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.

The Smallest Voices

“…Yeah, I’ve heard there are places in New Ireland where children aren’t allowed to go after dark…?”

Mark leans back – curious, polite. He and Suzie are old friends, and she has flags in the corners of her face for him: a smile, a twitch, a purse, an eyebrow, not quite a wink. Suzie has been telling us about island sorcery – the love spells that will set you barefoot, night-wandering, mad – the women who cast their spirits out to wander with stolen forms and strange faces – who wake tired – and people who are willed to death. But: “It won’t work if you don’t believe it…” (don’t worry white kids). She directs an amused glance at me, my body language inverted – I am leaning towards her, eyes wide, frightened – certainly half-believing, at least for this moment in the dim light of the balcony, folded as we are in the blackness of the Bismarck Sea.

“Yes – and when they come back, they cry, cry, and they lose weight…”

They waste away. Their spirits are detached from them, and they must be called back. Pat tells us that in her husband’s place, in Central Province, children can’t be carried in bilums after dusk – they might be snatched from their parents’ backs. Strange things happen after dark, Suzie and Pat agree. And you know something is wrong when a child won’t stop crying.

My return to Alotau is on a little plane again, cramped and sweaty after a marionette sprint across the tarmac. I have two scotch fingers, apple juice in one of those airline plastic cups that remind me of doctors’ samples, and a blocked nose which makes me feel as if my eardrums are bursting. Around me, the smaller passengers seem to be suffering the same misapprehension – there is a chorus of screaming that keeps up throughout the hour-long flight, which gives me ample time to reflect on how silent, for the most part, Papua New Guinean children can be.

Don’t get me wrong, there is boisterous noise – as I write, I can hear the scattered register of small voices, swooping, screeching. Every day at 3pm, kids cluster behind the probation office and pelt rocks at the fruit trees that overhang the fence, by the river – clunk, clunk, on the flat tin roof until Karen affects a gruff bass and bellows “HEY!” from behind our faded curtains. It is part of my job to visit schools, and attempt to demystify this country’s juvenile justice framework while seven-year-old potential felons (and let’s not forget, in PNG the age of criminal responsibility is still seven years old) wriggle and giggle like a hat full of caterpillars. I believe I can say with some authority that there are plenty of happy sounds to be heard from the children of PNG – it’s the sounds of distress that are missing. Children don’t cry.

Even when they are four years old and they have cut their fingers deeply on the small knife that their grandmother was using to pierce coconuts for the white lady and the other strangers at the centre of the family’s orbiting attention. What they do then is they take a grubby piece of fabric and they wrap it round their little injured hand and hover quietly at the edges of conversation until somebody notices, answering in a fuzzy whisper:

“… hurt …”
“… knife …”

At the school, the teachers had a hundred questions – not about juvenile justice, or the responses I have rehearsed with the kids (“Who do we ask for?” “SEEBEESEE!”) – but about child protection, and the new Lukautim Pikinini Act. Could we tell the children about child abuse? What are their rights? They brought us anecdotes – neglect, bruises. Babies having babies and fingers pointing at fathers.

There are so many ways that it hurts to be a child in PNG. They are brutally enumerated in the literature I trawl through in empty hours at work. And now I am shivering again, in the heavy air, in my big bright room full of dappled sunlight. Who knows what dark things it would take to make these tiny stoics cry and cry and cry.

New Perspectives

I’ve been off and away for the past week and a half: conducting a training workshop at the edge of the ocean in idyllic Kavieng, New Ireland with CBC staff and another Aussie volunteer, before stealing some time in Port Moresby with a handful of my original gang of nervous idealists. We had brunch! It is actually impossible for me to do justice to the thrill of publicly consuming rather firmly poached eggs and coffee made with UHT milk. I felt like I had snatched back a little piece of a life that was recognisably mine – not a lasting feeling in Mosbi town, for better or worse.

For more cosmopolitan hijinks in the crazy, crazy place that is Port Moresby, you can find dispatches from my brilliant friend Laura here

In New Ireland, I would rather leave you to picture something we didn’t do, through tragic constellations of transport and timing, and my throwing up a lot. And because I didn’t go, and because it is wonderful to imagine, and because, in its own way, this is a description I can’t improve, I am quoting Wikipedia:

This area is famous for its shark callers, men who can lure sharks to the side of their dugout canoes by singing to them.

Oh strange and wonderful place, keep on surprising me.

Fun, Fun, Fun

My friend Lisa organised a Fun Walk.

