Art/Story of the Niuklia Fri Pasifik: On Doing Creative Pacific Histories

ABSTRACT

The transgressive spirit, critical flair, and cultural power of Pacific grassroots movements are too often ignored or relegated to the footnotes within the discipline of Pacific history. Through a montage of creative and pedagogical campaigns, this article considers the Against Testing On Moruroa (ATOM) Committee in Fiji, and the regional Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement, as a nascent form of applied grassroots Pacific Studies. It then suggests that scholars ought to engage with the creative chronicle of social movements to make creative Pacific histories. Inspired by Fijian-Tongan poet and scholar Tagi Qolouvaki’s invocation of ‘activist art/story’, this article then describes the author’s creative practice-led research using audio documentary to recast the intellectual genealogy of critical Pacific Studies, discussing this movement as a foundational grassroots counter network.

Key words:

• Pacific Studies
• Against Testing On Moruroa (ATOM)
• Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP)
• nuclear testing
• nuclear colonialism
• self-determination

Acknowledgements

Vinaka vaka levu to Nic Maclellan, Professor Katerina Teaiwa, Dr April K. Henderson, Lisa Hilli, Dr Marco De Jong, Dimity Hawkins, Associate Professor Chris Ballard, and the reviewers for your generous feedback on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ ‘Aneil Sings His Protest’, Echo Magazine, May/June 1972.

² ‘Ulysses and Friends relive memories’, Facebook Group, https://www.facebook.com/groups/119658124747253 (accessed 15 Dec. 2022).

³ Ibid.

⁴ Siteri Suvakacolo, ‘Ulysses Hands out a Big Hit’, Fiji Times, 25 June 2022, https://www.pressreader.com/fiji/the-fiji-times/20220625/282179359764645 (accessed 15 Dec. 2022); Karen Stevenson and Katerina Teaiwa, eds, The Festival of Pacific Arts: Celebrating Over 30 Years of Cultural Heritage (Suva: University of the South Pacific Press, 2017).

⁵ Vanessa Griffen, ‘The South Pacific Festival of Arts’, Niu: Yearbook of the Student’s Association (North Melbourne: Magazine Art, 1972), 139.

⁶ Nick Dewolf, ‘Anti-Nuclear Banners South Pacific Festival of Arts’, Nick Dewolf Photo Archive, May 1972, https://www.flickr.com/photos/dboo/20258784464 (accessed 15 Dec. 2022).

⁷ Griffen, ‘The South Pacific Festival of Arts’, 138.

⁸ ‘Why Tahiti is Sending a One-Man Team’, Fiji Times, 6 May 1972.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Several critical contributions document the early campaigns of the Nuclear Free Pacific movement but do not focus on creative protest, including Vijay Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement: Problems and Prospects’, The Pacific: Peace, Security & The Nuclear Issue (London: Zed Books, 1988); Stewart Firth, Nuclear Playground (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Michael Hamel-Green, ‘Antinuclear Campaigning and the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone (Rarotonga) Treaty, 1960–85’, in Proceedings of the 14th Biennial Labour History Conference, ed. Phillip Deery and Julie Kimber (Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2015), 51–62; Anne Walker, A World of Change: A Life in the Global Women’s Rights Movement (Melbourne: Arcadia, 2018).

¹¹ It is worth noting that the early anti-nuclear movement in Fiji was, from its genesis, multi-ethnic as both a regional hub of the Pacific but also as a multicultural nation whereby Indigenous Fijians, Indo-Fijians, and other European, Asian, and Pacific ethnicities worked in solidarity with one another. This is important considering how NFIP is retrospectively presented solely as a trans-Indigenous and Black Pacific movement – which it indeed was – however, its Fijian origins, especially within organizations like the YWCA and PCC, which composed the ATOM Committee, were strategically inclusive and committed to multiethnic modes of activism (as a response to colonial British policies of segregation) to support its goal of the abolition of nuclear tests.

¹² In her book Decolonising the Pacific, Tracey Banivanua Mar describes how through the description of Indigenous peoples engaged in political activity as ‘centrifugal forces’ to empire, colonial administrators ‘deployed a terminology that captured the transgressive potential of Indigenous peoples and their sovereignties, and their capacity to breach and shatter both physical and intellectual colonial borders’. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Nadia Rook, ‘Counter Networks of Empires: Reading Unexpected People in Unexpected Places’, Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History 19, no. 2 (2018): 2. This example demonstrates that Tahitians engaged in performance arts who were suspected of entering a politicized space were also accorded such errancy.

