Keith Jackson & Friends: PNG ATTITUDE

Men of calibre: A curious and unexpected friendship

ED BRUMBY

Man of Calibre by Baka Barakove Bina, CreateSpace, 2015, ISBN-10: 1499751842, ISBN-13: 978-1499751840. 248 pages. Kindle $3.27, Paperback $16.20 + postage. Order here

FRIENDSHIPS come in many forms and from many sources. From shared experiences at school or at work. From shared interests in sport and pastimes. And through connections with family and friends. Some friendships last a lifetime. Others are more transitory.

Many of my most lasting friendships were formed when I was training to teach in Papua New Guinea in the mid-1960s, and then during my nearly 10 years as a teacher and writer there until the early 1970s.

Papua New Guinea remains, as was reinforced for me last year, a continuing source of friendship.

I have never met my newest Papua New Guinean friend.

An eight-word note brought forth a mountain of memories

KEITH JACKSON

PUBLISHING PNG Attitude – which I have done each day for nearly 10 years from locations as unlikely as the middle of a volcanic eruption in Rabaul in 2006 and a hospital bed after spinal surgery in 2012 - has its compensations.

Which is just as well, since I’m occasionally beset by concerns about the amount of time the blog and its cousin, the Crocodile Prize, suck from a schedule that never seems to ease no matter how many years pass me by.

I have just turned seventy, and who can ignore the Psalms which tell us we are actuarially entitled to “threescore years and ten” and then warn “if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”

Fly-a-bloody-way….

The weird world of seismic – stress, mud, dirt & heat

PHIL FITZPATRICK

Scenery and Seismic in Papua New Guinea by Barry Taverner, Self-published, 2014, ISBN: 978-0-9941501-0-3, 8½” x 12”, 133 pages.  $40 plus postage, order directly from the author at wrenhill245@hotmail.com

I have to admit to a certain bias in this review.

Barry and I have been best mates since we met in primary school, at a time that seems like centuries ago.

We both went to Papua New Guinea together as young kiaps in 1967.  We later became brothers-in-law.

He went back there in 1996 to work in oil and gas exploration with the fledgling company, Oilmin Field Services, set up by George Leahy and a couple of ex-kiaps, Ian Thompson and Clive Nicholls.  I followed him a year later.

Identity loss and recovery: A tale from the Bougainville war

ED BRUMBY

Lost in His Land by Winterford Toreas. Pukpuk Publications: Amazon/Kindle. 2014. 126pp. ISBN10:1503051846; ISBN 13:978-1503051843. Available from Amazon: USD 3.04 (Kindle); USD 5.70 (paperback)

IT’S now nearly 20 years since formal hostilities ceased on Bougainville.

While Leonard Fong Roka and others have provided valuable accounts of, and insights into the events and consequences of those times via books, essays and other means, their endeavours have been targeted primarily at adult readers.

No-one has written of the conflict and its effects specifically for younger, adolescent readers. Until now.

In Lost in His Land, Winterford Toreas provides a timely and somewhat conventional tale of loss, recovery and reconciliation that illuminates, for younger readers, the trauma that war and conflict inflict on everyone, combatants and innocents alike, regardless of age or gender.

Boka Kondra drives rejuvenation of PNG’s film industry

OALA MOI | Ministry of Tourism, Arts & Culture

LED by Minister for Tourism Arts and Culture Boka Kondra, Papua New Guinea’s commercial film industry is set for a rebirth after decades of resting.

Mr Kondra’s date with the PNG film industry started with a Hollywood film proposal just weeks after he assumed the ministerial portfolio in 2012.

In September of that year, he received a funding investment proposal from PNG’s Stanley Nandex for an action film with the working title The B-Team: PNG. The proposal had been made on behalf of the film’s Los Angeles-based co-producers, Gorilla Pictures.

Although Mr Kondra endorsed the proposal in-principle, it lingered for the last two years because the policy and legislative framework was not in place.

“When the B Team proposal was brought to my attention at the time, I realised I was staring at an industry that was practically left to die because of a lack of attention,” Mr Kondra said.

When culture & commerce clash – a new novel about PNG

PHIL FITZPATRICK

‘The People of the Bird’ by Mike Jelliffe, Nenge Books, November 2014, paperback, 200 pages. ISBN-13: 978-0-9925620-0-7, ebook ISBN-13: 978-0-9925620-1-4. Order online for $11 (plus postage) here  or email Nenge Books here

THERE are two stories in Mike Jelliffe’s debut novel, The People of the Bird. One is increasingly familiar to people in Papua New Guinea. 

It involves resource development and corruption, both at the political and local level.

The other is about cultural traditions and history and how they become blended into and influence modern life in Papua New Guinea.

It is around these entwined elements that the novel has been set

When greed and culture clash it creates impossible situations and problems that spill over with an unbelievably destructive force.  

