vinaka vakalevu

as it often does, it starts with an offhand comment, heard across a busy coffee table at a cafe that becomes our office every friday. you can tell it comes from a much deeper place, a seed that has been tended to quietly, studiously, through experience and exploration and invitations deeper into a world that other people know well. i have a fiji story of my own, many australians do. i don’t want to delve into the political positioning of humanitarian aid in the pacific (damn that alliteration writes itself), but you could definitely see it everywhere if you stop to notice. the last time i was in fiji, it was with a volunteering abroad company, where we pay for the privilege to travel internationally and ‘help’. as much as i put that in apostrophes, i do believe we perhaps did some good, maybe just a little.

for a week, we lived in a village that i will never find again on a map and honestly, i’m okay with that. i don’t think it is the kind of place that should be known to the broader world, the joy of that community would probably be disrupted. we were there to help refurbish the school, to teach and to learn (which in many languages is actually the same word), to be a part of this rich community, to play rugby barefoot in a dirt field, to join in with kava ceremonies and sing the night away. we slept on the floor of spare rooms in houses that sheltered generations of a family line and wore traditional clothes. as someone who doesn’t conform to gender norms, i found it very difficult to jump in and out of utes carrying things in the dresses but hey, we managed haha. i taught geography, played the ukulele and painted (branded) a massive mural on a wall with the logo of the tour organisers (not stopping to consider the broader implications of this, and it haunts me to this day). after ‘helping’ for a week, we left for a week of holidaying in a resort somewhere – one week of work, one week of play.
we spent hours reading on the beach, hiking to the far reaches of the island and climbing telephone towers for the view (maybe that was just me…), writing poetry and theatre scripts, dancing the night away, whispering dreams and fears into the dark, trying to work out what on earth we will do with our bachelors degrees. i was at the precipice of the phd, pondering the implications of my upcoming interview (which i never thought i would get when i applied for the phd scholarship via a facebook ad) and the subsequent move to canberra if i was successful. i still have the notebook i used in this time, and you can see me settle on the ultimate sliding doors decision that put me on to my current trajectory.

all this to say, i have a history with this corner of the world, and i felt it again upon returning, oh so different to who and how i was before, and in a way, more open and aligned to the intentions of this trip. the initial pitch was simple: we spend so much money going to conferences that are geographically close to us, cost a fortune, do very little for the local context they are hosted in, and leave us feeling short-changed in almost every way you cut it. now i get it, ‘conferences’ in the academic sense are never designed to be self-funded, even if i continue to do so. it is a way for the academy, universities, to parade professional development, to make it feel/look/sound like they care about staff. as a fledgling researcher, i was under the foolish impression that these coming-togethers were for scholarly debate and conversation, and i have definitely found communities where that is true, but they are not the default. there is still the condition that presented works should not be published yet so you benefit from the open question to this community – what do you think? i think we are coming back to this place now, slowly, as we try to fight for the time it takes to be deeply intellectual instead of automatically generating things not worth knowing…it’s a slow burn.

we haven’t even touched on the (im)practicalities of conferences for applied practitioners. where do the people doing things go for support about their practice? where are their robust conversations and theoretical musings, case studies with open ended questions and a genuine curiosity for where we could go next? given the embarrassing absence of personalised coach development in my backyard, and the national negligence we often turn our heads away from, crafting these spaces where people can connect and challenge and be curious is an ambitious pursuit – something i immediately wanted to be a part of. we travelled to fiji with the intention of asking the same big questions that your english teacher used to teach when writing an essay or story: who what where when why how.

a tennis coach/physiologist/physiotherapist in training, a psychology honours student (and so much more), one of my favourite thinkers and doers in the coaching science and sport-for-development space, and little old me. a motley crew of people who are passionate about sport, about to meet an even more serendipitous collection of minds and bodies and souls to entangle with. the University of South Pacific welcomed us in, fatefully hosting their ‘talanga’ (a regular gathering where people share their work and thoughts to a curious community) at the exact same time of day that we host the coaching special interest group (SIG) that brought the four of us together. it was like deja vu on another level. our resident pedagogue journeyed us through learning myths and metaphors, sparking rich observations and anecdotes across the group. a tour of the picturesque campus helped us work up an appetite before a long lunch with delicious local food and even better conversations ensued, joined by others in the sport-for-development space who could speak to the realities of trying to support participation and performance across the pacific.

