In revisioning these voyages I critically consider the trope of “first contact” and the associated idea of “the beach” in the historical anthropology of the Pacific (Dening 1998; 2004). This stress on the limen of the encounter between indigenes and foreigners, between Pacific peoples and Europeans, between Islanders and Outlanders,^[5] still pervades much of the writing about the historical anthropology of the Pacific. Unlike the celebrated “first contacts” of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (memorialised in the films and writings of Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson (1987), for example) for which we have textual, photographic and cinematic representations, eyewitness accounts of living (or recently dead) Australians and Papua New Guineans, and the accumulations of later oral histories, for these much earlier voyages we have only European documents, images, collected objects and a few traces in the ground of Vanuatu and the memories of its peoples. These voyages, the visits of Quirós, Bougainville and Cook, are not the preferred subjects of indigenous history. Unlike later encounters with labour traders and Christian missionaries, their voyages have left few sedimentations in ni-Vanuatu memory beyond the mnemonic names dispersed among the several islands (but see Taylor 2008; Lindstrom 2009).^[6]

In critically considering the trope of “first contact,” I isolate three major problems. Firstly, there is that very presumption of the “first”, the privileging of that originary moment of corporeal touch, the transcendental brush of the encounter which erupts in the flow of time, and which relegates foregoing moments to a kind of cross-cultural zero. This very idea of first-ness, of precedence, tends to occlude all the contacts, both imaginary and corporeal, that came before. On both sides of such encounters there were categorical anticipations and discursive expectations about strangers – from monstrous beings to divine gods. This has been far more thoroughly investigated for Europeans, with debates about how images of non-Western “others” changed from the Medieval or Renaissance periods to the Enlightenment (Fabian 1983; McGrane 1989; Pagden 1982; Salmond 1991) or from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century (see Smith 1984, 1985, 1988, 1992; Jolly 1992; Douglas 1999, 2006, 2008). But there have also been important discussions about the anticipations and expectations of Islanders and of Highlanders in questions about how far Captain Cook was perceived as a manifestation of Lono (Sahlins 1981, 1982, 1985, 1989, 1995; Obeyesekere 1992; Salmond 2003; Thomas 2003), and also, in the continuing controversies about whether and for how long New Guinea peoples saw Europeans as spirits or returning ancestors (Ballard 2003 [1992]; Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991).

Secondly, as well as these generalised questions about prevailing preconceptions – of others as similar and/or different – there are questions of changing perceptions more intimately grounded in the events of encounters. It has often been asked how European voyagers’ perceptions and reactions were dynamically influenced by the unfolding events of which they were part (see Smith 1985; Jolly 1992; Douglas, this volume). Thus, Smith (1985, vii) long ago stressed that his concern was not simply with preconceptions imposed on experience, but how the embodied experience of Pacific places and peoples transformed European visions. For Pacific peoples too, the events of encounters challenged and transformed their perceptions of the “strangers” along an alleged spectrum from divinity to humanity.^[7]

But, finally, I want to link the conventional idea of “first contact” to Dening’s far more powerful concept of “the beach” (Dening 1998, 2004). Much more than a physical space, Dening’s beach is a limen, a place in-between (see Jolly 2009). Throughout his magisterial corpus and especially in Beach Crossings (2004), Dening consummately explores such crossings, in which the horizons of conventional meaning, on both sides of an encounter, are displaced, expanded and put at risk: “On the beach edginess rules (hardcopy book-jacket).” But, as in this chapter, the paths of entrance and exit to the beach are typically retraced through the stories of early European visitors, “to reveal what their unseeing eyes were seeing, life on the other side of the beach as the islanders actually lived it” (2004, book jacket). Thus, the privileged crossings for Dening are those canonical cross-cultural encounters between Europeans and Islanders. This tends to suppress parallel histories, other crossings, other cross-cultural encounters between Islanders. And, moreover, such a stress on the encounters of Europeans and Islanders often reinscribes these past “beach crossings” from the expanded horizons of an optimistic post-colonialism, the promise of living together in new-found equality and reconciliation. And so we should consider how our stories of “first contacts” and “beach crossings” reverberate in the “echo chamber of the present”^[8] (Luker n.d.).