In the 1980s, Nic Maclellan was a trade union activist and member of the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) movement. He also travelled regularly to New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Marshall Islands, documenting struggles around US and French colonialism and nuclear testing. Between 1986-1995, Maclellan worked as a field officer for the Pacific program of the Overseas Service Bureau, in Papua New Guinea and Fiji, and then went on to establish the Australian Volunteers Abroad (AVA) program in Marshall Islands, Palau and Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). During his travels, Maclellan took hundreds of Kodachrome slides, which capture images of daily life in PNG and Micronesia during the 1980s, as well as unique moments in the rise of the Kanak independence movement during the 1984-1988 conflict known as 'Les evenements' or 'the events'. In the 2000s, Maclellan has worked as a correspondent for Islands Business magazine and contributor to Pacnews, Inside Story and other regional media.

Yacine Benhalima is French-Moroccan of Tahitian descent. He is a PhD candidate in history at the University of French Polynesia and Victoria University of Wellington. His current research focuses on the Free French in the Pacific during the Second World War, with an emphasis on Tahiti and French Polynesia. He graduated with a double BA in history and modern literature from Paris-Est Créteil University in 2018 and with a Masters in history from École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in 2020, writing a master’s thesis on the Pacific Battalion which was later published (Le Bataillon du Pacifique 1940-1946, L’Harmattan, 2021).

At the outbreak of World War I, Col. Sir Samuel Augustus Pethebridge took command of the Australian North-West Pacific Expedition, raised to occupy German islands north of the equator. Before the expedition could sail, the British government decided to allow the North Pacific islands to be left in the hands of their Japanese occupiers. Pethebridge suggested that his unit, known as Tropical Force, might be used to relieve the expeditionary force led by Colonel W. Holmes which had captured German New Guinea in the first weeks of the war. This was accepted, and in January 1915, Pethebridge succeeded Holmes as administrator at Rabaul. In January 1917, he contracted malaria which forced his return to Australia, where he died a year later.