Search

In the three decades following World War II, Australian assistance to Papua New Guinea (PNG) comprised around 80 per cent of the Australian 'aid' budget. The large amount of colonial spending has led many observers of contemporary Australian policy to reflect on the 1960s as a time of Australian generosity in the field of foreign aid. Examining this history through the prism of Australian colonial policy complicates the story of Australian generosity. From the immediate postwar challenges of Eddie Ward's 'New Deal' to the Paul Hasluck period and the immense changes of the 1960s and 1970s, foreign aid and colonial development were inherently (if not explicitly) linked. By bringing these fields of policy together, this article demonstrates that the narrative of Australian foreign aid generosity is challenged by the historical imperatives of colonial administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the topics that Bernard Narokobi addresses in his numerous writings is the place of traditional Melanesian leadership styles in a modern Papua New Guinea. This article explores Narokobi's leadership status to show how far-reaching and multifaceted his leadership career was: he was at once a traditional Melanesian bigman, a chief, and a modern public figure. The actions he took in these roles were for him a matter of the highest principle, something that at times had severe political consequences. Because in Melanesia the scope of the ritual that takes place upon an individual's death is an index of their status, an analysis of the mortuary rituals undertaken upon Narokobi's death provides insight into the significance of his leadership at every level from his clan up to the national level of Papua New Guinean society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narokobi's call for a distinctive 'Melanesian Way' was not rigid traditionalism. Narokobi understood Melanesian indigeneity as agentively engaging the foreign, seeking and welcoming it, as opposed to merely acquiescing to it as an unbidden, external force. This understanding was informed by Narokobi's Arapesh cultural background and his experience of a historic movement led by the visionary Arapesh leader Sir Pita Simogun in the 1950s to modernize the distinctive cultural institution of the Arapesh 'roads', which were practical travel passageways as well as valued channels of exchange and social relationships. The modernized Arapesh road facilitated Narokobi's passage to advanced education just as new scholarships and opportunities were created by Australia's acceleration of decolonization, positioning him to study law in Sydney and play a central role in planning for PNG's constitution. It was also a potent Indigenous model that Narokobi built upon in his famous concept of the 'Melanesian Way'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Army, while having a long association with Papua New Guinea after the Second World War and before independence in 1975, is often conceptualized as a small player in the decolonization process, of interest to scholars because of its cost and potential threat to democratic government. This article examines the Army's education programme and associated policies in the decade before independence to argue that the institution was acutely aware of looming decolonization, and actively sought to create a national Papua New Guinean military by repurposing policies originally designed to serve Australia's defence needs, in particular through 'civic' education. It embarked on this path without direction from the Department of Territories. While the results of 'civic' education are difficult to determine, this article shows that the Australian Army was engaged in the profound shifts occurring around it in Papua New Guinea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic development was a primary objective in the German New Guinea Protectorate (1884-1914). Although much of the Protectorate remained uncontrolled, Indigenous people found their lives and external relations transformed where trading posts and plantations were introduced. The small but coconut-rich Vitu Islands are exemplary. This paper discusses relations between Garove and Mundua Islanders and the trader Peter Hansen, from his arrival in 1888 to his departure in 1904. Ultimately, Hansen's personal behaviour prompted the islanders to oust him. However, by this time they had become enmeshed in a wider economy through village copra production and labour within and outside the island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the project to record interviews with Papua New Guineans about their experiences of the Pacific War between 1942 and 1945, which was very much a critical juncture in the course of Papua New Guinean history. It examines how Papua New Guineans' encounters with the War that devastated their land have been portrayed, and suggests that an exploration featuring Papua New Guineans in the telling of their own experiences with the War derives from the argument by the late Epeli Hau'ofa that they should be active participants in the reconstruction of their histories and the creation of their realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The palaeogeography of the Wallacea Archipelago is a significant factor in understanding early modern human colonization of Sahul (Australia and New Guinea), and models of colonization patterns, as well as archaeological survey and site interpretation, are all heavily dependent on the specific palaeogeographic reconstruction employed. Here we present five reconstructions for the periods 65, 60, 55, 50, and 45 000 years ago, using the latest bathometric chart and a sea-level model that is adjusted to account for the average uplift rate known from Wallacea. Using this data we also reconstructed island areal extent as well as