No Island is Doomed
- Reef Shark
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
Scott Hamilton
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 paintings by Seleka artists that reflect on the tsunami and its aftermath.
Seleka was formed in Havelu, a suburb on the swampy outer edge of Nuku'alofa, in the aftermath of Tonga's revolutionary turmoil in 2005-2006. Its founder and guiding spirit is Tevita Latu, a painter of immense talent and charisma. Seleka's sometimes provocative art and behaviour have led observers like me to consider them a Tongan answer to the Dadaists or Surrealists.
Anyone can join the club, and members meet regularly to drink kava, talk, and make art late into the night. The Selekarians have exhibited their work and given art classes in many countries. They have angered some conservative Tongans by reinventing many of the rituals surrounding kava drinking—they let women drink, they often dye their kava, and they sometimes drink it from a bowl with a toilet lid—and by making artworks that critique religious intolerance, corruption, and other local problems. But other Tongans respect the quality of the club's art and the way Selekarians have introduced marginalised groups to art.
Although the tsunami of 2022 forced the abandonment of 'Atatā, the island had long been under siege from the sea. Storms and high tides had regularly knocked down fales and carried off crops. Farmers had noticed the island's water table becoming salty. Exiled 'Atatāns have been provided with new houses and some land to farm, but their new village is located in the interior of Tongatapu, distant from the ocean where many of them made a living by fishing. Parents worry about the effect of exile on their children. They can share stories and songs from 'Atatā's past with their young ones, but the ocean that figures so prominently in those stories and songs is no longer a part of daily life. They fear that their children may be drawn into the drug culture and gangs that have become problems on Tongatapu.
The fate of islands like 'Atatā should make Aotearoans reflect on the climate crisis. We are a nation of islands, and we live on the same liquid continent as Tongans. Most New Zealanders grasp that global warming poses a threat to Pacific island nations, but they often show a lack of understanding of the nature of that threat.
I've talked with quite a few inhabitants of this country who honestly believe that global warming will wipe out all tropical Pacific nations. They either imagine that Pasifika people all live on tiny atolls, or else they believe that rising temperatures will make the region uninhabitable.
There's also a common misunderstanding about the size of Pacific islands. They are not all tiny, or even small. For every chain of fragile atolls the Pacific boasts a sprawling high island, like Espiritu Santo or Malaita. The Pacific is a place of mountains as well as reefs.
Ocean currents and winds mean that the Pacific islands will not face the severe increases in temperature that global warming will bring to landlocked regions like Uttar Pradesh or New Mexico. It will be cities like Lucknow and Phoenix, not Port Vila or Honiara, that will be menaced by 'wet bulb' conditions of very high heat and humidity. Of course, the ocean will bring other sorts of dangers. Pacific islands are already being hit with more cyclones in the twenty-first century, and increasing sea temperatures mean rainy seasons are getting rainier.
But if low-lying Pacific nations like Tuvalu and Kiribati die in the twenty-first century it will be because of Western hypocrisy, not climate change alone.
The West and other heavily industrialised parts of the world like China are responsible for the vast bulk of the carbon emissions that have caused the climate crisis, and thus have a moral obligation to help blameless nations like Tuvalu respond to that crisis. They also have the means to help atoll societies survive. They can create new islands and reinforce existing ones.
Few New Zealanders have heard of Hulhumale, but the island's story is worth knowing. Hulhumale is one of a number of new motu built from scratch in the low-lying nation of the Maldives. It was created between 1997 and 2004, at a cost of about one hundred and thirty million New Zealand dollars. The island covers four squate kilometres, and has a population of around sixty thousand. By building it, the Maldives government eased overcrowding on its nearby capital island of Male.
The Maldives is not the only country that has been building islands. A brand new archipelago has appeared in the South China Sea. China's government has made reefs into islands by dredging huge amounts of sand then adding soil and concrete. The new islands have become naval and air force bases in an area where Beijing claims sovereignty. The controversy over China's expansionism has obscured its achievement in turning water into land. One of its new islands covers six square kilometres, which makes it twice as large as Funafuti, the capital atoll of Tuvalu.
