At Navels

Here's Looking

In reading Niugini Lives, published by Jacaranda Press, the thought occurs, “What was the motive behind Jacaranda’s publishing of this col lection?” And the answer, un doubtedly, is that the publication was done with nothing but the purely altruistic motive of assisting the New Guineans in the search to find some one among them who can write about something worth writing about, for surely no publisher would ever expect to sell Niugini Lives except to those whose names appear in the list of authors, and are not, like Ahuia Ova listed among them, quite dead.

These days when librarians think they are archivists and think they must buy everything published, the greatest sales will be assuredly to libraries.

Niugini Lives is a collection of introversion, a contemplation of navels and appendages. Such collec tions have been seen in developed countries for the last 100 years. Who, anyway, wants to sit with Leo Han nett and listen to his earthy and his

spiritual adventures? In sum, that’s what this book is about, although the authors have avoided using the word.

Literary introversion is a thing of the past: today we write about what makes the other people tick. Oh, boy!

Haven’t we in the 20th century be come literary extroverts! And the paternal Mr Jacaranda knows this, and has not published Niugini Lives with the hope of selling it, but as an encouragement to future authors: a sprat to catch something bigger one day.

The authors and the New Guinea public should be grateful to Jacaranda for his fostering of literature in Papua New Guinea, and let us hope that Jacaranda’s faith is someday rewarded and someone emerges who can write and has something to write about.

In the meantime, I suppose, altruists like Mr Jacaranda can do little to help except to publish, as encourage ment, what is available. This is obviously what he has done in Niugini Lives, and all New Guineans interes ted in cultural development should thank him for his benevolence.

Peter Livingston.

(NIUGINI LIVES, soft cover, 109 pages, price $1.95, and published by The Jacaranda Press, Box 859, Brisbane, Queensland.)