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Futa Helu / "The ocean of humanity is fed by the rivers of many cultures."
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Building Links
RS: Introducing our Reef Shark Links page. These links are designed to help explorers of Oceanic art, literature, and thought, especially palangi readers who may have grown up outside Oceania's indigenous cultures. Keep an eye on the page as new links will be added regularly. Many people live in Oceania without understanding the region. The majority of Pakeha New Zealanders and Caldoche New Caledonians, for example, are still living mentally in Europe. The Javanese settlers o
Reef Shark
2 days ago
Book of the Week: The Bond of Time
John Pule, Canterbury University Press, 2014 Reviewed by Scott Hamilton The Bond of Time was written in 1983 and published in a small edition in 1985. It was republished in 1998 by the Pacific Writing Forum in Fiji, then appeared in a new edition with an introduction by Jeffrey Papamoa Holman in 2024. This is the cover of the 2024 edition; it features Pule's painting The Great World (to Ha). RS: Massey University Press has just published This Must Be the Island: Liga Hanai e
Reef Shark
Aug 26
No Island is Doomed
Scott Hamilton Hilinga Mea'a o te Maramataka exhibition poster, 14 Aug–19 Sept 2026, Fresh Gallery, Ōtara. At Fresh Gallery in Ōtara the Seleka Club has been holding an important exhibition. This year the Selekarians have been giving art classes to children in the new village of Atata Si'i, whose people had to flee the low island of 'Atatā after it was devastated by the eruption and tsunami of 2022. Visitors to Fresh Gallery can see the work that the children made, as well as
Reef Shark
Aug 21
Book of the Week: kluge
pip adam, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026 Reviewed by Scott Hamilton 'No one else in New Zealand is writing like this' says Philip Matthews in an admiring review of pip adam's new novel kluge for Newsroom. Like the creators of modernism a century ago, pip adam is trying to find new ways of writing suitable for a new century. And like them she is addressing the crises of her century. The academic industry that has grown up around modernist masterworks like TS Eliot's Th
Reef Shark
Aug 19
Greece Never Existed
Andre Breton and Keiji, with notes by Scott Hamilton RS: This new translation of Andre Breton's poem Rano Raraku was supplied by Indonesian-Australian activist and linguist Keiji, whose translated documents from Indonesia's 2025 uprising were featured in an earlier Reef Shark post. Notes by Scott Hamilton follow the poem. Rano Raraku How beautiful the world is when Greece never existed when the Persians did not pass My horse is grazing at the bottom of a crater The bird-men f
Reef Shark
Aug 14
Pat Hanly's Dance
Scott Hamilton This photo, taken from Te Ara's website, shows Pat Hanly working in 1977 on Prelude to a Journey, a mural for Auckland's international airport. Shamefully the mural was removed in 1996 when the airport was redesigned. In 1975 Pat completed another set of huge paintings for the University of Auckland's medical school. Called The Seven Ages of Man, they still grace the school. I was thinking about Pat Hanly on the weekend because the bright winter sunlight pourin
Reef Shark
Aug 12
Forgetting the Pacific Connection
Scott Hamilton In an article published in the May-June issue of New Zealand Geographic, Kate Evans asserts that 'across Polynesia, pā are extremely rare'. I don't think her magazine has many readers in Rapa Iti, which is just as well, because they'd be pretty confused by that claim. Rapa Iti island is famous amongst archaeologists for the spectacular terraced forts that top almost all its hills. Visitors to Rapa Iti have often remarked on how much the island resembles Aotearo
Reef Shark
Aug 7
From Mussolini to Britney Spears to Mayan Glyphs: a Talk about Translation with Jack Ross
Scott Hamilton Jack Ross has been one of Aotearoa's key experimental writers in the twenty-first century, exploring many different literary forms and drawing on many cultures. This is the second in a series of interviews in which Ross lifts the lid on his toolbox, sharing techniques that can be alternatives to the hegemony of a dreary realism in Aotearoan literature. SH: You've been a prolific and very adventurous translator, tackling many different writers from many differen
Reef Shark
Jul 29
Talking with J Wiremu Kane about Tolkien, History & Queerness
Scott Hamilton J. Wiremu Kane is a prolific writer whose work has appeared in many Aotearoan periodicals. In 2022 he was the Emerging Māori Writer in Residence at Pōneke's International Institute of Modern Letters. He is interested in writing fantasy fiction that does justice to the history of Aotearoa and the experience of tangata whenua, and in this exchange he draws on his deep knowledge and distinctive interpretation of the work of JRR Tolkien. SH: Kia ora Jared, here are
Reef Shark
Jul 22
Remembering Glenn Jowitt
Scott Hamilton It is twelve years this week since the sudden death of Glenn Jowitt, who was only fifty-nine. Jowitt took hundreds of photographs that documented the worlds Pasifika peoples made after migrating to Tāmaki Makaurau and other New Zealand cities, and he also journeyed to societies like Tonga and Mangaia to photograph the worlds that the migrants had left behind. But Jowitt's career began in his native Canterbury, and there is a seldom-noticed continuity between th
