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

In May 1972, on the rolling green slopes of the University of the South Pacific (USP) campus stood a small makeshift stage adorned in masi cloth. Ulysses, the kings of ‘flower power’ in Suva, hailed from ‘Soul City’ – a nickname for the urban and multicultural neighbourhood of Toorak where they had grown up. After weeks of late-night jam sessions with whatever instruments they could get their hands on, playing by ear in their rehearsal space that they called the ‘Tin Shack’, Ulysses took the stage before a live audience for the very first time. On stage that evening, in front of a large crowd of eager youth, was Anil Valera on vocals and bass guitar, Henry Foon on organ keyboards, Raoul Deoki on drums, and Colin Deoki and Patrick Chung on lead guitars. Wearing unbuttoned shirts, denim flares, and platform shoes, the band began to strum the chords of their first nuclear protest song, ‘Destruction of Humanity’. Anil sang the chorus passionately: ‘polluting and poisoning an ocean means the destruction of humanity’.¹ They combined this with their own songs and popular covers of Jethro Tull and Deep Purple, despite the Leslie speaker blowing out.² It was the remarkable debut of what would become one of Suva’s most popular and experimental bands, defying the genres of folk, jazz, disco, and funk, with a rotating set of members from different ethnic backgrounds, a residency at Lucky Eddies bar, and a successful career lasting all the way into the 1990s, making Ulysses a household name.

Ulysses was just one of many bands playing at the Spops festival, sentimentally recalled by many of its young organizers of the Against Testing On Moruroa (ATOM) Committee as ‘Fiji’s Woodstock’.³ While the launch was retrospectively deemed a ‘tremendous performance’ as a side event for the first-ever South Pacific Festival of the Arts, it was one of many instances of early creative protests that remain mostly overlooked in established histories of what is now known as the Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture (FESTPAC).⁴ In addition to anti-nuclear marches in Suva throughout the two weeks, this artistic intervention was critical given that international visitors and the greater public of Suva were visiting the campus, for one of the very first times since it had opened, in order to see the show. As then USP student Vanessa Griffen wrote in her review of the festival: ‘If Suva came alive for the Festival, so miraculously, did USP’.⁵ The lyrics of the protest song, slating French nuclear colonialism in the Pacific and the atmospheric tests on Moruroa that had been occurring since 1966, may have been alarming to some of the overseas visitors to Fiji. Picket signs in front of food shacks read: ‘United people of the Pacific, Stop French Nuclear Pollution of our Paradise!’, ‘We condemn French Pacific nuclear test[s]’, and ‘Where is the French conscience? Stop testing now!’.⁶ But this critical consciousness, with concerns spanning from the Vietnam war to the decolonization of the greater Pacific, was the new norm for the many students who had ventured far across the Pacific to get an education at the region’s new leading institution.

Attending the entire festival, visitors would have witnessed a myriad of traditional and contemporary Pacific dances over the week, as Vanessa Griffen recounted, ‘the grace and gaiety of the Cook Islanders, to the quiet moving drama of [Aboriginal peoples]’.⁷ Unsurprisingly, however, there was no Mā‘ohi dance troupe from the islands of French-occupied Polynesia at the festival. Absent from the programme was the world-famous Tahitian tamoure. Originally intending to send ‘a team of 30 dancers’, all that had arrived was a cable from Tahiti’s governor that travel was ‘too expensive’ and that Tahiti would be sending its director of tourism, who still had not arrived.⁸ Fiji’s Minister for Social Services Jonati Mavoa had said, ‘It is, of course, a problem that every country taking part faces’ and stated rather suggestively, ‘I think one can find some other reason why they did not attend’.⁹ Woefully, this was not the only time the French had purposefully barred the possibility of Mā‘ohi people reuniting with the rest of their Pacific family.

I begin with the tale of Ulysses at ‘Fiji’s Woodstock’ for three reasons. First, to illustrate the transgressive spirit, critical flair, and cultural power of Pacific grassroots movements that have been marginalized to the footnotes within the discipline of Pacific history.¹⁰ Second, to appreciate the expansive concept of Pacific solidarity in the ‘golden era’ of the 1970s that encompassed a loose counter network of youth and civil society comprising Indigenous, native-born, and naturalized citizens of Island states, who shared a deep commitment to the sovereignty of those across Oceania, which upwardly shaped the policies of independent governments.¹¹ And, third, to gesture towards a bleak legacy in which colonized Indigenous peoples were viewed as errant threats to the empire; the possibility of these ‘centrifugal forces’ coalescing thus required colonial restrictions on movement, surveillance, and sometimes even incarceration.¹² Colonial retaliation towards any attempt to reinvigorate ancestral connections across Oceania was immense, and recovering stories such as these attempts at regionalism enlightens how we exist now in relation to each other in a Pacific where Mā‘ohi Nui and many others, including West Papua, Kanaky, Hawai‘i, Guåhan, Aotearoa, and the lands now called Australia are still not liberated.¹³

It is here that I wish to situate these strategies of creative education of nuclear colonialism within a genealogy of resistance led by and for Pacific peoples.¹⁴ Through a montage, I sketch some of the creative campaigns and pedagogical strategies of both the ATOM Committee from 1970–6 in Fiji and the regional Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement from 1975 onwards. I consider how the creative intellectual contributions by Pacific youth and civil society have not been sedimented within academic discourses yet remain highly influential to the discipline of Pacific Studies. Here, I propose both as nascent visions of applied grassroots Pacific Studies. I then suggest 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 my 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.

