Pacific Viewpoint Research Articles

Ralph Gerard Ward, BA, MA, PhD (1933–2023)

New Zealand GeographerEarly View OBITUARY Ralph Gerard Ward, BA, MA, PhD (1933–2023) John Overton, Corresponding Author John Overton [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9080-9510 SGEES, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand Correspondence John Overton, SGEES, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author John Overton, Corresponding Author John Overton [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-9080-9510 SGEES, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand Correspondence John Overton, SGEES, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 04 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/nzg.12356Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. REFERENCES Bedford, R. D., & Overton, J. (1999). R. Gerard Ward: Quintessential Pacific geographer. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 40(2), 111– 135. Connell, J., Webber, M., Walmsley, J., & Curry, G. (2016). Emeritus Professor R. Gerard Ward (Australia-International Medal) citation. https://www.iag.org.au/ward-australia-international-medal Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

Creative Hubs in Hanoi, Vietnam

Creative Hubs in Hanoi, Vietnam

Welcome letter by the new editorial team at Asia Pacific Viewpoint

Welcome letter by the new editorial team at <i>Asia Pacific Viewpoint</i>

That which feeds: Sacred solidarities and roots of resistance

Sponsored by the Asia Pacific Viewpoint, this paper was originally delivered as a keynote address at the New Zealand Geographical Society (NZGS) conference in November of 2020. Building on the conference theme, ‘Embracing Diversity: Expanding Geographies’, it argues that any consideration of our diverse, layered and growing environments must consider the sacred. Rather than focus solely on what are often deemed ‘sacred’ sites – or those places marked by physical signposts, particular rituals or sanctioning – it encourages us to think deeply about the everyday sacred though recognising how places feed. Flowing between places and times, between Kumutoto Stream in Te Whanganui‐a‐Tara and Pōhakuloa in Hawaiʻi, this paper is a call to stand on whenua and see it, smell it, taste it and love it. It is an invitation to relate to place on an intimate level. It is a prompting to be critical of the urban and colonially constructed spaces that have become naturalised in our daily lives and to uncover the stories, histories and peoples they work to displace and erase so that we can plant collective roots of resistance and solidarity for better futures.

Kanne Lobal: A conceptual framework relating education and leadership partnerships in the Marshall Islands

Kanne Lobal: A conceptual framework relating education and leadership partnerships in the Marshall Islands

On the changing relationship between North Pacific climate variability and synoptic activity over the Hawaiian Islands

AbstractThe teleconnection between tropical and extratropical climates in the North Pacific and continental regions of eastern Asia and western North America is known to vary on decadal to multidecadal time scales. In this study, the teleconnection pattern is studied with observational and reanalysis data products. The regional focus is set on the Hawaiian Islands in the central subtropical part of the North Pacific. By analysing correlations between regional climate indices and large‐scale climate modes during the years 1980 and 2014, it was found that the correlation between El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the synoptic weather activity over the Hawaiian Islands decreased over time. Composite analysis of the geopotential height anomalies and upper level winds suggest that the systematic shift in the North Pacific Jet (NPJ) position had an impact on the teleconnection between tropical Pacific SST and winter storm activity and precipitation variability in Hawai'i. The change in the correlations and in the NPJ structure coincides with a transition from the positive phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) towards a neutral and weak negative state. This observation‐based study provides a central subtropical Pacific viewpoint in support of the growing body of research studies that have reported a major shift in the Pacific climate system during the mid‐1990s. The article further discusses the potential role of decadal‐scale changes in the North Pacific Oscillation (NPO) phase in changing the strength of the ENSO teleconnection with synoptic activity over the Hawaiian Islands. The results of this study are relevant to paleoclimate interpretation of individual proxy records as well as for regional downscaling of future rainfall for the Hawaiian Islands.

Yanama budyari gumada: reframing the urban to care as Darug Country in western Sydney

ABSTRACTIn non-urban places of Australia, caring-as-Country frames natural resource management (NRM) as a practice of reciprocal, more-than-human care-giving (S. Suchet-Pearson, S. Wright, K. Lloyd, and L. Burarrwanga. 2013. ‘Caring as Country: towards and ontology of co-becoming in natural resource management.’ Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54 (2): 185–197). Caring-as-Country is an idea that encapsulates the entangled, reciprocal relationships that people have with, and as part of, agentic more-than-human worlds. In more urbanised places, however, practices of caring-as-Country are often unrecognised, undervalued and undocumented. In this paper we make explicit practices of caring, healing and rejuvenation at Yellomundee Regional Park, Darug Country in western Sydney. Our discussion of care, entanglement and reciprocity at Yellomundee focuses on two specific activities that embody caring-as-Country: the return of cultural burns and sustained presence on Country in the form of Darug-led culture camps. The Darug principle of yanama budyari gumada, to ‘walk with good spirit’, embodies and invites new ways of thinking and practising intercultural caring-as-Country in heavily colonised, urban places like Yellomundee. As we document the practices arising from this invitation, we consider its far-reaching implications for NRM and planning, and we expand on the importance of geographies of care for unceded urban places.

