Book launch by The Hon Ralph Regenvanu: My Land My Life - Dispossession at the Frontiers of Desire

Throughout Oceania, land is central to identity because it is understood to be spiritually nourishing and sustaining. Land is the mother. Land, and the kinship it nurtures, is the basis for sustaining livelihoods and ways of life. Therefore, Indigenous dispossession from the land has deep and far-reaching consequences. My Land, My Life: Dispossession at the Frontier of Desire explores the land rush that took place in Vanuatu from 2001 to 2014 which resulted in over ten percent of all customary land being leased. In this book, Siobhan McDonnell offers new insights into the drivers of capitalist land transformations. Using multi-scalar and multi-sited ethnography she describes not simply a linear march toward commodification of the landscape by foreign interests, but a complex web replete with the local powerful Indigenous men involved in manipulating power and property. McDonnell describes land-leasing processes and maps the relationships between investors, middlemen, and local men. She shows how property is a tool with which foreigners reassert capitalism and neocolonial control over Indigenous landscapes. The legal identity of “landowner” contains foundational contradictions between the rights established in Vanuatu’s kastom system and those afforded by property, as individualized rights over land. Property has also created sites for the production of masculine authority and enabled men to manipulate claims to land and entrench their personal power. This book explores how transactions of customary land have created new domains of agency and frontiers of desire: foreign desire to possess land and local desire to lease land for cash. It concludes with a discussion of Vanuatu’s constitutional and land reform package, drafted by the author, which took effect in 2014 and delivered a more empathetic approach to Indigenous land rights and ended the land rush.

The seminar will include a short discussion of the book by the author, Siobhan McDonnell, followed by the launch of the book by Vanuatu’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, The Hon Ralph Regenvanu.

Bio:

Ralph Regenvanu is Vanuatu’s Special Envoy for Climate Change and the Environment. Ralph is currently serving his fifth term as the Member of Parliament for Vanuatu’s capital and largest city Port Vila. He has previously held the Ministerial portfolios of Ni-Vanuatu Business Development (2010-2011), Justice and Community Services (2011-2012), Lands and Natural Resources (2013 to 2017), Foreign Affairs (2017-2020) and Climate Change Adaptation, Energy, Environment, Meteorology, Geo-Hazards and Disaster Management (2022-2024). From April 2020 until November 2022 he was Vanuatu’s Leader of the Opposition. Ralph has a background in cultural heritage management, and served as Director of the National Museum of Vanuatu from 1995 until 2006, during which time he was also a founding Board Member of both the Pacific Islands Museums Association (PIMA) and the regional cultural sites preservation organization, ICOMOS Pasifika. From 2013, Ralph was co-chair of the National Sustainable Development Plan Core Group which was responsible for developing Vanuatu’s ‘National Sustainable Development Plan 2016-2030.

Anna Naupa was recently the inaugural Associate Director of the Pacific Fusion Centre (2022-23), based in Port Vila, Vanuatu. The Pacific Fusion Centre was established to respond to the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ 2018 Boe Declaration on Regional Security, which calls for an expanded concept of security inclusive of human security. Anna holds MAs in Geography and Public Administration from the University of Hawai’i, Manoa and Harvard University’s Kennedy School respectively. She has written on a range of topics including Pacific geopolitics and regionalism, sustainable development and human rights. Anna is currently a PhD candidate at the School of Culture, History, and Language (ANU). 

Emerita Professor Margaret Jolly was an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow (2010–16) and has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, exploratory voyages, missions and contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema and art. Until 2024 she held an ARC Discovery Project Engendering Climate Change, Reframing Futures in Oceania alongside CI Siobhan McDonnell. Professor Jolly has taught undergraduates at the ANU, Macquarie University, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and the University of California at Santa Cruz and supervised over 60 PhD students and many postdoctoral Fellows.

Siobhan McDonnell is an Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University. Siobhan is a lawyer and anthropologist who has over twenty-five years of experience working with Indigenous people in Australia and the Pacific. Since 2019 she has been a lead negotiator on climate change for various Pacific governments (on loss and damage and mitigation). Her commitment to decolonial practice also means she has run land cases for Indigenous groups, and in 2014 supported the Vanuatu government by delivering land reforms to support better Indigenous land rights. Dr McDonnell has been awarded an Australian Research Council DECRA to conduct a collaborative event ethnography alongside Pacific researchers of United Nations climate governance.