The Pacific runs against the East Coast of Asia. It surrounds the archipelagos of Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia. It brushes past Australia and Papua New Guinea. It envelops Aotearoa New Zealand and a myriad of tiny Island nations — Samoa, Fiji, and Tuvalu — oases in a desert of water. It embraces the territories of Tahiti, New Caledonia and Hawaii, ongoing victims of colonialism still ruled from distant metropoles. It crashes against the great western coastline of the American continent, with its soaring mountains, parched deserts, and verdant jungles. This wide blue expanse touches an immense diversity of people and places, with definitive implications for them all.
This is a basin living in the shadow of multilayered and persisting colonialisms: Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch; French, British, American and German; Australian, Japanese, Chinese and Indonesian. This is a basin still living within the rolling effects of the 20th century Pacific War, a conflict often overlooked in its own century, but that has come to define the following. This is a basin that, with the rise of China and the declining prominence of Europe, has become one of the axes of global geopolitics. This is a basin enclosed by the great ring of fire, uniquely affected by climate change, where whole countries are facing literal obliteration by sea-level rise. This is a basin within which we live on unceded First Nations land. And yet this is a basin that Australians seem to pay little attention to…
When I came up with the idea of Honi Soit: the Pacific Edition, these eddying thoughts washed across my mind. I wanted to invite reflection upon our place in the world as inhabitants of Australia: our place in the Pacific. I hope the articles within these pages will make you, dear reader, think deeply on the swirling pan-Pacific forces that shape our lives. Inside this edition of Honi you will find a brief collage of the complexity, diversity, violence and ingenuity of our Pacific home. From colonialism in Timor and the Bikini Atoll, to the experiences of international students living across the Pacific from their homelands. From the massive natural forces of Volcanism in the Philippines to the similarly devastating impact of anthropogenic climate change on islands across the Pacific. From the legacy of our University’s links to American violence in Vietnam to the legacy of Paul Gauguin French Polynesia. From our sibling student publications in Aotearoa New Zealand, Land of the Long White Cloud, to Glass magazine, much closer to home in south-eastern Queensland. I hope these perspectives can make you stop and think more often about where we live, why our home is the way it is, and what we can do about that.
