Launch: Melbourne, Australia, February 1-3, 2019
Details for Institute Training
Wominjeka, Welkam, Kia Ora, Kia Orana, Bula, Hai, Tālofa, Alii, Mauri, Yokwe, Halo, Mālō e lelei and welcome/hello!
Thank you for visiting the Institute for Women Surfers Oceania! Our project came about through conversations between the scholar and activist lisahunter (yes, that’s the right spelling) and Professor Krista Comer, and also including participants of IWS California and IWS Europe (Wales). It has been lisahunter’s dream to establish an organization that puts together female education, health, activism, with relations to the sea. Most of the thinking about Oceania on these pages comes from lisahunter. Having attended IWS 2017 at Stanford, and hosted a wonderful Surfing Social Hui (conference) in Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2016, lisahunter saw in the IWS grassroots educational format a working model for her activist vision. Krista was generously willing! We went to work from there.
We plan, in the future, to hold the IWS in the middle of Oceania. This time we begin in the Boonwurrung country of Australia near Melbourne, where ‘country’ refers to both land and water.
Oceania is a space of difference, diversity, and connection. It is one of eight terrestrial ecozones, a mostly watery-surfaced geographical space of just over 8 million square kilometres. It comprises Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia and Australasia, includes the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman, Solomon, Philippine, Koro, Coral and Bismark Seas. Its countries: Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa, Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kiribati, Nauru and Tonga. The overall population of Oceania is around 40 million humans. The Bottlenose Dolphin population is unknown.
As inspiration for the IWS Oceania logo, the Bottlenose Dolphin signals intentions to enhance connections between surfing, people of different regions, and more-than-human life forces.
