Original subtitles

..Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...

In the 1940s,

Western powers began nuclear testing in one of the world's most beautiful

and unspoiled places.

Over the next few decades,

hundreds of bombs were detonated

in the islands and atolls of the Pacific,

causing immense environmental damage.

But the tests were just the latest chapter in a long and complex story

about how the West destroyed a world it had long seen as paradise.

For centuries, we have projected our fantasies onto the South Seas,

imagining this remote corner of the world as a place only of pristine

beaches, perennially ripe fruit and hula girls in every direction.

But fantasies have one thing in common.

They aren't true.

This particular fantasy was created in the late 18th century,

just as Captain Cook began exploring the Pacific.

Cook's voyages took him to Tahiti, Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand.

They marked the beginning of a seminal cultural encounter

that was both creative and destructive.

In this series, I'm exploring the impact of that and later encounters,

between the people of Oceania and those who went on to colonise them,

but opened our eyes to a new world of images,

reinvigorated Western art

and irrevocably changed the global imagination.

And I won't be telling it alone.

In these programmes,

indigenous people from all over Oceania will have THEIR say,

reflecting on the cultural legacy of these encounters.

TRANSLATION:

This episode tells the story of the Polynesian islands,

a group of sophisticated and at times violent societies,

how Europeans encountered them,

destroyed what they didn't understand

and appropriated what was left,

objectifying Polynesian women

and reimagining this vast maritime continent

as little more than a holiday destination.

The Pacific Ocean is the world's largest feature.

At over 60 million square miles,

it covers a third of our planet's surface.

Westerners long saw it as a vast blue wilderness,

but for this great ocean's inhabitants,

it was just as rich and complex as the land.

And it inspired some very unusual artefacts.

At first sight, this might look like, I don't know,

an abstract sculpture, made by some obscure surrealist in 1920s Paris,

but it isn't a sculpture and it isn't abstract.

It is, believe it or not, a map.

The traditional mariners of the Pacific didn't have sextants

and compasses,

and so, to navigate their canoes safely from one island or atoll to

another, they needed to rely on subtle signs in the water,

on the movements of birds and fish

and, above all, on their own memories.

And this chart, which is called a mattang,

was one of their favourite tools.

It is fashioned from 28 sticks

that have been lashed together

with string,

and those sticks form lines

that plot out the directions of swells and currents

in a particular stretch of ocean.

And either side, these two little cowrie shells probably represent

two islands in the middle of the Pacific,

and you can see here and here how

those landmasses disrupt the pattern of the currents.

This exceptionally beautiful object

proves that to the people who lived in it,

the Pacific was not some vast, wet emptiness,

it was a terrain and one's life depended on understanding it.

At the heart of the Pacific is Polynesia,

more than 1,000 islands bounded by Hawaii in the north,

New Zealand in the south,

Easter Island in the east, and Tahiti in the centre.

They are separated by vast distances,

but united by a culture and by their love and respect for the ocean.

TRANSLATION:

To understand this maritime culture, I have come to its mythical heart,

the island of Raiatea.

It is seen as the cradle of Polynesian civilisation.

According to one story,

an enormous fish made of earth

started its life here and then broke into pieces.

Those pieces then spread into the Pacific and formed the

Polynesian islands.

And the most important site on the island is this,

the Marae Taputapuatea.

It has been here for more than 1,000 years,

and was once the Pacific's most sacred place.

It contains a series of large rectangular courtyards,

paved with black volcanic rock.

Around their edges run altars carved from coral.

These spaces hosted all kinds of ceremonies.

This courtyard was the beating heart of Raiatean society.

It was a temple, it was a law court,

it was a town hall, it was a theatre,

it was a kind of place where all kinds of rituals and activities

took place, and at its centre is this huge basalt stone

now covered in graffiti.

This was a place where young priests received their investiture, as the

elders of the community sat around the edges watching on.

But it was not just for the people of Raiatea.

Positioned next to a sacred pass through the lagoon,

the marae was an important staging post in the Pacific, and Polynesians

travelled thousands of miles to come here,

to pay their respects and to worship.

Nothing could prepare you, or at least nothing could prepare me,

for the haunting power of this place.

