Papua Patchwork was shot in 1949 by the Australia and New Zealand Secretary of the London Missionary Society, the Rev. Norman Cocks, during an official secretarial visit to the LMS missions in Papua. Notice of the film becoming available to churches appears in the ‘Youth Chronicle’ section of the LMS’s monthly magazine The Chronicle for March 1952, where it is described as providing ‘a good idea of the waterways of Papua and the difficulties of travel with which our missionaries have to contend’ (The Chronicle, March 1952, 50). Several other audio and visual teaching aids relating to the LMS Papua mission are mentioned alongside it, namely two sets of gramophone records (‘Discussion Disc – Papua Problems’ and a ‘Medical Disc’) and a 36-shot filmstrip and commentary on the LMS’s Gemo Island Leprosy Hospital in Papua (this institution is also subject of the ‘Medical Disc’; ibid., 49-50). 

These materials, and the film itself, were part of a church-wide LMS programme entitled ‘Introducing Papua.’ Launched in 1951, it saw all of the Papua-related educational material ‘integrated in a programme for every branch of the local church from the Sunday school to the men’s fellowship’ (LMS Survey, 1951-2, 26). Some materials, such as the phonograph discs, were only thought suitable for adults (‘We know that they are not any use with children’; The Chronicle, op. cit.), but much of the rest was aimed specifically at the young, and included books (Cannibals Come to Town, by the then LMS Home Secretary Leonard Hurst [1951a]), educative programmes and activities for classes (Papua, by Monica M. Green [1951], and A Visit to Papuaby Bertha Krall [1951]), a play, and a plan for a ‘pageant’ (Survey, 27).

Filmmaker Cocks’s 1949 visit is itself documented in articles written by him for TheChronicle that appeared in 1950 (‘By Beach and Waterway’, Cocks, 1950) and 1951 (‘This is Papua’, Cocks 1951). Indeed, the April 1951 issue is almost exclusively devoted to coverage of Papua, and may be seen as the opening fanfare of the ‘Introducing Papua’ programme, as it contains several articles detailing current and historical missionary work and other pieces on the labours of the first LMS missionary to coastal south Papua, James Chalmers, who was killed by Papuans at Goaribari 1901.

These articles provide an ambiguous picture of the LMS’s stated rationale for its work in the Papuan mission field, an ambiguity that is expressed most plainly in an article by former LMS missionary to Papua Leonard Hurst (he of Cannibals Come to Town) called ‘The Years Ahead in Papua’ (Hurst 1951b). The general thrust of the piece is unremarkable, and follows a standard LMS narrative – the modern world has arrived, it is causing chaos within traditional societies, and these societies need the guidance of the church as they emerge out of the darkness of the past and into the light of the civilised world. As Hurst rather floridly puts it, ‘The old order is rapidly disintegrating under hammer blows of modernity and is being swept away by the seething rush of new ideas…’ (Hurst, 1951b, 61). Past LMS successes have seen ‘headhunters and cannibals’ transformed to exponents of ‘noble Christian living’, and savage warriors have laid down their arms for Christ, but the task must go on, for ‘[t]he Papuan of to-morrow must be…healthy in mind and soul as well as in body’ (ibid.). This is fairly standard stuff.

However, unlike other LMS mission fields such as Bechuanaland or the Rhodesias, where the idea (and in some sense the reality) of such a clash between the ‘old order’ and ‘new ideas’ had an obvious and easily indicated cause (e.g. migratory contract labour in mines, or political nationalism), no such disruptive influence is revealed in Papua, and it seems that the familiar tale of the coming of change did not require anything in particular to substantiate it here. Its invocation by Hurst only thinly veils a far more powerful evangelistic narrative that runs through the commentary on Papua – the old-fashioned appeal of converting savage stone-age cannibals to Christ.