A World of Insight and Wisdom that Came for the Pacific: or, Epeli Hau’ofa on All Our Human Follies

Abstract

Epeli Hau’ofa (1939-2009), the Tongan scholar and cultural reformer of South Pacific cultural policies and international relations, was Australia-educated, and focussed on Armidale, NSW at a most significant time in his life. That developing sensitivity did not change in the rest of his life. His early and most widely accessible comic writing is both Rabelasian in its surface plots, and deeply ironic as it endeavours to interpret the human consequences of policies seemingly well intended but disastrous in the event—this being the new ‘Glorious Pacific Way’. At the moderate end of the satiric spectrum, his moralistic fictions rely on laughter, wit, irony, irony, and milder forms of ridicule. The great crimes for the Ocean people are those of pretense and omission, and the thrust of his writing is to question so much that is not traditional, selfless and gentle. Starting as a folklorist and satirist, Epeli Hau’ofa would broaden his vision to become a social and religious thinker of vital significance for all the small nations of the southern Pacific as they enter the twenty-first century.