Carleton’s Kids: ‘Power and wealth’ in Contemporary PNG
Ceridwen Spark, Monash University
The American medical scientist, Dr Carleton Gajdusek, is best known for his work on kuru, a disease found among the Fore people in the Eastern Highland Province of PNG. Less is known about the Gajdusek adoptions: namely the 17 young people from the Fore and surrounding areas whom Gajdusek took to the United States and educated at his own expense. All but one of these adoptees has since returned to live and work in Papua New Guinea. Exploring the adoptees’ experiences, this paper focuses on the significance and long-term implications of these adoptions on the adoptees and their families in PNG. Representing the first public record of their experiences, it explores the challenges the adoptees have faced in returning to their ‘home country’. In particular, the paper considers the expectations to which the adoptees have been subjected since their return. There is a considerable gap between their kin’s ideas about what they ought to have achieved and therefore be able to provide and the reality of the adoptees’ lives. This gap bespeaks issues which are integral to discussion about opportunity, obligation and power in contemporary Papua New Guinea. In addition it demonstrates that even among those Papua New Guineans most exposed to a wider world, local relationships and politics continue to shape and determine life experience and opportunity.
