BOOK REVIEW: Melanesia (Travels in Black Oceania)

By Hamish McDonald, Black Ink Books/ Hurst, Collingwood, Australia. Soft cover, 336 pp.

This is a rare and excellent book about a region which had to be invented but is nonetheless very real for that. Melanesia, as Hamish McDonald points out early, was defined as islands which were not Polynesia and not Micronesia, and where people generally had blacker skin than those of the other South Pacific islands. Nor did they share, unlike the Poly…