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Sir Tom Davis, doctor, space scientist,academic, sailor, sportsman, author,artist, is best known in the Pacific for
Island Boy: An Autobiography, byTom Davis, Pa Tuterangi Ariki. Suva:Institute of Pacific Studies, Universityof the South Pacific; Christchurch:Macmillan Brown Centte for PacificStudies, University of Canterbury;Auckland: Centre for Pacific Studies,University of Auckland, 1992. ISBN982-02-0071-7,349 pp, maps, illustrations, bibliography, index. Cloth,US$25, NZ$45, F$18; paper, us$18,NZ$35, F$15·
tion, the development of a rural peasant way of life based on cash-croppingof copra and other commodities, andthe economic boom and ensuing affluence and inequality brought about byFrance's massive funding of its nucleartesting program in those islands. Thissaga of colonialization is a familiarone, in the Pacific and elsewherethroughout the world. In this particular case the story includes both theeconomic uncertainty and the ominousmedical and ecological risk of "livingoff the bomb."
Massey University and the authorare to be commended for bringing outthese lectures in an inexpensive andwell-produced publication (thoughmarred by dozens of typographicalerrors). These informative, lucid, andengaging essays will be of interest to abroad audience of both Pacific scholarsand more general readers.
DONALD H. RUBINSTEINUniversity ofGuam
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THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· SPRING 1994
the years he was a prominent CookIslands politician, six of them as opposition leader, nine as prime minister.Island Boy is his second volume ofmemoirs and brings up to date his lifesince 1952, when he sailed his fortyfive-foot schooner from New Zealandto the east coast of the United Stateswith his New Zealand wife and theirtwo young children to study at theHarvard School of Public Health. Theaccount of his boyhood in the islands,his 1940 marriage to Lydia in Dunedin,where he was at medical school, andtheir life in the Cooks from 1945, whenthe young Davis was the governmentmedical officer, was told in Doctor tothe islands, in print for many yearsafter its publication in 1955.
Island Boy lacks the stylish writingand evocative appeal that made Doctorto the Islands a bestseller. This presumably is because Lydia, who Davisacknowledges did the donkey work onthe first book in association with aprofessional writer, had no part in thisone, their marriage having broken upin the United States in 1967. In comparison, Island Boy reads more often like adetailed inventory of the author'scareer.
The text is divided into three equalparts. The first, "Home Ground,"revisits his boyhood and early yearsdescribed in Doctor to the Islands, butincludes useful new chapters on Polynesians and Polynesian navigation andsailing canoes, compounded from theliterature and his own experiences andopinions. The account of how, as theonly qualified doctor in the Cooks, hefaced the challenges of ignorance,superstition, and colonial bureaucratswho held a low opinion of his fellow
BOOK REVIEWS
Islanders, is still germane as a reminderof island life not so very long ago.
"American Interlude" covers thetwenty years to 1972 when, after Harvard, he undertook medical researchprograms for the US armed forceswhile remaining a civilian, and consultancies in pharmaceutical and foodresearch. He was involved in the earlydays of US space research, both beforeNASA, when the armed forces ran theirown programs, each struggling forspace superiority, and after. His specialinterest was in the effects of heat andcold on human subjects. All these yearsmust have been productive and interesting for him, but their pertinence istoo often lost to the reader under theweight of detail, particularly the minutiae of some of his medical research. Afirmer editorial hand would haveselected the more significant events andrejected the author's determined attempts to write almost everything intothe record.
"Home Brew Politics," the last thirdof the book, begins with his election toparliament in 1972 as a reluctant anduntutored politician who found unacceptable the chief electioneering weapon of Cook Islands candidates-thedenigration of one's opponents, knownin the vernacular as akakino. It was, hewrites, "all comedy entertainment, andwhat better comedy entertainmentthan someone else's discomfiture?" Itends with his disillusionment withpolitics after his party ousted him asprime minister in a no-confidencemotion in 1987 ("they said I hadbecome too authoritarian").
In this part of his book, Davis-hebecame Sir Tom Davis in 198o-ismore to the point, except for a ram-
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bling lecture headed "Economic Solutions," in which he ranges from AdamSmith to J. K. Galbraith in a bid toexplain his economic policies, which headmits he was never able to do to thevoters mainly because, he surmised, itwas over their heads. This reviewer hasto be counted among the unenlightened.
His introduction to politics alignedhim against Albert Henry, socialist,master orator, and premier (the titlewas later changed to prime minister)since self-government in 1965. WhenHenry and his government were dismissed from office in 1978 for electoralcorruption, Davis, as oppositionleader, took office. The relationshipbetween the two men was never bitter.Davis writes: "Despite our opennesswith each other and our liking for eachother, I was probably his prime subjectfor persecution over the years. Hispolitical training would not allow himto do otherwise. Our openness witheach other included discussions on themost intimate matters of a politicalnature affecting us and at no time dideither of us breach these confi-dences" (245).
Davis's administration helped breakdown the bitter divisiveness in the community from the Henry years of nepotism and discrimination, but Davis'sown leadership problems with theparty are documented here ("It neverentered their heads that not all of themcould be prime ministers and theirtroubles might just be starting oncethey got me out of the way" [246]), andmuch else besides. Useful for therecord are his details on "Doctor"Milan Brych, the "cancer cure" charlatan with a criminal record who had the
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THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· SPRING 1994
Cooks in uproar in 1976-1977. Theauthor also casts his net wider in achapter on "The Pacific Neighbourhood," which discusses regional politics, including the Fiji coups.
The book confirms Sir Tom as aperson of wide-ranging interests andachievements, yet strangely, it does notoffer many clues to what makes himrun. One is little the wiser about theman himself, or, strangely, his ownimpact on the times in which he haslived. What his peers may have thoughtof him during his long and varied
career, we are unable to judge. Theoccasional unexpected and rewardingpassages that might provide us withinsights, the isolated, disarming confidences that encourage us to believe thathe is at last revealing himself, leadnowhere.
A rounded picture may come oneday through an independent biographer, but meanwhile this measure ofcontemporary Pacific history from oneof the players is welcome.
STUART INDER
Sydney
