A Kennedy daughter offers a hand to Pacific nations threatened by climate change

Thousands of precious cultural relics from the South Pacific at risk from climate disasters will be safeguarded under one of the last acts of departing United States ambassador Caroline Kennedy.

In Port Moresby, the National Museum and Art Gallery has been temporarily closed as its air-conditioning struggles with extreme humidity.

The roof of the Tuku’aho Memorial Museum in Tonga last week collapsed under the weight of unprecedented rains and floods that have saturated the islands, putting its collection at risk.

US ambassador Caroline Kennedy views the Pasifika Collection with Australian Museum CEO Kim McKay.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Enter Kennedy, who convinced the US government to back the Australian Museum’s Pasifika Tauhi project to fund efforts to catalogue, digitise and help objects important to the South Pacific’s cultural heritage.

The daughter of late US president John F Kennedy retains strong personal connections to Solomon Islands, where her father was stationed and stranded during World War II.

Last August, Kennedy and her son, Jack Schlossberg, recreated part of JFK’s swims across a narrow channel to deliver supplies and scout for enemy hideouts following the sinking of his patrol boat – acts of heroism that earned him the Purple Heart.

The Pasifika Tauhi project will initially involve Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Tonga and Solomon Islands.

It takes its name from the Tongan word meaning to look after, tend to or take care, which is at the heart of the project’s aims to preserve cultural knowledge of the Pacific, home to peoples that speak a quarter of the world’s languages.

It will connect key experts from multiple countries in conservation, research and science to preserve precious collections and cultural heritage practices.

If successful, the initiative will extend to other Pacific communities and involve other museums across Australia, New Zealand and the US, according to Australian Museum director and CEO Kim McKay.

The Australian Museum would initially offer expertise in cultural conservation and preservation and help catalogue and digitalise objects.

Evacuation of objects in need of urgent conservation to Australia would be a last resort, McKay said, but not out of the question.

Objects made of natural fibres and wood were particularly vulnerable to degradation in changing climatic conditions, “which is why the clock is ticking on these precious Pacific collections”, she said.

McKay acknowledged the imbalance of Pacific nations’ minimal contributions to global warming and the impact of a dramatically changing climate.

The Australian Museum’s head of Pasifika Collections, Melissa Malu, said grassroots connections could only be positive.

Inspecting the Tuku’aho Memorial Museum on the Tongan island of Tongatapu in January, Malu found display cases were contaminated with ash from the 2022 underwater volcano eruption. Repairing or replacing cases could be an outcome of multilateral links, but this would be self-determined.

The project could also assist with the repatriation of ancestral remains and other culturally sensitive objects. Two ancestors were returned to Tonga earlier this year.

The trial project, an Australian first, was announced in the Australian Museum’s vast Rydalmere storage facility, the size of an airport hangar, where most of its 65,000 Pasifika Collection objects are held.

Kennedy was welcomed by Maori collections officer Logan Haronga, who blew the customary horn, the pukaea, declaring to ancestral spirits the ambassador’s arrival in friendship. To cement their bonds, she was offered a cup of kava, consumed throughout the Pacific.

Kennedy, who announced her departure from her diplomatic post before Donald Trump’s US election win, declined to take questions on the Trump presidency and its implications for Australia-US relations.

But she said it had been an honour to represent US President Joe Biden as ambassador to Australia, citing its help in combatting COVID, cervical cancer and providing humanitarian assistance during natural disasters.

“He has made the Pacific one of his top priorities as president,” Kennedy said. “We’ve opened new embassies, sent people there to learn, and [it] is personally meaningful to me as well given my family connection to the Pacific, and my visit last year to these islands to meet the families who helped rescue my father.”

In line with American diplomatic conventions, Kennedy’s term will conclude by the day of the presidential inauguration on January 20.

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