The Papua New Guinea Time Traveller's Log

Strong nerves and sure feet get you across the road in Port Moresby

2011-11-18T11:35:00.002+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

In a town where most people are on foot, there is remarkably little consideration given to pedestrians in Port Moresby. Everywhere in this city, you will see pedestrians diving through traffic to cross roads. There are few traffic lights or pedestrian crossings and particularly in the case of the latter, these are more honored in the breach than otherwise.

In fact, rather than catering for pedestrians, when the vast majority on foot have found their own way through the actively anti-pedestrian vehicular morass, the traffic policy makers have gone out of their way to place hurdles in their path -- literally!

Take the situation between the outward bound and inward bound PMV (Passenger Motor Vehicle -- minibus) stops at 4 Mile/Boroko, a busy shopping and gathering area for the many and an important bus interchange. Boroko is on the southern side and 4 Mile on the northern side of a major road, the Sir Hubert Murray Highway, four lanes of tearing traffic with a half meter (2 foot or so) island in the middle.

If you wish to cross the Sir Hubert Murray Highway to shop, go to the bank, take your child to school, visit the clinic, reach your house, change bus direction, or whatever, you can choose the only pedestrian bridge in Papua New Guinea or dash across the road through the traffic.

Most choose the dash through speeding, patently unfriendly car, bus, and truck traffic for three reasons. The first is that much of the time, the bridge is simply far too narrow to carry the traffic -- it is just wide enough for two people to pass in opposite directions. The second is that it is a favorite haunt of pickpockets, bag snatchers, muggers, and other low lifes ready to take advantage of any crush developing (a bunch of suspects lurks at the 4 Mile end of the bridge; I’ve spotted a couple on the Boroko side too). The third problem is inconvenience; the bridge takes you a block out of the direct way to most destinations.

To take their chance on the road, people step over the bus stop crash barrier, climb down to road level using one of two footholds* in the stone retaining wall, then dash to sanctuary on the narrow dividing island when there’s a break in traffic. They then make the quick dash through a break in the traffic in the opposite direction to get to the other side.

People have been making this death defying dash forever. So sooner or later, the authorities had to do something about it. They might have provided a secure pedestrian crossing (i.e. one with traffic lights) or built another, wider bridge. But instead, last year (2010) they built a fence along the middle of the traffic island to try to stop the pedestrians!

What the hey? Where are they supposed to go? Queue up to be mugged on the bridge?

Fortunately, however, the anti-pedestrian forces suffered a reverse due to their own incompetence -- the fence is too low to stop many pedestrians. They can step over it, albeit with a little difficulty for the shorter legged members of the community or ladies in skirts or laplaps since the top of the fence is somewhat spiked and you could catch your clothing on it or do a nasty injury to yourself if you slipped halfway. So the less able, including mothers with toddlers in hand and school-age children in tow, are seen sidling down the median strip to the end of the fence with traffic roaring past at 60+ kph (35+ mph) within touching distance.

They do it, though, because they figure this is safer and faster than the bridge.

The same disregard for the needs of pedestrians an be seen throughout Port Moresby. One intersection with traffic lights on Waigani Drive (six lanes, three each way) offers a marked pedestrian crossing from one side to the median divider -- but nothing beyond that! One speculates about the fate of the law-abiding pedestrian trapped on the island. Will they ever reach the other side? Tune in tomorrow for an update! :)

There are the occasional zebra pedestrian crossings; the wise walker waits until the road is clear before crossing (as s/he would if there was no marked crossing there) because most drivers seem to regard them as legitimate prey. It’s the darting dash or nothing.

I’m told this anti-pedestrianism s not just a Port Moresby phenomenon but in the islands, Rabaul/Kokopo and Kavieng, car, bus, and truck drivers have a much more friendly attitude towards those of lesser perambulatory means. Six lanes of traffic grinding to a halt for a lone pedestrian on the zebra crossing to the main market in Kokopo is routine while an inebriated cyclist I saw wobbling along the wrong side of the road in Kavieng was in more danger of skinned knees from falling off than of being run down by a truck.

So what is it that makes Port Moresby so anti the person on foot? Maybe it’s just the big town environment where people are strangers. Maybe it’s the ubiquitous street crime; drivers who stop for pedestrians at the zebra crossing in Koki have found themselves the victims of armed hold-ups. Or maybe it’s just a tough town where everyone is scratching for an advantage and once they get it, hold on to it grimly. Perhaps those who have got off their feet and into a motor vehicle don;t actually wish to inflict body harm or worse on pedestrians but are are simply making a point about status.

*I have a foolish little vanity that I am the only white person in Port Moresby who knows about those footholds and routinely uses them -- small things amuse small minds. That;'s my inverted status symbol, I suppose. :) ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Bride price -- it’s a clan affair not a store purchase, dammit!

2011-10-31T20:33:00.001+10:00

By Geoffrey Heard

The traditional marriage settlement in Papua New Guinea is usually called “bride price” in English and is crudely characterized by most outsiders as the purchase of a woman -- often the forced purchase -- as a chattel, a slave of her husband whose only value is to produce children and produce food as a garden cultivator.

There are cases of this, of course -- there are hundreds of different cultural groups in Papua New Guinea and very large variations among them in respect of marriage settlements and the position of women in society. In addition, as in any culture, there are brutes of men who abuse their wives and children, regarding them as chattels or worse.

But by and large, the simplistic outsiders’ view is wrong. While it certainly happened and some pretty vile practices have been recorded, it obviously doesn’t stand up in the many areas where women are the stewards of land and inheritance is matrilineal (land is the very foundation of life in any subsistence farming community), it doesn’t stand up in the many cultures which include courtship rituals which allow a degree of individual choice in marriage partner, and it doesn’t stand up in most cultures I know where men are dominant -- at least not today and not for a long time.

The chattel story is one of the white man’s nasty little fictions which ignores his own recent and pretty unsavory history of repression of women (the suffragettes in England are remembered, when that can’t be avoided, in connection with voting; all too often the depth and seriousness of the repression they were fighting against has disappeared into the void) while putting down others of a different skin color and different culture.

In most cases, Papua New Guinea marriage settlements are a payment from the husband’s family to the bride’s family. A friend from southern Bougainville once described the two-way settlement system in his area -- there were bride and husband prices, as it were, with the bride price being higher. In my experience, this is an exception.

Another failure of understanding by many outsiders is the complexity of the system. They tend to see “a man”, one side, paying a huge sum for “a woman”, the other side. But typically, there is no such thing as an individual making a marriage settlement, the settlement comes from the husband’s clan and goes to the wife’s clan. And then some!

Marriage settlement contribution and distribution is part of the mutual obligation system which Papua New Guinea is built on. You contribute to a marriage settlement; you will receive proportionately from the next one your clan collects. Everybody knows who owes what to whom and why -- and the debits and credits can span multiple generations and take on byzantine proportions.

Rules of contribution or distribution of the goods and monies might be quite strict according to nearness of relationship to the couple or they might be quite open with an expectation but not a rule. Needless to say, any branch of the family which fails to contribute to rule expectation can expect appropriate treatment at distribution time!

When my family, who are Tolais from the area near Rabaul, was preparing a marriage settlement, they sent the word out along the clan lines. It is almost impossible to calculate how many would have been involved in contributing, but my daughter-in-law was once talking about people three or four times removed from her and they, in turn, would have relied links that went even further if they didn’t have the “ready”.

The complexity can become byzantine. Very often, individuals both give and receive through different ancestral lines, and even more often, where a husband is paying out, the wife is receiving, and vice versa.

Among the Tolai, marriage settlements -- mostly made up front at the time of the marriage -- are regulated by local government councils who restrict both the currency and the amount. Four hundred param (fathoms) of tambu, traditional shell money, is the maximum allowed in my family’s area. The restrictions do not remove all difficulties -- the tiny cowrie shells used to make tambu have been fished out in all the near areas and have to be bought for cash from locations hundreds of kilometers away -- but the rules have helped in keeping the marriage settlement custom alive and well. That’s important, not just because of its economic impact, but because of its enormous impact on social cohesion. See http://pngtimetraveller.blogspot.com/2010/12/theyre-making-money-in-rabaul-literally.html

In Karai Komana and many nearby areas in eastern and central Papua, the marriage settlement is made years after the couple has married and produced a family. It is a celebration of their marriage and the contribution the wife has made to the husband’s family and clan. Normal practice is for a payment, the Bole, to be made to the wife’s family a year after the first child is born. It used to be some piles of peeled yams but today might be about K4000 plus some pigs and lots of yams (peeled, of c0urse! But why? Nobody knows). This is a statement that the child (and subsequent children) belong to the husband’s clan, an assurance of continuing marriage, and a promise of complete settlement later.

The settlement I saw, for Kurona’s wife, Nigona, was four children (the oldest is 16) and the best part of 20 years into the marriage.

If that first payment is not made, traditionally the marriage might be annulled at that point, the wife returning to her family -- taking her child or children with her.

An ungenerous payment will be seen as an insult, as a rejection of the wife and of cocking a snook at her clan, and might also lead to termination of the marriage. Better to make no payment at all than to offer up a spavined pig and K20!

The initial payment points to the universal recognition in subsistence communities of the value of children. They are loved for themselves, of course, but they are also a subsistence family’s health insurance and old age pension. The parents (and aunts and uncles) will support the children when they are young and the children will reciprocate when the parents and grandparents and possibly the odd uncle or aunt, are old, infirm, and unable to pull their weight in the gardens any longer. The cost of raising children is an investment.

In the industrialized west, there is no expectation that children will reciprocate so parents see the cost of children rearing as an expense, not an investment, which reduces their ability to make financial provision for their own future. They might very well make the decision not to have children -- a decision which would be the greatest folly in a subsistence community.

The escalation of the marriage settlement payments is no problem so long as the system is closed -- the medium of exchange -- fruit, veges, handcrafts, pigs, shell money, and whatever produced in the villages or traditionally traded -- goes round and round, and it doesn’t come out. People grow their own money, in effect. Knowing that a settlement is coming up, they plant extra crops for their contribution. Knowing they are going to receive a settlement, they take it a bit easy. In most parts of Papua New Guinea, the productivity of the environment is high enough for people to be able to work several days less than a full week to subsist, so cultivating an extra garden for marriage contributions is no problem at all.

But when people are living in a cash economy, the money doesn’t go round and round, it goes in and out and participants working regular jobs get regular pay -- they don’t have the income elasticity of their country cousins.

This can lead to financial disaster. Most of those working in the cash economy, even the those who might be described as middle class, are relatively poorly paid -- they are generally worse off than their country cousins put a day or two a week into cash crops. The perception, however, is the other way about so the town dwellers are expected to stump up big time when a traditional obligation is to be fulfilled. Failure to meet that expectation will result in loss of face and loss of standing within the clan. This is very, very serious with long term ramifications.

As a result, townies can be driven into the clutches of the moneylenders with personally catastrophic results. In Papua New Guinea, legal small short-term non-bank lenders charge 20-40 percent annual interest rates. At these rates (expressed in terms of months to repay rather than percentage of loan capital) borrowers can dig a deep, deep financial hole for themselves very quickly. Recently PNG’s biggest bank, BSP, Bank South Pacific, has been attempting to help borrowers find their way out by offering bank loans. However, it’s rumored bank employees are among the non-bank lenders’ biggest customers.

This kind of financial peril along with the move away from village life, and the high number of mixed marriages -- people marrying outside their traditional boundaries -- is leading to the old marriage settlement traditions breaking down. Often, no marriage settlement, bride price, is paid at all.

That’s sad -- as I found in Karai Komana and as I’ve also seen among the Tolai, the marriage settlement is a time of fun, togetherness, and vital reinforcement of family and clan links.

The day the last marriage settlement is paid in Papua New Guinea will be a sad day indeed -- it will mark the loss of a key unifying factor among the nation’s peoples. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Karai Komana marriage settlement -- color, noise, extravagance, fun and family links

2011-10-31T18:35:00.001+10:00

By Geoffrey Heard

“We are people who like to have fun!” Laeko Bala, Lavui’s mother, rasped on Sunday morning, as we settled side by side into the back of the Toyota for the trip down the mountains and back to Port Moresby.

She was hoarse from a day of prancing and dancing, hooting, hollering, chanting, and singing in recognition, thanks and praise for contributions from the many branches of the family who gave to the marriage settlement for her eldest son, Kurona -- Lavui’s big brother. (She was deputized for the role by her aunt, the woman clan leader, whose voice had faded too much to lead the celebrations.) Then there was the subsequent night of feasting, singing, dancing, talking, general fun, and exhausted sleep. How she kept it up, I don’t know. I’d fallen over before 9pm -- and I was just a spectator!

Laeko was speaking the truth though. Her clan had stretched its resources to the limit to put up a good show for Kurona and Nigona, his wife, presenting her extended family with K30,044 (about $13,000), six pigs (about K6500 in total), one cow (K1500), a wall of locally grown produce -- including yams, sweet potato, bananas, pitpit, pandanus, and betel nut, 60 10kg bags of rice, 230 traditional hand woven string bags, and to top it off, a carton of two minute noodles! This was an expression of the high regard in which Nigona is held in her marriage clan and of thanks to her birth clan for giving her up.

But while the underlying intention was serious, it was also all about having fun. As we drove down the mountain, members of my host family were talking about the fun they had had and eagerly looking forward to more getting together with more fun, feasting, singing, dancing and general roistering, at another marriage settlement in December when the Bala family and its clan would be on the receiving end instead of being the givers.

They were expecting a pretty bounteous haul -- virtually a refilling of their coffers -- but the actual total and the amount each clan member would receive weren’t in the forefront of their minds in the financial sense. The first interest in the size of what was to come seemed to be how the other clan would “score” in a sporting sense. The record cash component for a karai Komana Dava is a bit over K31,000 -- but that was when virtually the whole village was contributing to settle for a woman from outside the area. Would the giving clan in December be able to match the Bala family’s total? Or would they outscore them? Would they come up with some cunning ploy, like driving several live cows up the mountain and dramatically slaughtering them on the spot (the Bala family delivered their cow ready-slaughtered but the pigs were all alive)?

Anything was possible and it would all add to the fun.

Still, refilling the coffers was not something to be taken lightly because of escalating marriage settlements in Karai Komana and many other communities in Papua New Guinea where people now live in a mixed economy. Those who live in the village mostly live by subsistence farming with a little cash income from trading excess produce. A few go for money, focusing on cash crops. One man has a betel nut (areca palm) plantation -- betel, buai, is a high value crop and can return a good profit despite the remoteness of the village. But today a large number of people live and work away from the village, living in a cash economy, as nearly all Lavui’s family does and, in fact, most people from Karai Komana do.

Expected to contribute big time to the Dava but lacking the income elasticity of their country cousins, the townies can find themselves on financial trouble if they don't get substantial a pay back from the system quickly.

So yes, they are in it for the family fun but perforce they must keep a close eye on the figures. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Return to Karai Komana

2011-10-31T18:21:00.004+10:00

By Geoffrey Heard

“My brother’s Dava -- that’s our name for marriage settlement -- is happening in the village on October 29. Like to come?” said my mate, Lavui, on the phone. Would I like a return to Karai Komana in the Rigo mountains east of Port Moresby? And for a Dava too? Would I what!

I visited Karai Komana, Lavui’s home village, last year (2010) for a quick in-and-out trip during the night. See May 2010, I Break Out!

I hadn’t really seen the place, let alone the magnificent scenery of the area. That the scenery was magnificent was made clear by the hair-raising seven hour b0uncing and jouncing trip up and down the mountains to get there and back. Whenever the road, um, track is as precipitous and rough as that, you know the scenery is magnificent even if you can’t see it!

My Tolai son confirmed it. Despite being from Rabaul right on the other side of Papua New Guinea, he knew the area, having walked through it in younger days. “Wait till you see the places where the track is running along the ridge and there is nothing but space on both sides of the road,” he chuckled when I told him where I was going. Cheeky wretch; I brought him up on the Bougainville mine road in the early stages of its construction and the then notorious Chimbu sections of the Highlands Highway. There were times on both those roads in the wet season when we had to tailgate a bulldozer cutting a path through a mud and rock slide, with the mud closing up behind us. If the mud caught us, we would be over the edge of a 300+ meter (1000 foot) drop. Instant death and instant burial. How dare he try to scare me!

We would be staying in the village for two nights so I shopped accordingly. One 2 inch foam mattress, sheet, blanket, pillow, towel. I packed a change of clothes including long pants and a jacket; while Port Moresby was sweltering in doldrums heat and humidity, Karai Komana is at a considerable height and it could be fresh during the day and markedly cool at night.

The trip to the village started with the usual chaos of any extended family holiday journey; people popping up from all over the place with items to take (particularly contributions to the marriage settlement) and/or looking for a seat in the back of the Toyota Landcruiser 4WD truck (or ute as we call it in Australia). Lavui had to take a firm line to maintain an appearance of legality (in PNG, that means everyone sitting down within the confines of the truck and no arms, legs or bits of cargo sticking out the side) and a modicum of comfort for the closest family members. We only had one truck, we could have used a small fleet!

First stop was the pig farm where we purchased pigs to contribute to the bride price. Thankfully, Lavui was able to hand those off to his brother to take in his big truck so they didn’t have to come with us. I like pigs -- we used to have a few on the farm in my youth -- but I have never had a burning ambition to share passenger space with them when we’re bouncing up a mountain. Odd, that! :)

Then it was round the city making last minute purchases and collecting passengers and luggage before we finally hit the road in the gathering cool of the evening.

There were the usual stops to buy buai (betel nut) at roadside stalls lit only by a kerosene lamp as we rolled down the sealed road to Kwikila east of Port Moresby, then we turned towards the mountains, forded the big river, and started to climb.

The steep, badly eroded track was muddy, slippery and cut up. It had rained in the previous few days and with the marriage settlement about to happen, there had been a lot of traffic -- there would be a lot more before the weekend was over -- with scores of members of both the giving and receiving clans hurrying home from Port Moresby and other centers for the big event.

Several times, Lavui had to backup and tackle a section again as the Landcruiser was brought to a halt by deep, muddy holes in steep sections of the track. Once, everyone in the back had to get out and walk for a stretch while Lavui threw his usual finesse out the window and with a demonic grin and a vice-like grip on the steering wheel, slammed the Toyota up the mountain by main force, the engine roaring, the wheels spinning, the truck lurching and sliding.

We reached Karai Komana at midnight, unloaded our gear, unrolled our mats and mattresses on the floor of the small hut allocated to us, and within minutes, fell into a dreamless sleep cosseted by the quiet breathing of a dozen others similarly engaged who were sharing the room.

Next morning, Saturday, dawned fine and clear -- a little overcast, but with no hint of rain. Good. It was going to be a great day. More people had arrived in the early hours, and our Toyota had gone back down the mountain to ferry up the pigs from the point where the big truck had had to stop.

In the meantime, there was breakfast, and time to walk around the village, get to know new friends, and to appreciate the beauty of the location.

The place was bubbling with the fun and excitement of the Dava in prospect! (See my next post.)

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Inventing the wheel

2011-10-24T12:10:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

It’s pretty amazing how round a coconut palm trunk looks and how not round a disc cut from it turns out to be. But a couple of coconut trunk discs were still round enough for Lawrence and Faezi to use to invent the wheel for young Bale’s (pron. Barlay) bicycle -- his kokol, as he dubbed it in his three year old nakedness, for some totally unknown reason.

An old bike frame had been hanging around since 14 year old Faezi began messing with it last year -- putting together a running bike from a collection of bits trawled from the middens of his own and neighboring villages. He made it, too, which given his inexperience as a mechanic, his limited number of tools, and the state of the parts he was working with ought to go down in the annals of cycling as a triumph. But the old parts kept breaking so in the end the bits were returned to the midden -- that is, until young Bale toddled down and dragged the frame back up to the house, demanding action on his kokol.

Bale wanted wheels so after appropriate procrastination by Lawrence and Faezi had failed to dim his enthusiasm, they cogitated in depth and came up with a way. With Bale hovering and providing an unwonted helping hand from time to time, they cut a couple of discs from a coconut palm log and chopped away the bark. Not perfectly round, but pretty good. Then drilling holes for axles -- in the absence of a drill, the fact that the haus kuk fire was burning and there was a steel rod handy meant that the holes were going to be burnt out.

And so they were. Not terribly straight, but as Lawrence pointed out, they would make for a much more interesting ride that way.

Making the wheels and fitting them took an whiled away a pleasant couple of hours, giving Bale his first few rides took about ten minutes, then the whole thing collapsed for want of a second axle (we were using a round file for the front axle), and we all decided it was too hot to pursue the project further. Bale, to my surprise, was perfectly happy with the outcome.

His kokol had been created, he had ridden it, and he had no more demand for it in that form. He continued to drag the wheel-less frame around for a couple of days, seeming to make no distinction between a kokol with and without wheels. The rest of us were perfectly happy too. Lawrence and Faezi had proved their concept and as chief spectator and urger, I was more than satisfied with my morning’s free entertainment. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011. The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

It’s pretty quiet here, but something interesting is always happening

2011-10-23T12:42:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

The latest local production in the baby stakes is getting ready to walk. I was somewhat surprised to hear her parents say they would make a walking frame for her.

I had a vision of my 80 year old friend with his walking frame… No not quite right, and how would you make one anyway in a PNG village? Your typical toddler “walking” thing in Australia (and a lot of the rest of the world) is a brightly colored plastic vehicle with wheels, flashing lights, raucous sound, and a seat so the toddler can thrash around the legs and at some point, get an idea that they don’t need the machine. Even less likely for village production.

I strolled down to the haus kuk for a cup of tea a little later and saw the walking frame in the final throes of construction.

It turns out to be some sticks garnered from nearby brush cut to the preferred length then hammered into the ground and horizontals lashed to it. Baby was on to it in a flash.

When she’s walking freely in a week or so, the sticks will join the kitchen firewood heap. Too easy.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011. The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Kavieng to Rabaul with Solwara Meri

2011-10-21T12:10:00.003+10:00

By Geoffrey Heard 

New Ireland is described in Tok Pisin as a "masket" -- rifle -- it is a long, skinny island only a few kilometers wide in most parts, lying roughly northwest/southeast, with Kavieng at its northwestern end and the second town, Namatanai, 263 kilometers away (as the Buliminski Highway runs) in the mountainous southeastern end -- the butt of the masket.

New Ireland is coral (unlike New Britain which is pretty much all volcanic) which makes for legendary white beaches, wonderful reefs, cool streams of sparkling pure water running out of the limestone mountain spine, and the sweetest fruit you have ever eaten. Pineapple with no acid after taste? Just dripping sweetness? It's simply not fair!

I call Rabaul and environs paradise and in many ways it is. So what can I call new Ireland? It's paradise too. We have a bit of an embarrassment of paradisiacal riches in this part of the world, actually! :)

It was a huge pleasure to visit Kavieng and be in Medina again, but my time was limited so I had to get on to Rabaul. A call to Solwara Meri (Mermaid) had the next sector of my travel organized in a moment. Solwara Meri runs a "banana boat" -- open 22 foot outboard-powered boat -- ferry service from the west coast of New Ireland near Namatanai across the St George's Channel to Rabaul. Three services a day -- early morning, noon, and afternoon -- with the boats running in pairs for mutual assistance if necessary.

Their own buses were full but I could catch an associate's bus from Kavieng when it came through Medina at about 10 in the morning. It would bring me to Namatanai where I would board their truck for the quick trip to their west coast speedboat base to catch the 3 o'clock run to Rabaul. No sweat.

It went just as arranged -- at 3 o'clock precisely, we were pushing off from the New Ireland beach, next stop Kokopo/Rabaul.

Pushed along by one or two 60hp Yamahas, the boats make the trip in about an hour and a half in the smoothest water -- early morning -- and a bit longer later when the swell gets up. Our trip starting at 3pm took a bit over two hours -- the boats had to drive out quite a long way to the north of Kokopo then come back down to it running south-west to avoid confronting the sea too directly.

Even with a few waves around, the trip was surprisingly dry. Banana boats are pretty clean runners and the skippers are skilled, but even so, you wouldn't want to wear your Sunday best for the trip. And it takes just one tricky wave and…. After cheating the waves for nearly two hours, we got a bit of a splash right near the end of the trip. Nobody was worried though -- after all, this is the tropics, the temperature was still about 28 C, and our speed produced a nice wind. We were all dry within minutes!

Even though the skippers were angling across the swell, there was plenty of kidney beating percussion as the boats bucked over the waves. This (and the bus trip over part of the Buliminski which is unsealed) were definitely BYO cushion situations.

Back in the day I used to be somewhat subject to motion sickness but had never experienced it on a small boat or a canoe. I was fine on Solwara Meri until we stopped towards the end to wait for the second boat (which had veered more widely than we had) to catch up. As we sat rocking in the swell, I suddenly became conscious of my breakfast and lunch. Oh dear! The other boat arrived and we got underway again just in time to save me from disgracing myself!