Reporting on PNG issues has gone downhill says academic

KEITH JACKSON | Sources: AAP and Radio New Zealand International

THE director of the Pacific Media Centre in Auckland, Professor David Robie (pictured), says the reporting of Papua New Guinea affairs in New Zealand has deteriorated since Australian Associated Press closed its news bureau in PNG.

It was in October last year that AAP announced the decision to close its office in PNG after a 60-year presence in the country.

"Of course the major crises, for example, developments with asylum seekers and so on, they still get intensive media coverage, but largely it's a sort of a parachute journalism type approach now,” Prof Robie said.

“Whereas before, when AAP were operating, you were getting fairly comprehensive coverage of what is the most complex country in the Pacific."

Where to for Bougainville? A polemic, a plea & a plan

CHRIS OVERLAND

Bougainville Manifesto by Leonard Fong Roka, Pukpuk Publishing, 88pp, ISBN-10:1502917459. Available from Amazon: hard copy $US6.00; Kindle $US2.98

LEONARD Fong Roka comes from Panguna on Bougainville. Between 2013 and 2014 he wrote a series of articles about Bougainville that first appeared on the PNG Attitude website.

The essays outline the history of Bougainville, including the civil war in the 1980-90s, and suggest a way forward towards eventual independence from Papua New Guinea.

Bougainville Manifesto is many things: a history, a polemic, a plea and a plan of sorts. In it, Roka writes with considerable passion about his island home.

He asserts that, prior to the colonial era, Bougainville was part of a Solomon Islands nation state that had been in existence for at least 30,000 years. There is, in his judgement, compelling historic, socio-cultural and linguistic evidence to support this claim.

A consummate storyteller brings to life the tale of a tree

PHIL FITZPATRICK

Elep Returns: The Story of a Tree and its Conversion into Paper by Arnold Mundua.  Published (reprint) by Medtec, ISBN: 9789384007096, 160 pages.  Available from the author here

IT’S not often that you get to read a book that is narrated by a tree – or is it the spirit of a tree?

When we first meet Elep he is a blossom on a Galip tree. We then follow him as he turns into a fruit, falls to the forest floor, gets swallowed by a wandering muruk, is discharged out of its rear end and then grows into a mighty giant destined to watch over his beloved Amumsong rainforest in West New Britain.

Enter Rimbunan Hijau and Elep quickly finds himself cut down and turned into a log in a stockpile on the coast waiting to be shipped overseas to Japan where he is turned into a massive roll of paper.

After 62 years, a book of spiritual uplift without too much religion

CHRISTIAN BROTHERS VUNAKANAU

Moments of truth: A missionary in PNG for 62 years by Br Barry Louisson, Moore Printing Kokopo 2014, 250 pp, K20. Email barry.vuvu@gmail.com

HERE’S a new book recommended for both personal reflection and a place in community libraries. The theme is after the Blessed Edmund Rice, “providence is our inheritance”.

It is an autobiographical work by Br Barry Louisson (pictured), written as an investment in the people of Papua New Guinea with whom he has lived and worked since 1952.

The book's style and content are particularly suited to Papua New Guineans, a 'story' people, but it would have appeal for other readers who have some familiarity with the writer, the people or the subject.

Ku High School anthology brings happiness to young writers

JIMMY AWAGL

THE Ku High School anthology is the first book of its kind in Papua New Guinea. The compilation of stories is by students who entered the literary competition promoted by the Simbu Writers Association earlier this year.

The entries are in the form of short stories, essays and poems and it was a struggle for Grade 9 and 10 students to write quality material as they had not been taught to systematically structure stories and essays. And the construction of poetry proved complex for Grade 9.

Those students who did not contribute entries regretted this later when the published anthology was displayed right in front of their eyes during the school assembly.

17 titles & counting: Pukpuk, PNG’s pre-eminent book publisher

KEITH JACKSON

PUKPUK Publishing received an honourable mention in yesterday’s review of the Crocodile Prize Anthology 2015 by Drusilla Modjeska in The Australian newspaper.

And it would be a fair question for readers to ask, ‘Well, what is this upstart? Where does it fit in?’

Like the Crocodile Prize and PNG Attitude, Pukpuk Publishing is a voluntary, not-for-profit project established to both strengthen the Papua New Guinea-Australia relationship and to ensure authors and poets writing about PNG can achieve publication for their work.

In the case of Pukpuk Publishing, its objective is to bring long-form works to publication and to take those books to market in a coherent way.

The entity is the brainchild of Phil Fitzpatrick and it spun out of his magnificent work to bring the Crocodile Prize Anthology to print, which it has done each year since 2011 - even in the fallow period of 2013.

PNG voices raised in anger in new Crocodile Prize Anthology

DRUSILLA MODJESKA | The Australian

THE better part of a decade ago, Papua New Guinean writer Regis Tove Stella said what his country needed was writers, far more of them than there were, to claim, or reclaim, the role of ‘‘visionary’’ and witness.

