of a radio series...

Taim Bilonc Masta

More than a book of a radio series...

Taim Bilong Masta: The Aust ralian Involvement with Papua New Guinea. By Hank Nelson.

Published by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Syd ney. Distributed by Hodder and Stoughton Australia. Price

$16.95. Isbn 0 642 97566 3.

Taim Bilong Masta, the book, is more than a spin-off from Taim Bilong Masta, the radio series.

The aim of the radio series, which was broadcast over the Australian Broadcasting Com mission network in 24 parts in 1981, was to persuade many dif ferent Australians to talk about their time in Papua New Guinea in the colonial period.

At their best the programs

were good history, good enter

tainment, with their value being

in the way they opened subjects

not then dealt with in published accounts, and in the presentation of so much first-hand testimony.

Those tapes, which are now av ailable as a cassette series, are basic sources in the history of Australians in PNG and belong in the archives.

“In general, the interviews (on the tapes) confirm the value

of oral evidence for the historian, demonstrate the articulateness of

ordinary people talking about

their own lives, and show that nearly all will go to considerable effort to contribute,” says Dr Hank Nelson, of the Australian National University, who did re search and comment for the series, which was produced by Tim Bowden in association with Daniel Connell and a handful of others.

But if the series belonged to Bowden, this book belongs to Nelson and his designers and editors. Nelson has meshed the oral evidence of the tapes quite brilliantly with the basic history of modem PNG to give us a highly readable account of the country’s making.

He makes it fairly zing along as he takes us on patrol, into the goldfields, introduces us to the misfits, erupting volcanoes, the missions, the courts and the calaboose, discusses plantation life, and tells what PNG life meant to the women and chil dren. “The Loneliness and the Glory” says one chapter head ing; “The Boat Came Every Six

Weeks” says another chapter headings as evocative as the chapters that go under them.

The tapes of Taim Bilong Mas ta are for serious students now, or for the people whose voices are on them; Hank Nelson’s book is for everybody, and it is a book I predict will have more than the curiosity sale guaranteed by the ABC’s promotion machinery. It deserves to go into a reprint, presumably with a hard cover, for it makes the more vital evi dence on the tapes available in an accessible form.

There is of course no way the book can give all the information on the tapes any more than the radio series itself could: there were more than 300 hours of recorded interviews with some 350 people.

But Nelson’s selection of in terviews for the book could hard ly be bettered, surely, and the illustrations enhance the written material in a manner that is quite sparkling. The reproduction of advertisements and news items from early editions of PIM and PNG newspapers is splendidly conceived and executed, as is the selection of historic photographs (with great dependence obvious ly placed on PlM’s picture files).

Taim Bilong Masta covers the period from the turn of the cen tury to independence in 1975.

Nelson sums it up in the final chapter thus: “Australians as colonial offi cials had not been good at wear ing plumed hats, holding cere monies or building monuments.

They left styles, structures and ways to act. Papua New Guinea had been intensely important to a few Australians, but only in war had it been of crucial importance to most Australians.

“The way Australians ‘went finish’ was as good as most things that they did. They were confused about how and when, and seemed to have stumbled; they consulted Papua New Gui neans at length then suddenly ignored them on a major deci sion; they made small mistakes, but got the big issues right; they used no guns or jails against political opponents; they shook a lot of hands and laughed a lot; they were generous on the final points; and they went quickly”.

Stuart Inder.