"In Australia I sickened of the urban life, the crowded rush to work in the mornings, the tiresome after-work booze-ups at the pub and the predictability of my future. I’d spent five years in advertising. I was now an account executive doing the bidding of my corporate masters, selling the American dream that had become Australia’s. My initial fascination had become a curse and no longer was I interested in the shallow search for unique selling points and catchy phrases, the pretty pictures and the jingles, selling capitalism to the masses.
As I observed the careers of my fellow workers grinding relentlessly toward retirement, I felt a dark cloud descending and as it thickened around me I struggled to find a way to escape. I thought about inland Australia where mining companies paid well and life was rough in the desert. I considered joining the army, something to initiate and toughen me and help me escape the malaise I felt. But the war in Vietnam was in the headlines every day and Australians were dying in a distant struggle that made no sense to me and I quickly dropped the idea. And then, one day, an old school friend suggested Papua New Guinea.
We were having lunch at a pub when he told me about patrol officers, young men employed by the Australian government taming the wilds of Papua New Guinea. Suddenly the cloud lifted as I realized that perhaps this was the answer, a way out; overseas travel and adventure, all paid for by the Australian government.
Immediately I began reading to learn as much as I could about this faraway place and applied to become a Cadet Patrol Officer with the Australian Department of External Affairs. It would take six long months before the invitation for an interview arrived.
Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad had nothing on James Sinclair and Jack Hides, Ivan Champion and the other great explorers who wrote of their adventures in Papua New Guinea; who’d disappeared behind the ranges and into the swamps and vast inland valleys deep in unexplored territories on the second largest island on Earth."
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Indeed, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad had nothing on them and all those who came to New Guinea in search of adventure and a less-than-ordinary life. Not all were as eloquent as Andrew Leslie Phillips in the article above but all can relate to his words, "In Australia I sickened of the urban life, the crowded rush to work in the mornings, the tiresome after-work booze-ups at the pub and the predictability of my future.".
Andrew became a 'kiap', or patrol officer, in New Guinea and also spent several years on Bougainville; I was a "Bank Johnny" in Australia and became an audit clerk in a chartered accountants' firm in Rabaul, then went to Bougainville, then Port Moresby and Lae, and travelled all over New Guinea which became "home" to me like no other place.
A lifelong friend from my New Guinea days who, like all of us, had to return to Australia but struggled to fit back in, put it rather well when he said, "My spiritual home will always be New Guinea."
Perhaps this struggle is something we all share. I, too, still think almost every day about those many faraway places in which I lived and worked. The years spent there have left me unsuited in many respects for life in the deep south. I feel suspended between my past life in the islands and my present life in mainstream Australia, and I still seek a place where I can feel truly content.
Perhaps I will always remain AN OUTCAST FROM THE ISLANDS!
