The imprisonment of Speight and his cohort on the island of Nukulau, larger of a pair of islands plainly visible from many vantage points in Suva, has a nice irony to it.

For much of the 20th Century it was used as a recreation island. I, like countless other kids of my generation, used to stay there during long hot school holidays in the late1940s and 50s, lounging on the beach, swimming in the sea (what tiger sharks??), eating wild almonds and fish we caught on the surrounding reefs.

But its greater notoriety in earlier years was as a quarantine island. There, for 30 years after the mid-1880s, indentured labourers imported from India were held in purpose-built barracks (long gone) and inspected for disease. The unfit were sent home, others dispersed to plantations - it was the Ellis Island of Fiji [see photo].

To now be "quarantining" on the island a group whose actions have posed a supreme threat to the health of the Fiji nation, who used as a smokescreen for their self-interested outrages the putative threat (for which we should perhaps read "industriousness and economic success") of the descendants of those early immigrants, seems somehow very fitting.

But even before its quarantine era, Nukulau was home to a natural soulmate to George Speight, a Salem Yankee called John Brown Williams. Appointed US Consul to NZ, then commercial agent for Fiji, in 1845 he bought Nukulau for $30 (a purchase whose details caused it to be ruled illegitimate by the British enquiry following colonization).

In 1849 Willams's July 4th fireworks extravaganza burnt down his residence-cum-warehouse, and following time-honoured practice most recently seen in Suva, during the conflagration Fijians on the island diverted the contents of his store to their own purpose. Supported by the guns of US warships and the threat of transportation to America to face the music (Colombians are not the first to face this questionable legal maneuver!), Williams pursued the totally uninvolved but theoretically solvent Cakobau for restitution of his losses.

These "debts" he compounded from $5,000 to over $44,000 in the space of ten years - a rate of interest that would earn the sincere admiration of even Australian merchant bankers. Inability to pay, and fear of American reprisals, was one of the two strongest motivations for Cakobau's request that Britain take over "his" kingdom, pay his debts, and protect him from America and his second perceived threat, from the imperialist designs of the Tongan Ma'afu.

So in its way, the unimportant little island of Nukulau played crucial roles in determining that Fiji become a British colony, then in the infamous Girmit system bringing Indians to Fiji, and is now home to the second man in a decade to use the legacy of that immigration as a platform on which to mount his political agenda.

Finally, I heard this morning that there has been some thought of transferring Speight and his co-conspirators to Makogai island, which is up the east coast of Vitilevu, not far from the old capital of Fiji, Levuka. That may just be wishful thinking, but symbolically, it would be an even more appropriate long-term home for them, because until the disease was effectively overcome in Fiji a couple of decades ago, this was the country's leper colony!

Rod Ewins © 1 August 2000. © This note is copyright. Apart from those uses permitted under theCopyright Act 1968 (as amended), no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the author.