Papua New Guinea portraits : the expatriate experience

Abstract

The Europeans who went to the land that is now called Papua New Guinea went with many different motives: to serve God or mammon, to satisfy their curiosity, to win fame and find adventure. Their lives illustrate that Papua New Guinea was a frontier where men who elsewhere might have led ordinary lives could accomplish the extraordinary. They faced an astonishing range of physical and mental challenges in this, to them, new, formidable and beautiful country. Some walked where no white man had ever trodden; some taught; some preached; some exploited. Inevitably, over time they faced problems of adaptation, none perhaps greater than the change from masta-boi relationship to that where Papua New Guineans rule their own nation, a situation that Hahl or Monckton, for example, would have greeted with total incredulity. Some, like Chalmers, lost their lives there; some, like Mason, fought there; some, like the Leahy family, still live out their lives there. Individually these pen portraits sketch men who were adventurous, physically tough, and mentally flexible; together they vividly portray the way of life of the white man in Prospero{u2019}s other island.