Veteran Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver has revealed new details of the night she was detained and denied entry to Fiji under the country’s military regime in 2008, recounting fears of interrogation and worse in an extract from her memoir, Be Brave. The passage, published by 1NEWS with permission, describes how immigration officers stopped her at Nadi International Airport while she was travelling to report on the expulsion of New Zealand’s acting high commissioner, Caroline McDonald.
“I felt my throat catch,” Dreaver writes, quoting an immigration officer who told her, “You’re being denied entry,” shortly after she landed. She says she immediately suspected she might be on a blacklist because of her reporting on the government led by Commodore Frank Bainimarama, who had seized power in 2006 and presided over a period when journalists and critics frequently faced pressure and intimidation.
Dreaver recalls being escorted to a guarded compound near the airport and placed overnight in a small room with barred windows and a pane of glass in the door. Realising the risks of being isolated, she rang colleagues and family in New Zealand to ensure word of her detention spread. “I knew my safety depended on as many people as possible hearing about my detention,” she wrote. She also referenced other journalists who had been refused entry, noting that Mike Field had been deported earlier — a development that reinforced her fear she could face similar treatment.
The memoir extract also recounts a chilling response from a military media liaison officer when contacted on Dreaver’s behalf. “She deserves everything that’s coming to her tonight,” the officer reportedly said, a comment that intensified Dreaver’s fear she might be moved to a military camp. At the time, she had heard accounts of critics being taken to army facilities where they were allegedly mistreated, and she describes preparing mentally for confrontation. “If I was told to strip I wanted to be able to look the soldiers in the eye and be strong,” she writes.
Dreaver’s detention ended the next morning when immigration officers returned her to Nadi Airport and placed her on a flight back to New Zealand. As the plane lifted off she said she wept quietly, realising that being on a banned list meant she could no longer cover a country she loved. The memoir frames the episode as one among a series of pressures faced by journalists covering Fiji during the Bainimarama years.
Be Brave is Dreaver’s account of her decades reporting across the Pacific. The new extract adds personal detail to previously reported patterns of media restrictions under the military government, and underscores the practical dangers correspondents faced while covering political developments in Fiji. The episode also highlights how the treatment of foreign and local journalists became a flashpoint in relations between Fiji and countries such as New Zealand during that period.
Dreaver’s disclosure arrives as part of broader reflection on press freedom and the personal risks undertaken by journalists in the region. Her memoir offers a firsthand chronicle of those hazards, and the Nadi detention stands out in her account as a moment when professional purpose collided with immediate personal peril.
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