Afterword

The late Bernard Narakobi described a moment at an airline counter in colonial Papua New Guinea (PNG) when he was pushed aside so someone else could get priority. He referred to the person as a ‘non-Melanesian’. Narakobi, a lawyer subsequently regarded as one of the country’s most formidable thinkers, never claimed to be the author of the phrase ‘Melanesian Way’, but he promulgated it as a pithy expression of a distinctive manner of being that encompassed a whole swathe of peoples. ¹ Invoked frequently around the time of PNG’s independence to refer to the heritage – and future – of this emergent nation, Narakobi’s appeal to it deliberately extended beyond the one country. The Melanesian Way could be found all across the region that Westerners (his term) had happened to call Melanesia. Here are two actions very germane to this volume. One is the ready adoption of an exogenous term (‘Melanesia’) to do the work that was invested in identifying a sense of place, authenticity and community. These essays give countless examples of the ways in which people, always at moments of change in their lives, are open to recreating themselves. The other illuminates something of the aims and circumference of the editors’ enterprise. Narakobi refused to define what he meant by Melanesian Way; it was already there, this view from the centre of the cosmos, you need only look around you. It was the non-Melanesians who had to define their (as he saw it, intrusive and alien) practices. A view that centres, that is, makes a centre from, what is important – rather than chasing after borders and boundaries to find meaning – is one sense in which Hirsch and Rollason have indeed given us a Melanesian world.