It's hidden away in a remote corner of the Pacific, derelict, desolate,

almost deserted,

apart from a few scuttling crabs,

and it feels almost impossibly remote and yet...

..for Polynesians living all over the place,

thousands of miles away from each other, in New Zealand, Tonga,

Fiji and Samoa in the south, in Easter Island,

in Tahiti and the Society Islands in the east, and in Hawaii,

all the way in the north, this place,

this very spot was the centre of the universe.

The capital, the spiritual home,

the Jerusalem off an entire maritime continent.

But what was it that was worshipped here?

The Polynesians had many gods,

with many different names and attributes, and sometimes

they took unusual forms.

At first sight, this might look like some kind of broom handle,

but it was once an object of immense and perhaps even terrifying power.

For most of the year, it was hidden away, wrapped up in leaves,

but during important ceremonies,

this object was brought out of hiding and worshipped with the same

reverence that people in other parts of the world bestowed

on monumental marble statues.

It is a figure of Oro,

the Tahitian war god, and it's made from a simple wooden core that is

wrapped up in coconut husk fibre.

It's almost abstract, but if you look at it closely,

you can just make out that these fibres

have been arranged to form two ears,

two eyes, a nose and a grimacing mouth.

Now, it might be diminutive in size,

but this figure was believed to dictate the outcome of battles,

the fates of chiefs and, over the years,

countless people were sacrificed in its honour.

To understand the full extent of Polynesian culture,

we need to travel north, to the islands of Hawaii.

Many of Hawaii's early inhabitants had come from Raiatea,

settling here around 400AD.

But gradually, they developed a culture of their own.

Hawaii was, in many respects,

even more advanced than the islands around Tahiti,

and the proof of that is beneath my feet.

I am walking along a one-mile-long wall

that marks out the edge of a large man-made reservoir.

It was originally used by indigenous Hawaiians to trap,

cultivate and catch fish.

It was, in other words, a fish farm and, astonishingly,

completely astonishingly,

it was originally built as much as 800 years ago.

There was nothing like it anywhere else in the world at the time,

and although it may not look like it today,

this was once world-leading technology.

Hawaiian society was as complex as its engineering projects.

Communities were highly stratified,

run by hereditary chiefs known as ali'i.

This hierarchical society produced a singular art form.

It began in a place like this.

Teams of men, roaming the forests, with nets in hand.

They were under orders from their chiefs

to look for something precious.

They were hunting for a handful of birds

that were native to the Hawaiian islands.

Now, one of them was the i'iwi, the scarlet honeycreeper,

the other one was the 'o'o, the honeyeater.

Now, what they would do in the case of the 'o'o, for instance,

was to cover a branch with glue,

wait for it to land and get stuck and then very, very carefully,

remove just the tiny number of yellow feathers from its body

and then, if they didn't eat it,

they would release it back into the wild.

Now, over time, they would trap hundreds and hundreds of birds

and collect thousands and thousands of feathers,

and then they would do something remarkable with them.

These unforgettable faces belong to Kukailimoku, the land snatcher,

the island eater, the Hawaiian god of war.

They are at least 250 years old,

perhaps much more, and they've both been made in the same way.

An armature has been fashioned from wicker and then covered

with fibre netting, and you can just see the fibre netting down here.

Then, invaluable feathers, tens of thousands of them, have been tied,

bundle by bundle onto the netting.

The eyes are mother-of-pearl shells,

the teeth have been extracted from the mouths

of some very unfortunate dogs,

and this head is covered with human hair.

It once belonged either to a dead ancestor

or to the chief who commissioned it.

All of the materials are symbolic in one way or another,

but none more so than the feathers.

The Hawaiians believed that the gods were born covered head to toe

in feathers and that, like birds,

they could move effortlessly from Earth up to Heaven.

But they are terrifying.

Their goggle eyes stare out at us, their mouths grimace,

but they were supposed to be unpleasant.

Heads like these, which are known as aumakua hulu manu,

served many different functions,

but arguably the most important job occurred on the battlefield.