HAT OVERBOARD

We had a hilarious moment when I stood (holding on to the wheel-house with a grip like an octopus, believe me!) to take a picture of the second boat running astern of us. The wind whipped off the old straw hat that has been my companion on three tours to PNG and a moment later it was floating in our wake far astern. We all fell about laughing at the time -- the action was so sudden and so fast we were all totally startled. It actually turned out to be a problem though; a search of the stores in Kokopo failed to turn up a replacement -- and I need a hat to avoid sunburn of the head!

A GREAT DAY AND ECONOMICAL TOO

A great day traveling, capped when I arrived in Rabaul by the good fortune to find a bus half empty and about to head out for Vunakabi. I was aboard in a flash and home in Vunakabi half an hour later. I tottered off to bed early and slept like a log.

The Kavieng-Medina-Namatanai bus fare totaled K40 the Solwara Meri truck trip was K2, and the speedboat sector cost K60. A total of K102 or about $40. is that economical travel or what? Oh -- add the K14.95 I had to pay for a crummy cotton hat today!

Certainly, the banana boat/bus run between Kavieng and Rabaul is not for everyone, but for a lot of islanders and visitors looking for something a bit different at economical rates, it's a godsend.

You can book by ringing John and Nelita Tse, who own and run Solwara Meri, on 7136 3764. Or if you prefer, just inquire where you see banana boats parked on the beach. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011. The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

The real market in action -- buying and selling betel nut in Kavieng

2011-10-20T12:43:00.003+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

The main Kavieng bus stop, a scene of somnolence at eight o’clock on the inevitable hot, sunny morning, with a couple of dozen passengers scattered around, a mini-bus pulling in and out now and again, and a notable event being the arrival of a 25 seater school bus, is hardly the place you expect to see naked libertarian capitalism in action, the market red in tooth and claw.

But that is exactly what I did see while waiting for the Medina bus with my grand-daughter, Shirin.

We were idly chatting with a street betel nut vendor (Shirin was buying and chewing a bit too), a substantial woman named Beryl with a relaxed sense of humor sitting cross legged on an empty rice bag with her “maket”, her stall, in front of her. Her little stall was nothing grander than another empty rice bag spread out on the ground and on it, the buai (boo-eye) makings -- a couple of dozen betel nuts, some daka (pepper), and containers of kambang (lime). For the uninitiated, you chew all three together which turns red in your mouth and provides anything from mild stimulation if you spit out he juice to significant intoxication if you swallow.

In addition, she was also selling cigarettes individually from a packet.

Suddenly, in the midst of a remark, this mild mannered woman uttered a sharp exclamation, seemingly levitated to her feet, and in a single step was sprinting hard past us abandoning customers and market! When we recovered from our startle, we looked for the whatever had stimulated this mad action. It turned out to be a mini-bus that was pulling into the back of the bus stop.

Our vendor was not alone in targeting the bus. It was a clearly a race with a dozen others competing, some of whom had already reached the bus and were clammering at the “botskru” (boat’s crew, the driver’s assistant) who was scrambling out of the passenger door and up on to the roof rack even before the bus completely halted.

Supplies of fresh betel nut had arrived from villages down the road and every street vendor within reach of the bus stop was hot footing in to grab a share.

Failure meant no stock to sell and no income. Nothing. Nada.

There was perhaps five minutes of frantic bidding before handfuls of money changed hands, the winners took possession of their purchases, and the losers returned disconsolately to their stalls or just a seat in the shade while they waited for the next arrival of stock.

Beryl was triumphant. I’m not sure how much she spent, but it clearly was a very significant amount compared with the few kina worth of offerings she had on her mean stall, and she had secured a lot more than her fair share -- two and a half bags plus a big bunch of nuts. Since betel nut is in short supply in Kavieng at the moment (three for a Kina, and not particularly big nuts at that) and there is unrelenting demand, she was assured of a profitable day.

But what of the losers? More supplies will arrive from time to time during the day, so there will be other opportunities. And the first winners like Beryl have ruled themselves out of the market for the rest of the day -- they have pretty much spent their available funds and their stock is too valuable now to leave unattended so their early success has ruled them out of further competition.

And in any case, this is paradise. Betel nut might be selling at K1 for three, but for the same money, you can buy enough bananas to feed a substantial family. Libertarian capitalism might rule the buai market, but the good earth ensures nobody starves. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Ah, Kavieng, New Ireland. You win!

2011-10-20T11:39:00.003+10:00

By Geoffrey Heard

Flying from Port Moresby to Rabaul in East New Britain on Monday afternoon, I was surprised mid-flight by the announcement that the weather in Kavieng, New Ireland (the adjoining island to New Britain where Rabaul is located) was fine and hot and we would be arriving there at 4.50pm. Huh? It was no surprise that the weather was fine and hot in Kavieng just a couple of degrees south of the equator, but we were landing there?

Turned out this flight bypassed Rabaul to land in Kavieng then flew the half hour back to land at Rabaul at last light to overnight there. I had been toying with the idea of visiting New Ireland on my last two trips to Rabaul. Now here it was dumped in my lap!

We landed at Kavieng and I leaped off the plane with a happy cry to the astonishment and consternation of the plane and ground crews and the kindly concern of some passengers, including the United Church Bishop of Kavieng. They clearly had a notion that I was a bit erratic and ought to be handled with care. Was anyone picking me up? No. Did I have anywhere to stay? No. What was I doing there? Standing on the soil of wonderful New Ireland for the first time in 40 years.

I told the Bish not to worry, I would be fine; one of the first lessons I learned on arrival in PNG nearly 50 years ago was that if you hung around a bit almost anywhere something would turn up.

In fact, Kavieng town was only a kilometer away, 10 minutes' walk, and has a handy collection of hotels, resorts and guest houses. Since the vast, vast majority of the people around the world have the misfortune to be ignorant of New Ireland's delights, there's always a room available.

I didn't have to resort to resorts, however. Ringing my family at Vunakabi, Rabaul, to tell them I wasn't on the plane led to them ringing their daughter in Kavieng (I had forgotten about her) and 10 minutes later, I was safe and sound in the bosom of the family again!

I did have a very pleasant welcome and lunch next day at the Malagan Resort delightfully located right on the beach in Kavieng and suggest that if you are traveling Kavieng-wards, it is worth consider. It is under new management and negative comments in Lonely Planet no longer apply, I was told. In particular, the much criticized swimming pool has been done away with. What on earth possessed the former management to build a swimming pool literally on the magnificent beach is a question with no answer!

I stayed two nights in Kavieng, then took the bus down the Buliminski Highway (aka the East Coast Road -- named for the German Governor who oversaw construction of it more then a century ago) to Medina Village, where I stayed a day and a night, enjoying the serenity and beauty of the place and most importantly, meeting tearfully with the sadly depleted ranks of old friends and becoming reacquainted with people I knew as young children who are now in late middle age.

Then it was the bus again to Namatanai, New Ireland's second town, and the speedboat trip to Rabaul. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011. The opinions, comments, and photographs in this article are his own.

I am a victim of Port Moresby street crime…and come up smiling!

2011-08-07T11:13:00.003+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

It's Sunday morning, and I'm feeling absurdly chuffed. The reason is simple; last night I was a victim of Port Moresby's notorious street crime … but came out of it victorious. Well, almost!

In the taxi home, I couldn't take the adrenalin-fueled grin off my face or stop myself chuckling as I ran and re-ran the scenario in my head. Petty though the situation was, I felt as though I had been tested and had triumphed. Like some sort of rite of passage.

The incident occurred as a group of us left the Lamana Hotel's Gold Club after seeing the PNG's Got Talent hip-hop dance competition.

As we stepped through the door, I slipped the taxi fare home, two bills, a K10 and a K5 (a generous fare for the short trip), into my shirt pocket ready to pay the taxi without having to take my wallet out of my buttoned hip pocket. I realized the end of that action could be seen through the bars of the gate. Careless.

The taxi was 30-40 meters outside the Lamana security gate (everywhere in Port Moresby has security fences and gates, homes, restaurants, supermarkets…). As we walked away from the gate, a man apparently drunk, himself to me, talking rubbish about the show and asking us for a lift home in our taxi.

I was instantly wary and began (as is my wont) rehearsing possible scenarios and my response. He had to be preparing to pick my pocket (a hold-up was out of the question with so much security nearby, I thought) and his best bet would be to go for it as I was getting into the car; half standing, half sitting. I planned accordingly.

His chance came early though. I was set to get into the taxi with my eyes firmly on the would-be pickpocket and the taxi door between him and me, when one of our party stopped behind me and questioned the amount.

Involuntarily, my I glanced away from the thief. His hand moved like a striking snake, skilled fingers pincered onto the money in my shirt pocket, and whipped it out. I didn't feel a thing!

But I saw -- even as I glanced away from him I was realizing my mistake and my eyes flicked back just in time to see the flash of his hand. Another striking snake (the night was full of them!) and I had his hand in my grip, my other hand pushed him off-balance, and I stripped the notes from between his fingers. I had the K10 in my grasp; the K5 bill fell to the ground. I left it, hopped into the taxi and we were away.

A couple of the security guards started down the hill towards us. I waved them away -- in Port Moresby, security guards will give a petty thief a severe beating. I didn't want that, the man had offered us no violence, I had learned a life lesson, and Port Moresby is a hard place to make a living legitimately.

At home, I got a beer (SP Export white can, of course!) from the fridge and went out to sit on the back verandah to look at the lights, the night sky, and come down from the adrenalin high.

But what if he had been armed? What if …? I put the "what ifs" firmly from my mind. They didn't happen. What had happened was that in my 69th year, I had encountered my first pickpocket, and had out-thought him and won. Not quite Olympic gold, I know, but you can only respond to the challenges you encounter.

I popped the can. Life felt good and it still does this morning.

---

This is by no means to make light of those who have been victims of serious crime in Port Moresby, on or off the streets. The victims are legion and several good friends of mine have suffered the worst kinds of crime short of murder. Port Moresby has a very, very serious crime problem involving murder, rape, assault, burglary, and theft of all kinds, all exacerbated by corrupt police and the under-paying, under-equipping, and constant undermining of those police who are straight.

By and large, though, you can be safe if you take care. In this case, I had put myself in harm's way by choosing to go to Lamana and walking outside at night. I had exacerbated the situation by being careless and literally pointing out where I was carrying money.

As I said, a life lesson learned. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

What was interesting about your last visit to the doctor?

2011-07-20T12:45:00.001+10:00

By Geoffrey Heard

Free entertainment along the road, free fresh-off-the-tree bananas? What unexpected thing happened last time you were on your way to visit your doctor?

It is a beautiful, sunny morning in Paradise 1, Vunakabi, and the first thing on the agenda today is to take 10 year old Roselyn (named for her grandmother) to the doctor to have her cut and infected foot treated. Well, to the nurse at the clinic a couple of villages away, Rapitok. That means traveling by bus along a secondary route. Could mean a fair wait for the bus.

As we wait at the roadside for an hour-and-a-half for a bus which will pick us up (a couple go past full), I have to consciously suppress the niggle of misplaced urgency.

I chuckle as I on what I would be doing right this moment if I wasn't sitting at the side of the road chatting with Roselyn the child, Roselyn the grandmother, a couple of the kids who are shooting at a tree with their slingshots (and having a go and scoring a lucky hit myself), other members of the family wandering in and out of the picture, chatting with passersby, and editing pictures and writing this on my laptop.

I would be sitting on the tank stand 20 meters away doing exactly the same thing -- but with a poor chance of spotting and stopping the appropriate bus, that's what! I'm not waiting for a bus, I'm having a morning with my family!

There are no designated bus stops outside town. There are designated routes (we're on number 4) and maximum prices, but apart from that the bus stops when hailed or when passengers indicate that they want to get out.

Finally a bus arrives with a couple of empty seats heading where we want to go. Roselyn and I climb in, satisfy the natural curiosity of the other passengers interested in why a 10 year old Tolai girl is addressing the old white guy as "Bubu Geoff" (Grandfather Geoff -- in fact, I am the child's putative Great-Grandfather), and prepare to enjoy the trip through satisfyingly scenic surrounds.

A couple of kilometers along the road, we hear the sounds of celebration. "Subuna," explains Roselyn excitedly, "they're going to do a bride price exchange."

This is something I haven't experienced. It's pretty much an all day event, I am told, where the groom's husband visits the bride's home village to complete payment of the marriage settlement and claim the bride.

She hides in her parents' house and won't come out. The visitors tempt her and try to persuade her to come out with their singsings (song and dance). Finally, they might enter the house and physically remove her.

It is all pre-arranged and scripted and regarded by everyone as jolly good fun. At least, I'm told that is so today. I'm not sure it was always thus.

As we reach the hamlet where the subuna is in progress, the beating of drums and the chanting voices rise to a happy crescendo, then we are past and it fades behind us.
After a 20 minute ride, we reach our destination only to find the clinic closed. More waiting. The sister, it seems, will come, she is very reliable, but she has to catch the bus from another village, Taulil, which is poorly served. We settle down to wait in the shade of a tree under which someone has built a small stall out of bush materials. The two or three women occupying it today are making one or two small improvements to it while selling the ubiquitous betel nut and a few food other items, including some "banana mau" (ripe bananas -- similar to the Cavendish banana common in Australia).

We chat back and forth a bit, explain the Bubu Geoff thing again, and settle down to wait. I'm working through my email (ain't mobile technology grand? it is when it works!) when one of the ladies makes me a gift of a hand of bananas. It turns out her son is a PMV driver I've travelled with a number of times who has become a friend.

Roselyn and I are enjoying a banana snack when a mini-bus arrives with the nurse. She bustles in, lines up the patients on the bend outside the clinic, and deals with them all cheerfully, caringly and with despatch. More patients arrive as we are leaving -- it's going to be a busy day.

Across the road a couple of people are waiting for the bus heading out. We join them; one is an old bloke and having ascertained that I am a b-4 (foreigner who was in PNG a long time ago -- I find it hilarious to be a b-4 -- back in the day, that referred to people who had been in PNG before WWII), launches into reminiscence. We swap the names of people we both knew back then, laugh about the absurd (and there was plenty of that), applaud some of our contemporaries, share sadness over tragedy, and -- like all old blokes -- condemn the current generation and agree that the world has gone to the dogs since our day.

In the course of that, it transpires that a former colleague lives just down the road. My new friend is just proposing that we stroll down to say hello to him when the bus arrives. We all have to take it -- there might not be another bus for an hour or three.

I promise to return on my next visit. Lovely to see you again, Rapitok. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Lighting the morning fire; the plastic bag method

2011-07-15T12:01:00.002+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

Our house in the village has some early risers and some late risers. I tend to be one of the former since I don’t often stay up late gossiping, yarning and chewing betelnut with neighbors, relatives and friends. (I’m happy to gossip and yarn, but I’m not a betelnut addict.)

In addition, I’m leading a fairly active life; you’ve no idea the energy expended staying upright in a minibus driven down the side of a mountain by a guy with blatant Formula 1 ambitions, to say nothing of the amount of walking you can do between stores in Kokopo which is strung out along three or four kilometers of (glorious) sea front.

So I am up soon after dawn, have the first of my two daily washes (bucket and dipper) in what is supposed to be cold water (but it isn’t really cold; it comes from a 9000 liter tank which has cooled only a little overnight after the heat of the previous day), then dry and dressed (shorts, shirt, sandals), I move on to the question of the morning cup of tea.

Young Rachel or Roselyn, two of my putative great grand-daughters aged something like 12 and 10 respectively, are likely to be up, and we will confer on lighting the morning fire.

Here is how it is done (with a shuddering nod in the direction of environmental correctness). First gather up all sorts of kindling, wood chips, twigs, dry coconut leaves, and if we are really lucky, a segment or two of dry coconut husk (detritus from the evening meal when a coconut would have been husked and scraped out for extraction of the “cream” for cooking -- but usually the evening cook has already used this husk for his or her fire).

Ignore any newspaper lying around (we have that too, a couple of people in the house are avid newspaper readers). This is the wet tropics, that means high humidity even when it is sunny and dry, and that, in turn, means something as absorbent as newsprint is not really dry after a night on the cook house bench. The cook house (or as we call it, haus kuk) has a roof but apart from that, is open to the environment, including having no formal floor to differentiate it from the surrounding “outside”, so if the atmosphere is humid, everything in the haus kuk is too. Day-old newsprint here just tends to smoulder and die.

Next collect a couple of plastic bags. These are your fire starters. Since you can’t get out of a store without your purchase being plastic bagged, there are lots of them around even in a semi-bush village environment.

There is an important principle to grasp before you start. It took me a couple of days to wake up to it. With paper or coconut husk, you set the fire with the igniter underneath so it burns up, the plastic bag method is top down.

Assemble the kindling in the fireplace (a bunch of stones) keeping a few bits and pieces in reserve, squeeze a plastic bag into a bit of a rope, then gingerly dangling it from a stick, apply a lit match to the bottom. As the plastic burns, it melts and drips on to the kindling. Do I hear an “Ah ha!” moment? When the bags burns up near the top, you twist the stick to wrap the remaining plastic bag around it, put that on top of your beginning fire, and add the last of the kindling.

Given good luck, strong lungs to “winim” the fire when it staggers (Rachel and/or Roselyn provide these), and some usefully dry firewood (see the remarks about damp paper above; the same applies to firewood particularly the fibrous logs from coconut palms), you are now on the way to the morning cuppa and a hot breakfast!

PS: I’m no fan of lighting fires with plastic bags, but it’s now ubiquitous in PNG -- I’ve seen it used by a top public servant to light an official entertainment barbecue. I can’t stop it -- nobody can in this intensive recycling community short of banning plastic bags altogether -- but at least I’ve alerted my people to its environmental impact and in particular, persuaded the kids that breathing plastic smoke is a really, really bad idea. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Aibika to the rescue as we suffer kid-stress in paradise

2011-07-13T12:01:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

It’s a stressful time in paradise -- it is school holiday time and packs of kids are roaming around, playing vigorous games, hooting and laughing, running, chasing, bluffing, arguing, resolving disputes by shouting louder and occasionally delivering a smack over the ear, and paying no attention to parental cries for merciful quiet.

Our usual quota of anything from five to a dozen ankle biters and above (depends on how many related houses you include in the count and the time of day) has been supplemented by the arrival of a daughter of the house with three of her own plus one of her brother’s children.

The increase of the four visiting kids attracted the attention of every child for several hundred meters around so that we had a whole tribe (in reality, a clan) racing around in one giant pack for a day. Then they were alternatively arguing and playing in a number of lesser giant packs for another day, and finally thinning out on the third day as interest waned, all the kids had got up to date on the news since they were all together last time, parents demanded their children stay at home long enough to complete family tasks, and everyone shook down into comfortable smaller groups.

But every now and again, they coalesce and the chaos and cacophony break out again!

It was quite funny watching normally “cope with anything” parents and grandparents fraying at the edges and suddenly finding they had urgent errands to run in town which demanded that they instantly flee on the nearest minibus to return a couple of hours later looking virtuous, errand apparently completed satisfactorily. And so it was -- they had achieved their goal, a break from the kid cacophony and frenetic activity.

Note the use of “was” in “it was quite funny”. I was rolling along quite nicely in all this when what amounted to a giant wave of noise and mad activity engulfed me just before lunch today. Mercifully, a minibus with a spare seat appeared within minutes to whisk me away to do my urgent business in town. The escape was worth ten times the asking price of K2.00 (80¢).

Right now, the sun is setting and the sky is on fire over Kerevat and the Bainings mountains.

And a level of peace has descended.

The soccer game in our front yard has ended although the bigger kids have moved across the road and joined the touch footy game there (they have a rugby ball on that side) as it runs down to its inevitable end in the deepening dusk.

Our littlelies are out the back undergoing the serial social bathing experience -- they stand on the spare part of the tank stand and are vigorously doused and washed down by the nearest mother or aunt (some aunts are not much older than the tots they are bathing) armed with a bucket of cold water and a can for throwing it over them. Resistance is useless; there are some pretty firm hands around here and the kids know that their mothers are never going to gainsay another mother or an aunt. They’re the sisterhood! Anyway, the water’s not really cold -- this is the tropics! It’s just not hot.

In the haus kuk (cook house), mother and grandmother, Roselyn, is producing mouthwatering odours as she prepares dinner for about 15 (she actually does count them when serving up). The rice is ready, and she is now working on the stew of greens, salted fish and coconut.

I’m very familiar with the underpinnings of this village diet but to my surprise, I’m finding I’m noticing the details of it more than I have before.

I always knew greens played a important part in the diet, but only recently have I noticed how big a part in terms of volume, variety and flavor. Your average Tolai eats a lot of greens. And not just just big bunches of leaves, but a huge variety. Again, it was something I knew intellectually, but after living for decades in Australia and becoming re-accustomed to the focus on just a few species in our supermarkets and fruiterers, I had forgotten how rich and diverse the Tolais’ diet is.

Tolais must regularly eat 100 or more varieties of greens, some of which they grow in gardens and some of which grow wild to be harvested when they see it. The most prized of the greens seems to be the leaves of the aibika, a stalky plant with a spinach-like taste and consistency.

If you’re traveling from Rabaul to Port Moresby and want to guarantee your welcome there, you visit the market on the way to the airport and for about K2 (80¢) buy two big bunches of aibika, enough to feed six or seven people. Yum, yum! (You’ll also be asked for betelnut, buai, but that’s anther story!)

I’ve seen four (or is it more?) kinds of leaves going into the mix tonight. Aibika is there, also pumpkin and/or choko tips, two more kinds of leaves I don’t recognize and perhaps two or three more (or they might be more or less mature leaves of the same). Whatever, cooked with coconut and with the salted (but not salt) tuna added (it might work out wt 20 gms per person), it will be delicious and very nourishing.

After dinner, I’ll have a cup of tea while we sit around talking for a bit, then I’ll retire to bed to repair the stress of the day with some well-earned shut eye.

Ah! There’s the call for dinner now. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

In a bind over Bundy … and the world economic system

2011-06-23T14:33:00.002+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

It's late morning, Tuesday, 21 June 2011, and I'm in the duty-free store (really the GST-free store these days) at the Brisbane airport buying rum for the elite of Port Moresby's rum and coke drinkers. I've been instructed by email and text that two liters (the PNG duty free limit) of rum is required and the brand is the Australian-made Bundaberg rum. These are dedicated Bundy 'n' coke drinkers.

But as I survey the shelves, I am startled to find that the formerly expensive and upmarket Bacardi (white) rum is a couple of bucks a bottle cheaper than the formerly el cheapo Australian-made Bundy. Here's a revelation -- with the Australian dollar having taken off to a degree (and other former leaders like the USD and Euro having gone south somewhat), the removal of tariffs on imported liquor, the price differential between domestic and imported has been turned on its head.

So with a guilty apology to Australian-made, I decide to do my Port Moresby friends a favor -- I'll take them upmarket Caribbean sunshine.

When I proudly unleash a liter bottle of Bacardi in Port Moresby that evening, I'm repaid for my thoughtfulness by horrified cries of "What? We said Bundy!". When I reveal that I have grossly departed from the script and bought Frangelico instead of a second liter of rum, my name is Mud with a capital "M"!

Tough -- we're all having dinner and I'm rounding out mine with ice cream and Frangelico like I had at my farewell dinner (except that I'll be pouring the Frangelico out of the bottle, not out of a shot glass!). The team can take it or leave it. I might be a bit of a soft touch in some respects, but in regard to desserts (and rum and coke which I regard as a last resort drink), I can be as tough as nails.

Making that purchase really hammered home a point, though; one which I have been acutely aware of for some time in my own tiny business. I used to sell Australian-made books in the USA. At that time, the Australian dollar was ranging around 70 US cents. At one point, it got as low as about 55 US cents. It was quite ridiculous, of course -- at the time, Australia had as useful an economy as most others and certainly one as useful or better than America's which was already mired in up-to-the-nostrils debt with a whole lot of stuff going on -- like the idiotic invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq -- that were clearly out of control before they began and was adding staggering amounts to US debt hourly.

The Australian dollar's climb coincided with a post office clamp down on special rates for overseas mail (mail is the only viable carrier for micro-business products), and suddenly, every book I shipped was making a loss! Raising prices wasn't an option; Americans are used to certain price points and won't be moved from them.

I had to switch to printing in the United States -- leaving me to ponder what to do with a roomful of brand new books which now weren't salable (I still have them).

So I was fully aware of what the currency movements had done to price relationships, but striking them so vividly contrasted in the duty-free really hammered home the point.

