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.