it’s moments like these that you can almost see the yellow brick road forming, one step at a time, arm in arm as we (metaphorically) merrily skip towards the unknown with a level of optimism that we maybe didn’t arrive with. it is far too easy to get bogged down in our everyday realities, the impossibilities of it all, but conversations like these are enlivening. a stark reminder that we are not alone and no abundance of resources can overturn the flawed logics that put them in place. you can have funding and still not spend it well, you can have no funding and not benefit purely just from having more money.

it is the way we approach these problems, our problematisation of the situation, that sets the foundation. do you really need to know someone’s biomarkers and peak height velocity and VO2max when there is nowhere they can run safely? when you inspire someone with a disability to take up a sport but cannot officially get them classified so you roll the dice and fund travel to an international competition only to find out they don’t fit in that particular box and cannot compete in that sport or class? something that cannot be determined before you go because there are no people trained to classify athletes according to paralympic standards in the pacific? when we talk about tracking athletes to help them succeed, this question does not regard the athlete in isolation, as many indigenous forms of knowledge continue to remind us. we are deeply implicated in the world and athletes do not exist separate from their environments, the systems and structures that scaffold them.

to quote a paper that i was fatefully recommended just months before this trip became a possibility – we become gardens by Peers and colleagues (2023):

“We cannot even assume that each of us are wanting, or even able to imagine, the same world. What if as Tuck and Yang (2012) noted, our ‘worlds’, regardless of our best intentions, are somewhat ‘incommensurable’ (p. 31)?” [p 4]

there were moments where nothing was planned but everything happened. and others where everything was planned and nothing happened. these incommensurable worlds unfolded not because we had a schedule to work to or a timeline to complete but rather, we were present. we took up space. we floated through the ocean, venturing through the depths of coral gardens, marvelling at millions of fish and tailing after turtles. wandering among rock pools and staring out over the water with our laptops open, lost in conversation. the connections we built, between each other and people who inhabit these islands day in day out, cannot be manufactured. they may be subtly sustained through whatsapp messages and video calls and workshops but this will only ever yield a knowing about the world, not knowing of it.

in the ‘we become gardens’ paper, the collective of authors connect to Gaudet’s (2019) deep visiting methodology: grounded in relationality which is at the core of Indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being; such methodologies “lean deeply toward inner worlds, self-reflexivity, to then build reciprocal relationships; one such method to create these relationships is visiting” (Gaudet, 2019). many people write about the Pacific, but considerably less are there. this is not to say that one weekend trip in any way qualifies us to lead this song, but it does allow us to join the chorus, to find ways for our voices to come together and amplify the message that has perhaps been lost in the cacophony of self-aggrandisation in australia: the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games is a home Games for the Pacific too.

“Like singing together, the collective sound that emerges shifts, swells, and quells; different voices take more of a lead, or take a break, a breath. But we do not always write in collective voice. A core belief of the collective is: there is no meaningful consent or consensus without invitations and affirmations of dissent, discordance, and divergence (Eales & Goodwin, 2015).”

so i write, and i collect photographs, and i snorkel, and i point out every gorgeous starfish i find, and i ask about beliefs and theories and methodologies, and i kayak, and i walk, and i stretch, and i read, and i can do all of those things in many many places, but they are richer for having done them together, a world away. the parallels between the ‘we become gardens’ paper and our experiences on this tour will be something i continue to unpack in future editions, but in the meantime, i like to think that perhaps someday we will continue this correspondence with the work of others across the world and timelines and mediums. in a way, we are becoming [coral] gardens.

you can check out my photo gallery here: Fiji (SIG On Tour), and a short poem below:

airport lounges to university halls,
a parallel universe as we dial into the call.
taking a cutting of a community garden,
to snorkel the pacific, the garden of eden.
new life breathed into old conversations,
old concepts holding up new considerations.
mice and turtles, crabs that follow,
kayaks at high tide, starfish in the hollows.
dinnertime yarns and bowling them over,
hyperextending the experienced others.
the threads we weave are all we need,
a productivity with space-time to feed.
tangling relations that knot with slack,
one question left: when will you be back?