Novel
The Crocodile
Vincent Eri · 1970
Synopsis
In a village on the Gulf of Papua, before and during the Second World War, young Hoiri Sevese, a Toaripi, has lost his mother, dead, it is believed, from a spell. With his father, a deacon of the London Missionary Society, and the men of the village, he makes the long canoe journey to Port Moresby, where he sees cars and white people for the first time, then attends the Catholic mission school. Grown to manhood, married and a father, he is conscripted by the Australians as a carrier on the wartime tracks, far from his wife and son.
Context
Written as a university assignment under the supervision of Ulli Beier, the novel appeared in 1970 from Jacaranda Press, in Milton, Queensland, and is regarded as the first novel written by a Papuan. It sets the justice of the whites against magic and traditional beliefs, and one commentary reads in it the devastating irruption of white civilisation into the Papuan world. The country's national literary prize now bears its name, the Crocodile Prize.
Who it is for
For reading the first Papuan novel, which tells of Australian colonisation and the Pacific War from the inside.
Prizes and reception
The book became required reading for Papuan secondary-school pupils at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s.
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