Lajos Biro and his contributions to early New Guinea contact
history.
This extensive document is a Thesis by Emese Molnar-Bagley. B.A History, Trinity
College Washington D.C., in fulfillment of the requirements of the Degree of Master of
Arts, University of Papua New Guinea. 1993
Being of Hungarian descent, Emese was able to translate many of the letters and notes
of Lajos Biro into English. This is also a valuable record of German New Guinea in the
1890s from the perspective of a non-German national. Because of the difficulties of
reading his work in the Hungarian language, little was known about Biro prior to
Emese's work.
So far as we know, this copy of Emese's thesis is the only one left in the world and
was in the possession of Emese's daughter, Ms Terka Acton. Ms Action lent her copy
to Dr Simon Day of the London University who kindly photocopied it page by page. Ms
Acton has given permission for it to be published on the internet. We are greatly
indebted to her for this permission which will allow this major work to be available for
researchers of Papua New Guinea history.
The Thesis has been placed on the University of Queensland website, from where it
may be downloaded.
See http://www.atsis.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=131427&pid=0
There are two appendices which are not on the University website. It is not possible to
download anything from this site because of the file sizes.
A DVD with the thesis and the appendicies can be provided for $AUD25 plus $AUD5
postage within Australia.
The Abstract
