TALES OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA - Sold Out

Insights, Experiences, Reminiscences, Edited by Stuart Inder

Review by Ian Hicks in Sydney Morning Herald , ‘Spectrum’, Jan 5-6 2002

If they think of Papua New Guinea at all, most Australians have only a jaundiced view of the 26-year-old nation to our north. How could that be otherwise? The news from PNG seems usually to be bad followed by worse; yesterday’s political instability and today’s official corruption to be topped by tomorrow’s new mining pollution scandal.

Some fortunate Australians have a different viewpoint. They are the men and women who lived and worked in PNG, particularly those who did so between 1945, the end of World War II, and 1975, when PNG became independent.

This book is their stories, told in their own words and in an unmistakably Australian idiom. Stuart Inder, the editor of the old Pacific Islands Monthly, chose them from hundreds of contributions published during the past 20 years in Una Voce, the quarterly journal of the Retired Officers Association of PNG.

In his foreword, Inder admits cheerfully to having edited the 60-odd stories, which range from several pages to a few paragraphs, with only a light hand. That’s all to the good. Although these stories were written for an audience of insiders - the authors’ mates and their families - they were without exception written with skill.

A few yarns fall a bit flat - perhaps, as the comedian said, you had to have been there - but the individual voices remain true. And what a swag of stories they have to tell.

Bill and Nancy Johnston’s three linked stories are a powerful slice of personal history, the impact of a child’s death conveyed with a calm grief verging on nobility. There is the saga of the life and death of a pet pig called Cabbage, a thoughtful contribution to the Kokoda Track debate and a surprisingly gentle view of the impact of beachcombers in the Trobriand Islands.

There is many a tale of back-breaking effort, not always rewarded, and of acts of considerable bravery. And there is humour, such as the days-long party thrown at Mount Hagen for a patrol officer diagnosed (wrongly, as it later turned out) with terminal cancer:

Some husbands forgot their wives and partied on without them, while others forgot where their wives were sleeping and crawled into the beds of other wives by mistake. On the other hand, there were some wives so exhausted by the revelry that they did not know that their sleeping partners were not their husbands, while there were other wives who knew but didn’t care.

That larky tale, The True History of the Hagen Club, is the work of former District Court magistrate, Chips Mackellar. It’s great fun, and it tells you a good deal about the way Australians got things done in pre-independence PNG.

Mackellar is also the author of the best tale in the book, A Family Matter, which you’ll not read without at least a lump in the throat. When you’ve finished it, you’ll have been subtly introduced to a continuing PNG dilemma: how to balance family tradition and the Western way of doing things when the independent umpire has gone home.

I don’t think there’s been a better book of personal recollection from PNG since 1982's splendid Taim Bilong Masta, which is out of print (your local library either has it or can get it for you) but which ABC Books is thinking of reprinting.

Tales of Papua New Guinea is a modest but invaluable contribution to Australian history. It transforms deeply personal experience into a broader view of what Australians did, and what they sought to do, in a PNG now gone forever.

Ian Hicks, a former literary editor of the Herald, was the paper’s correspondent in PNG from 1969 to 1973.
 

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Review by John Farquharson in The Canberra Times, ‘Panorama’, 2 February 2002

When veteran London Missionary Society minister turned politician Percy Chatterton came to write his memoir of a lifetime spent in Papua New Guinea he called it Day that I have Loved. For Chatterton those years there were the happiest of his life and he found a profound love for the land and the Papuan people to whom he ministered. And the people came to love and understand him, giving him ample reward for his long years of labour and dedication.

That same theme and motivation comes through Tales of Papua New Guinea, a compilation of enthralling, but true, stories selected from more than 20 years of issues of Una Voce, the quarterly journal of the Retired Officers’ Association of PNG. But these are not just kiaps’ (patrol officers) stories.

They embrace the whole range of people from missionaries, planters and miners to public servants, parliamentarians, businessmen and individuals of varied ilk.

Sensitively selected and edited by Stuart Inder, former long-serving editor of Pacific Islands Monthly, who incidentally was the instigator of Percy Chatterton’s memoir, the stories capture richly evocative images of the lives of people who loved what they were doing, accepting postings wherever they took them and then getting on with the job. Their experiences span three major phases in PNG’s history and development - Time Before (World War II), War Time and Time After (the years between World War II and independence). Throughout that time PNG really marched to the administration’s beat, as government control and other enterprises were stumblingly extended across a land making its way into the 20th century.

It was an era when, as Chips Mackellar recalls in his tale of Life With Crocodiles, ‘you could walk for three months without ever seeing another soul except your own patrol personnel’. Over vast areas ‘there were no roads or foot trails. It was a totally trackless wilderness’. Against that setting Mackellar goes on to tell the gripping but terrible tale of how a crocodile snatched a baby in a Fly River village. A mother had ‘just finished breast-feeding her baby and put him in a bilum (string bag), which she hung from a protruding floorboard, about a foot (30cm) off the ground. The baby was sound asleep when I heard somebody cry, “Crocodile! Crocodile!” and I looked up to see an enormous crocodile running like a lizard on his two back feet. The crocodile swept past the house snatching the baby in the bilum on the way. People yelled, dogs barked, pigs squealed to no avail. Within seconds the crocodile crossed the isthmus and plunged into the water on the other side, taking with him the baby in the bilum’.

That was a tragedy of indigenous village life. Europeans had their share of tragedy too, apart from plenty of hardship, on isolated outstations, where families had to be raised with scant or no readily available medical assistance. Nancy Johnston movingly describes how family dramas could arise out of nowhere. She and her kiap husband, Bill, were stationed at Kikori, in the Gulf, when tragedy struck. The resident medical doctor was several days walk away, in the mountains, inaccessible to aircraft when their daughter Christine, three weeks before her second birthday, suddenly took ill. In an hour, she had died in her father’s arms. Radio contact could not be made with Port Moresby or anywhere else, being lunchtime. By the time the signal was picked up by the Department of Civil Aviation in Madang, it was too late.

They were more fortunate at their next posting to Bogia, between Madang and Wewak, when their daughter, Margaret, developed a high temperature. A doctor treated her for malaria, giving her an antibiotic as an added precaution. Her temperature could not be stabilised and with the doctor concerned about her survival, an urgent message hurriedly brought Bill back from patrol. Margaret’s problem was later found by another doctor to have been exacerbated by overdosing with drugs. His pronouncement was that ‘according to the book, that child should be dead!’ However, continual vomiting saved her life.

Not all PNG experiences were as harrowing as that. Take Candy Parrish’s and Kay Cole’s introduction to PNG after leaving comfortable lives in Australia to join their kiap husbands. Candy’s trip to New Guinea to marry Doug Parrish in Lae and then her first month of marriage read like the script for one of those old Hollywood comedy-of-errors movies. (To save space, Candy and Kay’s numerous mishaps have been omitted here.)

That is just a taste of the wide range of gripping yarns and now never-to-be-repeated experiences that this fascinating, skilfully edited, book has to offer. The PNG Retired Officers’ Association has produced an attractive, highly professional publication well deserving of a place on any bookshelf. It should go on the ‘must-read’ lists not only of old PNG hands, but also of general readers who, I’ve no doubt, will be drawn by something really different.

John Farquharson is a writer and media consultant whose long-term interest in PNG began in the early ‘60s. He is a former deputy editor of The Canberra Times.