Repatriation, Exchange, and Colonial Legacies in the Gulf of Papua: Moving Pictures

This book explores the people of the Kikori River Delta, in the Gulf of Papua, as established historical agents of intercultural exchange. One hundred years after they were made, Frank Hurley’s colonial-era photographic reproductions are returned to the descendants of the Kerewo and Urama peoples, whom he photographed. The book illuminates how the movement, use, and exchange of objects can produce distinctive and unrecognised forms of value. To understand this exchange, a nuanced history of the conditions of the exchange is necessary, which also allows a reconsideration of the colonial legacies that continue to affect the social and political worlds of people in the twenty-first century.

Lara Lamb is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She has worked with people in Papua New Guinea from 2008 to the present day, and has published a wide range of academic papers that have expanded our understanding of the Gulf Province significantly. Lara also has a long history of working with Indigenous communities on the central Queensland coast and in Arnhem Land, where she is engaged with ethnography, oral history and archaeology. At the time of publishing this book, she is conducting ethnographic and archaeological investigations on the Great Papuan Plateau.

Christopher Lee is a Professor in the English discipline in the School of Languages, Humanities and Social Science at Griffith University and a member of the Griffith Center for Social and Cultural Research. He is one of the foundation editors of the Journal for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) and a former national president of that professional Association. He has published widely on settler-colonial literature and cultural history with a special interest in the circulation of representations in the world. His most recent book publications are a study of settler-colonialism in the historical fiction of the Australian novelist Roger McDonald (Postcolonial Heritage and Settler Well-Being, 2018); and an edited collection of essays on the recollection of trauma in the public sphere with Jane Goodall in Palgrave Macmillan’s Memory study series (Trauma and Public Memory).