Reef Shark
Jul 21
India Before & Beyond Modi: Two Quick Notes on Two Big & Neglected Subjects
Scott Hamilton This statue of Manilal Doctor stands in Port Louis, the capital of Mauritius. In Mauritius and later in Fiji, Doctor acted a lawyer and advocate for indentured workers. Working with guidance from Mahatma Gandhi, he played a vital role in freeing thousands of Indo-Fijians from a system not far removed from slavery. After being deported to New Zealand, Doctor became a tenacious advocate for Indian independence here, before returning to his homeland. Doctor deserv
Reef Shark
Jul 13
Notes from a Badland
Scott Hamilton RS: The italicised passages in this text come from comments left on social media about Dome Valley. Kawakawa part politely as we enter Dome Valley. The plant's pitted green tongues seem to be trying to say something, but when I stop to listen I can only hear the wind's beautiful nonsense. I wonder whether I will be able to impress Robert with this place. He has been telling stories about the outback of his native Canada, about kayak rolling and lumberjacking. T
Reef Shark
Jul 8
A Ballad of 2026
Murray Edmond RS: Reef Shark will be running an interview next week with the important Aotearoan poet, scholar, fictioneer and dramaturge Murray Edmond. This is a new work by the author of Fool Moon and Shaggy Magpie Songs. A Ballad of 2026 Nostalgic for the mess we made and have now lost mud deep water brown white skins kauri logs floating down the little town’s beginnings materialized at 2am as if the 1970s were back in sepia in the motel of dreams my eyes pirouette a drown
Reef Shark
Jul 3
The Academy of Ignorance
Scott Hamilton Paula Morris is the founder and director of the Academy of New Zealand Letters, which created the list of the twenty greatest works of fiction from New Zealand and the South Pacific being criticised in this article. These twenty works were part of a larger list of one hundred works of fiction created in the southern hemisphere. The Academy of New Zealand Literature has published a list of the hundred best works of fiction from the southern hemisphere, in an eff
Reef Shark
Jun 28
And the Seventh Dream of Horus is Tagaro
A short short story by Felice Quail I dreamed last night that I was standing by Tikapa Moana o Hauraki, the ancient airport of this island, the place where millions of kuaka gather every autumn, waiting for a mysterious order to fly to Kamchatka & Alaska. It was the sound I had noticed first, as I sloughed through the mangrove mud off Miranda Road. Instead of the quick soft trochees of the kuaka's call I heard a loud, continuous whining. I emerged on the stone beach & crouche
Reef Shark
Jun 22
From Comic Books to Shields
Scott Hamilton This image appears on the back cover of Chris Boylan and Jessica Lindsay Phillips' The Man Who Cannot Die. The book was published by JM Fogel Media in 2021. When I am in Auckland Museum's Pacific Masterpieces gallery with kids I like to ask them a question: can you spot the superhero? The gallery hosts one of the many shields that artists in New Guinea have adorned with the figure of the Phantom, a comic book superhero created by American Lee Falk in 1936. Chri
Reef Shark
Jun 18
Clifton Crais & Hongi Hika
Scott Hamilton I was excited to find Hongi Hika in the list of characters at the beginning of Clifton Crais' acclaimed new book The Killing Age. But Crais gets the Nga Puhi warlord wrong, and his error points to a wider problem with his book. The Killing Age ranges across the world of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and describes the immense violence violence that accompanied European colonialism, the industrial revolution, and the export of guns. Crais
Reef Shark
Jun 11
Words from the Archipelago of Fire
Keiji & Archipelago of Fire This photograph from August 2025 appeared on the website of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It was taken in Jakarta. Young women were an important part of the uprising in Indonesia. RS: Keiji was involved in political and social activism in Indonesia in the 1990s and the 2010s. This is an edited email, in which she discusses the 2025 Indonesian uprising and the texts she has supplied from the Indonesian revolutionaries calling thems
Reef Shark
Jun 9
Bild a Rod! Or: Why We Love Hiroki
Scott Hamilton Hiroki Sakai with team mates and fans. The photo was taken in February 2025, after Sakai had signed up to play in the 2025/26 season. Sakai's kindness to young fans has endeared him to Auckland FC supporters. Often he has stayed long after the end of home games, signing autographs for kids. Sakai has played for Japan at three World Cups. Winston Peters congratulated Auckland FC after the club won the final of the trans-Tasman A League competition. But our city'
Reef Shark
Jun 7
The End of Heroes
Scott Hamilton RS: Reef Shark wants to champion the art and lifeways of Oceania, which preserve ways of thinking, acting, and being that have been marginalised or abolished in the 'wealthy' countries of the northern hemisphere, where capital and technology rule. But as well as documenting Oceania we will publish analyses and excoriations of the failed civilisations of the West and China. 1: 'All that is solid melts into air' I can't stop looking at this photo, which has been
Reef Shark
Jun 5
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