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There Once Was an Island: Bringing Southern Pacific Perspectives to the Climate Change Conversation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Andrea E Murray
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“What if your community had to decide whether to leave its homeland forever?” The documentary film There Once Was an Island (http://www.thereoncewasanisland.com/): Te Henua e Nnoho (On the Level Productions 2010) asks this universal and archetypally complex question of its subjects and its audience. An all too real story about sustainable ecological heritage and cultural continuity is played out on a tiny Pacific atoll called Taku (pronounced Tau'u'u, also known as The Mortlocks). Residents of Taku live on a very small island located 250km northeast of Bougainville Island, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Filmmakers Briar March (director) and Lyn Collie (producer) follow the lives and decisionmaking processes of three people who have grown up on Taku and are struggling to reconcile themselves to the likelihood that their entire Polynesian community of 400 people will be forced to relocate to Melanesian Bougainville, the nearest seat of government. Satty, Endar, and Telo each take a different position on the joint problems of relocation and cultural preservation. The film highlights the interplay of post-colonial PNG politics and the expertise of scientist outsiders, showing how this dynamic influences these three individuals’ unique and occasionally conflicting perspectives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 13 , Issue 50 , December 2015 , e3
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2015

References

Editor's Note:

This is the third article in a three-part special issue titled “Pacific Islands, Extreme Environments” edited by Andrea E. Murray. Murray's review of a documentary film about the present-day consequences of climate change in Papua New Guinea provides an ethnographic complement to the other two articles in the series: Ilan Kelman's piece on the challenges of multi-scalar governance in Small Island Developing States, and Tarique Niazi's inquiry into the fate of so-called “climate refugees” in the Asia-Pacific. In this review, Murray argues for the power and urgency of multimedia research and reporting in places most immediately affected by rising sea levels. The author also questions the pervasive belief that certain dwindling human populations and cultural practices can be “saved” by relocation to a more densely populated mainland.