Indigenous Pacific Worlds
PANEL 16
Indigenous Pacific Worlds
Wednesday, 6 July 2022
11:45 am - 1:15 pm
Location ROOM 101
Panel Speakers:
Lily Yulianti Farid
Leigh Penman
Oli Acevedo
Moderated by: Laurel Mei Singh
Oceans as Archives. Archives of Oceans II
This panel is composed of team members of the Australian Research Council’s Laureate Program, Global Encounters & First Nations Peoples: 1000 Years of Australian History. Australia is an island continent until very recently you could only get here by sea. The researchers in the Global Encounters project are using a variety of archives to explore and interrogate ocean travel over the past millennia. We use the term archive in its broadest sense; it includes European language materials (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and French), First Nation textual sources (oral histories, material culture), botanical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence, amongst other traditional and non-traditional archival sources. The papers in this panel session will explore a range of historical and ongoing maritime engagements, and their archival traces.
Navigating the oceans through prayers, songs, and maNtras in Bugis and Makassar maritime traditions
Lily Yulianti Farid
For hundreds of years, seafarers from south and west Sulawesi, Indonesia have been archiving their knowledge and maritime traditions in songs, prayers, and mantras. This presentation will present how this knowledge and traditions are documented, archived, and managed in the digital era within the seafarer’s communities in South Sulawesi.
Lily Yulianti Farid is an Indonesian language, literature and society researcher, writer, translator and communication specialist with more than 20 years of experience in Indonesia, Australia, and Japan. She started her career as a journalist for Kompas, a leading newspaper in Indonesia in 1995 and later expanded her career into academic and creative fields. Lily has worked on engagements between Makassar and Northern Australia including a film and exhibition.
“New Guinea is not an Island,” or
the implications of the Dutch non-discovery of Torres Strait
Leigh Penman
One of the great geo- and oceanographical non-discoveries of the United Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the sea passage to the Pacifc Ocean. Hypothesised to lay between the lands they knew as New Guinea and Carpentaria, the passage had actually been known to indigenous mariners for millennia, and to the Spanish since 1606. This paper charts the consequences of this gap in VOC knowledge, in particular its implications for Indigenous Australian encounters with Company employees.
Leigh Penman is an historian of ideas, who has held teaching and research positions at the University of Oxford, University of London (Goldsmiths), and the University of Queensland. He is the author of Hope and Heresy (Springer 2019), The Lost History of Cosmopolitanism (Bloomsbury 2021) and By His Sword (Oxford, forthcoming).
How can First Nations methodologies and relationality be practically applied to Indigenous-colonial interactions in the Pacific
Oli Acevedo
This presentation will discuss how a wide range of non-western and non-human sources could be viewed through an Indigenous relational methodology in order to better understand decision making and agency in Pacific interaction.
Oli Acevedo is a PhD candidate in the Global Encounters program where he is studying Indigenous-colonial interactions in the Pacific. As a descendent from Chilean Mapuche peoples, he has a personal motivation in combating traditional western research and ideology concerning Indigenous-colonial relationships. He was drawn to decolonial studies after witnessing and indirectly benefiting from the ongoing oppression of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific, including the overwhelming repression and denial of First Nations’ histories