Going back...

Oh, and it’s not quite so easy, you know? Between here and there is three months of cold weather and stress, and a small crumpling – humiliation like a rubbished paper square – every time that I admit that it’s been hard.

I have a pre-dawn moment at my front door. It’s raining. The taxi isn’t here yet. Pete is still asleep. I’m a long way off late, but I consider it: hurtling back upstairs, hiding under my doona and pretending I didn’t hear the alarm. Turns out I owe a small piece of happiness to a man named Fred, who was early.

I went back to Alotau. It was a good time.

I find it difficult to write while travelling, and these past weeks were giddy and multi-coloured and reckless and emotional and constantly half-drunk – no pools of isolation, no distance or disconnected observation. It’s harder to mine aphorisms when you are busy at the heart of your own existence. I need more time to think.

But, meanwhile, a few moments of quiet:

a morning jetty, the distance between cloud and bay as blurred as the difference between warm water and moist air on my barely wakened face

and

a balcony in the trees, bare legs, browning, glossed with mozzie repellant, folk songs tinny with no speakers, and wine glasses (four), all filled at the same good source

and

a dusty office, hushed by a steaming urn

and

a swollen Moresby night, calm and sleepless in a twisted sheet, counting my goodbyes between the whir of the fan, arrhythmic clanging of the wakeful docks, and his breath, almost steady, in

and

out.

Over

It is a very particular experience to empty a home where you’ve been happy. That, I have imagined, watching Lisa slowing compacting her life into cases, washing, folding, giving things away. My life, of course, is somewhat more hasty and chaotic. Isn’t it always? And it is scrambled together, mouldy and dirty and incoherent, in the course of a sudden, tearful Friday night, leaving trails of anti-malarial tablets, bobby pins, scraps of something useful strewn across the floor, and mud in the shower.

I’ve been in Port Moresby since Saturday, silent and uncertain. I’m here now to say goodbye.

Last week the Australian government agency that sponsors my voluntary placement here in PNG was forwarded an email which raised concerns regarding my safety here in Alotau. That little email has generated tornadoes of print and phone calls back and forth: Alotau, Port Moresby, Canberra and back again. The upshot of this week of suspended, silent drama is that I cannot safely remain in Papua New Guinea. The reputation of my volunteer program has taken its own belting in the past year, and if I were to be involved in a security incident after they had received a written warning about my safety, it could spell the end of the program. Unfortunately for more people than me, PNG is a place where things do happen to people, all the time. And I have very suddenly run out of government-funded gambling chips.

This is heartbreaking, for oh, such a lot of reasons. I would like to reflect on two of them.

When I started this blog, I didn’t have a clear idea what its style, its shape, its overarching substance would prove to be. If I imagined anything, it was self-aggrandising tales of boots-and-all bravado, world-weary dispatches from the northern frontier – flak-jackets in paradise. Because that is what I knew of PNG from my inner-Sydney sanctum: guns and violence and carjackings and machetes and rapes and brutality. And jungle.

And of course you know, because you’ve read it: my PNG has not been that. It is beautiful. And kind and brave and brutalised, and yes, violent, and terribly sad. The truth that I’ve tried to capture over the past months is that this is not a violent country, but a country afflicted by violence. And it’s particularly cruel to be pulled away, for this of all reasons, when I’ve finally felt like I might be able to change a few minds about this place, even on the silly, helpless scale of a blog.

I’ve been safe here, because Papua New Guineans have kept me safe. And as hard as it has sometimes been to be a white woman in PNG, it is harder to be a woman (or a child, or a long-long), and not to be white.

The other thought I have for you is much closer. It’s been made very clear to me that the decision to remove me from my assignment in PNG has been made on the basis of perceptions rather than truths about my safety, and the associated reputational risk to the program. I’ve been treated with respect, fairness and a great deal of sympathy but my work is meaningless in the face of that risk. Because of course, none of this is secure. It’s not just one volunteer project in Papua New Guinea, but an edifice of jobs and programs that balance on a budgetary whim. And we in Australia have no great appetite for international development aid. (Ironically enough, for various strategic and philanthropic reasons, PNG receives the lion’s share of Australia’s foreign aid budget each year).

