OUR network has long covered the globe but sometimes we don’t hear from readers for months, or even a year or two.
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GOOD morning. We were indeed pleased to hear yesterday from a doctor we first met in Port Moresby six or seven years ago. Dr Momia Teariki-Tautea has since made a medical career in Western Australia and is presently working in Geraldton.
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THE good doctor remains staunchly in contact with daily life in PNG by means of The National’s e-mail edition. Dr Teariki-Tautea hails from one of our more remote areas – the Mortlock islands. The population, as he says, has Polynesian inputs, “tasol longlong blut Manus, Tolai, German, etc., etc…!”
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PAPUA New Guineans are fast becoming the Scotsmen of the South Pacific. The Scots have for centuries had the reputation of being great emigrants. The court of the Russian empress Catherine the Great was peopled with many Scots, who even then, were famed for their educational and professional skills. And here’s a fascinating example with PNG connotations.
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IN the Madang province, the name of Baron Nicholas Mikluho-Maclay remains well known. Towards the end of the 1800s, the Russian anthropologist and adventurer settled on the Rai coast near Madang; he was the first European to suggest that the local people should govern themselves, a revolutionary concept in those days.
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THE first part of his name was certainly Russian, but Maclay was pure Scots; he was descended from Russian and Scottish parentage. His grandson, Paul Maclay, was a well-known ABC Sydney radio announcer until the 1970s.
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NOW it seems that Papua New Guineans are popping up all over the globe. We have senior pilots who have worked for years for one of the most distinguished airlines in the Middle East; there are dozens of professional Papua New Guineans scattered throughout the Pacific – in Fiji, the Solomons, Vanuatu and in Tonga and Samoa. Many otChers are working in Oz and Kiwi land, while post graduates students can be found scattered throughout America, Britain, Europe, Japan, India and China.
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IF you’re one of these trail blazers, we’d love to hear from you at deenesenolis@hotmail.com. Cheers!
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- Dee Nesenolis