Tough for many Australian businesses

The ridiculous movements in the currency market make it very, very tough for a lot of Australian industries. And then, of course, the ones that are making out like bandits, the mining industry, don't want to pay appropriate taxes on gigantic windfall profits most of which are going overseas to people who have more money than they could possibly poke a stick at in a month of Sundays.

The trick in all this is the financial system constructed by the monied elite for the benefit of the monied elite. At the beginning of modern democracy, the monied elite had everything their way -- democracy slowly rolled back some of that those privileges to some degree, but money always ruled.

Now big money is bigger than ever -- a handful of modern corporations have enormous transnational power supported by the most powerful governments in the world; the USA is the prime example but it's not alone, Australia runs along like its little lapdog -- and it is busy rolling back democracy and turning relatively egalitarian societies like Australia into inequitable, unjust, undemocratic societies which are merely enormous money pumps that feed the money bags' greed. The rich are getting richer, a (very) few of the middle class are getting richer, most of the middle are getting poorer, and the poor are getting even poorer.

The process is complex and includes many subtle steps, but the underlying trick is simple. You set up a scenario where people are restricted in their movement around the globe -- nearly everyone in the world is actually a prisoner in the country they were born in, both physically and mentally -- while allowing money and goods unrestricted movement.

Thus, people are not free to move from place to place to take advantage of the best wages, for example, while capital is free to move from place to place to take advantage of the worst wages, and their goods are free can go anywhere. Then they declare "globalization" to be the great savior of the world's economic system and "protection" at national borders (against goods and money only, naturally) to be anathema, old fashioned, unfair, and nasty, and they're away towards riches even further beyond the ordinary person's imagining and to gathering even more power to make the trick even more effective.

Of course, it is all a Ponzi scheme and must collapse sooner or later, but when it does collapse, we all know who will have the most comfortable ride -- the super rich. When money becomes essentially valueless, it pays to have sh*tloads of it.

When everyone's down and they scraped up all the money and valuables about, they'll start all over again building another huge pyramid.

The "poor" who have kept a grip on their own land like the majority of people in Papua New Guinea will do next best because they can still live off their land -- in large part, they are outside the world economy. The middle and lower classes in the developed countries will do badly because they are bound up in the money machine, are in debt to the money machine, and will have to take what pittance they are given. And, of course, the truly dispossessed, the very, very poor of areas like Sudan, Eritrea and so on, will do worst of all as has been demonstrated in depressions and recessions throughout history.

I reflect on the period in which I grew up and have lived in or in touch with Australia -- the latter part of the 1940s, the 1950s, 1960s, even into the 1970s and 1980s. In many respects this was the democratic dream time, the high tide of democracy in both in Australia and overseas.

Today, we are participating in its end.

Of course, democracy always had its dark underbelly -- the wars against the "evils of communism" and now "terrorism" (the latter so clearly an excuse for ramping up control of frightened populations), the exploitation of the weak and poor both at home and overseas --particularly overseas, the pretense of self-determination and the granting of independence to colonies (economic colonialism is so much more profitable), and so on and so forth.

Of course, while we know all this, fighting back is difficult. The vast majority of Australians (and Americans, and Brits, and French, and Germans, and Canadians and whoever!) all know that the solution is to clamp controls on capital and globalism. But much as we talk and protest, politicians of the major parties, the politicians in control, flatly refuse to act for the good of the people -- the good of those they are supposed to be representing.

They are corrupt. Whether they take cash on the barrelhead or under the table or just accept promises of support so they can stay in power (or in the case of the enormously rich mining companies, promises of no public opposition to them), they are corrupt. They promise to represent the people, to work for the good of the people, but they do not.

They know damned well that if they moved to do what people want and fix the economy so it serves the people rather than enslaving them in the service of a tiny elite, their money masters would come down on them like a ton of bricks.

They are so afraid or their palms so well greased that they stand up in public and tell barefaced lies. They sign Australia up to trade agreements that take decisions on trade out of our hands, clearly advantage our trade competitors, are unfair to our neighbors, and put disputes about trade rules into secret courts. Having signed up Australia in the full knowledge of what they are doing, they then feign looks of doleful helplessness as though it all happened by accident and not design!

I really applaud the Icelanders who broke out of the thrall of these poisonous, anti-democratic, anti-people schemes and refused to drive themselves into penury to pay off debts incurred foreign bankers under cover of their name.

We need more of that. We need to do that in Australia.

In the meantime while we Australians are getting up the courage to act in accordance with our national myth (rugged bushmen, individualists -- in fact we are among the most urbanized societies in the world and the most politically apathetic and naive), we need to do something immediate about Bundy.

For mine, I promise to buy two bottles next time I go to Papua New Guinea. No Caribbean sunshine (get nicked, Bacardi), no Italian dessert wine, just Bundy. I swear!

I might even get a bonus by doing that -- a bit of respect from the disgruntled Moresby Bundy 'n' coke team. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

On the road again back to Papua New Guinea for another visit

2011-06-18T23:00:00.004+10:00

By Geoffrey Heard

Evening, Saturday, 18 June 2011

It’s not long after eight on a chilly winter's Saturday night in Melbourne as I start writing, but I am as snug as a bug in a rug in Car D of the XPT train as it glides through the suburbs heading north. To farewell me on my trip, my daughter and I have just indulged (and that is the only word) in a delicious three course dinner at The Vault Café, Batman's Hill* on Collins hotel (http://www.batmanshill.com.au/), strolled (fairly) leisurely across Spencer Street to the pretentiously named Southern Cross Station, and boarded the XPT.

Three minutes later, with a single blip of its horn and a short announcement, the XPT was quietly accelerating out of the station and beginning the 1000 kilometer journey to Sydney where it’s due to deposit me into the heart of the city at 6.30am.

I say three minutes later, and it was literally that. Actually, I almost missed the train -- that would have been a hoot! What with the mixed dips being just plain beautiful, the Malaysian style curry exceptional, the rich vanilla ice cream with a shot each of Frangelico liqueur and black, black coffee sublime, and the wine excellent, we were both feeling pretty relaxed and happy with life until we were jolted into action by the big clock on The Age building opposite reminded us urgently of the time! Thanks Age!

And if the bill for the two of us was within a couple of bucks of my (Seniors card discounted) train fare to Brisbane, that’s neither here nor there -- it was better than reasonable for the quality of the food, wine and surroundings, I am replete, I’m on the road to Papua New Guinea again, and I’m happy, happy, happy.

Let me explain. I'm in the throes of selling my house in Melbourne in pursuit of a more relaxed lifestyle. I had expected the sale to be done and dusted in March so I could escape tropics-ward before the first chill of winter, but the market is trending down and the demand for old places on a biggish block like mine is falling off.

I've been working away, as one does, making the place more presentable and, as one also does when thwarted, moping a bit. Then three weeks ago I awoke on a frozen Melbourne morning to the realization that my continuing presence was doing little or nothing for the house sale and that if I booked immediately I would be in time -- just -- to get Air Niugini's economical Wantok fares to Rabaul for the annual Warwagira and National Mask Festivals.

I bounced out of bed and onto the Air Niugini site (http://www.airniugini.com.pg) so fast I nearly spilled my first cup of tea of the day which I made in passing from the kettle boiling on the gas heater (yes, really).

I saw the very first Warwagira Festival way back in the 1970s but have not seen another since so was eager to see it again. I had not seen the National Mask Festival but it had attracted favorable reviews from everyone I know and from strangers who’ve paid full price to get there, so I was right into getting among that too.

Having set the parameters with the Air Niugini bookings, it was a question of "what next"? Air Niugini takes off from Brisbane and I was about 2000 kilometers south of that in Melbourne. Fly or …? Ah, forget it! I would train it, I decided, the XPT overnight from Melbourne to Sydney (http://www.countrylink.info/planning_your_trip), one night in Sydney at Glenferrie Lodge, Kirribilli (http://www.glenferrielodge.com/), then XPT again overnight from Sydney to Brisbane.

That timetable would give me the chance to see and photograph a few things in both cities before I moved onto the next leg of my journey. And it would save me from one of those unnecessarily stress-inducing embarkations which make air travel today such an unpleasant experience.

Call me old fashioned, reactionary, even Luddite, but having spent most of my adult life traveling by road or air, I am returning to the favored transport of my youth. I train it all over the place around Melbourne; it's faster and more economical than driving a car a lot of the time. For long distance, it's actually pretty stunning to realize the great value you get out of trains. For the cost of the fare, you get travel and accommodation if you overnight; travel and sightseeing if you do daylight trips!

And as I wrote at the beginning of this piece, departure is relaxed and happy. With my ticket printed out from the internet in my pocket, including seat allocation, I walked on to the platform (no ticket check), and onto the train (no ticket check apart from directions to my carriage) literally three minutes before departure (they do ask you to be there 10 minutes prior but I was greeted with a smile), stowed my suitcase in the main luggage rack at the end of the carriage, then found my seat and sat down. A couple of minutes later, the train started.

As I was writing this, half an hour or so into the journey and 50 kms up the track, a lady came around and checked our tickets.

So easy. No ridiculous security checks, beeping screens, tough looking characters investigating your underwear. No two hour queues and grossly overpriced coffee and cakes once you’re a captive in the departure lounge. And no gouging airport parking fees either -- you depart and arrive in the middle of the city, the hub of the public transport system.

And all in a relaxed manner and in generally congenial company! I'll admit my preference for the economy car and its aircraft type seats is not going to be everyone's favorite (I work alone most of the time so it's a treat for me to be among people) but if you wish, there are upmarket alternatives at very reasonable rates.

If you haven't tried it recently, give it a go!

But back to the point of it all, Papua New Guinea. I can't wait to get there again. Reading my earlier posts, you might think I’m more than slightly besotted with the place, and you might be right. I am. I love it. Not uncritically, I think I've made that plain, but I love to be there. It feels like something is happening. It feels alive -- and so do I when I’m in it. ###

* For readers not familiar with Australian history; no, not named after the comic book character, but after an English chap who famously said of the then swamp: "This is the place for a village", did the usual dirty deal with the indigenous inhabitants, and founded Melbourne, naming it after an English Viscount whose wife had an affair with the poet, Byron.

What a delightful connection!

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2011.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Someone to watch over me

2010-11-14T12:39:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

Let's be quite clear -- Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea's capital, is a tough town. In fact, it's a hot, dirty, tough town.

HOT: most of the time it is pretty hot and dry, and right now it is particularly hot and humid -- this being the doldrums, the few weeks between the dry season with its cooling laurabada (south-east trade wind) and the lahara (the north-west monsoon) with its cooling rains. Particularly hot, by the way, means only a couple of degrees more than its usual 30 celsius -- that couple of degrees really makes a difference.

I can remember decades ago when I was about to make perhaps the silliest decision of a life liberally sprinkled with silly decisions, looking out the window as the sun rose on yet another Port Moresby doldrums morning and saying out loud (with expletives deleted): "One more sunny day and I am going to go crazy!"

Then I took off for Australia. Just plain silly. It took decades for me to get back.

DIRTY: the rubbish in the streets is amazing. No busy street sweeping machines here, although now and again, you see men and women equipped with spades, shovels, brooms, and wheelbarrows cleaning up a length of street or drain or whatever and doing a darned good job. There's also the "voluntary" rubbish collection -- people collecting bottles of various descriptions for private recycling, for example.

But every day there seems to be a new accumulation of plastic bags, bits of cardboard, paper, drink bottles, cans, mango skins and stones, betelnut husks, and whatever rubbish, casually discarded to clutter the footpaths, roads, shoulders and gutters, and float around in the wind along with the dust, and petrol and diesel fumes from the racing minibuses, trucks, and ubiquitous SUVs (of the better off travelling in airconditioned comfort with the doors locked -- see "Tough" below).

And then there's the red splash of betelnut juice spat everywhere, defacing walls, paths, roads, everything up to a height of a metre or so. Everyone, it seems, is chewing betelnut and spitting the crimson liquid, it is even served after lunch in some pretty classy restaurants. Of course, no-one spits in the restaurants (they swallow), but nearly everyone feels free to spit outside.

It makes the few attempts at what one might call "proper graffiti" appear pathetically ineffectual in terms of defacing anything.

At times, Port Moresby looks like one mighty midden. It would surprise most visitors and even many foreign residents of this town to see that the same people who litter in the streets generally live in neat and tidy villages. In the village, they still litter, but they sweep around their houses first thing in the morning and often again in the afternoon. That's even true of squatter settlements (generally hidden from the eyes of the better fixed) within Moresby itself.

TOUGH: I've talked about this before. There's lots of street crime in Port Moresby, simple theft like pocket picking or purse snatching, but also armed hold-ups, and violence. There is invasive crime -- armed hold-ups (characterised locally as "a hands-up") of businesses, householders, and car drivers (hence the closed windows and locked doors of the SUVs), and the like. Every business house and home of any consequence has its security grilles, secure entrance, and fence, a barred or mesh construction a couple of metres high, often topped with razor wire. Attack dogs snarl behind the fences; uniformed security guards are ubiquitous ("security" might be Port Moresby's biggest industry).

You don't need to look twice to see where this crime comes from. Everywhere is the evidence of people struggling to make a tiny living. While most of Papua New Guinea is not in what you might call "starvation poverty" because people still own their own land traditionally, in Port Moresby people really do struggle to eat because it is hard, dry and they are a long way from home. They are selling pretty much anything on the streets to put a feed in their belly. Or committing crimes. Or both.

And that brings us to the title of this piece. Most days, Port Moresby is pretty busy, but on Saturdays, when most working people have the day off and do their shopping and socializing, it is a seething mass of humanity, no more so that in the retail area known as Boroko which is five minutes walk from where I am staying.

So last Saturday morning, having put in several solid hours writing, I strolled down to Boroko in mid-morning to visit the bank for a withdrawal and to do a little shopping.

I was stripped to the essentials for a tough town; no bag to be snatched, shorts with pockets fastened by velcro, a nearly empty wallet with just one credit card in it, and the awareness that as a white guy I am a target for street crime -- I am automatically labelled "rich" even though this label is laughably distant from reality. But when you have nothing.... Besides, all those Papua New Guineans who are far richer than me are in SUVs with the windows up and the doors locked.

Jenny, the housekeeper where I am staying, was concerned but was tied up with her work or she would have accompanied me. She uttered a warning to be careful because it was Saturday. My first watcher.

The second appeared as I stepped off the pedestrian overpass that took me across the main road into Boroko proper. I had noticed a youth peel off from a group at the other side of the overpass and follow me across; I had varied my pace, shifted from side to side to put others between us, and used the excuse of people coming the other way to walk somewhat crabwise so I could keep an eye on him. Now a biggish, oldish bloke hove to beside me. "Better watch your back, my friend," he said. "That young fellow looked as though he was up to something, so I kept just behind him ready to give him one if he made a move." My second watcher. I thanked him sincerely.

I made a couple of purchases with a credit card at a jewellers, then headed off down the street for the bank. I should have had a small bag with a strap over my shoulder and held under my arm. As it was, I had a couple of valuable small items stuffed into what had become a rather over-full pocket. Not the best way.

At the bank, a couple of the ATMs weren't working, so the security guard looked pretty busy managing a fair sized queue. Not too busy, it turned out. When I finally got to make my transaction 15 minutes later, the guard stepped in front of me as I left. "Better take a taxi, sir. Four men followed you here and they are waiting outside ." My third watcher. I marvelled that he had been able to keep an eye on the street while he was managing the queue and entry to the ATM booth. More thanks -- I walked straight out and jumped into a passing taxi.

Later that day, as I was extracting 50 toea (20 cents) from my pocket to pay the fare for a minibus ride to a hotel where I could access the internet, I dropped 10 toea on the seat. A fellow passenger, obviously of humble means, noticed my loss, picked up the coin and handed it to me. My fourth watcher.

Nasty things happen in this town, really nasty things, but when you get perfect strangers helping you in the street, it feels pretty nice.

THE KICKER

O. Henry, famous for the kickers he dreamed up for his short stories, would have loved this.

When I was in the jewellery store, a little old lady, very poorly dressed, slapped down about K1500 ($600) to buy a lovely little gold mask ornament. When I got to the bank, she was already there, a couple ahead of me in the queue, wearing the mask on a gold chain around her neck. She withdrew several hundred kina then walked away through the crowd unremarked and unnoticed by the thieves watching me.

The damned ATM rejected my card so I actually left the bank with just enough cash in my pocket to pay the taxi driver -- not even enough to tip the eagle-eyed security guard.

Someone should have told those thieves the first rule of life: don't judge a book by its cover! ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Why would you come to Rabaul and isolate yourself from this wonderful place?

2010-10-27T20:11:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

What does "international" mean in the name of a hotel? In the case of the new Gazelle International hotel in Kokopo (the new Rabaul) it seems to mean a commonplace box surrounded by a pretty much totally unnecessary security fence cunningly designed to negate the obvious advantages of a scenic and historic site.

There is some ugly stuff in Kokopo, a combination of leftovers of an era when Kokopo was a mere sub-district headquarters, and the pellmell development of the town when its new role as provincial capital was forced upon it in the wake of the volcanoes erupting and destroying Rabaul proper in 1994.

The Gazelle International hotel is the new ugly, possibly the most inappropriate development on a wonderful site that Rabaul/Kokopo -- in fact Papua New Guinea generally -- has ever seen.

Did the architect ever visit the lovely, clifftop site adjoining the airy, relaxed old Ralum Club? Was he familiar with Rabaul/Kokopo?

If he did visit, either he or his investors must have been remarkably insensitive to ethos and environment. The hotel is built on the site where the fabled Queen Emma had her mansion in the 1880s. That was a spacious, airy place built to present to its residents one of the most beautiful views in the world -- a panorama of sea, land and sky, St George's Channel, the Duke of York Islands, New Ireland.

There are pictures extant of Queen Emma's mansion. Indeed if the architect had visited the site, he could have seen some of them on the wall of the Ralum Club next door. After inspecting the old pictures, he might have relaxed with a cooling gin and tonic on the Ralum Club's wide verandah (it is almost all verandah), looked out at the vista, and conjured up visions of how he could go about creating a truly outstanding building that would enhance an historic site.

Instead we have ugly box, surrounded by ugly, sun-blasted car park, with the wonderful vista screened off from the the hotel's public areas by a two metre steel picket fence to be topped by razor wire! Yes, you can see the view through the fence. Well, almost. No, it doesn't look at all attractive viewed that way. I was told with a straight face that the hotel couldn't consider itself truly international without that fence.

The dopey thing is that that level of security is unnecessary in Rabaul. If you were building the hotel in Port Moresby, where the raskols roam free and carjackings, armed hold-ups, and break-ins are daily occurrences, then, yes, you would need that fence. But in Kokopo you simply don't. It's a town where residents and tourists alike are the ones roaming free and are plenty safe. Oh, and that raises another point -- no convenient entrance arrangements exist for those who would arrive at the hotel on foot after roaming free.

As for those public areas... Let's just say that even without you having to peer through the pickets to see the view they make no significant contribution to the claim that the Gazelle International is in anyway of superior quality. I have to admit that the kitchen's is good, though.

I escaped from the Gazelle International's cramped, over-airconditioned dining room to the wide open spaces of the good old Ralum Club -- but even that is only a partial escape today. The busy hum of the hotel's airconditioning system invades that once peaceful space. An architect sensitive to the site might have situated the airconditioning at the back of the hotel facing into the car park and added some sort of noise screening to protect the neighbours. Given the other design atrocities, though, that would probably be too much to expect.

My advice for what it is worth: if you're visited Rabaul, the best accommodation is Kokopo Beach Bungalows, right in the middle of town, built to take full advantage of the views and the environment. Rapopo Plantation Resort is another good choice; it's in the spirit of its name and site and the kitchen there is pretty good. Takubar Beach Resort has been recommended to me, the Kokopo Village Resort has its points, and I'm always open to the suggestion that for a relaxing holiday, Kulau Lodge, on the north coast an hour or so from Kokopo, is a great place to be.

And if you want to stay in the old Rabaul close to the volcanoes, then the Hamamas Hotel is the place to go.

Of course, the Gazelle International is ideal if you want an airconditioned box that insulates you from the tropics and a fence that isolates you from Kokopo/Rabaul and the Gazelle Peninsula.

But if you go that route, you'll be looking AT this tropical paradise -- you won't be IN it. And you'll be missing a truly memorable experience. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010. The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

What does “standard of living” mean in paradise?

2010-10-25T09:12:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

Today we took a break from Paradise 1 (Vunakabi in the Rabaul heights, Papua New Guinea) and visited what turned out to be Paradise 3, Karavia village on the nambis (shore) at Blue Lagoon just outside Rabaul’s glorious harbour. (You’ll remember we’ve already identified another seaside location, Takubar, as Paradise 2.)

The tide was well on towards high but still coming in, which promised cooling dips on a hot sunny morning, when our little party comprising my putative grand-daughter, her husband, their two kids, a toddler and a babe in arms, and me hopped off the bus at about 11 o’clock.

Karavia is the grandson-in-law’s home village; we went visiting to show off the babe to various relatives, acquaint the toddler with the sea, and generally to flop around in the salt water and have a good old chin-wag during the preparations for and subsequent demolition of a picnic lunch on the foreshore.

The food we had was pretty standard -- singapo (dryland taro) roasted on the fire (a touch of butter and pepper and salt, it’s just delicious), and a chicken and greens stew with rice, sweet potatoes and plantains (extendable food is the go; by the time we left, about a dozen people had turned up to eat). But this picnic was not about special food, it was about people and place.

And what a place! A bunch of children gambol in the sea against the backdrop of Rabaul’s volcanoes reaching towards a handful of fluffy white clouds which, in turn, give way to a mighty arch of blue sky. Coconut palms lean gracefully seawards as though tutored on picturesque poses from first sprouting. A mango tree promises sweet dessert. I splash into the sea and dive into sun-warmed water leavened by surprise runnels of coolness raised from the depths by the incoming tide.

Introducing the toddler to the sea is a delight. This child who daily objects to being bathed can’t get enough of it. He grins and shouts as the wavelets splash into his little body. He staggers and wobbles forward for more. Rescuing him is a full time job. Half an hour later, as we rinse him (and ourselves) with fresh water dipped from a little well (fresh floats on salt, so don’t dip too deeply), a woman appears with a bundle of washing.

I’ve missed the fact that this is also the village clothes washing facility with a galvanised iron-covered bench of good working height, the well with its long-handled dipper, and a rescued small fibreglass tank our host has just added to it so whoever is doing their washing can dip up however much water they want for the whole job before they start. Handy. There’s a long line between two trees for drying.

We head for lunch leaving the lady to do her laundry with a bit of bar soap and lots of vigour.

After lunch, we’re lounging about chewing betelnut and smoking, and the grandson-in-law asks the big question he’s been pondering, he says, for some time; he has read that Papua New Guinea rates low on standard of living compared with Australia and other places -- what does that really mean?

I open my mouth and that is about as far as I get. If I chewed betelnut myself this would be the time to clear my mouth, call for a new nut, dig deeply into my basket for the accoutrements, fail to find my knife to open the nut and set up a search for that….

In the absence of the habit as a procrastination tool, and having quit smoking a quarter of a century ago, after a longish pause (people here are happy to allow you to think) I have to say that the question has a lot more to it than appears on the surface.

On the face of it, the standard of living of Papua New Guinean villagers is so far behind that of your average Australian, even your poor Australian, that they’re hardly within sight of each other. That’s looking at the matter the easy way -- using developed nations’ measures which have a lot to do with money and goods, and things you can buy and count.

It’s a standard, but is it living?

Here I am sitting in the shade of a mango tree (yes, we finished lunch with a taste of its bounty) on a tropical beach with my belly full, the afternoon sun slanting down, cooled by a bosky breeze, looking out at one of the most beautiful scenes in the world (a couple of fishing boats heading out of the harbour now add an accent to the volcanoes, sea and sky) in congenial company enjoying diverting conversation. The lady’s washing is flapping gaily in the breeze.

This is the stuff of legend -- the dream of a generation of Australian superannuants, most of whom (like their fellows in other industrialized societies) will never see anything like it. After 40 years on the treadmill they’ll find they’re in some sort of financial trap that leaves them struggling in the end to do much more than pay for their own funeral. And while they are myopically searching for pounds (as the currency was when they started saving) and picking up pennies with their arthritic fingers, they’re being demonized as a burden on the community who should keep pounding away on the treadmill until they drop.

Here in paradise, millions of Papua New Guineans live in this dream. They don’t need so-called “labour saving” devices like a washing machine and a drier -- they can wash in the shade and dry in the sun and tropical breeze. They don’t need a range of designer suits and a flash car to go to work -- in fact, generally speaking, going to work in the regular corporate job sense, is a choice rather than an obligation. They eat pretty well from their gardens supplemented by a little hunting or fishing and trading of surplus produce, they can house themselves using bush materials (most people do), and they can lounge around on the beach with family and friends when they feel like it.

