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| Hobart's Wooden Boat Festival celebrates all forms of Pacific voyaging. () |
By Lucy Cooper for Pacific Beat
Artist Michael Tuffery is trying to "not get too overexcited" as he walks through the streets of Hobart, Tasmania's capital city.
"I'm in my element," he said.
"I was a little bit overwhelmed when I walked downtown and saw my images around the city."
The Aotearoa New Zealand-based artist of Tahitian, Samoan, and Cook Island descent is a featured artist at the biennial Australian Wooden Boat Festival, the largest celebration of wooden boats and maritime culture in the Southern Hemisphere.
Voyaging and the Pacific is being celebrated at the festival this year, which in 2023 welcomed 60,000 visitations across four days.
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| Artist Michael Tuffery is a featured artist at the biennial Australian Wooden Boat Festival.() |
Hosting workshops at the festival, Mr Tuffery hopes to "open eyes" through his artwork.
"We are sharing the same highway, the same sea.
"I know Australia's got their version and then we're opening it right up to the Pacific and we are opening up another door, and it's healthy," he said.
Mr Tuffery said his DNA inspires his work, drawing on his love of history to create pieces that are exhibited throughout the world.
"[History's] always been fascinating for me and especially Tupaia [the Tahitian Polynesian navigator], and Cook, and the voyaging.
Traditional culture in a modern world
The festival is celebrating all forms of Pacific voyaging, welcoming traditional weavers from Niue and Samoa, academics from across the region, and Proa's, a type of sailboat commonly used in the Pacific, will be on display in the docks.
"Marshallese are known for their speedy canoes and since the foreign colonised the country, the canoeing culture has been fading," Alson Kelen, Director of Canoes of the Marshall Islands, said.
Mr Kelen, a featured speaker at the Wooden Boat Festival, has been involved in the traditional canoeing culture of the Marshall Islands for several decades, documenting the construction of the canoes, and establishing a school for at-risk kids.
"We're very fortunate to document [canoe construction] and now we're using it to help educate the young people, keeping the culture alive.
"We're working on curriculum for the classroom, so the kids would have to learn the traditional canoeing, not building it, but the science, social studies and math, using the canoe as the main tools to study those subjects," he said.
At the festival Mr Kelen hopes to also shine a light on the role ocean voyaging has in the fight against climate change.
"We're one of the smallest countries in the world that uses a lot of fossil fuels," he said.
"Marshall Islands is a group of atolls so if you need anything you need water transport to get your needs, whether it's medicines, school supplies, or food for your family, you need a vessel to go across.
"The solution has always been in the Marshall Islands, which is our canoes, to reduce the usage of fossil fuels."
Far and wide
Travelling six thousand kilometres to attend the festival, Mr Kelen said he is "so excited" to celebrate Pacific voyaging.
"Boat people speak the same language, whatever the boat looks like we all speak the same language, and we all educate our countries and our communities using the same language and culture," he said.
Marine Vallee travelled a similar distance, six and a half thousand kilometres, from her home in Tahiti to Hobart's waterfront.
"It's rather extraordinary that we are able to attend, and we are very happy that we've been contacted because living in the French speaking part of the Pacific sometimes we feel some remoteness," she said.
The assistant curator at the museum Te Fare Iamanaha — Musée de Tahiti et des Îles, Ms Vallee who is presenting a paper at the festival, works on collections focused on cross-cultural exchanges throughout history.
"We have wooden remains related to maritime crossing of the Pacific during the waves of the settlement on this island," she said.
"We have a series of fragments and objects … dated around the 11 century AD, that are reflecting on the exceptional maritime crossing in the Pacific and all the knowledge of Polynesians travelling under the stars.
"We also have objects that relate to exchanges across several archipelagos throughout what is today French Polynesia."
A testament to the significance of the festival, Ms Vallee has spent the past two years trying to obtain funding to attend the festival and sharing the work of the Museum of Tahiti and The Islands.
"It's just a fantastic opportunity to strengthen the links with the rest of the Pacific, reconnect or connect with other institutions, people, knowledge holders, and communities from the Pacific, it's great," she said.
First published at ABC News, February 11, 2025
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