Australia, December 2017. Maryse Payne Minister of Defense solemnly announced: “Australia’s oldest naval mystery has been solved.” The wreck of HMAS AE1 had just been found off the coast of Papua New Guinea after it vanished at the start of World War One, on 14 September 1914, a hundred and three years ago.
A century later, the Great War never ceases to confound investigators, question historians, even draws citizens’ attention. Is the extent of the antipodean populations’ participation in the conflict well understood? Is this heavy human toll well appreciated?
Dozens of specialists gathered together for the international conference Pacific Islanders in the Great War, shed a new light on Pacific Islanders’ in this conflict. Men but also women, came massively alongside the allied forces on the Western Front, and particularly in Picardy. What is the sense of the war? the blood shed? How is the blood spilled involved in the building of the national feeling? In providing a fresh look of the war at the level of a whole continent, this survey addresses these critical issues from a new perspective.