When Hawaiian men went into battle,

they held these war gods above them on a pole,

in order to intimidate their enemies,

and the scarier their head was,

the more likely they were to gain a psychological

and indeed spiritual advantage.

Feather work had many applications and today, indigenous Hawaiians are

still using this old technique.

Feather work has been a part of Hawaii's culture,

a part of our history from the very beginning.

As our ancestors travelled throughout the Pacific

and they inhabited islands,

it came with them,

and when they landed here and adapted to the surroundings

that we have and the birds that we have,

they refined their work and there is nowhere else that you will find

this type of intricate feather work.

TRANSLATION:

I've been around feathers all my life,

and my tutu started teaching me when I was five years old.

I knew that it was my kuleana, it was my responsibility,

and so now that my tutu and my mother have passed,

I continue their work.

Feather work, when we look back in our history, was very important,

very symbolic.

Feather work was only worn by our ali'i, or our kahuna class.

The ali'i were our rulers, our chiefs, our chiefesses.

The kahuna were the religious folk, our scholars and teachers.

Some feathers in particular, like the yellow,

coming from the 'o'o or the mamo, were very few in number,

so, typically, if you saw feather articles like capes or lei

that had those feathers,

typically, those articles belonged to those of a higher rank.

So someone like Kamehameha, our first king,

his cloak was entirely yellow.

Stories say that it took as much as ten generations

just to collect enough feathers to be able to produce this cloak.

The Bishop Museum in Honolulu houses a centuries-old feathered cape

that is particularly special.

It contains an estimated half a million feathers,

extracted from 80,000 to 90,000 birds,

and would have taken years to make.

It is one of the masterpieces of Hawaiian feather work.

At the end of the 18th century,

it was presented to someone the Hawaiians must have regarded

as a great leader - not a local chief,

but a British mariner called James Cook

whose arrival in Polynesia would change everything.

When Cook and the crew of the Endeavour first entered the Pacific

in 1769, the South Seas were largely unknown to Europeans.

Cook's voyage was shaped by the values of the Enlightenment.

On board the Endeavour were scientists and artists,

to record not only the flora and fauna,

but the culture of the last unknown corner of the world.

And on reaching Tahiti,

his crew's first task was to make a measurement.

It had taken them eight months to get to Tahiti.

Now, they had come here to observe the transit of Venus,

a rare astronomical event that they believed would enable them

to calculate the distance between the Earth and the sun,

the so-called astronomical unit.

They made their observation with little success, it must be said,

on 3rd June, but in the meantime,

they fell head over heels in love with their new surroundings.

Tahiti is indeed a special place.

Its jagged peaks are covered in lush vegetation, and the climate is warm

all year round.

The British found everything they could want here - fresh water,

abundant seafood, and fruit unlike anything they had tasted before.

On board the Endeavour was the gentleman naturalist

and Fellow of the Royal Society Joseph Banks,

and he was amazed by this exotic wonderland.

Joseph Banks thought Tahiti was paradise.

He called it, "The truest picture of an Arcadia

"of which we are going to be kings that the imagination can form."

Now, he wasn't the first to think this.

The few Europeans who had come to Tahiti before him

had compared it to the Garden of Eden.

They called it the new Kythira.

Now, all of them were doing the same thing.

They were all constructing a myth.

But arguably the most appealing feature of this new Kythira

were its inhabitants.

Polynesian attitudes to sex were quite different

to those of 18th-century Britain.

Banks and his companions found the local women were not only beautiful

but amorous, and they took full advantage.

This view of Polynesia as an exotic,

erotic paradise is a myth that still endures.

But it was first expressed in art in the 1770s,

when Cook returned to Tahiti on a second voyage to the Pacific

and brought a gifted painter with him.

His name was William Hodges.

Hodges wasn't supposed to be on the voyage.

Joseph Banks had already signed up another artist, Johann Zoffany.

He'd also insisted that a whole new part of the ship

be constructed to accommodate him and his 15 associates.

Now, Cook begrudgingly agreed,

but the new additions made the ship so top heavy

that it was deemed unseaworthy.

When the new deck was eventually dismantled,

a furious Banks withdrew from the expedition

and took his staff with him.

