Houses Far From Home: British Colonial Space in the New Hebrides

HOUSES FAR FROM HOME: British Colonial Space in the New Hebrides. By Margaret Critchlow Rodman. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2001. xiv, 247 pp. (Maps, figures, B&W photos.) US$24.95, paper ISBN 0-8248-2394-X.

This is a delightful and important book. The "houses far from home" are the courtrooms, prisons, offices and, above all, residences constructed by and for British colonial officials in the former Pacific island colony of the New Hebrides (since independence in 1980, known as Vanuatu). For most of the occupants of these buildings, "home" was far away, usually in Great Britain. The buildings themselves, lovingly described in this book, witnessed many stories in the course of being constructed, modified, re-occupied again and again and eventually, in many cases, demolished. Rodman's object has been to trace some of these stories, drawing upon extant archival records, interviews with former occupants (most of whom had returned "home" to England) and the surviving physical evidence of the buildings themselves. The narratives related here are rich, deeply personal, often hilarious, nostalgic and very discerning, especially about the inequities, self-deceptions and contradictions of a colonial situation.

With the exception of a handful of relatively grand edifices erected in Port Vila during the hopeful opening years of...