Bronwen Douglas is a Senior Fellow in Pacific and Asian History at The Australian National University. Her major research interest is the history of race since the late Enlightenment, focusing on the interface of metropolitan discourses, field encounters, and local agency in the representation and classification of indigenous Oceanian people. She also has longstanding interests in the intersections of Christianity and gender in Melanesia and the colonial history of New Caledonia and Vanuatu. She is the author of Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology (1998); editor of Women's Groups and Everyday Modernity in Melanesia (2003); and co-editor with Nicholas Thomas and Anna Cole of Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West (2005).

Chris Ballard is a Fellow in Pacific and Asian History at The Australian National University. His research focuses on concepts of race in colonial encounters and on indigenous Melanesian historicities – their transformation through cross-cultural encounters; representation through various media, including film and fiction; and articulation with contemporary challenges such as land reform, large natural resource projects, and cultural heritage management planning. His regional interests are in eastern Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu. He is co-author of Race to the Snow: Photography and the Exploration of Dutch New Guinea, 1907-1936 (2001); and co-editor of The Ok Tedi Settlement: Issues, Outcomes and Implications (1997), Fluid Ontologies: Myth, Ritual and Philosophy in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (1998), and The Sweet Potato in Oceania: a Reappraisal (2005).