Dr Kevin Pondikou - and the new born baby saved by both his medical and his organisational skills

KEVIN PONDIKOU

RUMGINAE - Two weeks ago at around 7pm I received a call on the hospital’s 24-hour emergency phone from community health worker Puse at one of our remote aid posts situated along the Kiunga-Tabubil Highway.

Puse was calling to say a pregnant woman from the remote village of Kokonda had  travelled to Senamrae complaining of having painless vaginal bleeding during pregnancy.

I advised Puse to refer the patient here to Rumginae Rural Hospital where I’m the only doctor – although amongst my colleagues are community health workers, nursing officers, laboratory technicians, administrative personnel and a range of ancillary staff.

With these staff I am able to create an emergency response team when it comes to performing a Caesarean section, which, because of the bleeding, I suspected the woman may need.

Once I gave Puse the green light (meaning I accepted responsibility for the care of the woman and her unborn child), he went looking for someone to drive the ambulance and arrange for fuel.

Senamrae had recently received a brand new ambulance and I knew the woman, Jinna Gideon, could be immediately transported to Rumginae.

I also asked Puse to check his aid post for extra catheter bags and sterile gloves which I had run short off.

I was attending to another patient when later that night Puse brought Jinna to Rumginae. I was especially happy when he presented me with the IDC bags and the gloves.

When I reviewed Jinna, she was not bleeding and I did an ultrasound scan which confirmed my diagnosis of placenta pravea - a condition where the placenta comes before the baby which can lead to dangerous bleeding during pregnancy and a labour which can cause death to both mother and child.

I admitted Jinna even though she was not bleeding because I expected her to bleed again later, at which stage she would need an emergency Caesarean section.

Over the next two weeks, Jinna remained stable without any bleeding.

It was then I received a call on my two-way radio from community health worker Lorna saying Jinna was bleeding. It was just after midnight, around 12.30.

When I heard she was bleeding, I was certain Jinna would need a Caesarean. I quickly focused on what I had to do to assemble our emergency response team at such an odd time.

We had just finished working all day Friday and I was going to depend on the kindness and professionalism of our staff to drop what they were doing and attend to this emergency.

At the hospital there was just two staff on the night shift, community health workers Lisa and Lorna. I needed two more staff to create a Caesarean section team.

In all, I needed a minimum of five people - me doing the operation, an assistant, someone to cover the anaesthesia, someone to act as paediatrician and look after the baby once it was delivered and a scout to move around the theatre as required.

I called the matron and we discussed the case. We then roused two students at the adjacent Rumginae Community Health Worker Training School. It was now 1.30am.

I couldn't do the operation without the students, John and Garisa, because I knew they were blood group O, the same as the patient. If Jinna needed blood, they would be the donors. It was now 2am.

The laboratory officer arrived. His job was to cross match the blood if it was needed.

Around us, the hospital grounds and staff quarters were in complete darkness because there is no 24 hour power here at Rumginae. The generator runs from 8am to 12noon then 5pm to 10pm with the hospital also operating on solar power.

As there had been times during surgery when the power went off leaving us in total darkness I had brought my torch along as a precaution. Having found the lab technician, Unam, John went to look for Elson, who’s responsible for the generator. It was 3am.

Elson checked the generator batteries and assured me the power would not go off during the operation.

By 3.30 the emergency response team was assembled. Unam was available in case we needed blood. Sr Nimmy was our supervisor and scout with the community health workers covering each of the other roles.

We began the Caesarian and everything went smoothly with a bouncing baby boy weighing 2.6kg being born at 4.40am.

It had been a team effort of immense proportions.

Later the patient was brought back to the ward and the theatre, instruments and drapes were cleaned and sterilised.

Mother and child are both doing well.

As you may know, Keith is travelling in Europe. Unfortunately he has become quite ill and is unlikely to be able to post as usual for the next few days. Keith apologises for this but assures you he'll be back soon and encourages you to maintain your contributions

WARDLEY BARRY

You saw me get another wife
and you said it is illegal.
But you said it is lawful when you
left your wife for another man.

You saw me with my two wives
and you said it is detestable.
But you said it is proper when your sister
licked her girlfriend’s doughnut.

You saw us celebrate our marriage
and you said it is wrong to buy women.
But you said it is acceptable when your daughter
sold her body for twenty dollars.

You saw my wives with grass-skirts and bare breasts
and you said it is indecent.
But you said it is art when your son
took a photo of his girlfriend with nothing on.

You talked about my primitive philosophies;
you told me I don’t see right, sleep right, sex right ...
But you said nothing when three men and ten women
had a drunken orgy on your doorstep.

Tell me, masta. Do you want to right me or white me?

Papua New Guinea as seen from space

PHIL FITZPATRICK

TUMBY BAY - One of the surest long term ways of combatting human induced climate change is to reduce our footprint on the planet.

The best way to do this is to limit the growth of population. The logic is simple: the less of us there are, the less we will collectively need.

With a reduced population we won’t need as much energy, food or water. It is something our ancestors knew but which we seem to have forgotten.

By not digging up all our minerals, chopping down all our trees, using all our water and cultivating all our land we will give the planet and the climate a chance to recover.

As simple as the idea sounds the less likely it is to be invoked.

Why not? Well, all of us, but especially our politicians, are just not geared to long term planning.

As a species we have evolved into insatiable consumers.

We want everything and we want it now. If we see someone with something we want more of it and we want bigger and sassier versions of it.

We care little for the future. We don’t care that we are going to leave our children and grandchildren a stricken planet. All we care about is that we can have what we want right now.

If we destroy the planet so what? We won’t be here to see it, so why worry?

We as individuals and families and our various nations have built up an enormous debt but care little about paying it off – that’s for future generations to worry about. We have mortgaged the future of those generations and sold them down the river and we don’t care one iota.

To pay off our debts our children and grandchildren will simply have to perpetuate our mistakes.

Meanwhile, our electoral cycle driven politicians can only see 3, 4 or 5 years ahead to when the next election occurs.

Just like our lust for everything now they lust only for short term solutions that will win votes at the next election.

Instead of promoting ideas like carefully planned population growth they continue to harp on with ridiculous mantras about growth and development.

The last thing our planet needs right now is growth. The last thing we need to do now is cater to the short term greed that growth encourages.

Growth is only good when it can do more with less. Growth that does more with more is ultimately destructive and will eventually be our downfall as a species.

There is no reason why we can’t grow as human beings yet be less in number. It is all a matter of balance.

Reaching that point of balance is probably the biggest challenge that faces humankind today.

If you hear a politician spruiking about ‘growth’ turn away. He or she is a short term junky and an idiot.

JOHNNY BLADES & KOROI HAWKINS

PORT MORESBY – As Papua New Guinea prepares to host the APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) leaders’ summit in November there are high hopes that the event will ‘unlock the potential’ of the nation.

Leaders of the world’s biggest powers will converge on Port Moresby to discuss trade and investment.

It is billed by the PNG government as the ultimate chance to unlock the rich resources and the economic potential of the country.

Despite a struggling economy and record debt levels, the government went on a borrowing spree to develop the city’s infrastructure in time for APEC for three days from 15-17 November.

Radio New Zealand’s Johnny Blades and Koroi Hawkins are currently in PNG and will continue to report on this event in which the country holds high hopes.

“We put together a video report about APEC. Please take a few minutes to check it out,’” Johnny writes.

“There'll be more stuff coming, as we've just been in the earthquake affected part of the Highlands. Mendi valley was quite beautiful I must say.

“Later, we will be doing a longer radio documentary on the quake, APEC and government priorities.”

RNZ has a content sharing agreement with Auckland’s Pacific Media Centre’s Asia Pacific Report which has generously agreed to further share with PNG Attitude readers.

ALPHONSE M HUVI | Editor

INUS - Devare Adventist High School is located in the Taonita Constituency at Inus in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. The school shares political boundaries with Tinputz and Wakunai District.

It is the only Adventist high school that caters for the 23 Adventist primary schools in Bougainville. Unfortunately, not all the students who attend these primary schools secure a place at Devare. But the fortunate students who do make it come from various church backgrounds.

Apart from classroom learning, students play sport, do work duties and attend morning devotion and evening worship.

The students are assembled into six cultural groups according to the schools they come from: Buin, Kieta, Nagovis/Siwai/Torokina/Kunua/Kereaka, Wakunai, Taonita Teop Tinputz and Buka/Atolls

The anthology is the first of its kind for Devare Adventist High School and, in this article, I offer a sampling of the students’ writing.

The eagle woman

LYDIA HARRY

Long ago in the past there was an old woman who lived with her daughter. Their village was on a mountain called Mount Aravia. That mountain is in Suir in the Tinputz District.

The woman was very old and her clan was the eagle. Her daughter use to help her work in the garden.

One day they worked in the garden from morning till late in the afternoon. The mother then left her daughter in the garden and went to the nearby river.

She washed her body and rubbed it til her body turned white. She rubbed her body on a stone and sang very loudly.

Her daughter realised that something was happening at the river so she went to check.

The mother was busy singing and did not notice the daughter creeping up to her. The daughter was surprised to see a white colour on her mother’s skin.

The daughter shouted and ran back to the house. She was afraid of her mother.  She couldn’t believe her mother, who was an old woman suddenly becoming young with white skin.

Her mother then changed her skin colour back to black. The old woman’s daughter was not very happy with her mother changing skin colour.

The last words the mother said were, “The eagle clan can become white if only my daughter is not afraid of me. The reason why I am black is because my daughter has rejected the colour I wanted so much.’’

How the big stone Wakapoi came to be

JOY PAAI

Long ago there was a village in Iamane area of Bana District called Keriau. Most of the village people there were subsistence farmers.

In the village lived an old woman. The old woman looked after a pig. It was kept inside a fence. The name of the pig was Wakapoi.

The pig used to eat the food in the gardens of the village people at night. During the day it went back outside the fence and slept for the whole day.

The pig continued to eat the food from the gardens eventually finishing it all. One day the villagers decided to hide and kill the pig that ate their garden food.

While they were watching, Wakapoi came through the fence and began to eat the food from the gardens.

The villagers got their spears and aimed them at the pig. The pig fell down dead. They left the pig where it was and went home to tell the owner of the pig.

When they returned to the spot where they had left the pig they found a big stone instead of the pig.

The village people named the stone Wakapoi. That was how the big stone came to be.

Today the stone is still there at Keriou.

How the lake appeared

NESVILLE PATU

There was village near the mountains. In the village lived grandfather, grandmother and their grandson.

One day, grandfather told his grandson to fetch water for drinking. The little boy carried a bamboo for fetching water and went to the creek.