I don’t believe the decision to send me home was a just one. It’s easy, and masochistically gratifying, to see myself as a little person up against a bureaucratic machine, and in one sense I am. But the truth is, what happened here was that an agency’s activities and decision-making were effectively determined by another little person (and a little email). I think there’s a valid question here for us as Australian citizens and voters: how is it possible that one small-town racist can call the shots on a international agency? How do we let this happen?

And, a question about international development (which is something I had pledged to leave to smarter, more experienced, better-informed minds): Do we think this is a good thing?

This is Alpha 2 to Base, do you read me?

Alpha 2, over.

I anticipate that I will be back in Sydney in a few days, but lovely readers, I have one last request for you from PNG – please wait around and check back in a week or so? If you’ve been along for the ride so far, you will know I have lot of bent-heartstrings and a lot of unfinished business here. There is one last something I will need your help to do.

Night Music

Susan takes special care of me. In the markets, she buys nothing – she can get it all cheaper in Mendi – but she trails me, eyeballing young men and keeping a discreet hand on the strap of my bilum.

We settled together early, mostly through the gravitational accidents of conference rooms and hotel dining tables, although I had noticed her quiet smile, her squinty, wicked humour and her determination to be heard. It’s hard to estimate her age – she must be younger than my parents. She is not from here, but she is married to a highlander. She misses her place, a seaside village at the southern end of New Ireland.

We have cultivated a week of allegiance: in-jokes and gentle sillinesses, but it is not until the last night that I think to ask her about her family. Does she have children? How many? How old?

“Four,” she says. And pauses.

“My son was murdered,” Susan says, and maybe I am the only one who thinks it is suddenly. “Twenty one.”

He was beaten to death by a group of young men that he knew. His friends. They were walking at night outside of town. I ask if it was a fight and she says no, she thinks it was jealousy. Her son was on holidays from university where he was ranking high in his engineering degree.

It has been three years.

Susan works as a probation officer, supervising young people on parole and community work orders, and managing their rehabilitation.

At home in Alotau, our little stilted house is in distant earshot of a village. Once or twice since I first arrived, I have heard night singing – curious layered chants, with a swaying ocean rhythm. Hot darkness, insects and the sound like a floating veil – it was something very beautiful, a snatched joy and a mystery.

Last week, Karen showed up for work after days’ disappearance, with a hollow raspy voice and serious expression.

“My husband’s auntie passed,” she whispered. “We have been singing all night at the house.”

There was singing again tonight, just faintly. It was still beautiful.

People Like Me

PNG islanders have a phrase in tok pisin, which may be exhaled – like the best of holiday catchphrases – in a state of torpid contentment, to say: everything’s alright. Only that’s not quite the literal translation. Due to some wardrobe deficiencies and a draconian hotel policy on shorts, my friend has worn a lap-lap to the bar. Round the edge it is printed, repeatedly, in proud and cheery woodblock: Em no rang yet!

I have been wanting for a long time to share the delights of Papua New Guinean bureaucracy with you. These are tales of bank queues, senseless forms, no trains, no automobiles and routinely overbooked planes and The Edifying Fable Of The Committee Meeting (Volumes I-XIV). It’s all very funny, in a slightly hysterical way – I’m most often reminded of the experience of reasoning down phone lines with someone who can apply perfect logic to the delusion that police are broadcasting satellite radio through their teeth. The strategy is roughly the same, too – take a deep breath, be patient and just let this one roll.

But I’m not going to tell that story today.

