Blake Singley: ..the people. I would also like to acknowledge all Pacific peoples joining us today. Thank you for attending this event today, coming to you on this beautiful, gorgeous day from the unceded land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. Can I please remind you all to turn off or turn down your mobile phones, so we don't disturb the event today.

This afternoon's presentation, 'Power and Vision: Australia and the South Pacific Commission' is by Dr. Alexis Bergantz, the 2025 National Library of Australia Fellow. Our distinguished fellowship programme supports research to make intensive use of the National Library's rich collection through residencies of 3 months. National Library of Australia fellowships are made possible by generous philanthropic support. Alexi's Fellowship this year has been supported by the Stokes family. Dr. Alexi Bergantz is a senior lecturer in global and language studies at RMIT University. His research explores Australia's entanglements with France and the French Pacific.

His book 'French Connection' won the Australian History Prize in the 2022 New South Wales Premier's History Awards. It's a delight for me to introduce Alex today because we're former colleagues here at the ANU. So it's really great to see him here enjoying all that the National Library has to offer. In his presentation today, Alexi will explore the creation and development of the South Pacific Commission, the SPC, Australia's first significant foray into regional institution building in the post-war period. Alexi will also examine how competition and cooperation between colonial state actors, particularly Australia and France impacted the creation, mission and means given to the SPC over the post-war period to the 1980s. This is a timely contribution to discussions about regional competition and cooperation and will benefit current efforts for greater indigenous representation and self-determination across the region. Please join me in welcoming Alexi Bergantz.

Alexi Bergantz: Thank you. Hi everyone. I would also like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we gather today, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples here in Canberra. And I pay my respects to the elders past and present. I also want to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nations, on whose lands I live and work in Melbourne. It is a privilege to speak and to learn on these unceded lands, places of knowledge, story and connection that have been cared for over countless generations. I recognise the strength and continuity of First Nations cultures here and across the wider Pacific and I'm grateful to be part of conversations that take place across these lands and waters. I'd also like to take a moment to thank the National Library of Australia for the opportunity to spend 3 months here on this fellowship.

I'm especially grateful to the Stokes family, whose generosity makes the fellowship possible and also a warm thank you to all the Library staff who've made me feel very welcome in the last few months. I also want to thank my home institution, RMIT University, for giving me the time off teaching to be able to immerse myself in a new project, to slow down and to think a little bit more deeply, particularly in such an inspiring environment as the National Library. So today I want to talk to you about a new project. So it's very much work in progress that I've been doing on an organisation that is known today as the Pacific community. It was created in 1947 as the South Pacific Commission. It was created at Australia's initiative as an agency to strengthen cooperation between 6 colonial powers in the region for what was described at the time.

And I quote for the 'economic and the social welfare of the peoples of the non self-governing territories of the South Pacific'. So a bit of a mouthful to say colonies. Half a century later in 1997, the organisation was renamed the Pacific community. This was done to reflect the by then much larger geographical scope of 27 countries and territories, and the ethical framework in which it now operates. As its current strategic plan explains it is a Pacific organisation that combines science and technology with cultural wisdom and indigenous knowledge for the collective betterment of the region. So it is an institution in, of and for the Pacific, but the history of the organisation, of course, as it evolved and transformed over half a century, is far more complex than that neat institutional arc. The SPC was Australia's first major experiment in regional institution building in the post-war era.

So it is an important organisation to think about to consider when we want to understand Australia's engagement with the region coming out of the second World War and its engagement with the emerging international order, the UN and so on. My research looks at how competition and cooperation between colonial actors, here you'll see particularly France and Australia, shaped the creation, the mission and also the means that were given to the SPC from its founding in 1947 onwards. And just in that change of name there from the South Pacific Commission to the Pacific community, we can already glimpse the 2 interrelated strands of that story. On one level, it is a story of great power play, great power politics in the Pacific, and on the other it is a story of indigenous empowerment, of how western organisation was gradually indigenised and re-imagined.

Historians have been surprisingly slow or unwilling to look at the history of the SPC despite what I think is its significance in shaping up the region in the second half of the 20th century. They've tended to focus on more obvious alliances that would've had more of a, I suppose, political significance in shaping up the region, the Colombo plan, [unclear] and so on. So it's been left mainly to international relations scholars to examine the SPC, but when they do that, they tend to look at it from within the context of the building of regionalism or regional government and governance in the region.

And what I want to do in the next 45 minutes, and I'll come back to that point in the middle of my talk, what I want to do in the next 45 minutes is to first outline my approach, which is different to what IR scholars are doing, I'm steeped in cultural and diplomatic history, to then tell you what I've been doing in the last 3 months during my fellowship, to hopefully then be able to give you a bit of a glimpse of the archival and interpretive work that I hope to keep doing on this organisation. And I'll do that by zooming in on the very beginning of the creation of the SPC. So today I'm not starting with the beginning, we're going to start somewhere in the middle and I will end the talk with the start.

