CONVERSATIONS are a big deal in the Pacific. Sometimes the hardest decisions are made without words at all, carried in the spaces between, the silences, and the relationships in the room. When the words finally come, what is said – and who is speaking – decides how the message lands.
Take Moruroa. Not “Mururoa,” the colonial mis‑spelling that still litters French official documents and global media, but Moruroa: the atoll where France forced through six final underground nuclear tests between September 1995 and January 1996, a decade after Pacific leaders had declared the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone. An underground test anywhere in our oceanic continent is a test on all of us.
Beyond French Polynesia’s nuclear history, the Runit Dome is the cracked weight of the nuclear legacy and ocean justice conversations we owe ourselves. On Runit Island in Enewetak Atoll, the United States dumped radioactive soil and debris from its Marshall Islands test sites into a bomb crater, then capped it with a thin concrete dome locals call “the Tomb.” Built between 1977 and 1980 as a temporary fix with no bottom seal, that dome now cracks above a rising sea – a wound on the face of the ocean, demanding attention and a ‘reimagined’ healing.
The threads from Runit continued their journey to Rarotonga. It was 6 August 1985, and the 16th Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting was being hosted in the Cook Islands. A month before, French government agents had bombed and sunk the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, an act of terror to stop the Greenpeace flagship leading a protest flotilla against nuclear testing at Moruroa. The bombing killed photographer Fernando Pereira as he slept in his cabin onboard. The fallout of global condemnation against France was immense.
Meanwhile on that fateful last day of the Pacific leaders meeting in August 1985, I was a school dropout recruited off the road and into the newsroom of the Cook Islands Broadcasting and Newspaper Corporation building. Trying to work out how a camera worked, I was a few doors away from the room where Pacific leaders were signing what would gain international renown as the Treaty of Rarotonga, declaring the South Pacific a nuclear‑free zone. Like many Cook Islanders, I was oblivious to the history unfolding around the corner and up the stairs to the Prime Minister’s office.
By 1995, I had swung full circle and was back at the now‑privatized Cook Islands Newspaper, with a communications degree under my belt and an editor who chose not to accept a funded trip for Pacific journalists to Moruroa, in protest at France’s decision to resume nuclear testing there. Another protest flotilla, this time led by a vaka from the Cook Islands, was stopped by French military vessels at the edge of the French Polynesia EEZ and did its chants of protest and defiant haka at sea. This poignant mana of indigenous voice in the face of global powers is a key part of any reimagining and revival.
And so here we are, in 2026, with an Ocean’s meeting somewhere every minute, it seems. We’re abuzz with Ocean commotion, but what’s next past all the noise? A recent State of the Pacific Ocean gathering launched on World Ocean Day into a call to “Reimagine,” flipping the talanoa from yet another state‑led talkfest to people‑led conversations. The challenges loom large: climate crisis, militarization, resource extraction, dollar signs and profit versus values beyond price. All this plays out in an oceanic continent where corruption, inequality, family violence, and fundamentalism are layered through nations at different stages of nationhood. What do our cultural safety nets really hold once they are frayed? What does an “Ocean of Peace” mean once leaders walk away from the limelight and the photo op?
“Once you see what I am about to share, you can’t unsee it,” warned one presenter on the geopolitics of power, satellites, and armed flags arching across our Pacific skies, seas and land. Security is no longer just women and peace; it is domain, data and identity. It is the uncomfortable awareness that being “friends to all, enemies to none” can be misconstrued and weaponized in ways our founding leaders of collective strength, and the so‑called Pacific Way, could never have imagined.
In truth, the State of the Ocean is demanding we look at the state of ourselves and reimagine how we are governed. How we do business. How safe we make our homes. Whether our regional multilateralism, diplomacy, civil society, media and academic freedoms still protect ocean states from disproportionate burdens – or whether those protections are being quietly eroded. Even when the honest answer to these questions is “I don’t know,” the refusal of beige policy papers in favour of fresh arguments and ideas is a sure sign of people working things out for themselves.
Reimagining the Ocean is not just a clever theme. It is, as one Pacific faith leader said, “a turning – the courage to let an old story die so a truer story can live.” Moruroa’s fissured underbelly and the concrete Tomb on Runit are scars we all bear. They remind us that reimagining an Ocean of Peace begins within. It begins with reimagining what it means to be people of the Ocean of Peace. It begins with reimagining us.
It happens when we take that deliberate step away from the status quo, stop treating the Ocean as a backdrop, and reclaim the words that take us beyond words, to that unapologetically Pacific Ocean space – audacious, authentic and forgiving enough to rebuild a better world where everyone, from all corners of this one blue planet, can own their place in conversations that better connect the Ocean we share to the humanity we are.
