If somebody had said to me during August, 2000, in all seriousness, that early in October, I'd be living and working in Suva, Fiji, teaching journalism at the University of the South Pacific (USP), I would have politely suggested that there are highly qualified professionals around who can help with that kind of problem, and they're very good these days.

By the middle of September, 2000, I was furiously gathering documentation, buying airline tickets, sending off e-mails and faxes, burning up my ISP fees, and reading my eyeballs red to get some sort of meaningful handle on as many aspects of contemporary Anglophone Pacific countries, societies, cultures, and especially mass media and journalism so I would have some sort of common frame of reference with the journalism students I was soon going to be teaching at USP.

I knew my time in Fiji was going to be very challenging and demanding, not only because of the still very fraught political situation following the May 2000 Coup.

I honestly had no idea at all just how permanently exciting and interesting life in the Pacific is. It was truly a Life Changing Experience which, as you will see, I am still undergoing.

I arrived in Suva and at USP on Friday October 6, 2000, and met the first students that night. As Monday, October 9, was a public holiday in Fiji, I joined the Journalism Course Co-Ordinator, David Robie, and some students for a picnic at Pacific Harbour, just to the west along the coast from Suva.

(L to R) Harry Abre (PNG), David Robie - Co-Ordinator USP Journalism, Tali Waqa (Fiji), Donna Herder (Rotuma), Salesh Kumar (Fiji; behind Donna), Losana McGowan (Fiji), Me (with one of my first Fiji Bitter stubbies), Tamani Nair (Fiji, in front of me). Monday, October 9, 2000.

It happened like this.

Like most journalism academics in Australia and New Zealand, I subscribe to an electronic list called JEANet, where we put up all sorts of notices and discuss all sorts of issues. Because of the May 19, 2000, Fiji coup, USP was short-staffed, but David Robie had found a small pot of New Zealand aid money to hire a short term emergency journalism lecturer. He'd been largely on his own since the end of 1999 when a specialist television journalism lecturer, Ingrid Leary, resigned and another part-time lecturer in radio, Pat Craddock, was very stretched with other USP Media Centre responsibilities and had announced his resignation as well.

I was experienced and qualified to do what the emergency position required, and I could move fast. Between David's call being posted on JEANet and my arrival in Suva passed no more than a month.

Coming to Some Sort of Understanding of Fiji

The way I've come to understand Fiji goes like this:

It's a developing country with a population about three-quarters the size of metropolitan Brisbane and an economy undergoing very significant stresses as something, probably tourism, replaces older industries like sugar as the key economic sector and driver. But most tourism focuses on the resorts on and near the West and Southern Coasts of Viti Levu, with some incursions to Eastern Islands like Tavenui and Levuka, and to the North, around Savusavu, on Southern Vanua Levu.

Suva isn't all there is to Fiji by any means, and you'd have an extremely narrow view of the country if all your focus was on Suva. You cannot understand and 'work' Suva unless you really plunge into the place. Like it or not, Suva is the capital, almost all government, military, business, and media operations are based there, so understanding Suva is part of the key to understanding Fiji, but only a part. It's a fairly small, concentrated, and rumour-filled city.

If you want to almost instantly demonstrate how stupid or arrogant you are, complain bitterly about how services you take for granted in Brisbane are not up to Australian standards in Suva, and other cities like Nadi, Latoka, or Savusavu.

It's the unevenness of the services and technology which can drive you nuts in Fiji.

Electricity, sewage, water, hospitals and medical services, newspapers, radio, television, pay TV, and InterNet access are all available, but electricity and water outages are quite common, it's a good idea not to get seriously ill or suffer a serious injury outside Suva, you have to read all three English language newspapers very carefully every day, plus listen to the English language radio - FM 96 and Bula 100 - and watch Fiji TV News to get some sort of handle on what's going on, but you cannot trust any of them to get it entirely accurate, Pay TV is vision encrypted with only a few extra channels for which you can pay as much as $FJD 200 a month, which includes a Hindi channel, and modem access InterNet costs lots and the fastest speed you'll get, if you're very lucky and Log On in the very early morning or on Sundays, is 33 baud.

Like everybody else, I'd been closely following reporting of the May 2000 Coup in Australia, but I'd always felt uneasy about the whole thing being entirely explained by reference to race, a clear imputation behind much of the reportage I'd read, heard, and seen.

On the surface, it sure looked largely racially motivated, with the target of the coup being an Indo-Fijian Labour Party dominated government headed by Fiji's first Indo-Fijian Prime Minister, and the perpetrators almost exclusively, apparently, nationalist Fijians fearful that Chaudhry was plotting to erode their rights, probably using the fairly new 1997 Constitution as his main vehicle.

Phenomena like coups are always highly complex, and my study of the available literature on the Rabuka 1987 Coups in Fiji clearly showed that they were far more complex than many commentators had suggested at the time. To be sure, Rabuka, and his supporters, and, more recently and even more vividly, Speight and his supporters, siezed upon and played the 'race card' for powerful propaganda effect.

Many journalists fell for this propaganda because they had little background knowledge of Fiji, Fijian history, culture, or society, flew into Nadi and then Suva at short notice, had to make some sort of quick sense of the situation to file reports for demanding and insatiable editors back home, and Indians versus Fijians seemed the most obvious angle with which to go. It was, apparently, blindingly obvious. All one had to do was toddle up to Parliament from one of the tourist hotels in downtown Suva, look around, see who was being held hostage and by whom, record some grabs from Speight during one of his many media conferences, belt out the copy on one's laptop, edit the story on one's flyaway editing rig, and zap the packages back home on the SatPhone or from FinTel's link point at Watawaqua.