topography for each time period. These reconstructions were then used to estimate visibility for each island in the archipelago, and finally to model how intervisible each island was during the period of likely human colonization. Our models provide the first evidence for intervisibility between Timor and Australia at ca. 65-62 ka and 47-12 ka, the second of which is notable for its overlap with the oldest radiocarbon dates from Timor-Leste and Australia. Based on intervisibility alone, however, our study suggests that the northern route into Papua New Guinea was the most parsimonious route for first modern human entry into Sahul. Our study provides archaeologists with an important baseline from which to conduct physical surveys, interpret archaeological data, and theorize the colonization of Wallacea and Sahul. © 2017 The Authors. Archaeological Prospection Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the people of Auhelawa, a society on the south coast of Norman by Island, Papua New Guinea, make use of two historical figures--one a warrior, the other a police officer--to represent the nature of social transformation. In different ways, the stories of these heroes produce a dichotomous temporality of a time of war and a time of peace and thereby frame different kinds of sociopolitical institutions as inverted moral types. Comparatively, Auhelawa's historical discourse resembles many indigenous Melanesian societies and can be taken as another instance of Marshall Sahlins's claim that humiliation is necessary for people to learn to see themselves in a dominant culture's eyes. I argue that these stories frame the cross-cultural encounter as an epochal shift, but not from tradition to modernity. Instead, people tell and circulate this historical knowledge in ways that play on its meaninglessness and thus hinder the capacity of narrative to situate contemporary life in terms of a history of progress. This kind of denial of a modernist historical consciousness is another aspect of humiliation, and it suggests that anthropologists and ethnohistorians rethink their assumptions about how postcolonial subjects locate meaning in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Commonwealth of Australia was founded in dreams of a Pacific empire. One of the first acts of the new nation in 1901 was to request the transfer of British New Guinea to Australian control. Aware of their poor reputation with regard to the treatment of Aborigines, Australian political leaders determined to redeem their reputation in the new colony. At the same time, however, they wanted to encourage white settlement and overcome Papuan resistance to the white take-over of their land. Alfred Deakin recruited professed ‘Australianist' Hubert Murray, the foremost critic of the old regime of Captain Barton, to effect this goal. Papuans were anxious about the transition from British to Australian authority, apprehensive that ‘white men' were coming to steal native land ‘like they had stolen the lands of the Queensland natives'. From the Papuan perspective, the Australian take-over of British New Guinea and Murray's ascendancy represented continuity in colonial practice, rather than the advent of modern imperial ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The new imperial histories approach is becoming increasingly popular amongst historians and yet has rarely been applied to Australia's colonialism in Papua New Guinea. This article uses this approach to come to new understandings of the development of Australian public health and medical research in the second half of the twentieth century. It does this by exploring the lives of three Australian doctors who journeyed to Papua New Guinea and returned to Australia to become eminent medical researchers, asking how their experience overseas shaped their later work in Australian public health and research. In doing so, this article 'colonialises' both their Papua New Guinea experiences and their contributions to the development of Australian public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing largely on archival records, this paper examines the Australian use of a detachment from the Native police force to guard the Australian war criminals' compounds for Japanese war criminals established at Rabaul and Manus Island, both in the Territory of New Guinea, from 1945 to 1953. Australia was the only Allied country in the immediate post-war period to utilise civilian police as guards for Japanese war criminals, let alone to draw principally upon Indigenous personnel. While Australian views of the Indigenous population remained paternalistic, if not outright racist, throughout this period, the use of the Native police opened up some small space for more complex perceptions of questions of racial difference. Yet, the Native police detachment to the Australian war criminal compounds has been, until now, generally overlooked in the broader history of the Native police forces of Papua and of New Guinea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discuses the significance of the unique gold coin of the Kushan king, Huviška. The legend on the coin reads Imšao which recalls the ancient Indo-Iranian mythic fi gure, Yima/Yama. It is contended that the reason for which Yima/Yama is portrayed on the coin with a bird on his hand is not the idea of Glory and his reign, but rather the paradaisical state according to the Wīdēwdād, where Yima/Yama ruled over the world. It is contended that Huviška aimed at presenting himself in this manner to his subjects who were familiar with the Avestan and mythic Indo-Iranian lore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Anthropologica is the property of CASCA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Bulletin of Medical History is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

