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The state of life writing in the Pacific presents us with something of a paradox. On the one hand, on a country-by-country basis, there seem to be numerous gaps, with academics the primary authors of the few lives that have been written. On  the other hand, as Doug Munro has remarked, when taken as a group, the corpus of life writing in the Pacific is one of the most substantial bodies of work about the politics and history of the region.2 Certainly, when it comes to the study of leadership and political leadership in particular, nothing from the mainstream academic disciplines rivals its breadth and depth, which is especially remarkable given that much of this writing is of recent − that is, post-colonial − origin. This point is argued most persuasively by Jonathan Ritchie’s contribution to this volume, which focuses specifically on the state of the life writing art in Papua New Guinea, but it is of more general relevance. Academic and popular commentators in the Pacific regularly observe that politics tends to be heavily personalised, highlighting the ways that governments and coalitions rise and fall on the strength of their leaders. In this context, the individual life takes on added significance than it might elsewhere. Despite this, life writing generally, and life writing about political figures in particular, is  a recent development and as such tends not to be based on a wide reading of the available literature. There is comparatively little reflexive analysis about how these texts have been created and what they contribute to mainstream disciplinary approaches.

Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice