Books from Papua New Guinea

Port Moresby Mixed Doubles is a collection of short stories by Michael Challinger, set among the white expatriate community in urban Papua New Guinea. Originally published in 1992, the book was later reissued with a new preface by the author. The stories follow expatriates who form a wealthy but transient minority in the country, most of them without long-term ties to the place they temporarily call home.

Local Papua New Guineans appear in the stories largely as domestic workers, office subordinates, or casual sexual partners, reflecting the social barriers that persist between communities. Among the expatriates themselves, relationships are shaped by boredom, jealousy, and inflated self-regard. The stories move between tragic and comic registers, and their recurring concerns include insecurity, money, alcohol, and sex. Challinger uses these preoccupations to sketch the particular tensions of privileged foreigners living in a society they occupy without fully joining.

Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea's capital, sits on the shores of the Coral Sea and serves as the economic center of the country. The city's mix of international compounds and local settlements provides a concrete backdrop for the social divides and uneasy coexistence that run through the collection.

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Tim Flannery, an Australian mammalogist, spent years conducting fieldwork in the remote interior of New Guinea, searching for animal species unknown or poorly documented by Western science. In the Tok Pisin language widely spoken across Papua New Guinea, the phrase throwim way leg means to take the first step of a long journey. Flannery's expeditions carried him into caves, up cliff faces, and through dense highland forests in pursuit of creatures such as giant bats believed to be extinct and the rarely observed black-and-white tree kangaroo.

The book records both the biological fieldwork and the human encounters that shaped it. Flannery describes early tensions with local communities, including groups whose traditions included cannibalism and who initially regarded his team of wildlife researchers with hostility. Over time, these relationships shifted. Tribespeople became collaborators in the search for specimens and shared ecological knowledge that proved essential to his findings.

New Guinea is the world's second-largest island and one of the most biologically diverse land masses on Earth. Much of its mountainous interior remained difficult for outside researchers to reach well into the late twentieth century. Flannery's account sits at the intersection of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing, grounded in specific species discoveries and the logistics of working in terrain with few roads and limited infrastructure.

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