First Contact

6/21/2025

The opening few quotes of this documentary suggested to me just how the Inca might have felt when Pizarro arrived on their doorstep in the 16th century and made his presence felt amongst natives who had never seen a white man. Those that these people did see were Australian prospectors who had moved inland from their increasingly impoverished local coastal locations on the island of New Guinea in search of gold. What we are now shown is an impressive collection of archive from these virgin territories in the 1930s where little had changed for the lives of the natives for generations. Needless to say, the new arrivals were better armed and placed to impose themselves on the more primitive culture they encountered, but although there were initial casualties there seems to have emerged a cert