When the boy arrived at the creek he saw a lot of girls from another village fetching water. They told the boy to wait until they had finished. The boy waited.

More girls arrived to fetch water and they continued to tell the boy to wait. The boy felt sad and he started to cry.

The boy’s tears fell into the bamboo and filled the bamboo. This continued till the afternoon.

The boy went home and told his grandparents what the girls have done to him. He showed them the bamboo of tears. His grandfather became angry.

“Go and stand at the side of the cave facing the sea and point at it.”

The little boy instead left the mountains and moved to the caves facing the sea. He pointed at the sea and the sea came crashing to the mountains. It destroyed the whole village.

The little boy with his grandparents also died with the villagers. The only survivors were two women who were out in their gardens.

The sea returned to the shore but a part of it settled on the mountain top forming a big lake. The lake is found on Mount Balbie where the village once was.

The origin of my clan

JENITHA BENJAMIN

Long, long ago there lived four young girls. Their names were Basikang, Barapang, Bokoringu and Kuravang. When they were old enough to get married they married four handsome men.

The four women had children of their own. Although Baikang, Barapang and Bokoringu’s children were able to communicate well, Kuravang’s children could not. They were mute. They could only do signals and gestures.

One day Basikang, Bakoringu and Barapang’s family came up with a good plan. They invited Kuravang’s children to go gardening with them.

In the evening they went back home. Basikang and her husband collected different kinds of snakes and put them in their bag. Kuravang’s children did not know this.

After dinner that night, the children sat in a circle and told stories of the past. They were so busy telling stories that they did not see Basikang’s husband.

Basikang’s husband crept to the children and let loose the snakes in his bag. The snakes crawled to where the children were busy telling stories.

The children screamed and shouted at the top of their voices. They talked in loud voices cursing the snakes.

The other children noticed that while they were screaming and shouting, Kuranang’s children also did the same. They were actually screaming and talking like normal people.

From that day onwards, Kuranang’s children knew how to speak and they named them Karangponto in Kieta language meaning ‘they were scared, screamed and talked.’

So the Kuranang’s clan in Kieta was named after those children.

How children were born as lilies

LAVINIA LOTSON

There was once a terrible drought. The whole land was so dry that the people had nothing to drink. They became hungry because the drought was causing famine.

In a village there was a lovely girl. Because of the drought and famine, no one had come to ask her for her hand in marriage.

Every day the beautiful girl went to look for water. On this particular day she arrived at the muddy river. All of a sudden a fish swam to the surface and spoke to the girl.

“I will fill your bucket with clear water,” the girl was surprised but she willingly gave the talking fish her bucket and sure enough the fish did filled it with clear sparkling water.

The girl’s family was very happy. Every day for many days the fish did this good deed for the girl. The girl and her family recovered from the ill-effects of the terrible drought.

The girl soon fell in love with the fish. The fish was soft, gentle and kind. Afte several days the girl married the fish.

But the girl’s parents wanted to know where she was getting the fresh water. The girl answered, “Don’t ask me how I got the fresh water. Be happty that I have provided water to salve your thirst.”

The girl’s father was able to perform some types of magic. He transformed the girl’s younger brother into a flying insect. The tiny insect flew after the girl when she went to fetch water. The insect spied on the little girl by the muddy river.

The insect watched the girl embrace the fish. The insect flew very quickly home to report the incident to the parents. The parents were very angry to hear that their daughter had fallen in love with a fish.

The next day the parents refused to let the daughter fetch fresh water. Instead, the girl’s brothers went to the river and caught the fish.

“Here is your husband,” they said and threw the fish at their sister’s feet.

The girl knew that there were three ways to end suffering.  The first way was with medicine.  If that failed, there was patience. If patience failed, the last one was to commit suicide.

The girl chose the last decision. She went to the river and drowned herself.

As she was dying, she gave birth to many, many children. Those children were born as water lilies and they are still floating today on the rivers.

How Buka Passage came to be

GILMO MOSS

There lived two brothers, Buka and Kokopau. They were very kind to each other. They lived in the jungle. Kokopau was older than Buka.

One day, Buka told his brother Kokopau that he wanted to go to the sea to get salt water to use as salt for food.

Early in the morning, Buka went to the nearby bush. He cut a long bamboo for fetching the salt water.

After cutting the bamboo he went home and ate his breakfast. Then he walked to the beach. When he arrived, he pushed his canoe into the sea and started to paddle.

While he was paddling he passed through a restricted area where people were told not to go. Before he knew anything, he was turned into a rock.

The bamboo he had cut started to grow on the rock. Then an island started to form.

His brother went looking for him. He went to the beach and saw the island.

He named the island Buka. Kokopau set up camp near the beach and has lived there ever since. Today, you can still see the two brothers facing each other across Buka Passage.

The woman who was transformed into a stone

SANDRA TONGI | A story from Nissan Island

Long, long ago there lived a couple in a small village. They had only one child. Their child was only one year old. The family lived happily together. Their village was situated some way from the sea.

One day the mother decided to go fishing and they both agreed that the father would take care of the child while the mother was away. While the mother was out fishing, the baby started crying. The father could not stop the child from crying. The child kept crying and this made the father angry.

He could not control his anger so he decided to kill the poor child, which he actually did. After murdering his own child, he cut the child into pieces then put everything in a big pot ready for cooking. When the pot was boiling, he ran away to the nearby bushes and hid there.

In the afternoon, the mother arrived and greeted her child calling out its name without knowing what had happened. There was no reply. She wondered why there was no sound at all in the house. The house was very quiet.

She went to the kitchen to store her fishing gears. There she saw the big pot on the fire place. She moved closer and carefully removed the lid of the pot.

Sadly she saw her child’s finger appear when the water bubbled up. She was shocked at what she saw. She wept bitterly and walked to a cliff.

The husband had been spying from the bush. He ran out from his hiding place to try to stop the woman from committing suicide. The man was too late in reaching his wife.

The woman jumped over the cliff and was killed. Later she was transformed into a stone.

Nowadays, people go and visit the place where she lies with her baskets by her side and tears in her eyes.

Patu the giant

McQUINN CLARENCE

There once lived a man named Patu. He lived in a valley near a river. The village people were angry with him because he often destroyed their gardens and burned their houses.

During the dry season, all the rivers dried up and the food in the gardens looked like dead grass. Early one morning, the village children got their empty containers and went to look for water. Patu was at his home asleep. The children found the river next to his house.

They were very happy when they saw the river. They quickly filled their containers then started to wash and play. The giant woke up when he heard the noise of laughter from the children. He shouted.

“You are making my river dirty.”

When the children heard him they felt scared and ran away. The giant walked slowly to the river but could not find them. He saw their foot prints and started to follow them. He found the children hiding behind a tree. He was so angry with the children that he chopped them up like firewood.

A few days later, the villagers realised that their children were missing. They sharpened their knives and prepared themselves for war. When they arrived in the bush, they saw the house of their enemy.

They walked quietly to the house. One of them went inside and killed Patu. They went home back home feeling excited because their enemy was dead.

The snake man

DEBRA GANGAVIRI

An old man named Peter Varesi lived near a small lake. He always chased the children who went to play near the lake.

One fine day the villagers decided to make a feast. In the first week of hunting they told the children to stay put in the village while they went hunting.

While the adults were hunting the old man came out of hiding. The children saw him and ran to the village chiefs meeting house.

“Hello grandchildren.  What are you scared of?” the old man asked in a slight voice.

One brave child turned around to face him.

“We are scared of you because you are made up of two bodies. Your head is a human being while the other half of you is the body of the snake.”

“Don’t be afraid. I am your grandfather.”

The old man told them to search for lice on his head. While they were searching for lice the old man fell asleep. The children continued searching for lice while they made plans to kill him.

“Quick. Tie his hair around the coconut tree.” the brave boy said to his friends.

When the old man woke he realised that his hair was tied to a coconut tree. He started to pull until he removed the coconut tree and jumped with it into the lake.

Two weeks later the parents returned from their hunting trip. They noticed that something had happened in their absence.

“What’s been going on here?” they asked.

The children told their parents what happened. The parents were overjoyed. They made a big feast to celebrate. The children played happily that afternoon. In the night they sang songs and danced around with each other.

One month later, they saw a coconut tree growing up out of the water. The coconut tree bore fruit and the children enjoyed eating it.

The old man did not die. He is still living.

Danapoa the snake

ARTHUNASIUS LEMON

Long ago there lived a big snake called Danapoa with her daughter Aveu. They lived beside the River Kakauparatai up in the mountains. Every morning Aveu used to warm herself in the sun.

One day a hunter called Kepoavu walked down the river and saw the woman sitting on a stone sun bathing.

He moved closer to hold the woman but the woman saw the man’s reflection in the water and jumped into the river.

The man kept coming back early in the morning to hold the woman but she would jump quickly into the river and swim to her mother.

One morning Kepoavu tried again. He moved closer to Aveu. Aveu saw his reflection and jumped into the river.

Kepoavu went back and collected some fungi that grew on decaying plants. He made a design on it. The next morning he left the design where Aveu sat to sunbathe.

Not long afterwards Aveu came to the river. She saw the design on the fungi and was studying it carefully. Kepoavu crept up to her and held onto her tightly. He then took her home as his wife.

The couple lived happily together. Later they had a baby boy. Kepoavu asked his wife to get her mother to help look after their child.

The couple would leave their child with their grandmother and go gardening. Every day they would cook food and leave it for their child to eat. However, when they came back the cooked food was always still there.

“What type of food does your mother feed our child? The food we cook in the mornings is always there when we come back from the gardens,” Kepoavu said to his wife.

The next day they went to the bush to collect some firewood. Kepoavu planned to spy on his mother in law so he left his wife behind with the bundle of firewood.

Kepoavu went back to the house. From his hiding place he could see that she was feeding their son with her own faeces.

The man got angry and could not control his anger. He took his knife and killed her. He cut her into small pieces and carried them to a small stream called Koukouvi. He threw the pieces in and went back home.

Aveu arrived home and saw only her son and her husband. She asked her husband about her mother and he told her that he had killed her.

“I killed your mother because she was feeding our baby with her faeces instead of the food that we prepared,” he said.

When Aveu heard this, she took her son with a bundle of kavivi (wild betelnut) and followed the stream where her mother’s body pieces had been thrown.

She followed the stream throwing the kavivi and crying out, AKO KOUKOUVI. She repeated the saying till the kavivi all sank to the bottom of the water. She knew her mother was there.

She held on to one kavivi and dug up an uriko (wild taro) to take home.  She cooked the wild taro and fed her husband. Her husband ate it and felt his throat become itchy. He became angry at his wife but she gave him the kavivi to eat.

