Choiseul

Choiseul is the largest island (2,971 km2) in the Solomon Islands' Choiseul Province. On Taro Island, the administrative offices of Choiseul Province are located in the town of Taro.

This island is located southeast of Papua New Guinea's Bougainville Island and north of the New Georgia islands' Noro. It features a number of small satellite islands, as well as a bigger one, Rob Roy Island, off its southern end, separated by the Nggosele Channel.

Hugo Bernatzik, an Austrian anthropologist and photographer, visited Choiseul Island in 1932. Bernatzik researched and described some of the island people's few remaining ancestral customs in an ethnography released a few years later. He also took images of the islanders and returned with a stone urn with carvings, which he believed reflected a disappearing civilization in contact with the contemporary world.

Blackbirding was a problem for the Choiseul islanders in the nineteenth century (the often brutal recruitment or kidnapping of labourers for the sugar plantations in Queensland and Fiji).

Location: Choiseul Province