So we're beginning the story on the 6th of February, 1970. We are in Anse Vata, the southernmost point of Nouméa in New Caledonia by the beach. It's a quiet stretch of sand and water that would in time grow into the city's main tourist area. On that morning before the heat of the day set in a small crowd gathered for what seemed a modest ceremony to raise a new flag Representing the South Pacific Commission. A fine south seas trade wind and a brilliant sunshine brought the flag to life, showcasing its design. The background is turquoise for the blue of the South Pacific Ocean. The white circular band represents the globe. And in the lower right hand segment representing the location of the islands of the Pacific, you can see 7 stars that denote the 7 participating governments in the South Pacific Commission. Inside the circle there is a stylised coconut palm chosen as a prevalent symbolic motive of the South Pacific.

The ceremony itself was very brief. There were few speeches given, the flag was blessed and guests raised a [speaking french] all before midday, but it was a ceremony rich in symbolism. The new flag was carried to the pole by the SPC's longest serving staff member from New Caledonia, Madam Exbroyat, who handed it to its newest staff member, a young Tongan girl, Miss Moella, who hoisted it. Watching on was the organisation's first indigenous Secretary General, Afioga Afoafouvale Misimoa. Standing beside him was his distinguished guest, the first secretary general of the organisation, first and twice serving Secretary General, the Australian diplomat, William Forsyth, who took up his functions in 1949.

This was an evocative tableau of continuity and change in the decolonising region. A middle-aged woman and I did the math, she was 41, a middle-aged woman passing the flag to a young indigenous girl and the first Secretary general of the organisation and Australian standing alongside the most recent appointment, a Western Samoan. 

Forming the background to the event were the flags of all member countries of the SPC. So most of the colonial powers that set it up, Australia, France, Britain, the United States and New Zealand, but also the flags of the 2 newest members of the organisation, the newly independent Nauru and Western Samoa. Both William Forsyth and the French High commissioner Louis Verger, noted that the event was a coming of age for the organisation. 

Forsyth in particular, gazing upon the hoisted flag felt, and I quote him 'that I was witnessing a symbol of the aspiration of all the island peoples to speak their own voice and after their long and perplexing contact with the industrial world, to recreate in modern terms their own rich enjoyment of life'. That William Forsyth should have been moved by the ceremony comes as little surprise. He had been involved with the organisation from its inception. In fact, he helped to think it into existence. He was Secretary General twice and he always followed the evolution of the organisation. In retirement, he worked for the Australian government as a consultant on Pacific Affairs and return to the SPC consistently.

He had always been an advocate for the SPC. He had been an advocate for its continued existence, for its continued funding and for the role that it had played and continued to play as the first and largest regional meeting place for indigenous peoples in the Pacific. He had also always been a supporter of the principle of having an indigenous leadership within it. The SPC had needed a champion. In a 1992 interview in Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, the Nouméa based, newspaper Forsyth is by then 83 years old, recalled how often he had had to defend the SPC, which was frequently dismissed as a colonial organisation. And indeed from the start, the organisation had found itself almost immediately out of step with the spirit of the times. It was created in 1947 by colonial governments for the welfare of their indigenous populations. But with that meaningful indigenous participation and it took shape, it developed its work programmes, just as the post-war international order led by the UN, was turning decisively against colonialism.

Forsyth insisted in that 1992 interview, that the label of Colonial no longer replied. He acknowledged, and I quote him that 'the birth of the baby was not easy, but the organisation had reached maturity. We have decolonised it', he said to support this, he pointed to the growing or grown number of Pacific states that had become full independent members of the commission and to specific reforms of 1973 that gave each member state an equal vote, replacing an earlier system of plural voting that had favoured the metropolitan powers. 'We have decolonised it'. The pronoun here is slightly slippery. So on the one hand we have the implicit symbolism of the ceremony itself, the passage of time that is quite literally embodied in the people present, the handing over from an old to a new guard. The vocabulary being used is also quite telling. We're talking about birth, coming of age and even the blessing of the flag can be seen as a kind of baptism.

So the overall image that is being drawn is out of a gradual and organic process that is building on lifecycle metaphors, where both the evolution of the organisation and decolonization itself are depicted as organic, natural, inevitable, passive, and peaceful processes rather than contested, uneven and contextual. Yet endowing, the SPC with its own flag had not been a matter of course. The idea had been resisted by the governing powers from as early as 1949, when William Forsyth first suggested it. Flags are powerful symbols. They rally, they unify, they project identity, even one as seemingly benign as the SPC flag signalled belonging and collective aspiration uniting people under a shared emblem of purpose. Only 14 years after this small ceremony, just 15 kilometres out from Anse Vata, the flag of Kanaky was raised for the first time on the 1st of December, 1984 by the indigenous Kanak Independence Movement declaring a provisional government in defiance of French rule.

