While there is much theoretical study of the evolution of border disparities, there islittle empirical an alysis of development asymmetries across border regions, and their causes or solutions. Often disparities among countries hinder the ability of transboundary agreements and other development initiatives to generate sustainable development. This study quantifies development progress amongst communities in Australia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) covered by the Torres Strait Treaty, 26 years after its inception.
Customary exchange across Torres Strait is examined through a study of documentary sources, oral history and museum collections. The study includes an analysis of the material culture of exchange illustrating (he variety of artefacts of subsistence, ornamentation and dress, recreation, ceremony and dance, and warfare The idea that customary exchange across Torres Strait was a system of fixed, formalised, point-to-point trade routes is contested.
Remote transboundary regions in developing countries often contain abundant natural resources. Many of these resources are being overexploited to supply an ever-increasing demand from Asia, often via illegal cross-border trade. Understanding the systemic issues that drive households to engage in illegal activities in transboundary regions is a prerequisite for designing effective interventions and diverting livelihoods toward sustainable trajectories, but is rarely applied. This study analyzed the drivers of illegal trade in marine products, e.g.
There is an apparent convergence of interest on the part of several key stakeholders in the need for an integrated, transboundary approach to sustainable development and resource management in the ‘ecoregion’ which includes Southern New Guinea and the adjoining parts of Northern Australia (here provisionally limited to Cape York Peninsula and Torres Strait). On the PNG side, the outer limits of this ecoregion correspond roughly with the boundaries of Gulf and Western Provinces.
This report examines social development issues among the lagoon people of the Fly River—the Boazi, Zimakani, and Suki people—in that section of the river marked approximately by Cassowary Island and the Binge River. The lagoon people are closely related in culture, social organisation and the form of their ecological adaptation both to the ‘canoe people’, or Marind Anim, of the southern border area of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya, and east to the Gogodala people of the Aramia River (Crawford 1981).
The South Fly District of Western Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), is one of the poorest regions of the country. Drivers of change affecting livelihoods in the South Fly are accelerating in pace and magnitude. Population growth, climate change, sea level rise, gas extraction, over-fishing, ongoing environmental impacts of Ok Tedi mine, and the growing Asian market for illegally-harvested marine products are all undermining sustainable human development.
Within the context of the Purari Delta’s transforming materialities of resource extraction,and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku (‘hand head’) lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit-beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups’ identities manifest.
The Gulf of Papua, Papua New Guinea, is a rapidly changing geomorphic and cultural landscape in which the ancestral past is constantly being (re)interpreted and negotiated. This paper examines the importance of subsurface archaeological and geomorphological features for the various communities of Orokolo Bay in the Gulf of Papua as they maintain and re-construct cosmological and migration narratives.
Arriving in the Torres Straits in 1871, the London Missionary Society (LMS) commenced their attempts to convert communities along the south coast of what is now Papua New Guinea. Building upon their initial efforts in Tahiti (1797), their work in Papua was connected by belief, letter and the flow of objects to their efforts in Africa, China,
Whom and what do we touch, hear and see when we hold, listen and look at photographs? What histories are enfolded within photographs’ materiality? What elided pasts do they contain, and what possible futures can be negotiated with source communities by engaging with these artefacts in the present? In this paper I consider these related questions through an exploration of the nexus of relations, perspectives and histories enfolded within a particular glass plate (A6510,499) held in the National Australian Archives.
Within this article I discuss the productive potentials of looking at historic photographs of the Purari Delta with indigenous communities today. A particular type of artifact, the meanings of photographs are promiscuous. Thinking about the shape of cultural property relations that are manifest photographs, I show how engagements with
indigenous communities unsettlesEuropean preconceptions about what photographs are as well as how doing so
On the bank of the upper reaches of the Aivei River sat an empty cargo container, detritus from a failed logging and oil palm venture initiated in 1993 (Filer with Sekhran 1998: 188–9; Bell 2009). In 2002, when I first encountered this container, the forest was slowly engulfing its blistering orange-red surface (Figure 6.1). All the heavy equipment brought to this site had been removed r scavenged for parts, and the empty cargo container was all that remained.
Since the 1970s the site of Emo (aka ‘Samoa’, ‘OAC’) in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea has been cited as one of the earliest-known ceramic sites from the southern Papuan lowlands. This site has long been seen as holding c.2000 year old evidence of post-Lapita long-distance maritime trade from (Austronesian-speaking) Motu homelands in the Central Province, where pottery was manufactured, to the (non- Austronesian) Gulf Province some 400km to the west where pottery was received and for which large quantities of sago were exchanged (the ancestral hiri trade).
Carettochelys insculpta, the pig-nosed turtle (Family Carettochelyidae), is the sole surviving member of a family of turtles that was widely distributed during the Tertiary. It is restricted to the southern rivers of New Guinea and the rivers of the Northern Territory in Australia. Carettochelys is therefore a distinctive geographic and taxonomic relict and, although locally abundant, it is rare in the sense of being geographically restricted. Moreover, Carettochelys is unique or unusual among turtles in many facets of its morphology, ecology, and behavior. Populations in New
This paper reports upon a series of recent developments in New Guinea highlands warfare. Building upon existing literature highlighting the deep influence of modernity within this context, we draw attention to two particular developments yet to be reported in the literature and which appear to be of special significance. Through an analysis of Aiya warfare, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, we document the direct and increasing involvement of women within warfare, as well as the important role played by mobile phones used by warriors to communicate before and during fighting.
In 2003-2004, the Small Arms Survey completed a series of research projects across 20 nations of the southwest Pacific. One of these, a survey of the proliferation of small arms and firearm-related violence in the strife-torn Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (Alpers, 2005), relies on a range of background information, field interviews from 19 communities, weapon descriptions and summaries of supplementary material which are not included in the published work.
In the volatile Southern Highlands Province (SHP) of Papua New Guinea (PNG), approximately 2,450 factory-made firearms are held by private owners. These include between 500 and 1,040 high-powered weapons, most of which are assault rifles. Very few of the guns in SHP were smuggled from foreign countries. Instead, police and soldiers within PNG supplied the most destructive firearms used in crime and conflict.
Papua New Guinea (PNG) has long been a site of analysis for exploring the links betweennatural resources and conflict, having been cited as an example in prominent studies of the ‘natural resource curse’ and used as a source of learning in international debates on CorporateSocial Responsibility (CSR). Over the past d ecade, this scholarship has expanded to encompass conflict analysis and peace building.
Papua New Guinea (PNG) has long been a site of analysis for exploring the links between natural resources and conflict, having been cited as an example in prominent studies of the ‘natural resource curse’ and used as a source of learning in international debates on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Over the past decade, this scholarship has expanded to encompass conflict analysis and peace building.