This book is the second in the trilogy The Kerr Brothers in New Hebrides written by Katherine Stirling Kerr Cawsey and begins in 1919 when the Kerr Brothers—a company run by Katherine’s father, his sisters and his brother—have successfully developed their uncle’s (Captain Macleod’s) trading business and become plantation, store and ship owners trading throughout and beyond the New Hebrides Islands.
As with the first book, the second interweaves Katherine’s father’s diaries with the history of colonial settlement, the role of missionaries, and the effect of the inequities of French British Condominium rule and joint government on settlers and Islanders. But the sharpest focus is now on the predicament of British settlers in the New Hebrides in the face of far less rigorous Indigenous and foreign labour conditions
for French settlers and an easier trading environment for these settlers to sell their produce overseas. In this book the competition for land and resources seems to be solely between settler groups; the claims of Indigenous New Hebrideans are largely hidden from the story.
The diaries and Katherine’s painstaking research in French archives enable readers to study at first hand the fate of the Kerr Brothers as they become enmeshed in selling British settler lands to French companies such as Société Française des Nouvelle-Hébrides: companies which have a close and sinister connection to the corrupt and nepotistic French government of the 1930s. Here too is a detailed portrait of a man, Graham Kerr, whose good qualities, weaknesses and naive ambitions lead him to think he can play French politics with only a rudimentary understanding of French society, language and character. In counterpoint are portraits, sometimes in their own words, of two ruthless French individuals
whose aim is to destroy all of Kerr Brothers’
business interests for revenge and their own
amusement.
When Book 2 ends, the Kerrs have excellent connections with most people in New Hebridean society, French, British and Indigenous, and there is room for optimism about the future of their business beyond 1939. What the future brings will be the subject of the third and final book of the trilogy.