Paper short abstract:

This paper outlines the different experiences of single and married female migrants in the logging camps of the Western Province , PNG .

Paper long abstract:

Lots of people, including many who reside there, think Kamusi - the headquarters for operations in the Wawoi Gauvi concession - is not a good place to work or live. Despite this consensus many people continue to migrate there. In this paper I review ideas about Kamusi held by single female migrants and by married women who have moved to Kamusi with their families. These migrants, and existing residents, encounter divisions of labour that create new and complex relationships between the kinds of 'good' produced by men's and women's work. Some of these relationships are defined and negotiated by reference to family, church and the home village. Often the production of the good life in Kamusi requires women to enact continuity with what may surround or would otherwise be excluded from the Kamusi enclave (for example, the peaceful rural village home ). However migrant single women reveal a quite intensive concern with discontinuity and present freedom from tradition and the village as constituting, if not exactly a 'good life', then one more associated with a radical disjuncture with the past. I outline the very different understandings of gender relations that underlie these quite different experiences of women's work at Kamusi.