Notes from the Northern Territory: Jim Toner

March 2010

A reshuffle on the committee of the NT's PNG-Australia Social and Cultural Group saw Christmas slip by without celebration but not to worry: in mid-February the wantoks will hold a ‘Welcome New Year’ party in lieu.

A PNGAA member having composed his own obituary has lodged it with me for submision to Una Voce ‘when the need arises’. The motivation is to ensure accuracy of facts and eliminate superfluities. A sound approach bearing in mind an obituary once published in The Times. It was for a chap in the Colonial Office, London, who had served King and country in Nigeria, the Sudan, etc,. for years, was awarded a CMG, and then retired to the English countryside. Having outlined his admirable career the obituary concluded ‘Recently he was convicted of an offence in the gentlemen's lavatory at Reading railway station’. Better left unsaid, I felt. But I believe readers can rely on our Editor excluding brushes with the Law (for whatever reason) from her Vale pages.

Some Western Highlanders will recall Frank Carter, a Kiwi missionary who worked in that district for seven years in the late Fifties. He imported a 1955 DOT Scrambler to get about, found it ideal for the rugged conditions, and on departure left the motor cycle, now much the worse for wear, with the Mission. In NZ last year at the age of 76 Frank sought to re-live his youth by acquiring another Scrambler. It required a long search but eventually one was found. Which turned out to be his own 1955 machine refurbished. One for your book, Mr Ripley?

I first encountered Harry Coehn in 1963 when he came back to Rabaul, his home town, after two years teacher training at ASOPA. 46 years later in Darwin we patronise the same cardiologist. In between heart stress tests he told me about his trip to PNG two years ago. Moresby he found depressing. Triple security checks to get inside  a bank, gun shots in the night where he was staying in Korobosea, etc. He visited the Bavaroko school (near the Boroko RSL site) where he had been Headmaster to learn that its enrolment had jumped from 200 in his day to 900, matching the huge increase in Moresby's population over three decades.

However, he found life pleasing in Kokopo with the sight of its Sports Club now a mere empty slab the only sad moment. From there he went up to Raluana where he had taught and experienced the same joyful welcome, quite unexpected but very soothing to the ego, as reported by fellow chalkie Dave Keating after his return to Karkar island where he had been a Head. People, former pupils, flocked to meet Harry who remembered some and pretended to know those he did not. He certainly remembered Rabbie Namaliu, a student who went on to become Chief Minister.

Other members have reported on the current sad state of Rabaul after their visits and Harry could only gaze in astonishment at his former home in Sulphur Creek Road. However he found that Chinese from the pre-Independence demographic had contributed to a full maintenance clean-up of volcanic matter from their segment of the cemetery. Harry went over to New Ireland, stayed at the Kavieng Hotel, and pronounced it quite unimproved since last seen in the time of Joe Capy and Mick Gallen. And as the only accommodation available in Kavieng its charges resembled those of the proverbial wounded bull. He then embarked on a 16 hours drive to Manmo plantation near Namatanai, half on bitumen and half on dirt road, in order to visit family graves.

Harry, captain of the Darwin golf club for eight years, still takes an occasional swing at a ball but intends to devote this year to knocking out a biography basically for the benefit of his four grandchildren who, he says, have no idea what life was like in PNG let alone growing up under Japanese occupation.