Slow Violence on the Beach

Briar March’s 2010 documentary There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho opens with a shot from a camera that is half-submerged in seawater. ¹ It is followed by a sequence of stunningly beautiful images of the south-western Pacific at sunset filmed from a traditional fishing boat and accompanied by soft music and the sounds of a male voice singing in what to most ears will be an unknown language. A palm-tree-covered island appears on the horizon, a text insert informing us that what we see is Takuu, a small atoll 250 kilometres north-east of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. The atoll might look like a Western tourist’s dream vacation spot, but we quickly learn that Nukutoa, the atoll’s only inhabited island, is home to ‘a Polynesian community of 400’ that generally does not allow foreigners to set foot on it. It is a home that is only 0.5 kilometres long and only 1 metre above sea level, and, as a result of global warming and sea level rise, it is slowly disappearing into the waters of the Pacific Ocean.