ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the agricultural land settlement schemes (LSS) established in the 1960s on the north coast of West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Village farming families from other parts of PNG settled on the LSSs and, like the Australian administrators, they initially associated the scheme with transformative powers to bring them the wealth and “development” that Europeans had enjoyed and that had bypassed them in their remote home villages. The chapter examines the trials and tribulations of the project of economic and social transformation initiated by the Australian administration and eagerly adopted by first- and second-generation settlers. It explores the range of factors that have conspired to thwart the realisation of the dream that the settlers held of the LSS delivering the “good life” or what they imagined to be a Western or European lifestyle. As instruments of national development, the LSSs were thought to have transformative powers.
