‘They Will Terminate at District Headquarters’: Towards a History of Patrol Reports and Their Circulation in Papua New Guinea c. 1958–73
Wood, Michael (2025) ‘They Will Terminate at District Headquarters’: Towards a History of Patrol Reports and Their Circulation in Papua New Guinea c. 1958–73. Journal of Pacific History, 61 (1). pp. 78-104.
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Abstract
The patrol report is an important source of data concerning the history of colonialism in PNG. However, the patrol report as a specific set of documents with their own history has not itself been subject to analysis. The textual analysis outlined in this article is one approach to developing such a history. The article highlights the importance of official instructions on how a patrol report should be written and circulated within the bureaucracy. There were persistent attempts to regulate and reduce the flow of political and social issues into the centre of the state. These attempts were difficult to stabilize as they involved both the devaluation and revaluation of different types of knowledge found in patrol reports from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. What emerges from this analysis is a history that explores bureaucratic attempts to define and organize the way knowledge is reported and circulated rather than a history based on the content of those reports.
| Item ID: | 89005 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 0022-3344 |
| Keywords: | Papua New Guinea, patrol reports, pre-independence, production of knowledge |
| Copyright Information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Jul 2026 06:43 |
| FoR Codes: | 44 HUMAN SOCIETY > 4401 Anthropology > 440107 Social and cultural anthropology @ 50% 43 HISTORY, HERITAGE AND ARCHAEOLOGY > 4303 Historical studies > 430315 History of the pacific @ 50% |
| SEO Codes: | 13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1307 Understanding past societies > 130799 Understanding past societies not elsewhere classified @ 100% |
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