The Student Revolt, from the ATOM Committee to the NFIP Movement

What does this [Nuclear Free Pacific] mean? It means that all nations must be brought to agree that we, the peoples of the Pacific, will never consent, and will never cease to resist the location of atom-bombs in and around the shores of our home-ocean. (Junior Member for Naiqaiqi, 1973)¹⁵

Formulating within, beside, and beyond university campuses throughout Oceania from 1970, the articulation and movement for a nuclear-free Pacific began with the ‘student revolt’.¹⁶ In May, a small group of concerned members of the Student Christian Movement came together, including Francis Saemala, the president of the USP Student Union and first-ever Solomon Islander student at the university.¹⁷ The students were concerned about environmental pollution and further nuclear tests scheduled to be undertaken on Moruroa Atoll that year, and invited Dr Graham Baines to speak. An Anglo-Australian environmental biologist at the USP, Baines had been conducting a citizen-science project involving a Geiger counter on Fiji’s rainwater to measure the presence of the radioactive isotope Strontium-90. Through this work, he found the amount of radioactivity had increased fivefold in Suva. Baines told the students that although the 1970 test series at Moruroa could not be stopped this year, he suggested that ‘even a small amount of dissent can grow … if all the territories of the South Pacific including Australia and New Zealand, protested together, something might be achieved’.¹⁸

Two weeks after Fiji’s first popular protest meeting, where about 500 people packed Suva Civic Centre’s lower auditorium, the ATOM Committee formed to carry out the protest and passed several resolutions to encourage the incoming Prime Minister Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara and his independent government to champion the issue. They formalized the committee with the election of Dr Graham Baines as president and Dr Suliana Siwatibau, an Indigenous Fijian lecturer in botany and genetics at the USP, as secretary.¹⁹ ATOM was composed of ‘concerned individuals from the Pacific Theological College (PTC), The University of the South Pacific (USP), the Student Christian Movement (SCM), and the YWCA, and was from its inception backed by the Fiji Council of Churches (and later the Pacific Council of Churches) and the University of the South Pacific Students' Association (USPSA)'.²⁰ Its core leaders included Young Women’s Christian Association Executive Director Amelia Rokotuivuna, University chaplain and organizer for SCM Reverend Akuila Yabaki, and other educators and community organizers like Professor Walter and Bette Johnson, Dr Julian Hartley, and Ruth Lechte.²¹ ATOM steered a student revolt and became a group that even Australian Intelligence took note of from its early formation in 1970.²² As President Graham Baines reflected: ‘Fiji was a pretty quiet society at the time, so this became the only thing that was activating the people’.²³ Over the years, the ATOM Committee built and sustained networks with Tahitian independence leaders like Francis Sanford, John Teariki, and supporters such as Father Walter Lini, Bengt and Marie-Thérèse Danielsson, and Jean-Marie Vidal.

Combined with student ‘foot-soldiers’ such as Francis Saemala, Betty Schutz, Vimal Madhavan, Bharat Jamnadas, Rajendra Prakash, and Rajendra Singh to name a few, the environmental activist network represented a microcosm of Pacific nationalities and ethnicities from across the region, where Indigenous Fijians worked in solidarity with Indigenous and non-Indigenous settlers in Fiji.²⁴ Through the humanitarian lens of Christian spirituality and workers and women’s rights, justice for nuclear-affected communities was foregrounded across the movement.²⁵ After their inaugural declaration, ATOM’s primary concern was to ‘ban the bomb’ and educate the public that environmental pollution was a serious threat to humanity on Moruroa, in Fiji, and across the greater Pacific through the contamination of the marine food chain.

By 1972, when Ulysses took the stage, anti-colonial tactics of creative education were fundamental to the success of the intergenerational ATOM Committee. With the help of academics, the scientific communication of radiation exposure was central to the publicity campaign.²⁶ The creative communication of complex scientific ideas, combined with pertinent matters of colonialism and environmental racism associated with nuclear tests, allowed ATOM to popularize the issue to the Fijian public beyond the university, from the village to the government levels. In addition to a ‘reasonably successful’ campaign that included ‘press releases, information kits, leaflets and news sheets’, ATOM would use a diverse range of educational strategies to connect with Pacific peoples.²⁷ According to ATOM member Vimal Madhavan, Suliana Siwatibau would host informal after-class meetings in university classrooms, writing on blackboards about the dangers of ionizing radiation from fallout from the French tests. Madhavan recounted that ATOM’s student organizing that stemmed from this was even treated with some suspicion by the Fiji police, who were concerned about what university students were up to. Police officers even buttonholed him after a class on one occasion, asking Madhavan if he would go undercover for them, an offer that he firmly refused!²⁸

The Ulysses Band, as friends of the movement, would sit and busk outside the Bank of New Zealand in Suva on Saturday mornings, playing original protest songs like ‘Destruction of Humanity’, ‘Not an Age of Wisdom’, and ‘Song for the Frog’ alongside ATOM, who educated shoppers on nuclear testing by dispensing leaflets and asking for coin donations for their campaign. As then USP student Claire Slatter reported for the YWCA, ‘the widespread concern about nuclear fallout in the Pacific gave rise to a spate of letters to the committee and to newspapers … protest songs and angry poetry’.²⁹ Non-violent direct-action protests through the Suva streets with placards, chants, and firebrand speeches were regularly undertaken, especially during months when the tests were taking place. On multiple occasions, protestors would blockade the offices of French airline UTA (which led to the triumphant expulsion of UTA operations out of Fiji), supported by the more militant trade unionists of the Fiji Trade Union Congress (FTUC). Protests would also encourage the boycotting of all French goods and services.³⁰ Memorable interventions into daily Suva life such as these sought to put pressure on the Fijian government to act in the South Pacific Forum and United Nations to urge French President Georges Pompidou to end nuclear testing in Mā‘ohi Nui.

