
Stuart
Hawthorne 2011
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Stuart
Hawthorne was eight years old when he moved to Port Moresby in 1957. He
lived there for 20 years, leaving two years after PNG became an
independent country.
Though
his formal background is in other disciplines (philosophy
and science), Stuart Hawthorne became, as he puts it, something of an
accidental historian in 2003 with the publication of The
Kokoda Trail: A History. Similarly, his
second book about Papua New Guinea, Port
Moresby: Taim bipo,
is a significant history as well—a social history—of how his and other
expatriate families who moved to PNG during the 1950s lived during the
last two decades before independence. In this volume, he does future
historians a valuable service by capturing many of the small
importances of daily life in pre-Independence Port Moresby as such
things tend inevitably to become lost over time.
Like hundreds of expatriate children living in PNG before
Independence, Stuart spent most of his teenage years away from home at
an Australian boarding school. He attended Ipswich Grammar School,
which opened in 1863 with a distant relative, Stuart Hawthorne MA, as
the first headmaster. The book, No humbug: The life of pioneer educator Stuart Hawthorne MA is his contribution to the 2013 sesquicentenary celebrations of the school. Stuart
Hawthorne currently lives in Brisbane. He divides his time between his
professional interests, his grandchildren and a smart little 30 foot
cruising yacht called Lahara. |