After a protracted war of secession in 2001, the Bougainville region of Papua New Guinea was granted autonomy and deferred a referendum on its political future. This article argues that the Bougainville case highlights the challenges posed by attempts to settle self-determination disputes using these tools. It considers the challenges posed by deferred referendums, principally how to reconcile competing interpretations of the identity and future political status of the region. It also considers the challenges posed by attempts to negotiate the relationship between the unique identities of autonomous regions and their identities within the larger state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the question of women, decolonisation and nation-building. It argues that the inclusion of women within the nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG) was problematic partly because women had rarely experienced mainstream colonial rule — an experience that elsewhere provided a basis for participation in the post-colonial state. The paper also investigates how women were perceived and represented by male writers at independence. While the Pangu Pati attempted to include women in state-building, these efforts were not adequately supported. PNG's achievement of independence coincided with the globalisation of second-wave feminism, and this was to prove critical for PNG's female citizens in their efforts to be included in the new state, for PNG's membership in the United Nations provided an external push to raise women's participation in the nation. Nevertheless, the government's dependence on international organisations to push the women's agenda also hampered the development of an autonomous women's movement in the country. The paper argues that, for PNG's female citizens, colonisation, independence and decolonisation occurred simultaneously after 1975. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is an exploration of the attitudes and policies of key Australian ministers and officials towards decolonisation in the South Pacific through the 1960s and into the early 1970s. Until the late 1960s, Australian governments generally favoured a very slow pace of decolonisation for the region, feared that many territories would never make viable nation-states and actively considered the bringing together of some of the colonial territories into larger entities. Consequently, for much of the 1960s Australian governments were engaged in the ultimately fruitless task of holding back the tide of decolonisation as it swept into the South Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1990, shotguns and AA-16s were adopted into Enga warfare, setting off some 15 years of devastation as youths (~17 to 28) took charge of interclan warfare. In response, people called on elder leaders to adapt customary institutions to restore peace; subsequently, war deaths and the frequency of war declined radically. Data from precolonial warfare, 501 recent wars, and 129 customary court sessions allow us to consider (i) the principles and values behind customary institutions for peace, (ii) their effectiveness, (iii) how they interact with and compare to state institutions of today, and (iv) how such institutions might have shaped our human behavioral repertoire to make life in state societies possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2001 the Muslim population of Papua New Guinea (PNG) has increased from a modest 479 to over 5000 (approximately 500%) mainly as a result of a spike in conversions to Islam by indigenous Papua New Guineans. The evidence suggests that the recent growth of the Muslim minority in PNG is likely to continue in the future. Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future, Muslims in PNG will remain a small religious minority in a predominantly Christian country. Based on extensive fieldwork undertaken among this growing Muslim minority community in PNG, this paper discusses statistics, patterns and trends of conversion to Islam in a Muslim-minority country that borders Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim majority country. It provides a brief but important empirical contribution to the study of an emerging Muslim minority that appears representative of a broader trend of global Muslim population growth through religious conversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In eastern Papua, Christian missionaries found a social structure unparalleled in most areas of religious expansion in the world: it apparently lacked chiefs and any identifiable leadership. Nearly all the Massim societies of eastern Papua were matrilineal, and land was passed through females. Here, women enjoyed a higher status than elsewhere in what is now Papua New Guinea. By drawing on the records of missionary agents, both European and Polynesian, this paper shows how the Methodist, Anglican and Kwato (London Missionary Society) missions in eastern Papua all encountered difficulty in fostering a cadre of male leaders, but — as became evident after World War II — they experienced greater success in fostering women's leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a fraudulent scheme undertaken by French noble Charles Marie Bonaventure du Breil, known as the Marquis de Rays, in the late nineteenth century to establish a utopian society called La Nouvelle-France on the island of New Ireland, part of 21st-century Papua New Guinea. It examines the Marquis de Rays' claims about New Ireland's environment and climate and his plans for the community's governance. The author also reflects on the fate of people recruited to settle La Nouvelle-France, exploring the effects of tropical diseases and hostile relations with native peoples. Other topics include Marquis de Ray's trial for embezzlement and a group of Italian peasants who eventually settled in Sydney in New South Wales, Australia.