Cook's last-minute replacement was William Hodges.

Hodges was only 27 when he got the call,

but he was the most talented of all Cook's artists

and over the course of his journey,

he represented things that people had only imagined before -

the first-ever painting of an Antarctic iceberg,

and the verdant landscapes of New Zealand.

But Hodges' Tahitian rhapsodies made the greatest impact,

and this is one of them.

Welcome to Paradise.

This is William Hodges' grand vision of Tahiti, and what a vision it is.

The mountains rise improbably into the sky,

the hazy sunlight gilds the rock faces,

and a tropical breeze caresses the vegetation.

Hodges has structured this painting like a classical landscape -

those decadent paintings of Ancient Greece and Rome

that proved so popular throughout the 18th century,

but he's made some significant changes.

The cypress trees have become palm trees,

and the Mediterranean muses and nymphs

have been replaced by Polynesian princesses.

So, down here we have three naked Tahitian girls.

This one over here, she is swimming backstroke in a river,

and this one is thrusting her extravagantly tattooed buttocks

right out at us.

So, this was clearly supposed to be a deeply appealing image,

a doubly fertile Arcadia, untouched by grubby European hands.

This was the first great painting of a Polynesian paradise,

a vision that proved extremely enduring.

And yet, as with many classical landscapes,

there is nevertheless a note of caution here,

because just above those women is a carved effigy of a dead ancestor,

is a funeral bier and a shrouded corpse,

and I think Hodges is reminding us of that famous Latin phrase,

et in Arcadia ego - even in paradise there is death.

Hodges' warning was apt

because, in reality, Polynesian society was by no means a paradise.

It was just as flawed and violent as everywhere else.

And Cook's crew knew as much at first hand,

from a young Polynesian man with a tragic past.

His name was Mai.

He had been born on Raiatea in about 1753,

not far from the famous Marae Taputapuatea.

Mai was ten years old

when a group of warriors from a neighbouring island

called Bora Bora invaded Raiatea.

In the ensuing battle,

Mai's father was killed and the family's land was taken.

Mai's surviving relatives bundled him into an outrigger canoe

and paddled 100 miles south to Tahiti.

As he grew up, Mai became determined to have his revenge.

When he was old enough, he returned to fight the Bora Borans.

He got caught up in a battle between two canoes,

he lost four more relatives and was captured,

but then, on the second night of his imprisonment, he escaped,

he stole a canoe and he paddled through the dark

to another island called Huahine.

It was here that Mai,

now in his early 20s, encountered Cook's second voyage.

After some negotiations, Mai secured himself passage to Europe.

Mai, or Omai as he came to be known,

arrived in London on 14th July 1774.

He was the first Polynesian to reach Britain.

Mai came here for one reason and one reason alone.

He wanted to obtain guns and a ship so he could return to Bora Bora

and kill the people who had murdered his father.

But in the meantime, he became something of a London celebrity.

Backed by Joseph Banks,

he was whisked into high society and was introduced to King George III.

He also learned how to ride a horse,

how to play chess and cards,

and even became the subject of a West End play.

Mai also inspired a wave of portraiture,

the most famous of which was made

by the President of the Royal Academy of Arts himself.

This is Joshua Reynolds' portrait of Mai,

and quite some portrait it is.

It is a full-length, life-size painting,

almost two-and-a-half metres high, a format traditionally reserved

not for Polynesian stowaways but for royalty and aristocracy,

and Mai, it must be said, is every inch the patrician here.

First, his face.

Now, according to Captain Cook, Mai was an exceptionally ugly man.

You wouldn't know it from this painting, though,

because Reynolds has depicted him almost like a film star.

Second, the body,

because Reynolds has shown Mai with his right arm outstretched

in the so-called adlocutio pose.

That was the grand, authoritative pose

that Roman generals and emperors adopted

when they were in the middle of an oration.

It's a pose that we see in countless classical statues,

most famously of course in the Apollo Belvedere.

And yet, Mai was like no patrician the British had ever seen,

because he was ultimately a person of colour

and a person from the other side of the world,

and Reynolds has gone to great lengths

to emphasise how truly exotic he was.