The kavivi was sweet so Kepoavu asked Aveu where she got the kavivi.

“I will show you where to get it,” Aveu told her husband.

“Okay,” her husband agreed.

The next day they both went to the stream where the kavivi had been thrown and grown into a tree.

“You climb up but don’t look back,” Aveu warned.

As Kepoavu climbed the kavivi tree, water began rising at his back and drowned him. The water was his mother in law who he had killed.

Aveu and her son turned into rocks. The big rock and the small rock are still there on the mountain.

Bekinatun-The fisherman

JORDAN ARAKUA

Once upon a time there lived a man named Bekinatun who lived near the coast at Hanpan village (now called Ieta village) on Buka Island. Hanpan in the Halia language means “Big Community”.

One fine day before the sun had risen, Bekinatun decided to go fishing in the sea.

He prepared his fishing gear and set off to the beach. At the beach he got his canoe and paddled out to sea. He paddled and paddled until he reached his favourite spot.

There he got his fishing line, put bait on it and dropped it into the water. He waited but nothing happened. Suddenly he felt his fishing line move.

He pulled it out hoping to see a big fish. To his surprise, the fish had taken his bait and swum away. He put more bait on his line and let it down again.

Bekinatun waited patiently. The sun rose high up in the sky and was about to make its way down again. He counted his bait and realised that he had only a few left. 

He decided to give it a last try. He put the bait carefully on his fishing line and threw it into the sea.  An hour went past and still he felt nothing.

He had sacrificed the whole day to fish and yet he had caught nothing. The fisherman was about to doze off when he felt the fishing line move.

He carefully pulled the fishing line up. Bekinatun could not believe his eyes as a big tuna landed inside the canoe.

This catch lifted his spirit and he quickly put out bait for another try. Out came a red emperor.

Maybe this was his lucky hour. As the sun sank under the horizon he had caught enough fish of different sizes to feed a lot of people.

When it was getting late, Bekinatun packed his stuff and started paddling home. Many of his relatives were waiting on the seashore for him. When he arrived, he shared his fish with them and also with the community.

The people of Hanpan had a big feast to celebrate. They lit a fire and sang songs and danced around it with Bekinatun the fisherman.

Bakokora

JEANNELLAH KEVIN

A long time ago there lived an old woman by the name of Bakokora. She lived in the thick forest on a mountain called Denai at Koromira near Kieta.  She ate lots of traditional food grown locally.

There was a village near the thick forest where Bakokora lived. Many people lived there, especially little children.

One morning the parents left their children to go to their gardens. When the parents went to their gardens, Bakokora crept out of her hiding place to visit the children.

She prepared some traditional food and brought it with her. When she came near the children she called, “Come my small children. Come sit down and eat the delicious meal that I have prepared.”

The children all rushed to eat because most of them were hungry.  After feeding them, she left them.

Not long afterwards the parents arrived home. They have been working very hard in their gardens and most of them were very tired. They quickly prepared their evening meal. They thought their children were hungry.

When the food was cooked they called their children to eat. None of their children responded to their call and all the food was wasted.

The next day, the parents again went to their gardens. Again the old woman visited the little children bringing them more tasty food. The parents came back to feed their children and again their children refused to eat.  This continued for a week.

One evening, the parents gathered together to discuss the matter. They wanted to find out why their children were refusing to eat the food being prepared for them.  They wanted to find out who was feeding them. 

The next morning, some parents pretended to go to the garden then made their way back to the village. Other parents went to hide in the nearby bushes.

 While the parents were in hiding, they saw an old woman coming to the village calling, “Come my little children. Come and eat the delicious food that I have prepared for you.”

Seeing this, the parents could hardly control their anger. They ran towards the old woman shouting, “Go away with your food!”

The poor old woman was caught by surprise. She left all her clay pots and baskets of food and ran away. She made her way to the bottom of the hill and sat there. Looking back at where she had come from she heard the people talking and a rooster crowing. She left that area and went to Bakai Island.

She sat down but she could still see the village where the people had chased her. She left that place again and went to Tonolei Harbour. The old woman now lives in the thick pitpit bush around Tonolei Harbour.

The Katoiana bird

JENELYNE HOARI

On Teop Island there was a village. In that village there was a particular house. In that house there was a mother and her three sons.

They lived happily together but the sad thing was that they did not have a father. Their father had died many years ago. The mother used to do all the work in order to support the family.

Over twenty years the three boys grew up to be handsome boys but they had never helped their mother. They just lazed about waiting for food to be brought to them.

One day the mother told the eldest son, “Please go to the creek and fetch water.”

The son looked outside the window and saw that the weather was dull. He said to this mother.

“Mother, I feel cold. I don’t want to go out of the house today.”

When his mother heard her elder son say this she shook her heard slowly.

The next day the mother wanted to cook but there was not enough firewood. She said to her second son, “Son, can you go outside and collect some firewood please?”

The second son went outside but had not collected anything when he returned.  He went into the house saying, “My fingers are painful so I did not collect any firewood.”

For the second time, the mother shook her head slowly.

After some time there was shortage of food in the house.

“We are running out of food. Can you please go to town to buy some rice?” the mother asked her youngest son.

“Why go to town? It’s a long distance and the place is cold and windy. I don’t want to paddle across to the main land. Why can’t we drink tea this evening and forget about eating rice?”

The youngest son’s reply upset the mother very much. She cried and crawled outside the house. When the three brothers saw their mother crawling outside they thought that their mother was going to do something.

The boys waited to see what would happen. After waiting for what seemed to be like an hour, they went to see their mother. To their surprise they saw their mother lying on the sand.

They boys stared at their mother and tried to wake her up. Suddenly she turned into a bird and flew away.

As she was about to fly away, she looked at her sons with tears in her eyes.

“You looked amazed but from now on you have to look after yourself.”

The three sons followed the bird shouting, “Mum! Please come back to us.”

The bird took no notice of them and kept on flying.

Nowadays, on Teop Island there is a special bird called Katoiana. When it has young, it never looks after them. It leaves them on their own.

The elderly people still value that story and tell the children that at if they don’t listen to their mothers and don’t help them, their mother might turn into a bird and fly away.

LEILANI SITAGATA | Pacific Media Watch

AUCKLAND - The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s cutback in services to the Asia-Pacific region has “weakened the thin link” that many parts of the region have with the “outside world”.

In a public submission to the government review of broadcasting to the region, the Pacific Media Centre said the situation had impelled Radio New Zealand to “stretch their resources to do more, to make up for what has been removed”.

The ABC switched off shortwave services to the region in 2017.

Calling for the ABC to restore services, the PMC said “Australian broadcasting from the South Pacific is a sorry loss to people and cultures – as we know them well from the accumulation of studies and from our own media production exercises at this centre”.

PMC at Auckland University of Technology publishes the independent Asia Pacific Report, Pacific Media Watch freedom monitoring service, Pacific Journalism Review and other publications.

Auckland University of Technology’S radio major coordinator in the school of communication studies, Dr Matt Mollgaard, stresses the importance of broadcasting services from countries such as Australia and New Zealand to the South Pacific.

“[Broadcasters] help to strengthen local media outlets in the Islands, further enhancing democratic developments in the region,” Dr Mollgaard said in a research paper.

He said broadcasting services like RNZ Pacific and Radio Australia were prime examples of upholding media freedom and encouraging democratic life.

The PMC submission was prepared by director Professor David Robie and centre research associate and PJR editorial board member Dr Lee Duffield.

Restoration of Radio Australia services and other ABC services that may be made accessible in the South Pacific region, would be “highly positive”, said the submission.

“It would be most widely welcomed in the island countries, valued, and made good use of as in the past, with assuredly benefits to the originating media service and to Australian interests.”

The review is looking at the reach of Australia’s media in the Asia-Pacific region and if shortwave radio has become an out-dated technology.

The Australian broadcasting services is currently underway and public submissions have been overwhelmingly in favour of restoration of services.

In one public submission published by Asia Pacific Report, development worker Elizabeth Cox, who has 40 years of experience of living and working in Papua New Guinea, appealed for the return of a “revitalised Radio Australia”.

“Bring back Radio Australia. Ensure it reaches all rural areas,” she said.

“Provide Tok Pisin broadcasts. This is one of the best forms of aid you can give PNG.

“A revitalised Radio Australia will give the PNG and other international audiences a chance to shape content and direction – it can be linked to social media and inform and lift the quality of much of the local political conversation,” she said.

“The new Radio Australia should be a global friend and ally, not a coloniser or converter. It should encourage debate, conversation and support critical, independent and objective opinion.”

The Vanuatu Daily Post submission calling for restoration of services said broadcast communications were an essential projection of soft power.

“The lack of access to the eyes and ears—and therefore the hearts and minds—of Pacific islanders works to the detriment of Australian interests,” the newspaper said.

“It also works against the interest of Pacific nations.”

MATHIAS KIN

Phil Fitzpatrick and I have long wrung our hands about losing the story of Papua New Guinea’s history - present and past; the loss of true stories not much recorded and not much cared about in this time of change. PNG’s government, caring about its own ego, being more concerned with building a flashy city than creating a grand nation. But now former public servant and latter day author, Mathias Kin –after many years of personal devotion, struggle and expense – is on the cusp of publishing a history of the Simbu people. His has been a monumental achievement and an act of loyalty and love of his own heritage and a recognition that to gift an understanding of this is a legacy to future generations which will inspire and empower them. I hope you will buy this book when it appears in the next few months. And I hope just as much, that many other Papua New Guineans will follow in the footsteps of Mathias and commit to the long and often thankless travail of writing the history of their own people – Keith Jackson

KUNDIAWA - My early childhood in South Chimbu was spent with my fathers, mothers and grandparents in the gardens, hunting for birds along the Wahgi River, fetching water from nearby streams and collecting dry twigs from the bush for the night fires.

In the evenings, lying on those hard wooden beds usually resting my head on my father’s arm in the warmth of the hausman fire, I listened to my fathers and grandfathers talk of their heroic deeds in their former lives.

One of the stories that touched me most was of the killing of many of our people - not many pig-killings back - by a kiap they referred to as Holteru and his policemen at Suanule (Sua Creek). I believe I know the identity of Holteru.

After graduating from the Papua New Guinea University of Technology I came back to Chimbu to work as a public servant. Out of curiosity I started asking about these past experiences and I was not surprised when people in other parts of Chimbu told me stories of similar killings.

It troubled me to imagine that, in modern times, these government officials would do such barbaric things. I knew that, over time, these stories would be forgotten and the children of Chimbu, Papua New Guinea and the world might never know of them if they were not written down.

