Skip to main content

A Rower Remembers Creative Cities Southern Hui

Tufi Escape
Creative Cities Southern Hui is excited to welcome STEVEN EDMUND WINDUO as delegate and guest speaker. Steven will be visiting Dunedin, from Papua New Guinea, for the duration of the Hui, participating in events and speaking at Creative Connections on Thursday 30th November. 

'I think of myself as a rower of the ocean, taking the winds and currents of Oceania, traveling in and out of islands, around islands, carrying with me the burden of our collective experiences, always rowing to get somewhere to link up all our peoples, and teaching our people and others to appreciate our cultures, arts, way of life and knowledge systems.'

Steven Winduo is a writer and scholar from Papua New Guinea. He has read his works in homeland, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Minnesota, Hawaii, and the Philippines. 

His first collection of poetry, Lomo’ha I am, in Spirit’s Voice I Call (1991), was published during his MA studies in English at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch. This led to the publication of three more collections of poetry: Hembemba: Rivers of the Forest (2000), A Rower’s Song (2009), Detwan How?(2012).

In addition to his scholarly work, Transitions and Transformations: Literature, Politics and Culture in PNG(2013), Steven has also written short stories (The Unpainted Mask), a novel (Land Echoes) and several children’s books.

As part of the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) program, Steven recently participated in the 2017 Melbourne Writers Festival, and was a writer in residence in both the Philippines and Australia.

Steven held the Arthur Lynn Andrews Chair in Pacific and Asian Studies in 2011, within the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawaii. He has been a visiting research scholar at the East West Center, held within the Pacific Islands Development Program (2011). He has served as a visiting professor, for the Department of English at the University of Minnesota (2007-2008) where he previously received his PhD.

Maintaining his connection to New Zealand, Steven was a research scholar with the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Islands Studies, at the University of Canterbury in 2006.

Steven Winduo is currently the Director of the Academic Audit Unit at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Steven’s online blog about the arts, culture and education can be found 
here.

'Oceania is thousands of years old with a history and culture that is deeper than our intellectual excavations and descriptions. Our deep inner strengths are derived from cultural and social core, which to me is like a yoke so pure and free and as old as the core of an ancient rock that stands against the modernizing currents of the world. These are sources of our learning, creativity, and articulations. There is an unbroken spiritual connection we have as kinsfolk in our belief in our indigenous, arts, culture, and indigenous forms of knowledge, cosmology, and the ocean in us.' 

Creative Connections
 aims to explore creativity as the touchstone of healthy, sustainable communities and celebrate the power of collaboration to inspire.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The first PNG Writer: Hosea Linge

  With so much going on around us we tend to forget about important foundations of our history. I could not get out of my mind the much neglected discussion on the first Papua New Guinean writer. Every now and then we need to acknowledge the important parts of our history as we move forward. I would like to acknowledge the first Papua New Guinean to write a book in the 1930s. A New Irelander by name of Ligeremaluoga wrote and published his book under the title The Erstwhile Savage: An Account of the Life of Ligeremaluoga in 1932. Ligeremaluoga is from Kono village in New Ireland Province. Ligeremaluoga’s book is by all accounts the first written account by a South Pacific Islander. Most of what we know as Pacific writing is dated to the 1960s and 1970s. Last month I presented a paper at the University of Hawaii to discuss another early Papua New Guinean writer by name of Ahuia Ova of Hanuabada, who published his memoirs in 1939, six years after Ligeremaluoga’s autobiography. ...

Well Done! Nora

 Melanesian writers: Regis Tove Stella (PNG), Nora Vagi Brash (PNG), Sam Alasia (Solomon Islands), USP Fiji campus, 1999.    One of the outstanding playwright and poet to emerge in Papua New Guinea is Nora Vagi Brash. She remains the foremost and the only Papua New Guinean female playwright. Nora was involved with acting in amateur theatre, radio plays, and street theatre in early 1970s. Her exposure to the world of theatre in England inspired her to write her own plays on her return to Papua New Guinea. The National Arts School employed Nora as an assistant lecturer in puppetry, dance, and drama. She then moved on to become one of the two artistic directors with the National Theatre Company. Nora wrote her own scripts for the puppets using tradional stories of Papua New Guinea. The National Theatre Company toured local villages and performed in the streets. They went to the Pacific Arts Festival in Rotorua and Wellington, New Zealand. They also danced in Point Venus ...

Milky Pine Power

Young Milky Pine ( Alstonia scholaris ) The importance of plant names in the local language is an example of a complex structure of   meaning. Different plants are used for specific purposes in our traditional societies. The same plant known by a common name can have sacred names to different people. Most often these sacred names are linked to myths, rituals, and spiritual powers. Many people know the general names for plants, but different species have a different name or an additional word to indicate colour, wild plants, domesticated plants, or cultivated.  Where plants have medicinal and ritual values they may have sacred names known only to those who claim ownership of the plant and its powers. The tanget ( Cordyline fruticosa ), for example, is generally known in Nagum Boiken language as hawa . This name includes the cultivated ones, which are red in color and appears in long and short round leaves. The green wild ones are...