Book Reviews

Two Academic Books With

Something For Laymen

Adoption In Eastern Oceania by V. Carroll and Tangu Traditions by K. Burridge, are two books on specialist matters which, from reading, reveal more than the titles would suggest.

Written by and mainly for social anthropologists, the 13 articles in Adoption, each by a different author, deal with the customary and optional procedure for taking as one’s own a child of other parents in some of the islands of Polynesia and Micronesia, on Rotuma, and in the northern Hebrides.

In the introduction, Carroll points out that in his country, the US, “adoption” calls to mind the picture of a couple who have tried unsuccess fully to have children of their own and finally, with considerable mis givings, have secured a child of unknown parentage from an institu tional intermediary, and that the child is normally presumed to have been unwanted by his natural parents and often the child of an unwed mother.

In Oceania, children are frequently adopted by couples who already have children of their own, the child which is being adopted may not be unwanted by its natural parents, and the transaction is often between close relatives.

Different adoption

This book explains that little sub stantive comparison is possible between adoption in countries such as the US and Australia on the one hand, and adoption in Oceania on the other.

It will, to give but one example, surprise many outsiders that in ndigenous societies in Oceania the interests of the parents rather than :hose of the children are considered aaramount. Who knows, it may even ead parents in affluent societies to •econsider their position. . , .

When one keeps in mind that the aarent/child relationship is basic to he fabric of society, the great dif ference in adoption systems between

Oceania and advanced Western com munities goes some way towards ex plaining the difference between those two groupings of people as a whole.

This book therefore deserves to be read, even if only fleetingly, by those who are in some way or other con cerned with Oceania, even though they may not be anthropologists.

For example, anyone other than a Ponapean, advising on, administering or controlling land matters on Ponape, will gain from this book a better insight into the place of adopted children in inheritance and usage of land.

And Ponapeans will realise what caused their foreign rulers in the past to make some decisions so very much out of keeping with Ponapean customs.

The book is fairly easily under standable by the layman and proof that social anthropologists can get away from their jargon. This review being for the general reader, it is left to reviewers in anthropological journals to deal with the work by Carroll and his co-writers in more depth. To sum up, this book is worth reading by the non-specialist. * Among many New Guineans living in isolated inland villages, the people of Tangu are but one group whose contact with Europeans has been limited and intermittent, although it goes back for about two generations.

During World War 11, for instance some of the Tangu men were con scripted as carriers for Australian troops (among them myself) but they served almost exclusively in their home district, and for relatively brief periods at that.

Although many Tangu males have worked far from home in peacetime as contract labourers and thus been subjected to outside influences, the

very nature of the terrain in which their villages are located and the sparse natural resources at their dis posal have militated against the kind of economic development that has characterised localities such as the Gazelle Peninsula or Kar Kar Island.

The Tangu people have therefore continued to be subsistence agri culturists.

In his book, Burridge shows in great detail how the subsistence economy of a New Guinean people is rooted in its spiritual life or, if one likes to look at it from another angle, how the people’s spiritual life stems from the subsistence economy.

To a layman like myself, it’s very much like the conundrum about the chicken and the egg.

Behind cargo cult

What is important and of much value to any outsider in contact with people such as the Tangus, be he a missionary, trader or government officer, is the knowledge of the inter relationship between the secular and the spiritual which Burridge so lucidly describes.

Among other things, one gains a much better understanding of the reasons for the cargo cultism which has been described by Hoetker (1941), Burridge himself in Mambu (I 960) and others.

This book has a lot to say about Tangu myths, stories, legends, folk tales and fairy stories. As the author points out, their bearing on general

theories of myth, their functions, purposes, and relations to scientific thought needs to be kept in mind, though he has not made it his main concern.

Burridge has tried to show some of the factors and processes involved in changing the Tangus into “new men”. To anyone other than the trained and, so it seems to me, well experienced social anthropologist, this book is heavy going.

Publishing it, Oxford University Press has recognised an in-depth con tribution to our knowledge of one of the many small, isolated New Guinean groups emerging out of the stone age into the world of techno logy—a group which is in many respects very much the same as a lot of others in New Guinea.

It is from the sum total of con tributions such as this one that the intruders are given the knowledge to assist New Guineans to find their way, and for the growing number of New Guineans who are educated in the Western sense to have a written record of the world of their fathers

and forefathers.

HJ.

(Adoption In Eastern Oceania,

University of Hawaii Press, SUSIO. TANGU TRADITIONS, Oxford University Press, $14.50).