One reason is that all my anecdotes are too well-rehearsed, picked over in a multitude of expatriate conversations. It’s a motif for a cartoon villain – the ever-fertile, barely varying topic of the broken systems of PNG, uniformly inept and frustrating, but treated with an entirely variable degree of affection or attempts at understanding, and a variable quality of amusement – all these minor notes and discordant jangles.

“It’s like they don’t even understand the concept of efficiency,” says Kate, who does not work and does not speak to any local person who is not a waiter or her driver, and is therefore clearly an expert in both workplace efficiency and Papua New Guinean psychology.

I don’t want to write about these things because I am worried that I will get it just that little bit wrong, and I will sound like someone else.

I have been finding it difficult to define people like me, here. Back home, I am so patently of a tribe: my wantok are marked by our postcodes, our name-dropping, our secondhand clothes and boutique educations – but above all, by our politics, and the earnest collective desire not to be an arsehole.

In a town as small as Alotau, it can be hard to find anyone of my age and income to socialise with, let alone someone who can map my cultural reference points and share in all my preoccupations and big questions. So, a crowded restaurant – Laura and her partner Liam nursing coffee cups and discussing the demise of News of the World – and I feel like gasping, like I have taken in too much oxygen already – relieved and panicked all at once. These things – phone calls, trips to Moresby – are hooks to a world that I chose and furnished for myself. I need my people, I tell myself, to keep me decent, maybe to keep me sane.

It’s been a long day in our cramped, chilly conference room. Mark, exhausted, has told us a story we all already know, about a sixteen year old in a holding cell, not so far from here, not so many months ago: 5 police and a radiator fan belt. A riot, and a funeral. The last hour’s conversation, however, has relentlessly circled the question of incentives, sitting allowances and just how much it is reasonable for the National Juvenile Justice Committee to subsidise a biscuit budget. Frankly, I am A Bit Fed Up.

When we spill out and part ways, Negil asks me if I would like to join her for tea. Her room is the largest, with a tiny sitting room and kitchenette at the back. She has bought an immense bag of oranges from someone’s friend’s sister, and five of us sit munching in a haze of fresh, sharp scent while Pat boils the water. I like these women, a lot.

And they are not my age, and most of them earn a fraction of my volunteer’s allowance, and some of them haven’t been to university, and it’s a safe bet that none of them have read the same books as I have. Still, I am not explaining, correcting, qualifying, arguing. I am nodding a lot, actually, and talking less than I normally would.

We drink tea, and eat oranges, and we complain about Papua New Guinean bureaucracy.

So High

I’ve been in the highlands.

This is the wild country of fear and wonder – the imagined origin of all violence and the stony heartland of pre-contact tradition, towns which hulk in the middle of the map, narrowing their eyes at outsiders. Negil and Pat are nervous. Our vehicle is crowded with laughing women, none of us highlanders: Meri Central Province, Meri Niu Ailan, Meri New Britain and one white Meri New South Wales. We pay a lot of attention to locking the doors.

Mount Hagen is a town, not a mountain – a chilly, crowded valley surrounded by peaks and astonishing, gravity-defying terrace gardens. In the mid-seventies, it was packed out with coffee-growers and fortune seekers, a flare of rapid growth and development within days’ walk of high, hidden villages where first contact is still a living memory. We cut shapes through the wide streets in the mandatory 4WD, Mark snapping at the corrugated shopfronts – bracketed chalkboards advertising specials on lamb flaps – the packed dirt streets unchanged, only faded. There is something heavy in the air – although to me it feels less fearsome than funereal. The town is mist, and low-wheeling birds of prey. It feels forgotten.

The truth is, this is the third biggest “city” in PNG, which sits at the centre of the most agriculturally rich region of the country. In the bellies of the mountains, there is money: gold, mostly, some copper, and now LNG.

I don’t have enough instructive anecdotes to frame this place for you. It smells of woodsmoke and gardenias, and also raw sewerage. Earlier this year, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture made a specific recommendation for the immediate closure of Mount Hagen police station. Not training, or awareness-raising, or human rights monitoring, or improved facilities, but shut the fucker down, post haste.