So providing the SPC with its own flag was in many ways an acknowledgement that the organisation itself was changing. Looking upon the flag on that morning Afoafouvale, the Samoan Secretary General, captured the aspirations of a transforming institution when he declared, and I quote him, 'made this young flag become a symbol of peace, love, and goodwill wherever it may fly'. It was a wish for the future that sought to project unity, but that rested on deeply layered histories of division and hierarchy. For much of its existence, the South Pacific Commission had been shaped and strained by political tensions. Political tensions between metropolitan governments, between European commissioners and indigenous delegates and amongst indigenous delegates themselves. The organisation was caught in a continual tug of war between what many of its members and growing number of members wanted it to become and what its statutes and what the metropolitan governments, particularly France, would allow it to be.

The SPC was bound by kind of institutional strait jacket that prevented it from becoming a political organisation. It had to remain confined to coordinating and delivering technical assistance in the fields of health science education. It could not discuss ideas, such as self-government, or French nuclear testing. Framing this restriction in the perhaps loftier ideals of the French Republic or French universalism. The French high Commissioner congratulated the member governments on that day, on their achievements over the past few decades, and he expressed the hope quote unquote 'that they will continue to work in the same spirits and towards the same ideal, the advancement of man without regard to politics, race, or religion'.

William Forsyth was not wrong to say in 1992 that the SPC was no longer the organisation of just 5 or 6 great powers, but that it had become the conference of the South Pacific. Insofar as it was the largest gathering of indigenous leaders in the region. Forsyth was absolutely right. But the SPC by that time was no longer the only such venue. It was the largest, but its scope was indeed limited. In 1971, Indigenous leaders frustrated by the ban on political discussion that the SPC created amongst other organisations, the South Pacific Forum from which colonial governments, excluding Australia, New Zealand, were barred. Of course, the South Pacific Forum would later be renamed the Pacific Island Forum (PIF), which is the main political and economic policy setting organisation in the Pacific. In fact, and the argument has been made by others, the creation of the forum probably allowed the SPC to survive as an organisation by taking the politics out of it.

So in very broad terms, my project examines the history of the South Pacific Commission from its inception in pre-War Australia to probably the 1970s/early 1980s. It's a formative period in the history of the organisation itself, but also for the region and for Australia's engagement with it. So I'm not only interested in the SPC as an institution for regional development, but indeed I'm interested in using it as a lens to trace how different visions of the region, here in this case, particularly French and Australian, were imagined, contested and transformed. It's a story of the Pacific's gradual transition from a patchwork of empires, to a more integrated regional space, the one that is still marked by asymmetry, rivalry and competing ideologies.

Now you've probably guessed that I've spent the last 3 months in the company of one man, and that was William Forsyth. The collection of material here at the National Library on the South Pacific Commission is unique. I think it is the largest single repository on the SPC, outside of the SPC's own archives in Nouméa. Much of it was gathered, organised and carefully curated by Forsyth himself, the commission's founding and [unclear] serving Secretary General. So these are his private archives. Forsyth was a career diplomat and a public servant. He joined the Department of External Affairs in 1942 and over the next 3 decades, he served as counsellor in Washington, as Australia's representative to the UN and later as ambassador to South Vietnam and Lebanon. But I think the SPC remained his home, where his heart was. It's an institution he helped to imagine, to set up and to which he returned both professionally and personally throughout his life. His personal archive here at the Library fills some 103 boxes and covers more than half a century. It contains draughts of unpublished manuscripts on the Pacific, the sprawling, unfinished and unpublished 3 volume autobiography and a vast collection of official SPC material, all of which is in interspersed with personal correspondence. So, I'm very tired.

Forsyth in retirement wrote and rewrote tirelessly. He cut and pasted, he annotated, he retyped, and he even entered into a correspondence with the Library about how his papers should be arranged. So the result is not just an archive about an institution nor an archive of a life. It's an archive about itself. It is the work of a man deeply preoccupied with legacy and trying to make sense of Australia's place in the region. The first volume of his unpublished autobiography was likely typed in the 1970s, maybe late 60s, but he was still amending it in a fine, shaky, elderly hand as late as 1992, at the age of 83 a year before his death.

As historians, we know that archives are never neutral containers of the past. They're constructed repositories, they're shaped by power, selection and omission. Foresight's archive is a particularly vivid example of this. As a historian himself and as someone intent on shaping how he and the institution would be remembered, he built his archive to reflect a particular story, one that places the SPC within a Western narrative of progress, going from a colonial era towards what he imagined to be a decolonised present. And while I'm very interested in the evolution of Forsyth's, thinking about the region over time, what I've been doing during the last 3 months here at the National Library has been essentially to deconstruct his archive that he has so carefully organised. And I'm deconstructing it, figuratively speaking, in order to put it in what I'm hoping will be a productive dialogue with French overseas archives and the archives of SPC itself that I'm hoping to get to by the end of the year.

