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Book Reviews The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 19381939, by Bill Gammage. Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press (Melbourne University Press), 1998. isbn 0-522-84827-3, xx + 292 pages, maps, photographs, glossary, notes, bibliography, index. a$39.95, us$39.95. The outsiders marked out part of the Melanesian culture area, put borders around it, called it Papua New Guinea, then left the people of this newly invented country to settle their differences and run a modern state. In much the same way, historians read the documents of colonial administrations, described what governments claimed to be doing, and wrote the history of a nation coming into being. Historians--some of the best known anyway--settled for histories of policy because policy gave their stories coherence. Some shoehorned Papua New Guinea's history into preconceived theoretical frameworks. Papua New Guinea is more complicated than that. Papua New Guineans were many peoples and, in a sense, many nations during the colonial period. What governments and patrol officers thought they were doing was one thing; what actually happened was different, so that histories of policy can be neat but largely fictional in describing the impact of the government and the encounter between villagers and Europeans. Generalizing about Papua New Guinea,
The Contemporary Pacific – University of Hawai'I Press
Published: Feb 1, 2000
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