And so the idea of a history book on Chimbu was born; a history book in nine chapters.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to Chimbu and Chapter 2 a short pre-history of the region I have entitled ‘Taim Bipo - A stone age people’.

Chapter 3, ‘The coming of the lightning men’, tells of the arrival of foreigners into Chimbu in the 1930s and Chapter 4, ‘The killings of Europeans and Chimbu people’, tells the stories that initially propelled me into writing this history.

Chapter 5 is on the process and events of those early exploits by outsiders to penetrate and control Chimbu. Chapter 6, ‘Stone Age to Modern Age’ covers  the transitional period leading to Papua New Guinea’s national independence in 1975 and Chapter 7 is on the post-independence period until 1995.

Chapter 8, which covers events after 1995 up to the current time, I call ‘Three Decades of Growth and Gradual Decay’ and, in Chapter 9, in ‘Final Words’ I conclude with some thoughts on the future of the Chimbu Province and its people.

In the chapter that concerns the killing of indigenous people, I search for truth and try to get close to it but I know I can never present a truth that is beyond dispute and critical analyses. My story does not claim to adequately represent events seventy years ago. But have not the stories been told that capture the truth better than me?

My goal is to write towards what I call an inclusive history where the Chimbu side of the story is told, and tell it in the best way that does justice to the voiceless. The voices contained in my primary documents ought to be heard because these had remained silent for over seventy years.  

Generally names, events and dates will be missing, not adequately captured or wrongly placed in the scripts. I expect critics and disputes for which I take responsibility and will address them in a review and a new edition.  

Throughout the pages there are materials that might be better suited to an anthropological study. But I wanted to tell the whole story and I have attempted to tell it in as straightforward a way as I can.

I undertook some research through a number of archives: the Chimbu Department Archive, Lutheran archives in Kundiawa and the Melanesian Institute in Goroka.

I gained momentous spur from Anton Kaiyul of the Kipaku tribe who has kindly allowed me to use his entire research into the killing of his people by a government patrol at Dirima.

I must make special mention of two gentlemen who greatly assisted me with historical material, especially with me working out of Kundiawa unsupervised and where resource material is hard to find. Dr Bill Standish and Dr Robin Hide both of the Australian National University were my strong allies as I laboured through this book over ten years.

Phil Fitzpatrick and Keith Jackson also supported me with material in my research. Phil was also the chief editor of the book. Robin Hide also looked over the earlier scripts and Bill Standish assisted me with advice on chapter seven and eight.

Much important knowledge of our past was obtained from interviews I undertook – beginning in 2000 - with some of the old heroes of the past. Today the numbers of these colourful people are decreasing fast – many of my interviewees have since died - which indicates to me how urgent it is that this book be published before all these heroes, like my fathers, are gone and their stories go with them to be forgotten. Without the durability of the written word, our generation and others to come will never authentically replicate the unique memories of these people.

In this regard, I give the highest credit to my father, Raphael Kin Hobel and uncle Mikal Nime Nul, who in their early teens encountered Leigh Vial in 1939 and later as young men John Costello in 1946. These men were my constant allies whenever I came up short on any issue during my research.

I want to also thank my ‘brother’ at the Chimbu Writers Association, Arnold Mundua, and Cletus Kuble of Bomaigaun clan who constantly provided me with advice and support throughout the period of writing. 

In each chapter, I have written short life stories of some great Chimbu characters, locals as well as expatriates. Without them a book on Chimbu would not be complete. Maybe these profiles will be a catalyst for whole biographies of these iconic people.

This book can be used in schools and colleges. It will also be a good gift for friends and for the many people who visit the Highlands. Also the indigenous Chimbu people – whether in Chimbu or in the diaspora - will get to know their homeland better.

And, importantly, our younger generation will appreciate our past as I have while collecting, assembling, understanding and bringing to the page this important information about our province and our people.

Waiwo!

PATRICK KAIKU

Patrick Kaiku

PORT MORESBY - Later this year, Papua New Guinea will host the APEC leaders’ summit, a platform which government officials are will showcase PNG.

In recent times we have seen a flurry of events staged including sporting carnivals, multilateral summits and regional cultural festivals and are now accustomed to the argument that such occasions are necessary to display our country to the world.

But really how effective are they as methods of conducting diplomacy? What criteria are used to assess their outcomes? For instance, do they make more positive the attitudes and behaviour of foreigners towards PNG?

PNG bankrolls the staging of these events in the hope of demonstrating its offerings to the world. But another important avenue are public diplomacy initiatives.

Well targeted public diplomacy can be a cost-effective alternative to expensive public occasions. And it seems that the practice of public diplomacy is not very well understood by Papua New Guinean officials.

PNG currently does not have any coherent guide itself to what its global audience might be. In the absence of this kind of information, it stages events that are hard to measure against clearly stated objectives and hard to quantify in terms of their true effectiveness.

This year’s APEC summit could be used to initiate a comprehensive review of how PNG conducts its diplomacy in general and, more specifically, how it established its public diplomacy priorities.

The aim of public diplomacy is to positively communicate a country’s image to a foreign audience using a variety of communication tools. It is intended to build relationships: understand the needs of other countries, cultures and peoples; communicate our own points of view; correct misperceptions; and look for areas where we can find common cause.

It is concerned with a “nation’s influence on the international stage and its image in the mind of international stakeholders”.

Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans once said, “the images which others carry of us influence their attitudes towards us – not in a general sense but also with regard to our security requirements, to our goods and services, to our appeal as a place to invest in, to migrate to, to visit and so on”.

Public diplomacy is relevant to PNG because, in certain sections of the global community, we are still associated with cannibalism, lawlessness, sorcery-related killings, corruption and other negative connotations.

These days, modern technology ensures that whatever transpires within the borders of PNG is quickly impressed on the minds of foreigners. And often these impressions are not positive.

According to a 2014 report, PNG has one of the lowest ratios of tourist revenue to GDP in the world. As well as income, this also denies us opportunities to learn about the global community and the global community to learn about us.

Most foreign affairs ministries use internet technology to make their countries accessible to a global audience. Public diplomacy requires internet savvy. It can be argued that PNG’s official internet-based communication platforms need improvement.

PNG’s foreign affairs department should use web-based communication for practical activities such as data gathering or engaging with foreign audiences on foreign policy positions or global issues.

Currently PNG lacks the most basic baseline data in understanding our reputation and credibility globally. So we rely on hosting events to showcase the country in the hope that people will like and respect us.

But knowing precisely one’s target audience matters if we are to be serious about influencing global perceptions.

More importantly, PNG must not be constrained by its smallness in the international system. In public diplomacy, there are major contributions by small states in ideas, knowledge and innovation.

Small states like Estonia punch above their weight in contributing global public goods. The Estonian government has created a national brand around the idea of innovation and technological improvement. This is the niche that defines Estonia as much more important than its size might suggest.

Currently there is an emphasis on how global sustainable development goals can be achieved by signatory states. PNG has the ability to initiate initiatives on climate change, ocean management, forestry conservation and cultural resources. These could be PNG’s niche in global cooperation and an area for the conduct of public diplomacy.

A practical way to promote PNG would be through facilitating the work of non-government organisations establishing knowledge hubs, biological resource centres and other facilities for scientific research.

Research and scientific hubs are now preferred means of information-sharing. Resource-driven economies such as Norway and Botswana are transitioning from exporting natural resources to preparing human capital for an innovation and knowledge-driven economy. Qatar is investing in education and research and promoting educational hubs as the best medium for cross-cultural dialogue and understanding.

These are just a few cases of how public diplomacy can exercise a transformative affect on even the smallest countries.

If small states are lacking traditional measures of power, the ideas and values they promote on the global stage can still elevate their influence and stature.

It is not beyond us.

Patrick Kaiku is a teaching fellow in the Political Science Department at the University of Papua New Guinea

Michael Dom

MICHAEL DOM

LAE - Recently there was a difference of opinion over poems related to gender violence in Papua New Guinea and in my view the squabbling overshadowed more important issues which could have been discussed openly.

The feud was related to reactions of PNG Attitude readers to the poem ‘I am a PNG man’, which was touted as a valid and parallel perspective to ‘We are dying one by one’ (which I reproduce at the end of this essay).

There is no further argument offered here. Instead this review explores the process of writing in which ‘We are dying one by one’ was developed. This article will elaborate on the ‘sound of sense’ which readers’ picked up on and was within the poet’s skill to engender in their minds.

The mechanics – stanza style

The poem ‘We are dying one by one’ uses a three line stanza form based on the terza rima style but not in the same consistent meter. The unusual meter however was employed consistently in each stanza throughout the poem to create a familiar blend between the stanzas.

The sing-along rhythm contrasts candidly with the seriousness and complexity of the agenda about to be addressed. The agenda itself, violence against women and specifically rape, and the attitudes and behaviours with which it is associated are gradually exposed, only hinted at until the sixth stanza (there are nine such triplets), and this is also representative of the socially accepted and undertone nature of domestic violence.

The sing-along sound created in the first line is reminiscent of nursery rhymes. When reading the poem the tone of the first line is preset by the emotion raised in the following two lines of each stanza but this can only be realised by a second reading or by scanning forward. And by then the reader is unconsciously hooked by the rhythm and rhyme.

The second line of each stanza is an irregular meter of either eight or nine syllable length but the third line is always in ten-count syllables. But these lines nevertheless seem to unconsciously follow the same rhythm as the first, so the reader keeps singing along, reminiscent of social acceptability. What’s more the second and third lines provide a subtle complexity by offering two opposing views and then a conclusive realization in the last line.

This stanza scheme is set-up to lead you down a merry path to catharsis and resolution.

The subject – stanza substance

The first stanza introduces the theme directly and you dive straight in: women are slowly dying for some reason and they are intimate family members, possibly yours. The theme is literally brought home and personalized. The stanza makes you to think of your mother, and it doesn’t get any more personal than that.

The second stanza generalises into the current and familiar, it expands on two possible explanations for the ‘dying’ women; witch burning is murder and prostitution is a demoralising exploitation. The third line then expresses their likely ‘innocence’ of the outlawed and outcast social crimes by contrasting the critical role of women in society as care-givers, homemakers, na mama b’long haus. The scenarios are more complex than we may think and this stanza works on very many emotions in the reader: anger, disgust, shame, sorrow all provides a powerful cocktail.

The third stanza is about normalisation of the harassment of women in society at large which is a natural build up to greater violence against women even in the safety of home. Moreover, this everyday sexual harassment has happened or happens to someone you know, to your good neighbour, or to someone you may admire, romantically or sexually. There is an element of wry humour in this stanza, as some men may recall their ‘youthful exuberances’ or their own or their compatriots ‘mistaken advances’ towards women in the past. How does that make you feel now? The stanza asks.

