Results for Pacific Islands

Australia's engagement with the countries of the Pacific has intensified dramatically over the past year.

I have been enjoying your website tremendously. Believe it or not, I found the site by mistake. - Joe Katoa

Telecommunications managers in the Pacific are looking at how island communities can take advantage of new telephone and internet technologies. From Matangi Tonga Magazine Vol. 18, no. 3, December 2003.

Tongan soldiers and policemen may soon be deployed overseas on peace keeping duties in Iraq, as well as the Solomons Islands. - Matangi Tonga, Vol. 18, No. 2

Tonga’s Prime Minister announced on February 14 that there was a serious turn in Tonga’s relationship with New Zealand in the wake of unsubstantiated accusations made by New Zealand’s foreign ministry. The Prime Minister Prince ‘Ulukalala Lavaka Ata believed that a New Zealand Ministerial attack which ridiculed the Tongan government and Tonga’s Royal family was an attempt to influence Tonga’s March General Election, and “to take the moral high ground, to say they are holier than us, and to dictate to other countries what New Zealand wants”. Prince ‘Ulukalala Lavaka Ata was responding to the accusations at a press conference he called in Nuku‘alofa. From Matangi Tonga Magazine Vol. 17, no. 1, May 2002.

FROM OUR ARCHIVES 2000. "It seems to me that the whole approach to life in the Pacific Islands forever sails very closely to what we refer to as ethnicity, which is the way anthropologists and paternalistic aid donors forgive our basic racism....Another example nearer home was the racially motivated and cowardly violence, which young jobless, and dare I say it, hopeless Tongans, visited on our Chinese owned shops last year; an act of such barbarity that it shamed and disgusted me and every other Tongan of my generation...." Crown Prince Tupouto‘a comments in an interview with Pesi Fonua. From Matangi Tonga Magazine Vol. 15, no. 2, June 2000.

The whereabouts of three Chinese nationals, who were discovered hiding inside a container, when the Tausala Samoa arrived in Tauranga, New Zealand, on July 12, is now uncertain. Matangi Tonga Magazine Vol. 14, no. 3, July 1999.

'From the Stone Age to the Space Age in 200 years', is the title of a new catalogue on Tongan art objects–the first publication of the Tonga National Museum. From Matangi Tonga Magazine Vol. 14, no. 2, May 1999.