Charles Lane-Poole and early forest surveys of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Early forestry surveys of Papua and New Guinea can be understood as records of cross-cultural encounters. I argue these records are very much concerned with the social context of data production and as such provide interesting insights into the history of colonial forestry. Relying largely on the work of Lane-Poole, this essay examines his accounts of colonial intercultural communication, his own changing, at times inconsistent, understandings of such processes and his limited capacity to represent them. His innovative, yet also anachronistic, work combines elements of the travel writing of the 19th century naturalist with the more austere data requirements of the kind of scientific forestry that he was attempting to create in Australia, Papua and New Guinea. I use his surveys, and those of his predecessor, Burnett, to outline the difficulties they encountered as co-ordinators of communicative transactions between an array of people with often strongly divergent linguistic, cultural and political commitments.