Bobby Gaigo’s collective writings demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the exigencies of civil legal processes and the value Europeans place on documentary sources and the establishment of historical ‘facts’. He was putting a version of history on the record for future scholars in the manner of others he had consulted during his own research for land claims. In pursuing those claims he had come to recognise the importance of demonstrating a detailed knowledge of historical facts and articulating himself with those facts. His accounts, placing Tatana geographically and politically at the centre of the prehistory of the Port Moresby area, were far removed from the mythopoeic narratives which his forebears had told oral historians, but which the Tatana land claimants never told in court, about man-eating giants and migration from somewhere north-west of Galley Reach. Those narratives, he realised, would not satisfy the real criteria by which ‘customary’ ownership was proved in courts of law, and he probably doubted they would be credited as acceptable history by a western reader.

It was through this praxis, then, that Bobby Gaigo developed a historical consciousness, and thereby the conditions for representing himself as an autobiographical subject.^[57] For success in the court cases required stories to be testimony, subject to interrogation requiring proof, or at least probability, whereby the speakers had to represent themselves as witnesses, at first hand or second hand (the latter through recalling what a grandfather or other relative had witnessed). Called upon to describe themselves, their actions, their whereabouts at particular times, their qualifications and authority to make statements of fact, their memories of specific events at specific times, Bobby Gaigo and his fellow witnesses learned to position themselves in historical time, witnessing events from the point of view of an individual, an autonomous, ego-oriented entity, capable of discursively detaching themselves from what they described.

When Bobby Gaigo finally wrote his autobiography it is notable that although he referred to his father and grandfather, he did not narrate a detailed genealogy, in the way Kori Taboro had at several points in her story. His story was the story of himself, his achievements and occasional failures, as an individual historically shaped through his own praxis, not as a persona constituted by and dependent upon relationships, intrinsic to the mythopoeic experience of the world, and unable to exist outside of these conditions. As I said at the beginning of this paper, critical considerations of nascent Melanesian individual-ism contextualise its development particularly in the encounter with Christianity and capitalism, which are commonly seen as the major historical determinants of individualism in the West. But there is not a great deal of evidence of such determination in the stories of Ahuia Ovia or Kori Taboro. Bobby Gaigo’s story, though, indicates a link between the encounter with European criteria of proof and legitimacy, for example in legal contestations, and the development of the historical consciousness which shapes the concept of the individual, and thereby, autobiography.