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.