Bob Jackson did a good job ...

Bob Jackson did a tremendous job in joining up a lot of clippings into a "documentary" of his - of our - "Golden Years" on Bougainvile. As he wrote all that many years ago in an email to me:

"Hello Peter

I have looked for years for a web site featuring the "expat workers" view of Bougainville, it was a very pleasant surprise to find yours. I was in Spain at the end of a "too long" holiday, was bored and searching for something familiar, finding it brightened my whole day.

I was a BCL "power house pom" originally hired from Kalgoorlie West Australia (after travelling out overland) . I went there as a single man in 74 to work as an instrument technician in the power house at Loloho, after a couple of years I transferred to Operations as an "assistant unit controller".

I was in Loloho Camp 6 during the first night of the "74 rock festival" and electrified my donga window flyscreen in the hope of "staying alive". We had valiantly emptied our beer fridges to "save the amber fluid". The next night we camped in the power house smoko room after welding up all the doors (but one). We took up guard duty at the front gate armed with 24" stilsons and a length of water pipe, fortunately the riot squad were between us and the rioters so our weapons remained unused.

After a little over three years I left, had a couple of cruises and ended up in Brazil (intending a big S.American trip) but after Bougainville I didn't enjoy it much. I went to UK got married and returned to Bougainville (after a two year absence) to the same job, and living in Arawa Section 6/28. My first child was born in the Arawa hospital in 82 my second child in 85 in Brisbane (after an emergency medivac from Bougainville). I stayed in the power house until Dec 88 ending up as a shift supervisor. I left before the troubles really got started and as such have few bad memories of Bougainville.

Hash house harriers. I first ran with the Loloho Hash House Harriers and on my return joined the Arawa Hash. In the early days Arawa Hash hired a DC3 for a combined run with the Honiara Hash. Later we had 4WD trips to Sohano Island (the old Bougainville District Office) and every one slept in the old District Commissioner's House (or camped on his lawn). I was a shift worker and as such missed many runs but those I did gave me a buzz which kept me going until the next one. The adventure, the running, the beer, it worked for me!

I moved to (and still live) in a house half way between Brisbane and the Gold Coast in a place that I bought on a five day visit from Bougainville. Since leaving Bougainville I've had about thirteen years in local government (working in electrical design).

That's about it (apart from the inevitable divorce and re-marriage) a few years ago.

Keep up the good work with the web site!"

 

He also put together his own website - click here.

 

 

Walk into Paradise

 

I spent the last couple of days of the old year in a contemplative mood watching an old movie, WALK INTO PARADISE. It hasn't much of a storyline but the New Guinea Highlands scenery is wonderful to watch!

As my old friend Noel used to say, "My spiritual home will always be New Guinea". He said it as he tried to settle at Caboolture in the late 70s, and he said it again after he had moved to Mt Perry, and was still saying it in Childers where he passed away in 1995.

After having spent his whole working life in New Guinea, Australia had become a foreign country to him. He, as so many others (myself included), had become lost souls after leaving New Guinea. We hadn't gone there because of a particular job but because of the country itself which offered something for everyone, be he missionary, moneymaker, or misfit.

 

Of Christmasses past

Christmas 1970 inside my donga in Camp 6 on Loloho Beach

 

It's that time of year again! This photo is from 1970 when photography was black and white but not so our lives. It's Christmas in Camp 6 on the island of Bougainville in New Guinea. I'm sitting on the most important piece of furniture, a beer fridge, flanked by Neil "Jacko" Jackson on my right, and Bob Green to my left.

Neil Jackson was Bechtel's head-timekeeper, a titular job description at best as the only time he could be relied on to keep correctly was opening time at the local "boozer". For him it was always 5 o'clock somewhere. He's shown in the photograph when he's already well into his drink but still some time away from turning ugly and disagreeable.

Bob Green was also a timekeeper who got married just before he came up to the island. He liked his drink but also his wife back in Australia who wrote him long, passionate, and multi-paged letters every day which he received by the fistful on mail-day. He replied to them after the nightly drinking was over but the mental torture became too much and he returned to Melbourne after just a few months.

"Jacko" also moved back to Melbourne where he inherited his auntie's mansion in blue-ribbon Toorak. He finished his days fighting off the neighbours who tried to have him and his dozens of cats and mountains of empties evicted from their genteel neighbourhood. It's rumoured that he was knighted for his services to the Australian brewing industry and lived out his days as Sir Osis of the Liver.

Bob Green and "Jacko" were just two of several unlikely characters who back then I called by that shifty English monosyllable that covers such a vast array of meanings that you can never be quite sure what anyone means when they use the word "friend". We were friends not because we had sought out each other's company but because we were thrown into each other's company through work and circumstances.

I still wonder how in this company of alcoholics and misfits I didn't permanently impair my young body and tender soul. I'd just turned 25. My short life until then had been a series of lucky breaks, and the word 'regret' had not yet entered my vocabulary. An endless succession of more lucky breaks and golden tomorrows seemed to lie ahead of me. How wrong and how right I was!

