We had travelled by early-morning bus to the ferry in Allenge, Bornholm, where we caught the Bornholm Express to Simrishamn, Sweden. The crossing was smooth – about an hour; followed by an hour-and-a-half busride to Landskrona, where our tour guide, Steen Schonemann, Director of the Tourism Research Centre in Bornholm, found us a great place to eat lunch. We were then free to wander for a couple hours before catching the ferry across the Oresund Strait to Ven. On the boat we met our conference host, Eric Clark, and most of the other 75-odd conference participants who were travelling from various islands and mainlands from around the globe.
The hotel and conference centre where we met is called The Spirit of Ven - because it’s also a whisky distillery.
We stayed in little cabins around the property, and the meals were the best I’ve ever eaten at a conference – and I mean EVER! We had pork loin for lunch and roast duck for dinner; chicken for lunch and reindeer for dinner… The problem was that there was no time in the tightly planned schedule for walking it off! But we suffered through it, with big grins on our faces...
The conference itself was co-hosted by the International Geographical Union (IGU) Commission on Islands and the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, and was supported by The Swedish Research Council, the Royal Society of Letters at Lund, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. Our convenors were Godfrey Baldacchino from University of Prince Edward Island and Eric Clark from Lund University; Alicia Bauza van Slingerlandt from Lund was the long-suffering organizer. (Thanks, Alicia, for all your hard work!)
The opening speakers introduced us to Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, who had observatories on Ven from 1576 to 1597. The observatories are long gone, but the tradition of astronomy and cartography – Brahe’s other passion (he pioneered the use of modern cartogaphical techniques such as triangulation) - lived on on the island for centuries to come. The ancient maps the speakers used in their PowerPoints were absolute works of art.
The conference was memorable for lots of reasons, not the least of which because I finally heard scholars talking about the links between islands and literature – the first time since 1998 when the Institute of Island Studies hosted our conference, “Message in a Bottle: The Literature of Small Islands,” and the Isle of Man followed it up with their conference “Islands: Dreams and Reality” in 2000. Thanks, Lisa Fletcher and Ralph Crane (also from UTas), for your papers on “Reading the Postcolonial Island in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tale” and “Reading the Club as Colonial Island in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and George Orwell’s Burmese Days.” As it turns out, I had already heard of Lisa, through a very fine paper she wrote called “’…some distance to go’”: A Critical Survey of Island Studies.” It was also wonderful to meet more people from UTas – including Elaine Stratford, the Head of the School of Geography and Environmental Studies - and I look forward to lots more conversation about island literature – whether it’s literal islands or metaphoric ones - in the months and years ahead.
John Terrell talked about how islands are “good to think”: which is what island studies is all about – seeing the world through an island lens; islands are a good way to get your arms around a problem. He also reminded us of when and how to use the word “island” as a noun or a verb.
I learned from Philip Steinberg about “seasteading,” where people can “vote with their houses” if they don’t like the politics of the place where they’ve moored their floating houses. I learned about the concept of the hyphen in the insider-outsider dichotomy; that space of ambiguity is like the shoreline, always changing, but always there.
From the Taiwanese delegation I learned much about Orchid Island, and how, among other things, the Taiwanese government used it as a nuclear waste dump while trying to encourage tourism; locals complained and stopped it. I also learned about the concept of “landesque capital” which is all about humans improving the natural conditions of the land. From Simron Jit Singh I learned about the aftermath of the tsunami that devastated the Nicobar Islands (and parts of Indonesia) in 2004, and how a “complex disaster” changed a “hunter-gatherer subsistence society into a more aid-dependent, resource-intensive, and monetized one.”
Phillip Vannini talked to us about “islandisms”: “you know you’re from a small island when…” I totally related to his talk about his home island off the coast of Vancouver Island (Gabriola), where he talked about the different island “waves” (not the water variety) depending on how well you know the person you’re greeting, or the hand signals you use when you can’t pick up a hitchhiker. I was intrigued by floating docks… how they extend the shoreline in a different way…
I learned from Elaine Stratford about how islands need to be mapped to afford them some legitimacy - to those who aren’t actually on the island. “Maps speak islands into existence…” also made me think about how many people don’t know how to read maps any more. From Eric Clark, and his twin brother Tom – a psychologist from Florida - I learned about how islands, sustainability, and human nature intersect. This made me think about people’s capacity for resilience: do islanders have anything to teach the world?
I learned from Elizabeth DeLoughrey about the unconscionable things nuclear bombs did to the Marshall Islands, Bikini and Runit, and the Enewetak Atoll in the name of science: these islands were “a giant lab in the middle of an ocean.” And a presentation on sound by Rowland Atkinson made me think about how quiet an island can be – or not – reminding me of how hard I first found sleeping on an island, with the sound of the ocean roaring in my ears. Suzanne Thomas’s lovely film – part of her paper on “Nissopoesis” or “Island-making” was a meditation on water… watching the waves’ constant push and pull on submerged seaweed reminded me how tough and resilient we have to be in order to survive on an island. This “felt geography” of an “islandscape” – be it a smooth island space or a strident island space - offers a way of living that could save our lives. The image of islands as rhizomes still sticks.
The final paper, Grant McCall’s on Rapanui or Easter Island, cleared up a question I’d had from the first evening: why John Terrell called geographer Jared Diamond a fiction writer. Turns out that neither Grant nor John think much of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2005), which talks about Rapanui as “the best historical example of a societal collapse in isolation.” Grant contends that it was the Polynesian rat that ate the palm trees that led to the island’s collapse, and offered to debate Diamond on Australian radio; apparently, Diamond declined. (Would you want to debate Grant, someone asked?!) Grant knew, though, that he’d come to the right island when he saw a sculpture from Easter Island just outside the main conference room…
Finally, the favourite image from my paper – “The story in the landscape: Place theory and the role of Confederation mythology in the construction of island place meanings on Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island” – came from my co-author (and supervisor extraordinaire) Pete Hay. The concept of “boundary “shimmer” when talking about geographical and cultural boundaries gives me goosebumps…
After a final walk to the ocean, where I stuck my feet in the Oresund Strait (it wasn’t numbing – how’s that for damning with faint praise…), we headed off to the ferry, then by train. Many of us didn’t get a chance to say good-bye on the train platform – but it’s more “see you later”… on some other island…
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