SPACLALS – the South Pacific chapter of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies – is being revived in Australia as the primary network of postcolonial literary and cultural studies in the South Pacific region.

An important part of that process will be the conference, “The Two Canaries of Climate Change – Island and Polar Places”, to be held at the UNE FutureCampus in Parramatta, NSW, 14th to 16th February 2018.

ACLALS was started in 1964 with a conference at the University of Leeds and was officially accredited to the Commonwealth in 2005. The objectives of ACLALS are to promote and coordinate Commonwealth Literature Studies, organize seminars and workshops, arrange lectures by writers and scholars, publish a newsletter about activities in the field of Commonwealth Literature and hold one conference triennially. The last conference took place in July 2016 in South Africa, and the next one will be held in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2019.

SPACLALS is one of the 11 regional chapters of ACLALS. It has a long and distinguished history, beginning with the first SPACLALS conference at the University of Queensland in 1977. It is no exaggeration to say that the Australian impetus toward postcolonial studies began there and then.

(Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin – authors of the ground-breaking study, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (1989) – were all founding members.) It was also at that SPACLALS 1977 conference that the formation of a national association dedicated to the study of Australian Literature was proposed; and the inaugural conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) followed a year later.

From 1987 to 2016 SPACLALS also published SPAN, a biannual journal that included critical articles and book reviews on the postcolonial literatures of the South Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand.

For reasons that are hard to identify, however, SPACLALS has remained active in New Zealand and some other parts of the Pacific, its activities in Australia have declined – until now.

The SPACALS executive, chaired by UNE’s Professor Russell McDougall, is determined to increase the membership across all regions of the Pacific. The “Two Canaries” Conference is the organisation’s first move toward rejuvenating SPACLALS as the home of postcolonial studies in the region.