A journalese review of Barbara Dreaver (2026) Be Brave: The Life of a Pacific Correspondent
It is probably a good idea to be well informed about what happens in this world. My daily sources of mainstream information are - always carefully reading between the lines - without fail, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Stuff, RNZ Morning Report and the six o’clock TVNZ1 news. There are also daily summaries in my inbox from The New York Times, and various other left of centre information sources, online and offline, consulted at various times. Most, if not all of this information is produced by journalists, most of them nameless to me, although occasionally I do remember who is who, and sometimes even seek out news articles from them, e.g. George Monbiot from the Guardian who occasionally lets rip without fear or favour. On the TVNZ One 6 o’clock news one gets familiar with the faces and names but one has no choice but to watch them all, just managing to mute the ads in-between. While the news anchors fulfil their role as smiling entertainers without fail, some more enthusiastic than others, the reporters that appear on camera must adjust their acting capabilities to the story at hand: look sad and devastated when reporting on death and destruction, look happy and bemused when reporting on a celebrity wedding.
Journalism no doubt is a craft, first learnt at journalism school and then by doing it. No doubt also, at some stage early on, it is drilled into them that they are the Fourth Estate – at least in so-called Western democracies – with the sole responsibility to hold the other three estates to account. Freedom of the press is a much-vaunted concept that hardly ever lives up to its promise, be it the mainstream press compromised by their corporate owners, or the public broadcasting channels muzzled by the government funders. Now throw into this mix the social media channels, corporate, state-sponsored or influencer-brand-AI-driven – and the occasional individual efforts by bloggers like myself – and you drown in a maelstrom of information and disinformation, only to surface in the ocean of plastic waste. Of course, you may be lucky enough and land in the elysian fields, charmed by all the good news you have just seen on your smart phone.
Having read the accounts by some serious journalists like Fisk and Pilger, I was interested to see how NZ/Aotearoa/Pasifika journalist Barabara Dreaver would stack up with her book entitled Be Brave, suggesting perhaps a courageous attempt at reporting uncomfortable truths. Having come across her when I was working in the Cook Islands as a HOD English at Atiu College in 1992, I was somewhat surprised by the title, as from memory, she was not exactly brave, nor did I have that impression ever since, as she became the preeminent Pacific Correspondent for TVNZ. Reading her book I have somewhat revised my opinion, recognising the occasional acts of bravery even if tinged with naivety. Her student travels in Egypt with a female friend is a case in point. Her friend, a student of Ancient History at Auckland University – while Barbara studied towards a teaching degree – obviously had a fairly good reason to visit Egypt’s ancient sites while Barbara was happy enough to come along (during their OE). Now, in an ideal world there should be absolutely nothing wrong with two young women travelling in Egypt or anywhere in the world, but as we are made to know, this world is hardly ideal. Only the brave make it so - occasionally. As Barbara recounts, they were lucky to escape the male predators that pried on young female tourists. They were lucky but they were brave too. Having myself travelled in Egypt at a more mature age, I can nevertheless attest to the many tourist traps that spoil the beauty of the country and the people – a situation not only true for Egypt but for the rest of the world, in varying degrees.
Dreaver’s chapters on her upbringing in Kiribati and NZ might paint a somewhat exotic picture for Palagi readers who have no idea what the Pacific Islands are all about – barely knowing what NZ/Aotearoa is all about. I emphasise the latter point because the very idea of exotic places on earth is a hugely misleading idea promoted by corporate tourist operators, or worse, by benign racists who romanticise their ideas of white supremacy. Edward Said famously elaborated this state of affairs in his 1978 book Orientalism – a book one might recommend Barbara to read. The postulated otherness of the Pacific Islands and their peoples, especially in relation to New Zealand and Australia, can only be realised as a colonial and post-colonial enterprise. While such issues may seem academic – and we will discuss Scott Hamilton’s review of Dreaver’s book as an academic exercise – they are nevertheless important when it comes to disentangling popular if not populist ideas about the Pacific regions.
It might be telling, therefore, that Dreaver has nothing to say about her academic studies at Auckland university other than not wanting to become a teacher after all. Some three years of study for a BA (in education) must have left some impressions even if one wants to disown them, which in itself would be a fascinating idea worth of self-analysis. Similarly, she brushes off her experiences with not being accepted into the AUT Journalism program but instead into MIT’s 6-months Pasifika Journalism course which she completed top of the class but then could not find a job in New Zealand, being ridiculed by mainstream employers as some sort of inferior coconut course. All of this could have made a couple of serious chapters on NZ racist academia and mainstream media. Maybe by joining the establishment after all makes one less brave.