Looking at those old photos brings back lots of memories which make me feel young again and help me forget that these days when I try to leap tall buildings in a single bounds, I always hit the wall halfway up.

 

Gutpela Nait, Holi Nait

 

 

“Gutpela Nait, Holi Nait” i wanpela song bilong Krismas. Em i kam long maunten bilong Ostria (Austria) klostu long Jemeni (Germany).

Long 1817 Binksu Joseph Mohr i kam long St. Nikolaus Sios long taun Oberndorf klostu long Salzburg, Ostria (Austria). Em karim wantaim em tok bilong wanpela song em i raitim long 1816. Olsem, em i askim Franz Gruber, wanpela tisa long skul long Arsndorf, wanpela taun klostu, long raitim nek long dispela tok. Olsem, long Krismas nait 1818 dispela song bai ol i singim. Long dispela Krismas, organ bilong sios bai i bruk, olsem ol i singim waintaim gita tasol.

 

Gutpela nait, ho-oli nait,
lukim nau bik-p’la lait
raunim nupela Pikinini.
Em i Ki-ing bilo-ong glori.
Lukim em i slip, lukim em i slip

Gutpela nait, ho-oli nait,
wasman nau lukim lait
i stap klostu long Be-ethlehem.
Ensel li-itima-apim nem
bilong Jisas i ka-am, bi-ilong Jisas i kam.

Gutpela nait, ho-oli nait.
God i no moa stap hait.
Kamap kli-ia long Pikinini,
Em i bri-ingim marimari.
Krais Bikpela i ka-am. Kra-ais Bikpela i kam.

 

 

"Cannibal Tours" (1988) Documentary by Dennis O'Rourke

 

"Cannibal Tours" is a 1988 quasi-documentary film by the late Australian director and cinematographer Dennis O'Rourke. While it borrows heavily from ethnographic modes of representation, the film is a biting commentary on the nature of modernity. The film is also widely celebrated for its depiction of Western touristic desires and exploitation among a 'tribal' people.

The film follows a number of affluent European and American tourists and ecotourists as they travel from village to village along the middle Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Most of the villages in the film are inhabited by the Iatmul people. The film shows the tourists driving hard bargains for local handcrafts such as woodcarvings and baskets, relentlessly taking photos of local people, handing out cigarettes, balloons, and perfume, viewing staged dance performances, and offering naive comments on native people living in harmony with nature. The film, too, tacks between the tourists and black-and-white photographs from the era of German colonialism of New Guinea (1880s–1914). With some prodding, the tourists unwittingly reveal an unattractive and pervasive ethnocentrism to O'Rourke's cameras. The tourists thus become somewhat dehumanized by the filmmaker's camera even as they themselves dehumanize and exoticize even the most mundane aspects of Sepik River life.

The title of the film can be read in at least a couple of ways. At one point early in the film, a German tourist, clearly titillated, describes the bygone practice of raiding and cannibalism. He is obsessed with cannibalism, asking local men about the former practice, and snapping photos of locations where local people once practiced headhunting; other tourists also attempt to discuss the "symbolic" meaning of cannibalism. But the narrative plot of the film is to portray the tourists as the real cannibals who consume the world through their arrogance, acquisitiveness, primitivist fantasies of indigenous people, and photography (the cameras in the film double for the guns of past colonial administrators). In short, the film presents the tourists as the people driven by truly bizarre beliefs and behaviors. By contrast, the local people are represented as eminently practical and reasonable. Thus the 'natives' display the rationale logic of modernity, while the Western tourists are guilty of the very irrational traits they attribute to the natives. The climax of the film is when a group of tourists, faces painted in 'native fashion' by local men from one village (Tambunum), prance, dance, and assume a boxing stance to the music of Mozart. The message is clearly: we have finally succeeded in our quest for the primitive, and he is us.

 

 

P.S. Dennis O'Rourke passed away in 2013, aged 67. If you are interested in his filmography, look for:

Yumi Yet – Independence for Papua New Guinea (1976)
Ileksen – Politics in Papua New Guinea (1978)
Yap… How Did You Know We’d Like TV? (1980)
The Shark Callers of Kontu (1982)
Couldn’t Be Fairer (1984)
Half Life – A Parable for the Nuclear Age (1985)
The Good Woman of Bangkok (1991)
The Pagode da Tia Beth (1993)
Cunnamulla (1999)
Land Mines - A Love Story (2004)
To order any of these films, go to CAMERAWORK

 

These pages are all about memories, so it's perhaps appropriate to have some idle thoughts on memory

Why not read along as you listen? Click here

 

Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago!" has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birth-day", wrote Jerome K. Jerome in his book "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow". I can't remember when I started looking back to the good old days, but it must have been when I had found Eve and settled down.

Ah, memory, the pleasure and the pain of it! Jerome's last essay in this delightful little book is entitled "On Memory", and he begins it by remembering the first poem he learned. Memory is not always reliable and much of the things we should or would like to remember are forgotten. Men will always want to return back in time but that is impossible and so we must try to enjoy the life we have.

Perhaps listening to the reading of this essay, or reading it, or listening while reading along, will help you do just that. Happy memories!