One of the people who was heavily involved in the movement was a student of I-Kiribati and German heritage from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, Betty Schutz. Schutz grew up in Tarawa, near an American military base, and moved to Fiji as a young girl where she would eventually enrol at USP. British and American nuclear tests had also taken place at Kiritimati Island and Johnston Atoll, and she recalled being told: ‘You may see some lights in the sky but don’t be scared!’.³¹ At university, she became close friends with a Canadian named Christopher Plant. Together with ATOM, Plant facilitated tactical black comedy theatre methods to popularize the nuclear issue.³² To explain the hazards of nuclear fallout and weapons to an audience, the ATOM Committee toured several provinces of Viti Levu. In the 1970s, the roads were still unpaved, and it took nearly six hours to get from Suva to the western side of the island.³³ Using a slapstick style of comedy, students would use exaggerated physical activity to emphasize the intentional violent consequences of nuclear testing, from radioactive fallout to the possibility of nuclear accidents. One example of their village theatre was the satirical play ‘Monsieur Pompidou’,³⁴ ridiculing the French on everything from their president to their rather aquiline noses but also showing the potential consequences of nuclear colonialism upon the Pacific family.

SCENE 1

Fijian family’s dining room, Suva, Evening. FATHER, MOTHER and DAUGHTER sit at the dining room table about to have dinner together.

FATHER is conservative and the very stubborn head of the house who works for the government. DAUGHTER is a young student at the University of the South Pacific, one of those ‘pesky radicals’ and passionate about ending the nuclear tests at Moruroa Atoll. She wants to convince her FATHER of this. MOTHER is quietly supportive of DAUGHTER when she attempts to raise the issue of the health consequences of radioactive fallout.

DAUGHTER Imagine you are sitting in Viti, only 2,000 miles from Moruroa and the wind is going to bring this fallout! It’s going to get in your rainwater, your milk and your kakana!

FATHER Isa … Don’t bother me with that trash! We’ve got enough worries here already, and we don’t need one more phony one from you and your rabble-rouser friends from the university!

DAUGHTER No, I can prove it! Kerekere!

FATHER How are you going to prove it?

DAUGHTER goes to the kitchen and returns with a beautiful lemon meringue pie (shaving cream) and places it in the middle of the table.

DAUGHTER When the big bomb goes off, what do you think is going to happen?

FATHER Well, I don’t know!

DAUGHTER brings a root-crop from the kitchen and drops it into the lemon meringue pie, covering the entire family from head to toe!

ALL *Scream and carry on!*

DAUGHTER See, fallout does impact us in Viti!

SCENE 2

FATHER, MOTHER and DAUGHTER reconvene in the living room. DAUGHTER attempts to explain the possible accidents that could happen with the transfer of nuclear warheads from France across the entire Pacific Ocean to Moruroa Atoll.

DAUGHTER These chemical materials are not safe for us or our ocean. What do you think is going to happen when these materials are transported across the Pacific? What if something bad happens? What if something leaks? It has happened before!

FATHER Eh! These scientists know what they are doing, if they didn’t they wouldn’t be scientists. I’m sure we are in safe hands!

DAUGHTER brings a tray from the kitchen of three very tall and full glasses of water. As she hands him the tray, the tray drops and splatters everywhere! Water goes all over the father and he jumps up in shock!

DAUGHTER Well accidents do happen!³⁵

Through playful and transgressive actions, ATOM alerted Fijian communities to the environmental hazards of nuclear testing and transfer. This occurred in conjunction with a vibrant social life that was only possible through Fiji’s independence in October 1970. Public variety shows interspersed bands, performances, discussions, and other items. For American youth Giff Johnson, who tagged along to many ATOM events because of his parents, the willingness of communities to raise awareness of the nuclear issue was most vivaciously demonstrated when an Indian man who ran puri stands placed his hand into boiling oil to draw a crowd, after which ATOM students discussed French nuclear testing.³⁶ Indeed, ATOM was a key part of a broader movement of critical thinking about Pacific education that happened outside, next to, around, and in response to the formalized academy in the Pacific. In addition to their international work in pushing the Fijian government to take the case to the South Pacific Forum, the International Court of Justice at the Hague, and the United Nations, ATOM laid the foundation for the NFIP movement, which carried on its creative legacy.³⁷

Following other political predecessors such as trade union networks and church groups, the regional grassroots political movement in the Pacific Islands, the Nuclear Free Pacific movement, connected a diverse constellation of activists who intended to stand for the people rather than the establishment. Predominately funded through church and YWCA networks, the movement dreamed of creating a Nuclear Free Pacific Zone (which later became the watered-down Rarotonga Treaty of 1985), and developed the Peoples Charter for a Nuclear Free Pacific, which brought together ‘students, anti-nuclear campaigners, trade unionists, government officials, church-based groups and anti-colonial activists’ from across the Pacific.³⁸ The first highly successful conference took place in Fiji in April 1975, while there was a brief pause in French nuclear tests, as the French government prepared to shift from atmospheric to underground testing. The conference was a pivotal moment, as there was a change in priority from environmental concerns to racism and colonialism.

