Boy He Cry: An Island Odyssey

Author

prologue

The phone rang, overriding the drone of the computer, my clacking of the keys. I’d been working well and didn’t appreciate the disruption. The handpiece wasn’t in the cradle. I searched for it in the usual places and found it on the bookcase in the dining room, face down, beetle-backed, its green luminous light pulsing with each ring.

‘Hello.’

There was a crackling emptiness at the other end. I suspected a telemarketer from Calcutta. I used to hear the telemarketers out, try to treat them with respect, but found that once they started their spiel it was impossible to stop them. I resented having to be rude, knowing how much harder their lives must be than mine, but what else could I do? I had work to do. I was about to deliver my usual brush-off when I heard a voice I recognized.

‘Lodea, is that you?’

‘Eba. Yauwedo, hello! What’s wrong, you sound terrible?’ It was the youngest of my three Papuan ‘sisters’, calling from Alotau. Her voice lacked its usual bounce and sparkle.

‘I have bad news from the island.’

A jumble of tragic scenarios sprang to mind: a cyclone; a tsunami; a sunken workboat. No survivors! ‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s Eunice, that one woman, our small mother. Last week, she passed away.’

‘That’s terrible.’ Time and distance made it hard for me to process Eba’s news.

We were both silent. An image of my small mother passed before me but was hurried away by the noises at Eba’s end of the line: people talking, laughing, strains of Papuan pop.

‘Had she been sick?’

‘Not much. Her legs had been bad. You knew that, yeah? She’d stopped gardening. She was a real ai aihali, you know, an old woman.’

‘Ehewa, I know. But still … What did she die from?’

‘Malaria, probably.’ Eba cleared her throat and some of the usual strength returned to her voice. ‘I’m really angry, Lodea—I should have been there. I was due for annual leave. Had planned a big trip to the island, but then the hospital asked me to fly to Port Moresby for a meeting.’

‘Humbugas!’

‘They gave me no option. And then our small mother, she passed on when I was in the Capital. By the time I got to the island her body had been buried.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ The words sounded hollow, but they shouldn’t have, because in a small way I knew something of how she felt. I too wanted to go back to the island, felt stranded, useless, being so far away. A child started squealing in the background, making it hard to hear what Eba was saying.

‘… People are waiting. I have to go.’

‘Thanks for letting us know. Give our love to everyone there. I’ll … ring you.’ The line went dead before I got the last words out.

The green light on the phone blinked off.

My work didn’t seem so urgent now. I rang my partner, Shelley. Upset by the news but unable to talk, she hung up, already running late for a meeting. I made myself a cup of tea and pulled out the old photographs. I knew there weren’t many of Eunice—she’d always avoided the camera—but I wanted to see her face, bring her to life in my memory. If only to help me realise that now she was dead. I found a picture of her I remembered. Bent over, her face hidden from view, she was sweeping leaves with a sheaf of long, spiky grass. Next I came upon a series of shots showing her doing ai’abi [cat’s cradle]. The last in the sequence showed a string baby suspended in the act of being born, my small mother’s face beaming behind the outstretched fingers, the web of string, her eyes glistening.

We owed so much to Eunice, Shelley and I: the house we had lived in was on her family’s land; it was her family that had taken us in. Closing the photo album, I realised that my strongest image of her had not been captured on film. In memory, I was standing in the middle of our hamlet when Eunice emerged from the bush, returning from one of her gardens. A huge bilum bursting with root crops hung down her back from a strap pressed tight against her forehead. She staggered forward under the weight, picking up twigs to add to the pile of the firewood balanced on her head. When I went to help her, gathering sticks before she got to them, she waved me away and laughed her gravelly laugh. Looking back, I’m always amazed and humbled by the fact that this woman, her life already full and overburdened by eight children and innumerable grandchildren, still managed to find room in her crowded heart for strangers like us.

