in part, on the government’s interpretation of the Deed of Cession by which nearly 100 years before the leading chiefs had entrusted the islands to the British crown.

The Fiji Indians who in the 1960s were 51% of the population, and generally more advanced economically than the Fijians (43% of the population), looked favourably on the prospect of an end to colonial rule and their principal leaders called for a common franchise to replace communal (ethnic) political representation. The very influential but tiny European minority, concerned to preserve their longstanding privileged political representation, stood with the Fijians against radical constitutional change.

The 1966 elections were the first in which broadly-based political parties competed for a substantial power in the colonial parliament. The 1965 constitutional conference had changed the parliament (legislative council) from a council dominated by colonial officials appointed by the governor, to one dominated by elected representatives: 14 Indigenous Fijians, (2 elected by the Great Council of Chiefs), 12 Indians, 10 General electors (Europeans, Part-Europeans, Pacific islanders other than Fijians, and Chinese). The new constitution completed the expansion of the vote to a universal franchise, begun in 1963. Only four seats were reserved for colonial officials.

Most of the electorates remained ethnically defined, and all the seats remained ethnically reserved.

But overlaying the many communal electorates, were now three very large Cross Voting electorates covering the entire colony. They were multi-ethnic, made up from the communal electorates, and each had three reserved seats: Fijian, Indian, and General. The electors were entitled to four votes - one in their communal electorate, and three in their cross-voting electorate. Voting was not compulsory, and to cast a valid vote an elector need tick only the communal seat ballot paper if they wished. Communal seats numbered 9 Fijian, 9 Indian, and 7 General; there were 3 Fijian, 3 Indian, and 3 General cross-voting seats. Indigenous Fijians enjoyed additional representation by the two Council of Chiefs members of the parliament.

The intention of introducing the cross-voting electorates was to give people experience in supporting candidates of different ethnic identities from their own - a step, the British said, toward an eventual common franchise without reserved seats. It was hoped that political parties would each field candidates of different ethnicity, and that these would campaign together - the communal candidates assisting the campaigning of their cross-voting partners.

Some of the slides and photos illustrate this joint campaigning in western Viti Levu, by Fijian, Indian, and General candidates of the Alliance Party. All the pictures were taken on Viti Levu, Fiji’s major island.

The Alliance Party, whose main component body was the indigenous Fijian Association, won 22 seats (12 Fijian, 3 Indian, 7 General). The Federation Party (later the National Federation Party) secured only the 9 communal Indian seats; the party fielded only one non-Indian candidate, Fijian cane farmer Penaia Rokovuni (photos 48-54). Three General candidates were elected as independents.

References

Robert Norton 'Race and Politics in Fiji', University of Queensland Press, 1977, revised edition 1990

Roderick Alley 'The Emergence of Party Politics'. In 'Politics in Fiji' edited by Brij Lal, Allen & Unwin, 1986. Pp28-51

Frank (Francis James Clezy) and Rita Paton were Presbyterian missionaries in Tangoa, New Hebrides from 1931-1933. They married in Ballarat in April 1931 and in May 1931 left for the New Hebrides.

Rev. Dr John G. Paton's eldest son, Rev. Robert Robson Paton, could not serve in the New Hebrides because he was declared medically unfit for work in the tropics, but he was pleased that two of his sons were able to go. Frank was the first of the third generation. He worked as assistant to Rev. Fred Bowie, the Principal of Tangoa Teachers' Training Institute (TTI) and District Missionary of South Santo. Frank was a teacher supported financially by the John G. Paton Fund.

At Tangoa, Frank built a workshop for the TTI students where they could do repair and maintenance jobs. After returning to Australia, three children - Barbara, David and Ruth - were born. Frank undertook pastoral work and preaching in NSW, then taught at Caulfield Grammar School and Scotch College Melbourne. Rita died in 1982. Frank subsequently remarried.

Frank writes the following: "After my early days at school I began work in the city of Melbourne but decided that I really wanted to become a school teacher. So for some years I did a lot of study and teaching. We married in Ballarat, Victoria, and set off in 1931 for the Tangoa Training Institute (TTI).

The Rev. Bowie was the principal and we were the only assistants. There were 60 students, of which about a dozen were married.
We set our clocks every fortnight at sunrise, for 6am, because at that time we met in the Hall for prayers and study. 8-8:30 was breakfast time, 8:30-10 school work; 10:15-12:30 practical work in the plantation and weeding and gathering coconuts for copra, while my work was on the buildings etc., to see that they were in good order. For this work I could call on as many helpers as were necessary for any building and carpentry jobs.

The afternoon was for the students to work in their gardens over on Santo, except that we always needed to keep at least four of them in case anything unexpected suddenly had to be done. Rita took the married women for school work in the afternoons. All sorts of things might suddenly become urgent problems, for instance, the baker's oven developed some cracks and, as the two students who looked after the bread making usually baked every Tuesday and Thursday, they had to do it on Monday and Friday that week and I had to attend to and supervise the dismantling of all the bricks and make sure that the 'new' bricks were quite sound before rebuilding the oven ready for the Friday baking. (The oven was about six feet long, four feet wide and four feet high.) At one time, we found that the workshop was in a bad way. White ants or similar unwelcome guests had made it unsafe. It had to be pulled down, the timber burnt and a new one built.

