Many people and institutions have made this volume possible. As Darrell Tryon explains in his preface, we must first acknowledge the innovative funding which came from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as part of the International Program of Scientific Collaboration (PICS). This has been a very successful program. We also acknowledge the “Fonds Pacifique” of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs which, most recently, funded a week-long symposium in Suva, Fiji in December 2008 bringing biologists, archaeologists, historians and anthropologists together to debate the distinction between Melanesia and Polynesia in Oceania. Darrell Tryon and Serge Tcherkézoff were the main co-organisers of that important event.

There have also been significant contributions from the Australian side – from The Australian National University and particularly from several parts of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies: ANU Cartographic Services, Anthropology, Pacific and Asian History and the Gender Relations Centre (all now located in the College of Asia and the Pacific). The Gender Relations Centre has invested much in this volume through the work of research assistants and administrative staff as well as my own time. Also on the Australian side we must acknowledge the generous funding from the large Australian Research Council Discovery Project (2004–08, DP0451620). This bears the same name as this volume, Oceanic Encounters but a different subtitle: Colonial and Contemporary Transformations of Gender and Sexuality in the Pacific.

We must also thank the several institutions which have allowed images to be reproduced in electronic and hard copy form: All of these are acknowledged in detail in the captions which accompany the images. We warmly thank John Taylor for the use of his superb photograph of Ambae, Vanuatu, which we have reproduced on the cover.

We gratefully acknowledge the professionalism of Duncan Beard and his team at ANU E Press in the final design and production of this volume and Professor Stewart Firth, Chair of the Pacific Editorial Board of ANU E Press, who provided funds for final production and for securing permissions for reproduction of images.

We thank all of the contributors not just for the quality of their scholarship but for their prompt and thoughtful responses to the processes of peer review and copyediting; that has made the final stages of editing this large volume easier and even pleasurable. The comments of two anonymous reviewers were generous, cogent and extremely helpful. We thank each other as editors and contributors for the stimulating collaborative intellectual journey of which this is a part.

We especially thank several members of the Gender Relations Centre staff who have brought this volume to fruition: Annegret Schemberg who did preliminary work in editorial preparation just prior to her retirement, Josie Stockdill who did early work with the images and much later work in the preparation of the final manuscript, and Janet Beard who assisted in the compilation of abbreviations and acronyms, unusual symbols and the all-important index. But most of all we thank Michelle Antoinette whose final copyediting and work in securing images for this volume has been, to use a favourite phrase of Ian Chubb, our Vice Chancellor at the ANU, “superlatively good”. She has been both meticulous and gracious in this crucial role.

Finally we dedicate this volume to the cherished memory of Greg Dening and Epeli Hau`ofa, two stellar scholars, whose inspirational ideas about the “beach” of Oceanic encounters and the concept and value of Oceania have proved formative for all of us.

Margaret Jolly

The Australian National University

Canberra, January 2009