¹³ Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 152.

¹⁴ Katerina Teaiwa, ‘Our Rising Sea of Islands: Pan-Pacific Regionalism in the Age of Climate Change’, Journal of Pacific Studies 41, nos 1–2 (2018): 26–54.

¹⁵ Junior Member for Naiqaqi, ‘The Atom Men Our True Enemy’, Pacific Review, 16 Aug. 1973, 7. According to Walter Johnson and Sione Tupouniua, the panel discussion hosted at the University of the South Pacific in 1973, which ‘Junior Member for Naiqaqi’ writes about, was the first time that the abolitionist notion of a Nuclear Free Pacific was floated to the Fijian community with speakers from the Fiji parliament, the Pacific Conference of Churches, and a student from New Hebrides/Vanuatu. Johnson and Tupouniua, ‘Against French Testing: The A.T.O.M. Committee', Journal of Pacific History (hereinafter JPH) 11, no. 4 (1976): 213.

¹⁶ To describe ATOM, and to demonstrate how both radical and peace groups worked together, I borrow this term from the 1971 address to USP students by the then communist, trade unionist, and highly controversial ‘rabble-rouser’ of the time, Apisai Tora, who said, ‘The Student Revolt, far from dying out in this decade, is alive and well throughout the world. It is exerting tremendous influence on the politics of great nations … As I see it, “the ball is in your court”. Yours is the responsibility for the Fiji of Today, as well as tomorrow. You must question everything in your search for objective truth’. Apisai Tora, ‘Exploiters Condemned’, Pacific Review, 5 June, 1971. See, also, Joy Lehuanani Enomoto, Dejan Ann Kahilina‘i Perez, and Talei Luscia Mangioni, eds, Pacific Studies: A Transformational Movement (Honolulu: Center for Pacific Islands Studies, 2021).

¹⁷ ‘USP Students Urge Test Outcry Help’, Fiji Times, 15 May, 1970, 1; Saemala, ‘Francis Joseph’ in Solomon Encyclopaedia, https://www.solomonencyclopaedia.net/biogs/E000666b.htm (accessed 15 Dec. 2022).

¹⁸ ‘USP Students Urge Test Outcry Help’, 1.

¹⁹ ‘500 Protest in Suva About Testing’, Fiji Times, 30 May, 1970, 1; ‘There’s “Danger” in Fiji’s Rainwater: “Ban that French Bomb”’, Pacific Islands Monthly 41, no. 7 (1 July 1970): 33–4. The meeting was chaired by Dr D.J. Lancaster with four speakers: Dr Graham Baines, Francis Saemala, President of the Fiji Council of Churches Reverend P.K. Davis, and Vice-President of the Fiji Medical Association Dr F.A.S. Emberson. It was attended by Ratu Sir Edward Cakobau, on behalf of Ratu Mara, who spoke of Fiji’s potentially awkward political position given the Fiji Military Forces’ participation in the British tests at Kirisimasi in the 1950s, but Cakobau was committed to forwarding on ATOM’s concerns to the Fiji government. Cakobau would eventually go on to address the United Nations General Assembly in 1972 calling for the end of French nuclear tests.

²⁰ Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement’, 185.

²¹ Ibid.

²² A 1970 Fiji Intelligence Report for the Commonwealth documents that a security official observed the first-ever ATOM protest in 1970. While the Commonwealth dismissed it, they subsequently warned the Australian reader: ‘Should students graduating from the University of the South Pacific and other institutions find that their idealistic hopes of rewarding careers are in many cases likely to be frustrated for lack of opportunity, they could become a nucleus for extremist political groupings’.

²³ Graham Baines, pers. comm., 23 Aug. 2020.

24 ATOM member Betty Schutz described the youth members such as herself as ‘foot-soldiers’.

²⁵ See Christine Weir, ‘The Opening of the Coconut Curtain: Pacific Influence on the World Council of Churches through the Campaign for a Nuclear-Free Pacific, 1961 to 2000’, JPH 54, no. 1 (2019): 116–38.

²⁶ These became codified in the 1982 publication: Suliana Siwatibau and David Williams, A Call to a New Exodus: An Anti-Nuclear Primer for Pacific People (Suva: Lotupasifika, 1982).

27 Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement’, 186.

²⁸ Vimal Madhavan, pers. comm., 15 Apr. 2020.

²⁹ Claire Slatter, ‘1963–2000, Young Women’s Christian Association of Fiji/Amelia Rokotuivuna Archives’, Pacific Manuscripts Bureau (hereinafter PMB), Item 1211.

