Poetry, Politics and Protest: Responses to Nuclear Weapons Testing from Mā’ohi nui (French Polynesia) to Australia

Author: FREYA DAVIES-ARDILL
The French Australian Review No 80 (Australian Winter 2026): 52–76.
https://doi.org/10.62586/VROK3697

The intersection of poetry, politics and protest in response to nuclear testing in Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia) and Australia is illustrative of a rich tapestry of relation and resistance extending across the Anglo-Franco Pacific sphere—one that transcends both linguistic and geographical barriers. Notably, women and Indigenous people have been at the forefront of anti-nuclear movements across Oceania, as well as in Australia. The present article seeks to link together various literary, militant and political strands of anti-nuclearism across the Pacific region, drawing particularly on relationships, legacies and solidarities between Mā’ohi Nui and Australia. It begins by outlining the racist underpinnings and continuing impacts of nuclear weapons tests conducted in Maralinga, Moruroa and Fangataufa, and across the broader Pacific region. The second section examines political and grassroots campaigns of resistance, particularly in response to French nuclear tests, and introduces several anti-nuclear literary interventions, including early contributions of settler allyship such as Australian author Dymphna Cusack’s 1955 play Pacific Paradise. The article then moves to further contextualise the trans-Pacific—and notably trans-Indigenous—literary solidarities that arose alongside the movement for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific from the 1970s, touching on work by Ri-M̧ajeļ (Marshallese) poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Kanak author Déwé Gorodé and Tahitian/Mā’ohi author Chantal Spitz. The final section of the article offers a close comparative analysis of two short stories, “China Blue” and “Césure” by Tahitian/Mā’ohi author Rai Chaze, alongside the poem “Thunder Raining Poison” by Indigenous Australian Yankunytjatjara author Ali Cobby Eckermann.

Keywords: Nuclear colonialism, France-Australia relations, Trans-Indigenous literature, Oceanian literature, anti-nuclear literature