Pacific historians and anthropologists have long observed and commented upon the dramatic social and political changes that have occurred in response to colonial intrusion and pacification. As they describe the demise of indigenous political systems or the upheavals concomitant with new forms of economic activity there is often the implicit assumption that certain core institutions persist or that essential cultural characteristics are retained. In the Australian context, Aborigines, and even those who oppose their struggle for autonomy, subscribe to an idealised view of the desert or the ‘outback’ as the true locus of traditional continuity. The nomadic band of hunter-gatherers subsisting on their country is an image so compelling that it obscures the harsh realities of poverty both in large cities and rural regions and the facts of land alienation and cultural displacement. Similarly the idea of the unchanging village is as comforting to anthropologists as it is to many urban peoples in Pacific nations. The relative simplicity and monotonous regularity of quotidian activities in rural regions is seen to set them apart from the complexities and fast changes of the urban centres. And while some view outback Aborigines or Pacific villagers as those deprived of the benefits of technological and cultural advances, condemned to underdevelopment in remote backwaters, others see them as the guardians of custom, the true defenders of tradition. Both views fail to acknowledge how rural life has changed at its very core and that these processes of change began a long time ago.

Today on Tubetube people live in small, two-roomed houses built on piles a metre or so from the ground. The wood for beams, posts and joists comes from neighbouring islands, for Tubetube is small and prone to drought. Few hardwood trees grow there and there is very little swampy land where sago palms might flourish. Before a house is built Tubetube people enter into exchange agreements promising clay pots, areca nuts and occasionally cash for hardwood trunks and sago spathes. The only home-grown materials are the vines for lashing and areca palm trunks that are split to make slats for the floors. These houses, being made entirely from ‘bush materials’, conform to Western notions of the primitive or traditional architecture appropriate to a small tropical island.

Most Tubetube people are aware that these houses are quite different from those that their ancestors built and can describe the various innovations in style. They attribute these changes entirely to the Samoans, Fijians and Tongans who came as teachers with the Wesleyan mission a century ago. According to legend, these men not only destroyed their old clan houses but insisted that they rebuild in what is now called ‘Fijian style’. My own research suggests that the Polynesian mission teachers were not the only agents of change but that they were the first and most consistent destroyers of houses in which relics of the dead were stored.

I became intrigued by the demise of Tubetube architecture and the consequences or ramifications of the decline before I went to Tubetube.