What lurks beneath

The foregoing gives the barest overview of the context in which John Scott became known outside Fiji.

The Red Cross is OK, John Scott - “wasn’t he that white guy in that Fiji thing last year?” - and Fiji itself slipped away from world attention as the country groped to understand and perhaps recover from its latest self-inflicted traumas.

The coup of December, 2006, orchestrated and led by another of the apparent heroes of 2000, Bainimarama, demonstrated how poorly Fiji had, and continues, to recover, and hasn’t, from the 2000 crisis. There are almost no even minor heroes emerging from the current Fiji situation.

Early on Sunday morning, July 1, 2001, John Scott and his long term partner, New Zealander, Greg Scrivener, were horribly murdered at their Suva home.

On Fiji TV News that night, Police Commissioner Isikia Savua growled that Scott and his partner’s lifestyle had played a part in the murder. They had it coming, he clearly implied.

Watching Savua darkly opine on the motives of the then still unapprehended perpetrator in ways which any defence lawyer could readily exploit, and whose role, or lack of it, in the mayhem the previous year raised many still unanswered questions about where his loyalties might really lie, I nearly threw up. Seeing how the Fiji media, often eager to report every grisly detail of such altogether too common crimes in that very violent society, all but salivated over the story, I repeatedly cringed. Much overseas reportage was also seriously deficient, seizing on rumours and police innuendo about porn videos, drugs, implied pedophilia, and wild parties.

In London, John Scott’s younger brother, Owen, who’d made a career as an actor, was taking phone calls from Fiji and New Zealand, trying to comfort John Scott’s young adult son, Piers, struggling, and largely failing, make his own sense of what had apparently occurred. They traveled to Fiji to bury their brother and father, finalise his affairs, and seek some answers and perhaps even justice.

Eventually, Owen Scott wrote Deep Beyond the Reef (Penguin, 2004), a memoir of his family’s life in Fiji through four generations, the Scotts being a leading kai Vulagi (European Fijian) family, something of a biography of his late brother, and his own groping towards some sort of explanations as to why his brother had been murdered.

The title came from a popular 1948 song, Beyond the Reef, by Jack Pitman and recorded since then by Bing Crosby, Jimmy Wakley, Alfred Apaka, Andy Williams, and Elvis Presley, which Owen and his father would sing together when he was growing up.

Beyond the reef
Where the sea is dark and cold
Where love has gone
And our dreams grow old
There'll be no tears
There'll be no regretting
Will you remember me
Will you forget …

Deep Beyond the Reef is an exceptionally clever title because, beyond the protective reef, which embraces the islands in its care, lies the deeper, colder, sea containing darker secrets, including the feared tevoro vasua, the devil clam, symbolic of demons lurking just out there, beyond the protection of society’s conventions and beliefs.

Trying to find out why his brother was murdered, the means and suddenness making the awfulness of this murder so much more awful, takes Owen Scott into the murky deeps beyond the protections of society’s conventions and illusions. He knew the tevoro (demons, devils) lurk in Fiji, having experienced one of them in the person of his, and John’s, war hero, lawyer, leading politician, knight of the colonial realm, serial philanderer, and chronic alcoholic father. At times, John Scott had been something of a father figure for Owen, protecting him from their father’s excesses.