I am an anthropologist whose work also has an interdisciplinary focus, engaging cognate areas of politics, geography, development studies, history, and postcolonial studies. My current research coheres around two key areas of interest and activity. The first of these engages themes of conflict, memory, gender, landscape and development in relation to the legacies of the Second World War in Papua New Guinea, including the growth of war tourism in the region surrounding the Kokoda Track. The second focuses on intersecting race and labour relations in the Australian horticultural industry, with a geographical focus on the Shepparton region in northern Victoria. Connecting these two strands of research activity is a focus on the Asia-Pacific region, a concern with contemporary postcolonialism and the reverberations of the past in the present, and an empirical and theoretical attention to land and landscape.

My book, Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste was published in 2017 by University of Hawaii Press. It examines the entanglement of customary and modern forms of connection to land, arguing that this destabilizes relationships of power in ways that can lead to the eroding of local autonomy, but also create new opportunities for rearticulating customary authority.

Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania (ASAO)
Australian Anthropological Society (AAS)
Australian Association for Pacific Studies (AAPS)

Melanesia
Australia (area)

The Colonial time
20th century
21st century