History of the Divine Word

Missionaries in P-KG

The news that a history of the Divine Word Missionaries’ activities in Papua-New Guinea since 1896 has just been published won’t put the general reader into a frenzy of excitement.

Histories of missions have the reputation of being dogmatic and dull.

However, there is a surprise in store for those who can lay their hands on The Word in the World 1969. The 189-page book contains several good first-hand accounts of P-NG life, and, better still, it has many of the best black-and-white pictures ever to come out of the territory.

Tabbed a “report on the missionary apostolate” of the Divine Word Mis sionaries, the booklet is published by Divine Word News Service, Rome, printed at Steyl Press, Holland, and edited by Mr. Norman Ruffing, of the News Service.

There are nearly a dozen chapters on P-NG written mostly by mis sionaries in the field on topics varying from primitive ideas of sacrifice to the Mt. Hagen Show.

Additional chapters include descriptions of missionary work in Mexico, Taiwan and Ghana, and

there are four maps, including an interesting reproduction of an East Indies map of the 1590’s which started a controversy at that time on whether New Guinea was an island or joined to Australia.

Neither country, of course, was explored then.

But, for my money, it’s the book’s well-printed close-up pictures that make it a winner and a worthy ad dition to collectors of New Guineaiana. Among the pictures: A Chimbu mother with her dead child ... a gaudy Highlander at the Hagen Show . . . Mingende Airstrip . . . Moresby from the air ... a Hagen man voting ... a war-dance at Goroka ... headmask carving. .. .

We can thank photographers from the Australian News Bureau and Moresby’s Information and Extension Services for most of them, although Qantas and a couple of other sources have supplied a picture here and

there.-

K. Mcg.

A grinning High lander at P-NG's Mount Hagen Show -just one of the many excellent photographs in "The Word in the World, 1969".