More facts on Queen Emma

The recent publication, by Pacific Publications, of the second edition of my book Queen Emma of New Guinea has brought me many letters from all over the world.

The story of Emma’s love-life, and of how she built her trading and planting empire in the South Seas is also the story of how New Guinea was created and shaped between 1870 and 1914. This has stirred the interest of historians and students of sociology, as well as readers who seek colourful stories of the South Seas.

Some correspondents have corrected some of my history. For example, where I reported that the urn containing Emma’s ashes disap peared mysteriously from her mat-mat (cemetery) at Kokopo after World War I, I said that according to one local story the ashes were taken away and scattered over the sea, near Gunantambu.

But lan Hudson writes me from Mount Hagen; ‘’My grandfather, E. T, Hudson, was a friend and associate of Coe Forsayth (Emma’s son) and it was my grandfather who brought the ashes back to the Forsayth family in Sydney.”

Other people have assured me that the ashes found a resting-place in Sydney’s South Head Cemetery.

A letter came from Mr. M. C. Wilson, for some years a plantation manager in the Kokopo district, Gazelle Peninsula, who is now taking a specialised course in tropical agriculture in Armidale, NSW, I asked him what had happened to the mat-mats of Emma and R. H. R. Parkinson, which I found several years ago buried in secondary jungle growth behind Ralum, and the old tombstones of which gave me so much valuable material for the Emma story.

Mr. Wilson has kindly written the story of what has happened to those famous plantations established by Emma and Parkinson, and which were the beginning of the New Guinea copra industry, and it will be

published in PIM shortly.

R. W. Robson.