The faith in which young Catherine Spence had been nurtured was a harsh one. In the religious allegory which she wrote in the 1880s, she depicted it as a doctrine of fear. She had learned that the creator ‘hath foreordained whatever comes to pass’, that ‘our first parents being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the estate wherein they were created, by sinning against God, and that all people, being descended from Adam, sinned in him, and fell with him in his first transgression’. This crude and narrow version of Calvinism, drawn up in the 17th century expressly ‘for the more rude and ignorant’, puzzled and appalled her. She found the deity who exacted retribution for Adam's sin, from all his posterity for all time, unjust. ‘Why oh! why!’ she exclaimed ‘had not the sentence of death been carried out at once, and a new start made with more prudent people?’ God's injustice made him ‘unlovely’, but ‘it was wicked not to love God’, so she saw in her question and judgement her own condemnation. Furthermore, if she, an outwardly virtuous person, was already damned, so too must be almost everyone in the world. Even children could not be saved. One book that had profoundly influenced her childhood told of three child pilgrims following the path of Bunyan's Christian. But the children had the added burden of an imp called ‘Inbred Sin’ which never left them, not even at the point where Christian's burdens had fallen away.

Catherine Helen Spence was born in 1825, the fifth of eight children of two Scots – Helen Brodie and David Spence. She accounted herself well-born for, she said, ‘my father and mother loved each other’. She considered herself well-descended, ‘going back for many generations on both sides of intelligent and respectable people’. This was a clear statement of a conviction that she began to reach in her 20s and held firmly by the time she was in her 80s – that sincere affection, intelligence and respectability counted for far more in individual happiness and social harmony than birth, wealth or even piety. But she was not as wholly unworldly as those statements in the opening paragraph of the autobiography that she wrote in her 80s would suggest. She also quoted her father saying that ‘he was sprung from the tail of the gentry’, while her mother ‘was descended from the head of the commonalty’.

Her mother, Helen Brodie, was descended from a long line of East Lothian tenant farmers who had, she boasted, ‘always been at the head of their class’. To maintain such a position during the enclosures and onslaught on small holdings of the 18th century, a tenant farmer must have been ready to adopt new agricultural methods and implements.

If the Unitarians of South Australia were not generally active in promoting social change, those in England were. Catherine Spence met a number of them during her year in Britain in 1865-66. Furnished with introductions from Emily Clark, and preceded by her reputation as the author of Clara Morison and a political pamphlet, she was welcomed into the circles of Emily Clark's cousins, Florence and Rosamund Davenport Hill, and those of her uncles Rowland Hill and Matthew Davenport Hill.

Matthew Davenport Hill joined Mary Carpenter in the campaign for changes in the punishment of juvenile delinquents and the establishment of reformatories in the 1850s. The Davenport Hill sisters were at work on a book about ways of caring for destitute children: Florence was to read a paper about boarding out children from workhouses at a meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science in 1869, and Rosamund was to become a member of the London School Board ten years later. They introduced Spence to the gentlemanly Frances Power Cobbe who, having subjected her generous Anglo-Irish warmth to a chilling stint as a teacher in Mary Carpenter's reformatory for girls in the 1850s, had moved on to philanthropic action over the care and education of pauper children, and to struggle in the campaign for female suffrage. Her Essays on the Pursuits of Women had appeared in 1864. At Rowland Hill's house, spence met the golden-haired philanthropist, feminist and artist Barbara Leigh Smith, on whom George Eliot modelled the character of Romola.

It is almost impossible for a meeting to be held in the world to discuss international economic issues without it being disrupted by violent demonstrations. Papua New Guineans are not immune to the distrust and bewilderment that surround these issues which affect all of us. As is so often the case when we don't understand something we hit out blindly at it. The World Bank, the IMF, WTO and APEC are all institutions that come under this mantle. They are blamed for almost everything that is supposed to be wrong with our lives.

It is fashionable to blame these institutions and the easy part is that those who do blame them can do so by merely calling their names rather than having to justify their stands or provide any evidence for what they are saying. This study is aimed at providing a reasoned argument about the effects of WTO and APEC, primarily how they affect PNG but also about how they affect other small Pacific nations.

PNG is a trading nation and will be one for a long time to come. We rely on exports for our income and our growth and we need to create the best possible conditions in which our exporters can sell to the rest of the world. There is nothing wrong with being a trading nation and many of the world's richest nations got there because they were good traders.

The Economics discipline at the University of Adelaide has a distinguished 100-year history of which the University and the State of South Australia can be proud. Very few other departments, of any discipline in Australian universities, could claim to have a majority of its lecturer appointments rising to full Professor status over a period as long as 1901 to 1995. Nor would many other university departments be able to say they have had five of their graduates win Rhodes Scholarships in the past 12 years (Table 14). While teaching and research productivity is more difficult to gauge, because changes in quality matter, the growth in the number of graduates per Economics and Commerce lecturer per year has been impressive: from 2.5 in the 1950s and 1960s to 5.0 in the 1980s, 7.5 in the first half of the 1990s, and 12.4 in the six years to 2003.

The period since the Dawkins' reforms to higher education began in the late 1980s has been one of rapid change for Economics at Adelaide, as it has for other departments. One indicator of that is the number of changes (three) in the name and composition of the faculty in which Economics is housed since 1988 (Table 23). Another indicator is the growth in the number of awards available. For over five decades, Economics was provided via just the B.A. and M.A. From 1930 the B.Ec. then served Economics and Commerce for another six decades, supplemented by three professional diplomas until 1952 and by the M.Ec. from 1938, the B.Ec.(Hons) from 1939 and the Ph.D. from 1965.

The terms of reference of this study, which was commissioned by PNG's Institute of National Affairs, require it to:

• identify the costs and benefits to PNG of compliance with WTO and APEC;

• identify industries that may be affected and profile them in terms of employment, original capital investment, (if possible) written down capital values, government commitments including equity, protection, tax incentives;

• make suggestions about how PNG can best adjust/adapt to compliance with WTO and APEC conditions;

• identify short and long term measures that PNG and other (larger) member states can take to minimize the short-term costs of compliance (which should look at removing structural rigidities over a planned time scale, interventions that might make PNG industry more competitive such as additional research funding, identification of alternative investment opportunities and possible structural adjustment assistance measures);

• identify any other measures that PNG should be taking to improve its competitive position in both the short and long term; and

• identify any other likely problems from compliance with WTO and APEC.

The report was prepared following a one-week visit to PNG by Malcolm Bosworth, from 6 June 2000. Discussions were held with PNG officials from relevant ministries as well as representatives of key business groups and industries (Appendix 1). A public seminar on ‘WTO and APEC’ was organized by the Institute of National Affairs and held in Port Moresby on 9 June 2000 (Appendix 2).