What this means is:

tents in a big muddy playing field, which ends where the water begins, plus palm trees, and billowing smoke from wood-fired barbeques, and a trickle of people in the early dawn, walking the seven kilometres out to the starting point so they can walk back in with a raffle ticket on their arm, and maybe a t-shirt, and lots of coloured t-shirts, in fact, which all say MILNE BAY FUN WALK (I have one), and a swarming mass at the registration tent, where I am standing on a chair and shouting: “Everybody take two biiiiiiiiig steps back!”, and everybody is laughing, and patient, and eating sausages, and people keep pressing bundles of small notes into my hand, donations, and Lisa and Pam are wearing silly hats, and there is a band, and then the children arrive, little ones with motor disabilities pushed in wheelbarrows covered in palm streamers, by firemen, and I am drinking barely diluted Tang, which tastes pretty good actually, and catching friends in the crowd, and it is harder than I thought to find the people I know because there are FOUR THOUSAND PEOPLE here, and Lisa is on the megaphone now, and she is exhausted but smiling, and the sun is so hot, and I am dreaming of a coconut, and then the tent just sort of vaporises into somebody’s helpful hands, and people wander away, and the air over the town is heavy, it ripples, you could cut it like a lime and squeeze out these two things: first, a rainstorm, and second, Joy.

Somewhere over the Rainbow

The national radio station has been broadcasting from the covered sections of the Alotau market. I can hear them as I arrive, picking my way through the altogether more transient set up sprawled outside the gate – neat pyramids of rich, tiny tomatoes and pawpaws basking in halos of their own ripened scent, all spread on palm leaves with tidy signs that say K2; 70t. The sellers smile mildly as I make my laboured and ill-informed selections, and hustle me in a collective effort towards the lone pile of thick-leaved, dark and bitter parsley I have been searching for.

In my first week, Sisi swept me through the steaming pans and idling palm fans – swat, fly, fish – and selected the best of everything for me: a big, rubbery chestnut, spotted fish with the skin on, the softest piece of tapioca – then, starfruit, ready to eat, and the right kind of oranges (thin-skinned). Her soft disapproval – a little snitching sound between the teeth – when I reached for an inferior onion, or pineapple too-ripe. Oh, the skills of grandmothers! I have a sudden, heartsick longing for my Nanna, who came from a village too, after all, and who would have known how to go about the parsley.

Inside, people are seated along the benches usually covered in produce. Lisa waves from the other side – she is about to be interviewed – and I wander through to a perch among the crew. I can see the bay from here, bent palm trees and the bruised, ominous tropical blue sky. They are interviewing a band – old men from Milne Bay who nurse guitars and the puny punchline of a ukulele. Then they begin to play.

I don’t know how to describe it. There is a breeze, warm and salt-smelling, which bowls against me like a labrador, and somehow those thin high happy notes are riding it, guiding it, even. It is one of those moments when I feel so palpably Elsewhere – the sky, the water, and the fat frangipani tree, this music – they belong to each other. They harmonise. I am enthralled by the strangeness and at the same time nostalgic, in no particular way, for places I belong.

The man with ukulele is singing softly, as mournful as a ukelele song can ever be: and there, he is smiling the words, his mouth a crumbled half-set of teeth, stained a bloody red with betelnut. At the end, there is more chatter – this band, it appears, is one of the last of the traditional Milne Bay string bands. The man was singing in his first language, which belongs to the hill country of the southern side of the bay.

“Can you translate the meaning of the song?” asks the interviewer.

The old man smiles.

“It is about the wind. When it blows, it brings memories of home.”

This is the story of a stand of trees

Your place is over those mountains. Two days of walking – it is better, you remember, when you are climbing and descending – the thick leaves shelter you, although in the rains, the mud-soft slopes will test you. But the road is hot, rough, unforgiving. It did not reach your village before – two years, maybe – when you last came this way with your grandmother, laden with garden food to sell at the big covered market. Two days. The vehicles did not stop for you, and you reached town late, and slept outside the market on the gravel, close together.

This time, you came by vehicle. Jolting about in the back of the high police wagon. That is probably how your brother got his black eye.

Where you stay in the police station is not a room meant for sleeping, it is full of chairs like a school, and a desk. A man lies behind like a bent stick, he smells of jungle juice and his head has patches of blood. They give you Coke and cream crackers for a meal, which is good, although you would like some more crackers. They talk to you in Pisin and English and you look around for that Constable who brought you in from your place who will understand but he has taken the vehicle back there and you don’t know how long you will be and maybe it is better here at the police station because you haven’t been to town for two years and your brother has never been and you don’t really know where you are.

You tell the police officers you are twenty one.

What happened is that there was a place that belonged to your village but then the coastal people came up from town because maybe some of them had had land in that place but you don’t think it was true because maybe it had been too many years and they were not from there anymore. There were trees there. They chopped them down and built canoes, left them half-carved, adrift in the grass and climbing mustard, among the wounded stumps. The village was angry.