The movement became known for its trademark grassroots conferences, secretariat, and associated alternative press. As ATOM dissipated, it was succeeded by the Continuation Committee for the Nuclear Free Pacific Conference (CCNFPC) and the more independence-focused Pacific Peoples Action Front (PPAF), with a regional anti-colonial newspaper, Povai, written and edited by Fijian conference attendees Vanessa Griffen and Claire Slatter.³⁹ This was followed by two conferences, one for the environment and another for Indigenous peoples in Ponape (1978), organized by the PPAF and Pacific Conferences of Churches (PCC) from Suva. After a conference in Hawai‘i (1980), the movement was renamed the NFIP movement to reaffirm a commitment to Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination movements within the nuclear-free vision. As Samoan historian Marco De Jong notes in this special issue, it was here that a ‘pro-Indigenous movement stressing the need for self-determination and celebrating the shared aspects of Pacific cultures: language, collectivity, love for the land, non-Western spirituality and respect for elders’ emerged.⁴⁰ The organizing committee was formalized in 1980 with the establishment of the secretariat named the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre (PCRC). This was followed by further conferences in Vanuatu (1983) where the charter was adopted, the Philippines (1987), Aotearoa/New Zealand (1990), Fiji (1996), Mā‘ohi Nui/French Polynesia (1999), and Tonga (2003) until its disbandment around 2006.⁴¹

The NFIP conferences were important kinship gatherings and pedagogical spaces of deep learning and radical listening through an exciting collision of ideas vocalized by many diverse people of different political leanings. The conferences should not be romanticized: while theorized as trans-Indigenous exchanges of kinship and symbolic solidarities, they were often powerful emotional experiences that included generative conflict, open debates, critical discussion, and reflection (it must be said, though, people did fall in love, danced a lot, and sang a bit too much karaoke).

The PCRC secretariat had a permanent staff and moved from Hawai‘i to Aotearoa/New Zealand, and then to Fiji where it operated until the early 2000s. This centre organized conferences that brought together delegates from states and territories that spanned the Pacific. In the early days, there was a scattering of newsletters and bulletins to inform the movement: in Hawai‘i, PCRC, following in the footsteps of Povai as the voice of the movement, published a regional newsletter, Pacific Bulletin, while the Micronesia Support Committee generated information on Guåhan, the Northern Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, Belau, and what became the Federated States of Micronesia. NFIP activists produced Pacific News (Sydney) and Nuclear Free Pacific News (Melbourne) in Australia, while in Vanuatu, West Papuan activist and Black Brothers musician Rex Rumakiek edited the educational news bulletin also named Povai for Vanuaku Viewpoints. As PCRC found its feet, the Australian publications were merged into Pacific News Bulletin, a monthly journal first published in 1986 in Sydney and, from 1999, in Suva – which kept members connected through the alternative press. Comparable to the only two other independent regional magazines of the time, Pacific Islands Monthly and Islands Business, the Pacific News Bulletin represented the grassroots voice of the region, coordinated by and for the NFIP’s broad base of members.

The PCRC Board was subdivided into eight sub-regions with elected representatives. Air travel was expensive, so for each conference, a board member often nominated and invited recognized delegates from their region to attend. Differing groups of people, changing locations, and long timeframes in between meant a fluctuating agenda. A counter network of empire in constant flux, the NFIP has been wrongly described as a loose coalition, signalling its formal disorganization. Instead, it should be viewed as both a formal organization and a broader ephemeral movement with ideas that had far-reaching impacts across the Pacific. The official organization (sometimes called NFIP/PCRC) was structured and organized, with a secretariat, paid staff, an elected board, and its aforementioned monthly newsletter which published for decades (without fail, even during the Fijian coups). Beyond this, however, there was a vast movement that identified with the NFIP concept and often used the name although not part of the NFIP/PCRC network. This included several Pacific Rim groups that focused on environmental anti-nuclear issues but were often reluctant to take on the full anti-colonial agenda. PCRC was proudly Indigenous-led and autonomous, and more Indigenous and church-driven than groups such as Greenpeace, which were a key part of the wider campaign.

Former PCRC staff member Nic Maclellan described the group as a ‘motley crew’ of young and not-so-young troublemakers across the region, often on the periphery of society and sometimes maligned by their governments due to their truth-telling, disruptiveness, and unrelenting criticisms of higher power structures.⁴² Though the movement is noted for regular rifts between environmental and anti-colonial factions, as well as those within settler states and newly independent states, it remained a transformative space for many, with shifting values and plentiful conversations around what constituted justice for the Pacific.⁴³ With organizing that spanned over three decades, as evidenced by the evolution of the ATOM Committee to the NFIP/PCRC, the movement was engineered by the people and for the people, utilizing creative and popular methods of communication to mobilize communities. Sustained through the kinship gatherings of conferences and the alternative press, the political beliefs and approaches were shaped by a commitment to independent, intellectually rigorous, and multi-scalar analyses of Pacific struggles against colonialism. Located outside and beyond the bureaucracy and institutional learning environments of the formalized academy, the ATOM Committee and NFIP/PCRC can be described as a nascent form of applied Pacific Studies that, in turn, critically inspired the discipline from the 1990s onwards as it transformed from generic area studies into a trans-disciplinary phenomenon.

The Anti-Nuclear Struggle in ‘Our Sea of Islands’

NFIP operates on the premise that whatever happens in one part of the Pacific Ocean affects the whole ocean, the continentals living on the edge of it, and the Islanders living in the middle of it. (Teresia Teaiwa, 1994)⁴⁴

Pacific Studies shall be interdisciplinary, account for indigenous ways of knowing, and involve comparative analysis. (Teresia Teaiwa, 2010)⁴⁵

If we take Teresia Teaiwa’s prescription of what Pacific Studies ‘shall be’, the creative campaigns and pedagogical strategies of both ATOM and the PCRC/NFIP may resemble a nascent vision of applied grassroots Pacific Studies. While these early students or activist scholars from universities such as USP would not necessarily identify themselves as Pacific Studies practitioners or ‘lay claims’ to doing Pacific Studies, the holistic strategies of creative education of their communities were, importantly, both interdisciplinary as well as localized and regional (or comparative) in scope.⁴⁶ They also foregrounded Indigenous epistemologies and commitment to place, while simultaneously articulating a bottom-up regionalism in their collective solidarity work. Through information-sharing channels ranging from regular conferences to the alternative press, these connections were nurtured and sustained through grassroots education of one another’s struggles.

