Video & Audio

A brother and sister duo from the FSM impressed judges in a recent art contest with a powerful message calling for conservation and unification across Oceania. “Now is the time to go hand in hand, we must come together as one; protecting our tuna,” Raychel and Richard Narruhn exclaim in their video submission to the PNA World Tuna Day Art and Talent Quest. “We are one people. We share a common source.”

Under Operation Grapple, the United Kingdom conducted nine atmospheric nuclear tests in 1957-8 in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony - today, the Republic of Kiribati. Nearly 14,000 British, New Zealand and Fijian military personnel staffed the nuclear test sites on Christmas Island (Kiritimati) and Malden Island, supported by dozens of Gilbertese labourers and two English women from the Women’s Voluntary Service. In this seminar, Nic Maclellan presents research drawn from his forthcoming book “Grappling with the Bomb” (ANU Press), based on archival research and interviews with nuclear survivors in Fiji, New Zealand and Kiribati.

Micronesia has shown escalating rates of suicide since the late 1960s. The suicide epidemic was sometimes attributed to changes in island social organization driven by rapid modernization. During the past year, a research team directed by the speaker gathered new data on suicide in FSM, completing a database documenting a full 50 years of suicide rates on the islands. 

Entering its fifth year with 17 songs from nine countries the Pacific Song Competition (PSC) was a true representation of Asia-Pacific’s diversity of song and culture. PSC welcomes countries around the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand and Australia in the south-west, up to Russia and Canada in the north and down to Ecuador and Chile in the south-east. The aim of the competition is to give musicians and performers a world stage that they might otherwise, not be able to attain. The PSC final series takes place by Web-stream on a virtual stadium with the final in November each year. PSC allows anyone to enter the competition. There is no cost involved to enter.