He concluded his 2007 book, Imagining the Other, with an elegant argument that it was only when the writers and intellectuals served as ‘‘watchdogs’’ alert to the ‘‘bleak’’ political realities and spoke out against corruption and greed — ‘‘the rape of a country’’ — that change would begin where it mattered: in the minds and hearts of a people.

In 2007 in PNG, a time of little publishing and all too few writers, let alone readers, it seemed a frail hope.

But PNG’s people have always been great storytellers and debaters, and while there may not have been many novels published and read since independence in 1975, there have consistently been a few noble souls who have taken the role of witness and poet.

Graham Taylor’s kiap’s story tells it all & makes history live

HARRY WEST

Graham Taylor, A Kiap’s Story: A decade in the life and work of an Australian Patrol Officer in the Kokoda, Madang, New Britain, New Ireland and Sepik Regions of Papua New Guinea 1948-1958, ISBN: 978-1502703453, 402 pages, including illustrations. Pukpuk Publishing.  Available from Amazon Books, Paperback $20, Kindle $4.66

AT 92, and as one of the very few surviving kiaps who served throughout the 30 year Trusteeship period in Papua New Guinea between the Pacific War’s end in 1945 and Independence in 1975, and having read scores of books on New Guinea, I did not expect at this late stage to come upon such a gem as this one.

Australia’s initial reluctant involvement in the New Guinea region was totally a strategic and defence consideration and, in prolonged and harsh economic times, development had a very low priority.

In 1945, apart from a narrow coastal fringe and the island regions (ravaged by the war), most of Papua New Guinea remained in its stone-age slumber, substantially undisturbed by external world influences.

Colouring in the blindspot: Stories that must not remain hidden

JOHNNY BLADES

Don't Spoil My Beautiful Face by David Robie, Little Island Press, 362pp, $40, ISBN 9781877484254. Mail order from the publisher here

SOMETIMES, to make sense of chaos in our world today, we look back at the chaos of yesteryear.

It can give context, remind us which paths have been taken, where mistakes have been made.

Similarly, it’s sometimes not until we look at what’s happening elsewhere in our region that we get a gist of what’s happening in our own individual countries.

But what happens when access to that context is impaired, or missing in action? Stories remain hidden. Abuses are repeated, failures accumulate.

Telling tales - challenges and opportunities for reporting PNG

BEN PACKHAM | Lowy Institute

AN editor once told me, there are always more than enough stories to go around. It's a good rule for a reporter to live by. But some environments are simply more flush with stories than others.

Papua New Guinea has a richness of news to match its mineral and cultural wealth. Australian journalists and editors looking for compelling stories should cast their eyes north.

Its economy is set to grow by 21% this year, far outstripping China. But most of its people live far from modern services, eking out subsistence livelihoods on less than $6 a day.

There are stories of corruption, sorcery and horrific crimes against women. There's humanity and inspiration, and ancient cultures grappling with the modern world.

Temlett Conibeer rides again – this time into West Papua

PHIL FITZPATRICK

‘At the West End: Temlett Conibeer in West Papua’ by A C T Marke, Frogmouth Press, Low Head, Tasmania, 2014, ISBN 9780646919164, 300 pages. $30, including postage from the author

THIS is the fourth in Andrew Marke’s Temlett Conibeer novels. The central character in all the novels is a sexually repressed and ultra-conservative Englishman with distinct Victorian attitudes.

Temlett Conibeer works in pre-independence Papua New Guinea as a malaria control officer.  Among his close friends is an ex-Nazi who was in the SS during World War II.

Critics of the novels range from those who regard them as appallingly bad literature to those who find them inexplicably fascinating.  I fall into the latter category, as did the late David Wall to whom this latest volume is dedicated.

Three new PNG-related websites that shine & sparkle

KEITH JACKSON

THERE are many splendid websites devoted to Papua New Guinea and its people and they’re often produced by folks who have both a great feeling for PNG and a wonderful sense of design and art.

Today I want to bring to the fore three sites which are published by people with a real commitment to Papua New Guinea and which are well worth a visit.

In their own ways, they're quite different in their intent and execution but, like PNG Attitude, they all have a strong connection with PNG.

When I was in New Guinea, I avoided an attack of the wheelie bins

PHILIP FITZPATRICK

Taubada Time: Papua New Guinea by Noel Tunny, $29.95. Boolarong Press, Brisbane, 2014, 178 pages, ISBN: 9781925046526

THIS short book records a vacation job taken to finance the author’s engineering studies in 1954.

It is set along the bottom end of the Fly River, east towards the Kikori River and west to Morehead and the Bensbach River.

During that time the author worked as a surveyor plotting seismic and gravity lines for the Australasian Petroleum Company (APC). 

