eye-view
pp. 63-64 · Read in the full issue
Camera's eye-view of PNG
European traders, missionaries, >fficials, miners and planters have ►een the catalyst of the changes /hich occurred in Papua New Guinea rom the early 19th century until re ently.
A Pictorial History of New Guinea Gash and Whittaker) provides a isual impression of those changes, t emphasises expatriate life and in ludes little of the kind of illustra ions and photographs used in an tiropological studies, but one needs o imagination to get the feel of the olonial era before World War 11.
The post-war years are only briefly ealt with.) One must, of course, keep in mind lat, because of the slow spread of teracy and modern technology mong the islanders, nearly all of the Titten and pictorial information has ame from Europeans.
Of the 680 plates, 36 are maps, a ;w are lithographs or cartoons, and le rest photographs. Edgar Ford, ho has drawn or re-drawn the maps, as done a magnificent job, and most f the other material has been ex ertly reproduced. There is a wealth f visual information, much of it ew even to anyone steeped in the terature of the islands. Starting
with photographs of stone tools and other finds of prehistorians, early maps such as the Mercator of 1569, the plates, accompanied by brief but pertinent texts, take us to the opening of the Legislative Council in 1951.
The co-authors do not claim that this is the pictorial history of the new nation of Papua New Guinea, and their selection is, of course, subjec tive.
Nevertheless, few readers will quarrel with the choice of such photo graphs as: Tolai people in the 1870 s; Motu students, 1884; Methodist Mission schooner Lord of the Isles off Dobu, 1891; LMS College at Vatorata, 1896; early Lutheran mis sionaries, 1900; European miners on Woodlark Is, 1905; German Sepik expedition, 1912-13; first postulants of the Handmaidens of the Lord, Yule Is, 1919; Louis Vangeke (who became the first indigenous Catholic
bishop), 1928; and pilot O’Day and assistant district officer Jim Taylor, Hagen-Sepik patrol, 1938.
No one will fail to be moved by the photograph of Aminio Bale, first Fijian missionary on the Gazelle Peninsula, or fail to enjoy the Sydney Bulletin cartoon of 1885, showing an islander telling John Bull and the Kaiser’s representative, “How happy 1 could be with neither”. And there are hundreds of other plates of equal historical significance and interest.
In a work of this magnitude there are, as one would expect, a few errors and omissions. The former are mainly misprints, eg Count Pfeil, not Pfiel, is correct, while the latter are failures to identify persons who were or are well-known to people still alive. (For example, the unidentified man in Plate 676, a group of people with Governor-General McKell at Rabaul in 1949 is, of course, adminis trator J. K. Murray; the Papua New Guinea delegates to the South Pacific Conference at Suva in 1950, Plate 679, include the late George Kassi and the late Miria Gavera who made a considerable contribution to their country’s development.) In the context of the achievement which this book represents, those
errors and omissions are, however, almost irrelevant, and arguments about photographs that ought to have been included in preference to those presented are, of course, purely sub jective.
Similarly, that the index contains pagination references when plate numbers would have been more helpful is, as criticism, not much more than a quibble.
Now that Papua New Guineans are citizens of their own, independent country, much of the emotionalism and shibboleths that have bedevilled academics and popular accounts of some aspects of other of their societies, their economics and their politics are gradually being laid to rest.
Good and bad, Europeans have played an important part in Papua New Guinea’s history, and although that part is rapidly diminishing, A Pictorial History of New Guinea, relatively free of personal opinion and allowing us to see for ourselves, is, therefore, an important contribu tion to the corpus of knowledge about the new nation. There is truth in the old saws “Seeing is believing” and “One picture is worth a hundred words”.
At $8.95, hardly more than one cent per plate, this book is a bargain.
The co-authors and Jacaranda Press deserve our thanks. —Harry Jackman.
(A Pictorial History Of New
GUINEA, by N. Gash and J. Whittaker; Jacaranda Press, Milton, 1975; $8.95'.)