New Guinea: Crossing Boundaries and History (review)

In this well-organized and carefully researched book, Clive Moore surveys the history of the entire island of New Guinea. In eight chapters and an introduction, supported by an impressive 636 -item bibliography, Moore, reader in history and head of the history department at University of Queensland, Australia, presents a "big picture" of a region that has often been portrayed in fragmented terms: whole books about half an island, or about only one of a thousand cultures.

His first chapter, for example, emphasizes the broad sweep of prehistory, examining landscapes, climate, biogeography, cultural and linguistic diversity, and change spanning about 35,000 years. In chapter 2, he focuses on the large-scale cultural spheres and trading systems extant in New Guinea and surrounding lands over the last 5,000 years, with special reference to recent research in archaeology and linguistics. Chapters 3 and 4 probe the earliest contacts between New Guinea and the rest of the world, one chapter emphasizing the trading relations between West New Guinea and the Malay world and Asia beyond, and the other showing the extent of early European exploitation of the region.

The next chapters explore the "gradual process by which European navigators explored, commercially exploited, and incorporated New Guinea and the islands to its east and west into empires" (74). In each of these, Moore is careful to discussWest New Guinea, not just the eastern half of the island. In some cases, of course, the parallels are clear, and in others, the contrasts are stark and enlightening. He successfully avoids the problem of some books purporting to study the whole island, where the western part is too quickly dismissed as more remote or too poorly documented. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the nineteenth-century activities of European traders, settlers, missionaries, and government administrators, with special attention to the drawing of new borders in those years. Despite his necessary "fast forward" overview ofeven the most complex anddetailed of historical events and processes, Moore manages to include pithy examples, not just quick summaries. In a section on scientific expeditions, he discusses work pursued in west New Guinea in the early twentieth century: "European exploration in west New Guinea between 1900 and the First World War far exceeded that in eastern New Guinea. Expeditions penetrated deep into the central mountains, drawn by the magnet of the permanent snowfields, always searching for new species with which to confound the scientific world. The reaction of the New Guineans to these intruders prompted Hendrikus Colijn to report in 1907 that 'in the mind of the Papuan there is no other difference between a Resident [government official] and a native bird of paradise trader than that he understands the presence of the latter, that of the former [is regarded] as a mystery, impossible to elucidate'" (144).

The next chapter, "Interpreting Early Contact," is a masterful discussion of the cultural dynamics operative in the early and continuing encounters, and includes twentieth-century inland contacts. Characteristically, Moore extends his discussion here with numerous quoted accounts, and with careful reference to such analyses of early patrols as Edward Schieffelin and Robert Crittenden's Like People You See in a Dream (1991) and Bob Connelly and Robin Anderson's First Contact (1987).

The final chapter, about colonialism and independence, and intentionally designed not to privilege recent history, highlights twentieth-century changes in economies, politics, and society. Moore carefully sorts out the multicultural complexities of colonial rule in New Guinea: "Edward Said's writings about 'Orientalism'—the Western conception of the Middle East and the Orient—have their valid critics, but it is hard to argue against his premise that all cultures tend to shape their representations of foreign cultures in order to master them better, or in some way control them. Any study of how Western knowledge depicted and understood Melanesia must examine the representations and the political power they express. With New Guinea...