You and your brother have slept rough since your grandmother died. You don’t go to school. Those old ladies let you cut betelnut, and sometimes you can sell in the village, and you have wantok there but you are too old to adopt and nobody has much to share but you get by. You like it better there than town, except for that cut space, which reminds you. In the night, you and your brother took bush knives and hacked the canoes into pieces, like kindling. That is your place.

That man from your village is here, but you mostly ignore him. He told you to make compensation to those coastal people after they caught you and you sat down with the village magistrate. You are proud of your place, and proud of the way that people look at you about the village now. Nobody from your place would make that compensation. The village is proud of you. You have no money, anyway.

That man has told the police that you are seventeen, and your brother is only fifteen. You don’t think they believe him. He has brought more people with him, another, older man who asks you questions quickly in Pisin, like he will maybe punish you or else run out of breath, and a dim dim lady who made your brother embarrassed because she touched him on the shoulder.

That man is telling the dim dim lady in English about the canoes. She nods a lot and makes small noises, but he keeps on telling her, until she starts talking and putting her hands around like she will hit him. The other man, the shouting one, is friends with the dim dim lady and he is nodding and smiling.

When the police come in, the dim dim lady starts to talk to them, slowly, loud and hard, not like she talked to you and your brother, and she stands very close to them. That Sergeant is not happy. You breathe fast in your mouth, will he hit her? Doesn’t she know that police can belt you? They leave.

You eat another cream cracker and sit on the floor, aim a kick at the chairs, but quietly. If you had a bush knife you would slash at the desk, hack through that high window, cut the room the police station the town and all these people with Coca Cola and sea canoes and guns and money and they would all be pieces of firewood and you would cook the best things you can think of in a clay pot over them burning.

Confidentiality, stolen stories and the ethics of truth-telling

I couldn’t write like this in Australia. I like it, this outsider’s vantage – it lends itself to lyricism and expansive gems of whitewashed wisdom – but it has its dangers, too. Cameras are just one way to snatch a soul, and I am conscious that I am writing about a place that has no voice(s) in Australia. Beware, dear Reader, and note that pronoun – the endless I – if you need a reminder. You are reading the flimsy impressions of someone who has just notched her first month in PNG. Be careful.

Not everybody that I write about in this blog knows that I am keeping a public record of my time here. I am generally unfussed about this – I would never commit someone else’s secrets to print – but I have also been fooling myself that this is just a digital, somewhat one-sided version of the boozy debriefs that are the pivots of my life at home. Which is not quite the case, it turns out. According to a helpfully shaded map of the world, there are a hell of a lot of you reading, in places as far-flung as Russia and Malaysia and Iran. Which is very exciting to me (HELLO! THANK YOU FOR JOINING US!) but also a little daunting and complicated. Particularly when it comes to writing about the work that I do here.

I am a volunteer in juvenile justice and non-custodial corrective services. My work throws me into contact with some of the most vulnerable and the most stigmatised members of this small community. And the stories they tell me are high-risk in a number of ways – matters before court, for example, or the chance of reprisal.

Back in Australia, my silence would be mandated by organisational policies, or by my affirmation before the Supreme Court of NSW. Which is not to say that there are no acceptable ways to discuss my working preoccupations, but there is always a process of editing that goes on. We have it polished, my friends and I, rinsing our anecdotes of detail and identifying features. That is not how I write.

I can’t tell you, but I can’t not tell you, either: that would be a half-a-truth that missed the point altogether. These stories are the reason I am here, and the most compelling corners of everything I want to share with you. So I have decided to take some liberties.

Not often, but occasionally, you may read something here which will be less true. Not untrue, but maybe many truths, patched, layered, unrecognisable. If you want to know which bits I saw, which bits I read, which bits someone told me, which bits happened in another province or another village or three years ago or to somebody else – ask away. You can email me, or buy me beer, try your luck. I would venture to suggest, though, dear Reader, that this would be what they call Missing The Point.

Here be Dragons

We crossed rivers to get here. The flooded causeway, where children materialise between the gravel pits and jungle to shout indistinctly at the sloping vehicle – and a stream, fed out of a red-clay gash which is marked with my clumsy-arse city-girl scrambling. My shoes are canoes capsized, sagging and flapping with water.

Samuel and I have been delivering the summons to next week’s meeting of the Provincial Juvenile Justice Committee, an errand which has taken us way out of town to the razor wire thickets of the prison and off-road to secretive villages amongst the palm plantations.