My cup of tea had gone cold. I drank the last of it in a single gulp. The news of Eunice’s death settled and clung to me, though in a way the sadness I was feeling was the weightless shadow of a much older sadness, the heavy grief I’d felt all those years ago, sailing away from the island, knowing how hard it would be to return, except in memory. Which is why I write of it now. To once more dwell beside the sea, under the shade trees, to listen to tales of dwarf’s hair and detective magic told by people like my small mother.

chapter

1

I had always thought of life as an adventure, but never of myself as living an adventurous life. I was, and have once again become, a bookish person; someone who having grown up in an outer suburb of Melbourne was satisfied to experience his adventures vicariously, under the gentle glow of a reading lamp or in the dark, sub-conscious space of a cinema. This, though, all changed when Shelley declared that she wanted to do a Ph.D. in anthropology and I agreed to accompany her on her fieldwork to a remote island off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

After eighteen months of careful preparation, of frustrating bureaucratic delays and anxious anticipation, we finally arrived in Alotau, the capital of Milne Bay Province. Squeezed between the jagged ridges of the Owen Stanley Ranges and the broad waters of Milne Bay itself, Alotau is located on the south-eastern tip of Papua New Guinea and is accessible only by plane, boat or foot. Most Australians, if they know of it at all, associate Milne Bay with the World War II battle that bears its name. In that conflict, Australian and American troops repelled Japan’s attempt to take Port Moresby from the east, and in so doing inflicted the first ground force defeat on the Japanese army in the war. Overshadowed by the more famous defence of the Kokoda Track, the Battle of Milne Bay was equally crucial in thwarting Japan’s intended invasion of Australia. In accounts of both battles, the people upon whose land these conflicts were fought remain part of the shadowy, jungle backdrop. Rarely distinguished by individual names, they are dubbed ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’, a name that expresses condescension as much as affection; the implied halo hiding as much as it illuminates.

The township of Alotau didn’t exist in 1942, but in 1993 it comprised half a dozen trade stores, three ‘supermarkets’ (more like general stores), a hardware store, a bank, a post-office, some provincial government offices, a police station, and, closer to the bay, a wall-less, tin-roofed structure, which, twice a week, housed the local market. Further out, past a smattering of Western-style houses, lay the United and Catholic churches, Cameron High School, the Masurina Lodge (a kind of social club for expatriates and higher paid government officials), and the hospital, inexplicably perched on top of a foothill of the Owen Stanleys. At the bottom of that hill lay Sanderson Bay, a bay within the bay. Here was the hub of the town, the busy intersection through which a steady stream of human traffic flowed between the province’s capital and its 600-odd outlying islands.

My memories of Alotau are dominated by scenes of people milling about. Of young men striking poses, smoking tobacco wrapped in bits of newspaper, casually holding hands as they sauntered along; of women talking, laughing, their kids kicking up dust as they chased each other between the clapped-out PMVs (Public Motor Vehicles) and rusty Landrovers parked along the footpath; of old men and women sitting, silently chewing betel nut in the shifting shade of the mango trees down near the market; and by the smells of the market itself, of ripe fruit, and smoked fish warming in the sun, the sour, cheesy smell of stale sweat and the thick clouds of rough tobacco smoke trapped in the damp air.

The provincial government’s offices were located at the end of the main street, a short walk across a dusty park from the post-office. A few days after we arrived, Shelley had an appointment to meet with the Provincial Secretary, to negotiate local government approval for the site of her research. As was becoming my habit, I tagged along for the ride. When Shelley first contemplated doing fieldwork in Milne Bay, her supervisor, Martha Macintyre, suggested three possible locations. The one she clearly favoured though was an island called Nuakata. A near neighbour of Tubetube, where Martha had done her own fieldwork, Nuakata is a tiny island in the Goschen Strait. Dwarfed by the much larger Normanby or Duau Island, and not far from Milne Bay’s entrance to the Solomon Sea, Nuakata was often overlooked—by locals and cartographers alike. This capacity for invisibility was attractive to Shelley because she intended focusing her research on Melanesian notions of the gendered person through a study of how local beliefs and practices regarding health—particularly maternal health—interacted with available Western-style medical services. With the PNG treasury in perpetual crisis, government services were in steady decline and this, Shelley predicted, would be felt most acutely in remote, overlooked places like Nuakata.

