Stuart Hawthorne was eight years old when he moved to Port Moresby in 1957. He lived there for 20 years, leaving two years after PNG became an independent country. This book is his affectionate account of a time now gone – the taim bipo of its title, when Port Moresby was an intimate village of expats and indigenous people, all intent upon re-building a country left badly damaged after World War II.
Though his background is in other disciplines (philosophy and science), Stuart Hawthorne became, as he puts it, something of an accidental historian in 2003 with the publication of The Kokoda Trail: a history. Similarly, this book, Port Moresby: Taim bipo, is a significant history as well – a social history – of how his and other expatriate families who moved to PNG during the 1950s lived during the last two decades before independence. He does future historians a valuable service by capturing many of the small importances of daily life in pre-Independence Port Moresby as such things tend inevitably to become lost in the fog of time.
Stuart Hawthorne currently lives in Brisbane. He divides his time between his professional interests, his grandchildren and a smart little 30 foot cruising yacht called Lahara.
Books by Stuart Hawthorne