We have a curious dynamic, Sam and I – our friendship is a delicately negotiated work in progress, which has veered eccentrically over the past weeks: he, sullen; me, overcompensating; his heavy-handed flirtation, my big-sisterly boundaries; my sharp, aggressive demands – abrupt frustration – and his quiet muleish dissent. It is all so very Cross-Cultural Communication 101, but knowing that I am making textbook mistakes has not imparted much grace – only blame, blame to the situation. I am doing it Wrong. And again and again and again.

But Sam is young, and smart, and bored. These things I understand. He doesn’t really know how to talk to girls, but he understands, too, that I am far from my place, and my different ways, and he is gracious, has forgiven my sharpness and unpardonable, humiliating criticism. There is an earnest mutuality in our laboured jokes, and today a spirit of warm complicity – we are out on the road, away from the office, so we take detours and he points out schools, beaches, villages – landmarks of note, small and (still) entirely worth remarking.

“Thelma is next. I will drop you at the probation office.” It’s not really a question, but –

“You want to see the settlement?” He smiles. A challenge.

Yes. I have tried to explain Thelma why I don't visit that part of town – embarrassed, my flung arms a semaphore apology, my exasperation an offering of shame. In an air-conditioned conference room in Port Moresby, we were given a list: No-go Zones; Forbidden for Travel. Now, in the comparative safety of Alotau, with Sam and the monster-size CBC vehicle, for certifiably work-related reasons, I have a chance to bear witness to somewhere off the map. Yes yes yes. I babble about fearfulness, exaggeration, and wanting to See For Myself, as we lurch up the hill.

What I see (for myself):

chickens,
frayed children,
wetness, greenness
and
houses, small, on metal stilts, put together from woven palm and fibreglass sheets, broken in patches as if they were punched.

There are a lot of mosquitoes.

People are sitting around watching, chatting, nursing babies, hacking coconuts, as I deliver Thelma’s letter to her mother. Samuel seems to know everyone. He announces me abruptly to the gathering group of gossips and curiousities:

“She wants to see the settlement.”

So we talk for a while, about life here – how many wage-earners in the compound, how many who come from here, Alotau, or from here, Milne Bay. The young people. Oh, the young people. How do they do with what chances they have. Are they hopeful? I make some children cry, and by the end of half an hour, I am Auntie Lydia, with “another skin”, don’t cry, say hello, em orrait.

Thelma’s mother has a question for me, voiced with hooked kindness – I am ok, I’m a nice girl, but she needs to know my Why.

“You don’t have settlements in Australia?”

No. Not quite. Not like this.

“So. Where do the poor people live?”

I have crossed two rivers, two countries, an ocean. I need a better answer to that question.

Snapshot (1)

It was a surreptitious dawn on the edge of the water: turn away one moment to bail deep rainwater from a canoe, turn back, and the sky is white. The bay was still, shadow-coloured like creased silk and away at the edge of the sky, a smudged, dream-like horizon.

I haven’t given you a picture of the bay, have I? Please don’t think I haven’t tried – I’ve snapped and cursed, snapped and cursed – but It. Just. Won’t. Fit – those plains of still water and the impossible slopes diminish on the screen, their colours leached like food that tastes of tins.

So here it is, just this side of black and white – in the middle of the endless ocean, the ladies of the Alotau Outrigger Paddling Club have their right legs hooked over the side of a six-seater canoe, like a sweaty, tropical chorus line. We are stretching. And maybe it’s only a trick of the light, but I’m sure if I just reach, re-e-each that little bit higher, if I could stand up in the centre of the canoe, I could touch this pale glowing sky, and tear off a piece, for you.

Living the Dream

There’s a certain type of conversation that certain types of expatriates (mostly the do-good variety) have in any number of last bars at the edge of civilisation. At any given moment, somewhere in the developing world, someone is wittily bemoaning the challenges of daily life – chuffing, self-deprecating and mockingly exasperated.

(for a whole lot of brilliantly rendered moaning about moaning, see here)

There’s an unspoken scoring system comprising various axes of remoteness, personal safety, communicable disease, language, dress, general obscurity, human rights violations and proximity to livestock. We were already learning to play expat bingo at our pre-departure training in dreary, functional, thoroughly first world Canberra (PNG took out all-comers on the security question, but Bangladesh was undoubtedly the overall winner, with the double-hit of risk of assault and explosive diarrhoea).

Alotau scores relatively low in most categories. It is safe and sleepy. There are supermarkets, guesthouses and a handful of expatriates. People speak English. On the other hand, it is inaccessible by road, and, you know, MALARIA. And the money shot: No tampons available for purchase anywhere in town.

Oh yes, it is open season on bodily (dys)function at the expatriate auction, the most intimate ailments broadcast like brass buttons and girl guide badges. Which brings us to my own personal moment of arrival, in a concrete toilet, with cracked seat and high cell-like window, surrounded by containers of petrol and inexplicable tubs of water – no soap. I am doubled with loose and tortured guts – self-inflicted after accidentally swallowing a caustic mangle of betelnut, mustard and crushed coral, the widespread local stimulant. NB. Betelnut should be chewed and spat, not ingested.

