Murder in the Pacific: Matt Francis on aid and agency in Vanuatu

In this episode, Gordon Peake speaks with the pseudonymous crime writer Matt Francis about the Murder in the Pacific series, four novels set across the provinces of Vanuatu and featuring Sergeant George Long, a Ni-Vanuatu police officer of mixed Chinese and Ni-Vanuatu heritage, and his partner Constable Jaylene Olly. Francis explains that the idea took shape during a rainstorm outside the Australian High Commission in Port Vila, when a description he jotted down grew into a plan to write one book for each of Vanuatu's six provinces. Four have been published, a fifth set on Ambrym against the backdrop of a Mount Benbow eruption is drafted, and a sixth is planned for Torba and the Torres Islands.

Francis describes the books as love letters to a country he adores, but ones that do not shy away from its absurdities or from the frictions of the aid industry. He and Peake discuss the gentle lampooning of donor programming that runs through the series: the banners, the certificates of participation, the photo opportunities, and the constant cycle of training courses that pull police officers away from their duties. Francis draws on three decades of experience, beginning with an international NGO in the mid-1990s using AusAID funds on HIV and AIDS care and prevention in Thailand and Myanmar, and reflects on why training remains such a favoured deliverable for donors.

The conversation turns to the geopolitics of Australia–China donor competition, drawing on Francis's fieldwork in Papua New Guinea in 2018 and 2019 and later community-level research with taxi drivers and market mamas in Vanuatu. He argues that Ni-Vanuatu and Papua New Guinean interlocutors have a sophisticated understanding of donor rivalry and exercise real agency in playing one partner against another, an agency he found Australian officials often failed to recognise. Peake and Francis also examine the politics of per diems as a rational salary top-up, and the highly political environment in which senior police and public servants operate in a small country where the pool of candidates for top positions is narrow and the stakes are correspondingly high.

Francis also explains the pen name. Writing the first book in 2018 and 2019, he feared being blacklisted from Vanuatu or having grant applications penalised after taking potshots at High Commission staff and Ni-Vanuatu political figures. He has kept the Francis byline for later projects, including film scripts and a musical. Peake, who reviewed the series for Devpolicy, commends the books as humbling, absorbing reads that convey how much backstory is needed to understand anything in Vanuatu, and how small does not mean simple.

Devpolicy Talks is produced by Robin Davies, Amita Monterola and Finn Clarke.

Devpolicy Talks is the podcast of the Australian National University's Development Policy Centre.

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