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1. The Conversation
Pacific Islanders have long drawn wisdom from the Earth, the sky and the waves. Research shows the science is behind them (12th March 2024).
A dramatic volcano eruption changed lives in Fiji 2,500 years ago. 100 generations have kept the story alive (17th August 2023).
From Southern Stars to Rising Seas: Aboriginal oral traditions thrive for 12,000 years with Duane Hamacher and others (14th August 2023)
Inside the mind of a sceptic: the ‘mental gymnastics’ of climate change denial. with Rachael Sharman (14th September 2022)
Friday Essay: how ancient beliefs in underwater worlds can shed light in a time of rising sea levels (20th August 2021)
Pacific people have been ‘pummelled and demeaned’ for too long – now they’re fighting back, with Roselyn Kumar (14th August 2020)
Pacific Islands must stop relying on foreign aid to adapt to climate change, because the money won’t last, with Roselyn Kumar (31st July 2020)
Their fate isn’t sealed: Pacific nations can survive climate change – if locals take the lead, with five others (30th June 2020)
Pourquoi les universités doivent déclarer l’état d’urgence écologique et climatique, with ten others (18th November 2019)
Forgotten citadels: Fiji’s ancient hill forts and what we can learn from them (1st October 2019)
Ignoring young people’s climate fears is a recipe for anxiety, with Rachael Sharman (20th September 2019)
Firepits of the Gods: ancient memories of maar volcanoes (4th June 2019)
Climate change forced these Fijian communities to move – and with 80 more at risk, here’s what they learned, with Annah Piggott-McKellar and Karen McNamara (30th April 2019)
Of bunyips and other beasts: living memories of long-extinct creatures in art and stories, with Luisa Ponciano (15th April 2019)
Giants: why we needed them (8th August 2018)
Monsters in my Closet: A Journey into Geomythology (8th December 2017) – also published as an audio Essay on Air read by the author (29th March 2018)
Islands lost to the waves: how rising seas washed away part of Micronesia’s 19th-century history (9th November 2017)
When the Bullin shrieked: Aboriginal memories of volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago (23rd August 2017)
Sidelining God: why secular climate projects in the Pacific Islands are failing (17th May 2017)
Rise and fall: social collapse linked to sea level in the Pacific (16th March 2016)
Ancient Aboriginal stories preserve history of a rise in sea level, with Nick Reid (13th January 2015)
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2. Cosmos: The Science of Everything
- Doomed to Drown (June 2020), available only in print edition
- Responses to Ocean Rise: The Ancestors’ Tales (5th June 2019) – extract below
““Ua mai, the water is rising”, the elderly Fijian man tells me. We are sitting side by side on an upturned boat under the shade of a sprawling casuarina tree, just behind the beach at Vabea Village on Ono Island in the Kadavu group. It is January, 2019. The sunset promises to be spectacular but my companion appears in a sombre mood. Having lived most of his life on Ono, he has witnessed the gradual changes that have taken place along the island’s coast driven, he knows, by the rising of the ocean. The beach here is being cut back, he tells me, pointing out the coconut trunks that have been placed along its landward side to try and prevent further land loss. He fears this is not enough and that one day Vabea will suffer the fate of nearby Narikoso Village, which is often awash at high tide these days. Having no appetite for science, he wonders why God is letting this happen, what the people of Ono might have done to anger Him, or whether some devilry is in play”
- Eye-Witnesses Call from Millennia Past (29th August 2018) – extract below
“… more than simply words, ancient stories were also communicated through performance, through dance and song, supplemented by other aides-mémoires such as rock art. It even seems plausible that today’s art, performance and fictional narrative all have their roots in the pragmatic concerns of our ancestors about the survival of their bloodlines“
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3. SAPIENS
- The Oldest True Stories in the World (18th October 2018) – extract below
“Nothing stirred in the relentless midday heat. The gum trees appeared exhausted, nearly drained of life. The hunters crouched in the foliage, their long, sharp spears poised to unleash at a moment’s notice. The giant birds that were the objects of their attention strode slowly, elegantly, unsuspecting. Most of these creatures were about 7 feet tall. The meat from even one animal offered the tribe sustenance for an extended period of time—but the hunters knew that this reward could come at a price. The mihirung paringmal were known to deliver a vicious, and sometimes deadly, kick.