Hunched there, amid all the indignity of my rebellious stomach, it occurred to me that in all probability it is these stories I will still be telling years after I have left this place. Wonder fades, the foreign becomes familiar, but toilet jokes are forever. In the world of the intrepid volunteer in international development, there is never any loo paper.

Bird of Paradise

The air is sticky, and the floorboards slick with spilled drinks – my makeup is melting, and I am learning for the first time what it feels like to sweat through my shins. We have been dancing to eccentric covers of golden oldies – Creedence Clearwater Revival with a reggae twist, and multiple reprisals of Mustang Sally – the band interrupted periodically by the scratch of the loudspeaker for another speech or endless lucky door prizes.

Alotau Enterprises – the Chinese family business which owns and operates the main supermarkets in town – is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, with hors d’oeuvres in palm baskets, free flowing booze and a cake the size of a coffin. I have a nametag. It reads ‘Lydia: Australian Volenteer [sic]’. I am foreign and I am well-meaning, and in this town that is enough to make me a lightning rod for kindness and unearned invitations.

The sound system jags and crashes, and we are hurried away from the catwalk stage in the centre of the floor. I find myself perched between an expatriate magistrate – a tweedy intellectual left out in the weather – and an older lady known to me only as “That Auntie”. Lights dim – music swells – and we are plunged into an increasingly hallucinatory sequence of narrative dance.

It begins with tradition: bare breasts and grass skirts, and near-naked men with polished thighs, stamping, swaying and vigorously tumbling, until a small child totes an enormous crucifix into their midst, and everything pauses for an interminable period of dirge-like worship. Then a figure in camouflage and green bodypaint, who breakdances to thumping nineties heavy metal – somewhat inexplicably, given that this stage of the performance appears to be devoted to the Second World War and the occupation of Milne Bay – followed, most mysteriously, by a series of undulating dancers strangely costumed in a mix of island dress (cowrie shell skirts, jangling neckpieces) and junk shop tinsel. The soundtrack is contemporary pop and nightclub anthems: Ke$ha and Gaga and Rihanna.

That Auntie nudges me, and giggles.

“That one,” she states informatively, “is not a girl.”

I glance up and check myself. Under her bodypaint, the dancer is long-muscled, broad-shouldered, sinewy like a big cat. She has no discernible breasts behind the pert absurdity of her painted coconut shells. In my layman’s opinion she is definitely gifted with a y-chromosome. She is gyrating to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’.

My amateur sociology is so not up to this.

Papua New Guinea is an intensely religious country – although this, too, is hard to chart by my Sunday School points of reference: Pacific Christianity has its own logics, and eccentricities which are far beyond my grasp. It’s a country saturated in machismo, yet men dance with men, and I mean dance – loose-hipped, grinding – and engage in public displays of affection that seem surreal to me: broad-shouldered, bearded men, linking pinkies or walking hand-in-hand through the market. It feels like a sort of hyper-heteronormativity – an understanding of sexuality where ‘gay’ is so far from possible that all sorts of transgressive behaviours are somehow neutralised. (Men and women barely touch.) Under the penal code of Papua New Guinea, consensual homosexual contact is criminal offence – one punished in all sorts of extra-curial ways by police and the interested citizenry. It is also a place where drag seems a curious decision – I struggle to understand what freedoms can be found in the trappings of the feminine, here.

This is something brave, and something confusing.

I search the darkened room. People are cat-calling, cheering and clapping, but their faces are innocent of mockery. They are just enjoying the show. The dancer dips her headdress and sashays back up the catwalk, and I realise like applause: she is dressed as a bird of paradise – the image of this nation’s flag, and the curious, flamboyant symbol of PNG.

How to drown on dry land

Lazarus has offered me the fish. He has been standing all night under the greenish light of the jetty, one line tethered, the other casting with long arms, out, out, past the blurry silhouette of his cousin’s canoe, which drifts in and out of my vision as the lights shift on the water.

The fish – his only catch tonight – is big, and glossy orange. It has been out in the air for a while, so there is no agonised leap, just the irregular slap of its tail on the wet boards. The fish has wide gills, which flash like a grinning accordion. Its one visible eye is rolling, and I step nervously, superstitiously out of its line of sight.

I don’t know what to say. There are so many ways that I could get this wrong. Is he offering me the fish for myself? I have been watching his technique, flicking quick questions. But I am also a guest of his boss, so it feels like the fish is a proxy gift – even possible that it has been quietly suggested that he should make the offer. I don’t want to offend him – but there is just one fish, and it defies my best logic to imagine that Lazarus has been out here all night for amusement alone.