Coming Soon:

Moresby's Story

Many ingredients go towards

making a town, especially a town like Port Moresby, but chief among them are people and the material creations of those

people—the streets, the roads,

the buildings.

Recently, lan Stuart, Port Moresby’s young Anglican Rector, has been putting together an account of the first 97 years of Port Moresby’s people and places and this entertaining, well-written and authentic story will be published in book form later this year, by Pacific Publications, Although the Papuans had dis covered the place possibly thousands, and certainly hundreds, of years before, it was left to Captain John Moresby, in 1873, to put it upon the map and to name it (the inner harbour with his father’s Christian name and the port with his father’s surname). To this extent Port Moresby, to date, has always been a predominantly European enterprise.

European residents of Port Moresby have always tended to be larger than life, especially in its early years.

First there were the missionaries and their families, some members of which were no more immune to the

local hazards of native women and booze than those who followed.

Then came the traders, the administra tors, the miners, the planters and those who raised flags and claimed it for the Queen —four of them in almost as many years.

In its short life, history has washed over it. There was a change of owner ship, from Britain to Australia, early this century. There were wars, depres sions, royal commissions, scandals, witch-hunts, pioneering fortitude, acts of self-sacrifice, self-reliance and bravery—all the normal behaviour of people thrown together in an isolated, tropical outpost. In the last decade there has been progress, growth, change unimagined even a generation ago.

Of the original buildings virtually none have survived. Termites, the tropics and a world war have seen to that. Of Surveyor Cuthbertson’s original grid plan of streets, imposed on his Granville West and Granville East without much regard for topo graphy, there have also been many amendments. But no allotment upon which a building stands today—and some where no building at all now stands—has escaped the researches of the author who has traced its history, frequently right back to the first galvanised shack or trader’s tent that was erected upon it.

Few people who have lived in or known or have been connected with Port Moresby and its 97 years of history should fail to find something of interest, and a new awareness of their town, in this entertaining story.

The book should be available

about September this year.-

IT.

Australiana

Galore

We have been receiving books galore on Australiana, as a re sult of the bi-centenary of Cap tain Cook’s discovery of the east coast of Australia.

Two Centuries is a magnificent, prestige publication, published by the Australian News and Information Bureau in conjunction with Ure Smith, the Sydney publishers. It is in colour and black and white and its main purpose seems to be to show off Australia abroad, through overseas government offices, etc. But it is also available retail at $5.95, and the production fully justifies the exceptional amount of work that must have gone into it. All the pictures —showing a broad sweep of Australia and some aspects of New Guinea — are first-rate and skilfully selected

and displayed. There is also a small, cleverly designed introduction of old prints and documents.

The text is lively and readable, although there is not much of it, because this is a picture book. A pity, then, that most of the photo graphs carry no identification.

Although they tell their own story, people who have never seen Australia, plus many who have, would un doubtedly like to know where that vast mountain of ore is, or where the tea is being plucked, or what art gallery they are looking at on that magnificent colour spread.

The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay (With an Account of the Establishment of the Colonies of Port Jackson and Norfolk Island) is a new edition of the volume originally published in 1789. It is the fourth in a series of “Foundation of Australia” volumes produced by Angus and Robertson in association with the Royal Australian Historical Society.

This edition is edited by James Auchmuty, vice-chancellor of the University of Newcastle, NSW, and the text is from the 1789 edition (with maps and plates), with the addition of two papers published in 1790 —the “History of New Holland from its First Discovery”, and “A Discourse on Banishment”, by Lord Auckland. Professor Auchmuty gives us a worthwhile introduction, and anybody who hasn’t been able to obtain one of the early facsimile editions of Governor Phillip’s voyage, and is not inclined to invest in the original (supposing he can still locate a copy) should be happy to acquire this edition at $lO.

Captain Cook's Australian Land falls —Eye-witness Accounts by Members of the ship’s companies of HMS Endeavour, 1770, is a 26-page booklet which is No. 2 of a little series from a private press, Roebuck.

The Roebuck Series is intended _to provide for publication of Australian historical subjects which might not otherwise see the light of day.

Captain Cook's Australian Landfalls has been produced by W. D. Forsyth, first secretary-general of the South Pacific Commission, and now retired in Canberra after an Australian diplo matic career. The book is available from him at 88 Banks Street, Yarra

lumla, Canberra, at 80 cents.-

SI.