Notes from the Northern Territory: Jim Toner

March 2012

Katrina Kadiba, a member of the Papua New Guinea Social & Cultural Group in Darwin, has opened a store specialising in PNG fine jewellery. Her refreshingly modern showroom, Bling Jewellery, is located in a more elderly remnant of what was once Darwin's Chinatown. Katrina, who has been living here for nearly thirty years, is the daughter of Colin Madden, a 1967-68 ASOPA chalkie who went on to be a school Principal in PNG. Together with his wife, Esther, from Tufi and also a teacher, he spent much time in Manus and ENB (Kokopo, Keravat and Rabaul). Their daughter likes to visit Tufi when she is able to see her maternal relatives.

Katrina sells attractive and genuine PNG handiwork crafted in Port Moresby at the House of Gemini and made from Lihir (New Ireland) gold or silver. The jewelled plauas and bataplais will appeal to wantoks. Members never likely to visit Darwin can examine the pictures on blingwebsite.com.

In a previous issue the exploit of a Darwin boatie in crossing the Torres Strait single-handed in a 15 ft dinghy was described. A problem motor caused him to be washed up on a Western Province beach halfway between Daru and the Papuan border and he found himself, to his surprise, welcomed by the 200 villagers of Sibidiri. This was in 2008 and while it made a good yarn once back in Darwin what he saw impressed Craig ('Crackers') Hand enough to found a charitable group with a website www.friendsofpapuanewguinea.org.

So he sailed back in 2010 taking all sorts of donated gifts, in particular a solar powered VHF radio which put the isolated village in touch with Thursday Island thence Cairns. The importance of this was the occasional need to canoe very sick people many kms to Boigu Island to receive Australian medical attention.

Fund-raising in Darwin and generous sponsorship by local firms met partial costs of that visit and supplied basic tools and first aid items for Sibidiri. This year 'Crackers' has organised evening functions at two venerable Darwin institutions, the Railway Club where there was roasted pig on a spit and the Trailer Boat Club where the main event was cane-toad racing. The money raised will be used for this year's gifts to PNG villagers of whom he had never heard three years ago.

Remember, remember the 14th of December ... I shall because, after switching on Sky TV multi-view offering a choice of News from Sydney, London or Wellington, I found myself watching for the first time EMTV from Moresby. Its sudden newsworthiness was of course the PNG constitutional crisis and the camera within an excited Waigani parliament roved from the gowned, bewigged Speaker to back-benchers from the Highlands in full oratorical flow. My only previous experience of the legislature in session was at the old House of Assembly on Tuaguba Hill where emotion was distinctly absent other than from a lady seated in front of me in the visitors' gallery. When Percy Chatterton rose to speak she leaned forward, visibly tense, holding one hand to her mouth and only relaxed once the Member had concluded without a stumble. She had accompanied him as a new bride to Moresby in 1924 where they both taught at the LMS school in Hanuabada and forty years later she was clearly devoted to her husband. He was knighted in 1981 and I believe she predeceased him which was a great pity if so.

There is comment elsewhere on the departure of Sir Michael Somare from the PNG government but with four decades in politics not to mention his earlier life in the Sepik it is certain that many wantoks will have known the future Grand Chief quite well. One would be Darwin resident Harry Coehn who, when a Headmaster in Wewak, took him on the golf course and helped him improve his swing and putting and now remarks that he found him a quick learner. Another would be Margaret Clancy in Perth who recalls that she taught the Somare children, Bertha and Arthur—who became respectively her father's Press Secretary and a Cabinet Minister—at the Ela Beach Primary School.

What is it about former Lancaster bomber aircrew? Is it some version of "Catch 22" whereby if they reveal their Air Force past they will be forced to fly five more missions over Germany? I have previously written in Una Voce that the late kiap and Land Titles Commissioner Bill Kelly never in all the time I knew him mentioned that he had been a Lancaster pilot. And now we have it revealed that Johnny Herbert, who died last May, was a rear-gunner on the bomber—not the safest seat on that plane.

I saw a good deal of the Police Inspector at the Rabaul District Office when he was assigned to solve the 'deserter' problem in ENB (workers employed under the Highlands Labour scheme who had quit their plantations). When John went off to University for a year to pursue a degree he asked me to house-sit while he was away. Presumably, though erroneously, he thought that the mild-mannered District Clerk would not hold wild parties and wreck the joint. However, it was eventually handed back intact before John went off to higher duties in Konedobu. Never in all that time did he mention that he had been in the RAF let alone a Tail-End Charlie on a Lancaster.
As Max Harris/Peter Cahill said in their Vale notice Johnny Herbert was a man who inspired trust and he had no trouble following Independence in gaining important jobs "down South". RIP