I make a fluttery apology – I don’t know how to gut a fish, I can’t eat it after seeing it alive, it’s too big!

Lazarus does not have the impassive, polished face of indigenous otherness. Even in the darkness, I catch a stitch of politely contained opinion: he is not impressed, but whether this is because of my purported squeamishness, or whether he has guessed at my feeble cover, I can’t tell. Despite mutual goodwill, there is something tortured about our continued conversation – like twisting a sodden rope.

Under the jetty, the little fish dart in choreographed angles, swarming brightly, perfectly spaced like a wildly complex carousel in motion. The women have the hang of it – plucking the tiny fish skyward in a swift reflex that barely disturbs the dance. I have lost the rhythm of spontaneous kindnesses, I think. My impulses are off, out of time.

The orange fish is still gasping, wetly, spasmodically – helpless, and terminally out of its depth.

The Daily Dim Dim

It’s all there, in the optimistic title line of this blog – my skipping dreams of cultural immersion, and demonstrable lack of corresponding research into the region where I was to live for the next year of my life. Milne Bay, as it turns out, is not a pidgin-speaking area: the former Territory of Papua was Australia’s colony, and before the Australian administration, it was known as British New Guinea – the German roots of Tok Pisin have no colonial seam in the region. History, and remoteness – Milne Bay is chased by mountains, and accessible only by plane or boat – mean that the lingua franca of the province is a broad, smudged English, and up until recently few inhabitants spoke Tok Pisin as a second, third language, or at all.

Still, my vocabulary stretches so far:

“DIM DIM! DIM DIM!”

Bright eyes and dirty hands – shy, delighted shrieking. Thankfully, whatever my other linguistic shortcomings, I speak fluent Small Child, and was able pull a series of suitably grotesque faces, as befits the white fright that I am. Dim dim is a non-pejorative term for a white person – and Alotau is a little place, where a dim dim sighting is evidently still rare enough to be worthy of lung-straining broadcast in the main street.

“But it’s not like I’m the only one,” I said with creased bewilderment, walking the muddy road out of town with Lisa. Lisa: who is light like a dryad, and sandy, freckled-fair – surely whiter by degree than I am, and graceful in a way that is essentially foreign and fey. She smiled.

“You’re news.” That morning, she had told the office staff at the disabilities support service where she works that she had a new housemate, and people rushed in with corrections, updates, breaking news – we know, we saw her in town yesterday, she is also Australian, she is smaller than you, she is working with Mrs Jonathan. “And it’s a small town – you’ll get used to people knowing your name, what you do, where you live. You’ll start noticing too.”

It’s been barely a week , when I register a white couple in the crowd outside Cheong’s General Store. She is holding his arm, and although they are not smiling I have the impression of American dentistry. Missionaries, I silently guess. They have a certain soapy quality, and wear neat polo shirts in complementary shades of confident pastel.

That night I ask Lisa and Julia who they are.

Is he quite tall?
Yes, I think so.
I think I saw them at Papindo’s.
What, the guys in the golf shirts?
I don’t know who they’re working for.

There are new dim dims in town.

Genus, Phylum, Type

“The stereotype tells a story.”

Tessa is a warm, passionate and articulate Kiwi. She is married to a PNG national – a big, quiet man – a highlander, from Chimbu province. She works, broadly speaking, in human rights. She cannot be serious.

But it seems she is. She goes on, listing instructive anecdotes to prepare us to negotiate the diversity and volatility of socialising in the metropolitan centres of PNG. Highlanders are violent, immoveable, cannot be seen to lose face or back down. Coastal people are passive and relaxed. From the blur of those five days of orientation, at least one piece of advice jags and jangles in my memory: Never cross an Engan. My confusion is sudden, like cold water.

This is the stuff You Just Do Not Say – except here, apparently, everyone does. In the country of 800 languages, you are defined by your differences – and by the collective attributes of everyone who is different like you. Sometimes it’s funny – like Steven, our driver, shouting ‘Chinaman! Chinaman!’ to grab at the attention of a short order cook – or maybe it was offensive, and we were just hysterical – caught in the fork of post-modern cultural relativism, guilt: how to tell a black man he’s being racist? – and drunk.

At other times it’s genuinely concerning. When people discuss crime, discuss violence in PNG, it seems often to be a conversation about migration, especially here in Milne Bay. There is a sort of shadow on these conversations, a suggestion that people bring their trouble with them, and their difference looms over the measurable realities of settlement life and hardship: rust, gravel, mud, guns, gold.

