Futa Helu / "The ocean of humanity is fed by the rivers of many cultures."

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

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

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

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

Reviewed by Paul Janman Photo by Paul Janman RS: Paul Janman is a film maker, photographer, and writer. His Tongan Ark, which celebrates the work and thought of Futa Helu, has been called one of the greatest films to come out of Oceania. This essay draws on his pathbreaking work as a psychogeographer of Tāmaki Makaurau and Aotearoa. You walk from the nearby Onehunga Mall to Princes Street on a bright autumn afternoon and the gallery has gone black. Not painted black: built bl