It seems straightforward: for years now, I’ve been saying that I’m working on Papua New Guinean politician Nahau Rooney’s biography. But really, I’ve been trying to make sense of telling a story that moves across epistemic spheres and transnationally across PNG and Australia. I experience movement between a biographical focus on a singular PNG woman’s life – an approach that focuses on the individual – and the strands of stories that weave into and from her over space and over time. Movement between individual democratic, feminist, human rights principles, and the cultural and social reality of political life embedded in social relationships, transformed transnationally by her marriage to Australian-born PNG citizen Wesley Rooney. I am one of their children. I experience movement into, within and beyond Manus and PNG’s independence-era history, including the women’s movement. Movement between PNG mortuary time, where exchanges animate past and present relationships, and archival spaces where inanimate documents reveal insights. I sense how stories of people’s lives and political history are neither dead nor stable; they are brought to life in moving ways. In this presentation, I will reflect on relationality, movement and transnationality in the movement, thematic analysis and preservation of the source materials – recorded interviews with Nahau Rooney, video footage of her mortuary time, and the Nahau and Wesley Rooney Collection – that I draw on as I move through this project.

Nayahamui Rooney is a senior lecturer in the School of Culture, History & Language, in the College of Asia & the Pacific, ANU. Her positionality in this project moves between Canberra, where she works on the Nahau and Wesley Rooney Collection, and Manus Island in PNG, where they are buried and where Nahau preserved their archives until her death. In other projects, Nayahamui explores urban life and land in PNG, gendered violence in PNG, and the Australia and PNG bilateral relationship through the Manus asylum seeker Regional Processing Centre.