The fourth stanza brings out women’s personalities, the good girl bad girl images, and red flags that verbal abuse occurs at any time and may be regardless of a woman’s observed behaviour. If she’s going to church she’s sworn at, if she’s flirting she’s sworn at, it’s a no win scenario.

The fifth stanza starts to get more personal. We enter the workplaces and the homes of women who may be victims of gender violence and see that, within the broad spectrum of the working woman to the stay-at-home mum, there is a pervading devaluation of women’s varied roles in society and a focus on their sexual and reproductive function. Women are commoditized into childbearing units and/or chambermaids for men’s pleasure.

And now the sixth stanza goes straight to the core: physical and sexual abuse of women by men. This follows on from the devaluation of women’s roles in stanza five, logically for the poem and in reality for women.  However, there is again an element of cheeky humour conjured by the image of a man using his ‘penis as a knife or a gun’. The image is blatantly sexual but within the context of the poem it is not at all rude.

Neither is the image a crude device – it is in fact precise. This confronting image provides a deviously delightful, slightly guilty, slightly dirty, quirky feeling that is in stark contrast with the seriousness of the matter. Things are very, very bad, but we can still laugh at or to ourselves. The humour is critical at this stage of the poem, which is fast becoming grim and has more murk to work through.

Stanza seven is simply harsh reality. And there are statistics to prove it. I wonder if there are many of us in PNG who do not know personally a woman who has been raped, narrowly escaped the crime or who is not ever conscious that this could be her fate at any time in any place and with almost any man.

And who are these women? The eighth stanza explores this by talking directly to men folk: one may be your daughter or your girlfriend or your child, whom you give away as a bride to someone else’s son, whom you hope will treat her with respect and love. This is personal to parents and just as importantly to boyfriends. Tingim ah, ol mangi, gel pren b’long yu tu istap insait, laka.

Stanza nine kills them off. This stanza explodes the agenda: from childbirth to marriage, through the two most basic human and social events in our lives, women are dying. Moreover, they know their fates and many live with the daily threat of violence so that it has become expected, even to the extent that amongst themselves women suffering gender based violence may categorize and are ready to accept different levels of the same hell.

Catharsis and resolution

It is the simple but powerful final couplet in my poem which inflamed the raging debate about the role of men in combating domestic violence and the related issues of gender equality and equity in PNG.

The first line is the familiar repeated refrain but here it is about to be directly qualified: We are dying one by one, on this island in the sun / In PNG, it’s a death-row sentence being a woman.

The key word is death-row.

Death-row is not senseless slaughter on a battlefield, it is systematic: our society maintains systems which disadvantage women or does little practical to improve on the failings.

A death-row sentence does not mean instant death but a waiting period for legal termination: there is weak policing of VAW cases in a country where spousal abuse is endemic.

Death-row inmates know of each other’s fates. Death-row is high security – there’s no way out. Death-row sentences may be commuted to life or parole after decades of serving hard time.

Without reducing the seriousness of an actual death-row, I believe the sorry social situations that women face in many parts of the world, including PNG, are not very far from a death-row sentence.

That is so little and so much said in a single line.

Readers who liked the poem were propelled to this moment where they decided for themselves ‘the undeniable truth’ of the matter.

It was this line that was tread on in the poem ‘I am a PNG man’ which offered a perspective that while valid was nevertheless incongruent with the resolution reached in the reading of ‘We are dying one by one’. The conclusions in ‘I am a PNG man’ did not harmonize with the readers own experiences.

A deeper disquiet was created by the adamant defence of good PNG men, when in fact these men were not on trial.

What was on trial was the society in which we all live that allows and enables the perpetuation of women living their lives out on a death-row sentence.

That was the real issue worth debate which was lost in the muddied waters of a shallow feud.

__________

We are dying one by one

Our torpedo-headed anti-hero minister, Peter 'Mutton' Dutton

PHIL FITZPATRICK

TUMBY BAY – Australia’s torpedo-headed Minister for Xenophobia, Mutton Dutton, doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between a migrant and an asylum seeker.

He doesn’t understand that some people have the time and relative security to apply to migrate to Australia while others who are faced with an immediate threat to their health and well-being need to escape their countries quickly and in any way they can, including in leaky boats.

The walloper in Dutton believes that seeking asylum is tantamount to a criminal act and, as such, deserves punishment.

It is a familiar meme, particularly among conservative politicians who believe that people under stress, such as welfare recipients, are to blame for their circumstances and need to be dealt with harshly for their own good.

Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist from Iran who has been imprisoned on Manus Island for the last five years, makes the point in an article in ‘The Saturday Paper’ that there is a danger that the cruelty overseen by Dutton on Manus and Nauru is “in the process of replicating itself throughout Australian society”.

It is a good point but I suspect that it might be the other way round; that the cruelty already inherent in our welfare systems was simply applied by our government to asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru.

Boochani has recently published a book about his experiences on Manus called ‘No Friend But the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison’ and I am looking forward to reading it.

That he has managed to write the book in secret using nothing but his mobile telephone is a remarkable achievement.

That he has survived punitive imprisonment on Manus for five years and retained his sanity is also remarkable.

He is not alone of course. All of the asylum seekers who have survived on Manus and Nauru must be remarkably tough and resilient people.

I was watching our fake farmer and prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, in a photo-op on television with some real drought stricken farmers recently and it struck me how uncomfortable he looked.

A while later I saw a similar photo-op featuring the leader of the opposition trying to work out how to operate a four-wheel-drive with real gears.

The two images made me wonder what had happened to all our red-blooded politicians. Compared to the asylum seekers these two examples of Australian manhood seemed decidedly flaccid.

Sensible people have been calling on our government to bring the asylum seekers to Australia on compassionate grounds for a long time.

I’ve developed a slightly different view. We don’t need to bring them here because we feel sorry for them. We need to bring them here to inject a bit of grit and backbone into our society.

We need people like Behrouz Boochani in Australia. We need people like him much more than we need people like Dutton, Turnbull and Shorten and the rest of the limp-wristed brigade in Canberra and elsewhere who purport to be our leaders.

Those people imprisoned on Manus and Nauru are heroes. We should celebrate them, not punish them.

Nauru's Baron Waqa - "Doesn't want journalists to investigate the living conditions of refugees"

SRI KRISHNAMURTHI | Pacific Media Centre

AUCKLAND - There has been much wringing of hands over Nauru’s ban on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for next month’s Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ summit.

But there are even more perplexing reports about Canberra’s relative silence on the issue.

The elephant in the room about the ABC ban that has people tip-toeing through the frangipani and whispering in hushed tones is Canberra’s asylum seeker detention centre in the small Pacific state of Nauru.

Nauru is the host of the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ summit on September 3-6 and the ban on the ABC has been widely condemned by media freedom groups, including the Pacific Media Centre.

The Nauru detention centre has become a significant part of Nauru’s economy since 2001.

It was a windfall in the wake of the end of strip mining of phosphate which left Nauru bereft of resources and finances.

“Nauru’s Australian-managed detention camp is a disgrace, just as the one on Manus island was,” said Daniel Bastard, head of the Asia-Pacific Desk for Reporters with Borders.

“It shows the profound hypocrisy of both Australian and Nauruan authorities.

“Canberra outsources its absurd anti-immigration policy and washes its dirty hands in paying huge amounts of money to Yaren which, in exchange, accepts to carry on human rights violations,” Bastard said.

“For sure, Nauruan authorities don’t want journalists to investigate this issue, to report on the living or surviving conditions of the refugees and to interview the numerous men, women and children arbitrarily detained in the camp,” he told Asia Pacific Report.

“And the Australian government doesn’t want this hypocrisy to be exposed either, since Canberra is responsible for this matter.”

Hey Mr Donald, ask O'Neill what he's doing about our six-year wait for an ICAC

EDDIE TANAGO | Act Now!

PORT MORESBY - It is now six years since prime minister Peter O’Neill promised Papua New Guinea an Independent Commission Against Corruption.

Yet that vision is no closer to being realised today than it was in 2012.

Peter O’Neill has totally failed to live up to his promises in both the 2012 and 2017 Alotau Accords that the government would establish an ICAC.

The impact of not having a dedicated anti-corruption agency that is politically independent, fully resourced and that has full powers of arrest and prosecution has been devastating for our economic well-being and the quality of life for ordinary people.

Delegates at last week’s APEC anti-corruption and transparency workshop repeatedly spoke about how corruption inhibits development and is a serious threat to economic growth yet PNG had almost nothing to show in terms of progress under the United Nations Convention on Corruption.

In PNG we repeatedly hear that a large-proportion of the national budget is lost every year to corruption, taking money directly from health and education services.

We also hear about the high costs that businesses have to endure as a result of corruption, which act to reduce profits, lower employment and limit investment. Yet the government has just dragged its feet for year after year over an ICAC.

Act Now! says that PNG, Australia and China are spending more than K1.1 billion on the whole APEC extravaganza, a tiny proportion of that money would have been sufficient to fund the operations of a robust, independent and well-staffed ICAC for more than a decade.

Ridding PNG of the scourge of corruption would do far more to assist development in PNG and ensure the well-being of our citizens than a huge party for the world’s leaders and their entourages.

We hope that in November, when the leaders from the world’s two biggest economies will be here in PNG, they will ask the prime minister why he has not established an ICAC and whose interests he is protecting.

PHIL FITZPATRICK

TUMBY BAY - My children were born in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

By the time they reached the truly cognitive stage of their lives, we had already swapped a Commodore 64 computer for an Amstrad that ran on floppy disks - and when I say ‘floppy’ I mean things as big as saucers that actually flopped when you picked them up.

My son and daughter were part of the first generation of children born into the digital age and they haven’t looked back since.

I can remember going to the local chippy and buying fish and chips wrapped up in newspaper but they’ve had no experience of anything like that. Chicken and chips come in little cardboard boxes that nowadays you order online.

Sometimes I feel sorry for them but they just laugh in their ignorance and call me an old fogey.

What they don’t seem to appreciate is that a lot of people in the world don’t yet live in the digital age and have little hope of ever doing so.

For large numbers of people, computers and digital gadgetry are just modern novelties that have no relevance at all.

A lot of those people live in Papua New Guinea. They live ‘in the village’ as the smart young things in the city are apt to say in slightly disparaging tones.

For those ‘villagers’, modernity is measured by kerosene lanterns, nylon fishing line, shortwave radios, the occasional newspaper and, if they can get them, books with paper covers and pages - things that are perfectly adequate additions to their traditional lifestyles.