In the meantime, as she writes, the only job she could get was one in the Cook Islands, by invitation of a fellow MIT journalism student, by the name of Jason Brown, born in Australia but presumably brought up in the Cook Islands as he was a student at Tereora College in Rarotonga. They both worked at the Cook Island News. Strangely enough as I just googled Tereora College, as I am writing this, I was directed to an online Cook Island News article entitled ‘Letter: Tereora College ‘on life support’, moaning about ‘Anau’ classes that teach Cook Island Māori indigenous culture instead of concentrating on the more useful NZ English based curriculum. Like Māori in NZ/Aotearoa, Cook Island Māori are at loggerheads with the colonial heritage, one that embraces English-based education and Westminster-style governance. Dreaver could have written a book about it, especially as she studied education. Instead, she details her eight years in Rarotonga as first as a reporter for the conservative, pro-business Cook Islands News and then as an owner/reporter (with Jason Brown) for their Cook Islands Press newspaper. Having become disillusioned with the Cook Island News they set out to expose the various business scams supported and engaged in by the government and business elites, all in the name of battling for the common man who just wants to know the truth – the facts of the matter. The two of them did a very good job at rattling at the corrupt establishment and carpetbaggers who are legend in the Pacific islands. Unfortunately, in my opinion, they never got to grips with the underlying malaise that simply remained in place, giving rise to the next and the next scandal as an inevitable sequence of bad news. When the government goes bankrupt and the NZ/Australian/British donors move in, as they always do when the chips are down, invariably imposing austerity packages for public services, and eventually we resume business as usual. In a small country like the Cook Islands, this merry-go-round cuts across families and traditional alliances shift with the winds of financial opportunity. As such Jason and Barbara – by now partners in more sense than one – swim with the sharks. One might invoke Brecht’s famous lyrics here:
And the shark, it has teeth,
And it wears them in the face.
And Macheath, he has a knife,
But the knife can't be seen.
In other words, what are the conditions that give rise to Macheath in the Cook Islands (and elsewhere) rather than exposing one gangster after another, as Dreaver seems to do? She never questions the Westminster system which might be unsuitable for the Cook Islands and New Zealand too. Later on, Dreaver also falls for the cliché that China is muscling into the Pacific, being a dangerous presence as harbouring the unmentionable ideology of communism. Her only criticism of the USA in this context is that they are not having a strong enough presence in the Pacific to deter the Chinese. That the Cook Islands as well as the Solomon Islands and Kiribati have been seen as courting the Chinese if only to extract more aid from the Western powers is another thorn in Dreaver’s eyes. Geopolitical analysis is not exactly the forte of many a journalist in New Zealand, instead playing the same old song of the evils of Chinese communism, rather than engaging in a rational analysis that might reveal socialism as a better option for the Pacific (cf. some such attempts as Melanesian Socialism).
This malaise is not only confined to New Zealand as we know all too well. Even liberal British journalists hum along, as for example voiced by a deputy editor from the Guardian, i.e. rubbishing China even as disaster strikes, as in Nepal and Tibet (which is part of China):
The challenges posed in covering disasters like this are numerous – from getting reporters like Hannah safely into position as quickly as possible, to assessing and verifying the accuracy of reports coming from scenes of chaos and devastation. The Chinese government’s strict control on information in Tibet makes the challenge even harder.
Since Barabara Dreaver is also very much involved in this journalistic disaster enterprise (for the Pacific), describing various political and natural disasters she was sent to report on, we might pause here as well, and expose this rather obscene obsession of ‘getting reporters like Hannah safely into position as quickly as possible’. Forgetting the oxymoron of ‘getting someone safely into a disaster zone’ – not to help but to take pictures of the disaster, one has to wonder what this is all about. Another Guardian correspondent puts it like this:
As a war correspondent, I worked with photographers who said the camera was a buffer between them and reality.
