Divided Isles
Solomon Islands and the China Switch
By Edward Acton Cavanough
Published by La Trobe University Press/Black Inc
RRP $36.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781760644192
In 2019, Solomon Islands made international headlines when the country severed its decades-old alliance with Taiwan in exchange for a partnership with Beijing. The decision prompted international condemnation and worried Australian security experts, who feared Australia’s historical Pacific advantage would come unstuck.
The reporting mostly focused on what this decision meant for other countries, such as Australia, with strategic interests in the region.
It is often framed as another example of China’s inevitable capture of the region – but, according to Cavanough, this misrepresents how and why the decision was made, and how Solomon Islanders have skilfully leveraged global angst over China to accrue and wield political power.
Despite Solomon Islands’ importance to Australia, knowledge of the country – a fragile island-nation stretching over a thousand islands and speaking seventy indigenous languages – is limited, its strategic role in the war in the Pacific more likely to be known than its current affairs.
The fact remains it is still a nation ‘rife with grievance, poverty, corruption, greed and an extraordinary lack of access to the most basic of services’ and even well-meaning interventions such as RAMSI by Australia in 2003, which was designed to restore order, fail to deliver meaningful improvements in the day-to-day life of Solomon Islanders.
VERDICT: This book is a well-timed deep dive into a country that is, by every measure, one of Australia’s nearest neighbours.