The article explores the role of the village in the identity of the Vula'a people of Papua New Guinea (PNG). It uses the theories of philosopher Martin Heidegger to explore continuities and changes in Vula'a identity over time. Particular focus is given to Irupara village in the Hood Point area of PNG. According to the author, the relationship between towns and villages has become more important to Vula'a identity since World War II. It is suggested that Christianity and colonialism have also factored significantly into Vula'a identity. Details related to the relationship between ancestors and place in Vula'a culture are also presented. Other topics include the London Missionary Society (LMS), burial practices, and the island of Moukele, PNG.

Nineteenth-century European colonialists of Papua New Guinea brought western ideas and government, along with diseases that decimated the population. They received in exchange the killing endemic diseases of the country and all nineteenth-century settlers suffered severely. As doctors were few, and medicines did little, and as sick children could not attend school, sixty years of prewar medical services and education had little impact. However over those same years there was an expansion of medical science and the challenge in 1946 was to use these advances to reduce the high morbidity and mortality and ensure healthy children for educators to prepare for eventual national self sufficiency. Epidemiological research within the Public Health Department was an essential component in generating management and prevention strategies for all the significant diseases. The principal outcomes by 1975 were a raised life expectancy from 34 years to 56 years, a doubled population, many university graduates, and nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the case for synthetic histories-broad narratives of historical process that critically combine the insights and perspectives of research from multiple disciplines. Drawing on the 28 contributions to the edited volume Papuan Pasts, on the deep history of the Papuan peoples, a brief synthesis of findings is offered in the form of a narrative. This enables the identification of a series of gaps, not just in the spatial and temporal coverage of research but also in the range of perspectives employed. The absence of Papuan voices is particularly challenging, and suggests that the future of Papuan histories lies in the closer articulation of a concern for deep time and questions of the genesis and immediate past of living Papuan communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First Contact, the first in the celebrated Highlands Trilogy of documentary films by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, tracks the passage in 1933 of the first Europeans to enter the largest of Papua New Guinea's highland valleys. Interviews with surviving members of the expedition and with living eyewitnesses among the Highlands communities provide a remarkable counterpoint to the original visual and textual record of this last first encounter. The Europeans act out their roles as explorers, photographing and filming their own performances along with those of the Highlanders, while Connolly and Anderson's camera and questions set the stage for a further layer of performance or re-enactment which is completed when the original footage is screened before Highlander eyewitnesses of the events of 1933. While a substantial body of secondary literature has developed around the film, there has been surprisingly little contribution to debate from historians. In their focus on capturing the mood and texture of first contact events, Connolly and Anderson depart radically from conventional historical narrative formats. The success of their approach underscores the potential of film and other non-textual media to recast our understanding of history as an act of reconstruction and re-enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Chris Pinney's suggestion that images 'narrate a different story, one told, in part, in their own terms', I examine the 1929 silent 35-mm film Sugar Cane Hunting in New Guinea. Emerging out of a particular moment in the colonial history of the Territories of Papua and New Guinea, the film and the United States Department of Agriculture Sugar Expedition from which it arose, provide important but largely overlooked glimpses into the workings of colonial science, racial imaginaries and exploration. Examining this film helps restore it to the larger discussion of such events of the 1920s, but more importantly enables a discussion of the narratives constructed and elided by this artefact. Doing so complicates the Expedition's account and repositions the film as an important vehicle for recovering silences in the histories of colonial science, practice and encounter in New Guinea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a significant body of government documentaries made in Papua and New Guinea, focusing on those works produced in the late 1950s and 1960s that visually report on those policies and practices of development that were part of Australia's trust responsibilities. It traces the political, institutional and administrative negotiations that determined the semantics and rhetoric of the visual and aural modes deployed to represent the Australian work of development of the Territories and its peoples. While these films were instrumental public relations projects, those involved in their production carefully negotiated the field of their representations and the interrelations between 'actuality' and policy, a caution bred, at least in part, in view of their envisaged status as part of PNG's history. These flawed and compromised projects provide visible evidence of the interrelated stylistic and political challenges of attempting to visualise development positively during a time when the Trust discourse on racial relations was entangled in broader Cold War contestation about freedom, directed self-determination and the path towards capitalist modernity in the decolonising Asia/Pacific region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the debate between the use of the terms "track" or "trail" in officially referring to the Australian War Memorial's commemoration of the Kokoda path in the Owen Stanley Ranges area in Papua New Guinea during World War II. The article examines the use of by soldiers and war correspondents in diaries and dispatches from the 1942 campaign, the use of the term following the war, and the decision of the Australian Battles Nomenclature Committee officially calling the area the Kokoda Trail. The article examines the publicity associated with the debate during the remembrances of the campaign during 1992 and the "Australia Remembers" celebrations during 1994 and 1995.

