ANZ presents
Countries and the Cultures, pt. 7
Solomon
Islands (delegates,
VIPs unknown)
 The Solomon Islands is
made up of almost 1000 islands northeast of Australia and are
believed to have been inhabited by Melanesian people for thousands
of years.
When Spanish
explorer Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira visited the
Solomons in 1568, he found some gold at the mouth of the Mataniko
River. He thought this could be one of the locations from which
King Solomon obtained gold for his temple and named the islands
after him.
The United Kingdom
established a protectorate over the Solomon Islands in the 1890s.
Some of the most bitter fighting of World War II occurred in
the Solomon Islands campaign of 194245, including the Battle
of Guadalcanal. Self-government was achieved in 1976 and independence
two years later. The country is a Commonwealth realm with a constitutional
monarchy and a parliamentary system of government.
The archipelago
is part of two distinct land based ecoregions -the Solomon Islands
rain forests ecoregion, which has come under pressure from forestry
activities, and Vanuatu rain forests ecoregion, where more than
230 varieties of orchids and other tropical flowers dot the landscape.
In February Solomon
Islanders received a global award for a watershed forest preservation
initiative. As one of two recipients of the 2008 International
ReSource Award for Sustainable Watershed Management, the Solomons
along with China will share prize money of more than $150,000.
The winning project
called "Voices and Choices for the Chivoko Community",
was submitted by the Lauru Land Conference of Tribal Communities
(LLCTC). The project's goal is to secure the Chivoko watershed
forests and place them legally beyond the reach of industrial
logging ventures. To achieve that goal, the project will draw
on national expertise to produce a collaborative watershed management
plan that provides a pathway for sustainable forest development
practices.
In the culture
of the Solomon Islands, where age-old customs are handed down
from one generation to the next and believed to be from the ancestral
spirits themselves, traditional knowledge on the environment,
its resources, and their management obviously does not mean the
knowledge is static.
Tuvalu
(30
delegates, 4 VIPs)
 Tuvalu consists of nine
small islands in the western Pacific, just south of the equator.
Formerly called
the Ellice Islands, Tuvalu's first Polynesian settlers were probably
Samoans or Tongans. They became a British protectorate in 1892
and were annexed by Britain in 19151916. In 1975, Ellice
was given home rule, and renamed Tuvalu. Full independence was
granted on Sept. 30, 1978.
In 1997, the
government adopted a strong stance on the need to control emissions
of greenhouse gases in order to ensure the survival of low-lying
island nations, which are threatened by rising sea levels.
Tuvalu is a constitutional
monarchy with a parliamentary democracy and reportedly makes
millions of dollars each year by leasing its highly marketable
.tv Internet domain.
While it is believed
Tuvalu has been inhabited for about 3,000 years, the caves on
Nanumanga island suggest traces of human habitation some thousands
of years older.
Several years
ago off the northern shore, two scuba divers investigating a
local legend of "a large house under the sea" found
an underwater cave more than 131 feet down the wall of a coral
cliff. Dark patches on the roof and walls and blackened coral
fragments on its floor suggest the use of fire by human occupants.
The last time
people could possibly have occupied the cave was during a time
of low sea level more than 8000 years ago. The evidence of fire
may be ambiguous, but the durable cultural memory of the cave's
existence is not so easily dismissed.
The "big
house under the sea" off the island in Tuvalu is not the
only hint that the Pacific was colonized much earlier than 6,000
years ago.
In the Journal
of Pacific History (April, 1986), Dr. John Gibbons of the University
of the South Pacific in Fiji and his co-author, Dr. Fergus Clunie,
postulate that the Pacific was colonized by waves of "boat
people", driven from their ancestral coastal homelands in
Indonesia and South-East Asia by rising oceans.
Dr. Gibbons and
Dr. Clunie have offered a radical theory which suggests skilled
mariners were navigating around the Pacific perhaps 10,000 years
before the great civilizations of Sumeria and Egypt.
Current discoveries
have Pacific archaeological finds dating back 6000 years ago,
the earliest date of distinctive shards of Lapita pottery.
But Clunie and
Fergus believe the Lapita culture was merely the modern tip of
a cultural iceberg and that people who had not yet developed
the art of pottery-making were sailing around the Pacific perhaps
10,000 years or more before the Lapita peoples left their pottery
shards to be discovered.
More exploration
of the Tuvalu caves along with Gibbons and Clunie's theory of
colonization of the Pacific may well bring about a reappraisal
of when and by whom the Pacific was originally populated.
[Compiled from Wikipedia and the websites for the corresponding
countries.]
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