Reporters harping on the 'race angle' for their overseas audiences earned the contemptful description of 'parachute journalists' from better informed correspondants and locals alike, because they 'parachuted' into Fiji, often hung around the famous, or infamous, and certainly very pleasant Bures overlooking Suva Harbour out back of the Centra Hotel on Victoria Parade, Suva, swapped rumours and several kinds of booze with each other, and largely missed the real stories often almost literally right in front of their noses. They were, in AFP's Pacific Correspondant, Michael Field's, apt phrase: 'Clueless in Coup Coup Land'.

When I got to Suva, and plunged into Fijian society and politics, as well as struggled to understand and then use the available local media, I quickly realised that race was not the decisive or overwhelming dynamic in the May 2000 Crisis, as it was being called by locals.

Deeper currents were driving the May 2000 Crisis, including conflicts between different Fijian regional and tribal groupings which predate even Colonial times, the Chaudhry Government's attempts to slow and even reverse privatisation of government assets begun by Rabuka which alienated key business interests, and antipathy to Labour by certain entrenched media interests which were not helped by Chaudhry's arrogance and threats against them.

It's become an absorbing hobby in Fiji and especially Suva to speculate about who was really behind the May 2000 coup, speculation often lubricated by yangona and Fiji Bitter, but I'll leave my informed contributions here.

My over-riding point being:

In Fiji, things are never quite what they seem. You have to constantly work extremely hard, and apply maximum scepticism, to piece together some sort of overview, with some details fitted in, and you cannot believe any one media outlet's reports. Fijian politics can be, and usually is, about as murky as a tanoa of yangona.

Discovering Contemporary Pacific Music

One evening in late November, 2000, I was wandering down to the USP Staff Club for my regular libation and, as I walked along the side of the building, I heard this amazing music. I went in, my Fijian mate, George Domona, the barman, had my Fiji Bitter open on the bar, and as I paid him, I asked,"What the hell's that music playing??!!"

"Oh, I'm sorry," said George, "I'll take it off if you don't like it."

Voices of Nature Black Rose's 2000 CD

"No! No! It's bloody brilliant. What is it! I've gotta get some of that to take home!"

George handed me the CD cover for 'Black Rose's' current album for 2000, Voices of Nature:

The track that knocked me right out was Koka and it's about a place where culture and tradition are preserved and are highly respected despite the changes and dominance of the modern world.

Kila...? Black Rose's 2002 CD

The CD had been out for about a week, and, try as I might, I simply could not find it anywhere in Suva. It had totally sold out.

I despaired of being able to take this amazing music home to Australia for Christmas, 2000, until, while vaguely browsing the shelves of a Taapoo shop at Nadi Airport on my way home, I saw two copies of Voices of Nature. I snapped them up immediately.

My friends back home were initially dubious about the music I was raving about, no doubt thinking it was ukulele ershatz Pacific Islander pap written for tourists. But, when I played the CD for them, they were as blown away as I was, and remain.

At QUT Journalism, some of us like to play some music while students are coming into lectures and settling down. I play some Black Rose, just to be different. Some students hate it, writing it off to my well known obsession with the Pacific. Others have exactly the same reaction as I and my friends have to this stuff: "What the hell's that!!?? It's amazing!!"

"Yep," I say smugly, "That's contemporary Fijian music, by Fiji's hottest band. These guys are Huge in Fiji. You haven't lived unless you've been to a Black Rose concert in Suva. Just sensational!"

I was in Tuvalu, mostly on the main island of Funafuti, during November, 2002, and, while there, heard quite a lot of an Auckland-based Tokelau band called Te Vaka (which means The Canoe) who sing in Tokelau and Tuvaluan. Liked what I'd heard, but I was rather distracted by my sciatic pain and what I was doing with the Tuvalu Media Corporation. I bought Te Vaka's current CD, Nukukehe, at Nadi Airport on my way home, and when I finally got into it, it just knocked me right out.

This band is just amazing!

No wonder they're huge in many parts of the Pacific, including New Zealand, Tuvalu, Tokelau, as well as in Europe, where they've toured. They're finalists for the BBC Radio 3 World Music Awards for 2002.

Two songs on Nukukehe really 'speak' to me. Sei Ma Le Losa (This Flower and This Rose), written in memory of the founder of Greenpeace, David McTaggart, who was killed in a car accident in Italy in late 2000, and who did so much against nuclear testing and other acts of domination in the Pacific, and Loimata E Maligi (Let the Tears Fall Down), in memory of the 19 school girls killed in an horrific fire at the Motufoua High School on the Tuvalu island of Vaitupu in March, 2000. While I was in Tuvalu, I went to Vaitupu, and Motufoua High School, and felt incredibly sad as I did so, and still feel so every time I hear Loimata E Maligi.

Te Vaka knocked me out so much I bought their two earlier albums, Ki Mua, and Te Vaka, and these are just as wonderful and powerful. Another song, on Ki Mua, which especially speaks to me is Ke Ke Kitea (So You Can See), which is a plea to Developed World leaders to actually come to threatened Pacific countries like Tuvalu to see the damage global warming and sea level rise are doing there. One of the reasons I went to Tuvalu in November, 2002, was to see for myself what climate change means for the country, and this I most certainly did.

You can order Te Vaka CDs On Line.

Some Good Sources of Pacific News

- East West Centre, University of Hawaii

Coconet Wireless - Pacific Links & Info maintained by Dr Susanna Layton at UQ.

- Radio New Zealand International

And a few Pacific Maps:

Tuvalu