A vast literature about the religions and histories of Papua New Guinea (PNG) exists, but less than a handful of items mention the history of Islam or Muslims in PNG. This paper contributes to an initial attempt to establish a comprehensive historical account of Islam in PNG's broader history by detailing the formal establishment of Islam there from 1976 to 1983. Beginning with Islam's expatriate Muslim founders, it examines the challenges and events that led to the religion's institutionalisation and consolidation. This period of early effort provided the basis for a self-sustaining and, of late, growing religion. The ideational, material and migratory effects of globalisation and decolonisation appear as factors in the growth of Islam in PNG, despite persistent Christian resistance to its presence. The paper draws upon numerous unpublished archival records and interview data collected during fieldwork to PNG in 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the history of the Dutch colony Papua West New Guinea, also known as Dutch New Guinea. It is noted that after sovereignty was granted to Indonesia, Dutch New Guinea remained under Dutch rule for the purpose of potentially becoming a settlement colony for European Indonesians. The article focuses on the ways in which Dutch New Guinea is an example of imperialism. Comparisons are drawn between Dutch New Guinea and European settlements in East Africa, the Belgian Congo, and Portugal.

At the battle of Bitapaka, thirty New Guineans died defending a German wireless station against invading Australian forces. Other indigenous Pacific Islander First World War servicemen have been commemorated through memorials, parades and literature, but history has been unkind to the New Guinean servicemen. Colonial, geographic and cultural conditions as well as the limitations of historical methodology have left them without a voice. This paper argues that empirical history has failed the indigenous servicemen of Bitapaka, and advocates the use of imaginative forms of historical methodology, in an attempt to create voices for history's silenced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the political situation in Bougainville, an island which is part of Papua New Guinea. Efforts to build peace there are discussed in the context of a mining-related crisis which began in the late 1980s and lasted into the early 21st-century. It is said that Bougainville in particular, and Papua New Guinea in general, can be characterized as political and economic hybrids, combining local traditions with imported institutions. This political hybridity is said to be a typical characteristic of post-colonial nations, and its impact on the stability of the state is analyzed.