True, I know it is really more complex than this, but I would argue that it is not nearly as complex as the big end of town (local or foreign) likes to make out, especially when they are working up some specious argument to defraud the Paradiseans of their birthright -- the land they own by tradition.

Our host family lives in a couple of rooms in a bush materials hut, they cook in three battered pots over a fire in a little lean-to, own half a dozen simple garments each, wash themselves and their clothes on the foreshore, and if they want to go to town, pay K1.50 (about 60¢) for a seat on the local mini-bus. And they garden and fish. They live in and are of the land. They are subsistence farmers who earn a little cash by providing childcare daily for a neighbour who is a doctor (but still lives in a pretty humble dwelling in the village -- who wants more?), and selling a few coconuts and betelnuts, and a little excess garden produce.

They are largely independent of the world’s economy and that drives the world’s financial elite to distraction. The rich make money by manipulating “investment”, by moving money from place to place to exploit the poorest in each land and the world, by looting every corner of the globe for its riches, by sinking the poor into unnecessary debt.

One of their big lies is to pretend that subsistence farming is worthless, that it holds back individuals from personal progress, and makes no contribution to a nation’s well-being. Another is to pretend that the only way a nation can “develop” is to commodify land so it can be bought and sold. The third is a big one -- that national development must be carried out with international “investment” and loans.

All three are the exact opposite of the truth, of course.

About 90 percent of Papua New Guineans are subsistence farmers and feed and house themselves from their land. Hence while this lovely country is high on the list of “poor” nations the vast majority can eat pretty adequately. They aren’t starving. The country’s so-called poverty level is a failure of the measure -- the industrialized nations’ Gross Domestic Product, which measures only cash flows, not work and production.

Commodify land? Why? Buying and selling land doesn’t create wealth it just creates money movement and allows land to become the plaything of the rich. It is productive use of the land that is important. Like sustainably growing the food you eat. You want to build a factory? Okay, lease land. And limit silly and unproductive trading games with the lease.

As for foreign investment -- again, this is largely unnecessary provided local funds are appropriately invested and spent. And most of all, "development" is appropriate. Is a mine that employs no local people, provides virtually no benefits for the host nation, and will be exhausted in 20 years leaving behind massive land damage and water pollution really development? Nope, not for the people of Papua New Guinea.

The strength of subsistence farming in paradise as a way of living in the modern world has been tested and shown to be the best. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, these people I am living among, the Tolais, were awash with cash, making big money producing the best cocoa in the world. Then disease swept through the cacao trees; in a few years, the halcyon days of the cocoa industry were a memory.

Just about everybody lost something, those who had invested heavily in cocoa suffered serious losses, but ... nobody starved, nobody went on welfare (there isn't any anyway, doesn't need to be), and most importantly of all, nobody thought for even a moment that a short walk off a high cliff was the way go.

Why not? Because underneath it all, they had the super safety net of their traditionally owned lands, subsistence farming, and a mindset. In reality, the cocoa, for all its financial glamour, was just an extra they had grafted on to their traditional life. When it collapsed, they were able to lower their sights, clear away the (literally) fruitless cacao trees, plant more food crops, singapo (dryland taro -- 'bun bilong Tolai'), sweet potatoes, corn, and greens, and by and large return to the relaxed life of their ancestors while preparing for the next opportunity.

That’s quality of life, I reckon. That’s what living in paradise is really about.

In Australia, as drought-driven debt piled up in recent years, farmers began suiciding at an alarming rate. They have no comparable safety net in land, alternative lifestyle and mindset.

Yes, there are couple of the standard of living indicators which ought to be improved in Papua New Guinea, education and health are two which could be improved dramatically at very low cost.

However, the solutions the west and Pacific powers such as China offer (apart from publicly slamming corruption which they assiduously feed) involve the total destruction of the Paradisean way of life and the transformation of these hard working, energetic, enterprising people into land-less low-wage slaves and poverty stricken peons working for the (rich and often foreign) man.

That, it seems, is the cost of a high standard of … what? Existence?

Honestly, how does 40 years on a production line or staring at a blank office wall, driven to work overtime by the "lifestyle" demands of your society (you really must have a giant gas BBQ), stack up as “living” compared with the Karavia nambis?

Am I getting a bit radical in my old age or is this wisdom? ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010. The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

When there’s food, we eat

2010-10-24T08:06:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

Here in paradise, aka Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, we have scheduled meals just like anyone else anywhere else -- but we also have a lot of what can only be called opportunistic eating.

It’s not like snacking in Australia where you decide to buy something more or less labelled “snack” and then eat it, often at a designated time (e.g. morning tea or, as Queenslanders call it, little lunch or smoko). Here in paradise the process is product driven, we eat stuff when it falls to hand -- literally.

A ripe mango falls -- and they’re falling all the time right now in the middle of the mango season -- we eat it. Right away, regardless of the time of day or night and whether or not a scheduled meal is in prospect or has just been eaten.

Someone picks a bunch of ripe bananas, they despatch the kids with a hand here and a hand there. Invariably at least one and probably more will be consumed by the recipient on the spot.

A pineapple is in the offing -- the ubiquitous bush knife goes into action, and in no time, slices of the luscious fruit are being passed around, hands dripping with sweet juice.

Fruits here are consumed in season and on the spot with no preparation except slicing them or ripping off the skin where appropriate.

You don’t need to do a lot of preparation in paradise -- the fruit straight off the tree is just so delicious that anything more elaborate than a squeeze of lime and a few grains of sugar on your slice of pawpaw (papaya), a particular weakness of mine, is likely to spoil the taste sensation. Or should that read: “sensational taste”?

In general in Papua New Guinea, every tree and every fruit is owned by someone. While most land is clan owned, usage rights are very clear and woe betide a clan member who pillages another’s tree. And as for a non-clan member who is caught thieving ...

Some trees are in the public domain, however. One of our mango trees has branches in a neighbour’s air space -- the mangoes on those branches belong to the neighbour. Other branches reach over the public road and it is open slather on the fruit for personal consumption.

The level of complexity of it all is illustrated by a soursop tree growing on the roadside verge opposite us. While cassava planted on the verge by our neighbour clearly belongs to the neighbour (in fact, they are harvesting some of it as I write), the soursop tree and its fruit are in the commons.

The other morning -- too early for our eagle-eyed team of juvenile fruit fall spotters -- a ripe soursop fell to the ground. A woman walking down the road later saw it in the grass, inquired of one of our household whether it was available, and on receiving clearance, broke off a handy snack for herself and her child, leaving the remainder with us. Needless to say, despite the fact that most of us had just breakfasted, we honoured her gift by doing the right thing by it, with enough left over for a couple of solid snacks for passersby.

At another level, we ate a mid-morning meal the other day. One of the couples in our house had returned from their garden early with sweet potatoes and greens. My expectation was that I was looking at ingredients for lunch or dinner. Nope. They just cooked up the food (with coconut cream sauce) right then, dished up plates for everyone present, and we ate -- because they felt like it.

Uh oh -- here we go again. My hostess with mini-water melons in hand is heading towards my possy in the shade of the mango tree. What can I say? Thank you, they’re excellent! ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Games children play

2010-10-20T18:05:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

Here in paradise, Vunakabi Village near Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, there is a plethora of kids and a plethora of games.

Right at the moment -- it's the afternoon and the kids are home from school -- two teams of five are playing a game called “tin”. Like the best children’s games, this involves a lot of noise, running around, maniacal activity, and loud disputation about the actual rules and their application.

The total equipment comprises a bunch of empty fish and meat tins (cans) collected from the rubbish heaps of village houses and a ball -- a store-bought rubber one in this case but a missile of banana leaves does as well. They have 15 cans, enough to make a stack five rows high with rows of five, four, three, two, one cans. The venue is a grassed area about the size of a good backyard plus its surrounds -- which include a couple of roughs with long grass and the road and its verge. We have two teams of five, mixed girls and boys in the age bracket 8 to 14.

The game starts with lots of loud disputation about the rules. First, that the teams will be mixed, which team will start the game as the quarry (we’ll called them Team 1) and which as the chasers (Team 2), then the limits of play (no running on the road or into the roughs by Team 1, no running to tag by Team 2 -- which gives the smaller Team 1 players a chance), and finally, when that is decided, the dismissal of a patently self-interested attempt by Team 2 to add more tins to the stack.

Right, we’re ready to play!

Team 1 builds the stack towards one end of the field, then one of them takes the ball and from a much discussed distance finally marked by a heap of discarded thongs/flip flops, throws at the stack to break it. Failure to break the stack in three throws means the ball and ownership of the stack, is turned over. They succeed on the second throw, a kick from a Team 2 member demolishes it completely without scattering the tins too widely, and it is game on!

Team 1 must now rebuild the stack before Team 2 can tag them all with the ball. Rebuilding the stack can be in one go or progressive. Sounds easy enough, but this lot are deadly throwers, even gaining a high percentage of hits when they have to lay-off for a target moving across them, so the rate of tagging can be pretty high.

Amidst much shouting of instructions and encouragement, Team 1 scatters to the boundaries and Team 2 mans up (keeping one player within reach of the tins), passing the ball around, trying to put pressure on. The movement of ball and child is fast, furious and noisy.

Team 1 gradually gets the upper hand, moving play upfield away from the tins. Then one of them lures his opponent into a wild throw. A miss! The ball is in the long grass! In a flash, Team 1’s little Roselynne strikes! All of 8 years of age, she has an uncanny ability to make herself invisible. She initially set herself up on the boundary well away from the tins and made some noisy short forays upfield, but as play moved away, she quietly drifted back and in. The moment she sees the miss she is sprinting, diving, madly rebuilding the stack. Her older sister, Rachel, runs in to help.

They’re nearly finished, but the ball is in the air, coming back hard and flat to a Team 2-er standing over the them. Roselynne is off and away, twisting and turning. Rachel is a little slower, but in sacrificing herself to tagging, gets another tin in place and helps keep Roselynne safe.

Team 1 scatters to the boundaries again. Team 2 mans up but keeps two players near the tins. They know they are in trouble, too much of the stack has been rebuilt, only three more tins need to be put into place to give Team 1 victory. They try to keep play close to the tins, but they can only win by tagging, so they must follow Team 1-ers offering tagging opportunities.

Finally, a Team 2-er tags with an easy short throw up the field. Roselynne is darting in again before the ball has left the hand. Two more tins are stacked; she dashes to safety.

It’s all over bar the shouting now. Team 2 drops a catch, all eyes turn to Roselynne as she darts in, but while they aren’t looking, Dulcie has slipped in from the other side, and the final tin is in place.

And the shouting! Oh my gosh, the shouting! The Collingwood army (notorious followers of Australia’s most loved and hated football team) could take lessons from this lot. Team 1 is not only vociferous in victory, but merciless, chanting glorification of their victory to the skies, recounting how they did it, advising Team 2 of their errors and telling them that they’re about to go down again!

Team 1 wins a string of six games before Team 2 beats them with a cunning set play, a feint then the tagging of Roselynne early in the game. Team 2 gives Team 1 a pounding in the vociferous self-glorification stakes! The two teams swap roles. Team 2 is looking good with a couple of victories before more children arrive.

Too crowded. The tagging team floods the stackers and the game peters out.

But boy, it was fun while it lasted!

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

They’re making money in Rabaul -- literally!

2010-10-20T15:37:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

If you made your own money in Australia then used it for a large public exchange, you could expect the Feds to come thundering through your door in pretty short order and a judge to give you a substantial thick ear for your temerity in threatening the financial security of the realm.

Not so here in paradise, aka Rabaul, Papua New Guinea. Here, you make your own money and you are applauded as a person of substance and worth. Always provided that the money you make is the traditional shell money, tambu, of the Tolai people -- tiny cowrie shells perhaps 5 mm long threaded on param (fathom, about 1.8 metres) length strips of cane.

Shells on cane? You make your own? How can it be worth anything? Anyone could whip up a bunch of the stuff, you might think, and devalue tambu overnight. It’s not that simple nor that easy, of course. If it were, the canny Tolai people -- as lively a bunch of traders and entrepreneurs as you’ll find in any day’s march -- would have rendered tambu valueless long ago.

The shells themselves are pretty common but you need hundreds for each param of tambu and when you look at the production process, you quickly realize there are easier ways to make your fortune. Tambu has survived 150 years of European contact, the exploitation of cheap shell supplies, and a total reconstruction of the local economy which has seen Tolais climb to the top of the cash and consumer tree in PNG. Today, tambu holds firm with a cash equivalent value of perhaps K100 (about $40) per fathom and if you don’t see it used as often in daily market trading as it once was, this is more a recognition of its worth than any loss of value.

Here in my patch of paradise, Vunakabi, a new bride is being welcomed to the family. That means the traditional marriage settlement is in train and that, in turn, means tambu. Production is in full swing and everyone puts in -- men, women and children, including the bride and groom.

The tambu cowrie has long been fished out in the Tolai area so people as far afield as the northern Solomon Islands can make a useful dollar collecting the tiny molluscs as they roam the sea floor, or harvesting them from coconut shells distributed in favoured spots -- the little creatures cluster in the shells. The next step is spreading them out to die and dry in the sun -- an olfactorily disturbing process. At this point, prospective users buy the shells in stubby beer bottle or rice bag lots (a stubbie bottle full of quality shells from the Solomons currently commands a price of about K25 ($10).

In addition to new shells, old ones are constantly recycled. Our household went into the market with “brus” (home grown and cured tobacco) and “buai” (betelnut), accepting only tambu as currency. This resulted in mostly short lengths of tambu which they’re stripping off the cane, inspecting for quality, and threading on to new, longer lengths.

Stripping down the cane and threading the shells is a family operation. First, every single new shell must be carefully gripped in a pair of pliers to crack the back out of it leaving the rim to be threaded on to the cane. In our house, two pairs of pliers are in action, another person is stripping the cane down and smoothing it at what looks like terrible risk to the skin of her arm, and two others are threading -- no easy job, the canes are sized so that the shells grip. A full day and half a night of intensive work produced about five param of tambu and there is no question that this was pretty good going.

The full settlement seems a long way off but no-one is fazed; contributions are filtering through from the farthest reaches of the extended family network to make up the total. Still and all, there will be lots more days and nights of intense work for everyone here.

The marriage settlement or bride price is often disparaged by Australians as degrading the woman to the status of work unit or chattel. Sure you can see elements of that in it, but there is much, much more -- including providing the children with the priceless benefit of access to the bride’s clan land (this is a matrilineal society) and a lot of fun and bonding for all generations on both sides of the exchange.

It is one of the more visible parts of a whole bunch of very important, formalized, and inclusive stuff that has developed over millennia to support a marriage and the children.

It all makes an Australian “traditional wedding”, bride looking like an over-inflated meringue, groom doing his stunned penguin impersonation, merely a remnant of England’s Victorian era, look like very thin stuff indeed. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Pick your preferred paradise

2010-10-17T15:26:00.000+10:00

By Geoffrey Heard

It is difficult to understand the concept of choices between two varieties of paradise. Paradise is perfect, right? So it can’t come in two varieties by definition.

Well, here in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea -- here in paradise -- your nitpicking rules simply don’t hold up. There ARE two kinds of paradise and that’s that!

Right now, I am living in paradise: the village of Vunakabi, inland from Kokopo -- the new Rabaul since the volcanoes devastated the township in 1994. But I’ve just spent the night at a friend’s house at Takubar, just along the beach from Kokopo. I am torn -- Takubar is paradise too. There are two paradises, which is the real paradise?

In the wet tropics, it gets pretty warm and not a little humid during the day. We’re talking 30-32 degrees celsius. Day after day. It can be tiring. Cooling during the night can be limited at near sea level. This makes the Vunakabi area, about 20 kilometres inland and a couple of hundred metres above sea level, a great contender for the title of true paradise.

That distance from the coast and the bit of height mean that while you can revel in the tropical warmth during the day, the humidity is not so aggressive, and at night it cools nicely to a very friendly “light blanket” temperature. No need for noisy, energy-hungry air conditioners. I’m sleeping like a babe. (There is plenty of airconditioning available for those who prefer it, of course.) Further, the views, particularly the afternoon views, over the great valley to the Bainings mountains are spectacular.

Paradise. Let’s call it Paradise 1.

But last night’s visit to Takubar on the beach near Kokopo has left me rent. The night was warm, so it was a case of no bed coverings at all until about three in the morning when a cooling breeze invaded my dreams enough to encourage me to pull a sheet over myself. I slept well nonetheless.

The big reward came with the dawn. That cooling breeze had dropped to nothing, the sun was rising and already delivering heat where it hit. I pulled on my swimming shorts, slipped out the back door, and in 30 steps was sinking into the warm, gentle embrace of the tropical sea.

The sky was blue, the Rabaul volcanoes on the horizon were enhanced by a few fleecy clouds seemingly tethered above them, and a small cargo ship was making into port cutting a white wake across the horizon. Someone nearby was strumming a guitar and quietly singing to himself. Further along the beach, villagers were enjoying their morning wash, happily tossing a wave and friendly “boina malana” (good morning) to me.

It was lowish tide, the sea was almost dead flat. The only word to describe the water was pellucid. Looking down, I could see every feature and creature of the bottom, including my rather odd looking, very white feet, rippling in a constantly breaking and reforming pattern of light and shade as the sun glanced off the tiny wavelets heading into shore. I launched out feeling as though I could swim forever, and although a dozen strokes were enough to disabuse me of that ridiculous notion, I nevertheless felt at once super-energised and languorous.

Paradise 2.

And I suddenly realized (in a relaxed kind of way) that while I had not enjoyed such an early morning swim in this tropical paradise for decades and thus had substantially wasted my life, there are actually millions of people as near as Australia who have never had this sublime experience at all.

Friends, you haven’t lived. Book now! Your destination is Rabaul (Kokopo in reality today), Papua New Guinea. The time to visit is right away, and if you can’t make that, book now for any time (particularly winter for those poor people who, like me, have been suckered into living somewhere that has such a nasty season).

Accept no substitutes -- particularly no pale imitations with a “North Queensland” brand. Remember the box jelly fish -- the one with a sting so painful that even if it doesn't kill you, you actually wish you were dead.

We don’t have them in Rabaul. As I said, paradise. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

It’s mango season in Rabaul

2010-10-16T15:16:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

Is there any more superbly luscious fruit than the mango? Any fruit that gives rise to such extravagant passion? I know, I know -- a freshly picked snow apple can bring tears to the eyes, the old fashioned pears we had in their short season when I was a child ran with sweet juice, fresh grapes off the vine positively sparkle on the tongue as the sun reaches out its first warm fingers on a brisk Mildura (north-western Victoria) morning.

That’s all fine and good, but really, everything considered, there is nothing like a ripe mango straight off the tree, and right now, it is mango season in paradise, aka Rabaul, Papua New Guinea.

You won’t find it in standard dictionaries but you need to realize that “Rabaul” is a short form of “Cornucopia”. About three degrees south of the equator with a moist climate and rich volcanic soil, Rabaul has more food and more variety than you could possibly poke a stick at in a month of Sundays. All that food is as fresh as the day and so often of unmatched flavour. I’ve eaten pineapples here that in the instant of consumption were peerless, and pawpaws galore that (with a little lime juice and sprinkling of sugar) could be considered a solid form of the nectar of the gods.

But a fresh ripe mango...

The mango season is special this year because it is coming at the end of a most unusual drought. Rabaul has just had its first decent downpour in six months. Due to this drought, the mangoes are a little thin in the ground.

At Vunakabi village where I am staying, on the ground is where the mangoes are. Like so many other things in paradise, mangoes simply fall to hand. Sure, if you want to supply a market stall or cater for a gathering, you can despatch kids with sticks to encourage the mangoes to come within reach or send someone up the tree to shake branches, but for personal consumption, mostly you just sit there and wait for ripe mangoes to fall off the tree so you can pick them up at your convenience and revel in their lushness.

This year, though, there is no question of “your convenience”. With mangoes in shorter than normal supply because of the drought, competition for the falling fruit is hot to say the least. The thump of a mango hitting the ground is surprisingly loud (Rabaul’s volcanic soil is full of tiny air spaces and booms like a drum) but it’s best when a mango from a big tree hits a tin roof in the afternoon when all the children are home from school.

CRASH!!! It sounds like a bomb going off.

“Mango!!!” The cry explodes from a score throats. Games, playthings, brooms, vegetable peeling knives, and (almost) baby siblings go flying as every child within earshot hurtles out of the blocks determined to collar the precious fruit.

The race might end with a small outbreak of high pitched disputation to do with the smaller children telling the bigger ones how they should share -- of perhaps claiming unfair use of superior weight and muscle. Whatever, while the winner takes all, there is lots of sharing around -- children here are brought up to live in a community.

Furthermore ...

CRASH!!!

Excuse me -- I’ve got to run! ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Real community living in a living community

2010-10-14T14:40:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

I’m walking up the road to take a picture of the sunset. A hundred metres along, I’m greeted by a couple of women sitting at the roadside gossiping. “Boina ravien, Geoffrey, yu go we?” (Good afternoon, Geoffrey, where are you going?) they say, the greeting in the Tolai language and the remainder of the sentence in Tok Pisin -- the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea. Everyone here knows I speak only a few words of Tolai beyond the usual greetings, so apart from when they're pulling my leg, they speak to me in Tok Pisin or English.

I explain that I am going up to the church to take pictures of the sunset. Which church, they ask? The Catholic church, I reply. There’s a good view from our United Church, says one. There certainly is, I agree, but there’s a strategically placed coconut palm that’s part of the view from the Catholic church which will enhance the picture. Oh, that’s important, they agree. And what are they doing? I ask. We chat back and forth for a few minutes, then: “Io rou!” (You go!), they say.

And off I go ... for another 100 metres where I repeat the process at a cluster of roadside stalls. The dozen or so people there include a couple of strangers, so explanations about me and my presence in the village are added on.

This is life in paradise, aka Vunakabi Village, Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, where I am holidaying. This is life in paradise, aka Vunakabi Village, Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, where I am holidaying. Having spent the Australian winter working on a way back to Papua New Guinea with some sort of employment attached, I’ve decided on a holiday. I need a change of scenery from Melbourne and a warm temperature top-up!

I’m staying with my adopted son, Bale (pron. Barlay), and his wife, Roselynne, and immediate and extended family (Gilbert and Sullivan’s Sir Joseph had nothing on Bale et al -- I share paternity with the other Dad, ToPiamia, now in his 80s and a good friend, and have children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren here, to say nothing of sisters, brothers, and cousins you can reckon up by dozens and dozens), and slowly, slowly, I am learning to live in an open way in a close knit community again.

It’s not as easy as you might think.

I’ve spent far too long in Australia and in crime-ridden Port Moresby -- I’ve gone private. In Australia, we know little or nothing about our neighbours and reveal correspondingly little of ourselves; in Port Moresby you keep private so the rascals don’t find out what’s behind the fence (Going up the hill to take some pictures of the sunset, eh? That means the house will be unoccupied for at least 40 minutes ...).

Here in Vunakabi, I am reminded daily of the way you need to be open in a village where everyone lives cheek by jowl, everyone knows everyone else’s business (most house walls are literally sieves), everyone works their small subsistence holdings close together, and everyone relies on everyone else. I’m relearning how positive and facilitating that can be.

People still have secrets, of course, but the greater part of their lives is an open book to their neighbours, relatives and goodness knows who! The linkages among the Tolai people stretch across their territory, the Gazelle Peninsula, home to about 200,000 people, across Papua New Guinea, and around the world -- wherever Tolais live.

Ordinary privacy is by consensus -- manners, if you like; people are aware of stuff but they don’t talk about it and they don’t throw it in others’ faces.

My family’s house happens to be on the main road and since it includes a little store, it is something of a focus. In the morning, we sit out in the sun for a little while until the old joints get mobile, then move into the shade (it’s heating up to 30-32 celsius), munch our breakfast, drink our tea, and exchange greetings -- and information -- with everyone who comes within range.

“Boina malana!” (Good morning!) we call. Then a bit of back and forth, and finally: “Where are you going?” Now -- it is pretty obvious where they are going. We are talking to a woman carrying a bag on her back with half-a-dozen young banana plants sticking out of it, on her head she is balancing a garden spade, by her side is her child with a little bag, a banana plant and a bottle of water, and they are walking down the hill in the direction of the family garden.

But we do not presume, she can tell us if she wishes: “We’re going to the garden to plant bananas”. We inquire about her family’s corn, sweet potato, beans, betel nut, and a number of other crops, and exchange a remark or two about the prospects of rain -- we’re having a drought in green Rabaul. “Io rou!”, and with an answering “Io!” off they go.

But this information extends far beyond the commonplace, the here and now, and the immediate environs.