The first three-quarters of the book is about this experience and the last part is a potted history of the exploration of the Fly River and its huge delta.

Head in a Jar – the story behind the novel ‘Dead Birds’

In the most recent issue of the Australian literary quarterly, Meanjin, TREVOR SHEARSTON writes about the inspiration behind his 2007 novel Dead Birds, set in the early days of exploration around Papua New Guinea. Trevor is an eminent guest at Thursday’s Crocodile Prize events in Port Moresby. Here’s an extract from the article….

THE narrator of my novel Dead Birds is a severed head.

I found him on page 284 of volume two of New Guinea: What I Did and what I Saw by Luigi Maria D’Albertis (pictured below left), the Italian naturalist who made three trips up the Fly River, the last in 1877, collecting bird of paradise for sale in Europe.

My narrator was shot dead on 19 July of that year, by a member of the crew, Fiji Bob, a ‘reformed cannibal’, who, out alone hunting, heard himself to be surrounded and fired pigshot into the chest of the first man he saw. D’Albertis asked to be conducted to the spot.

Saturday in the Guam

GRAHAM TAYLOR

This is an extract from a memoir by Graham Taylor to be published under Phil Fitzpatricks’s Pukpuk imprint. 'A Kiap’s Story' provides a fascinating insight into the activities – and hazards - of a patrol officer’s life.

THE date, December 24 1951, the place, the hostile homeland of the uncontrolled tribes in the Guam River swamps, deep inside the Madang District of Papua New Guinea.

It came from nowhere, somewhere to my left perhaps. In a micro-second, in just a fleeting moment of time, a blurred movement shot across my field of vision.

I felt a gentle swish of moving air, a faint thud high up on my body and then a bolt of searing pain in my right shoulder.

Numbness invaded my arm. With a sense of utter disbelief I saw an arrow, maybe a metre long, sticking out of my right shoulder. It had pierced my khaki work shirt and impaled itself in soft tissue.

Human rights film festival gears up for a PNG year

PNG HUMAN RIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL

TWENTY-four year old University of Papua New Guinea student, Benberth Kadum (left), is behind the design for this year’s PNG Human Rights Film Festival poster which was released in Port Moresby this week.

“The design speaks about Papua New Guinea,” said Mr Kadum, a fourth year Arts and Design student. “It is traditional and our tradition is what makes Papua New Guinea unique.”

Film Festival Director, Alithia Barampataz, said the design’s local theme is particularly relevant for this year’s program.

“In this, the fifth year of the Festival, we are tailoring our program to connect with the PNG audience, so we selected a design which reflects the Festival’s local focus and it’s been great to work with a young talented PNG artist on this process,” Ms Barampataz said.

Visitants: Is this the greatest PNG novel written by an outsider?

KEITH JACKSON

EMINENT Australian author Drusilla Modjeska is lecturing on Randolph Stow’s great Papua New Guinea novel, Visitants, at Sydney University on Monday.

Drusilla says that it remains, after all these years, the great Australian novel on PNG.

“No contest,” she asserts.

Visitants has been described as underrated. To which the retort has been that’s an understatement.

The novel, which was published in 1979, is set in the Trobriand Islands and, in Drusilla’s view, remains unsurpassed in outsider fiction of Australia’s “complex near-neighbour, PNG.

“Each time I read it, I admire it more," she says.

New Dawn FM: The independent & united voice of Bougainville

MARYANNE HANETTE | Bougainville 24

NEW Dawn FM is a community radio station on the island of Bougainville that provides informative programming to listeners.

The conflict years Bougainville left parts of Bougainville underdeveloped and many people do not have access good roads, electricity or communication systems.

Some people have a radio and as a result, radio is one of the best ways to share important news.

This gave Aloysius Laukai (pictured) the idea of starting a community radio station.

So in 2005, he began New Dawn FM.

Blogging for social change in PNG: The PNG Attitude connection

DEV CAPEY

In pursuit of his Master’s degree at Auckland University of Technology last year, Dev Capey submitted a thesis entitled Blogging for social change in Papua New Guinea: A case study investigation of The Namorong Report. Plucked off the net by an eagle-eyed Martyn Namorong, you can read the complete thesis online. In this extract, minus the citations, we reproduce Mr Capey’s analysis of the role and functions of PNG Attitude

NINE of [Martyn] Namorong's July [2012] posts were syndicated, or 're-blogged', on PNG Attitude (asopa.typepad.com).

Almost all of them were his longer, more carefully developed posts: seven essays, one piece of political commentary, and one anonymous post featuring an environmental report, were all re-blogged on PNG Attitude in July.

Farrell and Drezner argue that within spheres of blogs with common interests, certain blogs become 'elite' blogs and subsequently become important nodes of activity in that blogosphere.

All blogs are a networked phenomenon that rely on hyperlinks and recommendations from fellow users: "blogs interact with each other continuously, linking back and forth, disseminating interesting stories, arguments and points of view".