He is wearing this bizarre white garment

that includes Polynesian bark cloth,

a Roman toga and a Middle Eastern turban.

He's gone barefooted, and the hands I mentioned earlier, well,

if you look at them closely,

you'll see that they are covered in black tattoos.

Common practice in Polynesia, maybe,

but virtually unheard of in British high society.

And let's not forget the background -

the background's always very important in portraits -

because Reynolds has tried his very hardest

to create a Polynesian setting for his Polynesian sitter,

although, in truth,

it looks a little bit more like the Lake District than Raiatea.

He has clearly never seen a palm tree before in his life.

But taken together, I find this

a tremendously successful and persuasive painting,

because what Reynolds has done is taken Pacific culture

and European culture and brought them together,

and in the process, he has created yet another Polynesian myth.

If Polynesia is paradise, well, this is its ideal inhabitant.

A Savage maybe, according to 18th-century views,

but, my, what a noble savage.

Mai eventually got his wish.

He returned to Polynesia on Cook's third voyage

and launched an attack on his enemies.

But he fell ill and died before he could win his land back.

And Cook would face a violent encounter of his own.

After dropping Mai at Tahiti,

Cook's crew sailed north across the Pacific to Hawaii.

They visited the islands twice, and on their second visit,

things turned deadly.

Cook and his crew were anchored just off the coast of Hawaii

to repair a broken mast.

They'd been here only days earlier

and had been treated almost like royalty,

but this time things were rather more fraught.

An unknown group of Hawaiians stole one of Cook's small boats.

A confrontation ensued,

and Cook made a fatal miscalculation.

He landed with nine marines.

His plan? Well, it was to kidnap the local king

and to take him hostage until the stolen property was returned.

The king, it must be said, went willingly,

but as he was led along the beach to waiting boats,

a crowd of angry Hawaiians gathered round.

In the melee, Cook shot one of them dead, and as he turned to the sea

to launch his vessels, he was clubbed over the head, stabbed,

held under water and repeatedly beaten and stabbed again until dead.

It was a sordid and entirely avoidable end of a life

that continues to divide opinion.

By the time of his death,

Cook had made three voyages across the Pacific.

He and his men had imposed themselves on societies

across Oceania, often with unnecessary violence.

And yet, he had done more than anyone else of his generation

to map the mysteries of the globe.

These voyages fired the Western dream of a pristine paradise,

a lost Eden, unsullied by outsiders,

but the very promise of that paradise

contained the origins of its own undoing.

In the decades following Cook's death,

more Westerners arrived in Polynesia.

Whalers and passing merchants were among the first to come ashore...

..with destructive consequences.

Europeans brought many things with them to Polynesia.

They brought disease - syphilis, gonorrhoea, tuberculosis, smallpox -

diseases against which the locals were almost defenceless.

They brought guns, they brought alcohol, they brought tobacco

and, together, these things

spread through Polynesian society like wildfire,

and communities duly went up in flames.

In the 100 years since Europeans first arrived,

close to 90% of the Polynesian population died out,

and all the while, indigenous beliefs were under attack.

Europeans also brought Christianity.

Missionaries poured into the Pacific,

hoping to convert the heathens,

and they were phenomenally successful. By the mid-19th century,

the vast majority of Polynesians were already Christians,

and this had a huge impact on the culture of Polynesia.

Clothing changed, tattooing died out,

and the great religious artworks, which were now dismissed as idols,

were thrown on one fire after another.

But a few survived.

And one is particularly special,

not only for its importance to Polynesians,

but for its influence on Western art.

This, in my view, is the David of Pacific art.

It is arguably the greatest surviving masterpiece

in all of Polynesian sculpture.

And it goes by the name of A'a.

This breathtaking object was made on the island of Rurutu

hundreds of years ago, we don't know exactly when,

and was revered by the locals.

But when, in the 19th century, they converted to Christianity,

they gave it away to missionaries as proof

that they had abandoned their old beliefs.

The London Missionary Society brought it back to Britain and

instead of burning it, they put it on display as a trophy of victory,

and today, it is here in the British Museum.

Western artists soon recognised A'a as a masterpiece of world art.

