History of Kwakea

Kwakea (also spelled Pakea in older records) is a coral island in northern Vanuatu — roughly five square miles in area, ringed by a lagoon, and sitting within sight of Vanua Lava in the Banks Islands. For more than a century it has been home to one of the more remarkable cross-cultural family stories in the Pacific, linking the Banks Islands to Australia, the Torres group to Pentecost, and the world of nineteenth-century island traders to families still living today.

Before the Whitfords

When Captain Frank Whitford first dropped anchor at Kwakea in the 1890s, the island was almost empty. Oral tradition records that a war canoe of Fijian exiles had earlier raided the population, leaving only two survivors: an older man known as Tom and his daughter Retwal. Their descendants would remain part of life on Kwakea across the generations that followed.

Pakea (foreground), Nawila islet on far side of lagoon, Mota Island in distance. The island of Vanua Lava is out of the frame to the lower left. (Aerial photo courtesy of Violet Bowhay)

The Whitfords Arrive, 1895

Frank Whitford was a trader who worked the islands by schooner. His wife, Alice (née Ford), had been born in 1874 at Tukutuk Plantation near present-day Port Vila, to an Irish father and a ni-Vanuatu mother from the Banks Islands. The couple’s first home was at Malekula, about 200 kilometres to the south, where their first child was born. Alice was uneasy there — alarming encounters with local men persuaded her to ask Frank to find somewhere else for the family to live.

Frank had visited Kwakea on one of his trading voyages and remembered it well: low and sandy, with a sheltered lagoon, a few acres suitable for coconuts, and only two inhabitants. In 1895 the family moved there and stayed. They went on to raise eight children on the island — four sons (Walter, Jim, Donald, and Frank) and four daughters (Dorothy, Chrissie, May, and Laura). A ninth child, Ellen, was born to Frank and a ni-Vanuatu woman from the Banks Islands.

Whitford children. Standing: Walter. Seated L-R: Dorothy, Jim, Laura, Donald, May, Frank, Chrissie. (Names in bold feature in article). Sydney, circa 1915. (Photo courtesy of Violet Bowhay)

A Working Copra Plantation

Frank planted Kwakea in coconuts, and the island grew into a substantial copra operation supplied by the schooner trade that linked settlers, planters, and missionaries across the archipelago. Like most island stations of the period, the Whitford household depended on the work of ni-Vanuatu employees who lived alongside the family. Members of Tom and Retwal’s line — including Ada and, in time, her daughters Pansy and Evelyn Grace — grew up working as housegirls and nursemaids in the Whitford home. Samuel Sarawea, a Banks Islander whom Captain Whitford had taken on as crew, married Ada and became one of the senior figures in the island’s daily life before he was lost at sea.

The Next Generation

By the mid-1930s Frank and Alice had both died, and most of their children had moved on — to Australia, to Ambrym, and to other islands. Only Dorothy, born in 1907, stayed on at Kwakea. She kept the family trading and copra business going with her ni-Vanuatu employees, raised her two daughters Violet (born 1931) and Wilhemina (“Mina,” born 1936) on the island, and by her own account worked as hard as any man there. Mina died in infancy in 1937. Violet — later Violet Bowhay — grew up on Kwakea and spent much of her adult life in Sydney, returning often to the island that had shaped her childhood. Her recollections, gathered by anthropologist Margaret Rodman in the late 1990s, remain one of the richest accounts of life on Kwakea.

A Crossroads of Lives

Kwakea was never an isolated plantation. It was a node in a wider Pacific world: schooners passed through carrying cargo and news; women fleeing difficult situations on other islands sometimes boarded the Whitford ship seeking a new start; Anglican bishops, French planters, English settlers and Banks Islanders all left their traces here. The descendants of those who lived and worked on the island — settler, ni-Vanuatu, and mixed-heritage families alike — are today spread across Vanuatu, Australia, and beyond. Different families remember different versions of the same events, and that, too, is part of Kwakea’s history.

A Living Place

Kwakea today still bears the marks of those generations — the coconuts Frank planted, the lagoon Alice looked out on, and the family ties that span ocean and country. It is a small island with a long memory.

Historical account drawn from Margaret Rodman, “Traveling Stories, Colonial Intimacies, and Women’s Histories in Vanuatu,” The Contemporary Pacific, vol. 16, no. 2 (Fall 2004), pp. 233–257, including the recollections of Violet Bowhay and Evelyn Grace as recorded through the Vanuatu Cultural Centre’s women fieldworker programme.