Cheers for the Territory of Niugini,

where the coconuts stand

Even before the result of the South Pacific Post's “Find a Name for New Guinea” contest was announced, some of my friends had remonstrated with me for spelling “New Guinea” as “Nugini”. “New”, they said, should be spelt “Niu”, and of course they are right. The fact is that I was overawed by the authority of Neo-Melanesian’s oracle, Fr. Mihalic, who spells it “Nu”, perhaps because as an American he pronounces it “Noo”. But he has been followed by most writers of Pidgin; and even the South Pacific Post, which now says that “Niu is a Pidgin form of new”, calls its pidgin newspaper “Nu Gini Tok Tok”. Who was I to say that they were wrong?

However, a 10-year-old Papuan girl, Ada Ole Anna Arisa, who is either more courageous than I am, or, more probably, has never heard of Fr. Mihalic, has now won the “Find a Name” contest with “Niugini”.

I hail “Niugini” with enthusiasm, for two reasons. First, “niu” is the “right” way to spell “new”, whatever Fr. Mihalic may say. And second, as Ada very properly points out, it means something to the Papuans whom we are asking to give up the name with which they have been familiar from childhood.

As a matter of fact, though Ada probably doesn’t know this, “Niu Gini” has a very respectable history going right back to W. G. Lawes.

Entertaining

In the 1880’s, while Britain and Australia were arguing about what should be done with the place, Lawes was producing school texts in Motu for use in his mission schools. I remember seeing a much thumbed copy of one of them during my early years in Hanuabada. It declared itself to be a Siogarapi Buka, and, in addition to introducing a number of ingenious and entertain ing spellings for names of the world’s countries, continents, seas and oceans, it told its young readers quite categorically that the name of their country was Niu Gini.

And this made good sense; be cause, as Ada has reminded us, “niu” in Motu means “coconut” and “gini” means “stand”, and the young students of siogarapi had only to look up from their books to see coconut trees standing around all over the place.

As a result, a whole generation of young Motuans grew up believing that the proper name of their country was Niu Gini, and that it was just natural perversity which led Euro peans to spell it in the crazy way they did.

* “A” schools are those in which an Australian (actually NSW) curriculum is followed. “T” schools follow a special Territory curriculum, which includes the teaching of English as a foreign language.