³⁰ ‘Fiji’s Bomb Ban Stays’, Fiji Times, 24 July 1973, 1.

³¹ Betty Schutz, pers. comm., 11 July 2020.

³² For example, the ATOM Committee produced a nursery rhyme booklet with doggerel poetry against nuclear testing. See Chris Plant and John Hayes, Nursery Rhymes for a Nuclear Age (Suva: ATOM Committee, 1974).

³³ Giff Johnson, pers. comm., 4 July 2020.

³⁴ While a full script of the play has not been found, the author has reconstructed scenes of the satirical play through interviews with American NFIP activist Giff Johnson, who had joined the actors for some of their travels in rural areas of Viti Levu.

³⁵ Giff Johnson, pers. comm., 4 July, 2020. Giff Johnson is the son of Professor Walter and Bette Johnson, two American activists who campaigned during the Chicago civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to desegregate schools, hospitals, and neighbourhoods. The family left the University of Hawai‘i on a sabbatical and eventually moved to Fiji for Walter to teach at USP in 1972. Following his time in Fiji, Giff became an active member of the Nuclear Free Pacific movement, helping to organize the Micronesia Support Committee and the third conference in Hawai‘i in 1980. He went on to marry Marshallese nuclear justice champion, Darlene Keju.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Dimity Hawkins, ‘“We Will not Relax Our Efforts”: The Anti-Nuclear Stance of Civil Society and Government in Post-Independence Fiji’, JPH 59, no. 1 (2024): 17–36.

³⁸ Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement’, 187.

³⁹ CCNFPC, ‘Resolutions’ (Conference for a Nuclear Free Pacific, Suva, Fiji, 1–6 Apr. 1975).

⁴⁰ See Marco De Jong, ‘“Our Pacific Through Native Eyes”: Māori Activism in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement’, JPH 59, no. 1 (2024): 60–82.

⁴¹ While the movement dissolved, its history is often called upon by its contemporaries including, but not limited to, the Pacific Conference of Churches, Youngsolwara Pacific, MISA4thePacific, DIVA for Equality, Pacific Network on Globalisation, Te Kuaka NZA, Hawai‘i Peace and Justice, Prutehi Litekyan/Save Ritidian, Melanesian Indigenous Land Defence Alliance, Australian Nuclear Free Alliance, Pacific chapters supporting the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and many more.

⁴² Nic Maclellan, pers. comm., 2020. However, it must be noted that many high-profile Pacific politicians were involved in the movement in its heyday, including Father Walter Lini, Oscar Temaru, and many others.

⁴³ One often highlighted example is the way Māori and Kanaka Maoli representatives endorsed the 1987 Fijian coups to the great dismay of members of the Fijian chapter and Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group (FANG), who were at the forefront of anti-coup protests. See De Jong, ‘“Our Pacific Through Native Eyes”’.

⁴⁴ Teresia Teaiwa, ‘bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans’, The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 101.

⁴⁵ Teresia Teaiwa, ‘For or Before an Asia Pacific Studies Agenda? Specifying Pacific Studies’, in Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning Across Asia and the Pacific, ed. Terence Wesley-Smith and Jon Goss (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 116.

⁴⁶ Vijay Naidu noted this contradiction at USP, ‘Well, it seems that USP is involved with and is doing Pacific Studies without openly laying claims to be doing it: indeed, one is tempted to say doing it in a rather circumspect, even surreptitious, way’. Vijay Naidu, ‘No Pacific Studies, We’re USP’, Journal of Pacific Studies 22, no. 1 (1998): 191.

⁴⁷ Epeli Hau‘ofa, Kisses in the Nederends (Auckland: Penguin Publishing, 1987).

⁴⁸ Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, 152.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 148. This was further explored in his companion essays: Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Epilogue: Pasts to Remember’, in Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History, ed. Robert Borofsky (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 453–72; and Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘The Ocean In Us’, The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 392–410.

⁵⁰ Katerina Teaiwa, pers. comm., 22 Aug., 2022.

⁵¹ Teresia Teaiwa, ‘Militarism, Tourism and the Native: Articulations in Oceania’ (PhD thesis, University of California, 2001); Teaiwa, ‘bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans’. See, also, Teresia Teaiwa, ‘Articulated Cultures: Militarism and Masculinities in Fiji during the Mid 1990s’, Fijian Studies 3, no. 2 (2005): 201–22; and Teresia Teaiwa, ‘Postscript: Reflections on Militourism, US Imperialism, and American Studies’, American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2016): 837–53.

