Potholes bigger than cars

Swimming with Sharks Chapter 9.1

Pacific peoples live in other’s shadows or as Australian journalist Helen Fraser put it when writing about New Caledonia, ‘your flag is blocking our sun’.

The Solomons was barely a colony or nation, but leftovers after the main Pacific feast. Its mostly Melanesian people have been there for around 5000 years and separated into distinctive language groups. 

European contact came in 1568 with Spanish explorer Alvaro de Mendana looking for the source of King Solomon’s gold. He died there never knowing it was rich in gold. What the locals may have known as Isatabu became Guadalcanal after the Andalusian hometown of Mendana deputy, Pedro de Ortega. 

Tokyo’s decision at the start of World War Two to build an airstrip there determined the fate of the independent state. The Battle of Guadalcanal was immortalised in statutes and movies but forgotten were the people who called it the ‘Long Death’.