Mount Hagen, for me, was fierce humour, great coffee, pigs, broccoli, beards and an awful lot of Not-In-Kansas moments.

I want to come back.

A Good Belting

I was prepared (or I thought I was prepared) for violence. In 2005 and 2006, Human Rights Watch produced two reports on police brutality in Papua New Guinea, with special attention to the interactions of police and vulnerable persons, including sex workers, men who have sex with men, the informal sector, boy and girl children and women. I read them – one before I left, the follow up in spare hours throughout my first weeks here. I have put the links at the side. Read them, if you have the time. And imagine what it is that I imagine throughout my polite and cheerful dealings with police.

What it is to be white in Papua New Guinea, is, among other things, to be treated with deference way beyond your experience, and often over and above your older, wiser, senior colleagues. There is a sort of universal agreement that everything you say is terribly sensible and redolent of expertise, at least for as long as you are in the room. It’s not polite-ness (the obsequiousness of bad waiters and men who say laay-dies) – but a truer courtesy, the precious handling of a novelty, and, occasionally, distrust.

So it is that senior police acknowledge me with a wave from the high front cab of the vehicle

(and I picture young women, pulled from the parked van by their hair, two by two into the thick jungle)

In the station, where desks are arranged so that only the interviewer is seated, a junior officer is dispatched to fetch me a chair

(and I picture a row of teenaged boys, standing, with their genitals on the desk, percussive thwack of a stick brought down across them)

I am not a witness to such things. I struggle with myself in almost every encounter – disgust at them – disgust at my own prejudice – and the thought, unavoidable: this is why no-one reports crime.

There is another reason.

I am afraid to admit it, but in some way I understand the violence: the bully’s instinct, swelled in a uniform – some other, bigger anger, a collective impotence that can be exorcised on the snappable body of a young man. A good belting to release frustration, that will set him right.

The things I have witnessed are not really things I am able to write about. The vaguest outline involves not brutality, but mostly a lot of things that just don’t happen – a lot of people who aren’t where they should be – and a certain smell in the narrow gaps between bodies in a cell, which I will leave you to imagine for yourselves.

I say I understand the violence because right now all I want to do is grab this incompetent police prosecutor (with his yes and his of course and his lazy-heartless-do-nothing) – I want to take him by the shoulders and I want to shake him, slap his fat face side to side to side until his teeth are loose – and this feeling, I suppose, is just exactly how these things start.

Snapshots (Travelling Edition: New Ireland)

This week, I have been concentrating – compacting memories with a squinched intensity, hard-pressured enough to push a shutter in my mind, and capture these things for you. So.

(snap)

At the far edge of the island, Mark, posed like an explorer – legs an intrepid triangle, balancing on the scribbled sharp volcanic splash of rock and pointing towards New Hanover on the horizon. He is holding a single beer bottle, which we have been passing between us with swashbuckling egalitarianism. Beside him, there is a small

(snap)

spotted white dog – damp and rakish, with a cheeky tilt to his head – he swam after our boat, and appointed himself our tour guide, leading us through

(snap)

thick-winding jungle, coconuts, vines like dark cords – shells and coral underfoot, where Japanese guns loom in secret clearings.

Here are some images of training:

an overhead view, perhaps, of a cluster of heads and hands and whiteboard markers, bent round a single sheet of butchers’ paper; and the mandatory group portrait – look-at-us-smiling-we-have-matching-t-shirts! – which in this case, is captured on a white sand beach – behind them, coconut palms, bending coy and conspiratorial and

(snap)

a stretch of sea, impossible, turquoise-bright – and way, way out, in the corner of the frame, an optical quirk: the dark figures of young boys fishing, one duck-diving, bobbing, the other standing on a submerged reef. From this angle, he is a parable.