From the Islands

In 2019, I revisited Clarks Beach, the village on the Manukau Harbour where I learned to swim as a kid in the 80s. Back then, the place was mostly populated by retired Pakeha farmers. On regular trips to the fish and chips shop, I’d hear them chatting about dairy subsidies and courgette prices.

In 2019, though, I found the same fish and chips shop full of young men speaking in Bislama, the Melanesian language that mixes archaic English words like piccaninny and savvy with an indigenous grammar. Melanesian and white teenagers kicked a soccer ball round a park. The flag of Vanuatu, with its curved pig’s tusk in a golden triangle, flew above the motor camp. Scores of Ni-Vanuatu were living in Clarks Beach. They told me that they came from the island of Erromango, in the far south of their archipelago, and that they were working for six months at a local orchard. Many were spending their second or third