What ever happened to the Papua New Guinea Dictionary of Contemporary Biography

The 1980s were both troubling and exciting years for PNG and Papua New Guineans, not to mention scholars looking back at them.Pleasant memories of independence from Australia were still fresh, yet cracks in the postcolonial nation-arguably only held together by a bandaid in the lead-up to 1975-had begun to reveal themselves.The nation may have been independent, but were its people decolonised?As the poet and scholar Vincent Warakai evocatively wrote in 1984:We are dancing Yes, but without leaping For the fetters of dominance still persist Yes, still insist On dominating Holding us down. 1 James Griffin, an Australian historian at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) and an important character in this story, believed that PNG's inaugural prime minister, Michael Somare, and other post-independence leaders had been handicapped by a stream of 'wicked fairies'. 2Even if the report card after a decade of independence was 'understandably mixed', the experienced PNG and Bougainville observer added that nobody could seriously object to the fact that a 'nation state with reasonable prospects of survival has been created'. 3 This, Griffin argued, was an achievement worth celebrating, however cautiously.Whatever differences in opinion may have existed between Griffin and Warakai about the reasons for PNG's mixed report card after 1975, both would have surely agreed that more work was required to bolster the dual processes of decolonisation and nation-building. 1

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