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Charles Abel and the Kwato Mission of Papua New Guinea 1891-I975, by David Wetherell. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press (website: www.mup.com.au), 1996. ISBN 0-522-8436-6, xxviii + 247 pages, maps, photographs, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. Paper, A$24.95.
In a lucid narrative, historian David Wetherell presents several strands of the complex life of Charles Abel, founder of the Kwato Mission, with some reflection on the contribution of the mission to the shaping of modern Papua New Guinea. In his research Wetherell, who taught in Papua New Guinea from 1963 to 1970 and is now a senior lecturer in history at Deakin University, had access to what may be the largest personal archive in Papua New Guinea, the Abel Papers in the New Guinea Collection at the University of Papua New Guinea. Using Charles Abel's own publications and letters, family correspondence, and accounts by those who admired and despised him, Wetherell tells the story of a brilliant and authoritarian leader "in whom a number of personalities seemed to work in harmony, and merge in an overall concord with the personality of his wife: the planner and visionary, the fireside actor, the disciplinarian, the tender and sympathetic father, the controversialist, the sportsman, and the lover of scenery" (xviii).
Charles William Abel (1862-1930), an Englishman who had spent some years in New Zealand,...