Jemima Garrett, second left, with Pacific Islands media practitioners Dorothy Wickham, and Lisa Williams an during a Pacific Islands Forum meeting in May 2019. Photo: Facebook / Dorothy Wickham
Australian journalist Jemima Garrett has worked in the Pacific for nearly 40 years.
Initially working for Radio Australia, she covered some of the dramatic stories in the region over that period of time.
She has also been a trainer and advocate for Pacific journalism, most recently through the Asia Pacific Media Initiative.
To mark Garrett's career, she was made a member of the Australian Order of Merit (OAM) during the Australia Day celebrations at the end of January.
RNZ Pacific spoke to her about her journey and asked if it had been fun.
(The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Jemima Garrett: It's been enormous fun, and really the most amazing opportunity to get out on the ground and to help people, have Pacific people have their voices heard, both in the region, and in Australia.
Don Wiseman: And do you feel that through that time, that has changed significantly?
JG: I do. I think the biggest thing sitting here in Australia is that I noticed from the very beginning that Australia had a problem speaking with, and not to the Pacific. I think finally Australia is starting to get over that.
So one of the things I've been doing more recently, is I've been the convener of a lobby group which is seeking to improve media links with the region. What we've seen as a result of that is a injection of funding into the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). And finally, we've seen the ABC employ an amazing range of Pacific talent to present programmes that go out to the region and to Australian audiences, and that's actually a generational breakthrough.
When I first got involved in the Pacific, which was in the mid 80s, a wonderful Tongan-Australian journalist, Jill Emberson, and myself, put it to air a series on Pacific women, which had Pacific women talking about the issues they thought were important in the way they wanted to talk about them. It was the first time that Pacific women had had the opportunity on Australian radio.
At that time, I thought that this was the beginning of Pasifika people like Jill presenting Pacific programmes. But no, it's taken until the last few years for that to happen in Australia. While the media currently is in crisis, and I know in New Zealand, you're all too aware of that with the job losses, I think there have been improvements.
DW: So we're talking here about the Asia Pacific Media Initiative?
JG: That's right. At this stage, Australia's only made progress on the Pacific side of that because of funding issues. But what it's seeking to do is to increase the media links between Australia and the Pacific, and there's Australia and Asia, so that we in Australia hear the voices of people from those regions.
DW: How do you go about that sort of work?
JG: I guess history comes into it, because Australia has had a hot and cold relationship with funding media. In 2014, we saw the Abbott Government absolutely slash Radio Australia and the Australia television service - money that went to the ABC - and that was the wrong point for doing that because it was just as the tech platforms were starting to have a really big impact on media, so that Pacific media was struggling.
The development assistance side was slashed. Myself and a whole lot of other people, and listeners may be aware of Sue Ahearn, a New Zealander working in Australia. She and I were the co-conveners of this group, and we really decided that it was time, in Australia's national interest, that something was done about media and that Australia had stronger connections. I guess that's what we've been working on since 2018.
DW: If you had to pick out the most interesting and dramatic story that you've been involved in, what was it?
JG: Oh, well, too many. Probably the most dramatic one, which is still having reverberations today, was the 1988 uprising of the Kanak Liberation Movement in New Caledonia, which is very much the antecedent of the problems we are seeing, the fact that that hasn't been dealt with well. Another one is the PNG land scandal, which saw 11 percent of PNGs traditionally held land essentially leased out, often without landowner permission, to mainly logging companies, over a period of a few short years. So that was one that affected so many people.
Every country has some interesting developments, and they're happening constantly, as you know as a Pacific reporter.
DW: You mentioned a book you've written, but it's just one of a number, and you've written on some very interesting issues, such as the Nauruan men who were lifted off the island by the Japanese during World War Two and used as slave labour, I think, on Chuk.
JG: That's a really interesting story, and not enough is written about the indigenous experience of World War Two. The people of Nauru were right at the centre of it because the Japanese arrived very early and, essentially, used the Nauruans as slave labour, but they sent two thirds of the population off to what's now Chuk in the Federated States of Micronesia, where, again, they were used as slave labour.
But they were actually also the target when the bombers that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima were practising, they actually practiced over Chuk, and some of the bombs landed near where the Nauruans were. They had an extremely rough time, and their population got so low because of the starvation and the isolated islands that there were less than 200 Nauruan men left at the end of the Second World War.
It was a pleasure to be able to tell that story. I did it with the high school students in mind because the experience had been so traumatic for the Nauruans that very few people had spoken about it, and a lot of people were starting to die off at that stage. It was great to have it written down, and for the book to be in the library and available to people.
It would resonate with people in Solomon Islands, all across Micronesia, all the islands and Papua New Guinea, of course, all the islands that were held by the Japanese.
DW: The work you're doing now, you see yourself doing it for many more years yet. What are your plans long-term?
JG: I think the need is there for many more years. I'd say at this stage, we've seen a big injection of funding, which has meant that audio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has been restored well. But we don't have full links. And when you look at the impact of the tech platforms on Pacific media, there's a huge need for support for Pacific media to be able to survive economically, to go on telling their stories.
So, that's where the emphasis is. We're looking at a much different sort of media relations, co-productions, joint projects, can lead to really innovative, exciting material that audiences will love, but will be important culturally and to relations between countries, because understanding is the basis of everything.