As a historian, a cultural historian, I'm interested in bringing those archives together, to grind them against one another, to get to a certain granular level of analysis, and restore contingency and complexity to the processes that created and shaped the SPC. And I'll say a bit more about that in a minute. Right now I'm going to pause for maybe 30 seconds to show you an image that is less inspiring than the flag raising ceremony, but that hopefully will help you understand what I'm talking about. It's a hand drawn organisational chart of the SPC structure, drawn by William Forsyth in the early 1950s. And paradoxically, it's a very abstract thing to look at, but I think we'll give you quite a concrete idea of what the organisation actually is and some of the inbuilt tensions within it. You don't need to read everything that's in the boxes, but just look at how they're organised and maybe the titles of the boxes.

Okay, so you have the giant square, that's the South Pacific Commission itself, the organisation. Confusingly within it, the square at the top is also called the South Pacific Commission. So for clarity, I'm to call that the Commission. The commission is the governing body of the organisation. Its members are delegates of the governing powers. So 2 for France, 2 for Britain, 2 for the Netherlands, and so on. It set the budgets of the organisation, a very restrained budget, and it coordinated the work or the wishes of the member states and it could make recommendations. Then the big box in the middle, that's the secretariat, so that's where William Forsyth, the Secretary General worked. And then you have the 2 so-called auxiliary organs, on the left-hand side, the research council, its members were appointed by the commission and they worked towards implementing the development programme of the organisation and the development projects were approved by the commission. So you can already see in the 1950s how the commission and the research council, essentially one was the same organisation. They talked to each other and they European commissioners. On the right hand side, there is the South Pacific Conference. So initially this was a very minor fringe, consultative auxiliary organ. It gathered every 3 years indigenous representatives from the region.

Most of the scholarship on the SPC has understandably focused on the conference itself. It is the first meeting of indigenous delegates from across the Pacific, and over time it would become the most important organ of the commission. Indeed, the conference would become the South Pacific Commission. It was a once a product of empire and a seedbed of post-colonial regionalism. Scholars have framed the conference as a place for the invention of a regional idea, a political imaginary through which Pacific peoples began to see themselves as belonging to a single region. Ratu Mara, the future president of Fiji recalled attending the first conference in 1950 in Suva in Fiji. And you recall that at the time it had felt quote unquote 'like a gathering of the tribes. We were happy to know each other, renew acquaintances and renew our roots'. Even within the colonial limitations set by the commission, the conference became a site of exchange. It allowed island delegates to articulate local concerns, to observe one another's experiences under different administrations and to begin developing the habit of regional diplomacy.

As decolonisation gathered pace in the 1960s, the composition and the purpose of the commission began to shift. So I'm going back to the chart. Territories such as Western Samoa, Fiji and PNG gained independence, others entered into various self-governing arrangements and that meant that the commission, the governing organ of the SPC started changing. It transformed the nature of the commission, which started to reflect the composition of the conference itself. So these external changes forced the SPC into a legitimacy crisis. How could it credibly claim to represent this new Pacific if decision-making remained confined to the colonial powers? Queue the 1973 reform that Forsyth talked about forgiving equal voting to all members, and in 1975, further reforms formally elevated the conference itself to the status of the SPC's main organ, effectively reversing the original hierarchy. What had began as a consultative assembly of indigenous representatives became the main decision-making body responsible, responsible for setting the commission's agenda and electing its leadership. So the story of the conference in itself can be seen as symbolic continuity in the history of the Pacific. The early conferences gave Pacific leaders experience in regional diplomacy that directly informed the creation of the forum. And later the Pacific community C'S transformation was gradual. It was not a rupture, but it was incremental. It was an incremental indigenisation of regional governance, something that scholars have seen as a shift from colonial trusteeship to regional partnership.

More recently in a book about Pacific regionalism, Stephanie Lawson has warned against a danger to homogenise the Pacific voice and indeed western powers. She points to the rivalries, to strategic disagreements and the uneven interests amongst Pacific delegates that suggests that it was never just a single coherent indigenous position or that at least we need to be sensitive to its strategic dimension. What I want to do with this project is to take up that insight but expand it. I'm interested in tracing that same complexity through the history of the organisation as a whole, including with the so-called metropolitan powers that tend to be lumped together as the Western powers. Aim to treat the various components of the SPC, the secretariat, the technical programmes, the conference individuals as interconnected case studies in order to move across scales of analysis. So what I want to do is that I want to move away from the government to government level.

So it's an important part of the story, but it's not all of it to go down to relationships between particular individuals to expose their conflicting worldviews and even moments like that flag raising ceremony. Part of what I aim to do is to restore a sense of historical contingency to recognise the role that individuals, like William Forsyth, played in shaping the region, but also how profoundly the process shaped them in return. Through forsyth's experience, we can glimpse the emergence of Australia's own Pacific consciousness. At times engage with the Pacific in the Pacific, but more often hovering just adjacent to it. In his memoirs, Forsyth describes the early years of the SPC as quote unquote 'a period of searching'. He recalls and I quote him at length, 'we were not at all clear how we would come out of our discussions and research thinking about these matters. It was a period of searching and to some extent of groping'. Situating Australian actors in this context reveals just how incomplete their knowledge of the region was, and particularly the knowledge of France's presence within it.