Pablo Picasso kept a cast on it in his studio,

as did the British sculptor Henry Moore.

Both of them admired non-Western artists' capacity

to re-imagine human form,

and in A'a, they saw an object of uncommon power.

A'a was a creator god,

a generator of life and a common ancestor to the people of Rurutu,

and that is why, in this extraordinary act of invention,

he is covered with people -

with 30 little humans who make up all of his features.

His eyes, his ears, his nose, his mouth, even his nipples.

They are his descendants.

They are his progeny.

But, for me, the most intriguing thing

about this relentlessly interesting sculpture is what went inside it.

The whole back can be removed, the inside is hollow.

So it was clearly designed to contain something,

and the current thinking is that this object

originally housed the bones of an important Rurutan chief.

The skull would have fitted inside the head,

the rest of the bones would have filled the body.

So before the Rurutans gave this object away,

they must have removed those important relics

and buried them somewhere or hidden them somewhere sacred,

and they still haven't been found today.

A'a still has a powerful place within Polynesian society,

not least on the island in which it was made,

and its absence is strongly felt by the custodian of its former home.

TRANSLATION:

In the second half of the 19th century,

the Pacific became a playground of imperial ambition.

Missionaries were followed by colonisers.

The British, who had already colonised Australia and New Zealand,

took Fiji, the Solomon Islands and the Cook Islands,

which were named after Cook himself, while their great rival, France,

took Tahiti, Raiatea, the Austral Islands,

the Marquesas Islands -

a maritime area the size of Western Europe -

and in doing so, they transformed a whole swathe of Polynesia into

something that is still known as French Polynesia.

The new colonisers change the places they settled.

They converted wild land into plantations,

they constructed harbours,

roads and modern European buildings,

and they increasingly encouraged their citizens

to leave Europe and settle in the paradise they'd just conquered.

One of these settlers stands out from all others,

someone who reinvented the fantasy of paradise

in large part through the objectification of Polynesian women.

In 1890, Paul Gauguin needed a miracle.

His wife had abandoned him and taken his children with her,

his old friend Vincent van Gogh had killed himself,

his career as an artist had stalled

and he was penniless.

So he hatched a plan which he announced to his estranged wife

in a letter.

"May the day come, and perhaps soon,

"when I can flee to the woods on a South Sea island and live there

"in ecstasy for peace and for art,

"with a new family, far from this European struggle for money.

"There in Tahiti, in the silence of the lovely tropical night,

"I can listen to the sweet murmuring of my heart

"beating in amorous harmony

"with the mysterious beings of my environment.

"Free at last, with no money troubles, and able to love,

"to sing and to die."

His sentiments were no doubt deeply felt,

but they were far from original.

Paul Gauguin had bought into an old myth about Polynesia

that went all the way back to the time of Captain Cook.

He was dreaming of a tropical paradise,

a land in which the living was easy,

and so were the women.

In March 1891,

Gauguin boarded a ship called the Oceania and left Europe,

he hoped, for ever.

He arrived in Tahiti three months later.

But it wasn't the paradise he had been expecting.

Tahiti felt far more like Europe than he had anticipated.

It was filled with French people, French buildings, French newspapers

and exorbitantly priced French wine.

After three months, he moved out of the capital to the countryside and

built himself a traditional hut with reed walls and a thatched roof.

Gradually, and with a great deal of effort,

Gauguin fashioned his own fantasy paradise.

He learned a few words of Tahitian, he got to know his neighbours,

and he spent a lot of time walking around naked.

In a letter, he wrote, "Bit by bit, step by step,

"civilisation is peeling away from me."

Gauguin's experience wasn't as authentic as he liked to claim,

but it did inspire a number of intoxicating paintings.

This is his first major Tahitian canvas, painted in 1891.

It is called Ia Orana Maria,

which means Hail Mary in the local language,

and combines Christian subject matter with a Polynesian setting.

It shows the Virgin Mary and the young Christ as Tahitians,

surrounded by bare-breasted worshippers and ripe fruit.

And this is his first Tahitian portrait.

It shows a beautiful woman staring evocatively into the distance,

as exotic flowers rain down around her.

