ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I interrogate the colonial-era conception of the ‘mixed-race’ person in the Port Moresby area of Papua New Guinea (PNG). Port Moresby was established when the south-east coast of the New Guinea landmass was colonised by Britain in the 1880s. 1 Germany colonised the north-east coast and its offshore islands at the same time. Racial politics during German colonial possession and subsequently under Australian rule in the northern region of PNG were historically different from those in the southern part (Firth 1986; Mair 1948). Consequently, the fortunes of non-European foreigners and ‘mixed-race’ people were also different (see, e.g., Wolfers 1975: 62-87; Johnson and McGavin, this volume), and so I will not address them here. My discussion draws on fieldwork findings in a village near Port Moresby, along with genealogical and archival research covering the colonial period from the earliest known marriages between local villagers and foreigners. The term ‘mixed-race’ gained currency in Papua New Guinea in the later colonial period, replacing ‘half-caste’, although the latter was still used in its pidgin form, hapkas , in lingua franca discourse. The colonial administration developed regulations to apply to people categorised by such terms, as if they were easily identifiable as neither ‘native’ nor ‘non-native’. By the late colonial period, Europeans had a conventional understanding that mixed-race people were socially recognisable by some combination of three things: facial features, place of residence (certain suburban areas were understood to be mixed-race enclaves) and a non-indigenous surname. Indeed, when I lived in Port Moresby in the early 1970s, I naïvely accepted without reflection the late colonial image of a mixed-race person. In a later period of residence, the 1990s, I conducted anthropological fieldwork in Pari, a traditional village on the edge of the National Capital District. When I investigated genealogies to clarify ethnographic findings, I was surprised by the number of villagers without ‘mixed-race’ appearance and with indigenous names whose genealogies included a non-indigenous person. It was a lesson in the shortcomings of a colonial stereotype and pointed to the need for a more nuanced representation of people of mixed heritage.