From Aotearoa to Melanesia, Pasifika peoples have a long history of creating small-scale artificial islands. When Europeans and Americans began visiting Malaita in the nineteenth century, they found thousands of people living on artificial islets off its western coast. Malaitans piled up stones on barrier reefs, and later poured sand and soil over the stones. The artificial islands made good bases for fishermen, and were also used as refuges during wars on the mainland.
Many other tropical Pacific peoples built their own islands, but the practice could also be found in temperate Polynesia. The town of Matamata began as an island-pā on a vast swamp. There were many similar pā and kāinga in the same region. Māori quarried small stones from the foothills of the Hūnua Ranges, then moved them by waka across the sea and up the Waihou and Piako Rivers. The stones became islands. Other fortified islands were built in the riverine lakes of the Waikato region.
There is nothing alien, then, about the practice of island-building. It is a part of the traditions of many Pacific peoples. To save nations like Tuvalu island-building needs to be done with twenty-first technology, on an unprecedented scale. But it can be done, as the Maldives and China have shown.
New Zealand and Australia have the wealth, technology, and moral obligation to build islands for the atoll peoples of the Pacific, and to reinforce existing islands. But Australia is instead offering Tuvaluans a scheme that takes the loss of their homeland for granted. Canberra has created a special visa for Tuvaluans who want to flee their homeland. A number of commentators have lauded the visa as an act of compassion, when it is really a betrayal.
Like all Pacific peoples, Tuvaluans have evolved their culture in a dialogue with their islands and seas. Their environment finds its way into their dances, their architecture, their politics, and their food. Their economy is still anchored in subsistence farming and fishing, and in the distribution of wealth through kin networks. Egalitarianism is an ancient value. Tuvalu has never had a king. Even chiefs have had limited powers, compared to their counterparts on many larger Polynesian islands.
Tuvaluan culture will struggle to survive if Tuvaluans are dispersed across a dry continent where the capitalist mode of production reigns. But we know that Tuvaluan culture can survive on a new tropical island. Neli Lifuka's classic book Logs in the Current of the Sea book tells the story of how he and other migrants from the overcrowded Tuvaluan atoll of Vaitupu bought and settled the previously uninhabited Fijian island of Kioa after World War Two, using money they had earned working for the American military.
The settlers of Kioa worked hard to build villages and to clear land for crops. They fished the new waters using the skills and technology of their ancestors. British administrators sent the New Zealand war hero DG Kennedy to oversee the development of Kioa. But Kennedy was a domineering alcoholic, and Kioans eventually expelled him. Today Kioa thrives as a Tuvaluan island in Fiji. The flags of both countries fly from its wharf, and its people are bilingual. Kioa shows what can be achieved when a people have control over their departure from one island and their settlement on another. Logs in the Current of the Sea should be seen not only as a memoir but as a guide to the future.
Between 2014 and 2016 the New Zealand Navy did intensive work on Tuvalu's capital atoll that hinted at the potential for repairing low-lying islands. Navy engineers oversaw the filling of a series of huge holes that American forces had dug in Funafuti during World War Two. The holes had become filled with stagnant water, and were affecting the stability of surrounding land. Tuvaluans had lacked the machinery to repair them. By filling the holes with sand dug out of Funafuti's lagoon, the engineers not only stabilised the crowded island but expanded its area.
Another positive example comes from Tonga, where the European Union has paid for a series of groynes in lagoons. The groynes have been designed to create small waves that will wash in sediment and thus build up coasts. Tongan ecologists asked for the groynes because they had noticed that seawalls could actually speed up the erosion of coasts, by stopping sediment from reaching shores. In some parts of Tonga locals have complemented the groynes by planting mangroves, trees with an ancient reputation for holding soil and protecting coasts.
The projects in Funafuti and Tonga and the island-building elsewhere show us how the nations responsible for the climate crisis could come to the aid of Pacific societies threatened by that crisis.
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