We were both nervous at the prospect of meeting the Provincial Secretary. It seemed presumptuous to be arbitrarily nominating an unsuspecting island as a place to do research. Quite rightly, Shelley expected to have to defend her proposition, to demonstrate that it wasn’t made with colonial intent or arrogance, but rather with an appreciation of its own preposterousness.

Our anxieties were quickly allayed when Samuel Benedict warmly greeted us at the door of his office, gesturing for us to take a seat at the large coffee table that dominated the room. Adjusting his shirt, leaning back in his seat, he negotiated the small talk with ease. Then, narrowing his focus on Shelley, he asked, ‘So, where do you want to go?’ Given the bureaucratic hoops she’d been forced to jump through to get research approval at the national level, Shelley was stunned by the casualness of the question. Like a startled child asking a shopping mall Santa to grant her a Christmas wish, she replied, ‘If possible, we’d like to go to Nuakata.’

‘Nuakata? … Nuakata?’ Obviously puzzled, Samuel retrieved a map from under the jumble of papers on his desk. As with everyone else we’d met in Alotau, the name ‘Nuakata’ didn’t ring a bell for him. Shell began describing the island’s location, and once Samuel spread the map out on the coffee table, she reached over and pointed to a tiny heart-shaped dot. There it was, like a titbit brushed from Normanby Island’s table, frozen mid-fall toward the open, crocodile jaws of Milne Bay. A little distracted, still studying the map, Samuel asked why the particular interest in Nuakata. Shelley proceeded to outline the scope of her research, making the point that Nuakata’s relative closeness to Alotau, combined with its neglected status, made it a perfect place for studying the interaction between local and Western-style medical beliefs and practices.

After a short pause, Samuel stood up, extended his hand, first to Shelley, then to me, and said, ‘I hope it all goes well. I’ll take you over and introduce you to the senior administrator of the Health Department.’ That was it. No grilling, no need for long-winded, defensive explanations. Nothing. We had, it seemed, been granted permission to approach the people of Nuakata with Shelley’s proposal.

Our sense of relief was, however, misplaced. The senior health administrator was already in a meeting when Samuel ushered us into his cramped office. Having introduced us to Barnabas, the administrator, but ignoring the other two people in the meeting, Samuel made his excuses and left. We offered to leave too, to wait outside until the meeting was over, but Barnabas insisted we stay. He completed the introductions. Gesturing to the plump, middle aged woman sitting beside me, he said, ‘This is Matron, the head of nursing’, and then, to the large, sleepy-eyed man beside her, ‘And this is Bill, the head of the disease control section of the Department. It’s good they’re here, they can have some input into the discussion.’ Neither Matron nor Bill appeared to agree. Like a Brighton Beach postcard version of someone in her position, Matron kept her arms folded across her white, bulging uniform and, while acknowledging our presence with a nod, maintained a withering scowl. Bill was only slightly less hostile, his body fluent in the quieter language of sardonic disinterest.

With the four of us sitting uncomfortably close together on the other side of his desk, Barnabas stayed standing as he spoke. A short man, with a Trotsky-style beard and piercing brown eyes, his intelligence was obvious, his energy kinetic. Watching him sit, then stand again, then move about the tiny space behind the desk, I was reminded of an American evangelist I’d seen as a kid; the frenetic way he utilised the stage just before he made the call for people to commit their lives to Christ. Certainly it seemed that one reason Barnabas wanted the four of us to meet together was that by doing so his audience was doubled. I don’t say this ungenerously, for if on one level I was being cast as a member of an audience, I at least found Barnabas’ performance entertaining, confronting, and, at one point, quite moving.

With an interrogator’s timing, having captured the limelight for himself, he suddenly shone it directly back on Shell. ‘So, tell us about this research of yours.’

