This book is a milestone in the historiography of Australia and Papua New Guinea. It puts paid to sterile debates about whether PNG’s independence came too early. ‘Decolonisation,’ Professor Donald Denoon concludes, ‘is by no means complete and independence is a work in progress.’ What happened on 16 September 1975 was the beginning of a ‘trial separation’: ‘Australian rule over the territory was not a marriage made in heaven, and it could never be consummated by full integration. Yet those countries are so close in so many ways that the divorce cannot easily be made absolute.’
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