Foreword: Exemplary centre and beyond

The foreword to the special issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint considers the concept of exemplary centre as it was formulated by Clifford Geertz in light of its potential and limitation to address issues of power and politics in the study of contemporary urbanism. The articles in this issue deal with topics of urban culture and politics in Southeast Asia.

Taking stock: Reflecting on Asia Pacific Viewpoint

[Extract]In August 2013 the editors of Asia Pacific Viewpoint were invited to a Journal Editors' Meeting at the Forefront Asia dialogue at the National University of Singapore (NUS). This inaugural event was framed around the theme 'The study of Southeast Asia today: A dialogue at NUS', and keynotes speakers included high-profile regional scholars Anthony Reid, Abidin Kusno and Jonathan Rigg. One of the aims of the dialogue and editors' meeting was to examine key issues and developments in Southeast Asian studies, and discuss ways to collaborate more effectively across the region. We took the dialogue and meeting as an opportunity to 'take stock' of what Asia Pacific Viewpoint has been doing for the past decade, and to ponder the future direction for the journal. A review of this kind is overdue, with the last being Murray (2005). Since then editorial and technological changes have taken place within the journal and the broader publishing landscape has undergone rapid transformation.

The mythical arguments for decentralisation

The mythical arguments for decentralisation

Pacific ‘Solutions’ and Imaginaries: Reshaping Pacific relations or re-colonising the ‘sea of islands’?

Asia Pacific Viewpoint. For much of the time in New Zealand and Australia, our journal’s name has little resonance with the bulk of the population in these countries. There are moments though, when events at home and abroad come together to pull the respective gaze of New Zealanders and Australians away from more parochial fascinations, such as the RugbyWorld Cup taking place in New Zealand as we write, and from the Western media geographies that direct attention to North America and Europe, with occasional glimpses of military activities in the Middle East. These moments can be revealing, in large part because of the glimpse they give us of the national ‘viewpoint’ towards the Asia Pacific and how countries in the region are scripted. Three recent events and trends give us cause to pause and reflect on where the current relationship between New Zealand, Australia and the Asia Pacific region is at, not just in terms of the diplomatic or economic form of the relationship, but also in terms of the imaginaries associated with the region. The raison d’etre of Asia Pacific Viewpoint since its establishment in the 1960s has been to improve ‘understanding of the changes that are transforming the Asian and Pacific scene’ (Buchannan, 1960) and encourage alternative viewpoints and perspectives. Our brief analysis of three contemporary examples suggests that we have a long way to go. Asia Pacific viewpoints are central to recent Australian debates regarding refugee policies. In 2001, conservative Prime Minister John Howard controversially refused to let the Norwegian tanker, the MV Tampa, dock at an Australian port after it had saved 433 mainly Afghani asylum seekers from a sinking vessel between Indonesia and Australia. With an election looming, and conservative voices manipulating widespread anti-refugee feelings that bordered on hysteria, Howard deployed military forces to prevent the vessel from landing before hastily devising the ‘Pacific Solution’. Rather than ‘process’ (a disgracefully dehumanising term) the asylum seekers on Australian soil, he looked first to Indonesia, who refused, then to more economically dependent states in Melanesia. The former Australian colonial territory of Papua New Guinea, which allowed Manus Island to be used as a ‘human processing zone’, and the tiny island state of Nauru (whose once bountiful supplies of phosphate had long since been diminished by Australian mining companies and used to enhance the New Zealand and Australian agricultural economies) became sites to ‘outsource’ and ‘offshore’ humanitarian responsibilities (see Rajaram, 2003). Midway through the stand-off, the Twin Towers were brought down, contributing to public anxieties and approval of Howard’s handling of the crisis, even as Australia’s international reputation floundered. For Howard and his supporters, the episode rejuvenated long-established anxieties many Australians hold towards Asian refugees and migrants, rekindling the ‘Yellow Peril’ fears that underlay the country’s notorious White Australia policy. In contrast, the Pacific was scripted as neo-colonial spaces where Australia could forgo its humanitarian obligations and Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Vol. 52, No. 3, December 2011 ISSN 1360-7456, pp233–235

Bleeding boundaries: Gendered analyses of militarism in the Western Pacific

This introduction to an Asia Pacific Viewpoint special section on militarism and gender in the Pacific argues that gendered analyses are crucial to understanding processes of militarization, and that multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are integral in that effort. The introduction also provides background to the articles, outlining their origin in a workshop on militarism and gender in the Pacific held in Wellington, New Zealand in 2009, and its subsequent iteration in sessions at the Oceanic Conference of International Studies in 2010. The special section constitutes the first publication of a permanent working group on militarism and gender in the Pacific with an international, multidisciplinary membership.

Political Machinations in a Rural County

The article discusses corruption and selective policy implementation as general phenomena, related to the configurations of political power and the behavior of key actors in a specific rural county, Benghai County of Anhui Province. The County government only takes up initiatives in which three conditions are met, which are highlighted.

