Return to Paradise

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I was lucky because my first job in the islands was in Rabaul after which everywhere else was just an anticlimax; everywhere else except perhaps for Western Samoa where I lived and worked several years later and where the movie "Return to Paradise" was filmed which in turn was loosely based on one of James A. Michener's stories in his book "Return to Paradise".

But back to Rabaul which had been my jumping-off spot in the then Territory of Papua & New Guinea when I arrived there in early January 1970. It was everything I had expected of the Territory: it was a small community settled around picturesque Simpson Harbour. The climate was tropical with blazing sunshine and regular tropical downpours, the vegetation strange and exotic, and the social life a complete change from anything I had ever experienced before! And to top it all, I loved the work which offered challenges only available in a small setting such as Rabaul where expatriate labour was at a premium.

Much of those happy memories came back to me when I read the story simply called "Rabaul" which is also contained in Michener's book "Return to Paradise". I quote from it here without, I hope, running foul of any copyright laws. After all, the incomparable Michener has been dead since 1997, and the publishers shouldn't mind either as I know you'll be rushing out to buy the book after having read this one story. Here goes:

 

Rabaul Before the catastrophes, Rabaul was the loveliest town in the Pacific. Lying near the equator, it demonstrated how idyllic tropical life could be. It was a picture town. Wide avenues were lined with flowering trees. Handsome homes were surrounded with gardens of profuse beauty. A botanical park contained specimens from across the world, and the town was kept extraordinarily clean. There were no mosquitoes, no malaria and the nights were cool. The Germans had built Rabaul in 1910 on a scimitar-like arm of mountains that cut off a bay of great beauty. The town was completed in 1914 and immediately lost to the Australians, under whose supervision it became even more charming, with a social life patterned upon archaic eighteenth-century customs. There were two clubs, the Rabaul and the swanky New Guinea. Manners were impeccable. At formal dinners women wore gowns from Paris. Men were obliged to wear patent-leather pumps, black trousers, stiff shorts, hard collars, bow ties, white mess jackets. Perspiration was measured by the bucket and par was three fresh shirts for an evening dance. But "the conventions were protected." Men visiting Rabaul who refused to wear tropical whites were asked to leave. Women who wore shorts were visited by the police and informed of the next ship south. The police also dealt ruthlessly with any white man who had visions of beachcombing with some dark beauty. He was tossed out of the territory, fare paid if necessary. It was all right, however, to welch on debts owed to Chinamen, many of whom went into bankruptcy because of unpaid chits. Each family had five or six servants - ninety cents each a month - and no white man was permitted to lift or carry. White women often did no work at all. There was a good library, movies, a gay party life and a plane from Australia twice a week.    more

 

You may have already gathered from the use of the word 'gay' that Michener's book was published as long ago as 1950. Much had already changed by the time I arrived, and the final blow came on 19 September 1994 when Rabaul's volcanoes blew up and destroyed the town.

Read the rest of Michener's story "Rabaul" - click here - until the fitting end, "... and the noonday brilliance of Rabaul have enchanted many white travelers who have stayed on for many years and built happy lives. Often on a cool night when the beer was plentiful and the stories alluring, we have envied the men and women of the South Pacific."

And so say all of us! (Now go out and buy the book!)

 

The power of words, imagination and Charles Dickens

 

 

"You cannot pretend to read a good book. Your eyes give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames." [From "Mr Pip", page 155]

With his rumpled tropical suit and wide-eyed look of perpetual concern, Hugh Laurie's Mr Pip – the only white man on the island – could be a character out of a Joseph Conrad novel. But it's 1991 and he has been caught in the midst of a civil war in Bougainville, where he's trying to lighten the spirits of the village children with readings from Dickens' "Great Expectations".

This unlikely but beguiling idea was dreamed up by New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones after he covered the conflict between Papua New Guinea and Bougainville over the closure of Rio Tinto's copper mine in the 1990s. And it gave him a prize-winning novel, which has done more to expose the sufferings that the war inflicted on Bougainville's people than all the reporting done at the time.

