Margaret Rodman has chosen to explore the British colonial presence in the New Hebrides from an oblique but evocative perspective: its administrative architecture. The uncontestable value of this approach is enhanced by Rodman's decision to focus not only on the major public buildings of the Anglo-French Condominium as a measure of imperial intent but also on its official residential architecture. Her emphasis on domestic housing and the memories these station houses elicited from their former administrative residents gives the study its special strength.

The book’s structure, however, has an uneasy cadence. Rodman begins, appropriately, with her own domestic experiences on the island of Ambae during her early fieldwork there, for it was the intensity of these memories that drew her into a more systematic study of New Hebrides architecture. She then offers an important historical overview of the Anglo-French Condominium (1906-1980) and the design of its capital, Port Vila. The chapter on the Residency of the British Commissioner introduces the reader through this single emblematic structure to both the domestic and official world of the New Hebrides with wonderful texture and insight. The book then abruptly careers into a chapter on prison architecture and its logistical implications for Condominium labor, followed by a chapter on the British Paddock, the main British settlement at Port Vila. In the final two chapters on the administrative centers on two outlying islands, Espiritu Santo and Tanna, the essential mission of the study comes fully into its own.

Rodman introduces the reader to an intriguing range of public structures, charting the complex Condominium politics that determined the location and design of the major administrative offices, post office, courthouse, and prisons. But it is in the seemingly endless contest over "suitable" residential arrangements that the challenge to assert an effective British presence under French surveillance is most evident. The determination of both British and French to achieve a precise parity of jurisdiction expressed itself with excruciating explicitness in negotiations over the alignment and elevation of their respective residencies and flagpoles.

The New Hebrides were acknowledged to be a marginal possession, particularly by those who had left more prestigious posts in East Africa or Hong Kong. The Condominium therefore was modestly funded. Official housing, transported from Australia in pre-cut kits, was spartan. Local bureaucratic resistance to residential expansion made the conditions of existing housing a highly sensitive and explicit measure of expatriate discontent. Even minor negotiations over renovations required extensive bureaucratic exchanges, diagrams, and invoices, ensuring an unexpectedly rich and revealing archival record of the period.

More compelling than the fiscal and administrative deliberations that dictated the location, size, and plan of the initial structures was the later political and social rationale that prompted seemingly endless accretions through which residences were expanded for domestic or official purposes. Verandahs, or more accurately the inadequacy of verandahs, became the arena in which status and rank were negotiated. Securing "suitable housing" was the enduring obsession of all officials, but the terms of suitability went well beyond simple issues of seniority. Each residence bore the mark of the discontent or aspirations of its new occupants. The official record of these requests reveals the changing expectations of those who served in the New Hebrides and their growing intolerance for fusing official and domestic space. The floor plans that Rodman provides are themselves an eloquent measure of these shifting priorities.

Official correspondence, particularly the minuting of files and invoices, which Rodman refers to as "the email of its day" (p. 90), exposes the tensions and often random willfulness that underlay official action. But Rodman has gone far beyond the rich potential of the archival and commercial sources to elicit from both the retired officials and their wives their personal memories of their lives in the New Hebrides. It was an inspired decision to focus on their residences for, as she notes, they viewed her project as "uncontroversial" and "innocuous." Other more politically explicit or sensitive topics would have met with certain defensiveness, yet the opportunity to reminisce about their "homes away from home" drew them into telling critiques of the colonial service. Domestic memories, in their very banality and intimacy, evoked some astonishingly candid and unapologetic accounts.

Rodman introduces her informants with a careful reconstruction of their Colonial Office careers both in the New Hebrides and in other posts, so that the positions they take during the interviews have unusual resonance. Because of their disposition to describe the domestic challenge posed by the quarters to which they were assigned, the wives of the British officers have a prominence in the narrative that would be denied them in more official administrative histories. Particularly compelling are the short excerpts from these interviews, which are set independently from the text: "Why Melanesians are Different," "Close Your Eyes and Think of England," "Tanna as a Heavy Place," "The Charms of Backwardness," and "Musings on Half Castes."

Much has been made in anthropology of multivocality, but rarely is a study so explicitly invested in the composite voice. Rodman conducted interviews with families who occupied the same residence. Their disparate memories of a common house are a powerful measure of the various administrative periods of the Condominium and of the changing expectations of colonial service. One regrets only, given the domestic focus of this book, that children and servants had no systematic voice in Rodman’s interviews.

Imperial practices are central to her subjects' memories, notably in the chapters on the Residency and the British Paddock, whose parkland accommodated the sports and ceremonies so emblematic of the imperial presence throughout Britain's empire. The transformation of the Paddock common from pasture to garden to golf course drew Rodman's informants into a wider discourse on the shifting fortunes of Great Britain in the Pacific, balancing their more personal domestic memories of the buildings themselves. Elsewhere, particularly at the more isolated and controversial posts on the outer islands, notorious, even tragic, experiences of earlier administrators defined the culture and collective expectations of succeeding generations of official residents.

The world of the British administrator was a closed one, its insularity intentional and fiercely defended. British officials and their families remained resolutely aloof from their French counterparts as well as from the settlers and missionaries and the Americans who assumed control of the New Hebrides during World War II. Their post, however extended the tour, was never home. They marked their transience by referring to their residences as "cottages" and giving the streets of their spartan housing developments names evocative of the bucolic civilities of the counties and cathedral towns they had left behind. Idiosyncratic accretions of portable possessions from earlier posts or from Britain became in the Pacific "one's things." The decorative conventions and domestic priorities of these officials reveal much about their determination to keep the world they had been charged to control at bay. Not only was Melanesian culture and cuisine despised, but all indigenous design and “native” materials that might have served them well in the tropics were also studiously avoided in their domestic architecture. "Southwest Pacific corrugated Edwardian" (p. 164) was their preference.

Rodman has focused on the world of the British official and presents the colonial voice so effectively that it seems highly ungrateful of readers to expect more. Yet her informants’ candor as they discuss nonofficial communities also draws her into the worlds of settlers and missionaries, key actors in this complex imperial narrative. One hopes that Rodman will extend the skills she has so manifestly demonstrated in this book to the worlds that are here marginalized or silent.