At the very least, disaster journalists should just do voice-overs instead of being on camera doing dramatic false impressions. Sometimes it may not be the journalist who decides to be on camera but rather the producer who calls the shots. Only once does Dreaver hint at competitive egos clambering for the headline shot – one where Wendy Petrie wants to be the star rather than Barbara – while for the rest it’s always a wonderful team effort, like a happy family doing a great job at delivering the news baby. They all support each other when the inevitable hate mail arrives, as Dreaver quotes some she has received. Obviously, this is a dreadful business carried out nowadays on social media where any crackpot can post abuse and threats. When Dreaver casts herself as an investigative journalist who uncovers scams and conmen, one might assume that abuse comes with the job, just as police get abused by drunks and unhinged members of the public, not to mention the outright criminal fraternity. Maybe Dreaver could do a critique of contemporary NZ society that engenders such abuse rather than promoting the soldierly bravado of BE BRAVE (the title of her book no less). Nobody should have to be brave in the face of abuse and threats. It’s a shameful vision of our society.
Barbara Dreaver sees the necessity to offload all this dreadful business a journalist has to contend with, and then bring a bit of levity to bear. This misfires quite badly. When an unnamed fellow journalist (presumably from NZ) at dinner at a watering hole in Rarotonga wants to know how sea cucumbers are grown (as a vegetable) while she tucks in, there is great hilarity about her ‘incredible’ ignorance. Well, really? Sounds rather sad to me. Obviously, there must be lighter moments when journalists (and their camera teams) travel the world, or in this case the Pacific, but do we really want to know all the Schadenfreude?
It is perhaps no surprise that the NZ establishment values Barbara’s commitment to neutral journalism that bows enthusiastically to King Charles and subsequently accepts a gong from the Governor General. This is not to say that Barbara does a rally bad job as a journalist. No, in the overall context she does a not-so-bad job, even if she doesn’t come close to the journalism maxim provided by Bob Woodward as the ‘best obtainable version of the truth possible’.
Which brings us to the exercise of applying some proper political analysis as was done by Scott Hamilton when he reviewed Dreaver’s book. As an expert in Tongan affairs, he takes issue with Dreaver’s reporting on the infamous Tongan riots, glossing over the human rights abuses committed by both the Tongan and NZ police:
Soon after the riot, with the assistance of the New Zealand police who had flown into the country with Dreaver, Tongan cops began a campaign of retribution and terror that would traumatise a generation of young Tongans. For months young men and women were dragged into Nuku’alofa’s central police station and tortured. I have interviewed half a dozen victims of the terror campaign. All mentioned the complicity of New Zealand police. “Those Kiwi cops would stay for the verbal, then step into the next room as soon as the beatings started,” one told me. “The palangi asked the questions, the Tongans did the hitting.”
Equally Dreaver misrepresents the supposed Tongan democratization in the aftermath as some sort of progressive development:
She claims that Tonga became a democracy after the riot, when negotiations supervised with New Zealand saw the constitution rewritten. Tonga’s king, she claims, had “given up power”. After an outburst of inexplicable violence, Tonga was supposedly happily reunited.
Dreaver doesn’t mention that Wellington exerted huge pressure on the pro-democracy movement to agree to a deal that left extensive power with the country’s king. The total inadequacy of the constitutional changes have been shown again and again since they were made in 2010. Tonga’s nobles still have guaranteed seats in the country’s parliament, and its monarch controls the armed forces and has the power to sack ministers and whole governments. In 2024 King Tupou VI used his constitutional powers to sweep away the democratically elected government of Siaosi Sovaleni.
Hamilton then characterises the general malaise of Dreaver’s Pacific reporting as follows:
A comment by Dreaver hints at why she might be so sanguine about Tonga’s continuing lack of democracy, and so lacking in curiosity about its internal fractures. Observing preparations for the burial of King Tupou V, she enthuses about the supposedly “timeless traditions” of the country. Dreaver is fond of that oxymoron ‘timeless traditions’. She also uses it to describe Fiji’s political order. Like many New Zealanders, in this book she appears prone to accepting the nineteenth century Orientalist view of the Pacific as an ancient and unchanging region, a ‘sleepy’ place that contrasts with modern, dynamic Western countries like New Zealand.
https://newsroom.co.nz/2026/04/23/book-of-the-week-a-journalists-memoir-part-2/
No doubt all correct points raised. Maybe Hamilton expects too much from a mainstream journalist who, despite some academic training at Auckland University, has forsaken academic rigour in favour of a bland concoction of fact and fiction that suits a conservative readership. Since she is now in good company at TVNZ, she may be blissfully unaware as to what goes on in the floors above her. It would not really be an act of bravery if she were to investigate how someone like Paul Henry could be appointed to the Board of TVNZ by Minister Goldsmith – until Henry’s resignation to join the ACT Party as a candidate for the 2026 elections. In her good old days in the Cook Islands, she might have knocked on the Minister’s door and accused him of corruption.
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