Long after I had left New Guinea and on one of my frequent business trips from Saudi Arabia back to Australia, I was killing a bit of time in the ABC Shop in Adelaide's Rundle Mall when I found a set of twenty-four audio cassettes labelled "TAIM BILONG MASTA - Australia's Involvement with Papua New Guinea".
Of course, I bought them right away and for years I listened to them over and over again as, in the absence of any proper television or radio reception in the world's biggest sandbox, they had become my daily nightcap to drown out the howling desert winds.
I believe the creator of those tapes, ABC presenter Tim Bowden, is still around but not so those twenty-four precious cassettes which over the years, just like myself, had become warped and worn. In later years, I did buy the book by the same name but there's nothing quite like listening to those old familiar voices and I had been searching high and low for those recordings but without success - until now!
A kindly soul, Kieran Nelson, who grew up in New Guinea, worked for the Papua New Guinea Banking Corporation (PNGBC) and now lives in Brisbane, undertook the enormous labour of love of putting all twenty-four cassettes on YouTube for our continued listening pleasure. Thank you, Kieran, and here are the tapes:
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Episode 1 Never a Colony
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Episode 2 The Good Time Before
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Episode 3 God's Shadow on Earth
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Episode 4 The Loneliness and the Glory
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Episode 5 On Patrol
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Episode 6 Sailo
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Episode 7 The Boat Came Every Six Weeks
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Episode 8 Masta Me Like Work
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Episode 9 The Violent Land
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Episode 10 Moneymakers and Misfits
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Episode 11 Wife and Missus
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Episode 12 Growing Up
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Episode 13 Into The Highlands
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Episode 14 The Promised Land
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Episode 15 First Contact
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Episode 16 Gold
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Episode 17 The Good News
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Episode 18 The Mission Rush
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Episode 19 You Had To Be Firm
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Episode 20 Across the Barriers
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Episode 21 Courts and Calaboose
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Episode 22 War
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Episode 23 A Reason For Being There
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Episode 24 Going Finish
Happy listening!
