About the author
Stuart Hawthorne was eight years old when he moved to Port Moresby in 1957. He lived there for 20 years, leaving two years after PNG became an independent country.
Though his formal background is in other disciplines (philosophy and science), Stuart Hawthorne became, as he puts it, something of an accidental historian in 2003 with the publication of The Kokoda Trail: A History. Similarly, his second book about Papua New Guinea, Port Moresby: Taim bipo, is a significant history as well—a social history—of how his and other expatriate families who moved to PNG during the 1950s lived during the last two decades before independence. In this volume, he does future historians a valuable service by capturing many of the small importances of daily life in pre-Independence Port Moresby as such things tend inevitably to become lost over time.
Like hundreds of expatriate children living in PNG before Independence, Stuart spent most of his teenage years away from home at an Australian boarding school. He attended Ipswich Grammar School, which opened in 1863 with a distant relative, Stuart Hawthorne MA, as the first headmaster. The book, No humbug: The life of pioneer educator Stuart Hawthorne MA is his contribution to the 2013 sesquicentenary celebrations of the school.