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This article calls for transdisciplinary, experimental, and decolonial imaginations of climate change and Pacific futures in an age of great planetary undoing. Drawing from our personal and academic knowledge of the Pacific from West Papua to Samoa, we highlight the need for radical forms of imagination that are grounded in an ethos of inclusivity, participation, and humility. Such imaginations must account for the perspectives, interests, and storied existences of both human and beyond-human communities of life across their multiple and situated contexts, along with their co-constitutive relations. We invite respectful cross-pollination across Indigenous epistemologies, secular scientific paradigms, and transdisciplinary methodologies in putting such an imagination into practice. In doing so, we seek to destabilise the prevailing hegemony of secular science over other ways of knowing and being in the world. We draw attention to the consequential agency of beyond-human lifeforms in shaping local and global worlds and to the power of experimental, emplaced storytelling in conveying the lively and lethal becoming-withs that animate an unevenly shared and increasingly vulnerable planet. The wisdom of our kindred plants, animals, elements, mountains, forests, oceans, rivers, skies, and ancestors are part of this story. Finally, we reflect on the structural challenges in decolonising climate change and associated forms of knowledge production in light of past and ongoing thefts of sovereignty over lands, bodies, and ecosystems across the tropics.

A poem of the Pacific, women and mythology. "Look to the East and you may meet whom I see."

In 2014, the importance of providing all young Australians with opportunities to be actively engaged with and literate in the cultures and languages of Asia continues to be evident in curriculum documents and the media. Whilst there is wide spread agreement that the study of Asian perspectives is important for the successful future of many young Australians, one could question why none of the countries located to the east of Australia have been mentioned in either the Melbourne Declaration (Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs, 2008) or the Australian curriculum, as these countries are also some of Australia’s closest neighbours. If Australia, as a nation, is truly aiming to develop its young people to be global citizens through the teaching and learning of different cultures and beliefs, then it does not seem unreasonable to say that young Australians also need to develop an appreciation for their East-side neighbours. However, as it stands the curriculum is argued as a crowded place; adding might result in the loss of something else. This article demonstrates how the French language classroom can be used as a means to contribute to developing the international-mindedness of young Australians in regards to their East-side neighbours without adding to the crowding of the current Australian Curriculum.

What is the value of heritage? A source of explosive emotions which oppose the “value” of so-called Western expertise – history of social and human sciences and constant reevaluation of the heritage market – versus the values in “becoming” of the people who recognise themselves in this heritage and who claim it as a foundation for an alternative and better life? In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different groups in the Pacific reinterpret their heritage in order to redefine their singular values as cultural subjectivities: individual, collective and national, diasporic or transnational in the case of some Indigenous networks (Festival of the Pacific Arts, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, etc).

This paper opens with a historical survey of the imaginary representation of islands in Western literature and then proceeds to a selective account of the island imaginary in largely ‘middlebrow’ writings and photography about the tropics. Complexities and paradoxes in the significances and semiotics of islands can be found in much writing about the Pacific islands of tropical Australia. E.J.Banfield largely established the paradisal perspective on tropical islands and extolled the lifestyle of the ‘beachcomber’. The often challenged ‘truth claim’ that ‘the camera cannot lie’ is most pertinent to Hurley’s work: what we see there is not only a speculum but more often a spectacle of the island imaginary; indeed the staging and replication of content so as to reflect what Hurley wanted to see in his subjects amounts to the substitution of a hyperreal, which then establishes itself in the discourse of the tropical island imaginary. Norman Lindsay tapped into some persistent motifs of the island imaginary: the excitement created by shipwreck and survival; the romance and salacious possibilities afforded by the attractions between a heroine and her suitors; and the realities of human nature stripped of civilised manners. Paradoxically, the popular works of Ion L. Idriess problematize the boundaries between material fact and textual discourse, tapping into what may well be a paradigm for the island imaginary in general—a space where contraries multiply and fantasies materialize. Lastly, Frank Clune’s ‘counterfeit adventures’ similarly play around persistent binaries and stereotypes in the island imaginary, and perpetuate a reification of the complexity and elusiveness of their subject.

Two phenomena in particular offered hints to early nineteenth-century geology about dating the antiquity of the earth: volcanos of the kind discovered at Pompeii, and coral rock of the kind discovered, above all, in the tropical Pacific. This paper surveys the growth in knowledge of coral between the theories offered up by Johann Reinhold Forster (who accompanied James Cook on his second voyage of 1772-1775) to those more or less authoritative ones published by Charles Darwin in his Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs of 1842. Inputs both religious and secular are included, because the Biblical element imaginatively accompanied, and sometimes stimulated, the more strictly empirical endeavours of scientists. What was needed for nineteenth-century geological and biological theories to gain a footing was a new vision of time, and coral was a 'natural chronometer' of momentous importance in demonstrating how old the earth must be.

