OBITUARY: Vale Robbie Robertson, a 'son of Fiji and the Pacific'

Abstract

While most University of the South Pacific academics were united in their opposition to the 1987 and 2000 coups in Fiji – and many of them suffered in various ways from the 1987 coup, the 2006 coup was divisive in that quite a few senior USP academics and former academics (mostly Indo-Fijian) gave tacit and active support to it, believing in coup leader Voreqe Bainimarama’s rhetoric of anti-corruption and racial equality for all in Fiji as his justification. The death of historian and prolific author and writer professor Robert Robertson has highlighted through his books, scholarship and academic activism the injustices inflicted by the coups and globalisation on academics, journalists and marginalised beginning with Fiji: Shattered Coups (1988), co-authored with his journalist partner Akosita Tamanisau. This essay profiles an academic who ‘planted deep roots, metaphorically and literally, in the DNA of Fiji and the Pacific.

Keywords

• academic freedom
• Australia
• diversity
• education
• Fiji
• globalisation