Michael Field

George Grey had a way with words, even if the bamboo curtain rings in his hair and the imitation camouflage clothing suggested he was somewhat weird. 

"We are fighting a holy war, " said the former bank clerk turned guerrilla spokesman. "The trees are fighting, the stones are fighting, and women and the children are fighting." 

This was not the "paradise journalism" of junketing travel writers, but rather the reality of the Solomon Islands, where Grey and his fellow Guadalcanal rebels earlier this year were killing Malaita Islanders. 

Honiara, the Solomons capital, was packed with refugees, families were starving in terror in the jungle and children and old men were being hacked to death. 

Covering the Pacific is tough. Last month Kiribati followed Tonga's lead and banned me. 

The last Fiji Government had me on a variable blacklist, in Papua New Guinea soldiers wacked on betel nut made me question my immortality and in the Solomons it was just dangerous. 

It is not personal, it is the way the Pacific's ancient regimes hold on to power. All journalists are under siege. 

In Fiji it is an extraordinary assault, coloured by racism, that is tearing apart the media and political system. It has been reduced to a cipher with salacious stories about what the tea-lady saw. 

It is much more ominous than that. 

In the Solomons this year a couple of other journalists and I had gone out to a bridge where ex-Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka was to negotiate a truce. 

He began the meeting with a prayer, acknowledging the few journalists who had made it into militant territory. 

"We thank you Lord for their courage in carrying out their duty, " he said, perhaps aware we would need it. 

Radio Australia's veteran correspondent Sean Dorney, with more than 20 years of residency in PNG, had come up with an explanation for why Guadalcanal and Malaitan Islanders were at war. 

The former had a matrilineal society while the Malaitans were aggressively patrilineal. 

This lacked passion as we were surrounded by twitchy fighters armed with homemade Second World War vintage weapons, so I asked Grey what it was that he did not like about Malaitans. 

"Do you know what we call them?" he said. "Dog sperm." 

I had no reservations about reporting that, just as I had not held back from reporting the way Grey's rebels had hacked an old man to death nearby, killing the child he was holding in his arms. 

The story came back to Honiara where the local newspaper used it. In the University of the South Pacific newspaper Wanasolwara, State-owned Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation general manager Johnson Honimae took issue over Grey's quote. 

"Overseas journalists don't care what happens as a result of their stories, " he said. "If that reporter was in Honiara, he would have been killed." 

In an era of global warming, the plight of atolls are an acute concern and on Tarawa there is an environmental disaster of the locals' own making. 

I reported it, both for AFP and for the Suva based Pacific Islands Monthly. I also filed on a Chinese satellite tracking station which seems more of a spy base directed at the American missile testing programme in the Marshall Islands. And there was the story of the way the founding Kiribati president, Ieremia Tabai, had been arrested for running a radio station, to the irritation of his rival president, Teburoro Tito. 

For that Tito had a notice in the Kiribati Gazette declaring me an "undesirable immigrant".

In Tonga I am permanently banned for reporting on the democracy movement and the sale of Tongan citizenship and passports to Asians. The scheme's critics were right: the kingdom's courts found the whole thing as odd and unconstitutional as I did. 

Keeping me out is just part of the ball game. These governments, mainly made up of ageing chiefly men, do not like the young, university educated and often female reporters who constitute the bulk of the Pacific media. 

"Paradise Journalism" - the sort that treats the Pacific as one big sleepy tourist resort - helps the establishment. Non-Pacific reporters, often on airline freebies, declare how beautiful the beaches are, how happy the natives are and how good the singing is in church. Cultures and societies are reduced to one dimension. I am not saying that Pacific societies are basket cases, but they are immensely complex, difficult and fascinating places beyond the hula dancing and tourist kava shows. 

The problem is that those of us who go beyond it get banned; those who are local are told about how the more clever journalists from overseas report that they are all living in paradise and controls come down on them. 

The fact that New Zealand journalists are impeded in doing their jobs prompts no concern from the Government here. The last time I met Tito was on a Royal New Zealand Air Force flight that he was on, hitching a lift back from the Pacific Forum in Palau. He regaled me with the glories of his singing at a party the night before - and did not mention that he had banned me. It seems to be in New Zealand's foreign policy interests that people like me, and others, do not ask awkward questions or report different realities. 

With Australian and New Zealand help, Tito plans to host next year's Pacific Forum, which would have been the 11th for me to cover - but which, for the first time, I will now be banned from. 

Things are going bad for journalists. Samoa Observer publisher Sano Malifa has been beaten up. Somebody is going to get killed. 

It's certain to be a local, although I remain mystified by how somebody got into my Solomons hotel room and carefully placed a bullet on my pillow. "Thirty cal, American, " said former Army officer Rabuka, casting a professional eye over it. "Makes a very big hole."

The Evening Post

15 December 1999

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