I conclude by considering the postcolonial fortunes of the word half-caste. The end of World War II entailed a retreat from racial language and the concept of race in most of the European world and a process of decolonization for the managerial colonies. In 1962, Western Samoa became the first Pacific island colony to decolonize and one of O.F. Nelson's grandsons served twice as the new nation's prime minister. In Australia, although the removal of half-caste children continued into the 1970s, the emphasis on biological assimilation had passed. Arguments for cultural assimilation, which had sometimes been separate but were also combined with the case for physical miscegenation between the wars, now prevailed. In New Zealand, the deaths of Sir Apirana Ngata and Sir Te Rangi Hiroa were mourned in 1950 and 1951 respectively, marking the departure of men who in their prime had embodied what some called the first Maori renaissance. And on both sides of the Tasman, the term half-caste continued to be used.

Then the politics of indigeneity shifted. From the 1970s, many persons who had been labelled half-castes, together with those who acknowledged lines of indigenous ancestry, asserted a primary indigenous identification. Simultaneously, new sites proliferated — in schools, universities, political organizations, and welfare groups — to which people identifying as indigenous, whether or not they had received from their own family a great deal of explicit lore or custom, could come for cultural enrichment.^[61] This shift, and in Australia the related, painful issue of the past policy of child removal, charged the word half-caste with new political significance. By calling someone 'half-caste', the speaker could be understood as denying that person's indigeneity or more generally as discounting the survival of an indigenous identity and tradition. The word has since come to be used less often than at any stage in the last two hundred years.

In Fiji and Samoa, however, local renditions of 'half-caste' remain current and can involve ambivalence.^[62] With independence, many people of mixed ancestry who had formerly stressed their European connection began to stress the indigenous.^[63] In 1987, the historian Malama Meleisea (1987:56) noted that, over the previous decade, almost half the parliamentarians in Western Samoa 'were once classified as "Europeans" or are the sons of men so classified'. More recently, in Fiji, George Speight, the coup leader of mixed European and Fijian descent, stood as an indigenous champion. But in Samoa and Fiji, too, claims to indigenous status by persons of mixed ancestry can also be disparaged by calling them half-caste. Speight was thus discredited by his critics. The leader of Fiji's earlier coups, Sitiveni Rabuka, was also reported to have said: 'I am still waiting for him [Speight] to make his announcement in Fijian'.^[64]

The geography of time, however, is complex. Riccardo Orizio's survey of what he called The Lost White Tribes (2001) documented a tenacious pride in being 'European' among many distant descendants of white forebears in former colonies. In places where racial mixture can derive from multiple sources, a European bloodline is also sometimes vaunted above others — a point made in Teresia Teaiwa's poem (2000) describing the bitter coldness of part-European snobbery in today's Suva. There is also an echo in some more recent Maori writing of the celebration of miscegenation and the old language of race — praising, for instance, 'half-caste children for their beauty, a product of hybrid vigour' (Walker 1996:28). Thus, ironically, do elements of earlier discourses about the half-caste persist.