This book is the first to draw extensively on the recently released highly classified notes of the cabinet room discussions of successive Australian Governments, from 1950 to the mid-1970s. It details the changing attitude of the nation's leaders towards the place of Papua New Guinea in Australia's defense and security outlook. The Cabinet Notebooks provide an uncensored and unprecedented insight into the opinion of Australia's leaders towards Indonesia under Sukarno, Southeast Asia and Indo-China in general; the changing nature of relations with Britain and the United States; and towards Papua New Guinea. The cabinet room discussions reveal attitudes towards Asia and Australia's place in the region which are more nuanced, varied, and sensitive than previously known. They also illustrate the dominant influence of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and Deputy Prime Minister John McEwen in shaping Australia's response to the critical events of the time. Australia's Northern Shield? shows how, since colonial times, Australia has assessed the importance of Papua New Guinea by examining the ambitions of and threats from external sources, principally Imperial Germany, Japan, and Indonesia. It examines the significant change in Australia's attitude as this region approached independence in 1975, amid concerns as to the new nation's future stability and unity. The terms of Australia's long-term defense undertaking are examined in detail, and an examination is offered of the most recent attempts to define the strategic importance of Papua New Guinea to Australia. (Series: Investigating Power) [Subject: Politics, History, Southeast Asian Studies]

Less than five kilometres from Australia's most northern islands in the Torres Strait lies the southern coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The people living on the PNG side of the border along the South Fly coast live in abject poverty, with a near total absence of services and infrastructure. The disparity in income, housing and health outcomes when compared with their nearby neighbours and relatives in the Torres Strait Islands, is extreme. The border is the focus of a range of interventions by the Australian and Queensland governments, including border protection, quarantine, marine resource management, and infectious disease control, including an alarming outbreak of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. Restrictions are increasing on trading, fishing and access to Australian services. However, questions remain as to whether this focus is having unintended consequences, increasing the destitution and frustration on the PNG side, in turn exacerbating the security threat to Australia. And as the Australian border hardens, the Indonesian border beckons. This book presents the results of three years of research into the unique social and political geography of the borderland. The Torres Strait Treaty between Australia and PNG serves to construct a complex institutional layering, a tiered economy and a hierarchy of identities between those South Fly villagers who have rights under the Treaty to travel into Australia, and those who do not. This creates a politics of expectation and frustration that permeates everyday life along the South Fly coast, through which development projects must navigate.

When it came in September 1975, Papua New Guinea's independence was marked by both anxiety and elation. In the euphoric aftermath, decolonisation was declared a triumph and immediate events seemed to justify that confidence. By the 1990s, however, events had taken a turn for the worse and there were doubts about the capacity of the State to function. Before independence, Papua New Guinea was an Australian Territory. Responsibility lay with a minister in Canberra and services were provided by Commonwealth agencies. In 1973, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam declared that independence should be achieved within two years. While Australians were united in their desire to decolonise, many Papua New Guineans were nervous of independence. This superlative history presents the full story of the 'trial separation' of Australia and Papua New Guinea, concluding that -- given the intertwined history, geography and economies of the two neighbours -- the decolonisation project of 'independence' is still a work in progress.

Forty years after independence, Papua New Guinea is the largest single recipient of aid from Australia. Yet Australians seem to be largely ambivalent about the country. Few Australians know the history of our colonial rule in PNG and our long ties to the country are quickly being forgotten. PNG expert Sean Dorney examines PNG's weaknesses and strengths since independence and argues that, for moral and practical reasons, Australia needs to reconnect with Papua New Guinea. It is time we shed our embarrassment about our colonial past and embrace our relationship with our nearest neighbour.

Maps, line drawings, color photographs, and text describe eight genera of rainbowfishes, including fishes for the aquarium.

The main theme of this volume is a discussion of the ways in which legal mechanisms, such as the Land Groups Incorporation Act (1974) in PNG, and the Native Title Act (1993) in Australia, do not, as they purport, serve merely to identify and register already-existing customary indigenous landowning groups in these countries. Because the legislation is an integral part of the way in which indigenous people are defined and managed in relation to the State, it serves to elicit particular responses in landowner organisation and self-identification on the part of indigenous people. These pieces of legislation actively contour the progressive evolution of landowner social, territorial and political organisation at all levels in these nation states. The contributors to this volume provide in-depth anthropological case studies of social structural and cultural transformations engendered by the confrontation between states, developers and indigenous communities over rights to customarily owned land.

To many people, the suggestion that a kangaroo could live up a tree is fantasy. Yet, in the rainforests of Far North Queensland and New Guinea, there are extraordinary kangaroos that do just that. Many aspects of these marsupials' anatomy and biology suggest a terrestrial kangaroo ancestor. Yet no one has, so far, come forward with a convincing explanation of how, why and when mammals that was so superbly adapted for life on the ground should end up back in the trees. This book reviews the natural history and biology of tree-kangaroos from the time of their first discovery by Europeans in the jungles of West Papua in 1826 right up to the present day, covering the latest research being conducted in Australian and New Guinea. Combining information from a number of disparate disciplines, the author sets forth the first explanation of this apparent evolutionary conundrum. Features * Provides a fascinating and readable account of an unusual evolutionary conundrum * Written by a field biologist with more than a decade's experience working with tree-kangaroos