Northern Exposure: The New Guinea Research Unit

Abstract

Some time in late 1971, after a frustrating day at the Reserve Bank (where I was then senior economist in the Papua New Guinea Department), I came across an advertisement for the position of field director with the ANU’s New Guinea Research Unit (NGRU) in Port Moresby, and decided to apply. I wrote to my former Nuffield College supervisor in Oxford, Sir Norman Chester, asking if he would act as a referee. He promptly wrote back asking why on earth someone with a promising career in the Reserve Bank would think of giving it up to go to Papua New Guinea! From a career point of view he might have been right, but by that stage I had been seduced by Papua New Guinea, and in any case the Reserve Bank was no longer what it had been when ‘Nugget’ Coombs was governor. So, auspiciously, on 1 April 1972 I joined NGRU.