Anna: My life from a coffee plantation in Papua New Guinea to the shores of Byron Bay, by Anna Middleton, published by the author 2017, ISBN: 978-00994555298. Available from the author for $29.95.
WHEN I arrived in Mount Hagen in 1967 the coffee and tea plantations of the Wahgi Valley were well-established; the years of hard work, struggle and privations were mostly in their owners’ past.
What I saw was a largely privileged and powerful group of people, well off, with big houses, very comfortable lifestyles, situated in an ideal climate and with plenty of spare time to pursue a variety of leisure activities.
To my mind, and probably that of many others, they were a kind of aristocracy with a reputation something akin to that enjoyed by the early squatters in Australia.
They probably didn’t think of themselves as special but simply hardworking.
However, like any privileged group they stood out. And they had their fair share of eccentrics who were hard drinkers and uncompromising in their pursuit of the good life.
Unfortunately for them, and possibly for Papua New Guinea too, their ascendancy was short lived, perhaps only thirty years, between the late 1940s and the latter part of the 1970s.
Anna Middleton and her husband Jim were part of the Wahgi Valley plantocracy and her story follows what was probably a typical trajectory for this group.
Both of them came from relatively wealthy and well-educated Australian families and while they had an undoubted spirit of adventure they were not unaccustomed to comfortable lives.
Indeed, Papua New Guinea eventually allowed them to take this comfort to another level. In several places in her book Anna reiterates the luxuries afforded by having servants to do all the menial tasks.
When she and Jim left Papua New Guinea in 1980 losing those servants was something she regretted deeply.
Having servants, of course, made it possible to get on with the important aspects of life, partying and socialising. Her first encounter sets the tone.
“It was so interesting for me to experience being in a private house for dinner with native servants. I loved the fact that they waited on the table, cleared away and disappeared into the kitchen to wash up while we simply pushed out our chairs and went into the sitting room to wait for the staff to bring the coffee. I thought, This is for me.”
Much of the book is taken up with describing the social lives the planters and their wives enjoyed. The Papua New Guinean people, just like the servants in that first encounter, only ever hovered in the background.
Here and there, however, there is a hint of something deeper than this apparently frivolous lifestyle. There are whispers of hard work and dedication and genuine appreciation of the Papua New Guineans who worked for them.
It would have been good if the book had drawn this aspect out more. After all, the planters in the Wahgi Valley couldn’t have pioneered one of the key elements of Papua New Guinea’s modern economy without their workers.
One of the other things that caught my attention in Mount Hagen when I arrived were the scenes of men in traditional dress sitting on the lawns outside the hotels with jugs of beer, usually one apiece, which they were liberally lacing with rum and other spirits.
Anna puts the lifting of the ban on alcohol down as a principle reason for why life in the valley for many of the planter families eventually became intolerable.
The violence and crime that followed created such a lawless and dangerous society that it made many of the planters take up the offer to sell their plantations to Papua New Guineans and receive the compensation offered by the government under the 1974 Land Acquisitions Act.
Anna never returned to the valley but her husband and son went back some thirty years later. What they saw must have been very saddening.
“When we arrived there to grow coffee, we cleared the land and settled, built houses and made our lives complete. On returning to our plantation it was though we were never there. It is all unkempt, overgrown and most of it unrecognisable.
“The house has been fenced in from the garden, and the patios and breezeways have been enclosed for safety reasons. There is no furniture in the house and fires have been lit on the floor on top of the parquetry flooring. The doors on all the built-in cupboards have been levered off and burnt for firewood. I couldn’t believe the photos of our wonderful home and garden.”
Anna had helped lay that floor and had designed all of the interior layout and exterior gardens. Apparently the three tribes in the area were still in dispute over the ownership of the plantation when Jim and his son visited.
Anna’s book is a wonderful evocation of that time during the Wahgi Valley’s version of Camelot and, as such, is a valuable and revealing historical document.
I’m not sure she intended it to be so. I think she was more interested in conveying something more personal about her unusual life and great romance.
Instead she has exposed a side of the Australian experience in Papua New Guinea that, for better or worse, seldom sees the light of day.
The book is highly readable and quite revealing. It is funny in places and sad in others.
I recommend you read it. You might be shocked.