Press, Politics and People in Papua New Guinea 1950-1975

Writing in 1967, the Australian historian Hank Nelson observed in his pioneering survey of the press in PNG:

“..In Papua and New Guinea...the press has a special use: It provides a continuous record of what the European community thought of Papua and New Guinea and its people. The expatriates are constantly, overtly or implicitly, evaluating the country and the people. In doing so they make clear their assumptions on one subject over a period of time that cannot be found to the same extent in, say, a country newspaper in Australia.”

Nelson’s comments could be applied to the whole of the Pacific, for the commercial press was an expatriate creation aimed at an expatriate market. Throughout the islands it provided a mirror to their lives and showed themselves fairly accurately as they were. The attitudes expressed in letters to the editor and editorials are as important as the headlines and news stories, for they show what some expatriates thought about the countries in which they were living. The newspapers show an expatriate population expressing attitudes that were often at variance with official policy and out of sympathy with the needs of the indigenous population. It sometimes shows us what the indigenous population thought and did, but just as often their omission from the pages of the daily or weekly press leaves us to draw our own conclusions. From this we can trace an outline, at least of the changing relationship between the sinabada and the haus meri and the taubada and the haus boi. (The fact that an expatriate couple might be addressed as sinabada and taubada in Papua, but as masta and missis in New Guinea did not change the fact that the meri and haus boi remained just that.) Relationships between expatriates and indigenes did change in the period covered by this book; indeed a seismic shift in power, in attitudes and in relationships between expatriate and indigenous people occurred during these two decades.

The doctoral thesis on which this book is based was researched and written while the author was working in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.