Torn Between Two Worlds

by Margaret Reeson

Kristen Press, 1988 [First Edition – 4000 copies], ISBN 0858040603, black and white photographic plates, illustrated endpapers (maps), hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, no inscriptions, dustjacket shows some edge and shelf wear with a little rubbing, bumping, creasing, chipping and small tears to edges and corners, closed tears (see photographs)

“Twenty years ago, two boys caught their first startled glimpse of white men.  A patrol of the Australian Administration and Mission representatives of the Methodist Church in Australia had entered their home valley in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.  In the years which followed, the two, Wasun and Sond, were drawn inexorably into the pattern of change.
The resulting tensions have created in them a complicated pull between the ways of their clan and ways of the white man… between animiam and Christianity… They have found it impossible to abandon one world in favour of the other.  Wasun and Sond have been faced with value judgments among the many shifting shades of old and new, right and wrong.
The pages which follow are an attempt to record, as Wasun and Sond have themselves shared their stories, the influence of change in these two Highlands lives.  Of key importance is their encounter with and their response to the Christian Gospel.  The story must necessarily be incomplete.  At the time of writing, February 1971, the two men are in their early thirties.  The rest of their story has yet to be lived.”