Introducing Oceania and the Pacific Islands! Today in All Around This World’s online classes for kids we begin an adventure that will take us to one of the most naturally beautiful, geographically fantastical and musically exuberant regions of the world. Oceania and the Pacific Islands are a vast and – until the very recent advent of air travel – practically impenetrable array of thousands of islands that rise above the now-rising waters of the Pacific Ocean. The 300,000 square miles of land are strewn across millions of square miles of ocean. Water defines the life in all but the largest of the area’s land masses; the incredible distances between earthen peaks are as much a character in the region’s story as the histories and complex cultural customs of the peoples themselves.
For the next three months we will be traveling clockwise, more or less, around the region. We’ll start in Australia whose two-headed tale of ancient Aboriginal and comparably recent British population continues to unfold. There we’ll join Aboriginal youth on a metaphorical coming-of-age Walkabout. In Papua New Guinea we’ll compete as Huli Wigmen in a Sing-Sing, in Fiji we’ll use our hands to dance a story about the sea. In New Caledonia we’ll meet French colonizers and Kanak life-cycle celebrations and in Kiribati we’ll wake up before dawn to climb a coconut tree. In Guam we appreciate the saints with a feast, in Tahiti we shake our hips to a frenetic beat, and in the Cook Islands we sing harmony with a dozen disparate voices. In Hawaii we strike a chord for equality by eating pretend poi, and we end in New Zealand with a terrifying, and cathartic, dance. Over the course of the season we’ll learn two dozen songs that will introduce us to the rhythms of the deep wood drums that resonate beyond the boundaries of the shore and to melodies that rise from volcanic peaks to the endless sky.