The intellectual contribution of the NFIP certainly inspired Pacific Studies as it moved from a pragmatic form of area studies dominated by non-Pacific experts (divided according to disciplinary modes of enquiry such as Pacific Anthropology, Pacific History, and so forth) and became a more delineated discipline in the 1990s that was rooted in the empowerment of Pacific peoples and holistic forms of Pacific knowledge production. Both Epeli Hau‘ofa and Teresia Teaiwa, two cornerstones of Pacific Studies, highlight the solidarity of nuclear-free campaigning as a central part of their regional vision. The importance of grassroots education is acknowledged in Hau‘ofa’s 1987 satire, Kisses in the Nederends, where one of the protagonists leaves the world of development to pursue life as an activist in the NFIP movement.⁴⁷ Hau‘ofa’s later 1993 ‘Sea of Islands’ essay warns of Western discourses of ‘belittlement’ most visibly seen in the victimhood ascribed to the nuclear-affected communities of the Marshall Islands – communities that he viewed as a microcosm of all Pacific peoples, who are ‘in danger of being confined to mental reservations’.⁴⁸ He also recalled the importance of grassroots regionalism (that is not marred by the so-called ‘glorious’ Pacific Way), which he charts as present in the ‘golden age’ of 1970s independence that was lost by the 1980s. As the Fiji coups imposed harsh limits on academic freedom of speech, democracy, and good governance across regional institutions, especially the USP, throughout this reflexive piece Hau‘ofa’s main concern was centring grassroots critical perspectives and knowledges from below rather than perpetuating the state-based positions of those in power.⁴⁹

On the other hand, Teaiwa was present at the 1996 NFIP conference in Fiji and made a film called Freedom 2000 documenting the campaigns and experiences of activists.⁵⁰ Teaiwa was prolific in her academic and poetic work on ‘militourism’ in the Pacific, most thoroughly conceptualized in her PhD thesis and an oft-cited journal article ‘bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans’.⁵¹ She even engaged in critical fabulation of a subsequent chapter of Hau‘ofa’s Nederends some years later in 1999 whereby the protagonists ‘collaborate on an anti-militourist tamoure’ with her daughters becoming ‘spies and agents for the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement, accomplishing the decolonization’ of many Pacific states.⁵² Teaiwa reflected that reading Nederends offered the decolonial possibilities of an imagining proposed by the movement for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific that:

[I]nspired me to move from reading to writing, to write and extend the realism of the immediate. To write performance and activism. Against militourism. This is my fantasy … and it can become a reality.⁵³

Both Hau‘ofa and Teaiwa are not just favoured elders but also unique pioneers of Pacific Studies as a discipline in how they blended Pacific theory, grassroots perspectives, and creative practice. An appreciation for ‘reclaiming the visual [and otherwise] roots of Pacific literature’, which was extended to musical, oral, and other creative modes of knowledge production, was legitimately embedded within their teaching pedagogy and critical Pacific Studies programmes at the USP Oceania Centre of Arts and Culture and Victoria University of Wellington respectively.⁵⁴ In addition to this, both founded and mentored artist collectives like the Red Wave Collective in the 1990s and Youngsolwara Pacific in the 2010s, the latter articulating strong concern for regional and Indigenous issues, ranging from nuclear test legacies and demilitarization to the liberation of West Papua.

Preceding the 1990s, numerous other Pacific intellectual thought leaders engaged with the NFIP movement. Such Pacific intellectuals include, but are by no means limited to, Father Walter Lini, Hilda Lini, Déwé Gorodé, Susanna Ounei, Gary Foley, Amelia Rokotuivuna, Vijay Naidu, Claire Slatter, Vanessa Griffen, Simione Durutalo, Roman Bedor, Elicita Morei, Darlene Keju Johnson, Titewhai Harawira, Tuaiwa Hautai Eva Rickard, Davianna McGregor, Noa Emmett Aluli, Haunani Kay-Trask, and countless others who worked behind the scenes. Conversely, some activists were deliberately not part of academic circles, hence the potential for academic extractivism or whitewashing of these movements by outside narrators. This intellectual genealogy indeed informs and leads inter-disciplinary, and even what Katerina Teaiwa describes as ‘trans-disciplinary’, Pacific Studies concerned with Pacific Islander empowerment, self-determination, and taking knowledge beyond the academy in critical and creative ways rather than retaining it within the walls of the ivory tower.⁵⁵ Here, in an ideal world, a critical and creative Pacific Studies is based on community control and rejects a Pacific Studies that is amputated from context to serve the agenda of development and strategic initiatives by and for outsider interests.

In telling nuclear histories of the Pacific, the dismissal of our vast creative chronicle is a disservice and injustice to Pacific history. The NFIP movement’s creative chronicle, for example, is astounding but underappreciated and frequently sidelined in scholarly disciplines due to a dependence on documentary archives that are taken to be the sole verifiable fact. In line with Pacific historian Greg Dening’s ‘poetic for histories’ and Chris Ballard’s ‘oceanic historicities’,⁵⁶ I argue that Pacific scholars ought to take stock of vernacular, performative, poetic, embodied, and sensory archives, and encourage scholars to engage in making accessible and creative histories or ‘activist art/story’, just as those in our grassroots movements did.

