From 1978 to 1981 he was Deputy Private Secretary to His Majesty the King of Tonga, serving as the keeper of palace records.
In early 1981 he re-joined the University of the South Pacific as the first director of the newly created Rural Development Centre based in Tonga.
"[9] He was the author of Mekeo: Inequality and Ambivalence in a Village Society;[10] Tales of the Tikongs,[11] which deals (through fiction) with indigenous South Pacific Islander responses to the changes and challenges brought by modernisation and development; Kisses in the Nederends,[8] a novel; and, more recently, We Are the Ocean,[12] a selection of earlier works, including fiction, poetry and essays.
Tales of the Tikongs was translated into Danish in 2002 by John Allan Pedersen (as Stillehavsfortællinger, ISBN 87-7514-076-4) The BBC History magazine writes that Hauʻofa provided a "reconceptualisation of the Pacific": In his "influential essay Our Sea of Islands", he argued that Pacific Islanders "were connected rather than separated by the sea.
Far from being sea-locked peoples marooned on coral or volcanic tips of land, islanders formed an oceanic community based on voyaging.