We in the West see fit to close down things like shortwave radio because we think it is obsolete.

We talk about the end of books and tell everyone that digital readers are the way to go.

We watch newspapers and magazines go out of circulation and just shrug and consult our iPhone for the latest news.

What we don’t realise is that those things we dismiss as old and obsolete are actually very important to a large part of the world.

We also don’t realise that many people are perfectly happy with their obsolete things and have no desire for anything more modern.

While shortwave radios and books fit nicely into the simple rhythms of their lives, a lot of the digital stuff we take for granted can have a jarring and confusing effect.

This is something that a lot of our aid agencies have yet to learn.

Introducing whiz bang digital technologies into some of these communities, even with the best of intentions, can often be a lot more unsettling and even destructive than we realise.

Instead of making life easier for these communities there is a huge chance we will actually make their lives more stressful, intimidating, confusing and unpleasant.

While we might think that shortwave radio services are obsolete there are a lot of people out there who don’t. The same applies to newspapers, books and other old fashioned ideas.

What we need to do is think these things through before we assume that just because we don’t use them and there are more modern alternatives they can be arbitrarily discontinued.

This is clearly what happened with Radio Australia’s shortwave service.

That the Australian government cut the funds to the ABC to the extent that they decided to abandon the service speaks volumes about their lack of understanding of such issues.

While the world might be embracing technology, places like Papua New Guinea still largely need the old stuff. They still need shortwave radio and they still need books and newspapers, just like they still need kerosene to put in their lamps.

No smart app will ever change that fact.

The Slaughterhouse Creek massacre of 1838

JUDITH WHITE | Culture Heist

TWEED HEADS -  Truth telling was the theme of this year’s Garma festival, held in northeast Arnhemland on the first weekend of August. It’s also a crucial element in the Statement from the Heart made by the indigenous National Constitutional Convention at Uluru last year but rejected by the Turnbull government.

Telling the truth should be a simple matter, shouldn’t it? Yet when it comes to the nation’s history, for those in positions of power it seems to be the hardest ask. No government has yet given it a place among the much-vaunted but ill-defined “Australian values”. Kevin Rudd said sorry for the stolen generation, but didn’t go so far as to address the issue of the British invasion.

Politicians of both major parties are at fault. They hold that the Australian electorate will not support recognition of indigenous history. I believe they are wrong. A simple constitutional change, recognising the millennia of prior occupation of the land and Aboriginal culture, would have majority support in all states when put to the vote. The main proposal of the Statement from the Heart – for a Makarrata (“coming together”) Commission to bring about agreement – does not require a vote, just leadership.

Most nations that consider themselves “Western” have a long way to go in confronting their history. Neil MacGregor, former head of the British museum and now inaugural director of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum, which opens next year, has found modern Germany to be a “painfully admirable” exception. Unlike the British, he says, the Germans “are determined to find the historical truth and acknowledge it however painful it is.”

Compare that approach with the furore that greeted the opening of the National Museum of Australia in 2001 when then Prime Minister John Howard, his cronies and the Murdoch press attacked its “privileging” of Aboriginal history. Howard, who labelled invasion stories the “black armband” view of history, stacked the board with his mates to pull the museum back into line – and into denial of the origins of modern Australia. (Despite this, the National Museum has gone on to produce some first-rate exhibitions, such as Margo Neale’s Songlines last year.)

Meanwhile millions have been expended on the War Memorial (which director and former Liberal leader Brendan Nelson believes should have a limitless budget), on memorials overseas and on war propaganda in schools, but nothing on the history of the battles on Australian soil.

In fact the country’s true history is now well established and is increasingly understood by thinking Australians – even though, like the science of climate change, it’s still denied by Neanderthal politicians, bigots and the self-interested.

“It is a terrible story,” novelist Richard Flanagan said in his eloquent speech to the Garma festival, “but it is my story as much as it is your story, and it must be told, and it must be learned, because freedom exists in the space of memory, and only by walking back into the shadows is it possible for us all to finally be free.”

There are two crucial lines along which historical understanding has developed: one concerns the 60,000 years of pre-colonial civilisation, the other the British invasion.

For almost 40 years historian Henry Reynolds has been writing about the frontier wars – Australia’s longest war, fought across the continent. His 2013 book Forgotten War is an excellent summary of his extensive writing on the subject. The conflict involved at least 500 massacres of indigenous peoples; they have now been mapped by his fellow academic Lyndall Ryan. “Lest We Forget”, says Reynolds, should apply to the heroes who fell resisting the invasion, but in Canberra the motto seems to be “Best we forget”.

What kind of society did the occupying colonists destroy? Even many historians who rejected the official theory of terra nullius continued to believe that the indigenous peoples were “Stone Age” hunter-gathers. This view has now been overturned. ANU historian Bill Gammage wrote in his 2011 book The Biggest Estate on Earth of the “majestic achievement” of Aboriginal land management.

In 2014 Bunorong/Yuin writer Bruce Pascoe took this appreciation a huge step forward with his book Dark Emu. It draws on both recent archaeology and the records of early explorers to show the extent of indigenous achievements in agriculture, craft and construction as well as land management. Dark Emu is now the subject of the most recent dance performance by Bangarra Dance Theatre, has been re-published in the UK and is being translated into European languages. This week Pascoe is in Scotland as an invited speaker at the Edinburgh Writers’ Festival, and then goes on to Berlin.

Perhaps truth tellers, like prophets, are not without honour save in their own country.

Dark Emu and Forgotten War are both essential reading for anyone who cares about Australian history. They should be on the syllabus of every high school and tertiary institution in the country.

There is a strong tendency in this country for good writing to sink into oblivion. It mustn’t be allowed to happen with these books. As to why it happens at all, I don’t buy the facile answer that Australians prefer sport. A recent panel on ABC-TV’s The Mix, led by author Sunil Badami, raised the question of why so many books are forgotten. The speakers came up with some excellent reading-list suggestions, but the question itself remained unresolved.

I believe the collective amnesia has to do with the fact that writers and artists point us to the hard truths about society. Think Katharine Susannah Prichard, Judith Wright, Nene Gere, Randolph Stow and a host of others. More recently has come a great outpouring of indigenous voices – to name just a few: Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, Leah Purcell, Melissa Lucashenko. These writers give better expression to our unresolved history than all the government reports put together, and they should be celebrated.

A young Robert Forster at Bundi in 1968 - milling timber before he became a kiap

DANIEL KUMBON

WABAG – The just published memoir, ‘The Northumbrian Kiap’, is a skillfully written book about Papua New Guinea during the sixties, before the time when people knew what self-government and independence meant.

It clarifies many questions and doubts of the people who lived and grew up during that time – the present day sons and daughters of primitive tribesmen who had just witnessed with awe these men known as kiaps lead long lines of carriers with armed police escorts as they penetrated the hinterland and its traditional tribal lands.

These strangers established encampments, built patrol posts, constructed roads, hospitals and schools as they demonstrated there was another – perhaps a better - world far beyond the high mountain ranges and the raging rivers.

But life comes and goes. Just like ancient civilisations left behind monoliths, pyramids and relics, the kiaps left a legacy. They went and much of what they accomplished was abandoned and left to decay.

Robert Forster, the British-born author of ‘The Northumbrian Kiap’, was a kiap for most of the seven years he lived in pre-independence PNG.

When he arrived in PNG in 1968 there were places still to be explored and mapped and in the most remote valleys there were people who had no contact with outsiders and for whom knowledge of a rapidly changing world was passed on by word of mouth from ridge to ridge and across rushing streams.

Forster is now a journalist and puts his skills to good effect. There is opinion as well as description and analysis. For example, he believes PNG gained independence too soon. He documents his observations and experiences in an entertaining manner,.

He provides fresh insight about that time when kiaps were most active, they had taken government into the bush and in a sense they were a government unto themselves. The problems they faced, the solutions they sought to bring to feuding tribes, their interaction with local people, how they related to their children and wives, the long lonely nights their young wives spent alone when their husbands were on long patrols….. all are dealt with.

And so to the story of independence.

“In May 1972 Michael Somare had given the white dominated civil service, and many of the people of his country, a collective heart attack when he announced that PNG would be self-governing from December 1st 1973,” Forster writes.

Until then it had been assumed self-government would not be introduced until after the 1976 elections, with full independence trailing sometime after that. However, this was not the plan of the fathers of PNG independence nor, as it turned out, of the Australian government.

Forster was a restless young man who 50 years ago left cold county Northumberland to operate a sawmill as a volunteer in the isolated outpost of Bundi in the foothills of PNG’s tallest mountain, Mt Wilhelm.

At first, he didn’t know where PNG was, mistaking it for Sumatra in Indonesia. But it didn’t take long to find out that he was headed for a place recently discovered to be inhabited by stone-age cultures, undiscovered valleys and an exotic people; a place of regular earthquakes and active volcanoes where muddy brown rivers meandered crazily from the mountains often to lose themselves in a serpentine series of coastal lakes and swamps. A rugged and beautiful country accessible either by foot or small aircraft awkwardly landing on dangerous apron-sized landing strips.

After a 14,000 mile trip he did not enjoy, Forster finally landed in Port Moresby where the oppressive heat, dust and dilapidated airport even further failed to impress him. He then flew for two more hours to Madang and waited for three days before boarding something slightly larger than a model plane to take him to Bundi – perched on a hill and home to a government patrol post and a Catholic mission.

Like so many before him, Forster quickly engaged with this new country. He enjoyed flying between soaring peaks and along the rich valleys peaks, levelling out above massed cloud before surfing through small gaps in the layer to the small airstrips below.

Forster had been in Bundi a week when he saw his first mud-covered village woman naked to the waist towing a small pig on a length of string.

“Never before had I seen anyone so strange and I could not prevent myself chasing her down, skidding to a stop and pressuring her to stand in front of my shiny new camera. She posed readily enough for the astonished young man fresh from Hexhamshire but I flinch at my reaction now.

“She had covered herself with mud because she was in mourning a family death and was almost naked because she did not think it necessary to hide her body.” That woman was any highlands woman of the time.

As Forster settled among the Bundi people and began to learn Tok Pisin, I was in Standard 3 at Kandep Primary T School learning how to speak English under the watchful eyes of a Frenchman.

It was to this general area in the then Western Highlands that Forster, by now a kiap, came to work. After 18 months as a volunteer for the Catholic Church, he had gone back to England, married and migrated to Australia with his young wife, Paula.

In November 1971, his training at ASOPA over, Robert Forster the new kiap was posted to Minj.

He enjoyed his time among the tall handsome people of the Wahgi Valley, rolling cigarettes and telling stories in their smoke-filled huts as he tried to understand them and their culture and trying his best to stop their tribal wars.