The Tjapwurung, an Aboriginal people in what is now southern Australia, shared the story of this bird hunt from generation to generation across an unbelievably large slice of time—many more millennia than one might think possible. The birds (most likely the species with the scientific name Genyornis newtoni) memorialized in this tale are now long extinct. Yet the story of the Tjapwurung’s “tradition respecting the existence” of these birds conveys how people pursued the giant animals. At the time of this particular hunt, between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, volcanoes in the area were erupting, wrote amateur ethnographer James Dawson in his 1881 book Australian Aborigines, and so scientists have been able to corroborate this oral history by dating volcanic rocks.“
- Climate Wars: On Fiji’s islands, shifting sea levels have left a tangled legacy of conflict and survival (15th June 2016) – extract below
“From where the rattly pickup truck dropped us, it took nearly three hours to reach the summit of Seseleka, a mountain on the island of Vanua Levu in Fiji. The lower part of the climb took us through pine forests, then into less dense woodland on steeper slopes, made slippery by recent rain. The track was an elevated pathway following a narrow ridgeline that fell away steeply on either side; called tua, such pathways were once the main lines of communication on these mountainous islands.
The first signs of fortification made me forget my fatigue. There was a pile of rocks, roughly oval-shaped, representing a yavu, or house foundation. Its position made clear it was a guardhouse, intended to check the advance of unwanted visitors to the mountaintop community. There were more guardhouses at regular intervals, and then, across the ridge, the remains of stone walls and defensive ditches. When functional 200 years or more ago, these ditches likely featured rows of sharpened sticks—designed to skewer would-be aggressors—protruding from their bases.”
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4. Others
- Memories within Myth was published in Aeon Magazine (online and free) on 7th April 2023. You can read it here. And here is a choice quote –
But good storytellers don’t just tell stories. They do whatever they can to engage their listeners, something that applied as much thousands of years ago as it does today. Storytellers perform, they sing and dance, they mimic and entertain. And therein lies the deep roots of what has been ringfenced in today’s literate societies as theatre, poetry, dance and even art. It seems clear that ancient rock art, for instance, had little to do with beauty (although today we often laud its aesthetic qualities) but everything to do with practical wisdom. Such art, it seems, provided memory aids for knowledge-holders, perhaps to populate particularly difficult-to-remember details of important stories. Literate people inherited these things from their pre-literate ancestors but repurposed them as cultural creations, not knowing what else to do with them.
- No Problems: Community Fieldwork in Fiji. Blog, SUNRISE Project, University of London, 24 March 2023, link here. Some reflections by myself and Rosie Kumar on how fieldwork in Fiji did not turn out exactly as you might expect … extract below
One of the great things about Nadroga, which certainly informed our choice of field sites, is the way almost everyone gets on well together. People may look different, may worship different gods and pray to them in different languages, but everyone is tolerant. More than tolerant actually, for in the name of inclusivity many Nadroga residents speak three languages fluently – vaBau, vaNadro and vaIdia – along with a bit of English.
We speak those languages too. Well all except vaNadro really, where the letter s becomes h, and where the standard vaBau word for ‘no’ – the rather dull ‘sega’ – becomes the rambunctious ‘jikai’. As in ‘jikai na leqwa’ (meaning ‘no problem’), a reassuring refrain we heard constantly during our rain-sodden fieldwork. The road is flooded – jikai na leqwa. You can’t eat mud crab – jikai na leqwa. Your notepad fell in the puddle – jikai na leqwa. You get the picture.
- Endings, Chicago Quarterly Review (2020, volume 30) – extract below
“Science could have learned more and sooner had it treated the ‘stories’ of ancient Australians (and people of other non-western cultures) more seriously as potential sources of information about the past, had it not pejoratively dismissed such stories as entertainments rather than expository, characterized the storytellers as literati rather than true scientists communicating their wisdom along unfamiliar pathways”
- Go Tell It On The Mountain: Mythical Tales of Giants are Rooted in Geological Realities. History Today (2019, volume 69) – extract below
“Pause to consider that Brân’s name means ‘the Crow’, a bird of considerable size, and that maybe this name was – like the epithet ‘the Blessed’ and his giant stature – given to him posthumously. They were a celebration of his feats, subsequently impossible in a drowned world; validating them for future generations. Yet, rather than Brân, these stories may well derive from those of one Bionn, who was no giant. But, around 10,000 years ago as the land bridge between what today we call Ireland and Wales was narrowing and yearly becoming less readily passable, Bionn crossed repeatedly, regaling all she encountered, her long black hair swirling as her words flowed through the firelights of a hundred evenings, with memorable stories of her travels, the basis of those that have reached us today”
- Eight low-lying Pacific islands swallowed whole by rising seas. New Scientist magazine article by Alice Klein (7th September 2017) features my research in recently-vanished islands in Micronesia.
- Why ancient myths about volcanoes are often true. BBC Earth magazine article by Jane Palmer (18th March 2015) focuses on my research into ancient stories of volcanic eruptions and kindred phenomena.
- To find meteorites, listen to the legends of Australian Aborigines. Smithsonian Magazine article by Sarah Zielinski (3rd October 2014) features some of my research and that of Dr Duane Hamacher.
- Ten ancient stories and the geological events that may have inspired them. Smithsonian Magazine article by Sarah Zielinski (4th April 2014) features many of my ideas about ancient stories.