Solomon Islands
Nearly a thousand islands, about 700,000 people and somewhere north of seventy living languages, which makes this one of the most linguistically dense places on earth. People reached the main chain roughly 30,000 years ago, but the eastern islands waited for the Lapita voyagers around 1200 BC and the Polynesian outliers later still, so the country holds three settlement horizons about 28,000 years apart. Spanish ships arrived in 1568 and the name that stuck, attached later by other people, borrowed King Solomon and his mines to advertise a colony. Then labour ships, missions, a British protectorate, and in 1942 the largest war on earth landing on Guadalcanal, where islanders carried the wounded and scouted for the Allies and were mostly written out of the telling afterwards. Independence came in 1978, followed by the Tensions, an Australian-led intervention, riots that burned the same Honiara street twice under opposite foreign alignments, and a parliament that has changed prime ministers twice in 2026 alone. This archive is built mostly from what Solomon Islanders themselves put on the internet: string bands and panpipes, weddings and gardens and markets, Pijin lessons, reef and rain, and a war that is only one chapter of it.
A chronological documentary of 1,400 moments spanning 1625–2026 on Loreline.
Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-09-01
Eras
- Ships and Missions, Outsiders arriving and what came with them. The Spanish voyages from 1568, whalers and traders, the missions, and the labour trade to Queensland and Fiji that took thousands of Solomon Islanders, on terms that ran from contract to outright kidnapping. Note the shape of that argument: it is the academic Pacific-history mainstream that stresses islander agency, and the descendant communities who insist on slavery. Then the 1893 protectorate, the plantations, and Maasina Rule, the brotherhood movement of 1944 to 1952 that the administration misheard as Marching Rule and smeared as Marxist.
- Nature, The country is in the Coral Triangle, the most biodiverse marine region on earth. Reefs and the fish on them, mangrove and rainforest, the volcanoes Kavachi and Tinakula, and the other side of the same geography: the 2007 and 2013 tsunamis, cyclones, the Honiara floods, logging, and sea level. On the five islands widely reported as lost to the sea in 2016, the honest account is that they were uninhabited islets, that the study was really about wave energy, and that the same research documented eleven houses gone on Nuatambu and a provincial capital planning to move.
- Honiara and the State, The capital that grew out of an American wartime base, and the politics run from it. Independence on 7 July 1978, the Tensions from 1998, the Australian-led RAMSI mission, and a Chinatown burned twice: in 2006 over Taiwanese money, and in 2021 after the switch to Beijing, which is why calling the second one simply anti-China does not survive the first. Then the 2023 Pacific Games, and a parliament that removed one prime minister in May 2026 and had filed against his successor by August.
- Canoes, The tomako war canoe, plank-built and sewn without nails, carrying a nguzunguzu at the prow to guard against the spirits of the sea. Canoe houses, paddles, outriggers, and the boats people still build and race. These are among the few Solomon Islands objects that reached European museums early, which is why the deep past in this archive is so often a photograph of a canoe.
- Kastom, What is inherited and still practised: chiefly and big-man authority, feasts and ceremony, shell money from Langalanga and the red-feather money of Santa Cruz, carving and the ancestor shrine, tattoo and initiation, weddings, and the dances of Malaita and the Western Province. Headhunting belongs here too, and belongs qualified: it was a Western Solomons practice, not a national one, and the archaeological consensus is that its 19th-century scale was substantially driven by steel tools and the trade economy rather than being a timeless custom.
- Village Life, The ordinary day, filmed by the people living it. Gardens and taro, the fishing trip, cooking over a fire, the market, the school run, church on Sunday, family and children, and the interviews where islanders talk about their own lives rather than being talked about.
- Music, The largest part of this archive, because it is what Solomon Islanders put online most. Bamboo bands played with rubber thongs on open pipes, the panpipe ensembles of Malaita and the Are Are, string bands, church choirs, and the contemporary scene: Solomon Islands reggae, hip hop and gospel, the Wantok Musik catalogue, Narasirato, and the artists filling venues in Honiara now.
- The War, From August 1942 the Solomon Islands became the pivot of the Pacific war: Guadalcanal, Henderson Field, the sound so full of sunken ships it is called Ironbottom, Tulagi and New Georgia. This archive holds it to roughly a sixth of the whole, because the war is a chapter of this country and not its subject. What it looks for first is the islander side: the Solomon Islands Labour Corps, the scouts and Coastwatchers, Sergeant Major Jacob Vouza, and Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, who found Kennedy and his crew. No free photograph of Gasa exists anywhere, which is itself the point.
- Pijin and the Languages, More than seventy living languages for 700,000 people, held together by Solomon Islands Pijin, which is the real lingua franca and the language most of this archive is actually spoken in even when the titles are in English. Lessons, phrases, translation, and the vernaculars themselves: Kwara ae, Roviana, Marovo, Gela, and the Polynesian outliers of Tikopia, Rennell and Bellona.
- Sport, Futsal above all, where the Kurukuru have been Oceania champions and the national obsession is genuine; plus football, rugby, canoe racing, and the 2023 Pacific Games, which Honiara hosted and built for.
…and 1,400 more moments. Full text archive: /loreline-text/solomon-islands.md
