I would like to thank Andrew Pawley for particularly trenchant criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper and Nancy Sharp for more restrained comments. It has also been honed by comments on oral presentations of an earlier version by audiences at the Universities of Copenhagen, Lund, Sheffield, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as those at the Austronesians in History Conference at the Australian National University. This paper is dedicated to my wife Ruth Vatoa Saovana of the Wa-Do (Tinputz) language area, part of the Meso-Melanesian Cluster of Western Oceanic Austronesian languages, descendant too of those Bougainville non-Austronesian speakers who got there first.