Elite blogs, however, are often aggregators of content, and demand the most attention in a particular area of interest. In the PNG context, Keith Jackson's blog, PNG Attitude, fits that mould.

Brutal end: Unravelling the mystery of Michael Rockefeller

KEITH JACKSON | The Australian

‘Savage Harvest’ by Carl Hoffman, Text Publishing, 2014, 336 pp, paperback, $32.99

THERE’S been a short story, a novel, a play, a film and a rock song (by Guadalcanal Diary, 1984) about the November 1961 disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, scion of the wealthy and influential US family, who seemed to vanish without trace on the remote south-west coast of what today is Indonesian Papua.

In that same month 50 years ago, with the mystery generating headlines even in my home town of Nowra, I’d just been accepted into the Australian School of Pacific Administration in Sydney to train for two years to teach in Papua New Guinea.

I was eager to escape the tedium of a country town but trepidatious about the risks that decision might entail. The 23-year old Rockefeller’s disappearance in inhospitable Asmat territory sharpened that concern.

Anthology of best New Guinea writing makes for great reading

KEITH JACKSON

The Crocodile Prize Anthology 2014, Phil Fitzpatrick (ed), $US13.50 (postage c $6.00), 512 pages, obtain from Amazon here

THE Crocodile Prize, now in its fourth year, is the annual literary contest of Papua New Guinea.

It offers a variety of awards for short stories, essays and poetry, the best of which are published in an annual Anthology.

The 2014 Anthology at more than 500 pages is the biggest yet and the quality of the writing the best we've seen from this 7 million strong South Pacific nation.

National Capital District police crack down on radio commentaries

JULIANNA WAEDA | PNG Loop

A Port Moresby based radio announcer has been arrested and charged by Port Moresby police for broadcasting misleading information over the weekend.

The 30-year old from the Western Highlands went on air last week commenting on the lack of a report about the joint Australian Federal Police and Royal PNG Constabulary police operations.

NCD Metropolitan police commander Andy Bawa (pictured) said that the announcer also cracked a joke on air about how motorists can bribe police with betel nut and Coke.

Bawa said media personalities should refrain from making unsubstantiated comments or jokes that could be detrimental to regional and national operations.

He said an announcer was formally charged on Friday and should appear in court this week. He added that he plans to get in touch with media organisations to advise them to be more strict about their on-air content in order to avoid such incidents.

A right to use but not destroy – the kiaps & Panguna

BILL BROWN

In the late 1960s, with the Australian government pressing CRA to get on with mining in Bougainville and CRA still assessing feasibility, the district field staff – the kiaps – were caught in a position of having to mediate between their impatient bosses in Canberra and Konedobu and increasingly disgruntled landowners.

An extract from ‘Telefomin and Panguna: A Kiap’s View’ from ‘Australians in Papua New Guinea, 1960-75’, edited by C Spark, S Spark & C Twomey, UQePress

CRA had been pushing Canberra and Moresby to arrange access to mineralised areas at Mainoki, Karato and Atamo from where they had been ejected.

Those areas had to be evaluated before the Company committed to Panguna, and ADO (a new title for those formerly known as senior Patrol Officers) Chris Warrilow and Patrol Officer John Gordon-Kirkby had the job of escorting the geologists to the sites.

Ok Tedi Mining Book of the Year: Brokenville by Leonard Fong Roka

KEITH JACKSON

LEONARD Fong Roka really needs no introduction to readers of PNG Attitude.

And now the prolific 35-year old Bougainvillean writer - this year completing a PNG Studies and International relations degree at Divine Word University - has won Papua New Guinea’s first Book of the Year Award for his civil war memoir, Brokenville.

“I salute Ok Tedi Mining and its endeavours in this politically sick PNG climate to aim high for the ordinary people since the greatest thing is for us all to serve humanity in our own ways,” the straight-talking man they call ‘Captain Bougainville’ told me.

“And I thank Ok Tedi and the judges for considering my memoir, Brokenville, a story of a child, a family and a nation of Bougainville.”

Leonard started writing while a Grade 7 student at Arawa High School in 1997.

“We were coerced to write poetry about Bougainville issues by our English teacher, an Eastern Highlander, William Mania,” he said.

An accidental publisher: The birth of Pukpuk Publishing

PHIL FITZPATRICK

IN 2010 I wrote a number of articles for a trade magazine about the state of literature in the South Pacific region, including Papua New Guinea.

I sent a modified version of the Papua New Guinea article to Keith Jackson and he published it in PNG Attitude.

My research for the article revealed that the vibrant and dynamic literary scene of 1970s Papua New Guinea was in serious decline. 

What little was being published was sporadic and, with a few notable exceptions, of very average quality.

