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LOOKING forward to a restful couple of days? Whatever your choice,
we hope you enjoy your weekend. Go for it!
***
AS for us, we’ve a pile of PNG books waiting to be read. Here’s a
few titles to whet your appetite: Prof Ulli Beier’s recent book
Decolonising the Mind comes first, with its fascinating account of Ulli
and his wife Georgina and their impact upon the PNG arts. The Beiers
came to our country after some years in Nigeria.
***
ULLI greatly influenced the development of PNG drama, poetry,
biography and novels as the founding director of the Institute of PNG
Studies. Georgina, an internationally recognised artist, assembled the
raw artistic talents of Matthias Kauage, Barnabas India, Gigmai Kundin
and a host of others and helped produce the first great wave of PNG
contemporary art.
***
NEXT – a publication that’s part autobiography and part
collection of reproductions of the paintings of Bill Luff, the
outstanding NZ water-colourist who spent many years in PNG. Bill sadly
died of cancer last year; his art will survive both as a documentation
of a country and its people and as a tribute to a highly talented
artist.
***
MANY Papua New Guinean’s lives will have been touched by Prof
Scarlet Epstein. Her book titled Swimming Upstream is a remarkable
autobiographical record of a life that began amid the growing
brutalities and horrors of a Vienna invaded by the Third Reich, with the
teenage Scarlet confronting the Nazis and escaping with her mother to
Britain.
***
THAT life was to bloom behind a sewing machine in a London sweat
shop, gain shape and colour in the rarefied atmosphere of an English
university and mature on the dusty plains of India and a Tolai village
in PNG.
***
DR Epstein is now in her mid-eighties and as unstoppable as ever.
In the past three years, she has lectured at PNG universities, written
for The National, set up educational research projects and proposed an
investigation into village perceptions of links between sorcery and
HIV/AIDS.
***
QUIZ closes Sunday 5pm – check yesterday’s Column One. Send
entries to DeeNesenolis@hotmail.com, and join us on Monday … cheers!
– Dee Nesenolis
 
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