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This book probably suffers from my expectations (being too high) going into it.
It is a fairly early Frank Clune book, published in 1943 and describes the authors five weeks spent in Papua in 1940. Worth a short explanation here - Papua at the time of writing was was the Australian administered Territory of Papua, annexed for the British Empire. To the north, was Mandated New Guinea (otherwise known as the Territory of New Guinea), which until 1914 had been German New Guinea. In 1949 (after this book was published), the two territories combined as the Territory of Papua and New Guinea (still with Australia taking an overarching administrative control), which subsequently in 1975 became the Independent State of Papua New Guinea. Dutch New Guinea forms the other, western half of the island, which is now Indonesian territory, was known as Irian Jaya, and is now made up of the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua. Certainly it has been a turbulent and complex region of the world at the hands of the colonial powers, and played a part in both world wars.
tl;dr - this book takes place in the south eastern quarter of the Island of Papua, while it was in Australian administration, in 1940!
So while Clune spends time travelling about, we are given a potted history of all the people he meets (the Australians, not the Papuan's), and a very in depth history of exploration and adventure of each place he visited, rich in anecdotes and tales. This does, unfortunately mean hundreds of names, some of which get a chapter, some a paragraph, and some only a sentence. I struggled to keep them all in a tangible structure, especially when he would also periodically return to them when they again became relevant in his travel.
The other negative were the gimmicky puns and alliterations Clune insisted on peppering through the text. For me they were just distracting, and demeaning to those gently mocked. I am not sure whether he thought he was lightening the text, or raising its amusement, but I didn't think it worked at all.
Examples:P48“They certainly deserve a rich reward after all the money they've spent on their paleontological peregrinations.”P139“The wind dropped, the sun dropped, the anchor of the Panawhina dropped, and I dropped off to sleep in the estuary of the Fly River, while gnat-gnats hummed a symphony outside my gnat-gnat net.”P165“The first cartographic campaign to solve this riparian riddle was undertaken by...”But there is no doubt that Clune presents a thorough examination of history in this place defined by cannibalism, stone-aged natives, gold and minerals and the many colonial characters who play their part in the administration. Clune urges Australia to take notice - to clear jungle and establish crops - quinine, rubber, tea, coffee, cocoa; to seek minerals and gold; to harness rivers with hyrdo-power; and to make land available to the soldiers when the war ends. In short to make the Territory of Papua a worthy seventh Australian state.
Of course, as outlined above, this doesn't happen and PNG passes into self rule.
As the story ends, Clune is heading north, to the Mandated New Guinea, to continue his travels. That story is not published until 1952, under the title Somewhere in New Guinea.
3 stars