As someone who had watched the burgeoning literary scene in the 1970s, I was filled with dismay.  Tiny nations like Samoa were leading the way while Papua New Guinea seemed to have fallen by the wayside.

100 of the best as Jimmy Drekore’s bush poetry is published

PHIL FITZPATRICK

A Bush Poet’s Poetical Blossom by Jimmy Drekore, Pukpuk Publishing, 2014. Soon available on Amazon. $US10 (also in ebook). ISBN-13 978-1500596064. ISBN-10 150059606X

THE poetry of Jimmy Drekore will be familiar to the readers of PNG Attitude, the annual Crocodile Prize Anthology and the Simbu Children Foundation newsletters.

Jimmy won the prize for poetry in the Crocodile Prize in 2011 and his poems have appeared in all the subsequent editions of the Anthology, including this year’s which will be launched on 18 September.

He is one of several talented writers who have emerged from Simbu Province in recent years, which makes one wonder why those high mountains produce so many fine writers.

There is a clue in Jimmy’s poems. They have an earthiness, an honesty and a lack of pretension that is very attractive.

Those pre-independence years: Revelling in reminiscences

PHIL FITZPATRICK

Australians in Papua New Guinea 1960-1975, edited by C Spark, S Spark and C Twomey, University of Queensland Press, 2014, 339pp, ISBN: 978 1 9219 0243 7, $38.50

AS I write this, my son is in the Papua New Guinea Highlands working with people new to the country teaching them how to get along with the locals.

As the resources boom develops in PNG this orientation process is becoming a more frequent need. 

There are Papua New Guineans who can do the same job but the newcomers seem to feel more comfortable with one of their own.  Hopefully that’s an attitude that Luke can help change.

He is one of many Australians who are the children of men and women who were in PNG prior to independence and who are maintaining and continuing the relationship.  I sometimes think of him as “Son of Kiap” or “Kiap II: The Sequel”.

Two new books from the guy who was PNG's deputy sheriff

KEITH JACKSON

Curse of the Lamisi by Baka Barakove Bina, 90pp, $8.50, CreateSpace

Haffies are made; they are not born by Baka Barakove Bina, 38pp, $6, CreateSpace

IT has been a long time between drinks, so to speak, for Baka Bina. His last book, Zymur, was published by Oxford University Press in 2003 and the high school teacher turned lawyer has been greatly anticipating his next effort.

Well, the time has come, and Baka has produced two interesting books which are now available through Amazon subsidiary, Create Space.

Baka is from Kotiyufa village near Iufi Iufa in the Eastern Highlands. He originally trained at Goroka Teachers College as a high school English teacher then, in 2003, completed a law degree at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Before becoming Assistant Registrar in Common Law with the National Court he had spent 20 years as Deputy Sheriff in the same jurisdiction.

New poetry collection presents surprising lessons in life

PR WEB

Lessons in Life by Alfred Momia Lulu Sione, Picture Book, 44 pages; 978-1-4797-9794-3. Hardcover $58.84; Ebook $4.27

ALFRED Momia Lulu Sione’s Lessons in Life is a small collection of poetry on life that muses on often amusing dramas that pass the eye due to their commonality.

The poems dissect these aspects and expound on them, giving readers an insight into matters that, while seemingly trivial in life, may have a grain of surprising profoundness within them.

Alfred Momia Lulu Sione is from the Mortlock Islands in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville and holds a Bachelor of Technology (Accounting) degree from the PNG University of Technology. He has lived and worked in Arawa since leaving university.

An expatriate's life at Telefomin in the late 1950s

BILL BROWN

IT was July 1959, and just five weeks earlier Pamela and I had been married in Sydney, Australia.

Now we were the only passengers in a three-engined Junkers JU52, an old German-designed aircraft with corrugated duralumin sides, an undercarriage that did not retract, and a cruising speed of 160 kilometres per hour – and we were flying into the mountains of New Guinea.

Twenty-five years earlier, Adolf Hitler had trundled around Germany in the same type of aircraft, but it was unlikely that his aircraft had the passengers sitting just behind a huge stack of sawn timber, and it may have been equipped with a toilet.

What ‘modern’ means: An anthropologist returns to PNG

AXIE BARCLAY | Portland Book Review

A Faraway, Familiar Place by Michael French Smith, University of Hawaii Press, $US52.00, 229 pages

A Faraway, Familiar Place: An Anthropologist Returns to Papua New Guinea tells the story of an anthropologist returning to Papua New Guinea after many years absence.

He finds the place he lived and worked much changed, as well as that he himself as changed in the intervening years, and is no longer the charge-ahead, near-sighted youth he was when he first researched there.

It’s very much the story of people, as one might except from an anthropologist, from his relationship with his wife and her failure to thrive in PNG, to the people of PNG and their lives intersecting with his research.