The sitter was so overwhelmed by Gauguin's decision to paint her

that she insisted on wearing her Sunday best,

a European-style dress that normally she reserved for church.

Both of these paintings capture Tahitians at a crossroads

between old and new, indigenous and colonial cultures,

but Gauguin established a style that nevertheless resonated

with his new surroundings - rich colours,

decorative patterns, and, of course, mesmerising female subjects.

And yet, his interests weren't only aesthetic.

Like many Europeans before him,

Gauguin took advantage of the local women.

Over the course of two visits to Tahiti,

he slept with innumerable locals.

He married three of them.

One of them was 13 years old, the other two both 14.

He abandoned one, he had children with two,

and he infected all three with syphilis.

He depicted one of these wives in this extraordinary picture.

It is called Nevermore.

This is a portrait of Pahura.

Gauguin married her when she was 14 years old, and a few months before

painting this picture, when she was 15, she gave birth to his daughter.

Tragically, the baby died after only a few days, and Pahura sank,

understandably, deep into depression.

And that depression, I think, is writ large across her face.

Her eyes, which look swollen from tears, stare hopelessly into space.

But what I find particularly touching and also quite alarming

is how young she looks.

She is reacting to this tragedy not as a woman but as a girl.

After all, what do teenagers,

what do 15-year-olds do when they get bad news?

They run up to their bedrooms, they slam the door,

they collapse onto their bed and they curl into a ball,

and that is precisely what Pahura is doing.

But this painting, in truth, isn't really about her.

Paul Gauguin's art is always about Paul Gauguin.

In 1897, he too was suffering from depression,

and this image is drenched in his own misery -

the murky colours, the bright-red fabric that pulsates like blood,

the skulking women in the background gossiping or perhaps even plotting,

and, most unsettling of all,

the large malevolent bird perched on the window ledge,

staring down at the grief-stricken girl

and cursing her and him for eternity.

Gauguin, doubtless, got his idea

from Edgar Allen Poe's famous poem

which described a raven appearing one night at the author's home

and tapping, gently rapping, rapping at his bedroom door.

And the only thing the raven ever said, over and over again,

was "nevermore".

A few years ago,

the public voted this the most romantic painting in Britain.

Well, I must say, I cannot for the life of me understand

how they reached that conclusion because, as far as I'm concerned,

this painting is deeply, deeply disturbing.

This darkness began to pervade Gauguin's life.

By the time he painted Nevermore,

he was increasingly unhealthy and felt his life was coming to an end.

In the same year, he made his most ambitious Tahitian painting.

It is called Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?.

Almost four metres wide,

it was the culmination of Gauguin's personal mythology.

Read from right to left, it describes the cycle of life,

extending from infancy and youth through to maturity,

old age...

..and finally, the world that lies beyond death,

as embodied by this blue idol.

Gauguin wrote, "I believe that this canvas not only surpasses

"all my preceding ones, but that I shall never do anything better."

It is indeed is a hybrid masterpiece,

an unforgettable combination of ancient and modern,

Oceania and the West.

But this paradise contains the seeds of its own corruption.

Shortly after completing the picture,

Gauguin hiked up to the hills above his home

and tried to take his own life.

He had brought with him a bottle of arsenic,

but he drank too much of it,

vomited it back up and simply ended up making himself horribly sick.

Somehow, he made it back down to town,

where he was treated at a local hospital.

His life dragged on for another six painful years,

spending the last two elsewhere in Polynesia.

He died in May 1903, never returning to Europe again.

Paul Gauguin was a complicated person,

and his time spent in the Pacific was particularly controversial.

Some people think he was a noble explorer,

one of the first people to properly engage with Polynesian society and

culture on their own terms.

But others think of him as little more than a seedy sex tourist,

a man who objectified and exoticised this part of the world

for his own ends.

It is, as ever, a mixture of both, but one thing I think is certain -

Gauguin reinvigorated the old myth of Polynesia for the modern age.

In the 20th century, that myth became more pervasive than ever,

but it left Tahiti and migrated to the islands on which

Captain Cook had met his end.

# Hawaiian sunset

# Peeping from the sea... #

Blue Hawaii...

