Search for New Guinea's boundaries: from Torres Strait to the Pacific

Abstract

This is the first study of the origin and evolution of the borders that Western powers have imposed upon New Guinea. Making extensive use of diplomatic correspondence, official documents, and Australian and Dutch patrol reports from the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1960s, Dr van der Veur gives the reader an insight into what happens when diplomats and officials of different colonial administrations are faced with periodic crises over invisible boundaries. In this work the Irian boundary receives the most intensive treatment, but attention is also paid in separate chapters to the peculiar border between Queensland and Papua, and the lines which separate the Trust Territory of New Guinea from Papua and the British Solomons. In his conclusion the author surveys the heritage of absentee boundary-making and general unconcern, and points to several idiosyncracies and unsolved problems. The text is supported by some excellent maps, while the reader interested in consulting the original documents, most of which have not been published previously, may do so in a companion volume, Documents and Correspondence on New Guinea{u2019}s Boundaries. Search for New Guinea{u2019}s Boundaries will be of great interest not only to specialists in international relations and political geography but also to the general reader, for it treats a topic which is gaining in international importance in a scholarly and straightforward manner, often touched with humour. Show more