'Paul Sharrad's long career sets an enviable standard for modelling locally inflected, postcolonial reading strategies, which work out from his Australian place to read across the Pacific and into the wider world, illuminating literary history, transnational entanglements, and a specifically Pacific literary aesthetic, incorporating both texts and textiles. In this essay, I seek to honour his achievements by reading back across the Pacific, from my location in Canada, to address current representations of the North in Canada and Australia within global contexts of lived connections across cultures. Thinking about the many lessons Sharrad's work offers about cross-cultural translation in colonial and postcolonial times, I raise some agenda-setting questions here. ' (Introduction)