‘Overwhelmed’: PNG cabinet minister calls for social media regulation

BERNARD SINAI | Bernardos Bag of Beans

A cabinet minister in the O’Neill / Dion government is calling for the responsible authorities to regulate the use of social media in Papua New Guinea, according to the PNG Post-Courier.

Petroleum and Energy Minister Nixon Duban (pictured) said the National Executive Council made a decision last year for a regulatory policy for social media regulation. However, the policy has not materialised and he is now questioning why it is taking so long.

He said while the country and her citizens enjoy the ideals of democracy, persons with political inclinations and opportunists are abusing these rights.

PNG images – how popular novelists saw PNG way back then

PHIL FITZPATRICK

THE period between 1945 and about 1985 was the heyday of the paperback novel.  Apart from Penguin Books, the soft covered paperbacks mass produced on cheap paper in that period were of a particular genre that today we call ‘popular’ fiction.

During that period, if you wanted to read something more literary or highbrow you bought it in a hard cover book.

Nowadays just about everything comes out in paperback and hardcovers are only selectively published.

Australia had several stalwart popular novelists during that time.  One of the most widely read was Morris West, who wrote some 30 books and sold about 70 million in his lifetime.  Jon Cleary was another, as was the adopted Englishman Neville Shute.

Internet a right for everybody says Pope on Communications Day

FR GIORGIO LICINI

A statement for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Papua New Guinea & Solomon Islands Commission on Social Communications to mark the 48^th World Communications Day

THE recent pilgrimage (24-26 May) by Pope Francis to the troubled Holy Land the Middle East has made people with different interests and claims much closer to one another.

The presidents of Palestine and Israel agreed to meet him again next month to pray together and talk peace at Francis’ home in Rome.

The media coverage for the event was impressive and gave further evidence to what the Pope said in his message for the 48^th World Communications Day celebrated today.

Revisiting the mysterious disappearance of Michael Rockefeller

PHIL FITZPATRICK

Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, William Morrow, New York, 2014, 322pp, ISBN: 9780062325310. From Amazon: $US16.23 (Hardcover); $US15.20 Kindle

IN the earliest days of the Australian administration in what is now Western Province, one of the continuing problems was the raids on Southern Fly River villages by headhunters from across the border with Dutch New Guinea.

These headhunters came from the vast swamps of the southeast where the distinction between the Arafura Sea and the land is sometimes difficult to determine.  The raiders were known by many names, including Marind and Tugeri.

While headhunting in Western Province was brought to an end relatively quickly, it persisted for many more years over the border.  Even in the years following World War II, headhunters were active right through to the lands of the Asmat along the Casuarinen Coast.

Post-Courier publisher & journalist found guilty of contempt

CEDRIC PATJOLE | Pacific Media Watch

THE publisher of the Post-Courier newspaper, South Pacific Post Ltd (SPP), and veteran journalist Todagia Kelola, have been found guilty of contempt and will be punished by the National Court later this month.

This ruling was handed down by Justice David Cannings after the defendants’ early pleading of “not guilty” to contempt charges against them.

They were charged following a newspaper article published on 24 March revealing the identities of six people at the asylum seeker centre in Manus.

Papua New Guinea novel released free on Internet

UNITED States author Keith Dahlberg has released his mining novel South Sea Gold on PNG Attitude as a gift to the people of Papua New Guinea.

The novel began appearing in serial form in March on Keith’s blog (it can be downloaded at the end of this article) in recognition that many Papua New Guineans have difficulty affording to buy books.

The novel, which carries a serious message, tells of Tom Akani, reporter for the (fictitious) Port Moresby Journal, who has his eyes opened to conditions in his country's mining industry when he gets threats to his family and to the newspaper. His ongoing investigation reveals a plot endangering the national government itself.

A reviewer of South Sea Gold, Dorothy Harper, writes: “The author chooses a country and culture that is obscure to many, if not most, of us to demonstrate that the engine that drives advances and economic prosperity is the same everywhere (unfortunately): greed and corruption.

PNG political activists to defend ‘benchmark’ defamation case

KEITH JACKSON

SOCIAL media and political activists Noel Anjo Kolao and Sonja Barry Ramoi have instructed Port Moresby lawyer Tony Christie Waisi (pictured) to defend them in defamation proceedings filed against them in the PNG National Court by prime minister Peter O’Neill.

Interim orders have been obtained by Mr O’Neill’s lawyer, Tiffany Twivey, restraining Mr Anjo and Mrs Ramoi from publishing defamatory imputations against the prime minister in mainstream media and social media pending the hearing and determination of the proceedings on Thursday.

The case has been characterised by some social media activists as an attempt to suppress free speech in PNG, although media watchdog Pacific Freedom Forum believes these fears are unfounded.

Fears about social media reform in PNG unfounded, says watchdog

RADIO NEW ZEALAND INTERNATIONAL

A PACIFIC media watchdog, the Pacific Freedom Forum says fears about the Papua New Guinea government's proposed cybercrime policy are unfounded.