A little nervously, Shelley delivered her spiel. Unsettled by the palpable disdain emanating from Matron and Bill, she spoke quicker than usual and jumped from point to point without her characteristic poise. There was relish in the way Barnabas hammered her with questions regarding the details of, and motivations for, her research. Bill, in particular, seemed to be enjoying the playing out of this post-colonial minuet, watching his boss lead these Dimdims in a dance of inverted imperial dependence. Unfortunately for him, though, the phone on the desk began to ring. From revelling in being on the side of the powerful, Bill’s own subservient status was suddenly laid bare. Not wishing to interrupt the flow of his own performance, Barnabas gestured for Bill to answer the phone. Reluctant to move, to be seen as a mere receptionist, Bill looked pleadingly to Matron, who merely redirected her scowl from us to him. Finally, irritated, Barnabas broke off from the lecture he’d started to deliver and ordered Bill to answer it. The more junior bureaucrat hauled himself from his chair and, employing slowness as a form of protest, eventually did as he was told.

Barnabas’ attention returned to Shelley and me as he revealed that, unlike most other people in Alotau, he knew where Nuakata was because he had lived there for ten years as a boy. Sticking to this autobiographical path, he then gave an account of his considerable academic credentials, underlining the fact that he had studied in both Australia and the USA; that he knew how the West worked, what Western people wanted. Deriding what he took to be our world, even as he boasted of his credentials in it, he was leaving us nowhere to hide. Baldly stating his suspicion of anthropologists, he said, ‘Many of them don’t use their research findings to help the people they’ve lived with and they don’t return to the places once they’ve left. We had one Polish fellow here, Malinowski, and some German anthropologists who did research in the Trobriands. They came and got what they wanted and we never saw them again. Nothing.’

It was disconcerting hearing him talk of Malinowski as if his 1915-1918 field trip to the Trobriand Islands had occurred only a couple of years ago, but even more confronting was the way Shelley was supposedly answerable for the sins of her academic forefathers. What could she say? Only that her intentions were otherwise. Deliberately or not, Barnabas had surgically exposed the raw nerve of our post-colonial doubts about anthropology. This only made his next move all the more remarkable. Rather than continue to take delight in watching us squirm on the skewer of our own culture’s failings, he redirected us back to his own life story. But where earlier there was only boasting, now there was a suggestion of regret, even a plea for help. Returning to the theme of his worldliness, he said that while all his travel and education had given him much in terms of material and intellectual wealth, it had also robbed him of something far more important, more fundamental—his sense of place, of belonging. The hectoring tone shifted to one of confession as he told us that, just as he had not been back to Nuakata since he was a child, neither had he been to his mother’s village on Normanby Island for the past twenty-five years. His focus turned to me.

‘Why is that? Why can’t I go back to my mother’s village, even though I long to? Why can’t I face those people? Do you understand that, Roger? You’re a writer, will you write about that for me?’

I said then that I would, and I guess I hope that in some circuitous and delayed way my writing this book will honour that promise. At the time, though, I would’ve promised almost anything to end that meeting. Having revealed his own personal pain, Barnabas then asked Matron and Bill if they had any comments or questions. Bill still seemed to be smarting from the phone-answering incident, so it was left to Matron to re-apply the blowtorch; a task she executed with practiced efficiency. ‘I know what we’ll get out of it,’ she said, referring to Shelley’s research, the inference being nothing, ‘but what will you get out of it?’

More nervous than ever, Shell fumbled for the right words. ‘When I’ve written the thesis I’ll be awarded a Ph.D.’ This merely confirmed Matron’s prejudices. Arms still crossed, her customary scowl melted into a knowing grin as she slowly nodded her head in the direction of Bill.

Our ordeal ended with a tentative knock at the door. It was Jenny Henry, the Health Extension Officer for Alotau District. Her quiet arrival was for us, without doubt, a kind of rescue. Indeed, Jenny’s soft voice and gentle manner was the perfect antidote to our encounter with the Health Department’s more senior officials. With long, wavy hair tied back in a ponytail and smiling, brown eyes, she showed none of her bosses’ hostility. She was warm and friendly and seemed to be genuinely interested in Shelley’s research, especially when she heard of its proposed location.

‘Nuakata, that’s where I’m from!’

