Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

Updated on 27 July 2018. 2:07pm. I see myself as a writer scholar—a unique position that defines the various engagements within and outside of academia, more particularly as a writer and scholar living and working in Oceania. '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.' I participated in many activities in the Asia Pacific Region primarily as a writer and scholar of Pacific literature. Last year (2017) I participated as an Asia Pacific writer in the Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE), run out of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, Melbourne. The program involves a writer’s residency in Philippines, in Geelong (

For me as a writer and scholar living and working in PNG, I am always weaving the narratives of journeys and inter-island connections in my work and scholarship. I talk about the constructions of cultures and peoples of the Pacific in their literary and cultural production. The life of a writer-scholar is woven around the narratives we weave about ourselves. It sounds more like the life of a silk worm weaving its own world from its own silk. Sometime I have to wear the mask of a writer and see the world through its eyeholes. Sometimes I wear the scholar’s hat to talk about cultural discourse and literary imagining.   My discussions anchor in the notion of text that sometimes my students get tired of listening to me talk about it. This process of writing and reading text is considered a socially productive force: “It is all and any of the means of production and reproduction of real life” (Williams 1977: 91). The production of text and the act of reading involves