..with Elvis as your personal guide to America's exotic Eden,

our Polynesian paradise.

In March 1959, Hawaii became America's 50th state

and was soon a fully fledged tourist destination,

with modern commercialism fuelling the old craving

for a tropical paradise.

Walking through the streets of Waikiki today,

one can see how old ideas have been repackaged for our pleasure,

an age whose fantasies are inhabited,

indeed dominated, by sun, sea and sand.

When most people think about Hawaii,

they don't think about its complex history, its society, its religion,

its culture, its art.

No, they think of luaus, they think of hula girls,

they think of surfing,

they think of tiki bars and brightly coloured shirts,

and that is because, in the popular imagination at least,

Hawaii has become almost exclusively a venue for leisure.

The Polynesian paradise is now part of global culture,

peddled not just within America but all over the world.

Some of it might be harmless,

but it has one pernicious feature

that goes all the way back to the time of Captain Cook -

the myth of the Polynesian woman.

The cultural currency that's been portrayed is one of paradise,

and that you can go to paradise

and you'll be presented with an exotic, beautiful woman.

We haven't really been able to break from that myth that came with

the sailors, with the very first encounters.

I am Angela Tiatia,

and I am a visual artist based in Sydney, Australia.

In Foreign Objects, I really wanted to create a room

that was almost like a museum,

but that the objects were all collected from eBay.

So I would search under terms such as "exotic nudes" or "savage nude",

and seeing what would come up in my search.

So a lot of the objects that I found were of the female form,

and they portrayed the female body as quite sexual and passive,

and then I noticed that these objects

were not made by Pacific islanders,

but they were informing people outside of the Pacific

what our bodies looked like or how we behaved.

So prior to me being an artist, I worked as a model for 20 years,

and then I moved on to doing acting work.

I'd get a script or a job where I have to be the dusky maiden,

and so it's this thing of being part of the mythology

and the creation of the mythology, of the dusky maiden,

knowing that I'm implicit, knowing that I'm perpetuating it,

and having this complete loss in control purely because of economics,

but I'm doing this because I need the money.

And also that whole thing of the dusky maiden,

what is she actually saying to the world?

That she sexually available to the gaze

and to the pleasure of the Western male.

But what does that say to us, as Pacific woman,

that that's all that we're good for?

Now we're seeing that push back of the Pacific woman,

the Pacific artists, the Pacific writers,

the Pacific poets who are pushing back,

and then using those forms of media

to offer this different idea of representation,

this different idea of the Pacific body,

of the Pacific woman,

to say that there is a much broader experience

and that the myth needs to be exploded.

Old myths die slowly.

Not far from Waikiki is the Polynesian Cultural Center,

a theme park and museum that's been open since 1963,

with the slogan "go native".

It contains six villages

representing the major Polynesian cultures -

Hawaii, Samoa, New Zealand,

Fiji, Tahiti and Tonga.

Visitors from all over the world are encouraged to participate in

indigenous crafts and performances, from weaving workshops

to traditional dancing.

HE SHOUTS

And every night, it stages an elaborate show

telling a story of Polynesian culture through dance,

music and buttock-searing fire dances.

MUSIC PLAYS

This show, this theme park is undoubtedly spectacular,

and it's tremendous fun as well,

but something about it nevertheless makes me feel uncomfortable,

Because what it's doing is taking a whole set of cultures,

indeed an entire ocean continent, and lumping them together,

exoticising them and so turning complex societies

into little more than a song-and-dance routine.

But perhaps there's nothing new here.

From the time of Cook's first voyages,

Polynesia has been reduced to what the West wanted it to be -

an escape from social and ethical conventions.

Although we are now well into the 21st century,

the West's fantasy of paradise, as envisioned by Banks,

Hodges and Gauguin, has never been stronger.

It is a vision that belies the complexity of Polynesian culture,

much of which was swept aside,

but which indigenous people are now beginning to reclaim and revive.

In the final episode,

we explore the spectacular islands of New Zealand

and their inhabitants, the Maori,

a people who, against all the odds,

have kept hold of their culture

and are now an integral part of the modern nation.