⁵² Teresia Teaiwa, ‘Reading Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism and the “Polynesian” Body’, in Inside Out, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Sydney: UTS Review, 1999), 260.

⁵³ Teaiwa, ‘bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans’, 259.

⁵⁴ Teresia Teaiwa, ‘What Remains to Be Seen: Reclaiming the Visual Roots of Pacific Literature’, PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 730–6.

⁵⁵ Teaiwa, ‘Our Rising Sea of Islands’. While here I focus on the NFIP movement, for an excellent contribution on the ways in which trans-disciplinary Pacific Studies scholars ‘seek to enact a decolonial agenda within and beyond universities’, see Bianca Hennessy, ‘The Possibilities of Decolonial Pacific Studies: Learning from an Oceanic Genealogy of Transformative Academic Practice’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2022).

⁵⁶ Greg Dening, ‘A Poetic for Histories’, Performances (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996); Chris Ballard, ‘Oceanic Historicities’, The Contemporary Pacific 26, no. 1 (2016): 96.

⁵⁷ Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’.

⁵⁸ Tagi Qolouvaki, The Mana of Wansolwara: Oceanic Art/Story as Protest and Decolonial Imagining (Honolulu: Hehiale, 2015), https://hehiale.com/2015/04/27/the-mana-of-wansolwara-oceanic-artstory-as-protest-and-decolonial-imagining/ (accessed 15 Dec. 2022).

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement’, 185.

⁶¹ ‘Ulysses and Friends Relive Memories’.

⁶² It is important to note that some scholars have been charting the relationship between nuclear resistance, media, and aesthetics in the Pacific. E.g., Jessica A. Schwartz, Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021); Rebecca H. Hogue and Anaïs Maurer, ‘Pacific Women’s Anti-nuclear Poetry: Centring Indigenous Knowledges’, International Affairs 98, no. 4 (2022): 1267–88; Tiara R. Na‘puti and Sylvia C. Frain, ‘Indigenous Environmental Perspectives: Challenging the Oceanic Security State’, Security Dialogue 54, no. 2 (2023): 115–36; Michelle Keown, ‘Waves of Destruction: Nuclear Imperialism and Anti-nuclear Protest in the Indigenous Literatures of the Pacific’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54, no. 5 (2018): 585–600; and Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

⁶³ Joy Lehuanani Enomoto, ‘AELÕÑ IN AIBOJOOJ: Visual Reclamation of Marshallese Self-Representation’ (MA thesis, Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i Manoa, 2020).

⁶⁴ Enomoto, ‘AELÕÑ IN AIBOJOOJ’; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Planetarity: Militarized Radiations’, in DeLoughrey, ed., Allegories of the Anthropocene.

⁶⁵ Robert Seward, Radio Happy Isles: Media and Politics at Play in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 29.

⁶⁶ Kambati Uriam, In Their Own Words: History and Society in Gilbertese Oral Tradition (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 1995), vii.

⁶⁷ Unaisi Nabobo-Baba, Knowing and Learning: An Indigenous Fijian Approach (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 2006), 125.

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ Julian Aguon and Maya Soetoro, ‘Butterflies and Birdsong: On Radical Listening’, Matsunaga Institute for Peace, Youtube video, 1:00:15, 6 May, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLKzODQXY (accessed 15 Dec. 2022).

⁷⁰ Seward, Radio Happy Isles.

⁷¹ Noelani Arista, ‘Ka Waihona Palapala Mānaleo: Research in a Time of Plenty. Colonialism and the Hawaiian-Language Archives’, in Indigenous Textual Cultures, ed. Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson, and Angela Wanhalla (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 45.

⁷² Laura Ann Stoler, ed., Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

⁷³ Pacific Peoples Action Front, Conference for a Nuclear Free Pacific Proceedings [audiocassette] (Pacific Peoples Action Front, 1975) (accessed 15 Dec. 2022).

⁷⁴ Ibid.

⁷⁵ Ibid.

⁷⁶ Teaiwa, ‘Our Rising Sea of Islands’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Gender, Media and Cultural Studies, School of Culture, History & Language at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University under the Australian Government Research Training Program (AGRTP) Domestic Fee Offset Scholarship; and International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Geneva under the Critical Nuclear Weapons Scholarship Grant.

Notes on contributors

Talei Luscia Mangioni

Talei Luscia Mangioni – Department of Gender, Media and Cultural Studies, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. [email protected]