I wanted to meet a man whose acquaintance I had made in an Australian/western environment. So I was thinking about it in Australian mode -- it was my private business. BUT after a couple of failed appointments, my family gently prompted me and I talked to them about it. Immediately “my” business became “their” business and they brought to bear their vast web of information and linkages (there was even a family connection -- slight by western standards, practically immediate by Tolai standards), and the young woman across the road worked at a place where this bloke often called. Difficulties explained, problem solved.

Stuff can be simple when you know what is actually going on.

The advent of mobile (cell) phones has added to the information flow. I was heading off to a distant part of the district, the Gelegele area, to visit a couple -- former colleagues. I was to catch the bus to Kokopo, no sweat, I did that all the time, then wait at the Gelegele bus stop -- no signposting, simply a mango tree outside a vacant lot adjacent to a certain store in Kokopo.

Next day, I was waiting at the Gelegele bus stop in Kokopo with a bunch of green bananas in hand and a bagful of other gifts from the market over my shouder. I was obliged to introduce myself and my mission to several kind strangers concerned about my welfare. Not a lot of white-haired white men are found at the Gelegele bus stop (I had become a familiar sight at the Vunadidir/Kerevat stop outside the Echo store), much less with a bunch of green bananas. Then a PMV (Passebger Motor Vehicle -- in this case, a ute with seats in the back) pulled up. “Hello Geoffrey,” said the driver, a total stranger, “jump in front.” Turns out someone from Vunakabi had seen me, phoned home to ask what on earth I was doing at the Gelegele bus stop with a hand of green bananas, they in turn had then phoned their son’s future father-in-law who lived at Gelegele, and he had called the bus driver. Tolai express all the way.

You can look at all this in different ways. Many westerners would consider the level of questioning and the calm expectation of answers intrusive, an invasion of privacy, but here in Rabaul/Kokopo, you learn to expect such questions and you know you are actually participating in an exchange of information with people who are interested and expect you to reciprocate.

In addition, it seems to me that there is a different understanding of what is public and what is private. Sitting in a “haus win” (open shelter) at the market, I’ve been involved in a number of conversations and discussions with strangers in the past few days. Some of the talk is jsut chat and gossip, some is deeper -- land ownership, climate change, and cultural preservation and adaptation have all come up.

In Australia, two people sitting among strangers in such a place will discuss quite personal matters and be deeply offended if someone contributes to the discussion. “Mind your own business!” they are likely to snap with adjectival reinforcement. But in Rabaul, any discussion in public is pretty much open slather, nobody would think of discussing in public anything which is really, seriously private.

At the same time, there are matters people know about which are not discussed or even hinted at in the normal course of events -- an absolute necessity in villages where houses with plaited bamboo walls are built cheek by jowl. A hilarious example of this breaking down occurred many years ago when school students in their middle teens (14-16) were given an essay to write for an external examination. ‘A night to remember’ was the topic. Students told startled examiners more than they really wanted to know about sex in the village! Maybe the fact that the essay was assessed externally had something to do with their openness.

Peyton Place, eat your heart out.

And mention of Peyton Place (a best selling ‘tell all’ novel about the scandals in small town America published in the 1950s) brings up the negative side this. I’ve talked about the Tolai people here, because I am living among them and experiencing the benefits of that. But a similar situation exists to a greater or lesser extent in most other communities throughout Papua New Guinea -- it’s just not generally as extensive as it is among the Tolai because they are such a big, single group.

I say I am living in paradise in Rabaul, but yes, the Tolai community has its quota of criminals, charlatans, confidence tricksters, thieves, thugs, murderers, and corrupt individuals. It is not without corruption in its politics and administration -- a corruption that often relies on this web of linkages, information, and knowledge, loosely known as the wantok system. But even as the corrupt exploit the system, others monitor what’s going on through the same connections.

On balance, I suspect the good is winning over the bad in respect of political corruption. It might well be that the Tolai people, so long leaders in so much of Papua New Guinea’s development, will lead a swing of the pendulum against corruption throughout this nation. It would be fitting. ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

OMG! It’s so c-o-l-d...

2010-06-01T22:05:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

Written: 1st June, 2010

NOTE: I wrote this at the time, but did not post it. I should have done so. Here it is now.

Well, I’m out. Professional differences, let’s call it, have slingshotted me out of Papua New Guinea and back into Australia. Not the happiest outcome, but there was really no alternative after Australian volunteers International failed to support me when I told the boss that I was old enough and ugly enough not to want to put up with bullshit and game playing, so let’s cut the crap and get on with the job, or alternatively, he could ring up AVI and have me hurled hence back to the place of wintry darkness and gnashing of teeth -- viz Melbourne.

The AVI Country Manager had more than once expressed her disapproval of my frankness and refusal to accept childish rules from her side of the fence (see “I break out” and similar stuff posted earlier) so I suspect she was not unhappy to be shot of me. She certainly gave no indication to me of support.

And I am sitting here shivering (it was 30 celsius when I flew out of Port Moresby and 5 celsius when I landed at Tullamarine that night), wondering what on earth possesses anyone to live in this cold hole -- Melbourne, Australia -- where the news is a litany of violence and brutality, where smugness and denial of reality reign, where the media are complicit in the subversion of people-centred, democratic values and action.

And where corruption is perfectly obvious to anyone who is willing to do that first essential of criminal investigation -- follow the money trail.

I raise this because it is so often one of the first things mentioned when I speak to Australians of Papua New Guinea. First thing after the heat. Yes, it is warm, on the coast is it 30-32 celsius every day. And yes, Papua New Guinea has its share of corruption -- quite a big share.

But corruption in PNG has one saving grace -- it is kind of overt. Papua New Guinea’s population is five million, but its power elite is quite small and its principal mode of operation -- the “wantok system” -- is well known and easily identified. Tens of thousands of Papua New Guineans pay for the privilege to march against corruption and it is acknowledged in official documents. These things suggest the possibility of change.

Victorians, particularly, and many other Australians, on the other hand, deny that corruption exists here or at best are doubtful about it -- even when the evidence if obvious. Others are apathetic or don’t take it seriously. They dismiss talk of corruption as “conspiracy theory” -- as though this is some kind of irrefutable rebuttal of the allegation. Conspiracy? Of course conspiracy. Corruption inevitably involves conspiracy!
 Maybe there are “a few bad apples in the barrel” but corruption, real corruption, they say, tends to happen “over there”, in those other places. Mostly those places where people aren’t white. It’s a kind of racism.

The most outstanding example I’ve seen of this kind of barefaced lie was when the former Premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks, went to Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor) to report on corruption and recommended they set up an anti-corruption commission. Asked on his return whether we should have such a body in Victoria, Australia, he replied, with a perfectly straight face, that no, we didn’t need one because corruption wasn't a problem here.

Where in PNG you have a Chinese Government owned copper mine that appears to be not about to return one kina to Papua New Guinea while leaving a legacy of terrible pollution of the sea, here in Victoria you have a huge desalination plant being built which will put the people of this state into debt for 30 years and leave a legacy of terrible pollution of the sea.

On our behalf, the ALP State Government which many people voted for because it campaigned against a desalination plant, signed up for a huge plant with an establishment cost clearly out of scale with what we are getting, along with a guarantee that we will buy every drop of water it produces for the next 30 years ... regardless of whether we need it or not.

A public/private partnership, they called it, and as such, the details of the contract are commercial-in-confidence, so we the taxpayers and electors -- the mutts paying for this fraudulent scheme -- are barred from seeing them!

Is this corrupt? Did money or other benefits change hands? I don’t know -- I cannot follow the money trail because it is so tightly locked away. But I do know that there are billions of dollars involved and the only publicly acknowledged beneficiaries are the private owners of the plant. A bunch of workers who build it and a handful who run it will get wages.

Certainly the people of Victoria are not beneficiaries. The downsides for them are many. Here are some key ones:

• VICTORIANS LOSE OWNERSHIP OF WATER -- this is a backdoor privatisation after governments of both hues (alleged left and right, but in reality, both right wing tending towards national socialism) perceived it would be very unpopular to privatise existing water supplies outright.
• Victorians have been CONDEMNED TO PAY FOR DECADES for the most expensive water in the world. They could have had sufficient water by other means much more economically, without nearly as much pollution, and without the cataclysmic on-costs in both financial and environmental terms.
• The State’s GREEN ELECTRICITY TARGETS HAVE BEEN SUBVERTED -- the desalination plant demands a huge amount of electricity to run, which seriously undermines any attempt to cut Victoria’s electricity generation using its dirty brown coal technology. That’s a huge benefit for the private owners of the brown coal fired electricity generators (originally state-owned, but sold off 20 years ago in another deal that put the future of Victorians into the uncaring hands of private interests).

Consider this alternative. For less than the cost of the desalination plant, the State Government could have installed and plumbed in 22,000 litre (8,000 gallon) water tanks on every residence in Melbourne to capture and use roof run-off which is currently drained off to rivers and Port Phillip Bay at considerable expense. There would be no on-costs (the annual cost of the desalination plant is $560 million whether it is producing water or not) and the tanks could be made a requirement under the building code so that all new homes had them -- at no further cost to the government.

Of course, such a solution would aid small business, not big business and finance, and it would make ordinary people freer by making them largely independent of the centralized water system. It would be pro-democratic.

Instead, we get the grossly over-priced desalination plant, enormous debt, 30 years of payments, and skewing of the water supply system.

If deals like this, involving stupefying sums of money, do not benefit the people the politicians are supposed to represent and whose interestes they were elected to safeguard, then why would the pollies sign up for them?

The politicians betrayed their trust, broke their promises, kept secret public information, and signed contracts providing huge financial benefits to a small group of individuals. In short, they corrupted the democratic process; they are complicity with the big end of town in attempting to destroy democracy.

What induced them to do so? I can see only one realistic answer.

Now let me turn my back on this cesspool and its slimy creatures and get busy working out how to return to Papua New Guinea where at least I don’t have to pay to keep warm! ###

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

The opinions and comments in this article are his own.

Hot prices

2010-05-24T20:45:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

Just before I left Australia, I dashed around in search of a couple of polo shirts. I wanted good quality cotton ones that would hold their shape, with a breast pocket (I need somewhere to put my 11 year old phone so I can entertain myself when I bend over by seeing it slide out and bounce on concrete).

Prices were in the $20-$50 range but there wasn’t a decent polo shirt to be had in my XXL size.

Pottering around a store in Port Moresby the other day I also failed to find a polo shirt I liked. I did notice, though, that the stock looked very similar to what I has been looking at in Australia. Both came from the same place, China.

I also noticed the pricing. The figures looked much like the Australian figures, 20-45, but the prices were in kina, the Papua New Guinea dollar, so they were K20-K45.

Now let me translate that into Australian dollars for you. The current rate of exchange is about K2.50 = $1.00, so K20 is the same as $8 and K45 is the same as $18.

If the Papua New Guinea prices can be taken as a guide to what the prices of these goods in Australia could be, then someone is making a killing between the Chinese factory and the Australian consumer.

Looks like Australian consumers are being ripped off, doesn’t it?

Let’s also look at products locally grown in both places.

The excellent rump steak I bought in a Port Moresby supermarket the other day was K25/kg, that’s $10/kg, a price you haven’t seen in Australia for a long time. The top Continental Hot Dogs were K11.55/kg, $4.62/kg.

Bear in mind that these are premium products. Also bear in mind that the rump steak is not from some old cow grazing in a Port Moresby backyard. It comes from distant parts of Papua New Guinea so there are serious costs involved, including transport, before it hits Port Moresby’s cool counters.

Why is meat so much more expensive in Australia? One reason is that it is feedlot -- fed on grain -- an inherently expensive process. It is also poked full of hormones and antibiotics (which ought to be banned) at great expense. The Papua New Guinea cattle are grass-fed, which is inherently cheaper if you have lots of grass. Who wants grain-fed beef anyway? I repeat -- this beef beats anything I have had in Australia for tenderness and flavour for as long as I can remember.

I was asking my local butcher about grass-fed beef just before I left Australia. He told me he simply couldn’t get it -- there was a demand for it but little of it about. As a result, it had become a premium item with the concomitant inflated price!

Australia, do you get the feeling that you are being ripped off -- again?

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

I break out!

2010-05-18T13:47:00.004+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

15 May 2010

Last night I broke out of the prison of Port Moresby and the bonds the Australian High Commission and Australian Volunteers International have woven around me.

They have been telling me since before I arrived back in Papua New Guinea how important my “personal security” is. They are quite sure I am safest when in the city. Well, certain parts of the city. And at certain hours. I’ve been chafing at these bonds.

The chance to slip them for a night was too much of an opportunity to miss.

So it was that in tropical darkness at half-past-nine last night, my mate Lavui and I and a bunch of fellow Papuan desperadoes (a measure of our desperateness -- one was a girl aged only 12, but she had to escape too), boarded a Toyota Landcruiser ute to slip out of town for what amounted to a cannonball run to Lavui’s home village and back -- in darkness all the way.

We thought we might be in trouble before we had even got started when we were stopped at a police road block at 6 Mile, but they cleared us to go on. Routine license check, it turned out.

A few minutes later we were speeding east along the Magi Highway, the bar tread tyres howling on the bitumen, escaping towards tomorrow’s sunrise.

Free at last!

Free to drive and talk and share food and a tinny and a bottle of water. Free to chew betelnut and laugh and bounce over potholes. Free to joke, share intimacies and save the world.

Most of all, free to take a small risk and to be ready to rely on our own resources, friends and rat cunning if we ran into trouble, which might range from getting bogged on an untrafficked bush track in the middle of the night to encountering modern highway men.

As an Australian Volunteer, I have been warned against taking these clearly horrendous risks. I can only say thank God (or The Force or the rock in the back garden if you prefer) that today’s Papua New Guineans and their and our forefathers, and before them, the English, were a bit more open to a spot of risk than your average Australian abroad is these days.

If Papua New Guineans were as wimpy as today’s Australians this whole country would grind to a halt. If our forefathers, even the generation of Australians of which I am part, had been as wimpy as the current lot, none of us would exist, let alone live in Australia.

Or Papua New Guinea. Quite apart from the fact that there was the occasional hold-up on this very road back in the 1970s when it was a washboard corrugated dirt strip and I drove it in my VW Kombi half-cab, I’ve recently been reading a history of Tamate, the Rev. James Chambers, a London Missionary Society man who was one of the leading lights in bringing Christianity to this lovely land in the late 1800s.

After a life of incredible risk and adventure, even by the standards of the time, he was killed and eaten by the Goaribari people of the Gulf province. His fellows in a mission vessel escaped the Goaribari canoes due to caution on the part of their captain and a chance fair wind.

That happened not much more than 100 years ago today, and a touch over 60 years before I made my first acquaintance with a Goaribari man, who was an announcer at a radio station I was managing at Kerema in the Gulf. There could have been people still alive then who had had a slice of Tamate.

I’m told to avoid large gatherings of Papua New Guineans because something (like the assassination of the Emperor Franz Josef, perhaps?) might result in stuff going pear-shaped.

Yet this is a country where Australians are generally highly regarded and 99 percent of the population offer a smiling greeting on first acquaintance. Sure you might get the occasional troublesome drunk (try Paddy’s Bar any time after 9pm on Fridays) but if a jocular word doesn’t carry the day, the highly efficient bouncers will. Or you might run into someone with a genuine grievance, but concern and sympathy will carry you through.

Or if you get out of town, even in the outer suburbs, you might run into modern highwaymen. As we pounded down the highway last night, I recalled the opening of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities where the coach is struggling through foggy darkness up the muddy Shooters Hill, the armed guard alert to the danger of highwaymen who might attack at any second.

The story is fiction but the setting was reality. Nevertheless, life went on. Economic and social development took place, and Shooters’ Hill, now a hardly noticeable incline in south London, is infested with boutiques instead of highwaymen (it is probably a moot question which is worse).

Such, one hopes, will be the case with the Magi Highway in the not too distant future (preferably without the boutiques). In the meantime, life goes on, there is the occasional hold up, but car, truck and bus traffic pounds along the highway day (mostly) and night.

“So what do we do if the highway is blockaded by rascals?” I asked (all street criminals are called rascals here because the term has been adopted into Tok Pisin as "raskol").

“We slam on the brakes and chuck a bonnie,” replied Lavui. (This is a family euphemism for making a U-turn or U-ee, which Lavui adopted with glee after I accidentally came out with it when we were driving together. My daughter’s Year 7 Japanese teacher was named Bonnie Yue, so we adopted her first name to represent the sound of the second name, which in turn sounded like a U-turn).

Then what? Maybe head back to Moresby, maybe just wait a while for the bandits to get bored and go home. Or maybe wait until a big truck came along which would smash though the barricade, then follow it through.

No histrionics were required, and in truth, Lavui has never required them on this run, which he makes often enough if not exactly frequently.

We weren’t really desperadoes, of course, we were on a Mission of Mourning on this night, taking Lavui’s Uncle Male and a big bunch of food to his and Lavui’s home village ready for the feast he would make today to mark the end of a year after his wife’s passing.

The others in the back were a sundry mixture of younger brothers, nieces and nephews and a brother-in-law -- all good friends and all up at any time for a four-and-a-half hour trip to the old home village in the rugged mountains at the back of Rigo, and then back again.

All in a night.

It had to be there and back in a night for two reasons: Lavui needed to be back in Moresby today for his young son’s birthday party, and the ute had to be ready for another trip ... to pretty much the same destination. Why not roll the two trips into one? It would be much more efficient. I have a colleague much given to efficiency. We were having a discussion once, and I asserted that efficiency actually didn’t matter a damn.

And it doesn’t unless it delivers some superior social good.

In this case, Lavui had a family obligation he needed to fulfill. The others wanted a trip down to the old home village even if they would be there only 10 minutes -- just time for a quick chew of betelnut or perhaps, if someone still had a fire going, a cup of coffee or tea, and a catch-up with grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins.

The other trip was another bloke from a nearby village with a different set of relationships and his own imperatives -- including delivering some roofing iron. Socially, it would have been quite bizarre for Lavui to off-load his uncle and the feast food on to the other bloke. Efficient, yes, social good, no.

So there we were, hammering down the highway in the velvety darkness, stopping a couple of times for betelnut refills from tiny, stick and thatch roadside stalls lit by a flickering hurricane lamp, until we were past Kwikila, and then we turned left, north, inland.

It is difficult to depict for you the suddenness of the transformation. At one moment we were on a highway, albeit of only two lanes but nevertheless, black top, and the next we were ploughing through a 50 metre wide ford with the water over the axles.

I’ve been on some pretty rugged “roads” in Papua New Guinea -- the early forms of the road to the Bougainville copper mine site in 1968, the Highlands Highway and the “coffee road” around Elimbari in the Chimbu District in 1970 spring to mind -- but this was as rugged as it gets.

This was genuine 4WD country. Not SUV country, Lavui was at pains to point out, as the ute bucked and bounced over rocks, climbed in and out of washaways and rivers, and slithered through muddy stretches where the wheel ruts were two feet deep. Lavui has a true belief about 4WDs. This place munches up your SUV and spits it out, Lavui averred, that’s why you needed a really serious 4WD. And for him, that meant a Toyota Landcruiser ute. He first drove one on this track when he was 13. That was when he passed his father’s examination -- he could start from a dead stop facing steeply uphill without using the handbrake and without rolling back a centimetre.

That was before power steering, too. This Lavui is no heavily muscled giant of a man, he’s built more on the lines of a cross between a garden rake and a whippet. He’s all bone and tough, stringy muscle; a modern man from Snowy River. And he sure knows how to put the Toyota to the test.

We bucked and slid and and rushed and ground upwards and downwards and across and upwards again for something over three hours. Fortunately, there had been no rain for a few days, so most of the run was pretty dry; we didn’t need to use the shovel Lavui’s mate had thrown in the back against the possibility of being bogged.

As we went, Lavui talked of his childhood in these mountains -- a childhood in which this road played a vital part as the link between the big, wide world and the tiny village where his ancestors were born, lived, loved, died and were buried for millennia. Lavui himself was actually born in New Zealand when his father was studying for his Masters in plant genetics (and suffered heart problems which required open-heart surgery and led, eventually, to his premature and tragic demise) -- but he grew up on this road and every twist and turn was a stepping stone in his life.

Despite hanging on grimly to the grips on the roof and dash, I was thrown around the cab like a pea in a pod. Heaven knows how the passengers survived in the back (actually, I’ve been there and done that 40 years ago, I just can’t remember how I survived and laughed and loved it) but I could hear them singing and joking and enjoying the ride. Enjoying it! Yes, and so was I! We were surviving every challenge!

Finally, a few minutes short of 2am, after four and a half hours on the road, we arrived. The track smoothed out and in the headlights I saw we were on a ridge, with the land falling away steeply on both sides. Small houses with round pole frames, thatched roofs and woven split bamboo walls crowded up to the road on both sides.

“Oooooo!” whooped Lavui, the local greeting, acknowledgement, alarm call.

He pulled up outside a family home. We climbed out, stiff, sore, but triumphant. The youngsters in the back bounced out. Damn! I envied them that resilience.

I sucked in the fresh, clean air, redolent of bush smells with a touch of village, just on the cool side of balmy. Real air - the air all other air should be like. The sky rose in a black vault that went on forever; there was no moon so the stars shone out sharply and the milky way was a mess of bright gossamer strewn across the arch.

I was welcomed with quiet words and transparent friendliness into this little Shangri La, Karai Komana, Cockatoo Mountain, a hamlet of perhaps 200 today, with a remarkable record of producing people of outstanding ability and talent who have served their emerging nation in a dozen fields.

It was too late for anyone to have a fire going, so after unloading Uncle Male and his feast ingredients, we had a quiet chat, a swig of water, and a chew of betelnut, and Lavui took a few steps into the night to commune at his father’s last resting place for a moment -- the father he loved so dearly who had tragically died at only 49.

Then Lavui started the engine, turned the car, the youngsters came bouncing out of the darkness and swarmed into the back, and we were off again.

“We’ll be in Moresby by six,” said Lavui confidently, “it’s faster on the return trip because we’re going downhill a lot of the time.”

Faster down those hills? OMG!

The horrendous climbs now turned into horrendous descents, and the horrendous descents turned into horrendous climbs. We bounced and swung and crashed through the night, the headlights leading us along the track whether it was shale or rock or gravel or mud or water. But Lavui was right, we waded through the last ford and hit the highway again in something under three hours. I saw the highway bridge 100 metres from the turn-off, then the thrum of the tyres rolled into my head and I went out like a light. Lavui woke me as we entered the city in the gray dawn a few minutes before six.

It had been a beautiful night. I made it to the shower, then fell into bed and slept like a babe until noon. I awoke feeling wonderfully refreshed, and got up and washed the clothes by hand (the washing machine has broken down) with a song in my heart.

...

While I was writing this, sitting in what I am assured is the safety of Port Moresby on Saturday night, I heard three quick reports. Bang, bang, bang. 9mm automatic, I would say. Later, there was another, heavier, shot.

I hear such things every couple of weeks or so. Mind you, most of the time it is just the police letting the rascals know that they're around and mean business. There really isn't that much shooting at people.

I went to bed hoping my friends the security guards were all okay. They are unarmed; they have radios, and at night, dogs. A couple of days ago, four men with guns held them up at the precinct gate and stole their vehicle. Sensibly, the security guys offered no resistance.

I’ve told them I don’t want them taking any risks on my behalf. Anyone burgling my house can have everything I own; I’ll help them carry it out if necessary. Life is too short to worry about possessions (although I would hate to lose my MacBook and old Kodak P880 camera).

But this is the situation in the town where my Australian guardians say I am safer than on the Magi Highway and the backwoods track to Lavui’s home village.

You be the judge. I know what I think. No, not think, know!

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Return to Lae

2010-05-18T13:44:00.002+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

Sunday 9 May, 2010

Hello, Lae, on the north coast of Papua New Guinea, booming port and manufacturing centre (in a small way by Australian standards), after 35 years. I flew there yesterday (8 May) for an event I had helped (in a very small way) to organize from a distance, and flew back to Port Moresby today (9 May).

In the good old days (and they were good, although not old at the time), your plane -- a DC3 if you were coming from Rabaul, the Highlands or Madang, or a DC6B if you were coming from Port Moresby -- landed on the airstrip that began just behind the beach and ended in the middle of town.

To be precise, it began just behind the upthrust, rusting prow of a ship partially sunk during World War II, around 20 years before, just off the beach, which nobody had bothered to clean up. Wars are messy things. A bomb had broken its back, apparently, leaving the upthrust bow in a direct line with the middle of the airstrip.

I know that landing planes cleared this obstacle easily, but as the old kite circled over the harbour to make its approach, you couldn’t help conjuring up the ridiculous picture of your plane impaled on the steel spike while you and the rest of the passengers and crew, including a blushing and embarrassed pilot, dived into the sea off the wings.

