What lurks beneath

Deep Beyond the Reef is itself a compelling read and rewards by drawing the reader into and along with the story being told. Its exotic location, the reasons for it being written, the innuendo and many rumours swirling around the murders and subsequent, botched, police investigation, and the building of the story to its partial resolution also makes this story worthy of a documentary treatment.

It would appear that the confessed murderer, a Fijian man from a village near Suva, was insane when he committed the deed. How convenient for almost everybody associated with the interminably protracted case, except Owen and Piers Scott, Greg Scrivener’s family, their friends, Red Cross supporters, and those seeking justice for this awful crime, because so many loose ends were disposed of, swept under the mat, and neatly tied off. The murderer was nuts. Guilty but insane. End of story.

Not quite, and certainly not for Owen Scott.

Making reliable sense of almost anything to do with Fiji is decidedly difficult because Fijian affairs are often as murky as a tanoa (bowl) of yangona (kava), and the place often seems to run on rumours from the genuinely fantastic, through variously implausible, to the occasionally accurate.

Award winning New Zealand filmmaker Annie Goldson, who’d examined the 1991 murder in East Timor of 21-year-old Malaysian - New Zealand student, Kamal Barnadhaj in Punitive Damage (1999), and trans-gender New Zealand politician, Georgina Beyer, in Georgie Girl (2002), was drawn to Owen Scott’s story for all the obvious reasons.

In An Island Calling, Owen Scott appears as an excellent narrator and reference person through the complex story, itself told like a woven tapa mat being unpicked, its several strands needing careful attention lest the story become too dense and complicated, an important strand becoming lost. The circumstances of the murders, the familial and historical contexts, and then the immediately preceding events of 2000-2001 place Owen Scott’s, and his late brother’s, story into a clear narrative.

The most powerful sequences in An Island Calling occur when Owen visits the village, the vanua, from whence the confessed murderer, Apete Kaisau, comes. Colo-i-Suva is located just north west of Suva, and one drives past it if one takes the hilly route into town from Suva’s airport, Nausori. It’s something of a cooler, rain forested, retreat, a respite from the sometimes-stifling humidity down around the city and Suva harbour.

Kaisau’s family and church, with its pastor, welcome Owen into their midst, offering some sort of explanation for their son’s terrible act. After the long postponed trial, Owen and his family tentatively, warily, and then sadly, embraced the Kaisau family. Nobody came out of this with any real closure (to use an overworked piece of psychobabble). Owen’s line near the end of An Island Calling, about his having an invisible scar or a wound hidden on his skin forever is tellingly apt. He has a brother-sized hole in his soul.

The documentary, An Island Calling, makes a major contribution to Vulagi (outsider, Westerner) understanding of a major but neglected feature of contemporary Fiji, the continuing role and influence of so-called fundamentalist or Pentecostal sects and their pastors.

If the visitor keeps one’s eyes open on the King’s Road from Nausori into town, one passes large warehouses which are obviously supermarkets, next to which, and usually the same size, or even larger, are churches used by several Pentecostal sects. On Sundays, for the twice or more daily services, these are packed to overflowing. Down at the National Stadium near the University of the South Pacific, on Sundays crowds gather to pack the place and be bellowed at by a steadily more hysterical Fijian preacher. When Benny Hinn, whose tele-evangelism shows Fiji TV routinely runs, along with Australia’s Hillsong, visited Fiji near the end of January, 2006, the National Stadium was packed for three straight nights, though attendance figures were grossly inflated.

The long established Fiji Methodist Church - the Scott family forebears being early Methodist missionaries - still the largest mainstream Christian denomination, is struggling to keep its “market share” against predations from these newer, more entertaining, imports. Almost all churches in Fiji prey on their adherents, expecting, demanding, and receiving major collections and additional donations, to the point where church “obligations”, coupled with expected vanua obligations, could well be a significant contributor to growing poverty in a country already beset by globalisation’s economic strains, made worse still by self-inflicted traumas such as serial coups.

The influence of homophobic, Pentecostal, churches and pastors on already disturbed minds such as Apete Kaisau’s, who, in his more rational moments, explained his actions by reference to his pastor’s teachings, can lead to a lethal mix. His Bible, seized as part of the prosecution’s evidence, was annotated with underlining and scribblings about God’s terrible wrath to be visited upon licentious sodomites. On these kinds of issues, it seems the New Testament is edited out of many believers’ Bibles.