Like the radical joy of ‘Fiji’s Woodstock’ and the ‘student revolt’, we must find the creative chronicle of our histories. Creating our own art/story provides a culturally apposite entry point to upend ‘belittlement’ and aggrandize our histories and remind us of our ancient and contemporary cultural power.⁵⁷ As Fijian-Tongan poet and scholar Tagi Qolouvaki reminds us: ‘We grieve, heal, and imagine decolonial possibilities through activist art/story, in the community; stories are all we are, have and all we can be/imagine’.⁵⁸

In the following section, I explore the creative possibilities of the craft of Pacific history in my own research, and then discuss how I employ audio-documentary in teaching as a means for recirculating the vernacular knowledges of this movement. Here the transmission of sense-memory is vital, as too is attendance to embodied activism that is ‘decolonial, contagious and muscled’, recalling the feelings of excitement in the 1970s when many Pacific nations were on the brink of political independence.⁵⁹ This is especially critical for NFIP activists and academics in Fiji who were ‘detained, assaulted, injured and threatened’ after the military coups of 1987 (and onwards) but also those everyday people who nowadays endure the risk of death, incarceration, media censorship, and restriction of any form of political gathering without a permit from the government.⁶⁰ To take stock of the Pacific’s creative revolution through art/story allows for better understanding of both the stakes and nuances of decolonization: whether it be recalling the smell of ganja in the air, the high of clubbing all night at the Golden Dragon, or the remarkable weight of drenched bellbottoms in wet-season.⁶¹

The Creative Chronicle and the Reclamation of Art/Story

When tracing the creative chronicle of the Pacific’s nuclear resistance and beginning to think how this may be retold through art/story, I noticed that besides the documentary archive, information was communicated most emotively through our most hegemonic sense: the visual. The bomb’s intense flash seems to impair our collective recollection and imagination of the event.⁶² There is cumulative violence in the constant repetition of the military photographic and filmic representations of the mushroom cloud, which generates a nuclear sublime in awe of Western prowess.⁶³ Through the aesthetics of light, the atomic bomb is often a metaphor for the so-called gift of Western modernity, which is further supplanted by medical photography of survivors in misery and suffering.⁶⁴ Due to the travelling light, when a nuclear weapon explodes, you see it immediately but can only hear it many seconds and sometimes minutes after the blast. Surprisingly, what you see in early American films is an artificial sound manufactured by Hollywood to amplify its destructive potential.

Instead of using movements to generate my own theory of resistance, it is important to appreciate the seldom-acknowledged stories and songs of resistance as spectacular forms of knowledge production, especially in quotidian ways like ‘Fiji’s Woodstock’. In this instance, in my consideration of doing Pacific histories, I preferred to reorder the hierarchy of senses as a form of both methodological inquiry and Pacific Studies pedagogy. Given the hyper-obsession with the visual, I selectively privilege a different sense: the aural. I also select a different frequency of the radiation spectrum: the electromagnetic.

After winning the Jaycees Battle of the Bands in Suva in 1975, a live recording of ‘Destruction of Humanity’ was recorded by Ulysses, probably on a cassette tape, the democratizing technology of the time in comparison to vinyl. An anonymous person may have purchased it at a local corner store (after a long conversation about local music with the clerk) or bought it directly from the band members themselves.⁶⁵ Eventually, this person brought it to a Greenpeace pirate radio station in Aotearoa/New Zealand. From this, an unknown DJ illegally used a transmitter to take and encode it into a string of data, modulate and amplify it onto a sine wave, and receivers through small antennas took and decoded the sine wave to play a song. Like many other Pacific bands, Ulysses affected airwaves throughout the Pacific through frequency modulation and megahertz. Parallel to nuclear weapons, the radio was another popular technology brought to the Pacific by colonial powers during World War II, transforming the relationship of everybody to everybody. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Pacific peoples found in radio (which remains the most important and trusted technology during natural disasters today), and, more broadly, the creative arts and the alternative press, the means to transform their engagement with a broader international polity and insert themselves as controllers of their own narratives.

As Kambati Uriam asserts, Pacific cultures are rooted in oral tradition, and ‘oral traditions contain a close approximation of the past as lived, experienced and understood in the people’s own words long before the coming of the Europeans to our shores’.⁶⁶ Through storytelling, tok-stori and talanoa, we passed on our histories from one generation to the next. Sound’s narrowness as a medium creates intimacy between the speaker and the listener. Unaisi Nabobo-Baba has claimed that ‘indigenous peoples speak with authority about their world views, knowledge and epistemology: it is hearing of their voices that may be tenuous’.⁶⁷ Responding to Gayatri Spivak’s influential question, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, Nabobo-Baba asks a more appropriate question: ‘Has “the [dominant] other” the capacity to hear their voices and decipher their silences?’.⁶⁸ What happens if we continue this line of thinking and revalue our Pacific listening cultures? Chamorro writer and international human rights lawyer Julian Aguon views this departure as critical, stating: ‘A radical listening to the lives of those that are more vulnerable than yourself. That is how we do it, that is how we rescale, we have to do it in a gentle way and a more loving way and a more attentive way’.⁶⁹

Hearing a song on the radio has the potential to make the loneliest person in the world feel less lonely. As radio in the Pacific has created new regional, national, and local registers of communities, here it can be used to make creative histories of the NFIP movement.

