Three moods from

a new PNG study

Listen, My Country. By Alice Wedega. Published by Pacific Publications, Sydney. 1981.

Varnished paperback. I!0pp.

$4.65. Isbn 0 85807 051 0.

Alice Wedega, who is 77, holds a special place in the history of her country. Among Papua New Guinean women she was one of the first to gain formal recognition as a leader (thrust upon her. rather than sought), she was the first to sit in parliament, was the first to be named in an Imperial Honours List, and now has become the first to have a book published.

She introduces her book with an extraordinary little story which sets the mood for what follows. In the story she de scribes how she was at a dinner to welcome Queen Elizabeth to Papua New Guinea, and how a member of the Queen’s staff seemed taken aback to learn that the pleasant, thoughtful but perhaps unsophisticated daughter of Eastern Papua sit ting opposite him had recently been in Northern Ireland. ‘What on earth were you doing there?’ he asked. Her answer was simple: ‘My great grandfather was a cannibal, our people used to kill each other.

The missionaries came from Europe and stopped us doing all that. So I went to Northern Ireland to help the Europeans there stop doing that.’

Miss Wedega was an early product of what has been called the Kwato Mission Experiment the self-contained com munity settlement founded in 1891 on a Milne Bay island by Charles Abel of the London Missionary Society. Abel’s pro gressive and controversial ideas occasionally put him at odds with his hierarchy and the Kwato story has been told in detail in a number of places.

Miss Wedega touches on it only lightly, but for all that she gives a refreshingly new, simple and human account of a Christian based community seen for the first time through the eyes of an eight-year-old from a Melanesian village.

In her carefully-learnt English, Miss Wedega kept notes of daily events going back 65 years.

The book lends to display three moods. Its ‘missionary’ mood, although sincere and undoubtedly an accurate reflection of a transformed so ciety, is perhaps the least inter esting. It reads 100 much like a testimonial.

The book’s ‘community’ mood is its most valuable, describing Miss Wedega’s in volvement in national and com munity movements with empha sis on the role of women. The final ‘message’ mood, from which the title is taken, pro duces a simple plea to PNG women and men, too to unify, pacify and strengthen their young nation.

Listen, My Country is not a great work in social science or literature but it has a simple honesty that makes it a sig nificant contribution to modern

observations on PNG.

A. S.