Western Folktales in Changing Melanesia

Abstract

THE literature on the indigenous folktales, legends and myths of Melanesia is everexpanding.' However, because over one quarter of the discrete cultures of the world are present in this southwest Pacific region alone, the work of collating the ethnohistorical relationships of folklore from west New Guinea to Fiji has barely begun. Why similar stories turn up in diverse parts of the region, for instance, without any tell-tale signs of a possible migration from one distant culture area to another, has never been systematically investigated.2 Problems inevitably present themselves to researchers wanting answers to such questions at this late hour of the day, because anecdotal and narrative material could be carried from one isolated pocket to another during the colonial and post-colonial periods, with constables and carriers, let alone black missionary evangelists, who were often sent from coastal and early 'settled' zones into areas long distant from their homelands, whether by track, ship, aeroplane or (more recently) by roads.3 By these means, though, it was not only indigenous folk materials which might have spread over the last century or so, but also stori told by the whites. In fact, among these distinctly foreign stori (as the Melanesian pidgin has it for 'story'/'stories'), were Western, most often northern European, fairytales, and their intriguing manifestations in local or village contexts of Melanesia, as well as the nature of their spread and special effects in the region, form the subject of this contribution. Dissemination of Western fairytales through Melanesia was largely at the hands of European missionaries. During the pioneering period (ca. 1850-1914), the percentage of British and Continental mission personnel was at its highest.4 Even after the loss of the German imperial foothold in New Guinea and the western Solomons (1914), moreover, German missionary work managed to survive the change to the Australian administration.5 The Catholic mission orders had the best chance of bearing the repercussions of politico-military turbulence overseas, because they mingled German with other Continental personnel; and this mixed Continental presence was in evidence alongside Anglophone outposts in other parts of the region, especially in British New Guinea (later Papua) and outlying islands in the Solomons. To the west of Melanesia missionaries of Dutch extraction predominated until after the Second World War, while in New Caledonia it was naturally the French. The French shared opportunities with the British in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), although Anglophone (almost exclusively Protestant) missionaries were noticeably preponderant in Fiji and the central Solomons.6 Missionaries were the most significant disseminators of folktales precisely because they required simple illustrative materials both for their sermons and school classes, and they were characteristically interested in the capacities of the 'natives'-les sauvages-to tell local stories in return. The first interested if desultory collectors of myths or aetiological tales (as to 'where the coconut came from, let us say, or 'how the crow became black'), were missionaries; they also constituted the expatriate group most forewarned against what was typically recognized as exaggerated local yarning about