Some bloggers and other internet users are concerned the proposed policy could go too far in policing social media, and be used to block criticism of government.

But the co-chair of the forum, Titi Gabi (pictured), said the forum is working closely with cabinet to ensure freedom of expression remains.

Social media commentators fear crackdown by PNG government

KEITH JACKSON

WRITER and commentator Martyn Namorong says he fears the Papua New Guinea government is moving to exert control over the social media and crack down on critics like himself.

Mr Namorong told his Twitter followers early yesterday morning that “due to defamation cases being taken against several online I have officially shut down my blog as of 12 am tonight”.

It was the blog, Namorong Report, that first projected Namorong as one of PNG’s most popular and respected political and social commentators.

Marking the 50th anniversary of a sometimes scurrilous newsletter

KEITH JACKSON

FIFTY years ago today, on the bar of the Chimbu Club, appeared a single sheet of paper under the rough-hewn masthead, Kundiawa News.

The newsletter had been typed on the back of a kiaps’ census form – and it was a joke perpetrated by me, at the time a 19-year old schoolteacher.

The main story, under the headline ‘Kundiawa Scandal Rocks New Guinea’, related how this small isolated township had become notorious worldwide because of some outrage which the item never made clear.

Over succeeding months, however, the Kundiawa News developed beyond a put-on to emerge as a fortnightly 16-page newsletter recording the events, tribulations and issues of the Chimbu (now Simbu) region of the PNG Highlands.

Under the stewardship of Murray Bladwell and me, it published 50 issues over a period of two years before we were both assigned to other places and other duties.

Now, half a century later, the Kundiawa News is a museum piece but it remains a detailed and often intimate record of the expatriate lifestyle during that period of Australia’s administration of what we called “the Territory”.

The originals of its 50 issues (its circulation peaked at more than 200 copies with a couple of specials printing about 500) are now with the National Library in Canberra, offering researchers a glimpse into the mindset and attitudes of Australian colonisers in the mid-20^th Century.

Over the next two years, PNG Attitude will bring you regular insights from the old Kundiawa News and take an occasional look at Highlands’ life and times 50 years ago.

New film: POM General's maternity ward was like Dante's Inferno

AUSTRALIA NETWORK NEWS

TWO girls from Papua New Guinea and Cambodia feature in an award-winning Australian director's critically acclaimed film about the lives of girls around the world.

Rebecca Barry had wanted to make a film about the unique challenges faced by girls around the world, but it wasn't until she had faced the 2009 Pacific tsunami while in Samoa that she started working on the idea.

"It really kind of kicked me into action that I had to really focus on the important stuff and make a film about girls and why is it like this and celebrate their potential through making a film," she says.

Ms Barry's film follows the lives of six girls. Each has a different story to tell and two of the most powerful stories are from Cambodia and Papua New Guinea.

Ms Barry says she was drawn to PNG as it is Australia's closest neighbour. "It's a very close plane ride and you arrive and it's this other world", she says.

Opisa Pokep – a career tracking the modern history of PNG

PHIL FITZPATRICK

Opisa Pokep, OBE: Laip bilong wanpela polisman by Bernard Minol, UniBooks, Port Moresby, 2011, 110 pages, ISBN 9789980945310.  I bought my copy from Masalai Press via Abe Books for US$24 plus postage.

THIS delightful book is probably the first Tok Pisin book-length text published by UPNG Press (UniBooks). But I’m not sure about that and neither is the author, Bernard Minol.

Opisa Pokep is the author’s tubuna and the book celebrates his life, and in doing so, the lives of all the past members of the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary.

It begins in 1957 when Pokep left school after completing grade six and joins the police force.  He trained at the Sogeri Police Depot and then spent six months at Tufi Patrol Post before being transferred to his first long-time posting at Mumeng in Kukukuku country.  In those days Mumeng had one kiap and ten policemen.

Leonard’s story - conflict, complexity, barbarity & courage

KRISTIAN LASSLETT | Foreword to Brokenville

Brokenville by Leonard Fong Roka, Pacifica Sene, 248 pages. Available from Amazon in paperback for $9.50 here. Kindle edition for  $3.00, here

NEVER has a war, so unique in its geographical proximity and ferocity, attracted so little empirical attention.

Of course, much has been written in academic forums about the Bougainville conflict, but rarely are these works based on primary sources, or indeed rich lived experience. As a result, to this day, an epic event seared in the memory of the South Pacific remains obscure.  

Yet vivid memories and insightful analyses frequently circulate on Bougainville itself, insights in great need of formal recording, so that we can collectively participate in a process of learning and understanding.

But telling the history of this important Melanesian struggle is difficult, only those rare few with a deep reservoir of relevant cultural knowledge are astutely positioned to talk about the war on Bougainville and its foreboding human consequences.