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.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
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 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.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
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.
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.
Friday, May 20, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
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.]
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."
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.
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.
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