This lecture is in some ways the ‘lost’ chapter of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009), one eventually not written because the projected author could find not enough literary material even in that vast Pacific Ocean, or perhaps found – as mariners have – only far separated specks in that ocean. Yet Australian literature about the nation’s Pacific littoral and the islands within the ocean and the ocean itself is varied, considerable, and often eccentric. Our greatest drinking song is Barry Humphries’s ‘The Old Pacific Sea’. The Japs and the jungle are the hallmarks of fiction, poetry and reportage of the Pacific War of 1942-5. New Guinea has attracted such writers as James McAuley, Peter Ryan, Trevor Shearston, Randolph Stow and Drusilla Modjeska. The short stories of Louis Becke are the most extensive and iconoclastic writing about the Pacific by any Australian. Yet the literature of the Pacific littoral seems thinner than that of the Indian Ocean. The map on the title page of Rolf Boldrewood’s A Modern Buccaneer (1894) shows those afore-mentioned specks in a vast expanse of water. What aesthetic challenges have Pacific writing posed and how have they been met? Have the waters of the Pacific satisfied Australians as a near offshore playground but defeated wider efforts of the imagination?

If one should imagine a map of production locations for dive films or films set on tropical islands since the 1960s, it would likely show a trend towards the southern hemisphere and more recently towards Queensland.1 Creative industries development in Queensland has been stimulated partly by state bodies, namely the Pacific Film and Television Commission, and Screen Queensland; and the presence of Warner Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast, and filmmakers have also been attracted more recently by production offsets from Screen Australia. There is dim connection to the classical geography of the Antipodes as the underside of the world and a place of monsters.

The defence of Australia during the Second World War in the Pacific lay in the north of the continent: from Broome and Darwin to Cairns and Townsville. After the Japanese military swept through South East Asia, they were at Australia's backdoor. Initially, there was a quiet period where little appeared to be happening. Then a rapid build-up of Allied military strength began. Cairns, the closest city to the conflict; was only 1000 kms from Port Moresby and Papua New Guinea, and the war that raged in the Coral Sea and Melanesia. The hostilities were closer to the people of Cairns than their State capital, Brisbane, 1800 kms to the south. Roads, bridges, airfields and port facilities had to be greatly improved. All this and trying to keep Allied soldiers from quarrelling - the scene was set for the transformation of the sleepy tropical township of Cairns, where sugar, tourism and fishing held sway, to a busy centre converting to a forward base for the defence of the nation.

In the Home Box Office mini-series Band of Brothers (2001), one of the soldiers on a troop ship bound for England remarks: "Right now some lucky bastard's headed for the Pacific, get put on some tropical island, surrounded by six naked native girls, helping him cut up coconuts so he can hand feed them to flamingos". This paradisiacal view of the Pacific and tropical areas has existed for centuries, and despite European settlers' developing familiarity with the area, it is a misconception which has continued to be propagated in war films set in the tropics. These war films depict the tropics as antipodean utopias which become corrupted by the ravages of war. Thus, while many of these films attempt to display war realistically, they still hold to the historical view of the tropics as unspoiled and pure—until, of course, war intrudes onto the scene. These films rarely examine the effect of the war on the local inhabitants, but rather deal with soldiers coping with the disjunction between their preconceived notions of the area and the reality before them. Crucially as well, war is depicted as a greater crime against nature (both human and environmental) when fought in the tropics rather than in Europe. This view is promulgated in the representation of battles fought in these films. In films set in the Pacific theatre during World War Two, and more recent ones set during the Vietnam War, the battle for American and Australian soldiers is as much about coping with their surroundings as with fighting the enemy, who are often rarely seen, or only viewed in long shot. War films set in the tropics depict 'war as hell' because of the environment, which is by turns remote, mystifying, and generally rural, rather than urban, 'civilised' and familiar, as it is in the case of the majority of war films set in Europe.

Hypertext Archive of the Tropics. Prelimary themes: Travels in the Tropics; A Promise of Gold and Silver; On the Heat in Africa; Tropical Hallucinations; Aborigines, Kangaroos and Coral Reefs; Toucans and British MPs; Insects: the Curse of Tropical Climates; Tameness of the Birds; A Mexican Panorama; Birds of Paradise; The Equatorial Seasonal Pattern; Crossing the Equator; Tropical Conservatories and Hothouses in the Nineteenth Century; The Congo; A Surrealist on the Great Barrier Reef; The Stellar Heaven of the Equator; Crocodiles in Verse; The Northern Australian 'Wet'; Palm-Wine Drinking