First Contact: New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World by Bob Connolly & Robin Anderson
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 30.9 MB
Overview: Beginning in 1930, a series of expeditions led by the Australian Michael Leahy went looking for gold in the unexplored highlands of New Guinea and found instead an intact civilization of nearly one million people who had had no previous contact with the outside world. During four years of “first contact” exploration, Leahy took thousands of photographs of these tribal people and shot many reels of film footage, documenting an event that can never again take place on earth: the confrontation on a large scale—and ultimately the collision—of Western and pretechnological cultures.
This rich documentary evidence lay largely neglected for fifty years, however, until Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson came across it and set out to interview Leahy’s brothers, others who accompanied them on the prospecting expeditions, and a score of tribesmen and women. These interviews were the basis for the authors’ documentary film First Contact, which opened the Margaret Mead Film Festival in 1983 and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1984.
Now, after two years of further research, Connolly and Anderson have written a book that chronicles the “first contact” experience in detail. It is a classic story of adventure, exploration, and discovery, as well as a sobering examination of colonialism. And for one of the very few times in written history, we hear this story most eloquently not from the visitors but from the visited: from people who remember firsthand the arrival of the white people and the disintegration of their old way of life. These often startling personal reminiscences arc interwoven with a dramatic narrative account of the rise and fall of Michael Leahy’s star, of the end of one and the beginning of a new highlands culture, and of the achievement of independent rule in the nation of Papua New Guinea. The book is illustrated with more than one hundred striking photographs from the Leahy archives.
Genre: Non-Fiction > History Anthropology, Ethnology, First contact, History, Papua New Guinea
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