Throughout this research journey, I have been concerned with the commodification of grassroots knowledge through paperwork and text: Who am I to speak for or refract the words of the movement solely through my authorial voice? I saw this as a limitation and steadfastly believe that Pacific history does not need to be locked away in another monograph (this is not what is urgently needed, given the Pacific is neither nuclear-free nor independent). So, instead, opting for the role of disc jockey, this research offers a speculative way of making our histories accessible through listening. Through audio documentary of Niuklia Fri Pasifik Redio, I use art/story, remixing archival sound recordings of the Nuclear Free Pacific conference participants with contemporary interviews. Here, the relationship between the alternative press that informed radio broadcasts can be recalled, as past clandestine and pirate radio history channels in Melanesia did, such as Radio Free Bougainville, Radio Djiido in Kanaky/New Caledonia, and Radio Tanafo in New Hebrides/Vanuatu, as well as the other educational strategies of Pacific radio, including audio-storytelling and schools of the air.⁷⁰

I decided to do this when I found lost sound archives of the Nuclear Free Pacific conferences from 1975 and 1980. I had previously read the transcribed words of these activists of the Nuclear Free Pacific countless times in the documentary conference proceedings. However, sitting in the treasure trove of the Wong Audiovisual Center in Honolulu, listening to their words, and attuning to them, was an entirely different experience. Over the crackle of old audio cassettes, I listened carefully to what these voices were saying, and it was much more rewarding than sifting through bales of archival material. Unlike in the practice of reading, words were not inflected back to me as a researcher in my own mind’s voice. Instead, I was able to appreciate every accent, from Chamorro to Fijian-speaking English. I heard the audible gasps when people heard shocking information, the ‘hear hears’ of agreement, and people’s interventions when yelling from the back of the room. I noted when translators were required for people such as Japanese-speaking Micronesians and French-speaking Kanaks. I cringed while listening to a palagi New Zealander’s shrill voice when told something she did not want to hear and told to refer to the Fiji YWCA’s pamphlets on racism in the Pacific. I savoured every booming applause after people shared their truths. In line with historian Noelani Arista’s call for a ‘dialogic process’ of ‘ear-witnessing’ the archives, with the privilege of being able to listen to the recorded speeches in tandem with printed conference proceedings, I started to understand the multiple voices in the room and how these thought leaders were beginning to consider self-determination within the Nuclear Free vision.⁷¹ Just like the lyrics of ‘Destruction of Humanity’, so too were these words almost disintegrated. By re-activating and re-circulating these words through popular education, we can exemplify an alternate and engaging way of making Pacific histories.

These sound archives, correspondingly, ‘activate’ the documentary archives found in conference reports and periodicals. Historical research about nuclear era movements, especially contemporary histories, requires a more reciprocal relationship between the audio-visual, sonic, and documentary sources. Through such a mix, one may understand the emotional stakes that motivate peoples of the movement. It is also attentive to the reality that a lot of the DJs of this time also depended on the underground, alternative, counter-cultural, or Indigenous press as a means of gaining their understanding of global issues. These ideas were not communicated through people reading long, tired, academic articles with lengthy publication lead times. There was an immediacy in these periodicals, whether it was Vanuaku Viewpoints/New Hebridean Viewpoints, Seli Hoo, the Black News Service, Tia Belau, Micronesia Support Committee Bulletin, Pandanus Press, Nasiko, Nilaidat, Ondobondo, or Povai. Many of these people who were linked to the NFIP movement also had their own alternative and regional presses. Reactivating this material in creative ways is a means of de-commodifying Pacific knowledges.

Finally, sound archives, especially those in the form of cassette tapes like the ones I found in the Wong Audiovisual Center, face the risk of archival ruination and sonic decay.⁷² On average, tapes degrade 10–25 per cent over 10 to 25 years: sound and footage become skewed as the magnetic particles lose charge in a phenomenon called remanence decay. Meanwhile, reel-to-reel tapes and 8-track tapes can also deteriorate at some point. In saying this, there is immense beauty in impermanence and knowing that things said on the radio affected the airwaves throughout the Pacific. Things were spoken once and never recorded, but maybe they were never forgotten, maybe they got twisted into another truth. Sometimes they were retold and were only heard of by a friend of a friend around a kava bowl or adapted by someone else’s anecdote many years later. These NFIP tapes were strategically recorded though, with the intention of being re-played by those who missed the conferences or maybe future generations who wondered what the hell happened at these gatherings. The near ruination of these archives as activist records of the movement is something deserving of recuperation and appreciation by current and future peoples of the Pacific.

Niuklia Fri Pasifik Redio: A Speculative Artefact

The decolonial possibilities of doing creative histories are numerous. We may acknowledge the creative chronicle as important source material or historicities, but we also need to endeavour to create histories through Pacific ways of knowing, doing, seeing, and believing. The reproduction of art/story is therefore crucial. Attuned to the creative chronicle of research, I decided to create audio documentary to do this, entitled ‘Niuklia Fri Pasifik Redio’. It is a speculative exercise because, of course, there was never a singular regional radio station purely devoted to nuclear justice and self-determination issues throughout the Pacific. Here we can wonder together: What if there was? How can I create something out of what I have felt, seen, and heard in the audio-visual archives and how can we use it to reassert the Pacific legacy that fought for the liberation of our ocean?

When I embarked on this project, I was repeatedly reminded that it was important to do this work, as many of the elders of the movement were passing away. This was made extremely clear to me in July 2019 when I travelled to Palau for the Pacific Islands Field School with Professor Katerina Teaiwa, Dr James Viernes, and Austin Haleaypiy, and other students from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and the Australian National University, to be graciously hosted by Dr Patrick Tellei at the Palau Community College. I was incredibly excited to go to Palau, knowing their fight for their nuclear-free constitution, which was implemented in 1979 through eleven forced referendums because of United States military plans to convert their islands into a military base.

