'You are not a White Woman!'

During her trial for assault in Fiji in 1915, Stella Spencer was accused of improperly associating with and even making love to native Fijians, in such a way as to prejudice the order of the colony. The background to the trial was Spencer's work on behalf of the populist Fijian leader of the Viti Company, Apolosi Nawai. As well as using the trial in an attempt to vilify Nawai as a crook, the European colonists asserted a harsh racial division with regard to sexual conduct between the races. Sexual intercourse symbolised a diminution of white prestige. This article tells the story of Apolosi Nawai and Stella Spencer from contemporaneous reports, the Fijian National Archives and the Colonial Office Archives