The book focusses on Graham Kerr, Katherine’s father, and the tragic personal consequences of business failure for his direct and extended family. It asks what caused the Kerrs’ businesses to fail? Was it the unremitting harassment of the Kerr family and its businesses from 1927 to 1952 by the French company Société Française des Nouvelles Hébrides? Was it the effects of the unpredictable role of Vichy France
in the Second World War? Was it Australia’s role in creating difficulties for Kerr companies? Was it the decline of the Pacific franc relative to the Australian and British pound so the Kerrs had no money to afford the comfortable life in Australia they had worked so hard to achieve? Was it the unwise management by the Kerrs of their business interests?
In telling the story, the book provides a uniquely personal picture of the Western Pacific in the wider context of world politics—the War in the Pacific,
the discord in the Pacific created by a divided France, the role of the war and its aftermath on the Kerrs’ friends in France, the role of tariff barriers in preventing British settler traders in New Hebrides from selling produce within Australia, and the relative merits of communism and capitalism and the countries adopting these ideologies.
Katherine’s books have been characterised as ‘national treasures for Vanuatu’ for their contribution to Vanuatu colonial history.