But then, there is ownership, too: Julie’s proud shouts of laughter, and – “I’m from Hagen!” (of course I can hold my liquor, finish my plate, take care of myself, look out for them) – even Sisi, who in her measured, amused way, describes the determination of Sepik women. (Sisi is my boss. Expect to hear a lot about Sisi.)

I am sitting at a table on a wide balcony, giddy with jasmine and red wine. Julius nudges me. “You can tell the wogs at the table!” He is counting the olive ossuary I have left on my plate.

I feel a rush of warmth – a stranger in a strange place, suddenly a little less strange. Julius is a Cypriot who has spent his life in PNG, and when I polished my baby Greek on him two nights ago, he claimed me as a wantok – ‘one talk’, kin and connection, from the same place, speaking the same language.

It is true that we ate most of the olives.

First morning in Alotau

The rooster is a curdled clock. You wake, then drift in tangled sheets. Fan whirring.

There is water on the roof, and the spilled light is green.

A memory: someone, leaning into your perfume, who said: you smell like rain.

You curl into the wet season like the cheek of a new lover – warm flesh beneath cool skin.

Paranoia, paranoia

I was hungover on the plane to Alotau, queasily slumping forward on my knees in that unique fatigue that belongs to late nights and early flights and many other gay delights. Not the best of entrances to a new home and a new life, but Port Moresby is a town that demands an exit with fanfare, and after a week of intense supervision and heavily managed contact with the outside world, we were determined to firebomb our Friday night.

We did alright. We made it to La Mana, a notorious nightclub open to the sky, where white skin seemed to be enough to vouchsafe our entry to the Members Only balcony which loftily overlooks the pulsing, primitive dancefloor. We danced. And later, our supervision loosened by beers and borrowed cigarettes, we managed to reprise the grand tradition of the kebab run, Mosbi-style: a three am expedition to a kai bar – think twenty ways with a deep fryer, customers weary or drunk or belligerent, yet instantly willing to close ranks around our endangered species of clueless Australian when a fight broke out between the tables. We came back sticky with triumph, clutching parcels of bright orange fried chicken and soggy chips purchased through a grille, to find Lisa – full of UN wine – fast asleep on Dave’s shoulder.

It’s a strange life lived under security, even more so when your world contracts so rapidly from the freedom of hometown streets. Your index of adventure changes somehow – so much so that there were almost days of conversation and complacent reflection to be had from that time that Tom, Garry and I walked three blocks from our guesthouse to buy beer and snacks. (Seriously, guys: it was Awesome.) So my memories of Port Moresby are snapshots, frames, edged by windows. Palm tree. Rubbish fire. Mountain. Wire fence. Cloud. The dogs all looked hungry, and everywhere the spack-spacks of betelnut edged the rough kerbs like bright gobs of expectorated flesh. People were kind.

There’s a lot that can be said, has been said, will be said, about crime and violence in this country – but Alotau, I was told, would be different. In our (many) security briefings, the trainers laughed aloud. Lucky. Beautiful. Safest place in the country. You’ll have a wonderful time. On my first afternoon, curled in mould-mottled wicker armchairs, my new housemate (another Lisa) tells me – quietly, methodically, in her uptilting pretty Brisbane voice – what happened to that group of volunteers on a road outside Madang. She has arranged for us to have a shortwave radio in the house, after a couple of worrying incidents involving herself and the other Aussie volunteer in town.

God help me, I felt caged – in those security briefings, even on this peaceful balcony with calm, compassionate Lisa. I wrote about this same frustration years ago, in Cape Town – then, as now, I was infuriated by the failure to distinguish crimes against the person (as opposed to crimes against the handbag) in the maelstrom of certain doom that awaited a hapless whitey stepping out the front door.

Things change. Maybe it is the proximity of that horror – clinically referenced by the program as The Madang Incident – maybe a new place and a new way of speaking, thinking. Maybe it is just that odd and ill-applied word: maturity. This time, I have the decency to feel (just a little) ashamed of my outrage, when I am faced with the lived suffering of victims of random crime. So I will use my radio, lock the doors – and read statistics, and talk to people. And get back to you in a little while.

Mosbi Lessons

This story should begin with shouting, but how? It’s a language none of us understands, so the syllables escape me. But the meaning is unmistakeable, belted straight from the most intimate places that give us sound: loud and angry and panicked and menacing. This is the sound of someone who is about to hijack your life. He has burst out of the bush with a machete, his mate is carrying a shotgun, and these do not require translation.

Shit. Someone to my right – I think it’s Dave – exhales a whispered expletive, as Don, our guide and trainer, says quietly: Get down on the ground guys. The men are still yelling (I think there are three of them), and I drop slowly, and bury my face in a tussock of grass. I don’t want to look at them. My sunglasses are cutting into my face (stupid Rayban knock-offs) and there is dirt on my lips.