For most France was a distant and abstract concept and new Caledonia and even more obscure outpost when the temporary secretariat of the SPC was being relocated from Sydney to Nouméa in New Caledonia, the majority of its Australian staff declined to move. They cited language barriers, cultural differences, limited amenities and a sense that new caronia was as one put it a dead end and a backwater. One bureaucrat, reporting back from an earlier trip to the French colony, talked of the inescapable French custom of shaking hands and he warned his colleagues in Australia that would probably force them to make physical contact with the colonies racially diverse population. So it was in many ways, 1950s a confrontation as well between the insulated world of white Australia that some could inhabit and the complex multiracial realities of the Pacific at a higher level order. This is also a story about the practise and clashes of western diplomacy and cultural misgivings.

The French approach to diplomacy was in those days defined by particular cultural habits and institutional structures that were frankly not legible, not understandable, to an emerging first or perhaps second generation of Australian technocrats and administrators. French senior commissioners in these early days tended to be very highly ranked senior officials in the French administration, often stemming directly from the French colonial office. Within certain limitations, budgetary limitations. They tended to carry the brief as if it was a personal business. There were little empires onto themselves. Within the SPC that meant, for instance, at the beginning, bypassing the secretariat in hiring staff, appointing people without seemingly due process and entering into, frankly, mind boggling altercations about administrative process. It's worth pointing out that the image here is drawn by the Secretary General by William Forsyth. The secretariat is the biggest box. I can promise you that the French Commission has disagreed with that ranking.

On a slightly more serious note, the scholarship makes it very clear, and we know this, that France consistently blocked any attempt to bring political issues to the SPC table. This was driven of course by its determination to retain its territories in the region and by its equally firm ambition under the goal to secure global standing as a nuclear power since the creation of the Pacific Experimentation Centre, So that's the French nuclear testing facility in French Polynesia, successive governments in Paris took very great care to isolate their dependencies from the emerging regional order. Any attempt at the South Pacific Conference to discuss nuclear testing, even by French Polynesian delegates, often result in dramatic workouts by the French commissioners.

But what I would like to suggest is that the main fault line in the organisation's history, the problem with politics certainly lays in large part with France because of its drive to exclude, sorry, because of its drive to protect its sovereignty in the region. But what I would like to do is to start looking beneath that idea of sovereignty, because I think that underneath it there is a much more complex intricate web of motives. To cite just a few, there is the containment of anticolonial ideas within its own territories, the preservation of regional prestige, but also a deep suspicion of Australia as an emerging Pacific power. And that's a suspicion that's also rooted in a profound distrust of the Anglo-Saxon world. And also rooted in what I think of as an epistemologically irreconcilable understanding of colonial sovereignty that could not accommodate ideas of self-determination either for individual territories or for the region.

And so now I'll end with the beginning. The genesis of the South Pacific Commission can be traced to the immediate post-war years and specifically to the 1944 Anzac Pact between Australia and New Zealand. Within the Anzac Pact was contained a proposal for a South Seas regional commission. The intellectual roots of the SPC can be found further back. We can go back all the way to the Australian Institute of International Affairs in the 1930s where a group of men were starting to think about Australia's broader reconstruction agenda coming out of the war. And in that agenda, they linked the idea of regional security with social and economic development. The SPC would ultimately embody just the welfare side of that dual policy, but the 2 ideas were very much linked for a long time in Australian minds, so security and welfare. The French were initially, let's say, very lukewarm at the idea for the proposal of the South Pacific Commission. The French ambassador in Canberra warned Paris as early as 1946 to be cautious of the regional ambitions of the man he called the 'fiery Australian minister le Doctor. Evatt'. So that's Doc Evatt.

Fundamentally, the French was suspicious of the Anzac Treaty because it contained explicit mentions of self-government and self-determination. This was an idea and a theme to French colonial ideology. But it is worth pointing out that whilst France's imperial system remained rigidly centralised from 1946, French colonies were given representation in both houses of the French Parliament. And this was seen at the time as an innovation, it was cited as evidence of France's progressive credentials in matters colonial beyond these differences in colonial political economy. French views were also shaped by cultural and diplomatic suspicion of the Anglo-Saxons. And this anxiety, the suspicion, of the Anglo-Saxon world, truly permeates the early dealings of the French delegation at SPC or at the South Seas Regional Conference. The French senior commissioner Robert Lasalle-Séré. So he's the third man from the right with the glasses reading a paper did not speak a word of English, so he relied heavily on his interpreter. The woman to his left, Nancy Robson, as a side note with decades later, would marry John Kerr and become the Second Lady Kerr. That's a story for another time.So he depended heavily on the interpreter, Nancy Robson, to deal with the proceedings. So they became 

