Thor's Travel Notes
Background Information on Papua New Guinea
Related links on this site: 1. Photographic Memories of Papua New Guinea
2, Map of Papua New Guinea ( CIA map courtesy of the University of Texas resource site)
3. Expedition to Snake River, PNG,1987
4. Friends - Irimo Street PNG 1985 (a prose poem)
5. Super-Culture and The Ghost in the Machine (..reflections on human innovation and insight)
6. This Is Your Problem Friend, Not Mine -- towards a cure for formal language errors in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere..
7a. Contemporary newspaper account of social ills in Port Morseby, PNG's capital
7b. Another news story (4 December 2002) where the PNG Minister for Tourism pulls his gun on an unfortunate academic..Because Papua New Guinea is almost unknown to the world at large, I have included a brief profile of the country below. More detailed information is readily available from Internet search engines.
Profile
Papua New Guinea is not a small place. The main part of it, occupying around half of the world's second largest island (after Greenland), is a crooked triangle about 1700 kilometers from the eastern tip to the Indonesian border (West New Guinea is a politically restive Indonesian province), and 820km north-south through the centre at the border. Running east-west, abrupt mountain ranges make communications difficult, with roads mostly limited to a few kilometers near the main towns. The highest peak is 4509 meters. Cupped between these ranges are highland plateaux where the people remained more or less out of contact with the rest of the world for 4000 years, until some Australians penetrated about seventy years ago. PNG as a whole is comprised of some six hundred islands, from very large to mere specks of sand. 92% of it remains uncultivated, although ruthless logging has become a major ecological and corruption issue. The whole area is volcanically active, and earth tremors are an almost daily experience. Located immediately to the north of Australia, the climate is equatorial, although the highlands are more temperate. Rainfall is generally high, except in those areas where the mountains create a rain shadow.
For such an extensive area, the population of PNG is not dense at roughly five million. The birthrate is a high 4.2 live births per woman, but so is mortality. Life expectancy is 63 years. 40% of the population is under fourteen. There is perhaps no place on earth where human variety is so evident. The people come in every stature from fine-boned, light skinned Papuans, to powerful, dark-skinned highlanders, to ebony black folk on the islands bordering the Solomons. The dominant culture is termed Melanesian, though that has as much to do with certain cultural commonalties as genetics. Melanesian cultures tend to be more egalitarian and competitive than those of the hierarchical Polynesians who occupy much of the Pacific. Papuans in the coastal regions have somewhat different traditions to the Melanesians, and tend to be less aggressive. The five million people of PNG divide into around a thousand tribes and an amazing eight hundred and sixty-two languages. 1%-2% speak English, but 30%+ of the people have some fluency in a well-developed pidgin called Tok Pisin**. Restrictive tribal marriage rules and tribal rivalries have made it exceptionally difficult to weld a single national consciousness from this mass of village cultures. For a few decades, Australia was a rather reluctant colonial power in PNG, or rather a United Nations mandated trustee. This occurred partly as a result of accepting a League of Nations mandate to take over the northern colonial possession of German New Guinea after World War 1. [** Recommended reference on Tok Pisin : Geoff P. Smith 2002 Growing Up With Tok Pisin pub. Battlebridge www.battlebridge.com ISBN 1 903292 06 9 ]
PNG is basically a village agricultural society, with some cash cropping of coffee and copra. The few cities (really large towns) have no significant manufacturing industry. Most of PNG's infrastructure has been built by Australians, both before and after Independence was thrust upon the somewhat bemused citizens of Papua New Guinea in 1975. For many years, Australia has poured hundreds of millions of dollars annually into the place, out of altruism, commercial calculation and for strategic insurance. Considering the size of the Australian taxpayer investment, the returns have been pretty meager to ordinary PNG (and Australian) citizens. A few large mining operations have made some money, and sparked serious conflict. Many Papua New Guineans themselves concur that since independence, things have tended to go steadily downhill. In particular, corruption has become entrenched in the national politics of country, and the physical security of daily life had deteriorated dramatically. There are a multiplicity of reasons for this. It is a great loss all round, for not only is Papua New Guinea a strikingly beautiful country with immense natural resources, but most of the ordinary people are gentle, humorous and kind. Perhaps only time can repair these fault lines in the social fabric.
As in most situations where an outside civilization imposes its technologies and values by colonial presence, racism has always been part of the equation between foreigners (mostly Australians) and PNG nationals. In the PNG situation racism was almost a natural extension of hostilities between highlanders and lowlanders, and amongst rival tribes themselves. The presence of complete outsiders however naturally tends to draw PNG nationals together psychologically against the invader. The formation of nations may have always been like this. My father was in PNG in the early 1950s and found himself sickened by the condescension of white expatriates towards locals. Colonial racism however is not a simple equation. Everyone tries to make sense of the world as they meet it, and many of the whites in PNG were no gurus in psychology. They tended to be practical people, and after their own fashion often made sacrifices and contributions which greatly benefited those around them, black and white. Equally today, you will find some citizens of Papua New Guinea, especially politicians, who can be quite doctrinaire in their discrimination against whites. Most people on both sides arrive at a working accommodation within the limits of their own understanding.
My Contact With Papua New Guinea
For a year in 1985 I taught English as a second language for academic purposes at the University of Technology in Lae (PNG's second city). I returned to teach again in 1987, before eventually moving on to the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. My students were as bright as any I have taught anywhere. However, they did labour under significant handicaps. English was a language used only in study and the classroom. Reading was simply not a pastime for people in the villages they came from. Even the occasional village TV set was a prize possession for mass viewing, and usually driven by a small, noisy portable generator. The fathers and grandfathers of these students had literally been stone age hunter-gatherers or shifting cultivators. The psychological gulfs they had to leap were awesome. It was common for my students -- they were mostly boys -- to be sponsored by a whole clan, and the honour and future prosperity of the clan rode on their young shoulders. They were expected, in fact required, to marry village girls from their areas, and these girls would probably be illiterate.