We couldn’t believe it. Prior to that morning we’d never met anyone who had even heard of the place and now, two hours later, we were speaking to a second person who had lived there. What’s more, Jenny offered to take us to the island the following week. She was due to visit Nuakata in an official capacity, to sort out a land dispute regarding the island’s medical aid post, and was hitching a ride on her brother’s boat. Given there was to be a community meeting about the dispute, she thought it a perfect opportunity for Shelley to present her proposal to the local stakeholders. While we were there, and assuming the community’s cooperation, she suggested we scout out a place to live and arrange for some people to build us a house. It all seemed too good to be true, a kind of paradox of good luck. As if the dream, in becoming a reality, was becoming more fantastical, more dreamlike—the closer we got to it, the more unreal, the more preposterous it appeared.

Peter Gaskell, an old friend of mine, is leading me to a house in an Irish village: whitewashed walls, wet cobblestones, chimney smoke drifting into a leaden sky. We’re apparently going to a wake. Once inside the house everything is dark and dank. We enter a room where ten or so people, much older than us, are sitting round a large dining room table. There’s a coffin lying on the middle of it. An old man to my right reassures me the dead man isn’t in the coffin but lying on a bed in the next room. Despite the gloom, everyone is actually quite jolly. The man beside me keeps proffering different Irish beers to try, soliciting my opinion. His wife, sitting on the other side, serves me a lovely rich, whiskey-laced pudding. I glance across the table to where Peter, who has always loved a drink, is beaming—as if it is he who has died and, to his surprise, has found himself in heaven.

At the far end of the table, another old man—wispy white hair, gummy mouth, dirty tweed jacket—gestures to the mahogany coffin and explains how he spent his life-savings to buy it for his friend. Life-savings can’t save a life, but they can honour one. No coffin, he said, could be too expensive for his dead mate. A little later, this same man stands up and tries to shoulder the coffin by himself, staggering with it towards the next room. I jump up to help him and glimpse the dead man, gaunt and waxy on the bed.

No longer carrying the coffin, but walking alone down the hall, I peer into another room and see my grandmother (who I loved dearly and who had died exactly one year earlier) warming herself before an old fashioned gas heater. I sense there is someone else in the room. The hissing of the heater fills the silence. Grandma then tells me she is cold. I hug her and rub her back and try to give her some of my warmth.

[Jump cut] My mum enters the room and I’m holding a camera. Mum and Grandma had a strained affection for each other in the final years of Grandma’s life. I look at them through the viewfinder. They are standing too far apart to be in the same frame. I ask them to move closer. Reluctantly they do, then they smile, and I take the shot.

This dream and the others like it—all full of dread and death—came to me as I writhed about in a darkened room in the SIL compound at Diwala, ten or so kilometres west of Alotau. Our meetings with the government officials had occurred a couple of days earlier. Sweat-soaked, twisting and turning on a mattress on the floor, the soreness of my neck instilled the childish taunt ‘You’re a pain in the neck’ with an undreamt vehemence. My head felt like a watermelon split open with an axe; the red, pulpy bits throbbing, burning, bubbling in the sun. Constantly nauseous, I alternated between throwing-up and doubling over with crippling bouts of diarrhoea. To open my eyes, even a tiny bit, was to let in razor blade rays of light that triggered a pain that began in my brain and ended in my bowels. Every joint, every sinew, every cell of me ached.

Exhausted and no longer fully conscious, I drifted in and out of a tortured sleep. The delirium infected my dreams and I was driven crazy with the sound of dripping taps, ringing phones, running footfalls. Shelley and those around her discussed various possible diagnoses. At one stage I took six Chloroquine tablets, on the assumption I had malaria. But when these had little effect—except in delivering their own set of symptoms (the aural distortions increased and I lost all sense of balance)—and given there was some doubt as to whether I’d been in the country long enough for malaria to have incubated, the consensus was that I’d contracted a nasty virus. Months later, after Shelley and I had both suffered repeated bouts of similar symptoms which were relieved by the stronger anti-malarial, quinine, we decided this first illness must indeed have been a case of malaria; perhaps even one of the Vivax variety, which stubbornly refuses treatment and periodically recurs.

