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THE BLACK ISLANDS
A Melanesian journey
Music by David Bridie
Photography by Ben Bohane
Our nearest neighbours. Shared history and geography. An important place in our destiny. One day we may come to remember, as our forefathers knew, that Australia is a Pacific nation first and fundamentally…
The Black Islands are the islands and nations of Melanesia and Australia, sweeping in a great arc from Timor, West Papua and Papua New Guinea to the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji, New Caledonia and Torres Strait in Australia.
Long time wantoks David Bridie and Ben Bohane are both distinguished in their fields of music and media. Both continue a relationship with Melanesia that spans the past 20 years.
Bridie has contributed much to the modern soundtrack of Melanesia and indigenous Australia, from raskol gang epiphanies and mouth harp melodies, to central desert strings and thepop-shantypleasure of dive-in-the-sea My Island Home.His versatility extends to classical and haunting compositions for film.
Bohane is a Vanuatu-based photojournalist working mainly in black and white, who has documented the spirit worlds of Pacific island life with a focus on kastom, and conflict. He traces a cycle of life; where lush island landscapes meet kastom, cult and cargo cult movements, guerrilla rebels, war and reconciliation, prophets and laughing children. Visual songs of redemption. And the sea, always the sea.
Together they seek to create an event, a live collaboration of music and imagery that celebrates and provokes, one that brings another generation of Australians to a realisation of their own immediate neighbourhood. This is the Pacific century, and like all great turnings in history, it is often best understood by the strange poetry at its margins.
The Black Islands promises to be more than a slideshow, less than an opera, and a unique Australian moment that first grounds you, then throws you overboard to northerly island shores and tempests and back again to the sacred earth we stand on.
We are wan solwara – one Ocean.Plunge in.
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