“Keep your eye on the strip, don’t look at the ship,” I would silently beg the pilot as he made his approach, whilst also debating whether I should keep my pants on before diving into the water when the worst happened or remove them and to dive in wearing only my shorts. Clearly, there were advantages either way -- freer swimming in shorts, no embarrassment on landing in pants.

Whether my mental energy helped or not, no-one ever hit the ship so the pants/no pants debate was never tested.

Today that interesting approach and the convenience of a terminal in the middle of town are long gone. The old airstrip is littered with shipping containers on their way to “the LNG” -- the liquified natural gas project starting up in the Highlands. Semi-trailers roar and pound up and down the Highlands Highway 24/7.

The old strip couldn’t take the new planes, I am told, and in any case a screaming jet engine is not the best centre-of-city auditory experience, so booming Lae is now served by the revived WWII bomber strip at Nadzab about 40 kilometres out in the mighty Markham Valley (and it is mighty, look it up on Google Earth).

In the old days, even the DC6Bs paid homage to the massive upthrust of the Owen Stanley Ranges which separate Papua in the south from New Guinea in the north. To save time and fuel, your DC6B would fly through a saddle so at one point you could look at mountains passing beside the plane on both sides and rising above you. The Fokker F100 medium twin jet flying north from the capital, Port Moresby, today travels so high above the rugged Owen Stanleys that they look like molehills, before descending to land on Nadzab’s wside and handsome strip.

Having flown from Port Moresby in 45 minutes, you grab your luggage off the luggage trolley (the ground crew were a bit slow so the passengers helped themselves -- I bashfully received my bag from the hands of a delightful young lady who enhanced her considerable allure by kicking off her high heels to scramble out through the luggage port onto the trolley) then make a 50 minute trip to Lae along the Highlands Highway, a road far from perfect.

And there’s the rub.

Okay, so the old planes travelled at half to two-thirds of the speed of today’s jet, but they landed right in town. All the time saved in the air today, and more, is lost on the road trip.

In any case, as comfortable and convenient as today’s planes are, I still have a yen for the old rattle traps of yore. They had character. With their grunting and wheezing, their flapping, patched wings and popped rivets, their noise and the proximity of the ground, they continually reminded you of how intrinsically ridiculous it is to strap yourself into a cigar shaped cylinder made of flimsy aluminium and trust yourself to unnatural forces to avoid diving into the ground like a brick.

I mean, a beer can is a cylinder made of flimsy aluminium. Think about it.

And speaking of beer cans raises another objection. In the good old days, you could down your last drink, hard or soft, in the comfort of your hotel, on your back verandah, or wherever, potter over to the terminal and be boarding minutes later.

Today, the unfortunate traveller must lay in supplies for the trip to Nadzab. When departing Lae, as we were, on a quiet Sunday morning, this might be more difficult than you would at first expect. Without the support of your host with special local knowledge of bush bars, you might well arrive at the airport in a parched condition.

As it was, we drove up to Nadzab with time (and can) in hand and my fellow toiler in the vineyard, Lavui, in relaxed mode, only too happy to enliven the pre-flight wait by pointing out the spot where a Cessna had crashed some years ago shortly after he had made several trips on it.

Our plane for the return flight from Lae was a turboprop Dash-8, a bit more human than the F100. While it still cleared the Owen Stanleys with ease, it flew low enough for long enough for me to see the changes in the villages wrought by 35 years. Iron roofs were universal where thatched roofs had been unchallenged before; houses were bigger; and the roads -- they might be tough to drive over but there are certainly a lot more of them going a lot deeper into the mountains.

Unfortunately, Lavui and I were seated in the emergency exit row. This was great for the leg room but offered Lavui’s enhanced sense of humour freedom to range. It says something for the flight attendant’s attitude that she didn’t offer Lavui the inflight trial of the emergency exit he so clearly craved. Mind you, when Lavui focussed on her instead of the exit, he realized with some embarrassment that he knew her -- she had been a year behind him in high school.

Oops!

But what of Lae without the airstrip in the middle of it?

I hardly saw it apart from the drive in from the airport, touring around on
Sunday morning looking for breakfast, and driving out again.

A few impressions for what they are worth. Lae is the wet tropics. Anywhere you look, there is green, punctuated by touches of brilliant colour. You feel wrapped in a mighty green envelope. It’s calming, like the blue of the sea. Then there’s the smell. In Lae, there’s a kind of background odour of rotting compost. And the sounds -- insects and birds rampant.

Port Moresby is green at the moment, just easing out of the wet season, but a score of little things and a couple of big ones, like the naked stone in road cuttings, tell you that Moresby’s green is only skin deep. In a few weeks, it will be gone, the grass on the hills will have dried out to a thin, yellow and brown straw, there will be the usual fires burning it off, and the traditional hungry time will have begun.

As a town, lots of Lae is old and run down, the roads in are awful, but I would prefer it to Port Moresby.

On a sad note, I missed the avenue of stately and massive rain trees that used to mark the entrance of the highway into Lae, providing much-needed shade in this tropical clime.

However, with the increase in travel on the highway and to and from Nadzab, the trees became the preferred habitat of “rascols” -- the universal Papua New Guinea word for street criminals. In this case, the rascols were modern highwaymen armed with shotguns and military carbines who would would pop out from behind their tree to hold up the travelling gentry.

The quick and sad solution of a provincial governor a few years ago was to chop down the grand old trees.

We stayed at the Lae International Hotel, an imposing place in a tropical sort of way, even if you do need a compass and a cut lunch to get from the lobby to your room. But in a town where it rains every second or third day, there was no water for a shower. The town water supply is overtaxed. The hotel has a reserve supply ... but the pump was broken. The room charges remained at full rate. Not good enough.

The hotel was enhanced, however, by pretty amazing pizzas in its Italian restaurant. The ingredients were of excellent quality and distributed with a most generous hand although the cheese was overdone to my taste (and I love cheese). An American couple on the next table was transfixed when our Supreme arrived -- I thought they were going to leap at us and gnaw off our arms to get at it.

Wanting a change of scenery, we went around to the International’s main rival, the Melanesian, for Sunday breakfast. The old Melanesian is a bit more relaxed in style, but don’t order special eggs for breakfast unless you are willing to wait.

And that’s it for Lae. I’ll visit it again another day.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Rabaul -- a great place to visit and I WOULD like to live there!

2010-05-13T13:31:00.005+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard
(Note: I wrote this piece in 2004; one or two things are dated. There are end notes.)

I would have had no-one to blame but myself if my return to Rabaul after more than three decades had turned to ashes on day two.

Overcome by a sense of nostalgia, perhaps, or disarmed by obvious friendliness everywhere, I carelessly left my hire car open while I wandered into the market. An hour later, I returned clutching my purchases. Some tie-dyed laplaps, a bilum (string bag), a giant pawpaw (papaya) and some freshly-picked mangoes. Oh, and limes to go on the pawpaw.

A betel nut chewing trio lounging under a nearby tree flash me a collective crimson grin and a “Gutpela kaikai, laka?” (good food, eh?). Unlike the old Rabaul, just about everyone speaks English today, but people often drop into Tok Pisin for banter or to use particularly apt expressions.

“Gutpela tiru, ia!” I grin back, then turn to the car. My cameras are on the back seat, sunglasses on the dash, other bits and pieces scattered about. Nothing disturbed, nothing missing.
Now I don’t recommend such casualness, obviously you should lock your doors as you would at home, there is some burglary and theft about, but clearly you don’t need to take extraordinary security measures in Rabaul. I felt a warm glow. Rabaul had not let me down. Paradise lives.

Australia is talking about sending 300 police to Papua New Guinea for a year to help rebuilding the police force and establish law and order. Don’t bother sending them to Rabaul, is my advice, sent them to Port Moresby, Lae or somewhere else where they are needed.*

Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, is a superb destination, packed with interest, safe and tourist friendly. And, yes, I would want to live there!

. . . . .

I first saw Rabaul in 1963, assigned by AAP-Reuters, to be their first (and last, it turned out) full time correspondent in the town. I cringe when I think of myself at that time — a wet-behind-the-ears 21 year old who thought he knew everything. Oddly, I did know a little about Papua New Guinea (but not nearly enough, of course), having been interested in it since my Grade 3 teacher at Cheltenham State School, the angelic Miss Burville (I’m not sure of the spelling), returned from a holiday cruise with interesting bits and pieces to spread around the class as prizes. I won a baler shell but missed out on the carved wooden axe I had set my heart on. Now I would have a second chance to get one!

The road to Rabaul from Australia in those days began with a midnight flight from Brisbane to Port Moresby in a four engined DC-6B, arriving at 6 am. Unglue the eyes, change from winter woollies into cottons, then back on the plane to fly north “over a saddle” between peaks in the Owen Stanley ranges to Lae.

Port Moresby’s dry season surrounds, brown hills dotted with gums stunted by thirst, could be somewhere in Australia. The near view of the Owen Stanleys, though, their height, steepness, wildness and sheer superabundance, ridge upon ridge upon ridge, were alien to Australian eyes. As was the approach to Lae, over the sea, seemingly on a collision course with the rusty bow of a war time ship wreck. Here, we switched to a DC-3, a twenty year old refurbished relic from World War II, for the flight across the Solomons Sea and the length of the New Britain Island to Rabaul, on its north-eastern tip.

After the best part of a couple of hours droning low across reef-rich and island studded tropical seas and more ridges of jungle-clad mountains, of flying *around* Mt Uluwan (the Father) a volcano in West New Britain which surges in one mighty cone from sea level to 2300 meters (7,500 feet), topped by a plume so perfect it seems to have been painted in specifically to beguile the eye of the passing tourist, we new arrivals were in a surfeited daze. Blasé was our middle name. Another volcano? Another reef and island studded variegated seascape? Are we there yet?

It is midday with the sun high and bright as we track the coast again and begin a slow descent over the sparkling sea. Signs of habitation increase -- a village nestled in a space slashed out of the jungle along the beach, a fisherman on the reef; a plantation house and buildings set amidst an orderly grid of coconut palms; a road, more villages, more houses.

What looks like a headland juts out ahead, we jump it, roaring low over a small cluster of buildings on the ridge and suddenly, dramatically, the earth falls away and there is Rabaul spread out beneath us. I am told I actually sobbed aloud at that moment as I desperately tried to assimilate a vision so bizarrely different from anything I had ever experienced that it simply did not compute.

The giant, breached caldera like a great saucer, the looming volcanoes around the rim, the neatly laid out and compact town wedged between mountain and sea, the riot of growth, greenness and color, the indigo harbor dotted with scores of craft, international cargo ships, island tramps, yachts and canoes, the twin miniature peaks of the Beehive rocks jutting up in the middle.

Past the town, over the harbour, and past the airstrip on our left -- an emerald green and white grass and koronas (crushed coral) strip cut across a narrow isthmus so that it begins at the sea and ends at the sea like an aircraft carrier. The pilot drops the left wing for a tight u-turn above the rotten tooth of Tavurvur’s crater. For a moment we stare into its emptiness, hissing steam points and spreading sulphur stains, then the plane levels out and we glide in for a one bounce landing.

The ground crew fling open the doors and Rabaul rushes to embrace us. It is hot, humid, charged with sounds and fragrance -- friendly banter in a dozen tongues, a million insects clamoring for attention, the sweet fragrance of a billion flowers and rotting leaves, and a whiff of sulphur to remind us of the dormant threat of those rearing volcanoes.

Welcome to Rabaul.

. . . . .

Your arrival in Rabaul today is not nearly as dramatic and Rabaul itself is only half the town it once was. Less than half. The eruption in 1994 of what the head of the vulcanological observatory, Ima Itikarai, calls “the Rabaul Volcano”, saw to that. Minutes after 6 am on 16 September, 1994, just 10 years ago, the Tavurvur and Vulcan vents guarding the harbor mouth to the east of the town did a reprise with interest of their 1937 joint eruption. One thing that wasn’t repeated was the casualties of 1937; although this eruption was significantly larger, more prolonged and property damage was much greater, nobody was killed. A combination of long memories and close monitoring by and warnings from the observatory meant people in the town and surrounding villages were on the alert and ready to move out. In fact, many had moved to safety well before the eruptions began.**

Rebuilding the town, as was done in 1937, was not an option this time. Sterile, acidic, sharp-edged, irritating ash was everywhere, a meter to two meters thick in the most heavily hit northern and eastern sections of the inverted “L” of the town, on your skin, in your eyes and in every breath you took.

The solution was to clear the building wreckage then let nature take its slow course with regeneration. The port and associated light industrial area and a limited residential area in the southern part of the old town remained while the commercial center was moved to Kokopo, now dubbed new Rabaul, 30 kilometers to the east. The airport in the very shadow of Tavurvur was no longer viable so a new airport was built at Tokua, another 15 kilometers further east again.

Rabaul, once a pocket handkerchief of a town of spectacular beauty and great convenience, is now split into three well-separated parts -- a situation partly redeemed by the sealed road built by AusAID to connect them. The new Rabaul at Kokopo reflects the hasty resettlement of the commercial sector after the eruption; it is far from the planned elegance of the old Rabaul.

Plans are in hand, says Ezekiel ToLulu, head of the Restoration Authority, not only to keep developing the new Rabaul towards a more coherent and livable town structure but also to redevelop the old Rabaul in the volcano’s crater. Plantings are now assisting nature to reclaim the land, and in what may be a pointer to future directions, the old Queen Elizabeth Park, deep in the most eruption-affected area, was cleared and a pavilion built for the Warwagira and National Mask Festival in 2004.***

The dramatic DC-3 arrival, mountain hopping over the Bainings and chucking a u-ey over Tavurvur, is gone for good. If you fly in by Air Niugini these days, you are traveling in the comfort of a modern medium jet, a Fokker F-28-4000 or F-100 at around 26,000 feet (8,000 meters) and landing barely within sight of the Rabaul caldera. For something nearer the DC-3 experience of yore, try Airlink with its smaller aircraft providing a “milk run” service in and out of the regional airstrips as well as alternative flying times on some routes.

. . . . .

The returning old time resident will mourn the passing of the old Rabaul, but for the visitor, there are pluses in the new, three-part town. Truth to tell, old Rabaul was a smidge too self-contained, not to say a little self-satisfied, even smug. For a long time, this held back development of the area’s tourism potential and services -- why bother, when Rabaul was “Rabaul”? Three hotels, the Ascot, rebuilt and transformed to the Hamamas (Happy), at the western end of the main shopping street, Mango Avenue, near the Malaguna Road intersection, and the TraveLodge and the Kaivuna Motel, opposite each other at the eastern end of Mango Avenue and of the town, were the main facilities.

All three were located in the area hardest hit by the volcanoes erupting. Today, the Hamamas Hotel and the TraveLodge are open for business again after moving prodigious amounts of ash and achieving miracles of refurbishment. But along with New Britain Lodge, a couple of blocks back, they stand in virtual isolation -- the parentheses that emphasize the emptiness of the length of Mango Avenue between them. The angled car parking spaces you can still see on the sides of the road used to front on to shady trees and pleasant shops; now they front on to banks of black ash topped by scrappy vegetation. The white painted steel posts that carried electricity down the center of the road are still there; but bent and corroded.

Along with the shift of business and residential life to the new Rabaul at Kokopo has come a shift in focus for tourists — away from “Rabaul” towards the beach, the reef, the bush, and a relaxed lifestyle.

Kulau Lodge was opened 40 years ago with traditional style huts (now upgraded to bungalows) strung along the beach at Kabakada on the north-west coast about 15 kilometers outside the town, then stood alone for many years as the only serious beachfront resort in or near Rabaul.

After the 1994 eruption, with debate raging about the future of the old versus the new Rabaul, nobody was about to commit a large investment to a new major hotel in the new town location which many thought would be abandoned as the old Rabaul was reclaimed. However, people were pouring in to reconstruct, conduct business, or just look, and demanding bed and board. The result was some hasty upgrading of existing accommodation at Kokopo and a mini-boom in the development of beachside resorts that now seem to spring out at you at every turn of the road from the Tokua airport through the new Rabaul.

Between the old and the new Rabauls, tourists are offered a wide range of accommodation of varying levels of sophistication. The top of the line at the moment is probably the Kokopo Beach Bungalows development in the center of the new Rabaul by Taklam Lodge owners and old time Rabaul residents, Simon and Evelyn Foo. They have brought to the development the knowledge and expertise accumulated in Simon’s more than two and a half decades of marketing Air Niugini in tourist capitals around the world. Individual bungalows and a spacious “haus win” -- open air bar and lounge -- are strung along the top of the bluff overlooking St George’s Channel, the Duke of York Islands, and in the distance, the blue outline of New Ireland. Stone steps lead down to the beach where the hotel’s game fishing boat rocks gently at anchor.

Simon and Evelyn and their competitors share their expertise and knowledge through the East New Britain Tourist Bureau, the provincial tourism industry body, and the local Chamber of Commerce. The Bureau is promoting the relaxed island lifestyle and the amazing food of Rabaul, the culture, arts and crafts of the Province, the volcanoes, which have developed new appeal (their activity today is confined to releasing sulphurous vapor)****, the war history of the area, the unrivaled wreck and reef diving (you can just wade in right off the beach), all kinds of sea fishing, including game fishing (if the marlin and sailfish aren’t biting off Rabaul, they are sure to be active around the corner of Cape Gazelle only an hour or so away), mountain and bush trekking and caving.

The lifestyle has always been there, as have the culture, arts and crafts of the Tolai people who live in the Gazelle Peninsula, known for their Dukduk and Tubuan ceremonies, and the Bainings people living in the mountains behind, with their amazing night spectacle, the Fire Dance. Today it is better organized to ensure visitors get a more comprehensive but authentic experience. The peak attraction is the combined Warwagira and National Mask Festival held together annually in July (7-16 July, for 2005) which are attracting increasing interest both from participants from all over Papua New Guinea wishing to strut their traditional mask art and “singsings”, and from visitors, who enjoy two weekends and a week between of some of the very best traditional and contemporary performance, art and craft.

Rabaul’s war history is an old attraction too, but again it is now more accessible to visitors with the Kokopo Museum, signs along the road marking points of interest which often used to be kept secret, and tours of the multitudinous tunnels the Japanese dug to hide 100,000 troops as American and Australian bombs rained down on them.

Caving is a new attraction not even talked about thirty years ago. It is still only for serious cavers, but those with the interest and expertise can plumb the depths of the second deepest and longest limestone caves in the southern hemisphere. The depth and length claims may be understated; there is exploration work to be done.

. . . . .

Rabaul in the 1960s was very much a “foreigners town” -- completely dominated by expatriates -- Australians, Europeans, Chinese and Papua New Guineans not from the region. The 100,000 Tolais living in the Gazelle Peninsula were essentially visitors to the town then -- they came into Rabaul to sell produce, trade, hold Council meetings, meet with the “Gavman”, the administration. But few lived in the town itself.

This was still largely so in 1994, Dr Klaus Neumann notes in his excellent and highly readable book, Rabaul, Yu Swit Moa Yet: Surviving the 1994 Volcanic Eruption, but nevertheless, the Tolai people identified Rabaul as their own and were deeply affected by its destruction.

Just 10 years on, the three part Rabaul is a Tolai town. Tolais live and work in the town and use it in ways they never did in the past. They own, manage and run businesses, offices and enterprises. It starts with the woman who smilingly hires you a car and ends with the Air Niugini clerk who goes to seemingly infinite trouble rearranging your bookings so you can stay an extra day in Rabaul -- then comes up with a credit! Air Niugini is paying you to spend another day in paradise!

These days, most of the people you will meet in Rabaul are Tolais, all of those friendly people who give you a wave and a smile as your drive past, helpfully offer you directions or sell you mangoes, pawpaw and pineapples for pennies at roadside stalls outside town will be Tolais.*****

Lifted out of the caldera, Rabaul has become an integral part of the Gazelle Peninsula. It feels as comfortable as an old shoe.

. . . . .

I have been told I should take up a sport, golf, perhaps, or bowls, to prepare for my declining years, so since my mind was in a leisurely kind of hyperactive I-never-want-to-leave-here mode (I thought about it all the time, but thought slowly) after a week in Rabaul, I visited the local golf course at the Ralum Club, on the edge of the new Rabaul at Kokopo.

There is a fence and a gate, and a sign carrying a stern message: “Members Only”. The gate man opens up with a smile. You can walk around the end of the fence, anyway.

The first tee is just out the front of the venerable Ralum Club itself, a slightly down at heel building, with dark, polished wood floors, and completely open on this north side in recognition of the fact that a breeze is welcome 99 days out of 100 in Rabaul, and that there are better ways of living than cooped up in an airconditioned box cut off from the tropical warmth and atmosphere. Fans circle lazily.

A foursome is teeing off so I stroll over for a look and a word. Two Tolais, an Australian and a Chinese are chatting easily together -- old friends meeting for their weekly game. When I arrived in Rabaul in 1963, such a grouping was unheard of, the whites generally held themselves very much aloof, the Chinese were too busy making a place for themselves in the world (they were stateless at the time), and the Tolais weren’t interested in golf anyway. Now it is commonplace in this new Rabaul.

In a golfer’s terms, this is a 181 meter drive made tricky by the drop of about 30 meters right in front of the tee down to the level of the green and the rest of this nine hole course. Overshooting will land your ball with a splash in what the members are pleased to call “the biggest water hazard in the world”, St George’s Channel between New Britain and New Ireland, which opens at both ends into the Pacific Ocean.

In anyone else’s terms, these people are crazy. They are hitting off into one of the most beautiful views in the world. The coconut palms bend to the breeze, hibiscus, frangipani, flame trees and more flare in a score of colors against the emerald green of the land, the narrow, black strip of volcanic sand beach, and the hazy blue sea and sky. Giant rain trees drip with orchids. Around the tee, tiny black swifts flit and flash so fast they cheat the eye as they capture insects in flight. A storm head is building in the sky and tropical showers blot out parts of the jagged blue silhouette of the New Ireland mountains, and highlight the Duke of York Islands lying hull down in the channel.

It is a view of adventure and romance, and it ought to be. This is where the redoubtable Queen Emma, the renowned American-Samoan beauty, chose to set up her home and headquarters for a South Seas trading empire in the 1880s.

Our players shatter the romance with their drives, then clatter down Queen Emma’s steps to pursue their game below. I retire to the bar for a quiet gin-and-tonic while I seek and answer to the big question: how on earth can I organize my life so I can live here forever? The supplementary question is nearly as important: if I manage that, should I take up golf or simply sit in the haus win (the wind house) sipping a g&t?

. . . . .

Eager to attract tourists, Air Niugini offers generous discounts on fare plans booked from Australia and elsewhere outside Papua New Guinea. I was surprised at how economical visiting Rabaul was despite the advertised fare structure. In addition, while my discount excursion fare flying Air Niugini between Australia and Port Moresby allowed no change to the external sectors without penalty, change to the internal itinerary was free.

Once in Papua New Guinea, of course, your dollar goes further. The local currency, the kina, is about two and a half to the Aussie and with 100 toea to the kina, the money handles just like ours. It is even minted in Melbourne.

Air Niugini’s flight information is available at http://www.airniugini.com.pg/. Information about accommodation and facilities in Rabaul and East New Britain generally is available at http://www.eastnewbritain.com.

. . . . .

END NOTES ADDED IN 2010:

* In preparation in 2004-5, this did not happen after the PNG Parliament refused to allow Australian police to operate without being subject to PNG law.
** The volcanoes erupted again in 2005 and continue to sporadically pump out ash.
*** With continuing ash emissions, this is no off the agenda.
**** And ash in varying quantities.
***** This is still generally true, but more Papua New Guineans from outside the province have migrated to Rabaul. They are particularly active selling crafts at the new Rabaul market, at Kokopo.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. He madee two brief private visits to PNG in 2004 and 2006. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

My M’dina

2010-04-25T13:39:00.001+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

You remember, said a wondering voice on the phone
Of course. I stalk a land of ghosts
We walk and talk and together we recall
A thousand lessons, a thousand little jokes
They made of me and I of them
Before I could remember
As they so gently-roughly formed
The dull gray stuff inside my head
Into my life; their living

Now half a century on, those days, Donne’s
Rags of time, stand in sharp relief as though
Engraved on the inside of my eyes
Names and faces and fun and beauty
There’s only a handful left it seems
Except virtually in my head
Shades and shadows everywhere
Traces of the dead.

I rage at the manner of their passing
Some victims of anno domini of course
But also of a million minute thugs
Named and unnamed; parasites, virii and bacteria
That corrupted their paradise
And of another corruption that meant
A common drug, a doctor’s minutes
Withheld.

Forever.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

The “right” place to put stuff in the kitchen

2010-04-25T13:25:00.003+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

This morning I was searching for a cutting board. I have two; they both seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth. The frustrating thing was that I knew they were somewhere within the small compass of the kitchen because I knew what had happened.

The kitchen had undergone a womanly visitation.