Border crossings in the Asia Pacific: Metaphoric and jurisdictional

Lerner’s description contextualises our interest in borders. The papers in this special section of Asia Pacific Viewpoint have been inspired by recent work that examine borders not as forever peripheral to core interests of the state, but as sites of opportunity for state actors and institutions, personal discovery of freed spaces for identity formation and alternative gender roles (Schendel and Abraham, 2005; Tagliacozzo, 2005; Horstman and Wadley, 2006). They deal with both metaphoric and national/ jurisdictional boundaries by privileging narratives of those who are actually involved in negotiating one or both (Kyle and Siracusa, 2005). The papers further address the hierarchies of power that are linked to these narratives. Scott’s (1998) seminal work of problematising state attempts to exercise power for the control of publics and spaces through technologies of administration (censuses, town planning, mapping and systematised revenue generation and collection) has clear influence in much of current writing on borderlands as it does on contributors to the present volume. Attempts at control, according to Scott (1998), is fraught with tension since control over populations whose loyalty cannot be assumed or taken for granted is a perpetual anxiety for many states. Such populations include those who can escape state scrutiny because of being located at the geographical periphery where state presence may be weak or because of historical links that promote dual or multiple cultural affiliations whether prompted by geography or not. Consequently, such efforts are often unsuccessful. Similarly, Thongchai Winchakul’s (1994) pioneering work expanded on the notion of the nation-state as problematic when viewed from local perspectives and the ambiguity of the margin, thereby arguing for social scientists to pay more attention to local stories of the nation (Thongchai, 2002 cited in Horstman and Wadley, 2006). Work on borders has proceeded to examine international jurisdictional borders as there to be crossed and has taken up the challenge of locating the political economic and cultural dynamism of border regions, which, in Horstman and Wadley’s (2006) terms, is about ‘centering the margins’. More importantly, border studies have gone a step further in suggesting that border regions can be found throughout the geographical space of the nation (Cummings, 2006). This is because, borders, if viewed as dynamic social spaces in which dominant and marginal people negotiate their relationships, are to be found in most nation-states that are ethnically diverse such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea and Thailand, areas that are covered in this volume.

Migrant Women’s Bodies as Boundary Markers: Reproductive Crisis and Sexual Control in the Ethnic Frontiers of Taiwan

Migrant Women’s Bodies as Boundary Markers: Reproductive Crisis and Sexual Control in the Ethnic Frontiers of Taiwan

Abnormal Justice

Abnormal Justice

Introduction: Indonesia's democratic struggle:Reformasi, otonomiandparticipasi

Indonesia looms large in South-East Asia (accounting for around 40% of the population and land area of the 10-member states of Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN)). It is now coming into greater prominence in international affairs, being the world’s largest Muslim society and, since 2004, having undergone a remarkable transition from autocratic despotism to being the world’s third largest functioning democracy. It also has the world’s most fragmented geography (with 250 million people scattered over 17 500 islands, at least 9000 of which are inhabited year-round), and incorporates a cultural kaleidoscope of more than 200 ethic groups, which help make it an erstwhile and hopefully future tourist paradise, an intriguing enigma for social scientists and a central planner’s nightmare. The seven papers in this special issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint bring together the perspectives of historians, political scientists, geographers, economists, environmentalists, literature specialists and journalists. The authors were

Place, memory and identity: Imagining 'New Asia'

: The rapid transformation of Asian societies and landscapes, especially since the mid-1990s, has engendered much conjecture of the ‘Asian renaissance’ and the rise of a ‘New Asia’. This Special Edition of Asia Pacific Viewpoint explores the intersecting themes of ‘urban place’, ‘social memory’ and ‘cultural identity’ in the articulation of and contestation towards New Asia. Specifically, the six articles here offer various interpretations of New Asia – as tourism marketing tool, political vision and social identity – and the politics involved in urban, tourism and cultural development. From colonial hotels in key South-East Asian cities to the historic waterfront of Singapore; from festivals and rituals in Hong Kong, Hoi An (Vietnam) and Penang (Malaysia) to the clash of cultural values in Manggarai (Indonesia), ‘selective remembering’ and ‘ideological forgetting’ are central to the construction of New Asian identities. Ultimately, this Special Edition hopes to provoke continuing discussions on the rhetoric of New Asia and its imaginative and contested geographies, sociologies and histories.

Changing the geography of Asia Pacific Viewpoint

Changing the geography of Asia Pacific Viewpoint

How Does Schooling Influence Maternal Health Practices? Evidence from Nepal

Women’s schooling is associated with much of the world’s improvement in child survival and maternal and child health since 1960. Evidence for these associations is widely interpreted as representing a causal influence of formal education on health. The relationships of variations in female school attendance at the levels of individuals, populations, and historical periods to reproductive health outcomes raise new questions for comparative educational research concerning the process involved. This article reports the results of a survey designed to test a theoretical model positing that literacy skills acquired by girls in school are retained into their adult years, facilitating their exposure to public health messages in the media, which in turn influence the health knowledge affecting their health behavior as mothers. This survey was conducted in Nepal, a low-income country in which both mass schooling and demographic transition are recent developments, using direct assessment of literacy skills instead of the self-reports or imputation from school attainment levels often used in demographic and health surveys. After a brief review of the relevant studies to provide an empirical basis for