BY PHILIP FITZPATRICK

I’M AN OLD BLOKE now but I still enjoy going down to the Hervey Bay Esplanade occasionally for a coffee and to watch the pretty girls go by.  With summer coming on the scenery is improving day by day.

My good wife is very tolerant.  She enjoys the coffee, and the dogs like the stroll.  Besides, there are, on my wife’s authority, some good looking guys down there too.  It’s a harmless indulgence for both of us I guess.

Watching the scenery of the female persuasion has been a lifelong hobby and it’s probably the same for most men (getting some of them to admit it is a different matter, however).

I was staying in the TravelLodge in Moresby a few years ago and one evening I inadvertently stepped into a lift full of entrants in that year’s Miss PNG competition.  Talk about palpitations!  And they were all very polite and very smart to boot.

In olden times PNG, the par excellence of the species were the mixed race girls.  That combination of PNG, Europe and Asia produced young women of exceptional beauty.

Most district centres boasted a few, along with their tyrannical fathers - hell bent on keeping them away from the ravenous clutches of young kiaps and chalkies.  Woe betide anyone who transgressed. 

I guess that also increased their allure.  The fame associated with those lucky buggers who wrangled their way past the deadly paternal minders lives on in legend.

Sitting on the sidelines and admiring these exquisite creatures, one was wont to wonder what made them tick and what they thought about it all.  Did they enjoy the cattle market atmosphere or did they abhor it?  Was it all as it seemed or were there hidden undercurrents?

The answers, at least in part, can be found in Anna Chu’s memoir, Kapiak Tree (kapiak = breadfruit, not quite an apple but you see what I mean).  And she names names too.

A certain rotund Assistant District Commissioner ,of my acqaintance, who had been a bit of a tennis star in his youth, is mentioned.

“At the club one night ‘A’ offered to walk me home.  We held hands and all that…..’

“And all that” – how good is that?

And then there was ‘B’, of not too recent ultra conservative political fame in Oz, who pursued Anna relentlessly for many years without apparent success.

Anna says that along the Sepik “in the eyes of the local people there were good kiap(s) and bad kiap(s).  The good ones were those who didn’t play up with the local girls”.

By her own account the latter seemed to be in a minority.  And it wasn’t just the kiaps, every man and his dog seemed to be at it.  Hooray for Mother Nature!

The marriages, liaisons, affairs, divorces, bust-ups and separations detailed in Kapiak Tree are mind boggling, not the least those in which she was personally involved.  Elsewhere she talks about what she calls the three Bs: booze, buai and bonking.

To those of us with prissy minds, Anna’s revelations may appear a bit tawdry.  To some they will just confirm our misconceptions about mixed race people; the misconceptions that ultimately set them up as a race apart.

As I recall the strict social hierarchy went like this: European, Chinese, Mixed Race, Educated Papua New Guinean, Bush Kanaka.

Anna’s father was Chu Leong from Canton, well known to J K McCarthy and eulogised by him in an article in the Post-Courier in 1972.  Her mother was Elekana (Akiria Apotapu) of Banaro on the Keram River, a tributary of the Sepik. 

Elekana came to live with Chu Leong when she was fifteen as a default payment for a suitcase that her father had bought on credit from Chu Leong’s trade store.  When she was nineteen they were formally married in the District Office in Madang.  Anna (Mai Foung Chu) was born at Marienberg on the Sepik in 1942, where her father had become the local trader.

The book is not long at 122 pages; it reads well and has a mix of attention-grabbing photographs and some interesting endnotes.  Its value, I think, is as a record of a largely ignored group of people in PNG.  Many of them now live in places like Cairns and Townsville, comfortable in the climate and the company of their extended families and acquaintances.

If Anna’s story is anything to go by, the past lives of mixed race people in PNG, and even now for all I know, were so vibrant that they make the Bold and the Beautiful positively anaemic by comparison. 

More than that, however, and until something more definitive comes along, Anna’s little book is an important historical document.

‘Kapiak Tree’ by Anna Chu (2008) is published by Maskimedia in Cairns.  It is available through maskimedia.com.au for $28, including postage and handling.  Maskimedia is owned by Martin Kerr, whose exploits along the Sepik are described in his recently republished 1970s ‘New Guinea Patrol’