This article suggests a new reading of the famous wooden sculptures formerly carved in New Ireland to celebrate the dead. It is argued in terms of a holistic approach implying different ontological perspectives and shifting cultural modalities and discusses the available fragments of ethnography stemming from observations made in the early part of the last century. It proposes that in terms of iconic semantics the making and exposition of a malanggan sculpture formed a symbolic imagery telling how recently deceased persons assumed a new but temporary body and were given a brief spell of renewed social life. It is further argued that the essence of the dead was then absorbed into an anonymous non-structured assembly of deceased contained in some particular named malanggan design. Malanggan designs moved over time between different places, thus transporting sets of accumulated anonymous dead to new places. Thus getting rid of the departed was intuited as a device to negate the possible creation of kinship-informed organizations, while the receivers could appropriate some sort of blessings from imported foreign dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological models of regional occupation for culture change in and the arrival of trade goods into, the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea have largely relied on pioneering research undertaken in the 1970s, prior to the advent of AMS radiocarbon dating and from a time when excavation methods were relatively coarse-grained. These early chronologies were based on bulk radiocarbon samples potentially incorporating materials from multiple periods of occupation, and freshwater shells 'contaminated' by old carbon from regional Miocene limestones necessitating the application of correction factors of uncertain local applicability. This paper revises chronological aspects of pre-European contact history for the mid-Kikori River region of the Gulf Province. It presents a suite of 100 new AMS radiocarbon dates on individual pieces of charcoal, human teeth and a fish bone from 16 sites, in order to re-assess previous chronologies and understandings of the region's history, and to provide a new foundation for future modelling of site and regional land use. Past settlement systems in this region were guided by processes of social interaction and thus need to be interrogated through notions of social landscape in historical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the issues evoked in recent attempts by the Vula'a people of south eastern Papua New Guinea to document their history. Drawing on ethnographic research and Heideggerian philosophy it investigates the complex of myth, history and Christianity manifest in their representations of the past. The Vula'a lifeworld accommodates what might commonly be perceived as contradictions - multiple versions of significant local stories, and an acceptance of Christianity without the forfeiture of pre-Christian cosmology. I suggest that if we are to understand this lifeworld we must move beyond simple distinctions between history and myth, truth and falsity. Western ideas about truth and rationality are thus questioned in light of Vula'a experience. I propose we see myth as a mode of being and, consequently, as a form of truth. This is not, though, the truth of Western science, of proof and explanation. In Heidegger's terms it is "essential" and therefore beyond the realm of provability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note describes the traditional reincarnation belief system of the Guminis, a small group of people living in the south-east of the Simbu Province of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. This system embraces the belief that the spirit of some humans is, after death, reincarnated within the body of another living person of similar age and probably of the same sex as the deceased. This person, a stranger, then represents the continuation of the life of the person who died in terms of his/her social and kinship relationships. It is demonstrated that this belief system was functional in traditional Gumini society but may not continue to be so in future due to rapid changes in rural and urban life currently affecting the people of Papua New Guinea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to the popular tendency to scapegoat and demonize urban settlements in Papua New Guinea the trend among academics has been to normalize their existence. There is however little detailed information upon which to base either view. This paper reviews existing studies of urban settlements in Papua New Guinea and finds a lacuna of information on basic livelihood functions. On the basis of a household survey and general observations made during a four-week period of residence in an urban settlement in Port Moresby, it presents data on household composition, employment, income, expenditure and social identity for one urban settlement. The picture presented describes a way of life that does not support popular stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the history of the Omie of the Northern Province of Papua New Guinea. Analysis of the context and structure of events in Papua New Guinea; Grievances of the Omie people; Mythic materials as representative of Omie historiography in the pre-Independence period; Fundamental differences in the mode of presentation of the host community.

Focuses on the history of colonial transformation of Fuyuge persons and their horizons with reference to colonial and ritual units in Papua New Guinea. Effect of the colonial projects on the Fuyuge persons and their horizons; Details on the issues on colonial classification and quantification; Demonstration of efficacy and power through the capacity to render the units.

Discusses the effect of the 1955 amendments to the New Guinea Act on the recognition and alienation of land under indigenous tenure in Dutch New Guinea. Land rights of colonial subjects in the Dutch East Indies; Dutch legal expert C. van Collenhoven's critique of the Dutch colonial administration in New Guinea; Failure of the 1928 Dutch Agrarian Commission; Dutch residents' attitudes towards indigenous New Guineans.

Focuses on the different existing genres of West New Guinea history. Lack of community consultation by consultative political leaders; Broad disregard for indigenous voices in the writing of history; Evolution of West New Guinea's cartographic profile; Parallel history of contest over the naming of West New Guinea.

Discusses the impact of the discovery of West New Guinea's oil resources in the settlement of its 1949-1963 territorial dispute. Deliberate concealment of the oil resources; Indonesian exploitation of the oil resources in the 1970s; Delays caused by the 1945 Pacific War and the Indonesian war for independence; 1940 estimates of the oil resources; Redefinition of the international boundary after the World War II.