It's not often you get a book - and a movie - that sings literature's praises so eloquently. Set it against the background of the conflict in Bougainville where my own career really took off and shaped everything else I did later in life, and you finish up with a brilliantly nuanced examination of the power of words, imagination and Charles Dickens.

 

P.S. To watch the full movie, you may have to buy the DVD or look for it on Netflix. To read the book online, click here, then SIGN UP (it's free!), LOG IN and BORROW.

 

 

Pidgin English Kuk Buk

 

A tour of Panguna in 2018

 

Bougainville Copper AGM 2019

 

In April 2019, Bougainville Copper travelled to Arawa, Panguna and Buka to interview landowners, ex-Bougainville Copper employees, Bougainville Copper Foundation scholarship recipients and people who lived in the mine affected area.

This was the first time Bougainville Copper had been invited back into Panguna since the 1990 Compensation Payments in 2016.

The purpose of the team’s visit was to gather opinions of the villages in the mine area and surrounds. It is clear from the footage which we are about to witness, that our hardworking team, our Village Liaison Officers in particular, are doing a fantastic job, assisting Bougainville Copper re-connect with Bougainville. We hope to continue to strengthen our relationships, support our community and work towards a sustainable future for the people of Bougainville and the company.

 

"Your post goes against our Community Standards"

 

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen ..." Actually, it was a bright cool morning in October when I felt like Winston Smith because facebook had just told me "Your post goes against our Community Standards" and took down this real photograph taken on a real Singapore Airlines flight.

I wanted to share it with others in the PNG Expatriates facebook group but Mr "Sugar Mountain" Zuckerberg's Thought Police thought otherwise, and not only took it down but also banned me from posting anything else. What a relief! I've finally got my previous facebook-free life back!

With a name like Zuckerberg, this may be a regrettable throwback to Mr Zuckerberg's humourless Teutonic past, but it still doesn't explain why members of the facebook groups NGI Historical Society and TAIM BIPO, PHOTO HISTORY, PNG, PAPUA & NEW GUINEA with a decidedly learned anthropological leaning are not allowed to publish authentic photos of barebreasted native women or, indeed, native men with penic gourds.

I've just returned from my early-morning walk and found an enormous face gazing down at me from the wall of my house. It's one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it runs.

 

A million different journeys

There are no contributions from ex-Bougainville expats coming in, so here's a bit of a filler about Papua New Guinea generally:

 

 

16 September - PNG's Independence Day

 

It was in the dying days of 1974 when I received an urgent telegram from TOTAL - Compagnie Française des Pétroles to fly to what was then called Burma to take up a new position as chief accountant in their exploration office in Rangoon.

I was at the time working in the Territory of Papua & New Guinea, putting the finishing touches on Air Niugini's internal audit department, as the country was hurdling towards independence the following year. When the then Chief Minister Michael Somare - soon to be Sir Michael and Prime Minister of the independent country of Papua New Guinea - heard of my impending departure, he expressed his regrets that I wouldn't be there for this momentous occasion. "However," he said, "the least we can do is make our Independence Day the same as your birthday."

And so it came to pass that my birthday and Papua New Guinea's Independence Day are celebrated on the same day each year.

 

P.S. Of course, if you believe this, you'll probably spend the rest of your life doing a convincing impression of a cabbage! ☺

 

And so say all of us!

Here's a slightly abridged email from an ex-Bougainville engineer:

 

"Until old age caught up with me very suddenly - it sneaked up on me without my realising it - work had been everything to me. I was in demand and there was one project after another. Altogether, it has been a successful career, all thanks to my time on Bougainville. A lot of people worked there for lots of reasons; dollars were probably the main reason. I had just spent a year living in a boarding house in Melbourne run by Jews which was all right except that the cooked dinner was beef schnitzel and mashed potatoes every night, so a change of food and scenery was enough for me to sign up. Engineering-wise there was a lot of "new" technology on Bougainville with little back-up information which taught me to innovate. Thanks to my time there, I enjoyed a working life which I would never have dreamed of."