Being wifeless in Port Moresby (that’s my wife, Gabriela, with her picture up at the head of the followers panel. She’s in Timor-Leste -- hello darling!) I am finding that there are even more places in the kitchen to put stuff that a woman will consider logical and correct than I had dreamed of.

On each womanly visit to my house I am gently but firmly driven out of the kitchen and next day spend time searching for stuff -- stuff which has been moved to someone else’s idea of the “right” place. Sometimes -- well, pretty often -- they have a point, like the case that had me searching around this morning.

If that sounds prima facie sexist it's not meant to be. It's simply a fact. Blokes don't re-arrange kitchens in my experience.

Now I’ve always been aware, of course, that people’s right places for stuff, particularly kitchen stuff, can vary widely. For instance, Gabriela has spent a lot of time in Timor-Leste, her mother country, in the past decade or so, helping the place get on its feet. Returning home to Melbourne for a visit, she would pretty soon re-arrange the kitchen stuff her way from the consensus by default reached by our growing daughter, Jessica, and me.

At end of her stay, Jessica and I would put her on the plane, drive home and without need of a word or a wink, head straight into the kitchen to put all the stuff back into its right place ... according to us!

I had also noticed what amounts to a feminine conspiracy about this. My sisters or sisters-in-law, older daughter or nieces visiting my home in Australia would consult my wife about the right place to put things; they would never ask me.

Now I’m not a total dummy in the kitchen. Let it not be forgotten that at the age of 13 I won fame and glory by taking out first prize in the decorated sponge competition, open class, beating all he big girls and the mothers, at the Mordialloc-Chelsea High School fete. Not quite the Iron Chef, I admit, but not too shabby either.

So back to Port Moresby.

Several times now we have had a barbecue (there’s a open barbecue in the backyard and for K4.00 the Goilala firewood sellers at Malaoro market provide enough first class firewood for at least two barbecues) with people from the organization I work for.

The barbies bring women into the house, staff and distaff (ho, ho, ho -- I just realized I have been waiting decades to write that phrase!). Inevitably, they take over the joint and do stuff ranging from all the cooking (except the barbie) to virtually cleaning the house from top to bottom -- totally disregarding my pleas and protests along the lines of “but I just did it this morning” or “I’ll do that in a minute”. Obviously what I did was insufficient or lacked staying power and minutes count.

And they rearrange the storage as they go.

Sometimes they “consult” me. “I’ll put the Italian Herbs in that cupboard with the salt and pepper, it’s better to keep them together, don’t you think?” they’ll say, only it isn’t a question. Sometimes they will have a discussion among themselves about it leaving me to be a mere spectator. Mostly they simply relocate stuff without saying anything.

We had a barbie last night, the take-over occurred, and this morning I couldn’t find either of the two chopping boards when I wanted to prepare the ultimate breakfast -- a slice of pawpaw from the fridge (papaya to the great unwashed residing in the place of the outer darkness and gnashing of teeth), lime juice (about half a juicy lime) and a sprinkling of raw sugar.

(I would like to pause at this point to offer retrospective but heartfelt thanks to Dorothy Stewart, of the Ascot Hotel, Rabaul, for introducing me to this delight when I first arrived in Papua New Guinea in 1963. I was a bit dubious at first, never having seen this extravagantly luscious tropical fruit in the flesh until that moment but Mrs Stewart informed me firmly and finally that pawpaw was *the* breakfast in the tropics and showed me the proper way to prepare and eat it. I’ve never looked at any other breakfast in quite the same way since.)

So this morning I sliced the pawpaw and lime on a plate instead of the cutting board. After eating it with appropriate reverence I moved on to the second course, two slices of excellent wholemeal toast, one with Vegemite the other with marmalade, and a cup of tea.

And I started typing this story with the computer on the dining table.

Seeking inspiration, my eye wandering to the serving space between the bench and the upper cupboards and fastened on to an unaccustomed shape.

Ha! The truant cutting boards! Hung on the wall! I had been standing right in front of them and never raised my eyes above bench level. And you’re right, Dorcas, that *is* the perfect place for them. I had forgotten those hooks even existed. Thank you.

Thanks are also due to Amy, Jacqueline and Liz for their major contributions at the outset and over he weeks, and to various others for lesser, but nevertheless valuable input that has helped turn this house into “my” home.

I would put up a plaque listing you all but I’m sure it would be in the wrong place.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Give them curry!

2010-04-23T07:25:00.003+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

I seem to be going on about food a bit. It’s not that I’m totally obsessed with the sustenance of the old bod, it’s more that I’m interested in cooking and good food -- if you’re going to pig out, at least do it with quality, I always say -- and I’ve been having some gastronomic adventures worthy, I think, of note.

Last night I went with a couple of blokes, Peter, a 20 year resident, and Chris, a one week resident, a business volunteer, to one of the major hotels. We looked at the menu and the offerings in the bain marie and yawned.

Curry, we thought, was the go. As a 20 year resident, Peter was our leader, and he took us to a restaurant simply named Ang. Like many restaurants and retail establishments in Port Moresby, this place was situated in the midst of a pretty much darkened industrial estate. Corrugated iron warehouses and the like. You know about it because you work in the vicinity or someone has told you.

Unprepossessing to the point of total ugliness on the outside, unprepossessing on the inside. Think your average suburban Chinese restaurant, come down a couple or three notches, and you have an idea of the decor.

Apart from family, only two other tables were taken. It didn’t look like a location to challenge the taste buds.

“It’s packed at lunch time,” our guide assured us, “and I’ve never had a bad meal here.”

Things looked even more average when the cheerful waitress told us there was no beef but Peter held his nerve in the face of our disbelieving stare and ordered around that. He kept the brave face going through an unusually long wait (for a Chinese restaurant) for our order.

Then the prawns came out, which kept us quiet, and after another ten minutes, our fish, curried chicken, vegetables and a generous serving of rice appeared in quick succession.

Friends, I have to tell you that if heaven is like this, I’m an instant believer.

The deep fried prawns were delicious. I would rate them second only to the prawns I had a few weeks ago at Asian Aromas in the centre of Port Moresby, and I freely rate those as the best prawns I have ever had.

The rice was just right -- as it should be but isn’t always; the fish was red emperor cooked to perfection -- almost too good to eat; the vegetables were fresh and crisp and full of flavour; and the chicken curry...

Well, the less said about me and that curry the better. I can state with confidence that it was not a pretty sight. I do feel, however, that the other two blokes were hardly playing the game when they insisted that a third of the dish was a “fair” share. I mean, they’re both as skinny as rakes and hardly need food at all, really, while I have some substance to support. And I did let them have their “fair” share of the fish and veg!

And what did this delight cost the three of us in the end? With a beer each and Chinese tea included, K55 a head -- about $22. I was nice about that, I let them pay their fair share of the total.

In the course of all this, Peter told us that Port Moresby has a Curry Lunch Club. The members gallop out of their offices and whatnot at 12 noon to consume lahksa (...and mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun!). They work their way around a circuit of 15 restaurants in Port Moresby and suburbs. Fifteen! Not a bad number for a smallish city. Not all the very best, Peter said, but certainly at least good enough.

One of the places Chris and I had already discovered, the Cellar Restaurant in the Shady Rest Hotel. Actually there’s no hotel name sign out front, you drive down Taurama Road and identify the place by the sign saying “Hotel Room Sale Now On” and the other sign saying “Curry Club”. The decor is faux Spanish (or was that Austrian?), but it is now run by Sri Lankans who make a pretty successful curry -- definitely worth a second, third and further visits after that.

The Lamana Hotel -- with rooms at K650/night, a three level night club with the DJ suspended more or less in space, and conference rooms with names like Aphrodite 1 and 2 -- has a very nice dining room with excellent service and good food -- including some good but not inspired curries -- at the K35-45 main course level.

But whoa -- forget the decor, the perfectly outfitted waitresses. Think suburban-minus decor, cheerful service and those prawns, that fish, the veg, and most of all, that chicken curry...

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Warm hearts and two for the price of one in Malaoro market

2010-04-23T07:23:00.001+10:00

by Geoffrey Heard

I am deeply concerned; I am on the verge of being uncovered as a fraud. Some day soon, someone is going to see through my chesty promotion of myself as the bold septuagenerian (well nearly) risk-taker who prances around Malaoro market, the home of vagabonds, pickpockets, confidence men and violent thieves, cocking a snook at those in authority and all others who know what’s best for me.

The thing is that Malaoro is the nearest of Port Moresby’s markets to me but I was advised initially to avoid it. Being the nearest, I have patronized it anyway.

But pretty soon, someone in authority is going to realize, as I have, that Malaoro market is full of really nice people who are far too busy doing business and enjoying life to be bothered about mugging the pale gray ghost who appears sporadically among them (but mostly on Saturday or Sunday mornings).

I’ve already reported two instances of Malaoro honesty and generosity. Let’s add three more for last weekend. On Saturday afternoon, one vendor gave me, unasked, double the “standard” handful of cherry tomatoes I had bought for the “standard” and very reasonable price of one kina (about 45 cents). With a grin, he just poured two handfuls into my bag.

“Liklik presen bilong yu (A little present for you),” he told me with a smile when I explained I had only asked for one lot. I thanked him sincerely.

Further on, I spotted some nice looking limes away across several stalls, and had to take a rather circuitous route to them. They were being sold by an elderly woman (well, probably not as old me but who knows their own age except when they’re walking up stairs?) from the area immediately around Port Moresby. In the traditional way, her face and arms were richly decorated with tattoos -- blue on brown geometric patterns.

As I took the standard handful of limes and paid the standard K1, I said: “Tenekiu bada herea, Mama (Thank you very much, Mother).” The first word is an adaptation from English, the next two are Hiri Motu, the beautiful trading language and lingua franca of the people in this area, but the “mama” was wrong. “Sinana” is the Motu word for mother, but I had forgotten it. In any case, I wasn’t at all sure it would be the correct way to address a lady. I checked with a friend later; probably “Taihuna”, a man’s sister, would have been the go. I’ll practise that.

Regardless, the next moment I found I was again having double quantity thrust upon me. The old lady said something I missed (I’m a bit deaf). “It is a gift,” explained a young girl with the lady, presumably a grand-daughter.

Fumbling for Motu words, I thanked the old lady again. One day she and I will talk, but I fear it will be a few months more before I get enough Motu back to undertake a conversation. I learnt Motu late in my previous stay in Papua New Guinea because it was not until then that I lived in the Motu speaking area around Port Moresby. It is much more complex than Tok Pisin, and when I tried to thank the old lady again, I quickly lost it. But it is there inside my head trying to get out and I’m working away at extracting it.

The third instance was when I bought some greens from a confident stallholder, a Highlander, I’ve bought from before. I had a K1 coin in hand because I thought it was K1 per bundle, but it wasn’t -- it was 40 toea. I dropped the K1 coin back into my pocket, pulled out two 20t coins and paid.

“Eh, yu rong (Hey, you’ve made a mistake),” said the bloke, smiling broadly, and spread the coins in his palm to show I had given him a 20t coin and a K1 coin (the K1 is only slightly larger thank the 20t but has a hole in the centre to distinguish it; fine by sight but by feel, the two can be readily confused). I laughed, we exchanged the K1 coin for a 20t and the trader sent me on my way with an admonition to look after my money more carefully.

So there you have it. Malaoro is still a pretty run down, unprepossessing place, but it has lost its jagged edge. Behind that rugged exterior lurk hearts of gold. And I actually have a witness -- Chris Black, a newly arrived Australian Business Volunteer who shared the market’s bounty.

Get a grip, Malaoro, you’re in danger of making the mighty “man bilong bipo (man from early times)” look a fool with all this warm and fuzzy stuff!

And by the way, what on earth is a snook and how do you cock it?

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Going to the dogs, Englishmen and G&T

2010-04-04T16:43:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

The English (with a bit of help from the odd Scottish, Welsh, and Irish person) conquered the tropical world with gin and red herrings (both virtual and real in the case of the latter). I’m not much interested in the red herrings (or the Portuguese variant, salt cod, which obviously wasn’t as effective or I would be writing this in Portuguese) -- it’s the gin that I want to talk about.

The English drank the filthy fire water pink (neat with bitters and, one hopes, ice when available) and with Indian Tonic Water (also, hopefully, with ice most of the time). Then the Anglophonic Americans followed with a variety of gin-based cocktails.

In both cultures, the role of gin was celebrated in song and story. Indeed, it would be pretty safe to say that without gin, vast slabs of the history and literature of both nations could hardly exist.

All of which should mean, I think you will agree, as a literary person keenly aware of history, that two phenomena I have observed since my return to tropical life here in Port Moresby are deserving of special mention as indicators that the world is going to the dogs and not very gracefully at that.

The first is the paucity of bars and restaurants serving quality G&Ts and the second is the shortage of tonic water if you want to make your own.

I can take a pink gin if I have to but gin and tonic is my drink of choice. I like it long (about twice a standard glass) and I like it cold (plenty of ice). And I absolutely demand a slice of lime and a squeeze of juice (lemon is a poor substitute I’ll put up with in temperate climes).

Addressing the question of a decent G&T in a bar, I am reluctant to say it out loud, but I have had far superior G&Ts in such hell holes as Darwin and Dili than I’ve been served in some “reputable” establishments here in Moresby. I mean, a G&T in a shortish glass with only two rapidly melting ice cubes in it and NO LIME although prime limes plucked fresh from the mother tree’s twig that very dawning are for sale at up to four for a kina on the street outside? Come on!

And even in the one or two better performing places I’ve come across they really don’t grok the notion of “long”.

Thus the dedicated tropical liver (thank you for appreciating the pun) has been forced to fall back on his own resources, more or less confining his G&T imbibing to home. A long G&T is the ideal winding-down-after-work drink, lasting right through cooking and well into dinner itself. It is also ideal as the base drink for the busy host, allowing him to focus on meeting the needs of his guests.

I was greatly encouraged in this move at first by the fact that Port Moresby’s supermarkets offer at least two brands of cheap gin (to say nothing of rum and whisky) -- about half the price of Gordon’s and Sapphire.

But seeing me getting complacent, the supermarkets reverted to type with a catastrophic shortage of Indian Tonic Water (we will talk more about the vagaries of Port Moresby supermarket shopping at another time). I was forced to risk my malaria status (we’ll come to that in a moment) by drinking stuff like water and beer for nearly two weeks until a colleague, sensitive to the threat this posed to my health, spotted a few cans of the precious solution semi-concealed at the rear of a shelf of a certain supermarket, and texted me instanter. I was in the car and down there in a flash (allowing for the six minutes and ten or so seconds it takes to get out the gate) to make my purchase. Okay, okay, it was Boroko Foodland situated not in Boroko but in Gordons.

I stocked up (I remember the bad old days between ships in the islands) and just as well. It’s been a week now, but still the other supermarkets don’t seem to have caught up. In the tropics! Noel Coward (“Mad Dogs and Englishmen”) should be spinning in his grave, and as for W. Somerset Maugham...!

As I said, G&T is my drink of choice most of the time. I don’t mind a stubby or tinny or two (the Port Moresby world is pretty much split between “brown stubby” and “white can” -- the local South Pacific Breweries’ SP Lager and Export Lager lines) but under attack from the stubby suckers or tinny heads, I roll out my G&T rationale.

Quite apart from appealing to my taste buds more than somewhat, gin and tonic is a solid rational choice, a four-way winner. Here’s why:

Here in Port Moresby we are surrounded by a hoard of unseen assailants just bursting to get at us and lay us low. I speak of the mosquitoes carrying malaria, dengue fever, and 3,587 other nasties (for those inclined to argue about that figure, I have two words: “Prove it!”).

Now look at the noble G&T. The gin contains alcohol which kills pain. You need to kill pain when you have malaria, and given its prevalence, if you’re not taking anti-malarials there is a pretty good chance that you have malaria to some degree pretty much all the time. If you take modern anti-malarial drugs, you’ll feel the pain of them pretty much all the time too. So either way, you need to kill the pain pretty much all the time. Make mine a G&T, thanks.

The primary ingredient of tonic water (apart from water) is the anti-malarial, quinine. I have known pedants (who would not know a good time if it bit them on the bum) to argue that quinine isn’t that effective any more given the prevalence of malaria types now resistant to it and anyway, you would have to drink enough G&Ts to keep a camel going for a week to get enough quinine to make an impact.

Exactly -- that’s the beauty of it. You can get falling down drunk and *stay that way* and call it medicinal. Further, even if modern malarias are resistant, there is still some good old-fashioned malaria out there, real malaria, my kind of malaria, ready to have a crack at me if it can hitch a ride in the right vector. That’s what I’m protecting myself from. Phooey to all this i-malaria and the like. I’m just not interested.

This is where the l-o-o-o-o-n-g G&T fits in too. Here in the tropics, we have to keep the liquids up. Now alcohol, as well as banishing pain, has the pleasing side-effect of promoting the healthy movement of H2O through the system. The l-o-o-o-n-g G&T tops up, literally.

Water balance? Am I a shrivelled prune? No. Am I a stagnant puddle covered by a red slime? No. I learned at my mother’s knee that running water is pure water so I know that if I keep everything flowing I am on the right track for purity in both mind and body. Yes, I will have another, thanks. A smidgeon more ice this time?

Finally, the lime. Who will ever forget Captain Cook curing his scurvy-ridden sailors? Drinking my well-limed G&T, I can feel every one of my multitudinous wounds happily puckering up and pulling in a stitch. Sometimes, I swear, I can almost feel my gums sucking my teeth deeper into their sockets. Damn, it’s good!

So IF you don’t mind, I’ll continue to absorb the occasional G&T (but never on the Weetbix) preserving old values, keeping up the fight against malaria, H2O deficit and scurvy the way nature intended, and maintaining an environment for the appreciation and future development of English literature.

Yes thanks, but I really must insist, it’s my shout next time.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Hair yesterday, hair today, and hair tomorrow

2010-04-04T16:37:00.000+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

When I left Papua New Guinea in 1977, I could distinguish at a glance 30 or 40 different groups -- maybe more -- and I could address quite a few of them with a greeting in their own language (although a greeting was as far as I could go in this land of 800+ languages).

Returning 33 years later, I find myself flummoxed. Faced with a market full of people, I can pick fairly reliably people from only one tribal group, Tolais from Rabaul, and those from three regional gtoups, people from Buka and Bougainville, Highlanders, and Central and Eastern Papuans.

Long absence, of course, is part of my problem. I’ve simply forgotten what the different groups looked like. Apart from a few basic markers (e.g. the  Buka/Bougainville people have by far the darkest skin in Papua New Guinea, they are black where others are brown) I don’t know how I recognized the different groups. I simply had a gestalt in my head that signalled: “They are both from Morobe Province, but he is from Finschhafen and she is from Markham.”

The people I am looking at have changed too, though. Historically, Papua New Guineans were separated by their 800+ languages, the culture that went with each one, and geography (islands, mountains) for thousands of years. Nobody knows how long ago the separation took place but there is plenty of evidence that it wasn’t yesterday -- there are people who live on adjoining islands or in adjoining valleys who speak languages so different that the only commonality is the fact that they are languages.

People mixed very little across language lines so while each group took great care to avoid close interbreeding, nevertheless they developed their own “look”.

There were also some regional characteristics. Highlanders tend to be strong and stocky. Power lifters. When you see where they live and what they have to do for life, that body shape fits to a “T”. Many islanders tended to be leaner and longer limbed. That seems to fit as well.

Back in the 1960s, most people (it seemed to me) still married within their own groups and nearly everyone I met was the product of a union within their own group, so the age-old differences were retained.

Ask them their origins, and they could tell you precisely in a single word -- the name of their home small district. Look at them, and in nine out of 10 cases, you could place them pretty close to

Marrying out was accelerating by the 1970s and today, particularly in a city like Port Moresby which is a magnet for people from every corner of Papua New Guinea, there are many, many people of mixed parentage and even mixed grandparentage. The old visual markers of origin are broken and scattered. The old gestalts are stored somewhere in my head, but they don’t apply nearly as often as they did before.

A friend who, incidentally, married within his own village, almost a rarity in Port Moresby these days, was chuckling as he related the story of a young lad he encountered in the Boy Scout group he mentors.

“Where do you come from?” my friend asked.

The boy’s reply ran along these lines:

“My dad’s father came from X, his mother came from Y, but really that was only half Y because her mother came fron Z. My mum’s mother came from A and her dad from B, but they both had mixed parents too. So I just say I come from Rainbow.” (Rainbow is the Port Moresby suburb where the boy’s family lives.)

But aside from all that, and the fact that the people I meet today are mostly bigger than people were back when, there is one huge difference between the Papua New Guineans of yesteryear and those of today.

Hair.

Back in the day, every group seemed to have a kind of overarching hair style. There would be many variations in how each individual dressed her or his individual hair, but there would be something about it that pointed to the group. Often you couldn’t put your finger on it, but you recognized it for all that. You can see the same kind of thing between different periods in Australia.

Most Papua New Guineans have strong, tightly curled or crinkly hair which traditionally was combed in support of its natural tendency to stand out from the head. It’s length, shape and compactness (patted back after combing) along with its color were where the group “look” came through. The so-called “Afro” hairstyle was an indigenous style to Papua New Guinea long before African-Americans thought of using it as a signal to the world that they were going to be different in their own way.

And there was good reason to wear it that way. It protected the head from the sun and acted as insulation.

But today, distinctive regional hairstyles have gone out of the window in Port Moresby; even “natural” hair has gone. I’ll be interested to see what has happened in other parts of the country when I visit them.

Among women, the overwhelming style is severely straightened hair pulled hard back from the face and pinned or tied in a small, tight bun or roll at the back. There’s so much “product” on women’s hair in Port Moresby one suspects that if they all washed their hair simultaneously, the entire drainage system would be clogged for a month.

Dreadlocks are also in, often short and of even length around the head, like a Medusa’s cap. Some girls have tight plaits in lines over their heads in the African style.

Men’s hair tends to be short; often shorter than before, and since many are going to the same barbers, the regional variations have disappeared. Shaved heads are in, as are long dreadlocks tied back in a dreadlock ponytail.

For my part, I hope Papua New Guinean women’s fascination with straightened hair and the American “schoolmarm” look doesn’t last too long. It really is terribly boring and unattractive to my eye -- and it really does have a peculiar uniformity that overrides and suppresses individual and group/regional character.

Personally, I’m all for naturally curly hair.

Like mine.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Hardship? I’ve just eaten the best rump steak I ever had

2010-04-03T12:46:00.001+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

Having returned to Papua New Guinea as a volunteer, I am paid at the local rate, even a low local rate. I suspect I am the lowest paid person in my office except for the cleaner, and she works only three days a week.

I’m not complaining, you understand, I put my hand up for the gig with a song in my heart (the best place for me to have songs; vocally, my singing daughter would tell you, I am “interesting”) in full knowledge of what I was doing, so that part is fine. I bring it up only to illustrate that I really do need to be careful with my pennies, or more correctly here, toeas (toy-yahs).

However, feeling a bit frazzled after one of those messy days when you work like stink and nothing seems to happen, I called in at the supermarket on the way home the other day determined to buy something a bit different -- even to splash out.

What looked like a nice bit of local rump steak very attractively priced caught my eye. A bit over 300 grams for a bit over K7.00 (seven kina, about AU$3.00) perhaps a third of the Australian price) -- the “different” was there but splashing out wasn’t needed. I fried it medium rare and served it with a tomato and onion salad, a squeeze of lime juice, and plenty of salt (you *must* keep the salt up in the tropics and your low salt bodily condition means that when you put what might look like an excess of salt on food, it tastes fine).

The big surprise came when I stuck the fork into it with what I thought was reasonable force. The tines bottomed out on the plate with a clang. I applied the knife gingerly -- and found cutting this steak was like carving butter.

Whoa! But what about the flavour? Just plain delicious, that’s what.

I had started out to be satisfied with half the steak but in the end I was overcome by sheer greediness and ate the lot. From gourmet to gourmand in two serves.

It was the best rump steak I have ever eaten and I’ve had a few.

But was it a fluke? Ha! You can see what’s coming. Of course I had to go back and try again. A few days had elapsed so they were sure to be on a different carcass by now.

Same result, even though I overcooked one side a bit because an important phone call came through at a critical moment.

I don’t know whether to tell everyone about the rump steak at SVS Super Value Mart on the Hubert Murray Highway or keep quiet about it. I mean, it would be pretty sad if a rush developed and they sacrificed quality to ... what? Oh damn, I just let the cat out of the bag, didn’t I?

Another gourmet/gourmand delight in Port Moresby has to be the fish in season -- and oh boy, they sure are in season as I write! My local market, Malaoro (pron. Mah-l-ow-row), is known for its fish. It looks like a down-at-heel, dirty kind of place, make-shift stalls along the roadside, but the fish are superb.

