Newell Harry’s practice traces an intimate web of connections and histories linking Pacific island cultures (especially those of the Vanuatu archipelago)–via Australia, where he lives, and the Malay world–to South Africa’s Western Cape Province, the home of his extended family. He is known for acid text works featuring pithy appropriations of Pidgin and Creole languages, marrying a concrète poetics with craft traditions of the South Pacific. But his art is rooted in a studious kind of gathering, of stories, images, and artefacts, both on the ground in the course of his travels and in archives, markets, and collections. Harry has long explored island societies’ unfinished histories of exploitation and epistemological upheaval, as well as the cultural friction of colonial migration and its legacies concerning race and identity. His own South African and Mauritian descent affords a dissonant perspective on present-day Australia, a nation whose schizoid settler imaginary—as both colony and Pacific colonizer—is plagued by its uneasy history in a region looming ever larger in global affairs. Through the lenses of journalism, documentary practice and his own family’s experience, Harry’s recent research uncovers transnational solidarities and the contradictions of white multiculturalism in a certain geography of decolonization, lately called the ‘Indo-Pacific’.