My reading over Easter

I had a great Easter weekend with my four young children at home as well as went through a lot of reading, especially on the history of Papua New Guinea, given my avid interest in this subject.

This is not my first time to read these books, and they are certainly not hot off the press, but given all the problems the country is currently going through, I felt duty-bound to read through and refresh my history.

I will do same with all PNG books in my collection.

I spent the best part of Easter Saturday, Sunday and Monday reading two absorbing books of PNG history – Michael J Leahy’s Explorations into Highlands New Guinea and Peter Maiden’s Missionaries, Headhunters and Colonial Officers.

A review of Missionaries, Headhunters and Colonial Officers is given separately above.

Explorations into Highlands New Guinea (cover pictured) tells of the 1920s and 1930s when there were adventures to be lived and fortunes to be made by strong young men in the outback of Australia and the gold fields of New Guinea.

This is the diary of five years spent in hot pursuit – not of honor and glory, but of excitement and riches – by one such adventurer Michael ‘Mick’ Leahy, his brothers Jim and Pat, and friends Mick Dwyer and Jim Taylor.

Leahy and his associates explored the unknown interior of New Guinea, seeking gold and making contact for the first time with the aborigines of the interior mountains and valleys.

Their explorations recounted here probably represent the last of their kind in this century.

The discovery of gold in New Guinea in 1926 lured Mick Leahy (and a short time later his brothers Pat, Jim and Dan) into an adventure that resulted in important geologic, geographic, and ethnographic observations of Stone Age people in a region unknown to the rest of the world at that time.

Compelling reading for all who want to know about the history of a fascinating country!