But self-government was approaching and the people of the highlands were worried, very worried.

The government phrase for local revolt on self-government day was ‘civil commotion’ and the mood in the villages was erratic. Forster suspected that, if there was to be trouble in his region, it would begin at Banz. He knew there was nothing the few kiaps or police could do if trouble escalated.

“I would have been happy to stay if I was single but a secure family life did not mix with complex intercession between volatile village people and the new government’s shifting demands,” he recalls.

“Kiaps depended on bluff, reinforced by the implicit authority and neutrality of their white skins to maintain control, and too much of what was happening undermined it.”

He asked for a transfer from Minj to a position on the coast. And when it came through in April, 1973 he left the Wahgi for Bereina in the Central District of Papua.

While the sub district office at Minj had been busy and cheerful, Bereina was the opposite -  a tired, dust covered, backwater inhabited by people who chewed buai and considered themselves more than ready for self-government.

When self-government arrived on 1 December 1973, Forster witnessed Josephine Abaijah, the leader of separatist group Papua Besena, declare independence for Papua. She raised her red and blue flag at Bereina in front of a few mildly enthusiastic people and almost as many journalists.

Nearby, hiding behind a barricade of guns in the Forster home, was almost the entire expatriate population at Bereina including the Assistant District Commissioner who proclaimed he was ready to fight. But when Abaijah left, the small crowd soon dispersed.

After six months in Bereina, a bored Forster pleaded for a transfer. A sympathetic District Commissioner posted him to Tapini in the Goilala area where he was quickly inundated with work – attending to murders and cult related ritual killings.

He found life at Tapini good. The sun was pleasant, there was a well-maintained tennis court, a deep swimming pool fed by a mountain stream and a fine hotel with a terraced bar. The trade store was comprehensively stocked and planes landed regularly to deliver newspapers and mail from Port Moresby as well as frozen meat.

“There were three other white families with young children so socialising with peers was not a strain, the hydro-electricity supply was constant, and there was work for wives in the Post Office too. In PNG terms it earned four star, even five star rating,” he recalls.

This changed when Forster took over the patrol post at Guari. Paula didn’t want to go. The radio and generator were broken and the house in poor repair. Both her babies had arrived early and her third was expected in four months. There was no hospital at Guari.

Forster said Paula should leave PNG for England in February 1975. He would follow them in August the same year.

It wasn’t until 1990 that Forster met another Papua New Guinean - a man from Mt Hagen who hugged him tightly as the two spoke together in Tok Pisin.

This is a fascinating book, I highly recommend it to anybody who cares about the history of pre-independence Papua New Guinea – a time when the kiap was king but, when he left, the bush grew back.

The traditional bilas parade - could this be the last time this wonderful tradition is ever witnessed?

ARNOLD MUNDUA

KUNDIAWA – I never realised how fast traditional bilas would disappear until recently it dawned on me at a local beauty contest.

On a Saturday night late in July, Miss SME Simbu was crowned at the Mt Wilhelm Tourist Hotel. The participants were mostly girls from the nearby Kundiawa Lutheran Day Secondary School.

I’m not a keen follower of beauty quests so when my daughter Natasha broke the news that she was listed to participate I was caught off-guard. But I eventually gave her my consent.

One of the events was a parade of contestants in full traditional bilas. It took place at Dickson’s field when 14 beautiful Simbu lasses paraded in full magnificent Simbu bilas. It was the highlight of the entire contest.

But in spite of the brilliance of the parade, something surfaced that had been obscured from me, and I believe other Simbus. And that was the diminishing popularity of traditional bilas and the threat of its imminent disappearance.

While dressing the contestants in traditional bilas was a requirement, strangely I did not have any traditional bilas, not a single item, in my suitcase or wardrobe.

Thanks to some Simbus who kept complete bilas sets for hire, I was able to equip my girl to parade in the required costume. But the reality I discovered was the danger of permanently losing this tradition.

It had been a different scenario amongst the Simbus 40 years ago.

In the 1960s and 1970s, every home and family had in its possession articles that constituted the traditional bilas set. Some of these items had tremendous value, especially the Bird of Paradise plumes, which were part of the family’s wealth and treasure.

They were used as gifts, bride price payments and for trade as well as their primary use as body adornments.

These beautiful items were manually crafted and their manufacture was squeezed into the busy routines of their subsistence owners.

During a pig killing ceremony in 1974, the Mitnandes of the Upper Simbu travelled far into the Ramu Valley in search of yellow-gold Raggiana Bird of Paradise plumes, red-green parrot plumes, green beetles, shells and the white-gold possum pelts.

Over in the Wahgi Valley, the brown Raggiana Bird of Paradise plumes were amassed. The givers of this bilas were invited as guests to the pig killing and were rewarded with pork for their generosity.

In our house, my father had a suitcase full of bilas - a complete set ranging from the apron (kondai) to all kinds of colourful feathers including Raggiana plumes. And because he was a skilled and talented bow and arrow marksman, hunting the long tailed black bird of paradise (miugle), he had three sealed 100 mm bamboo pipes in which he kept the long black plumes.

And it was not easy to hunt down these birds. As a kid I remember dad spending a couple of nights in the forest in the Bismarck Range in order to return home with a single black long-tailed plume.

He camped in a particular place to obtain the plume only after studying the bird’s movements for some time. He talked about the plume growing longer and made frequent trips to check on it. And when he was sure the plume was ready for the take, he disappeared into the forest with his killing weapons.

He would construct a watch tower high in a tree next to the bird’s regular ‘dancing ground’, position himself before the bird touched down and got in his shot as soon as it landed to commence its ritual dance just before dawn.

He knew I would ask for the bird’s meat so, after carefully removing the plume and skin, he cooked the bird with forest herbs and brought home the cooked parcel for me to enjoy.

Meanwhile the black plume was carefully added to his collection in the bamboo pipe.

Of course with the introduction of shotguns, this was all made pretty easy. No hardship of constructing watch towers in the tree tops.

Between 1969 and 1973, when we lived in Goroka, Dad measured my arms and wove two arm bands and a waist band from cane strips. I did not know what was coming but during the grand Upper Simbu pig-killing ceremony of 1974 (it was to be the last of this famous ritual), I wore these items during the singsing.

Mum was an expert in knitting aprons (kondai) and kaur or purpur (grass skirts). She knitted many kondai, kaur and gagl-pugla as gifts for young boys and girls, and even adults, in the 1970s.

She collected fur from the possums killed by dad during the pandanus fruiting season when we tracked through the forest in search of the nuts. She also bought them from other women in the village markets.

Mum was selective. The fur from possum species locally known as mogl and towa were much sought-after. When placed between two bark fibre strings and rolled into twine for knitting, it was transformed into an exquisite polished silver coloured product, admired and envied when worn as a bilas garment, either as konda or kaur.

More recently, in 2016, I visited a cousin sister’s house in Kerowagi and was surprised when she pointed to the wall and showed me an apron (kondai) knitted by mum back in the 1970s.

“You see the kondai on the wall there…she knitted it for Peter [her brother, now in his 60s] and I kept it there in her memory,” she said. Peter Ambane was in his teens at the time.

I shed a few tears staring at the article made by the hands of my own mother some 40 years ago.

In 1974 she had knitted a small kondai (apron) and a gagl-pugla (cap) for me and, together with the bilas from dad’s collection, I was fully dressed from head to toe to join the other kids for the pig-killing ceremony singsing.

It was customary to line the kids at the front of a big singsing. So we led the dancers from the front closely followed by the adults.

It is sad for me to write now of that time 48 years ago which was the first and last moment I ever dressed in full traditional bilas.

So, on the morning of Friday 21 July 2018, as I struggled to find traditional bilas to adorn my girl, I recalled the 1960s and 1970s when bilas was readily available in just about every home. I recalled my father’s collection and a great sadness swept through me.

It is now evident that traditional bilas and the art of creating it is disappearing amongst the Simbus. I have yet to see a Simbu woman of the modern generation knitting a kondai, kaur or a gagl-pugla. Likewise, I have yet to see a present day Simbu man designing and crafting a bow, arrow, kundu drum or hunting for bird plumes. I know I can’t!

Like me, modern Simbus no longer remember the art of creating traditional bilas. Rapid cultural change of modern times has denied our past.

I also believe that most modern Simbus have never worn full traditional bilas. I hired a full set of bilas from a woman who hired it at K100 a day and got my girl dressed for the parade realising she might never be in those garments again for a very long time, or maybe during her entire lifetime.

Today’s ‘bilas’ of black charcoal and white clay body paint adorned with leaves over western clothes and a head buried in pitpit flowers and perhaps a colourless eagle’s wing as headdress is seen amongst many Simbu singsing groups today.

It tells us of the changes that have taken place, of the disappearance of traditional bilas and the present-day make-do with whatever is available.

Later that day, at the sponsor’s dinner night at the Mt Wilhelm Tourist Hotel, I formally thanked the organisers for making this opportunity possible for the girls to be clothed in full traditional bilas and to experience the bilas for themselves.

I emphasised that, regardless of the cat-walk that was to take place the next night, this parade in full bilas was the highlight of the entire event and of the contestants’ lifetime. I told the contestants to keep the photos of that day in a safe place and to treasure them and show them even as they became grandmothers in the future.

I made it clear that they might never be in traditional bilas again. Our customs and traditions are disappearing and our bilas is disappearing with them.

I was a glorious and sad day.

The first archived issue of PNG Attitude in the National Library of Australia from mid-September 2009

PHIL FITZPATRICK

TUMBY BAY - I like to write. I don’t really know why. Sometimes it’s easier to write than talk. Perhaps it’s because I find writing is a way of mustering and sorting my ideas. Maybe it’s just a way of blowing off steam. Who knows?

I’m nosey and I’ve got a wide range of interests and I write about most of them. I published my first piece in 1970 and haven’t stopped since.

What continues to surprise me is that, despite the demise of many traditional outlets like magazines and journals, I can still find people willing to publish what I write.

These days I like to write books. Writing books, both fiction and non-fiction, is an amazingly leisurely way to explore ideas.

Lately, the emergence of print-on-demand has meant that if I can’t find a publisher I can do it myself. That’s a wonderful freedom.

I don’t get many readers in Australia but do reasonably well in the USA and Europe. I can’t explain that either.

One of my principal interests is Papua New Guinea. This is because it has occupied a big chunk of my life. It helps a lot that it is a captivating place with a fascinating people.

Writing about Papua New Guinea is a little different to writing about my other interests. This is because it is essentially a two-way street. It is a two-way street mainly because of PNG Attitude.

