Elizabeth Burchill (1904–2003)

Birchall writes with a very 1960's travelogue style; recording what she did, saw, and thought without troubling the reader with too many doubts or reflections, or any sense that there were troubled horizons ahead for the yet to be independent nation of Papua New Guinea. In many ways this reflects the optimism of those times (the early 1960's), and to a degree the insularity of the white colonialists in New Guinea. But it also (and in a more admiring sense) reflectss Birchall's personal strength and optimist. She had nursed troops in the Middle East in World War II, worked with Wilfred Grenfell in Labrador in the 1930's, and with aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander communities in the 1920's and the 1950's. And if she lingers over descriptions of the gifts of western civilization, she seems at her most enthusiastic as she describes efforts to transfer skills to the indigenous people, and speaks honestly about the high rates of infant mortality and the inability of all of western technology and organisation to make more than the smallest difference to the lives of the people. Birchall's point though, is that it is worth making the smallest difference if that is all you can do; and build and hope for the future to do better. In the end I came to appreciate this as a well written (and well meaning) record of New Guinea in pre-independence days, particularly as a story that wasn't written from the usual perspectives of politics, ethnography or natural science.… (mehr)