PHILIP FITZPATRICK
TUMBY BAY - When the so-called baby boomers came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s a revolution of liberating enlightenment began to sweep the world.
It began in California, swept through Britain and Europe and finally made its way to Australia.
From there it seeped into Papua New Guinea.
Many people paid lip service to the changes, adopting the music and fashions but retaining their old-fashioned establishment views.
For most of the timeworn colonial brigade in Papua New Guinea, the changes were a mild irritant mostly manifest in the sight of young Australian patrol officers, teachers and other public servants sporting long hair and wearing beads and sandals.
The old guard frowned on the easy relationships these young people established with their Papua New Guinean counterparts but secretly admired the miniskirts that the local shop girls took to wearing.
If they complained about what was happening it was usually confined to the bars and lounges of their district country club or, if they were in Port Moresby, the members’ bar of the Royal Papua Yacht Club.
Hippy kiaps and Marxist teachers were never going to make much headway against the conservative establishment in pre-independent Papua New Guinea. At best they could only look upon in puzzled bewilderment.
Then, of course, Gough Whitlam burst on the scene and the scales tipped decidedly leftwards. What was thought impossible suddenly became eminently doable.
For Papua New Guinea it was dramatic and brief conflation of events that changed its future forever.
As surprising as it is, history tends to work this way.
Sudden changes, where the world seems to be tipped upside down, happen more often than we think.
When Bob Dylan sang ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ in 1964 who would have thought part of that change would be independence for Papua New Guinea?
For the old colonial brigade it was a bitter disaster. For many Papua New Guineans it was the beginning of uncertainty. For the hippy kiaps and Marxist teachers it was the beginning of hope.
Bitterness is often enduring, uncertainty less so, but hope is usually short-lived unless grasped quickly and made tangible through action.
We are now experiencing something similar with the Covid-19 crisis that has turned history upside down again.
Out of that disaster there is hope for change all over the world. Just like the old colonial brigade, the establishment is grimly hanging on to the past – or even trying to render an even more conservative future - while the young and old hopefuls are seeing the opportunity to create a better and more equitable world.
To quote the Indian writer Arundhati Roy:
“Historically, pandemics have forced human beings to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, and data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us.
“Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Unlike that earlier historic upheaval Papua New Guineans are now in a position to drive their response to this historical opportunity themselves.
Battered and bruised as it is from all those years of lost hope, the chance, if grasped, now exists to create change under its own terms and in its own image.
There are no die-hard old colonialists or starry eyed hippies in the way this time. There is just an open road ready to be trod.
The people of Papua New Guinea can choose to go back down the road to the past or they can go the other way and strike out into the future.
As Papua New Guineans face another political crisis, for which they bear no fault and have no part to play, hope is challenged.
Your dreams of a better future are ours too.