Allan Patience

This book is a milestone in the historiography of Australia and Papua New Guinea. It puts paid to sterile debates about whether PNG’s independence came too early. ‘Decolonisation,’ Professor Donald Denoon concludes, ‘is by no means complete and independence is a work in progress.’ What happened on 16 September 1975 was the beginning of a ‘trial separation’: ‘Australian rule over the territory was not a marriage made in heaven, and it could never be consummated by full integration. Yet those countries are so close in so many ways that the divorce cannot easily be made absolute.’

The cliché of the South Pacific as a tropical paradise is contradicted by the hellishness of the Melanesian/Polynesian political scheming that characterises most of the region. It is a form of scheming that would make Byzantine politics appear like the polite equivalent of an election for office in the Country Women’s Association. From Port Moresby to Suva, political élites hide behind a fraying façade of democratic governance while slyly engaging in corruption, crime, venality and spite in their dealings with each other and with the citizens they pretend to govern. Many are adept at manipulating the language of anti-colonialism to colonise their own peoples. The ramshackle states they have constructed cannibalise public resources, including resources donated by overseas governments and aid agencies. The South Pacific is becoming a zone of indefensible human suffering. This can be seen in the collapsed ‘state’ of Nauru, the recent violent civil conflicts in the Solomon Islands and Bougainville, and the looming governance crisis in Papua New Guinea. Fiji illustrates the South Pacific’s ‘hell in paradise’ theme vividly with its two coups in 1987 (led by Sitiveni Rabuka) and the even worse misfortunes of the Chaudhry Government in May 2000 at the hands of the notorious George Speight.

Papua New Guinea is definitely not one of the grand colonial stories. There is no tradition of empire, no tales of the raj, to be glorified or excoriated by historians and other nostalgics. Mostly, the various German, Australian and Japanese colonial administrations were not infrequently racist and stupid, often brutal and overwhelmingly unimaginative. Australia’s colonising and neo-colonising of what has become PNG was always, and still is, principally focused on its security interests, not on bringing civilisation to noble savages or developing a thriving economy. The colonial Australians who ventured into the oppressive heat, spectacular mountains, awesome rainforests and malarial swamps mostly comprised parsimonious bureaucrats, rugged patrol officers, no-nonsense police, Christian evangelists, and fugitives of pretty well every kind – ‘missionaries, marxists, and misfits’, as the saying goes.

This handsome volume purports to be an ‘overview of the current state of social-science research about Australia at the beginning of the twenty-first century’. Its editors have assembled a broad, if less than representative, group of specialists, most of whom comment on aspects of one of three fields declared, by editorial fiat, to constitute contemporary social science: economics, political science, and sociology. While acknowledging the immense diversity in the social sciences, the editors briskly assert that ‘the majority of universities in the advanced societies and the majority of the academic staff who work within them, are organised around, and identify themselves by [these] disciplinary labels’.