friends and he often confided in her needing, as she puts it, to get things off his chest about [speaking french]. She noted that during their very long drives from the Tontouta Airport to Numéa, and I quote her again, Hobert would usually discourse on the latest piece of Anglo-Saxon deceitfulness of which his country was the object. The French advisor to the new Caledonian delegation at the first South Pacific Conference in Suva in 1951 [speaking french] in a similar way reported to Paris that he felt a certain unease at the conference. The unease was not because of the presence of indigenous delegates, which he'd just dismissed. It was rather because the event fell to him like an Anglo-Saxon gathering. Nine of the 13 delegations came from British colonies. He viewed the indigenous delegates as products of an Anglo-Saxon empire. Having gone through schoolings at the hands of Protestant missionaries or indeed horror attended British boarding schools.

Lasalle-Séré summarised the French attitude in those very early days with remarkable candour. In 1950, he wrote to Paris saying, generally speaking, it seems desirable to thwart Australia, which would like to make the commission a regional body where it would play the leading role. And this trickled down to all of the negotiations at the beginning, the choice of language for the organisation, French or English, French and English, the location of headquarters, whether it would be in Fiji, new Caledonia, in PNG and so on. Lasalle-Séré was a senior colonial administrator. He was sent to the Pacific in 1947 to investigate rising nationalist movements in Tahiti. So he arrived at a negotiation table in Canberra in 1947, acutely aware of the global tide of decolonisation. 1945, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. 1947, India, Pakistan. The French Lasalle-Séré feared the spread of similar ideas to their own territories.

Reporting from Canberra, he warned Paris that the Americans, Australians and New Zealanders were trying to enshrine that principle of self-government in the new organisation. And so Lasalle-Séré moved directly himself to oppose including self-government in the PC's mandate, ensuring that it would be limited to the practical and technical study of economic and social problems. He knew that politics would inevitably resurface, but he believed at the time that that could be contained because the governing body of the organisation, the commission, was composed only of representatives of colonial governments. Of course, that would change. Even the selection of the location of the second South Pacific Conference in 1953 became a matter of concern. Lasalle-Séré opposed, holding it in Tahiti. And he supported instead holding it in Australian administer New Guinea, a place he called 'that remote corner of the Pacific', which in his view, quote unquote 'the noise surrounding the conference would find less resonance'.

What the French, what Lasalle-Séré feared was precisely that resonance, the symbolic potential of the conference. Lasalle-Séré was aware that to some delegates but also vested interests in the Pacific and in Australia. The gathering of the conference had taken on the character of a symbol. And here I'm going to actually quote him in French because the language is really interesting, very subtle, and then I'll give you my poor rendition in English. So he wrote of the conference, in French, [speaking french]. And in English, 'the conference takes on in their eyes the appearance of a symbol, the symbol of that South Pacific community, which they would like to make a reality. Though reality stands in its way. A symbol also of a kind of federal parliament capable of expressing the wishes of the peoples'.

If regions are, as Benedict Anderson once suggested of nations, imagined communities, Lasalle-Séré reflections here show a remarkable perceptive grasp of that process at work. He recognised that the South Pacific Conference had the potential to be the beginning of a process of political formation for the region. He called it an ideology that had to be derailed. His comment, that such a Pacific community was desired by some though reality stands in its way, to me is remarkable. It reveals the inability of people like Lasalle-Séré and their unwillingness to imagine a shift from a colonial order that they had built. It also presents an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, participation in regional cooperation whilst denying the very transformations that it might unleash.

The new SPC flag was adopted unanimously after a Pacific wide competition that attracted 450 entries from 13 out of the 19 territories of the organisation. The design incorporated many of the ideas that William Forsyth himself had wanted to incorporate in 1949. Back then, at the beginning, he wanted to include the colour turquoise or sapphire blue, because it was the most widespread colour that he could see on the islands found in lagoon waters and the ocean. He wanted to use yellow gold for the lettering because it reminded him of the island's vegetation, palm leaves and bananas. And yet when it came to the one symbol floating in the new flag, the palm tree, William Forsyth admitted he had struggled. He had thought of several options, palm trees, mangroves, bananas, sugarcane, canoes, but nothing he wrote, even the coconut seemed to symbolise Pacific Islands uniquely. In forsyth's difficulty, we glimpsed both the ambition and the constraint of that act of imagination.

His search for a unifying emblem reflects a will, perhaps a longing to create, the Pacific as a coherent space alongside I would argue, an awareness of the limits of any search construction or perhaps an awareness of his own limitations. And in that sense, Forsyth's symbolic labour stands in sharp contrast to Lasalle-Séré's defensive diplomacy. One sought to imagine the Pacific into being, while the other feared or that imagination might make possible. So Forsyth and Lasalle-Séré captured the 2 poles of the story that I've been tracing. One reaching towards a collective Pacific identity and the other holding fast to the hierarchies of empire between them lies the space where indigenous voices began to enter, to reshape what the organisation could mean and whom it could represent. And that to me, is why SPC is an interesting and important object of study. It is a window onto the making of the modern Pacific and onto the enduring negotiations between power, identity, and belonging that could continue to shape the region. Thank you.