SIL is the acronym for the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an affiliate of Wycliffe International, a US-based, fundamentalist organization that has set itself the audacious task of translating the Bible into every known language on earth (the fulfilment of which, they believe, is a precondition of Christ’s Second Coming). Since Independence in 1975, the PNG government has navigated a difficult course between a secularist desire to limit the proselytizing of overseas missionary organizations, while at the same time remaining economically dependent on the services (particularly medical) that they provide. For its part, SIL has demonstrated sensitivity to the government’s dilemma by conveniently repackaging its enterprise in terms of literacy services. In this way, while in the process of translating the Bible into any one of PNG’s 800 languages, SIL workers compile dictionaries and grammars for these languages, provide limited literacy programmes and translate a selection of local myths and legends (though, one imagines, none that overtly conflict with their own view of the world), which they then print-up as storybooks for use in primary schools.

I was deeply ambivalent about our decision to stay at Diwala rather than at the exorbitantly priced commercial place in Alotau. In one sense SIL was an outpost of a world I knew. Raised an evangelical Christian, the world of missionaries was far from foreign to me. The problem was that as an adult I had always felt uneasy in this world of certainty and had, ten years earlier, effectively left it.

When I first saw the SIL compound at Diwala I was reminded of a picture book version of The Swiss Family Robinson I had read as a child. Hacked out of the surrounding rainforest, the compound comprised four houses and a library-cum-meeting room, with another dwelling on top of that. All the buildings combined Western with local bush materials and had been constructed with the tropical climate in mind. The house we were staying in was built on stilts, its numerous louvre windows opening onto a lush canopy of frangipani and hibiscus trees. Its external walls were made from the fronds of sago palms folded into shingles, and the internal ones backed directly onto these and were a pattern of woven pandanus palms secured behind the exposed beams of a Western-style house frame. By day we would hear the industrious drone of bees and the calls of unfamiliar birds. Even when the sun was at its hottest, we would sometimes see giant, aqua and lime green butterflies flapping languidly through the syrupy air. In our bed at night we would listen to people traipsing through the bush, hunting or lighting fires, laughing, talking. Other times, we would hear the frantic slurping of a cuscus or bats feasting on the ripening fruit of a nearby papaya tree, or the gentler, somnolent sound of banana palm fronds clapping in the breeze.

Our hosts at Diwala were Diane and Jack; friendly, simple-faith folk from the American mid-west. Despite their suspicions regarding anthropology and the status of Shelley’s and my relationship with God, they were unfailingly nice to us. In time, though, I came to realise this was in contrast to their patronizing attitudes to the locals. Like me, Jack was in PNG because of his wife’s work, not his own. A tall, sinewy man in his early sixties, he’d been a builder before he met and married the much younger Diane. He didn’t seem to mind being in Milne Bay, but it was clear that it was Diane’s ‘calling’ to be there, not his. The inefficiencies and slowness of life in PNG and the government’s restrictions on missionary work and other business enterprises were obvious sources of frustration to his cando attitude to life.

One day I was looking up at the papaya tree near our house. Jack was standing beside me, shielding his eyes from the sun with his John Deer baseball cap. ‘See, there … there it is,’ he said, pointing his finger excitedly. While I was still trying to locate the fruit-thieving cuscus, Jack disappeared into the shed under his house and re-emerged with a modern-style crossbow. He loaded the high-tech arrow and bedded the bow’s rifle-like butt into his shoulder. Raising it towards the treetop, squinting through its sights, he squeezed the trigger—fired. The arrow made a sleek, zinging noise, but missed its target and rocketed off into the bush beyond the compound fence. ‘Darn,’ growled Jack, holding the impotent crossbow limply at his side as he watched the cuscus scamper away in a splash of leaves. ‘What I’d do for my Remington repeater! He’d be one dead cuscus, I’m telling you that right now.’

Naïvely, I asked where his rifle was, imagining it was away being repaired or had been lent to someone. ‘The interfering government here wouldn’t let me bring it into the country,’ he said, still looking wistfully up at the tree, clapping his cap on and off his head. ‘They won’t allow me to bring any of my guns, not even a handgun. They know nothing about hunting in this place.’ This, I thought, was a curious suggestion, given that much