Albert Wendt / 
"All is well in Lava, so spake the Flying-Fox."

I am Pākehā, grew up in South Auckland, and now live in Puhinui/ Warkworth. I have a PhD in Sociology and have published eight books and hundreds of shorter pieces of writing. My life changed when I began to visit Tonga in 2009. I taught at 'Atenisi, the impoverished but enormously influential university founded by the great Tongan polymath Futa Helu, and met writers, artists, dancers, and philosophers. Since then I have visited many other societies in Oceania, and have experienced again and again the thrill of discovering a new culture, a new literature, a new way of living. 

 

Reef Shark is motivated by love and frustration. I love the cultures of Oceania and the diverse literatures, art traditions, and bodies of thought they have created. I'm fascinated by the different social structures and institutions that have evolved in different parts of the region in response to challenges that local conditions have created. 

 

I think that Oceania is both marginal and central to the 21st century world. On the one hand the region exists far from the world's largest cities and on the fringes of the capitalist system that dominates the world. But that marginality gives Oceania a unique importance, because the region is home to ways of living, thinking, and creating that have been destroyed or restricted by capitalism and by the environmental degradation and parasitic technology the system has brought. Oceania is not a backwater but a great reservoir. 

 

The indigenous modes of production that still flourish in many Pacific countries show that capitalism is not the only possible economic order. The 'island time' that tourist advertisements laud contrasts with the rigid, mechanical time that prevails equally in Europe, America, and China. The human alienation from nature that is widespread in 'wealthy' countries contrasts with the symbiosis that has been achieved in many parts of Oceania. 

 

The 'alternative modernities' that were created by indigenous societies in places like 19th century Hawai'i and Aotearoa and that are rising again in the 21st century suggest that modernisation and economic development do not have to take the path seen in the northern hemisphere. And the newer peoples of Oceania—the Fijindians, the Japanese of Hawai'i, the Pakeha of Aotearoa—have produced thinkers and creatives who are adapting the cultures of their ancestors to the unique environments of Oceania. It is in the best of Pākehā art, music, and literature that European high culture makes a new beginning, purging itself of the poison of the nineteenth century. 

 

But I feel frustration as well as love, because the rest of the world's understanding of Oceania is still formed by colonial cliches. And the fragmentation of the region, a legacy of colonial borders and also self-interested local elites, means that creatives, thinkers, and activists in one society are often unaware of their counterparts elsewhere. I want to try to make this site and the Reef Shark print journal into a non-profit platform where work from across Oceania and from the past as well as the present can be shown and discussed. The richness of Oceania means that the material here will be diverse: poems will appear alongside archaeological reports, and documents from archives will sit next to photographs or paintings made recently. Interviews will have the exploratory, extended quality of discussions around the kava bowl of 'Atenisi University. I am not an expert on Oceania: I am a perennial beginner, a Pakeha exploring the region, conscious of the newness of my people's place here and the distance between my own background and experiences and those of some of the people I write about and interview. Reef Shark is a journey, and I hope to stay on the journey for the rest of my life.