Blake Singley: Thank you, Alexi. That was fascinating. So we have some time for some questions now, but I'd please ask you to wait for a microphone. So as this is being recorded, so we'll start over here, Allister, there's a microphone right there.

Audience member 1: Thanks, Alexi. That was a deeply fascinating talk. I was struck by the quote in French and the inability to imagine an independent or a decolonised South Pacific. And it struck me that within 5 years the Algerian Independence War begins. How quickly does that inability to imagine an independent South Pacific change as France begins to lose its colonies in other parts of the world?

Alexi Bergantz: Sorry, Allister, can you just repeat the question itself?

Audience member 1: So how quickly does that inability to imagine a decolonise South Pacific changes as France loses its colonies in the other parts of the world?

Alexi Bergantz: Thanks. You're really right to point Algeria out. That's the key example of France not being able to think about colonies the way that the British did. So anything that came close to the idea of a commonwealth was completely out of the realm of possibility for the French. And you look at the Algerian war, they really clung onto that for a very, very long time. I think even after the end of the war, it still took a long time, at least for the French administration, to realise that it wasn't part of France. I actually had a high school history teacher who was a [unclear] who had to leave Algeria at the end of the war. And this was in the 90s, late-90s, and he was still showing us maps of France and Algeria as this one continent or this one country. So I think that lingered for an extremely long time. And when it comes to the Pacific, I mean, yeah, it just parallels that I think. Thanks. It was a great teacher, by the way. I should not be throwing him out of the bus.

Audience member 2: Yes, excellent talk. Excellent talk. A quick question about Forsyth himself. I'm wondering to what extent you're going to make that a central part of the story. Two points there. I mean, first of all, his book 'The Myth of Open Spaces', it's a kind of then unfashionable disputation of the whole idea of settler colonialism. Australia is not actually that the settler colonial entity that most analysts in those days thought it was. And the second thing is, he was a very early exponent of the idea that Australia was part of Asia, which again makes him a kind of post-colonial thinker. I'm wondering whether those factors actually feed into his idea of the Pacific community.

Alexi Bergantz: That's very, very, a very good question. How much is he going to feature in the project? I'm not sure. Obviously, here he was the main part of it because I've been looking at his archives, but I'm really interested more in the institution itself. So that's why I'm mean when I said I've been deconstructing his material. And I haven't started tracing that sort of shift in his thinking or his overall thinking about settler colonialism in the region. I've been kind of stuck in the 50s, but I have definitely accumulated the material that he's been writing until the 90s. So that's something I'm very keen to trace and consider. Yeah, sorry, I don't have an answer to the question, but it's an important point to make.

Audience member 3: Thank you. I would like to ask you about the research council. It didn't exist in 1984 when I went to work for the South Pacific Commission. In fact, research was frowned upon. We were not allowed to publish anything that came out of our work.

Alexi Bergantz: Thank you. That's great and I would love to talk to you more about that. So the Research council is really interesting in itself. So I pointed out the relationship between the commission and the council, right? They're essentially colonial administrators at the beginning talking to one another about how to better the lives of the people of the South Pacific. And what I'm finding really interesting in the research is, particularly the first 10 years of the research council, so in 1957 there was a big review because everybody agreed that whatever they had been doing was not really working. The research council, there was a bit of a tug of war between the European researchers, appointees that thought of the research council as their own institutes that they were setting up in the Pacific. They wanted to do what we now call blue sky research, very abstract ideas. And they were constantly in conflict with the secretariat and the Secretary General who from the start, wanted the SPC to be an aid coordinating agency. And even that became contentious. So there's definitely a bit of a clash of worldviews amongst Europeans at the time. And then eventually the research council was kind of disbanded. Yeah. Does that answer your question? Okay.

Audience member 4: I was actually going to ask the same question, but in relation to the fact that certainly early on, the research council was very heavily involved in anthropological research and Harry Moored, I believe, was very much involved and it was that sort of the functionalist idea that knowing about the cultures of these people would help us govern them better. Have you kind of gone into any of that in your work?

Alexi Bergantz: Absolutely. So that's a really, really important part of it. In 45 minutes, I couldn't get into the work programme themselves, but particularly for that early period, until they got rid of the research council, I'm really interested in the early programmes they put in place. So there was a visual aid bureau, a literature bureau that was collecting knowledge of the Pacific and collecting it and creating at the same time. And Harry Mode was leading that effort from Sydney. That's something I haven't delved into yet too deeply, but I think it will be a big part of the project in itself. I'm also interested in it because of the people who worked within the programme. It's not just the books they were writing, the stories they're collecting. It's also the Australians that they were sending out to Pacific to collect the ideas with individual aid programme. One person who worked there for about 5 years from 1950 to 55 was the Australian author, Nancy Phelan, who was big name a thing or relatively known name in the 90s, wrote a number of travel books, cookery books. There was a book about yoga, yoga after 40, yoga and sex. 

