All at Sea

The Sydney Morning Herald & The Age

2 December 2016

The past and future of the Pacific Ocean, in 10 tales.

Pacific: The Ocean of the Future, Simon Winchester, HarperCollins, $32.99

In a much-loved New Yorker cartoon a journalist stands before a blackboard with a stick of chalk in hand. "What am I an expert in today?" he asks. The indefatigable Simon Winchester's impressively varied – almost protean – body of work recalls that joke at the expense of journalistic omniscience.

Among the 25 titles to Winchester's name there are books about skull collector Alan Dudley (Skulls), champion of Chinese science Joseph Needham (The Man Who Loved China), geologist William Smith (The Map that Changed the World), and the unhinged verbal genius William Chester Minor's role in the making of The Oxford English Dictionary (The Surgeon of Crowthorne); books that demand more than a passing acquaintance with phrenology, sinology, geology and etymology.

In only one scientific field – geology – is Winchester academically trained. And yet he has a magical ability to fashion popular narratives out of technical, in fact often quite obtuse, subjects – curiosities.

What is Winchester an expert in today? The Pacific Ocean, as it turns out. In Pacific, Winchester assembles 10 curious tales – and stories within stories – about the post-war Pacific.

The story of Japan's industrial ascent – and descent – is told in suitably pocket-sized form as the tale of the Sony transistor radio: its invention, commercial development, metamorphosis into a "consumer electronics" industry and, finally, its integration into the personal computer and the Pacific Rim high-tech beacons of Apple and Microsoft.

The Korean conundrum is largely condensed into the story of the USS Pueblo's capture by North Korean forces in 1966. A chapter on the imperial, particularly British, post-colonial disengagements from the Asia-Pacific region springboards from the story of the RMS Queen Elizabeth's undignified end as a charred wreck "black and smouldering" in Hong Kong harbour.

This segues into a speed-history of the Vietnam War – another instance of great power failure in, and retreat from, the region. The chapter concludes with a return in the same elegiac tone to Hong Kong and the sunset of British imperial power.

The Pacific attracted Winchester as a subject as far back as 1991 when, as a travel writer and editor, he was living in Hong Kong. The result was Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture. The new book is more meditative in tone and digressive in structure. It is sadder, wiser, and darker.

A region often described as the global economy's greatest chance for growth is also, Winchester cautions, a "thermonuclear sea" – one of his finest chapters narrates the disastrous American atomic tests at Bikini atoll. That story is braided, ironically, with the rise of the bikini: the original swimwear bombshell.

Pacific no longer, the ocean bordered by the Americas, Australasia and Eastern Asia, is at once environmentally imperilled – home to the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre – and "tectonically and meteorologically dangerous". The Philippines (Spain), Tahiti (France) and Australia (Britain), were colonised by European maritime powers who dreamt of – eroticised – the Pacific. Readers of Winchester's book will weep for her now.

It has also, most worryingly for future generations, become a hot zone of superpower rivalry, forcing the United States to reinvent its foreign policy posture in response to China's regional, if not global, ambitions. The Chinese navy, Winchester reminds us, "keeps on getting larger and larger, its area of operations wider and wider, and from a western perspective, its territorial claims ever more egregious". From an Eastern perspective, too. China is mired in territorial disputes with a slew of Asian countries the most visible of which is Japan.

Winchester took his inspiration, as he explains in the prologue, from Austrian writer Stefan Zweig's book Shooting Stars, an idiosyncratically chosen collection of essays about great historical moments. Winchester adopts a Zweigian approach to his subject by assembling moments and events suggestive of larger themes. He catalogued these potential subjects and then whittled the list down to a collection of "singular events, some portentous, some more trivial, but each of which appeared to herald some kind of trend.

"They showed, and in chronological order, a series of developments which, when accumulated as one depicted an image, perhaps more pointillist than precise, of the ocean as it had arranged itself in the past 65 years, and which also hinted at the way the ocean might evolve in the near future."

Pacific is imaginatively and energetically written, engaging and informative. But it has its limitations, and they bear on the question of expertise: it's a skim, a glide, a ride.

As if to compensate for an absence of depth and fresh detail, Winchester seems content to let style do the talking. His tone is distinctive, if a little starchy. The quasi-American Marshall islanders "must perforce wash their clothes and attend to their dead and be otherwise separated behind chain-link fences, while Alabaman and other strangers on the far side of the same fences come and go on the Marshall Islands quite as they please". Nor is he is immune from hyperbole: "The Pacific is an oceanic behemoth of eye-watering complexity."

Australia's contribution to recent regional history is a kind of time-warped That '70s Show. There is great delight in the story of Gough Whitlam's rise and fall, Barry Humphries' most grotesque comic creation, Sir Les Patterson, and the tragi-triumph of Utzon's Opera House.

Pauline Hanson, whose daffy xenophobia has surely been surpassed in toxicity by the European Far Right and one high-profile Republican presidential candidate, gets a look in. The chapter trails off with a lengthy cri de coeur over contemporary asylum-seeker policy. The tone of the Australian chapter is mildly condescending and the point of view adopted by Winchester is that of spokesman for a region disappointed in a lucky country that has grown querulous and narrow, and that, while blessed, is "not a great country. Not yet."

He acknowledges a "delightfully nuanced and multicultural urban Australia" while warning of "an awful undertow … a concatenation of white-dominated, blinkered, complacent and reactionary forces". These evil forces – it's hard not to picture them riding out of Tolkien's Mordor – "may yet keep this once-lucky place pinioned and fettered firmly in its past, thereby not allowing it to become a true member of the community in which geography has settled it, now, or maybe for some time to come".

It is curious, to say the least, to find Australia chided for not more fully embracing some benign regional ideal when she is one of the few successful democratic and polyglot societies in a region dominated by monocultures, one-party states and quasi democracies.

Winchester observes Circular Quay from a hotel window, indulging in a spot of cliched lyricism. From a recent visit to Darwin he observes that "all of the local talk was about was the customs boats that left the port…" All they talk about? How do they talk about it? The issue here is one of method: narrative authority is in the detail.

Much of the book feels as if it were written by a 70-year-old (apologies to W.B. Yeats) "smiling public man". Winchester ponders the Pacific, elaborates on past visits, observes from some comfy rostrum, and alludes vaguely to conversations – "every islander to whom I spoke about it tended to look at the ground and tried to change the subject" – that might have served his purposes more powerfully if recounted with some precision. In his journey around the Pacific the one thing he fails to do is dive in. *