Arnberger, H. and Arnberger, E. 2001. The Tropical Islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 556 pp. ISBN 3-7001-2738-3.
This is the first English edition of a book first published in German in 1993. It catalogues the observations and the insights of a husband-and-wife team, both distinguished geographers, who in journeys equivalent to "almost 33 circumferences of the Earth" (p 5) visited as many tropical islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans as possible. It is a huge book, crammed with numbers and maps and some excellent photographs, in both colour and black and white, and one yearns to say something positive about it for fear of demeaning the considerable efforts and undoubted sincerity of the authors. But to review a work which claims to be "an indispansible [sic] reference book" (p 5) yet is manifestly not so, it is necessary to be honest.
The book is a disaster. It runs into problems from the start with the authors' inability to define an island meaningfully. If "islands … are areas of land surrounded on all sides by water" (p 32), then why is Vienna not considered an island city, and on what grounds do the authors insist (like the Guinness Book of Records) that Greenland is the world's largest island (p 91)?
It is structured in such a way that aspects of the physical environment run into the social context and then back again. Chapter 8 discusses a classification of 17 (!) island types; only the most dogged reader would wade through such a mire.
One hopes for the reputation of the Austrian Academy of Sciences that most of the errors in the book are due to imperfect translation. But terranes are not all former continents (p 11), oceanic islands are not elements of continental plates (p 11), Fiji's nearest foreign market is Tonga not New Zealand (p 26), not all islands have a semi-diurnal tide regime (p 34), the annual migration of "red crabs" takes place on Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean not the one in the Pacific (p 43), there was never a "phosphate stratum overlying the coral limestone" on Nauru (Photo 16 caption), there is no country called the New Hebrides (p 135), Darwin's theory of atoll formation did not involve constant sea-level rise (Figure 60), Vanuatu does not comprise only volcanic islands (p 240), Tongatapu is not an atoll (p 241), there is no island in Tonga called Niua and the King is not called Taufa'ahan (p 273), and investments by the Government of Nauru do not guarantee a beneficial economic future for Nauruans (p 282).
Translation problems are serious. There is a whole section (2.3) devoted to "Tropical Whirlwinds" instead of tropical cyclones. Majuro, the capital city of the Marshall Islands, is referred to as a "village" (Photo 8). There are many spelling mistakes, many sentences which are beyond my comprehension; for example, "The number of known volcanically-originated shallows covered by coral caps growing towards sea level is constantly increasing" (p 241).
The authors make a lot out of their outrageous assertion that "before the first edition of this book was published … there was no reliable information on either the numbers of islands classified according to size for the individual ocean areas and regions, or on their area and population" (p 11). This ignores a huge amount of data and synthesis.
The geography is poor. To state that no-one knows whether the pattern of 20th century El NIños, the four strongest of which occurred since 1980, indicates a trend or is "a meaningless random cluster" (p 65) is a monumental cop-out that I would not accept from a first-year undergraduate. Heyerdahl's view that Polynesia was colonized from the east rather than the west is simply said to explain "many things, such as the ‘Longears' of Easter Island" (p 146). The authors' preoccupation with "3 phases of uplift" (p 215) in Tonga is risible given our present understanding of tectonic history in such locations.
As if all that was not enough, the poor reader has to deal with a plethora of abbreviations throughout the text, including approx., mill. and bill., inhab., N. for northern (and S., E. and W.), and even is. for islands. Some of the maps are so dense they are unintelligible, and there are tables upon tables of numbers of little interest.
I think what upset me most about this book are the derogatory attitudes towards island regions and island peoples which there is no attempt to conceal. Thus we are told that "Japan's claim to power in the Pacific Ocean shocked the Americans in World War II" (p 21); perhaps one might have mentioned how much more shocked were the Pacific Islanders who were in the direct line of fire.
The authors are lavish with their praise of Christianity, for example lauding the "very successful" missionary activities in Sumatra (p 122), without once mentioning the massive cultural cost of these here and elsewhere. In the Seychelles, we are informed that the missionary school system "made it possible for the black population to adapt to the 20th century" (p 354) without which - what? Without which perhaps they would never be able to aspire to the civilised diversions enjoyed by the cultivated Viennese? Or perhaps without which they would have rediscovered their own culture and found their own voice and developed their own sense of self-worth? I do not think modern geographers should be writing about societies other than their own without asking themselves such questions.
The word "native" is used in abundance, with all the derogatory overtones that were commonly attached to it 100 years ago. For example, "in the Melanesian region hunting is still of major importance as a source of food for the natives" (p 183, my emphasis), as if it should not be were these unfortunate people civilised like those in Vienna. The racism is barely disguised. We read of tribes of "primitive native-Malays" (p 131) on one page and then the "diligence, flexibility and unwavering endurance and unpretentiousness" of the Chinese in the Pacific Islands a little later (p 133). "Black" and "white" are terms bandied about with astonishing naivete. Although there are occasional forays into the romantic notion of native peoples living in harmony with their environments, throughout this book ‘nativeness' is named as a barrier to progress; for example, "difficulties resulting from the primitive economic level and life style and from the hostility of the widely illiterate Papua groups as far as the exploitation of resources are [sic] concerned, are easily understood" (p 198). But of course.
No discussion of the "native" people's views is given, save for a few anecdotes intended to illustrate the quaintness of their ‘backward' practices. And we are repeatedly told things like Nauru "was discovered in 1798 by a British whaler" (p 280) and "Tahiti was discovered in 1767 by the British Captain Wallis" (p 289) as though the people already there were merely part of the backdrop to Elysium into which Europeans like the Arnbergers wandered.
Compounding this are the demeaning value judgements which pepper the text. Statements like the islands of the tropical Indian Ocean being "economically uninteresting" (p 21), talk of "less important island archipelagoes" (p 89), and "intolerable" population increases (p 129) for example, may sound alright to geographers sitting in front of their computer screens in Vienna sipping cappuccino but do the authors truly believe that everyone elsewhere shares these views?
The authors appear to have spent an excessive time in the Seychelles, Bali and Hawaii (I wonder why); the latter is praised for its "splendid living conditions" and its "unique beauty" (p 203), nonsense terms save by the standards of tourism brochures.
Not since Paul Theroux's abysmal "The Happy Isles of Oceania" have I read a book which, while purporting to be insightful, showed such ignorance about island areas and island peoples. The Arnbergers' book is an ill-informed, badly-written gazetteer, surpassed by any of the Lonely Planet guides. It is the sort of book that gives professional Geography a bad name. I wish I had a desk with a leg 5 cm short so I had a use for this otherwise worthless tome.
Patrick D. Nunn
Professor of Geography
The University of the South Pacific
© 2002 Patrick D. Nunn
Institute of Island Studies