The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Despite the sheer magnitude of the oceans, we are among a minute proportion of Earth’s total human population which can truly be referred to as ‘oceanic peoples’. All our cultures have been shaped in fundamental ways by the adaptive interactions between our people and the sea that surrounds our island communities. In general, the smaller the island the more intensive the interactions with the sea, and the more pronounced are its influences on the culture of the island. However, one does not have to be in direct interaction with the sea to be influenced by it. Regular climatic patterns, together with such unpredictable natural phenomena as droughts, prolonged rains, floods, and cyclones that influence the systems of terrestrial activities are largely determined by the ocean. On the largest island of Oceania, Papua New Guinea, products of the sea, especially the much-valued shells, reached the most remote highlands societies, shaping their ceremonial and political systems. More importantly, inland people of our large islands are now citizens of Oceanic countries whose capitals and other urban centres are located on coastal areas, to where they are moving in large numbers to seek advancement. The sea is already part of their lives. Many of us today are not directly or personally dependant on the sea for our livelihood and would probably get sea-sick as soon as we set foot on a rocking boat. This means only that we are no longer sea travellers or fisherfolk, but as long as we live on our islands we remain very much under the spell of the sea; we cannot avoid it. Before the advent of Europeans into the Pacific, our cultures were truly oceanic, in the sense that the sea barrier shielded us for millennia from the great cultural influences that raged through continental land masses and adjacent islands. This prolonged period of isolation allowed for the emergence of distinctive oceanic cultures with the only non-oceanic influences being the original cultures that the earliest settlers brought with them when they entered the vast, uninhabited region. Scholars of antiquity may raise the issue of continental cultural influences on the western and northwestern border islands of Oceania, but these are exceptions, and the Asian mainland influences were largely absent until the modern era. On the eastern extremity of the region there were some influences from the Americas, but these were minimal. It is for these reasons that Pacific Ocean islands from Japan, through the Philippines and Indonesia, which are adjacent to the Asian mainland, do not have oceanic cultures, and are therefore not part of Oceania. This definition of our region delineates us clearly from Asia and the pre-Columbian Americas and is based on our own historical developments, rather than on other people’s perceptions of us. Although the sea shielded us from Asian and American influences, the nature of the spread of our islands allowed a great deal of mobility within the region. The sea provided waterways that connected neighbouring islands into regional exchange groups that tended to merge into one another, allowing the diffusion of cultural traits through most of Oceania. These common traits of bygone and changing traditions have so far provided many of the elements for the construction of regional identities. However, there are many people on our islands who do not share these common traits as part of their heritage, and there is an increasing number of true urbanites who are alienated from their ancient histories. In other words, although our historical and cultural traditions are important elements of a regional identity, they are not in themselves sufficient to sustain that identity, for they exclude those whose ancestral heritage is elsewhere, and those who are growing up in non-traditional environments. The ocean that surrounds us is the one physical entity that all of us in Oceania share. It is the inescapable fact of our lives. What we lack is the conscious awareness of it, its implications, and what we could do with it. The potential is enormous, exciting — as it has always been. When our leaders and planners say that our future lies in the sea, they are thinking only in economic terms, about the development of marine and sea- bed resources. When people talk of the importance of the oceans for the continuity of life on Earth, they are making scientific statements. But for the people of Oceania, the sea defines us, what we are and have always been. As the great Caribbean poet, Derek Walcott, puts it, the sea is history. This realisation could be the beginning of a very important chapter in our history. We could open it as we enter the third millennium. All of us in Oceania today, whether indigenous or otherwise, can truly assert that the sea is our single common heritage. Because the ocean is ever-flowing, the sea that laps the coastlines of Fiji is the same water OCEANIA 1 EPELI HAU’OFA Tolai people / Duk Duk at Kinavai ( Arrival of the spirits ) at the Ranguna beachfront, National Mask Festival, Kokopo, East New Britain, July 2011 / Photograph: Ruth McDougall PREVIOUS PAGES Tolai people / Kinavai ( Arrival of the spirits ) at the Ranguna beachfront, National Mask Festival, Kokopo, East New Britain, July 2011 / Photograph: Michael O’Sullivan 78