 

Can't we all relate to this? I certainly can! After my first and futile attempt to rent a furnished room with a family in a Canberra suburb - I spotted their Jewish menorah on the sideboard before they spotted my German passport! - I also had moved into a boarding house - click here - with an also very predictable menu - "if it's Chicken Maryland, it must be Friday!" - after which I went to Rabaul where I shared a house with two other chartered accountants - click here.

I'd gone to Rabaul just for the adventure on a much reduced pay and an even more reduced menu because, as each one of us took a turn in doing the weekly shopping, when it was the turn of the other two, they merely bought a leg of lamb and spent the rest on beer.

When the local newspaper, the POST-COURIER, began carrying ads for audit personnel on the Bougainville Copper Project, I applied and was invited to fly across for an interview in October 1970. I was hired on the spot, returned to Rabaul to give notice, and within a few weeks was back on what was then the biggest construction project in the world. Woo-hoo!

Seeking adventure had been my main reason for coming to New Guinea, seeking more money was an added reason for going to Bougainville - I went from $2,000 to $7,500 a year, plus full board and lodging and a beat-up Toyota Landcruiser - , but it was the professional challenge that kept me there for several years.

"Auditing" meant checking contractors' monthly progress claims against contractual terms and conditions. Those contracts had been written not by accountants but by engineers in far-away Melbourne, often with little or no regard to the practicalities on the ground.

Pitting our brains against those of the contractors' representatives whose aim it was to make the most of a once-in-a-lifetime chance, interpreting contractual clauses and, where necessary, pushing through essential contract changes which could save vast sums of money, made those long ten-hour days often seem not long enough.

Of course, there were those to whom Bougainville was just a great disappointment. There was one who had arrived on the island and, taking one look at those cloud-covered mountains behind which Panguna was supposed to be, refused to leave Aropa airstrip and took next morning's plane back out. Then there were those who, after having run up an adding-machine striplist from 365 down to zero, would each day cross off another number. Needless to say, not many endured this mental torture for the whole 365 days.

As for me, and a select group of others, we revelled in the challenge, in the comraderie, and eventually in the opportunities that, thanks to our time on Bougainville, came our way on other projects and in other countries.

As he said in his email, "Altogether, it has been a successful career, all thanks to my time on Bougainville." And so say all of us!

 

The story of Red Dog

 

This is not strictly Bougainville but it's about mining in a remote part of the world, and since so many of you before or after Bougainville also had jobs in the Pilbara, you should enjoy it:

There was Japan's Hachiko and then there is our homegrown version, Red Dog, who, after the release of the movie, became so famous that they renamed the Karratha-Tom Price Road to be known as the Manuwarra Red Dog Highway.

Red Dog (c. 1971 – 21 November 1979) was a Kelpie/cattle dog cross who was well known for his travels through Western Australia's Pilbara region. There is a statue in his memory in Dampier, which is one of the towns to which he often returned. Red Dog is believed to have been born in the town of Paraburdoo in 1971 and had a variety of names to those who knew him, including: Bluey, Tally Ho, and Dog of the Northwest.

Soon after Red's death in 1979, Australian author Nancy Gillespie wrote and compiled anecdotes and poetry written by several people of the Pilbara region for her book "Red Dog" as did Beverly Duckett in her 1993 book "Red Dog: The Pilbara Wanderer."

Red Dog's statue caught the attention of a number of people passing through Dampier, including British author Louis de Bernières - remember "Captain Corelli's Mandolin"? - , who was so inspired that he wrote "Red Dog", which then served as primary source for the movie.

And then came the spin-off documentary, titled "Koko: A Red Dog Story", which explores the life of Koko, who was cast as Red Dog in the film.

The DVD comes out in December. Guess who's placed an order already?