Gavin Souter

Gavin Souter is known to most Pacific historians largely on the basis of his one major work on New Guinea. Published in1963, New Guinea: The Last Unknown represents an early and remarkably ambitious effort to collect or gather together the myriad documentary sources on the history of European exploration of the interior of New Guinea. It stands as the first attempt at a history of the island in all its parts, with roughly equal attention paid to the Dutch, German, and Anglo-Australian archives. Given the materials available at the time of its production, it was necessarily a history of European exploration rather than an engagement with the deeper past of the island and its inhabitants —although, as I argue, Souter opened the way for a history of encoun-ers in which indigenous accounts might balance those of the archival sources. Grand syntheses of New Guinea are notoriously difficult, in any discipline, and historians both before and since Souter have generally refused the challenge.There are grounds, then, for some biographical context, and also for consideration of Souter’s research and writing methods: what inspired a feature writer at the Sydney Morning Herald to embark on such an ambitious undertaking, and to what extent did he succeed in this endeavor?… (lisätietoja)

Souter has written a hugely readable history of the exploration and colonisation of the island of New Guinea by the Dutch, British and Germans between 1875 and 1963. When all of the rest of the world had been ´discovered´ New Guinea presented the last challenge for explorers, missionaries, adventurers and charlatans. Souter recounts the colorful lives (and in many cases early deaths at the hands of cannibals) of these westerners who penetrated the ´last unknown´.

If this was all that there was to this history it would be a collection of entertaining stories. But Souter, who seemingly worked in Papua New Guinea in the 1960´s brings much more to the story. His extensive knowledge of the people and the landscape gives his writing a vivid and authentic character. It encompases the extraordinary diversity of New Guinea, a land where tribes are so isolated by the rugged terrain that they have developed over 700 separate languages and where snow falls near the Equator, at 15,000 feet above sea level, only a few dozen miles from steamy coastal swamps.. Without bringing any sense of heaviness to the narrative, Souter leads the reader through the politics of the colonial era, and the prospects for self government and development.

Souter takes his story to 1963, just as the Indonesians were taking over West Papua (Irian Jaya), but before Papua New Guinea (PNG) had been granted independence by Australia (in 1975). But I would recommend this as a very worthwhile history for anyone who has an interest in the post colonial fortunes of PNG or Irian Jaya. The roots of many issues that have dominated the modern era go back to the period covered so well by Souter. It is also an excellent reference for the period of German colonisation of Melanesia and the Pacific, and adventure brought to a abrupt conclusion by the First World War.… (lisätietoja)