Barramundi and Red emperor have to be the pick, but there are a dozen other varieties which are nearly as good. Then there are the painted lobsters and the crabs, both in a size and abundance Australians generally haven’t seen for 30 years.

The fruit and veg are also good at Malaoro and if, for example, garlic is in short supply, the supermarket is right there behind the market.

In addition, I’m starting to feel at home there. My employers, friendly locals and endless expatriates have told me I have to be particularly careful at Malaoro -- it is a known haunt of pickpockets and other criminals who would rip my ears off and empty my wallet at the drop of a hat.

But I know some of the vendors a little now and they know me. They see me coming and launch into their patter. They chaff me, try to tempt me when I am reluctant to buy, and above all, they are honest.

Two things happened at the market today that spurred me to write about it. The first occurred after I had bought some tomatoes. As I stuffed my change back into my pocket, I dropped a K2.00 bill (about $1.00). I didn’t notice, but a young lad of perhaps eight or so did. He was enjoying himself immensely on a homemade swing he and his friend had strung from a small tree behind the stalls.

“Tu kina pondaun!” he sang as he swung, “tu kina pondaun long giraun! Tu kina bilong yu ia!” (Two kina fell down, two kina fell on the ground, your two kina.)

An older man on a neighbouring stall looked down. “Eh, manki tok tru,” he told me, pointing to the two kina bill, “em ia, tu kina pondaun long han bilong yu.” (The boy spoke the truth, look here, two kina fell from your hand.)

Now here were are in the middle of a market which is supposed to be crawling with thieves, confidence men, tricksters and violent criminals but I have dropped two kina, and a boy and a man, both dressed pretty much in rags, have pointed it out to me and made no attempt to hustle me.

As I picked it up, the man was praising the boy. I reached into my pocket, grabbed all the change I had, about 70 toea (30 cents), and gave it to the lad, thanking him for his help.

The old stallholder patted me on the shoulder and told me sagely that I had done the right thing. That was the way to encourage kids to grow up honest, he said. Exactly, I agreed, and thank you for your support.

A short time later, on the other side of the market, a stallholder miscalculated my change and gave me too much. I said I thought he was in error. We calculated it together and found it was 60 toea out my way. He told me not to worry, it was his error. I told him I didn’t want to be responsible for him having to go home to his wife to explain that the financial collapse of his little business selling betel nut and bananas was due to a strange white creature who roamed around the market terrifying innocent stallholders and then took advantage of them when they miscalculated the change.

We had a laugh (along with neighbouring stallholders) and sorted out the correct change.

For expatriates in all sorts of positions, Port Moresby is a “hardship post”. They’ll get paid from 10% to 30% extra on top of their regular, Australian salaries to live and work here (their hardship allowances might be more than my total pay).

But how hard is the ship really?

I fully understand that here in Port Moresby the risk to life and limb from criminals or PMV driver assault while on the road (I’ll tell you more about the latter on another day) is greater than in Australian cities. I also accept that it is hotter than most Australian cities (but not most of Australia), there are unaccountable shortages in the stores from time to time (I’ve had search parties out looking for tonic water for a week), and there are no cinemas.

On the other hand, much food is very cheap (but bacon seems high, dammit, at least on my salary), many aspects of life are much more colorful -- including food shopping at the nearest local market -- household help is expert and cheap, the scenery is stunning, and their inflated salaries should run to a home entertainment system...just like at home but cheaper to buy here.

And anyone open to it will find themselves to be the recipients of constant small kindnesses. (When was the last time an Australian supermarket employee spotted you struggling with a messy armful of goods -- you only went in to buy two items but ... -- and appeared in front of you with a basket, unasked?)

In reality, of course, the measure of the “hardshipness” of anywhere is how much you can make yourself feel at home in it. An important factor in my feeling at home in the Malaoro market is that I am fluent in the local lingua franca, Tok Pisin, so not only do I understand what is being said around me, I can join in -- and do.

Many Australians live in this wonderful land for years without bothering to make themselves fluent in Tok Pisin. The same used to be true in the 60s and 70s when I was first here. It is really quite bizarre; Tok Pisin is a great lingua franca in this nation of 800 languages for the simple reason that it is a so easy to learn -- a vocabulary of perhaps 1500 words, most variations on English (you rely on context and word combinations to make many, many meanings) and straightforward grammar.

If you get a Tok Pisin dictionary and put your mind to it for a few weeks, you can just pick it up. And suddenly, you’ll hear someone talking to you and you will answer them and... .

When that happens, you are living “in” the land, not “on” it -- and hardship has flown out the window.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

A tear for a stranger in a strange land

2010-03-29T17:38:00.003+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

“Bomana” means “comrade” in what must be one of the most beautiful languages in the world, Motu, the language of the people who live along the stretch of the Papuan coast around Port Moresby.

It is a fitting name for the war cemetery outside Port Moresby where 3,819 troops killed in World War II lie buried. Australian, British and a handful of Papua New Guineans from the Volunteer Rifles lie here, most victims of the Kokoda Track horror.

No “fuzzy-wuzzy Angels” though, the carriers who gave their lives to supply the troops and made themselves famous in Australia by carrying wounded to safety or at least to have the consolation of dying among friends. The carriers paid a horrendous price in suffering and death on the Track which has only recently been publicly recognized..

The dead lie under serried ranks of marble headstones in a meticulously maintained green field which is almost shocking in contrast with the dusty scrub beyond its boundaries. A disturbing number of the headstones carry only the legend “Known Unto God”. Others give name, rank, serial number, home and address and age.

Although I lived in Port Moresby for five years in the 1970s and have visited the Papua New Guinea capital on a number of other occasions, I visited Bomana for the first time only yesterday.

I am glad I delayed my visit for two reasons. The first is that if I had visited before, I would not have known as much as I do now of the story of the battle for Kokoda and the other battles around the islands in which these soldiers died, to say nothing of their comrades whose bodies have never been found.

The second is that I was taken to visit yesterday by a group of Papua New Guineans who were totally separated from the war and Kokoda.

It was a Sunday family outing. All except one of the group were Highlanders, people who had no history of WWII, the first contact between them and the outside world, represented by Australians, had occurred only 10 years before the war began and neither invaders nor defenders took the war to their region. It offered no strategic advantage. This group was also separated from the war by a generation or more; all the adults were in their thirties, born 30 or so years after WWII ended.

While the children chased each other around with happy cries and wrestled and rolled on the soft green grass, one cousin -- your average working man, does a bit of driving, a bit of clerical work, a bit of labouring, took me aside to talk about it all.

“One of them was only 16!” he said in stricken wonder, a tear in his voice.

I was somewhat taken aback. When you think of Highlanders in Papua New Guinea, you think of tough blokey blokes who look as though they’d as soon have a fight as have a good feed. Of course, that’s a gross generalization, but I’ve never seen a wispy Highlander.

So I told him about the Australia of that time, the Australia I had heard about from my parents and other relatives and friends of the same era -- the Australia I had seen disappearing as I grew up in the immediate post-war period. The Australia where 16 year olds would lie about their age to enlist out of bravado, out of a wish to emulate older brothers or friends, out of fear of community disapproval, or out of sheer boredom.

He understood that. He came from a small village near a small town in the Eastern Highlands, and had run out of options there himself.

I also told him what I had read of the shocking way those young men were lied to, dumped on ships bound for Port Moresby without so much as the chance of a good-bye kiss from their mothers, wives or girlfriends. Thrown ill-trained, ill-equipped, ill-clothed, and under-supplied into combat against a vastly superior force by incompetent generals sitting on their bottoms in Australia who were judging their bravery by the body count.

“But they wouldn’t know the country. They wouldn’t know what was good to eat, or what leaves to chew to give themselves strength, or what to dress a wound with,” he said.

No, they didn’t; and they died all the more miserably for it.

He left me to wander further among the gravestones. “There’s a woman buried here!” he called back. “A nurse?” “Yes, she was a nurse.”

He contemplated the nurse’s grave for a while, then ambled over to the visitors’ centre. He opened the little door which gives access to a visitors’ book and the list of the dead. He leafed through the list, picking up names he had seen, then opened the book and borrowed my pen to add his line.

“Only 16,” he muttered as he recorded his visit.

There’s a bit of a mania in Australian political circles these days to “bring home” the war dead.

If there is ever a move to empty Bomana and transport the long buried remains back “home”, every Australian should resist it vigorously.

Not only is this a most fitting final resting place for those who fought so desperately and bravely for their homeland which had abused them outrageously, but it is a silent ambassador that enables ordinary Papua New Guineans to maintain friendship and respect for Australia regardless of insults dumped on them from time to time by petulant Australian foreign ministers.

We drove out of the cemetery. Around the corner, we passed the nation’s maximum security prison. Bomana, indeed.

Then we made another visit -- a gentle foreigner who was making his way on a 14 acre block outside Port Moresby, a softly spoken Muslim missionary from Sumatra in Indonesia. About 700 Papua New Guineans have converted, he told me. It turned out we had a common acquaintance in the Muslim community in Australia. We discussed Islam for a little while, and he offered me an introductory book. I thanked him for the compliment but declined. Been there, looked at that.

Just another Sunday afternoon in today’s Port Moresby.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Life in Maximum Security

2010-03-29T09:22:00.002+10:00

By Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

After two weeks’ practice, I’m pleased to report that I can now get from inside my back door to sitting in the car outside my front gate with the seat belt on ready to drive to work in a shade over six minutes.

The reason why I think this is news is that I live in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where there is more crime in a few minutes than most cities of similar size (some hundreds of thousands of people) experience in a year.

This necessitates living under bizarre security circumstances. The city is like a jail pulled inside out. The good guys (or at least, that’s how we like to think of ourselves) are inside the razor wire while the criminals roam the streets.

In my case, the house my employer has provided is an old place in a select part of town (just up the road are the residences of the heads of two major diplomatic missions) -- within a gated community no less atop a high ridge. Guards stand at the entrance and patrol the two to three metre high, razor wire topped, boundary fence. Guards with dogs roam the well lit streets at night. Inside that fence, each house has its own high fence, elaborate locks, alarms, maybe a guard or two, and dogs. My house came complete with a six foot corrugated iron fence all round, razor wire on top, grilles on all windows and doors, deadlocks on every door, external and internal, and an alarm system which no-one knows how to use. It also carries the signs of at least one break-in before the deadlocks were installed.

At night, I am pretty thoroughly locked in and I have been told by those who care that I should be. I was pretty spooked by the whole thing initially but now I am desensitizing myself to it and getting it under control.

It is such a nuisance, though, when you want to do a simple thing like go to work.

It has taken me two solid weeks’ of dedicated training to get down to within reach of the six minute mark for getting out of the house and on the road. My initial, untrained time was in excess of 10 minutes. Refining my technique and putting in the hard yards at training, I have pulled that down day by day until now I seem to have plateaued just above six minutes.

I would like to state unequivocally that I am no quitter -- I am up for the challenge. I have the six minute barrier in my sights, and I *will* break through. I know about sporting barriers; I am of the generation that saw man crash through the four minute mile barrier. Forget the Irishman and the Brit, they were mere bit players. Go John Landy, you’re a legend. It’s all a matter of the right mindset and dedicated training. I can do it.

This is how I have succeeded so far. I have separated the two back door deadlock keys (one for the door, the other for the grille) and a gate padlock key from the three front door deadlock keys (two for the door and one for the grill) and a duplicate gate key. They are now on separate rings in separate pockets, as are the four internal door deadlock keys plus the fire escape deadlock grille key. On the two plus one ring, I have added a colour tab to the key for the door. This makes for much faster key drawing and selection. In addition, I have oiled all three locks involved in a profligate manner to get rid of sticking on key entry and exit.

Picture me poised just inside the back door, computer bag over one shoulder, plastic box lunch in one hand. Shorts hitched, sandals firmly fastened. (You can see the Olympic connection immediately; the originals wore sandals, althogh not shorts.)

I check my watch. Go!

My hand dives into my pocket for the door keys. Insert red key into door lock, twist, drag door open. Untagged key into the grille, twist -- damn! wrong way, other way -- open. Step on to the verandah, put lunch box on rail to focus on shutting and locking doors. Door then grille.

Keeping keys in hand, dive into other pocket for car key. Grab lunch box. Three quick strides to car, unlock at drivers’ door, stick car key in ignition and start car (air conditioner on full -- at 7.30am it’s already hot), round to back, put computer bag and lunch in boot (not wise to have computer bag showing on seat, I have been warned a dozen times by high and low alike) then on to gate. Unlock padlock, swing open right gate, then left, kick into place rock to hold left gate open.

Back into car, reverse out and pull into kerb. Out again leaving engine running with air conditioner on full blast, kick aside rock and swing closed left gate, swing closed right gate stepping outside, reach through hand hole to padlock chain inside (as maintenance man sternly adjures “so the rascals can’t get directly at the lock with a lever”). Three steps and back into the car, pull seat belt over should and plug into socket.

Check watch. Six minutes 12 seconds.

I’m not suggesting that I am Olympic class just yet, but I definitely have that six minute barrier in sight. I do have a concern about apparel, though.

So far I have been wearing conventional shorts, with one pocket each side. However, I have found to my surprise that one pair of shorts I grabbed off the last of the summer sale racks before I left Melbourne has a useful feature -- multiple front pockets. (Two other pairs have hip pockets with flaps in place but sewn down!) The conventional pockets each side have shallower pockets in front of them. I feel that if I made full use of this feature, I might be able to smash down through the six minutes in one fell swoop.

But would this be ethical? I have in mind the recent banning of certain swimming costumes, and I cannot forget how naff the lovely Kathy Freeman looked striding to victory in the 2000 Olympics wearing a hoodie.

And ethical at the time or not, legality is what matters in the end. It’s no good claiming a time which might be disallowed by ruling bodies later and scrubbed from the record..

Maybe I’ll compromise. I’ll try a run in the special shorts and see how I go. If I break through the six minutes, I'll record my time but not claim it publicly until I see which way the ruling bodies sway on the issue. Meanwhile, I’ll go back to conventional shorts and work on refining my approach.

I really am confident I can do it. Really.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Life and Death in Papua New Guinea

2010-03-24T08:23:00.004+10:00

by Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

Large and beautiful butterflies and moths are such a feature of Papua New Guinea that there is a collection on show in the lobby of that architectural jewel, Parliament House, here in the capital, Port Moresby.

So it was no surprise when on returning home from work the other evening, a moth nearly as big as my hand alighted on my bag.

Examination showed its wings were a bit tatty, particularly one. It crept on to my extended finger, then flew off -- in circles, obviously a result of the wing damage. This was a moth nearing the end of its cycle.

As I watched, a willy wagtail burst into sight over the edge of the roof.

Snap!

With a flick of its wings, the bird disappeared back to the roof.

The action was so swift and so totally terminal that I was momentarily shocked. I found myself staring uncomprehendingly at a vacant space which a moment before had been filled by the moth.

This tiny “nature red in tooth and claw” incident and news I had heard earlier in the day of the death of a former colleague and friend, combined to make me reflect on the nature of life and death in Australia and Papua New Guinea.

We really are terribly fortunate in Australia.

Just before I left Australia for Papua New Guinea, the passage of half a century and a chance meeting resulted in a 50th anniversary reunion of my Matriculation (Year 12) class. In fact, because initially none of us could clearly remember who had made that class at Eltham High School on the arty north-eastern edge of Melbourne in 1959, those attending were actually the 1958 Leaving (Year 11) class.

Despite starting with only a handful of maintained contacts, we amazed ourselves by contacting every single member of that class within a couple of weeks, and had the good fortune to have nearly all attend. Google and spec phone calls can do wonders.

The evening reunion was fun and instructive. There we were, aged in the 67-68 years bracket and nearly all of us still working one way or another. Whatever happened to retirement at 65? Clearly we don’t know how to stop. Most seemed to be in full scale employment still, and those who had “retired” had reinvented themselves with new careers, perhaps refocussing what they had been doing, perhaps branching out in a new direction, perhaps picking up or expanding some voluntary or community activities.

But the really outstanding fact was that we were all still alive. Every single one of us had made it through the 50 years, generally in pretty reasonable shape. One, a dentist, releases the tension of meddling with people’s mouths all week by cycling vast distances are the weekend. Just recreational cycling, you understand, nothing serious. It makes me tired just thinking about it.

(An aside: quite a few of the fittest now were those who did *not* have much interest in sport at school. Looking around among my friends generally, those hobbling on arthritic knees and worse are mostly the ones who played sports hard in their teens and twenties.)

Now, clearly we have had some luck -- accidental death has not touched us despite the horrendous road toll of the 1960s-70s (about 10 times the current rate) and the fact that many of us continue to live and work in rural areas. Worse, those areas are mostly on Melbourne’s north-eastern fringe, site of many of Australia’s worst bushfires, including the Black Saturday fires in February 2009.

Contrast our survival rate with a group of people -- many of them a decade or more younger than me and my classmates -- in Papua New Guinea.

Returning to PNG after 33 years, I have been overwhelmed by the welcome I have received from former colleagues and particularly from the bunch of spirited young journalists I worked with as training officer for the NBC’s (National Broadcasting Corporation) News and Current Affairs Division in the mid-1970s just before I left.

It was a great time running up to independence, then independence itself in 1975, and the period afterwards. It was certainly a high point in my life, and clearly, it was a high point for them too. We were breaking new ground and building the foundations for a lively, robust media sector in Papua New Guinea, and we all knew it.

Many of those young journalists and broadcasters are still in the media -- now at or near the top of it. Others can be found in leading positions in politics, government, business, and community and non-government organizations.

It is such a pleasure to run into them and congratulate them on their success.

But with that happiness is tinged with sadness.

In contrast to my classmates, there are now yawning gaps in the ranks of colleagues and friends in Papua New Guinea. Every few minutes of happy reminiscence leads to news of yet another passing.

My impression is that perhaps a quarter of those I knew and worked with in the 1960s-70s are now dead. It might be even higher.

One or two have died in car accidents. Another was murdered in a home robbery in his village in Bougainville after surviving under threat for years through the insurrection there. Heart attacks, strokes, cancer, malaria, dengue fever, and any one of the thousands tropical diseases have accounted for the others.

I can’t help thinking that at least some of the deaths could have been avoided if the health services here were better. They have fallen away tragically in the past 30 years. I pass the Port Moresby General Hospital each morning on the way to work -- a once proud institution which is now a shabby shadow of its former self.

One of my new colleagues pointed out what is across the road -- a private hospital. Do the minority at the top of the socio-economic heap queue at the decrepit Port Moresby General or do they go private? he asked.

A few years ago, one of my former classmates came close to being the only one of us missing the reunion because of death. He could have died here in Papua New Guinea during a visit, but was fortunate to have what most Papua New Guineans don’t have -- travel insurance, and the means to buy first rate help and be whisked away to Australia.

How many more of my colleagues would have been around now to join me for a beer if they could have afforded the same level of care as that ... or had simply been able to access public health care as it was the day I flew out in 1977?

I grieve for my friends.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.

Happy as a pig in mud

2010-03-21T12:59:00.002+10:00

By Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard

“Happy as a pig in mud” is a much misused expression, but nothing could describe me more accurately in my current situation. There are millions of pigs in Papua New Guinea, whole economies of them, and they are all happily wallowing in the cooling, disguising mud of their homeland.

As happy as they might be, none is happier than me.

Returning to live and work in Papua New Guinea after 33 years away punctuated by only a couple of brief visits, I find a country which in many respects is what it was the day I left it with deep, deep regret in 1977.

In many other respects, it is what I dreamed it would become and what I found hinted at during my brief visits. In some other ways, if it is a dream, it has the quality of nightmare.

Looking beyond the fact that it is a country so outrageously beautiful, where every prospect doesn’t just please, it challenges the frantic eye and overloaded mind for description, it continues to be a country where people -- most people anyway -- are warm and friendly, whose first impulse is to welcome the stranger and issue the challenge: can you contribute?

I say that, then I must immediately qualify it. Too often, the people of places like Papua New Guinea -- smaller countries populated by people of colour -- are labelled on one dimension by westerners as “peaceful”, “smiling”, “welcoming” as though they are all one of a kind, millions of commercial cookies stamped out of the same shallow dough. Or they are labelled as violent, devious, and possibly murderous. Add that other label so popular today: terrorists. Poisonous dough, poisonous cookies.

Either way, the simple label is a kind of racism. It doesn’t see past the obvious and often least important aspect of the person.

How can you describe 5 million (or is it 7 million?) people in a word? Particularly when you can divide those all those people by language and culture into 800+ groups (or is it 900+ according to the latest research?) with those cultures representing the gamut of human cultural variation? And when you can divide them again between mountain and coast, land dweller and sea dweller, by gender, patrilineal and matrilineal social structure, and so on and so forth.

And education level and life experience and achievement in the western sense.

When I left Papua New Guinea all those years ago, most Papua New Guineans were at or near the beginning of their western style career. Mass higher education was in its infancy. The University of Papua New Guinea in the national capital, Port Moresby, and the University of Technology in the second biggest city, Lae, had been in place for 10 years or less, the culmination of an education boom that had begun about 15 years before.

Until the two universities began delivering graduates in numbers, from around 1971 or only four years before independence, there were few Papua New Guineans with tertiary education outside teaching, public administration or technology diplomas.

There were also relatively few Papua New Guineans with experience of the world beyond their country’s borders.

Running up to independence, people were hungry for knowledge. A discussion with a westerner would too often turn into a lecture as they milked his or her mind, hungry for content and context. There were lots of good ideas and good thinkers around, some great ones -- think of Jarrod Diamond’s quest in “Guns, Germs and Steel” built on a question posed by Yali of Madang, a man sidelined by the Australian administration as a cultist -- but often lack of content, context and simple life experience could cause a promising debate to fizzle or ideas to run into a dead end with sad results.

Not so today! Thirty-five years on from independence, Papua New Guinea and its people have their own experience, their own knowledge of the world, their own education and a growing army of gray-headed sages who have been there and done that -- often ploughing a virgin furrow in a lifetime of western-style work building a new nation.

Today, Papua New Guinea is a country bubbling with lively thinking and action backed by local and global knowledge and experience which in many cases reaches far beyond that of former mentors. It is full of women and men who confidently look the world in the eye and offer to take it on. It has people asking hard questions, who don’t squib debate. They still seek the outsider’s thoughts, but now it is not to fill essential gaps in their knowledge, rather it is to feed into a vast cauldron of ideas, opinions, knowledge and information they have surging around in their minds.

Then they are turning those ideas into action.

That intellectual energy is part of how I dreamed this country would be when I came back. I have dived into this intellectual cauldron and I’m loving it. I’m feeling so stimulated my head could explode.

The nightmare part is the talk of corruption and the apparent grounds for it. The newspapers, radio and television carry a litany of complaints. They ask: where did the money go?

Even in the national capital, the roads are dreadful; throughout the country, public health and education services have declined dramatically compared with before independence, public servants complain that they haven’t been paid, villagers complain that they aren’t receiving royalties or compensation payments while foreign mining, timber and fish companies plunder their traditional resources and report huge profits.

There is the spreading rash of oil palm plantations -- I was told four years ago that they were barely profitable except for the giant food corporations which demand the oil for the food they process in other countries. Encouraged and supported by government, the plantations are gobbling up more and more land daily, it seems. Promises to the local landowners I have hard about sound about as substantial as pie in the sky.

And then there are guns everywhere, crime like you wouldn’t believe in the national capital, HIV-AIDS, a mighty population explosion that is already stretching the limits of the land and sea, and, of course, climate change with its threat, already being realized at places like the Cartarets Islands in Bougainville and the Duke of York Islands off Rabaul, of inundating low-lying islands and vast areas of the coastal plains.

Talk of the environment leads me back to the dream.

Lacking what they saw as effective government action, the Cartarets Island community is taking action itself, with its own organization, funds and energy, and support from the Catholic Church and from a slew of NGOs and some governments in the most distant parts of the globe. They are slowly, gently and with every consideration for culture and tradition, transplanting themselves and beginning a new life (for to most Papua New Guineans, the land is life itself).

Similarly, in West New Britain, a group of villagers has banned fishing on some reefs they traditionally own to allow the fish to restock. Rising population and improved fishing tackle were resulting in fish stocks being decimated. Now these people have decided they will go without themselves to ensure their children have fish in the future.

These are just two cases. I know of many more.

These are the kinds of people I am among and to whom I want to offer whatever contribution I can make.

Wouldn’t you?

Now please excuse me, it’s time to roll over -- this little piggy thinks the next wallow looks too inviting to be true, and must investigate.

---

This material is copyright © Geoffrey Carrascalao Heard 2010.

Geoffrey Heard worked in media in Papua New Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s and has just returned to that country as an Australian Volunteer supported by AusAID working with the Media Council of Papua New Guinea. The opinions and comments in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the Media Council of PNG, Australian Volunteers International, or AusAID.