Then there was the complication of local wars. Highland tribes had (and have) a tradition of annual wars, and the student who declined to participate would lose all rights to inheritance, land, marriage, sponsorship and respect. In these 'wars' a few people might get killed, but they tended to be a kind of rough diplomacy and vehicle for leadership ambitions, with everyone going home for lunch. However, things have turned nasty in recent years, with stone age weapons being replaced by serious firearms, both home made and smuggled (increasingly for drugs). Worse, the 'payback' system meant that if a man of a certain status was killed (in war or by supposed magic) by another clan, a man of equal status in the offending clan had to be killed in revenge. Thus, as persons of high potential worth, my students were sometimes at risk from quarrels in which they had no personal part.
In short, PNG was an extremely interesting place to spend some time, but it was not and is not for the faint-of-heart. Anywhere in the world, life in rural villages (even quasi stone age villages) tends to be pretty safe for those with a local invitation to be there. This is because rural villages everywhere live by strict cultural rules which are understood by everyone and enforced by local leaders who also know everyone by name. Town and city life is an entirely different matter, especially in the first few generations before urban cultures have properly developed. PNG towns are full of young men removed from village control, and deeply frustrated by a lack of work, a lack of sexual opportunity, and an absence of anyone who speaks their local language. This is a violent mix, and the violence is random, indiscriminate and often fatal. It has morphed into dangerous gang rule ('rascals' in the local argot), and the most powerful gangs now have close political connections... What? You have just crossed the place off your holiday itinerary? That's a shame. There are offshore islands as close to paradise as you are likely to find.. For an academic like myself, life was also generally unproblematic. But one did have to think sensibly about where to go, and when ....
My own routine tended to revolve around the campus, and a mouldering tropical apartment in a safety-fenced compound several kilometers away. Gecko lizards scuttled busily up the apartment walls and enormous centipedes would regularly wriggle their way under the door. The cockroaches, those universal survivors, were also on steroids. But the real killers in this ever- buzzing, humming world were the malaria mosquitoes. Now they did scare me... In my little 4x4 Suzuki truck, I would make supply trips to the only real supermarket, and often on Saturday morning, trips to 'downtown' Lae where one lonely deli' in a banking building could make halfway decent chicken salads.
My neighbours tut-tutted at the daily risk I took on a forty-minute jog past kampongs and galvanized iron shacks, up to a jail by a stony river bed. I can still smell the smoke from acrid cooking fires in the early tropical evenings, and remember the ragged kids playing under palm trees by the roadside. My neighbours were right of course. The risks were real, and monthly incident reports from the university security service were a grim reminder. But my evening runs were in the real PNG. The campus was on another planet.
Through the cyclone razor wire fencing of my residential compound was a squatter settlement of folk who had somehow made their way down from the mountain villages in search of an el dorado city life. It was beyond me how they survived, for there was basically no work to be had in the city. But survive they did, and the rascal gangs apart, the Papua New Guinea people like this whom I met were remarkably tolerant, hopeful and self-disciplined. The closest dwelling I could see from my back door was a tin shack, hardly a garden tool shed, where eight people lived in something like harmony. One enterprising lady with spiky black hair and a missionary smock introduced herself through the wire as Jane. She had spotted my fridge as a money-making machine, and in fractured Tok Pisin (pidgin) asked if she could sometimes make ice blocks in it. Breaking all the security codes once again, of course I had to agree. So Jane would make her sticky red ice blocks to sell to harum-scarum 'monkeys' (kids) in a nearby vegetable market; [see my prose-poem, Friends - Irimo Street PNG].
The university staff themselves were an eccentric mixture academic refugees from a dozen countries. The design, funding and administration of Unitech was unmistakeably Australian. However in my field (language) the core were from that British colonial legion who seem to have tramped from one god-forsaken outpost of The Empire to another ever since Britain briefly ruled the waves a rapidly receding century ago. These are not your London toffs, but a special breed with thin hairy legs in baggy shorts who spend the best years of their lives swearing miserably in African shanty towns, or perhaps some Caribbean outpost, with a career peak when a mate gets them a job in Hong Kong. Their circuit diminished dramatically when India, then sundry other failed states dropped off the Queen's garden party list, but thanks to the real, mutton-chop God and American imperialism, English linguistic imperialism lives on triumphant. Almost to a man (even if they have gone native and married a local woman) they are supporting a clutch of ungrateful brats at enormous expense in some draughty English boarding school. They will finally retire, savings and friendships exhausted, disowned by their children, to a boarding house in Bournmouth ..... Given this awful prognosis, a surprising number of them are pretty nice blokes.
In the residential compound, we had a single American. I remember because he lived in the apartment next to mine. A lawyer, I think, drop-dead handsome, with a live-in PNG girlfriend who must have been the prettiest girl in Lae. He strung her along with the promise of marriage in fabled USA, and disappeared in a puff of smoke... Also in the compound, upstairs, was an Iranian geologist who liked to throw karate kicks from his balcony. He had a scrawny, shivering mongrel tied to the balcony, piddling through the floorboards and barking incessantly to scare away the rascals (smile..). I kept a supply of pebbles to heave at this poor creature around midnight when I wanted to get some sleep, so one bright morning the karate thumping gent threatened to break all my bones for disturbing the peace. I thought dryly of the real heroes on the other side of the fence, living eight to a shed, open to the vagaries of marauding gangs, tribal warfare ... and simple, devastating starvation.
* Note on personal names: all
names in this Diary have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals,
unless stated otherwise.