Australian National University, 27-28 January 2017.
Review by Michael Gunn
The ANU Humanities Research Centre, in partnership with the Centre of Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific and the ANU Pacific Institute held a conference on knowledge and culture in Oceania on 27-28 January. Organised by Peter Brown, Matthew Spriggs, and Kylie Moloney, the conference brought together a wide range of speakers and topics and brought a much appreciated focus to current thinking and approaches to the field.
Setting the course for the conference was master navigator Larry Raigetal, director of the Waa’gey Organisation (http://www.waagey.org), Yap, Federated States of Micronesia. Originally from Lamotrek, an atoll situated 920km (500 nautical miles) ESE of Yap, Larry was taught navigation by his father and was recently fully initiated as a navigator. He showed us very graphically what it is like to sail such vast distances in a traditional single-outrigger sailing canoe, much smaller than the Hokule’a and other Polynesian sailing vessels – which are “like Cadillacs in comparison”. His talk and video clips made us contemplate the hardships of sailing for five days on a very precarious craft, with no sleep, bailing all the time, continuously wet, suffering storms and squalls. His bravery and strength was completely apparent to us all. During his talk he mentioned the navigator’s maxim of looking back at the island he has just left, so he can know where he is going. We all became introspective at that point.
Following Larry the next 19 speakers also opened our eyes, our minds, and our hearts. They originated from Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Tahiti, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Aotearoa New Zealand, Tonga, Chuuk, and Australia. Topics ranged from rising sea levels through politics to the liveliness of Pacific objects in museums, but were linked by the key themes of active communication. As an audience we learnt more about Pacific ways of understanding culture, about politics, and cultural perspectives. We learnt about “respecting a tree” before altering its destiny. Respecting a tree requires one to communicate with it.
Some of the speakers were so eloquent, we almost wept for joy upon hearing them express their unique approaches to knowledge and its transmission, and how this is at the heart of Pacific cultures and provides a link between them. We were brought into the different realities that exist in the Pacific–from that of an archivist working in Fiji, to those facing the political front line in Papua New Guinea and in Vanuatu. We eventually drifted off, back to our respective homelands, refocused and reminded of the purpose in our work, why we exist, why these meetings are so important
to us all.