Dr James Viernes had reached out to the teacher and activist Elicita ‘Cita’ Morei to help us bring together some of the remaining NFIP activists, including Moses Uludong, Bernie Keldermanns, and Santy Asanuma. They sat and told our Pacific Studies students about the history of resistance against the United States, which was splitting the people of Palau apart. Their activism manifested in a myriad of ways: Moses Uludong published Tia Belau newspaper, Bernie Keldermanns spoke with women in the taro patches before every referendum, Cita Morei wrote poetry and helped her mother Gabriela Ngirmang of Otil A Belaud, Santy Asanuma protested in the streets of Palau. Keldermanns spoke of the fear she had over the persecution her family had faced, including the murder of her father – she remembered seeing the sun going down and wanting to hold onto it to stop it from ever happening. Morei spoke of the momentous day that the Palauan women of Otil A Belaud took their own government to the United States District Court. Our students were moved, and left knowing that they had witnessed a panel that would not likely happen again. A woman from the Palau Press reiterated to our group that it was a privilege to be able to access this information.

Understanding the imperative to recirculate these knowledges is urgent. The movement was a dynamic producer of anti- and decolonial Pacific knowledges, offering an abundant grammar for nuclear abolition, demilitarization, decolonization, and sovereignty that circulated between and beyond the islands of the Pacific. Here, I offer three examples from the cassette tapes that I regularly share with my undergraduate students so they too can understand the critical importance of NFIP and grassroots Pacific movements. They always leave my class understanding the gravity of the work of these thought leaders in standing up to empire.

I begin with the words of Amelia Rokotuivuna, the Fijian chairwoman of the first Nuclear Free Pacific conference in 1975. From the outset, she identified the aims of the conference in the NFIP’s maiden speech:

The aims drawn up by the planning committee reassert the right to self-determination of the Pacific people and our real struggle for liberation from the clutches of the imperialists. This struggle does not belong only to the countries still under colonial rule; it also belongs to the independent nations. It is our struggle to determine and create a new order which will define our relationship with each other and with the rest of the international community. The aims also exert the desire to preserve and create an environment in which we can grow to our full potential as individuals, as people and as nations. An environment, which is healthy and free from nuclear hazards and the threat of nuclear war. … The right of self-determination is ours. The right to develop as we choose is ours. The right to live and grow to our full potential in a peaceful and healthy environment is ours. And it is the hope of our planning committee that this conference will result in recapturing that power which is vital for the realisation of the right and creation of the new order.⁷³

Pete Thompson, a Kanaka Maoli student from the Department of Ethnic Studies based at the University of Hawai‘i, is another person whose words captured my attention. During a panel, he spoke about the need for self-determination while critiquing the ills of development:

I think sometimes this argument is always posed to us, you know, what are we going to do? You know, if we do not have the colonial oppressors leading us around and telling us what to do, what are we going to do is be free. You know, that’s what this is all about … this colonial throwing off the colonial oppressors and beating imperialism out of the Pacific. What we’re going to be is free, and that’s what counts. And if we make our mistakes, you know, in terms of developing our countries, then we’ll make the mistakes but let it be our mistakes rather than colonial mistakes, they may make a mistake and blow an A-Bomb then we don’t have any chances. So, the thing is, if we’re going to develop our own countries, let’s do it for ourselves, for our benefit, and not for the benefit of the imperialists and the colonialists who’ve been ripping us off for the last five to six hundred years in the Pacific.⁷⁴

Finally, the words of Guwamu and Aboriginal activist Cheryl Buchanan moved me, as she reiterated the persistent need for creative grassroots education to the conference:

One of the real problems that each one of us faces is what to do when we go back to our different communities. Now, ever since this conference has gone on, from what I can see, the majority of the time, the sort of language that has been used is not particularly what I would refer to as a people’s language … what I would like to see come from this conference is something really concrete, some, some way of being able to educate all of our people from all of the different areas on what nuclear business is all about … We arm ourselves not with guns, but with literature which is very simple and we spend as much time as we can just going and talking to all the people … So, if we’re going to start education, we start here right now before we even leave here and go back. And this is what we’re proposing from the Aboriginal delegation, is that at some stage during this conference, we do have a peaceful march, which really and truly indicates … unity amongst all the people that are here at this conference, because within this unity lies the strength. And that’s all what I want to say.⁷⁵

By interspersing these grassroots grammars through art/story, a fuller picture of the NFIP can be reimagined. Drawing from a creative chronicle allows for creative Pacific histories that activate students of the Pacific and beyond. Art/story can also re-sensitize us to what Professor Katerina Teaiwa describes as our genealogy of resistance in the Pacific.⁷⁶ It certainly does not fall on deaf ears in the current geopolitical climate as new nuclear threats such as the AUKUS pact, the Fukushima nuclear wastewater release, and escalating militarization of our region because of United States-China rivalry come into view. Rather than romanticizing the work of our intellectual predecessors, we can reveal their passions and dreams and consider the impacts they made on our Pacific worlds today. We can consider how both ATOM and the NFIP represented nascent forms of applied Pacific Studies, whose creative and pedagogical strategies inspired and were adopted by Pacific Studies as it became a rigorous transdisciplinary space from the 1990s onwards. Indeed, it does remind us of the potentials of grassroots Pacific knowledges in stirring the hearts, guts, souls, and minds of our people. Remembering the humanity and passion of our Pacific forebears who uncompromisingly defended their ocean from nuclear colonialism is undoubtedly more stirring than a journal article such as this one. Whatever it is, I wouldn't mind hearing more stories like ‘Fiji’s Woodstock’.

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.

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]

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’.