---

For "Memory" in Jerome K. Jerome's "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow", click here.

 

Why didn't I think of this?

One of the most wanted men in the South Pacific, conman Noah Musingku, has promised duped investors he will pay them in his own currency printed with pictures of himself and Jesus Christ.

"Since I was born I've never seen any monetary unit with the face of Jesus Christ on it. To me this will be the first time to see such money and it's also a sign of disrespect to our Lord Jesus Christ," one investor said.

Another investor asked if the new Bougainville kina would be legal tender. A police officer told locals should stick to their gardens rather than be constantly conned by Musingku.

For more, click here.

 

Alan Smith was right

 

When I set up the Bougainville Copper Project website way back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, I had in mind the four-thousand-plus expat workers who built the mine, the mine access road, the port and power-house, and the Arawa township, and who cooked the meals, ran the camps, bashed away on typewriters or, as I did, ticked and flicked the hundreds of progress claims by contractors working for the construction managers Bechtel Corporation.

Given that all that work was done in the early 1970s when the workers' average age was around 30 which, if they haven't succumbed to the booze and other occupational hazards, would make them octogenarians whose failing memory or computer skills may prevent them from responding to my website. All the more reason to welcome the odd email that still does come in, or the even rarer phone call, or the rarest of all, an unexpected turn-up at the gates of "Riverbend".

When that happens, we talk and talk and talk, about Loloho, Camp 1, the early days of the mine access road, the then seemingly metropolitan delights of Kieta, and fifty years disappear in a cloud of memories. We feel we are again in our twenties when it was always morning, when time was endless, and we and the world were young and full of hope.

We agree that those years on what was then the world's largest construction project to become the world's largest open-cut mine have been the best years of our lives when we gained experiences and formed friendships that would last us for the rest of our lives.

Alan Smith, who worked in BCL's IT Department in the "civilised" later years of 1986 and 1987, and also authored the BCL Blues (no contender for "Hot August Night"), was right when he wrote, "... that special place in my heart grows with the time that passes since we were there."

 

From little things big things grow

 

"Hello, Just stumbled upon your site. Name is Chris Jefferies and I lived and worked at Loloho assembling the drying plant. Lived at Camp 1 for a short while, but for the most part Loloho. Worked there from 1969 to Jan. '72 when I got the hell out to save my neck!

Canadian and worked for MKF and Johns and Waygood. I don't have many more photos for the reason that the "Pella" who was running the mail truck from Kieta, at that time, thought it was really fun to toss the mail out the window and watch it flutter away like the little birds, so a lot of us lost a considerable amount of correspondence and, of course, my return photos. Nothing surprising about that behavior, but doesn't help old memory lane. When I left Bougainville, I went to then Burma to work for Toshiba on a hydro project and there I was most definitely not permitted to even have a camera, (Viet Nam time.), so only memories there too. I would not trade my time in those places for anything; especially Bougainville, the Islands and Papua. Don't know that I would go back, given the opportunity, hard to say, and the likelihood of having that opportunity is little to none, so no point in conjecture. I don't know if this info is of any use to you, but there it is. Contact me if you have anything that you think that may interest me.

P.S. As an aside, I see that they are talking of re-opening. Are they going to throw us a party to show us their appreciation for the good job we did of putting it together? I'm still wearing a damned hard hat and still busting my butt. What the hell have I done wrong?"

I added these comments from an ex-expatriate from my Bougainville days to the Bougainville Copper Project website in or around 2002.

Even though we seemed to have lived in the same camp at Loloho, we never met in person on Bougainville. However, it must have been a meeting of the minds - or a matching taste in wall decorations? - that kept the correspondence - and the ensuing friendship - going until now.

For auld lang syne, we'll take a cup of kindness yet. Here's to another eighteen good years, Chris!

 

Happiness is a red plastic chair

Camp 6 Loloho, Bougainville Island
Click on image to go to the Bougainville Copper Project website

 

Happiness was a red plastic chair when my "home" was a 9x9-ft donga tastefully decorated with PLAYBOY centrefolds of girls waxed to the point of martyrdom, when all my wordly possessions easily fitted into a 2ft-wide metal locker, and when my needs for comfort were satisfied by a red plastic chair on the porch.

 

... because, Roy, an electrical engineer, forgot to plug it in!
Photo courtesy of Roy Goldsworthy, now residing in Malaysia

 

It was on Bougainville Island where it all began, the dreaming of a bigger and better future and the searching for wider and farther horizons. Almost fifty years later, I put this old bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty (under the OSASCOMP-rules, is "bleached-out" a colour-adjective or an opinion? Please put me out of my misery!)

Colour or opinion (or coloured opinion), I sit on it often and dream of the past, with my horizon no farther away than across the river.

 

 

These days, happiness is a bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty!

 

P.S. A certain expat, originally from Sunshine Vic. but now residing in Trump's America (and officially designated on the internet as a Republican voter), emailed this photo of himself and three fellow-donga dwellers (presumably not all in the same donga) at Camp 6 in Loloho, suggesting that happiness is FOUR red plastic chairs.