But she wrote and worked for the Visual Aids programme at SPC in the 50s. And what I'm finding fascinating with people like that is that she very clearly states it, oh, I'm going into the Pacific, we're going to teach these people how to cook or use soap and then we can leave and we'll have given them progress and they [unclear] will be happy.But what's amazing is her confrontation with the region, with the Pacific. She developed visual aid programme or visual aids for [unclear] in New Caledonia and then was shocked when Polynesians did not want to look at them, starting to realise they're not the same people. So I'm very keen to go into the work programme themselves insofar as they interacted with the region, but also were a formative space for the Australians involved in the organisation. 

And it must be said that this is by and large an Australian organisation for a very long time, they wanted to set it up as an international organisation, but the staff were Australian. They were British. Even in the 70s you see lists of staff members and they're essentially just all listed as British, British-Australian, British-English and so on. Forsyth I think was getting a bit upset after a number of years that people would still just view this as an Australian institution. There was a short encyclopaedia entry written in French, I think in the late 60s, about the SPC that was sent to him just for fact checking, and he's just crossed over the word Australian. He described the organisation as an Australian organisation. So it was really, all of the people involved were really adamant that it should be international, but it took a long time for it to become international.

Blake Singley: This will be our last question.

Audience member 5: This will probably be our last question. Thank you. Thank you. Great presentation. So they just had the SPC conference a couple of weeks ago in Tonga. I'm just wondering, you've done a lot of research probably up probably until the 50s, 60s, in the 70s. What's your, having done that, what does it tell you about the organisation today? Do you have a perspective on SPC today, how it looks today versus what it looked back then? Thanks.

Alexi Bergantz: That's a really great question and I probably can't really answer it. I haven't had too much to do with the SPC yet. I've been in contact with them and I'm hoping to meet them when I go there later in the year. But the little contact that I've had is how much the institution has changed, obviously over time become international and how it is integrated in the region now. A sense that I get, and it's really just a sense is that for a long time the organisation was kind of reluctant to look to its history because of its obvious colonial origins. But I have a feeling that there's a change in the culture, maybe also in the leadership as a younger generation that is more keen to just objectively look at what it was and how it's evolved. And I think that can be a very powerful story for the organisation. Thanks.

Blake Singley: Right. We actually, probably, because you didn't know the answer to that, you probably have time for one more quick question if somebody has one. Actually I have one if nobody, if you don't mind. I'm interested in Australia's place in this both as a country in the Pacific, but also as a colonial power in Papua New Guinea and how those tensions were manifested in the conference in the Commission.

Alexi Bergantz: So that's also a really big part of the project. I guess something that I want to look into more, because the SPC is being set up by Australia at the same time as Australia is playing an important role in setting up the UN in 1945 and taking over its trusteeship of PNG or what will become PNG. And at the time there's also a conflict in Australia within the administration as to how and who should deal with the SPC, should it be external affairs, should it be the Department of Territories. So there's this sort of really confusion about how to deal with a new international regional organisation and that kind of carries on for a long time and everybody who's involved then has a different understanding or idea of how to view the SPC or how to use it as well.

I found a letter by Gough Whitlam, again, the dismissal is happening soon, the anniversary. Gough Whitlam who was writing to in Forsyth in the early 70s saying, oh yes, the SPC. Yes, we've kept that because it's helping us prevent the UN from sticking its beaky nose into the Pacific. So various institutions used it in different ways. And the Department of Territories was kind of really, I suppose, confused as to how to deal with PNG and the SPC. Is it part of it, is it not? So that took a while to solve as well.

Blake Singley: Fascinating. Thank you. I just want to do a couple of quick plugs before we leave today. Firstly, if you enjoyed this presentation, you can go upstairs to our bookstore and purchase Alex's book there on

Alexi Bergantz: [unclear]

Blake Singley: The previous one on 'French Connection', which is a fantastic book. As I said before, it's a prize winning book. So really I do recommend that. And also lastly, I hope you can join us for our next fellowship lecture, which is called 'Documenting the Corpus of Books in the Indigenous Languages Vanuatu'. So somewhat related to this, which will be delivered by the 2025 National Library fellow professor Matthew Spriggs at 1230 on Thursday 27th of November. Our website is the place where you're able to find recordings of recent talks and performances from our fellows, as well as other things. And these are available, also available on the Library's YouTube channel. So thank you for attending today and please join me once again to thank Alexi for your fantastic.

Alexi Bergantz: And just briefly thank you for your questions. This is very much a work in progress, the beginning of a project, so it's very much appreciated and please feel free to get in touch with me, especially if you've worked at the SPC.