Australia's Future in New Guinea

THUS far Australia has proposed no ultimate aim for the political evolution of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea,l and indeed has been remarkably little discussion of the question, though it may prove to be of great importance. It may be this absence of a defined and acknowledged basic aim that causes the complaint, sometimes heard in the Territory, that there is no policy. Policies, it is true, do exist in relation to particular aspects of administration, yet the sum of these policies appears shapeless: is no criterion by which particular measures can be judged, no point of reference in relation to which diverse tendencies can be estimated. It is possible that policies are being pursued in response to immediate considerations which will prove inconsistent with whatever constitutional goal is later fixed. While the country was still scarcely opened up, the people utterly without awareness of politics, and the gaze of the world averted, it was easy to shelve the question. But circumstances are beginning to bring it insistently forward. It is still true that is no native intelligentsia able to ask about their political future in a way that commands attention; but, with the extension of educational opportunities, this is not likely to continue very much longer. Meanwhile, outside the Territory, Australia has to take account of the pressure of anti-colonial sentiments as they find expression in the United Nations and elsewhere, converging from diverse points of view upon a demand for the very rapid abolition of all colonial tenures, without much regard for local circumstances or for the dangers involved in dismantling the remaining structures of Western organization and coordination in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. What happens in Dutch New Guinea next door may also affect the state of the question on the Australian side. The continuance of Dutch control would create no problems. There is some speculation whether, in the event of a transfer of Western New Guinea to Indonesian con

Ethnology · Geography · New guinea · Political science · Commonwealth, Australian Politics and Federalism · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

• Readingsouth pacific

  George D Westermark•History and Anthropology•2001

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