My palms are flat on the ground, either side of my head, and in a moment of lucid absurdity, I imagine the voice of my yoga teacher: Now, pushing up into downward-facing dog… Instead, I catch a word in Tok Pisin that is terrifyingly comprehensible: Meri. Woman. Girl.

I am tapped on the back, nudged upright and one of them walks me back towards our van. I do not want to get in that van. I do not want to get in that van. The other six are still on the ground, but now Lisa is hauled to her feet, then Laura. The man with the gun shouts something, and I slowly climb and duck into the vehicle. Lisa is clearly stressed, and loses a thong as she scrambles over the back, closely followed by Laura, and the man with the bush knife, who yells relentlessly in Tok Pisin as the other two jump the front seats and take off at reckless velocity, the cab doors swinging.

“Heads down! Heads down!” We are pelting off road, down a steep and sparsely populated lookout slope, when the driver hits the breaks and Laura jolts, almost into the lap of our grass-crowned assailant. He cracks a grin.

“Exercise over. Okay, girls. You all pass.” And Laura – pretty, quirky, irreverent Laura, who does not miss a beat – taps his improvised camouflage, an impressive headpiece of twisted grass, and says in a sweet little voice: “I like this.”

[The cheat sheet on car-jackings: do what the man with the machete says, and you’ll be, if not fine, at least better off than if you don’t. If you are lucky, he might even turn out to be a clean-shaven mining engineer from Perth.]

This Is Not (Africa, Australia, or Any Place Beginning With An A)

It wasn’t a big plane, so when we hit the tarmac, I felt it in my jaw (and a jolt in my guts that may have had nothing to do with aerodynamics). I tried to catch Lisa’s attention, but she was wrestling with carry on luggage, and the others were too far back in the body of the plane. So I sat, hands between my knees, my belongings at my feet, and stared out past the ugly improvisation of the airport, to thick rows of squatty palm trees and dark swelling hillsides, quietly mouthing a hello. I am in Papua New Guinea.

We had collected each other in airports across Australia – in Sydney, it was Lisa first, white-faced and raw, and me, full of static and chaos and coffee; Tom and Garry who came weary from long goodbyes in Melbourne and Coffs Harbour; Laura, who slept in and joined us in Brisbane; and Dave, obnoxiously energetic after ten hours in transit from Perth - and lost each other again in Duty Free, alcohol being, for the most part, our common language.

It’s daunting to count forward a year of your life, in a place you have never seen and are ill-equipped to imagine – how much more so, when everyone from your mum to the directors of your volunteer program has a litany of certain death to discourage you. We had already lost one of our crew, and invoked his name nervously at Departures: someone heard he was off to the Solomon Islands, or was it Fiji?

I was still giddy with those first day nerves as we navigated the stairs from our small plane – the punch of heat like an oven door – and beetled across the tarmac, up another set of mobile stairs to the gate, where I watched the boys stumble bulky in sweatshirts, jeans and heavy hiking boots. Oh, heat! It was hot.

Hey! Someone up ahead was shouting. Hey! They began to beat on the closed glass door leading towards arrivals. We were locked out. Or in. Either way, it was fifteen minutes of milling in the heat, with baggage and bewildered expressions while various people walked back and forth with no perceptible degree of urgency.

I was secretly glad. It turns out there is more than one way to make an auspicious landing. And this is how it was that I heard, for the first time, that folded faded phrase (there is always one) which marks weary expatriate affection and backhanded local pride.

Two Australians – he broad-bellied and melanoma-laced; she, younger, with a pristine garment bag and sore, crumpled face, stood close to the doors – they must have been among the first off the plane. She said something I didn’t catch, but I heard his reply, thickly voiced as if it might have been meant for me:

“Welcome to PNG, the land of the unexpected."

Sky Eye

It comes at you slowly, ocean clawing back cloud, in the craned corner between the thin edge of the wing and the back of some businessman’s head. The water is the blue of almost-dawn until the sandbars emerge, smacks of bright turquoise clustering the coastline. This island is dark and busy, with slopes like breathing haunches. There are fires on the mountains. They send off great flags of white smoke, and, as the descent begins, visible flames, coconut palms in sharp focus above the tangled treeline, and the clay-coloured injuries of quarries.

I had a fear, more present than any other fears that might reasonably attach to this place. I was afraid of its maybe sameness – what it might mean, if The Last Place On Earth turned out to be unsurprising. It’s a bourgeois conceit in a globalised world, but I wanted so badly for this place to be new.

And from the sky, I felt it – that sudden pulse of strangeness, which is so addictive, it becomes a something that bypasses description, which cannot be imaginably imagined. A little like a first glimpse of PNG.