Figure 1.--This photograph was taken in 1950s in the Trobriand Islands, now the Kiriwina Islands. It shows tha choir of St Anthony's Primary school, a Catholic school led by nuns. The children wear school uniforms: the girls skirts and the boys cloths wrapped around the waist (lava-lavas). Both boys and girls attended the school shirtless.

Another Papua New Guinea island group is the Kiriwina (Trobriand) Islands to the northeast of PNG's eastern tip. The Kiriwinas consist of four main islands, the largest being Kiriwina island where most of the population lives. The name of the Islands has been changed to the Kiriwina Islands after the main island in the grouo. The Kiriwinas are flat coral atolls with tropical climates and heavy rainfall. The people of the Island's are mostly subsistence horticulturalists and hunters who live in traditional settlements. The Islanders' social structure is based on the matrilineal clans which control land and and other resources. There was a kind of monetary system based on a regional circuit of exchange of shells called kula. Islanders trades using kula a large, seagoing canoes. The first Europeans to encounter the Islands was French navigator Bruni d'Entrecasteaux on the Espérance in (1793). He named the Island's after the ship's first lieutenant, Denis de Trobriand, but no settlement occurred on the isolated Islands. The first European to actually settled on the Trobriands was a Methodist minister who established a mission on Kiriwina (1894). Northern New Guinea became a German colony, but they took no interest in the Trobriands. After World War I, northern New Guinea became a League of Nation's Mandate awarded to Australia. Colonial officials from Australia established a governmental station near the Methodist mission. A small colony of foreign traders and islanders crew here. The Sacred Heart Catholic Mission set up a settlement containing a primary school near the developing settlenent (1930s). Thanks to a Polish anthropolgist, Bronisław Malinowski, who began to work on the Islands during World War I, the Kiriwinas became the subject of intense investigation and academic interest in the early 20th century. During the Pacific Wars, the Islands were not occupied by the Japanese, but as part of the Battle for Milne Bay, a Japanese invasion force from Rabaul was attacked by Allied aircraft near the Islands (1942). A year later as part of Operation Cartwheel, American forces occupied the islands and built a landing strip there as part of the Allied effort to isolate the Japanese base at Rabaul.

Created: 9:43 PM 1/11/2014
Last updated: 9:43 PM 1/11/2014