Often in the evening, the students would practice singing new hymns in the Hall and as our house (?Number Three?) was only about 50 yards away, it was a joy to listen to. The hymn books had tonic solfa notation and the students were wonderful sight readers."

(From They served in Vanuatu by Jungwirth, Fred, 1988, 2nd ed., p.39)

A collection of slides from Papua New Guinea taken by Jill Clingan. The images document her time in Papua New Guinea working as a nurse for the Australian Baptist Mission from 1971-1973. The images cover several aspects of her life in the Western Highlands in PNG, including the mission station, her work as a nurse, the hospital, clinic visits, daily living, gardens, food and cooking, aspects of traditional PNG culture and celebrations including sing-sings, Christmas, health surveys and visits to other nearby missions.
Places visited include Baiyer valley, Baiyer river, Southern Highlands, Kiwinkia, Giimanda, Mt. Hagen, Wewak, Lumusa gorge, Wahgi Valley, Kudjip, Giimanda, Madang, Kar Kar Island, Ramu Valley, Ramu River, Lae.

This collection of 540 colour photographs was taken by John Baker in Solomon Islands in 1964 and 1965, while he was working there as a volunteer under the auspices of the British Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) organisation. He was 18 and 19 at the time and was what was known as a school leaver volunteer. There were 10-15 VSOs in the Solomons in 1964, with most working as teachers in mission boarding schools. However, John was attached mainly to two District Administrations to work on various local projects.

At the time, Solomon Islands was under colonial administration known as the British Solomon Islands Protectorate (BSIP), in which virtually all senior and technical/professional positions were still held by expatriates. Thus VSOs were working within and were very much a part of a colonial culture.

The photographs in the collection were taken with a Voigtlander Vito B camera on Kodachrome 100 colour slides. The camera was stored, including for many canoe trips, in an old Sunshine Milk tin with a bag of silica gel in the bottom. Captions for the photos were written in a foolscap notebook when the slides came back from processing. Thus the names of people and places were all recorded contemporaneously and so are likely to be accurate. These captions, written in 1964-65, sometimes have a colonial tone but have been left unchanged as they are an historical reflection of their times.

John Baker’s first work as a VSO was from August-November 1964 as a teacher at the Geological Department’s survey school in Honiara. Then he transferred to Western District headquarters in Gizo and worked during December 1964 and January 1965 as a surveyor on the Wagina Island Gilbertese resettlement scheme. In February 1965 he transferred to Eastern District headquarters in Kira Kira where he spent six weeks working on local election preparations. He then moved back to Gizo and spent April to August 1965 travelling round, organising the construction of concrete drinking water tanks in various villages in the Roviana and Wana Wana lagoons and subsequently on the island of Ranonnga.

Emeritus Professor R.G. Ward was Professor of Human Geography at the ANU from 1971 to 1998, and Director of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies from 1980 to 1993.

He was Foundation Professor of Geography at the University of Papua New Guinea from 1967 to 1971. He has taught at University College London, and University of Auckland and is President of the Pacific Science Association. Professor Ward has been conducting research in the Pacific Islands since 1956, and has done fieldwork in Samoa, Fiji, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea.

His books, as author or editor, include "Land Use and Population in Fiji", "American Activities in the Central Pacific, 1790-1870", "The Settlement of Polynesia: A Computer Simulation", "Man in the Pacific Islands", "South Pacific Agriculture: Choices and Constraints", "Land, Custom and Practice in the South Pacific", and "Samoa: Mapping the Diversity".

Professor Gerard Ward took these pictures when his ship stopped for a day in October 1956 at Niue whilst on his way to undertake field work in Western Samoa.

Professor Ward has commented on the visit: “One of the striking things about Niue was the upraised coral nature of the island. It is very difficult to cultivate and this is evident in the photographs PMB Photo 12_14 – 16. There is broken coral everywhere so parts of the land have very little soil and are unusable. These pictures show this, PMB Photo 12_26. Another feature is the lack of beaches, making access to the sea difficult and opportunities for fishing limited.”

This collection of photographs include streets and boat ramps around Alofi in Niue. The collection also includes images of local dwellings that use burnt lime plaster, village scenes, plantations, fishing techniques and outrigger canoes.

Ward died on 16 January 2023 in Adelaide.

Tim Bayliss-Smith served on the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) program in Honiara, Solomon Islands, 1965-1966. He worked as a teacher in the Survey Drafting School in the Lands Department of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate Government and as a librarian in the Geological Survey Department. Though based in Honiara, he travelled around Guadalcanal for work, as well as to Savo, Malaita and Bellona. Tim returned to Solomon Islands in 1971 for his PhD field research into energy use on Ontong Java atoll. He joined the Department of Geography at University of Cambridge in 1973 where he has continued his research in land management in the humid tropics, with particular focus on Melanesia. Professor Bayliss-Smith has made many subsequent visits to Solomon Islands throughout his research career.

This collection of 108 digitised 35mm colour slides are mainly from the period of his VSO placement (1965-1966) and mainly feature Honiara and surrounds. The images depict VSO housing; other VSO volunteers; trainees in the Survey Drafting School; Chinatown; Honiara market; WWII wreckage and other landmarks in and around Honiara. Activities such as sporting events, Easter procession; Queen's Birthday celebrations and gardening also feature.

This section holds a slideshow by the Australian Presbyterian Board of Mission showing slides of mission work in New Hebrides. The slides were most likely used to communicate the mission work and to garner support from outside.