La médaille John Dunmore remise à Raylene Ramsay

This medal has a very particular significance for me, emblematic as it is of my own dual heritages – the Pacific journeys and the French adventures. And more particularly still, because I spent seven years of my early career in the French Department where John Dunmore was Professor.

At the time, John had written his two volumes on the French explorers in the Pacific and was pioneering a variety of links between the French and English-speaking academic worlds and business communities. After we parted – Professor Dunmore retired from Massey University in 1985 and I set out to teach for a decade in Massachusetts universities – he would go on to complete his edition of the La Pérouse journals, a biography of De Surville (Storms and Dreams), of Comte Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and a host of other publications including the story of the first woman around the world, a biography of Norman Kirk and an 18th-century cook-book for mariners in distant seas.

John Dunmore’s tireless research on France in the Pacific was justifiably the inspiration for this award and for all of us who have come after. A week or so ago, I took part in the oral examination at the University of Canterbury of Giselle Larcombe’s cultural biography of Le Père Garin, a Marist who worked alone with Maori in the Waipara area from 1843-1847. Giselle was building on the work of Jessie Munroe, Hugh Laracy, Kate Martin and the earlier work of Peter Tremewan, all recipients of the Dunmore medal. My colleague at Waikato University, William Jennings, is also currently researching the Lettres d’Océanie archive of the early Marist missionaries in the Pacific. There is clearly a snowballing or indeed ‘butterfly’ effect at work here.

My own Pacific journey, however, had begun back in 1966 – a year spent teaching in the ‘bush’ at Do-Néva, the mission school in the north of New Caledonia founded by the pastor-ethnographer, Maurice Leenhardt, in 1902. Reading the classics by kerosene lamp in the evenings on my balcony surrounded by the dense vegetation full of living spirits to prepare for university exams and listening to the tales from oral tradition recounted (in French) around a school camp-fire were powerfully formative experiences. All these years later, Emma Sinclair Reynolds is completing a cotutelle Ph D with me on the contemporary adaptations of these stories from oral tradition while teaching at the University of New Caledonia.

So it was, then, that like Marguerite Duras in her ‘new autobiography’, L’Amant (The Lover), after the years of study of contemporary literature in France, after Cambridge and linguistics, children, years at Massey University, Massachusetts and critical theory, I found myself drawn back to my first love, to better know it – researching or translating the ‘new literatures’ of the French Pacific, a mediator between the French and Anglophone worlds.

But not on my own. I should like to briefly recognize those whose work founds, sustains and accompanies my own. Jim Hollyman and Chris Corne, whose work in lexicography and socio-linguistics is still widely respected, first set up our French Pacific Research Centre. My own research team of former MA students, Emma Sinclair, Dianne Walton and Mary McKendrick made a significant contribution to Nights of Storytelling, a Cultural History of New Caledonia (to appear in Spring 2010 at the University of Hawaii Press). My colleague, Deborah Walker co-translated the poetry and first novel of the Kanak writer, Déwé Gorodé, with me (L’Epave / The Wreck is forthcoming at Little Island Press) and produced a stunning DVD with Neil Morrison to accompany the cultural history, setting text to archival and creative image and providing Maori and English sub-titles. Professor Paul de Deccker, who passed away in July this year, formerly in Anthropology at the University of Auckland and first President of the University of New Caledonia co-supervised the Ph D thesis of Stephanie Vigier on time and space in Pacific writing with me. Paul recently also set up La Maison de la Mélanésie.

Thank you also to my colleagues of the French Department – a fabulous creature combining linguistics, cultural and political history, biographical studies, literary studies, translation and indeed language teaching, to the School of European Languages and Literatures, and to the University of Auckland which supports my continuing research and forthcoming books on the zones of cultural contact in the Pacific literatures and ‘hybridity’ in the Francophone world.