Thoughtful Report On Papua

By A Doctor's Wife

Margaret Spencer, who in 1959 published Doctor’s Wife in New Guinea, has now brought out a sequel, Doctor’s Wife in Papua, which is better than most people would have been prepared to predict.

MRS. SPENCER is the wife of Dr. Terry Spencer, who was a medical officer in the Territory for a number of years from 1954. They lived in the Highlands, in the D’Entre casteaux Group and in Rabaul. They have since “gone South”.

Mrs. Spencer’s first book was a fairly superficial account of life among the native people of the New Guinea Highlands. No European so much as got a mention—which in itself was not pertinent, but the result was a book which seemed to carefully avoid contemporary issues and which must have been a disap pointment to many people wanting to know about the writer’s reactions to the meeting of two cultures.

Mrs. Spencer explained that book in her opening pages as having “no real beginning, and no end, and its only sequence is in time”, and that is just what it was—a disembodied account of a segment of Highlands native life as seen by a faceless ob server.

In Doctor’s Wife in Papua, Mrs.

Spencer nails her colours to the mast and reveals herself as a thoughtful reporter with a compassionate and intelligent interest in all the problems of living in a tropical and primitive territory, whether they affect brown or white.

Are They Anti-Social?

After having had several more years of experience in the Territory, and in a different area (this book is set in Fergusson Island in the D’Entrecasteaux Group) her horizons clearly widened.

“The white people we meet here” (she writes), “who are all such in dividuals, are they like that anyway?

Do they come here because they are individualistic and adventurous, or because they are anti-social and cannot fit into the communities at home?

“One man, a high Government officer, has said to us, and only partly in joke, ‘The sane don’t linger.’

Perhaps where there are so few, the personality of each stands out and cannot hide itself because there is nowhere to hide, and no camouflage is possible.

“This is not really the story of the

white folk of these [Papuan off shore] islands: it is the story of the native people. But these islands are permeated with the influence of the white man, in a way in which the New Guinea Highlands, in our time there, were not, because enough time had not passed there since the white man’s coming among them, who had remained so long in isolation.”

Again, “We who serve in the Ter ritory are expatriates in a new land, our communities are small, and events are highly personal. We can see our endeavours lost through a change of policy remotely decided. We can experience isolation and frustration to the point of despair. And to pre vent us taking ourselves too seriously we need the satirical, humorous eye of a popular cartoonist! We certainly need our leave periods every two years.

“We can at times find our work both stimulating and satisfying, and the intangible rewards coming to us may be very great. To know that you have the respect and regard of a native people, no matter in how small a way, is a reward indeed. But you must never expect it to take the form of what we call ‘gratitude’—why indeed should they be ‘grateful’ to us who are disrupting their culture?

“There is one big factor. Time is against us, and events are moving at an ever-accelerating pace. A ferment is working within the natives them selves, and outside pressures are in creasing.

“Growing and heavy demands are perpetually in conflict with in adequate finances and services, and we all work within a shaky frame work, shored up by the devotion of those within it, and sustained in the hope of future consolidation. Even in a modern setting, a more than usual devotion to duty and a large measure of human understanding are inevitably required from those officers and their wives who work and live under these conditions.”

Doctor’s Wife in Papua is a useful contribution to the literature on the Territory, and there is something in this one for both the old hand and the casual reader.—Sl.

(Doctor’S Wife In Papua. Robert

Hale Ltd. 22/6.)