Customer Reviews

Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific

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As a traveller who has spent a total of about 18 months in and around the island regions of Papua New Guinea, I found this book to be just what I look for before and during a trip to any area. Moran's trip illustrated exactly what a traveller will experience while in the country and also gives the historical background so that time is not wasted trying to discover how a culture or area has come to be what it is.

While looking over the harbor of Rabaul and seeing the Duke of York Islands and the southern end of New Ireland, I felt as though I could feel the history taking place. Even Moran's encounters with modern day expatriots in airports and towns ring so true to my experiences that I felt he was writing about my trip without me knowing it.

It is my goal to gain this insight for every country I visit but it is hardly realized. This book fulfilled that goal for Papua New Guinea and raised the bar for my travel reading in the future.

This is the first book on the Island Provinces of Papua New Guinea rather than the Highlands for a hundred years and what a brilliant book it is! Finely-written with beautiful photographs (particularly of children and island landscapes) as well as excellent maps.

Clearly a product of extensive research, this book gives the reader a balanced insight into a vanishing world in a way that is both informative and hugely entertaining. The islands are still almost pristine and 'stone-age' in character but not for much longer I fear. The stories the author tells of characters both historical and modern are almost beyond belief - often hilarious - obviously the apex of European eccentrics vsited New Guinea.

This is travel writing of the highest quality about a place most readers are highly unlikely to visit. The account of the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriand "Islands of Love" is both penetrating and enlightening. Moran is one of those rare travel writers who respects what he sees and communicates this to the reader with dry humour and deep understanding. As a missionary tells him, life in Papua New Guinea can be both "terrible and wonderful" by turns. Moran steers us through this difficult cultural labyrinth with brilliance. I am looking forward to the Polish edition next year!

"Beyond the Coral Sea" will become the standard work and required reading for anyone contemplating a trip to Papua New Guinea - even those who are not.

An informative and at times entertaining read about Papua New Guinea and it's surrounding islands. The author interweaves his story of travel with the history of various explorers, missionaries, and local personages. He describes the various impacts modernization has had on the islands and discusses the effects missionaries, colonization, and the world wars have wrought. The book provides good insight to places rarely written about and the author colorfully describes various festivals, arts, and customs. I enjoyed the book although at times it slowed and a sense of sanctimony occasionally pervades the work. The book whetted my appetite to learn more about the region's history and art and an extensive bibliography is provided.

The isolated islands of the Coral, Solomon and Bismarck Seas were the last to be explored by Europeans, leading author Michael Moran to delve into the magic of these largely unspoiled colonies. BEYOND THE CORAL SEA travels the footsteps of some of the early explorers of the Coral Sea islands, considering history, cultural changes, and anthropological facts.

Australian travel writer Michael Moran boned up, so to speak, before his leisurely sweep through the cannibal islands. The cannibals are mostly Christians now, of somewhat puritanical bent, but not so strait-laced that they do not tease tourists about who's for dinner.

Nevertheless, this is more ambitious than the usual drool of travelogues, and consequently somewhat disappointing in that it shoots high but hits low too often.

Moran has lived in Poland and knows Polish and German, useful because he wants to explore the present in the context of the recent past -- the colonial era of Germany, Russia, Japan and Australia. Polish comes in because Poles did, especially the anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and the Russian Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, who introduced the concept of living at length among one's subjects. Moran has unlimited admiration for him.

For the missionaries, his feelings are mixed, as they should be.

Having packed his boxes of 19th century books, Moran then visits Port Moresby, in 2000 and still one of most dangerous places. Moran explains he will not visit the Highlands, even more dangerous, and he is glad to get out of Moresby for the eastern or island provinces: Massim, New Ireland, New Britain, Buka, (very briefly) Bougainville, the Trobriands.

It was hot.

Moran tries, not too successfully, to keep three balls in the air: flashbacks to the early years of white contact, meetings with Melanesians, meetings with `expatriates.'

The theme of the book becomes, "the beautiful children of Melanesia." These are contrasted with the fierce (but usually amiable once introduced) older men and the sullen, resentful young ones.

These, in turn, are contrasted with expats, who are either like Moran or, more often, western rejects, drunks, liars, con artists.

It's all a little too pat and somewhat skimpy on the Melanesians.

The attempt to analyze Papua New Guinea politics is interesting and may even, who knows?, be fairly accurate. That trying to impose parliamentary democracy on the sons of headhunters, people so poor that even the chiefs buy cigarettes one at a time, was a mistake seems obvious. But parliamentary democracy has failed in places with much stronger claims to be part of the modern world than Melanesia.

Melanesia is a violent place these days. But it always was. Whether it is more violent is a question Moran does not ask.

"Beyond the Coral Sea" is beautifully written; no other contemporary travel writer I know is in the same league. (I would have to go back more than half a century to Vincent Cronin's "The Golden Honeycomb" to find its equal.)