PNG Attitude is more than just writing. Writing for PNG Attitude is actually like engaging in a conversation.

I don’t know whether Keith intended it to be so or whether it simply evolved that way. I suspect it is a combination of both.

If you write for PNG Attitude you are liable to get extensive responses in the Comments section. Sometimes what you write will attract article-length rejoinders, themselves worthy of considered responses. Some topics can extend for days and weeks. Some even find reactions years later.

I can write an article and then engage in the comments process and end up with a contrary view to the one I originally presented. That’s a liberating experience.

I haven’t seen many other places where this happens, either in digital or traditional media.

In most digital media, responses to essays and articles are usually short and often vituperative. Playing the man and not the ball is common. Keith will have none of that. Neither will he allow the sort of profanities common to social media to intrude unless they possess some literary merit.

Very few topics are disallowed. As long as they have some relevance to Papua New Guinea, the editor will entertain them.

This is something you don’t see in other media outlets. Generally they only have a limited range of interests and subjects they will publish.

Keith is left-leaning but he doesn’t discriminate against opposite views.

I like to use this freedom to occasionally present provocative and unorthodox ideas. It is a way of laying a trap to elicit responses that would otherwise remain hidden but which I think need exposure.

Keith goes along with this because he knows what I am up to and is also probably interested in the responses. It is a great way to generate debate on important issues.

The multiplicity of ideas and topics on PNG Attitude also provides other opportunities. One of these is the recording and sharing of Australian and Papua New Guinean history, both as it has been and as it is happening.

If you flick through the PNG Attitude archives you’ll come across a great deal of history. I can’t think of anywhere else where such a treasure trove exists.

It has created an abiding interest among many Papua New Guinean readers. I sometimes find it remarkable that younger Papua New Guineans have never been exposed to the history of their country and are ignorant of it.

It is one reason why the National Library of Australia retains digital copies of PNG Attitude dating back to September 2009 and now refreshed in mid-October each year.

Sometimes PNG Attitude reports history as it is being made. Just like it attracts writers like me, it attracts writers, academics, journalists and first-hand participants from Australia and Papua New Guinea who are much more erudite, informed and expert who can shed light on events as they occur.

Another major contribution of PNG Attitude is the publication of Papua New Guinean writers who would otherwise have no outlet for their work.

This process also gives outsiders a great view of what people in Papua New Guinea are thinking. If it wasn’t for PNG Attitude where else could you consistently read work by Papua New Guinean writers?

PNG Attitude has ‘discovered’ a remarkable number of talented writers from Papua New Guinea. A few of them have become legends in their own right.

I was reminded of this power when Keith recently published some excerpts from a soon-to-be published high school anthology from Bougainville. The response of those students seeing their work on PNG Attitude was heartening. Maybe one or two of them will emerge as great writers later on. Who can tell?

I could go on and on but if you are a writer who needs an outlet you should consider PNG Attitude. I’m sure Keith will accommodate you and it’s a great way to hone your skills.

Try it.

J Hassen and his daughter protesting for Aboriginal rights at Parliament House in Canberra, 1958

CHRIS OVERLAND

ADELAIDE - We in what passes as the civilised world (an increasingly dubious descriptor) live in an era where the humble adjective has been entirely supplanted by the superlative. Almost numbingly mundane events are now described in the most florid and extravagant terms.

For example, someone winning one of the endless sporting contests that occur across the globe on a daily basis ends up being described in words that might once have been used only for events of the most profound importance.

So devalued have superlatives become that we now struggle to find words of sufficient power and force to describe events that really matter.

Also, we live at a time in which thoughtful discussion has been largely replaced by near hysterical denunciation of those you do not agree with and public discourse that is all too frequently just a shouting match.

Much of the media, presumably fairly reflecting the interests of its readership, displays an obsession with A to Z grade celebrities and shock and horror stories. In many instances, the connection between the objective truth and the story as published is tenuous indeed.

Donald Trump’s alternatively provocative, offensive, threatening and indignant tweets seem entirely consistent with the way public discourse on difficult or contentious topics is now conducted.

Bearing this background in mind, it is unsurprising to me that our political class has, as a general rule, shied away from openly discussing our collective history as it pertains to the Aboriginal people.

It is a very distressing history to contemplate, full of pain and heart ache. It is hard to reconcile justifiable pride in the undoubted achievement that is modern Australian democracy with the ugly truth about the harm done to Aboriginal people in the process of creating it.

Judith White alludes to the so-called History Wars of the 1990’s, in which efforts to have the truth told provoked a significant reaction, mostly from the political right. They preferred to see Australian history through the prism of the conqueror, not the conquered.

I think that the History Wars are now over although some of the combatants are still blazing away at one another. Much like those in southern states of the USA who still insist on mythologizing the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, the proponents of a triumphalist view of the British take over have actually lost but cannot admit it.

There is not cultural amnesia about this, at least at an academic level. No respectable historian can any longer seriously maintain that the wide spread murder, assault, rape and dispossession of Aboriginal people did not happen. The weight of evidence is too great.

However, beyond the halls of academe, the sound and fury of the History Wars seems to have barely impinged upon the public consciousness.

I do not think that this is because people have not heard and understood the arguments. After all, Kevin Rudd’s fulsome public apology to the Aboriginal people was very widely endorsed by the public.

So the problem is not lack of awareness or even sympathy, excluding only that tiny minority of contemptible recidivists epitomized by Senator Fraser Anning.

I am afraid that an irreducible number of such people will always be with us, but their views have been consistently rejected by the huge majority of Australians.

To my mind, it is simply a case of being unable to comprehend how the evils that occurred can now be put right.

The proposal to enshrine an extra-Parliamentary advisory body exclusively for Aboriginal people in the constitution may strike some people as a fine thing to do but, for many Australians, it smacks of creating a class of citizens who stand above and outside of the huge majority of the population.

This offends the very entrenched egalitarianism that is one of the hallmarks of Australian society.

Also, I think Australians are intuitively aware of the law of unintended consequences, where well-meaning people introduce reforms that produce a whole set of new problems to be confronted. Not for nothing has America’s Bill of Rights sometimes been described as a Villain’s Charter.

Combine this with the wider electorates’ notorious conservatism, and now almost pathological suspicion about the motives and intentions of the political class, and Malcolm Turnbull’s reluctance to push for constitutional changes becomes much easier to understand.

Right now, for the reasons given, I think that most Australians are neither amnesic nor hostile, but they remain unconvinced that constitutional change is either necessary or desirable.

I think that the onus now lies upon the victors in the History Wars to find a way to convince the Australian public that there is a sensible way forward.

This was done in 1967 when racist ideas were considerably more prevalent than they are today, so it is not impossible. But it will certainly be difficult.

Australia’s successful 1967 referendum included Aboriginal people in the census for the first time and allowed the Commonwealth government to make laws for Aboriginal people.

Its landmark importance in Australia showed that even small steps can be difficult in the making.

GLENN BANKS & MARTYN NAMORONG | PNG Post-Courier | Asia Pacific Report

PORT MORESBY - Government revenues from Papua New Guinea’s mining, oil and gas sector have essentially dried up.

With the ongoing effects of the devastating earthquake in Hela Province, the eruption of election-related violence in the Southern Highlands, a significant budget shortfall, and a foreign exchange crisis driving business confidence down, the resources of the government are severely stretched,

And the massively expensive APEC meeting looms in November.

In this context, the drop in government revenue from the resource sector is staggering. And accounts in significant part for the growing fiscal stress.

In 2006-2008, according to Bank of PNG figures, the government collected more than K2 billion annually from the sector by way of taxes and dividends, on mineral exports that had just topped K10 billion for the first time.

In 2017, the figure is just K400 million on exports of K25 billion – a revenue reduction of more than 80% in the same time that exports have increased by 150%.

Government dividends and corporate taxes made up just 1.6% of the value of exports in 2017 (and that was a significant increase over 2015 and 2016).

If we take the long-term average share of the value of exports that the government has received (at a little over 10%), this points to a potential ‘‘hole’’ of at least K8 billion over the past four years, an amount that would go a long way to covering the current fiscal deficit.

There are some precedents for the rapid drop in government revenues from the sector. In 1990 and 1991 – just as the ‘‘resources boom’’ triggered by the Porgera gold mine and oil production at the Kutubu oilfield began – revenues collapsed, largely due to the closure of the Bougainville copper mine in 1989; and again, briefly in 2009 due to the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.

But neither of these has been as deep or as sustained as the current hole.

A full explanation of the precipitous decline in resource revenues is beyond the scope of this analysis.

Clearly, a number of factors are involved, including a fall in commodity prices, major construction and expansion costs (which attract accelerated depreciation provisions) and generous tax deals.

The revenue dry-up of the past four years also reveals that the state bears a disproportionate share of the risks associated with resource projects and investments. If we go back to the original intent of the post-independence mineral policy, it was to translate mineral wealth into broad-based development across the whole country: “…known mineral resources should be developed for the revenue they can provide to the government” (PNG Department of Finance 1977: 2).

This clearly has not happened in the last four years. And certainly the Treasurer cannot be critiqued for commissioning yet another fiscal review: this seems appropriate, although whether it effectively addresses broader issues of a “fair share” of mineral wealth remaining in PNG remains to be seen.

While there is much less money coming from the resources sector, there is at least better data than there used to be.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is a global initiative begun in 2002 to give transparency to what were regarded as often opaque flows of resource revenues from multinational companies in the extractives sector (especially oil) to the state in the countries in which they were operating.

It is a voluntary initiative in which countries (and companies) can elect to become a “candidate” country, and so long as they are able to be compliant with EITI standards, they can be admitted as a full member of EITI.

The key requirement is to be able to report in a reliable way (through third party audits) on the revenues paid by companies, and reconcile these with payments received by the different arms of the state.

The involvement of all parties – companies, governments and civil society – and public communication around the event and its products is also seen as central to both transparency and raising awareness of the nature of resource revenues and their destination.

PNG initiated its involvement in EITI in 2012. Four annual EITI reports have so far been produced (for the years 2013 to 2016). These reports provide an increasingly rigorous and transparent set of data on flows from the sector to the government, and identify additional revenue streams to the government than what BPNG use (and have used for the past 40 years).

When all the additional revenue streams that EITI identify are included, the total share of the value of mineral exports rises to around 6.5 percent for 2017, up from the 1.6 percent based on the BPNG data.

EITI is not without its problems and the most recent PNG country report identifies areas where it needs to be strengthened in PNG, and a focus on companies rather than operations can lead to the obfuscation of total flows and payments from each mine, oil and gasfield.

In the PNG context, an examination of the sub-national flows and audit trails is also significant, and an initial study into this is underway.