“Certain Malays and South Sea Islanders”: Non-European foreigners in early colonial British New Guinea

Abstract

Non-European foreigners were integral in the late-19th-century encounter between European colonizers and indigenes in the southern part of what is now Papua New Guinea (png). They were initially rendered anonymous by collective descriptive terms like “Malays” and “South Sea Islanders”, but the handful of colonial administrators in the 1880s were soon relying significantly on the service and local knowledge of these so-called “alien natives”, many of whom had married indigenous villagers. While their work came to be appreciated by the early colonial Administration, by the end of the colonial period their contributions had been all but forgotten in conventional, dichotomous, historical narratives of the interactions of British or Australian foreigners and indigenes. This article revisits the activities of the so-called “Malays and South Sea Islanders”, to recover their historical significance.