A CHALLENGING THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Former Canberra Times editor Jack Waterford is getting on a bit in years (he’s 71) but remains one of the most acute commentators doing the rounds.

You can read his thoughts regularly on John Menadue’s Pearls & Irritations – the irritations being that P & I too often goes so far left it falls over the precipice of pretension. But not Jack, who is a prince of proportion. [Enough alliteration - Ed]

PNG OPPOSITION TAKES PNG-US DEAL TO COURT

Dr Bal Kama writes that the Opposition in PNG has just formally announced its intention to initiate a Supreme Court challenge to the constitutionality of the Defence Agreement signed recently between the US and PNG.

“PNG has robust precedent bilateral agreements,” Bal says, and he also raises four key issues that he had signalled earlier in an Academia Nomad article, ‘Issues around the proposed PNG-US defence agreement’.

THE FANTASTIC WORLD ACCORDING TO BIG PAT

'Big Pat' Levo - journalist, humourist, slayer of crocodiles....

If you’ve been missing your fix of entertaining Melanesian writing, let me direct you to Big Pat Levo’s ‘Adventures of Big Pat’ to be found here on Facebook. Big Pat has a keen eye for a story and a colourful turn of phrase in all of English, Tok Pisin and Pinglish. He seems to write with no regularity known to humankind, but his yarns are as timeless olsem man ilusim hanwas, so they can be enjoyed for the simple reason they continue to exist. Here’s a taste….

THE MYSTERIOUS WORKINGS OF THE PNG POSTAL SERVICE

In February 2008, PNG Attitude ran a short piece (link to it here) motivated by a book review by Greg Roberts in The Australian newspaper, ‘How PNG Gold Lost its Lustre’ . The book by Dave Henton told Andi Flower’s inside story of the Mount Kare saga. It exposed the consequences of applying Western remedies to Melanesian problems, the destructive activities of outsiders and the greed, graft and corruption engendered by these matters.

UNIMAGINABLE IS REAL WHEN HISTORY IS FORGOTTEN

Chris Overland

‘Maybe the US could even downsize its empire and undo the NATO damage. But perhaps that’s too much to hope for. Maybe NATO the vampire isn’t done drinking our blood and won’t be until the world goes up in nuclear flames’ - novelist and journalist Eve Ottenberg in ‘The World Would be Better Off Without NATO’, Counterpunch, 18 August 2023

Drs Peter and Lin Calvert in their younger years (Calvert family photo)

KIKORI'S DOCTOR BUBU MERI DIES AT 97

Dr Lin Calvert (popularly named bubu meri = grandmother) has died at her home at Kapuna in the remote swamps of Kikori District in Gulf Province. She was 97 and spent 67 years in PNG, where with her husband, the late Dr Peter Calvert who died in 1982, she established Kapuna Hospital. Dr Calvert’s work is continued by her daughter, Dr Valerie Archer.

BLAME US IF VOICE STUFFS UP, PEARSON TELLS POLLIES

Phil Fitzpatrick

Being responsible for what you do is one of the most liberating experiences in life (ask anyone who has just turned 18 and achieved adulthood). Noel Pearson made this compelling argument on Monday night while delivering the Meanjin Oration at Queensland University of Technology. He said the Voice was “claiming the right to take responsibility”.

Professor Emeritus Mary-Louise McLaws AM (Brendan Esposito, ABC)

MORE ON THE DEATH OF A GREAT WOMAN

Mary-Louise McLaws AM, 70, Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at the University of NSW and Advisor to the World Health Organisation, tweeted on 15 January 2022: “After a severe headache Thursday, I was diagnosed with a brain tumour…. Now it is time with my family.” ML, as she was popularly known, died on Saturday last. 

PHIL TAKES 'BLACK GLOVE' RUMOUR-MONGERS TO TASK

“People love making stuff up on the internet,” Phil Fitzpatrick comments in PNG Attitude today, taking aim at galloping – and wrong – claims that Matildas star Mary Boio Fowler, 20, is an Indigenous Australian (she’s mixed race Papua New Guinean-Australian) and that “black is considered a symbol of power and protection in some Aboriginal communities. Her gloves have thus become more than a style statement; they’re a part of her cultural identity.”

PNGns NOW THINK CORRUPTION IS A NORM

Teddy Winn is researching for his doctorate at James Cook University in Townsville and has been seeking to better comprehend how Papua New Guineans understand and respond to corruption. He’s already reached a clear understanding, as have other researchers, that “widespread corruption may be causing some Papua New Guineans to believe that corruption is a way of life”. He quotes a female public servant who said that “every ordinary public servant nowadays asks for ‘lunch money’ or ‘side coins’ to perform their otherwise mandated responsibility”.

FOOTBALL WORLD CUP: THE PNG CONNECTION

Avid reader and creative commenter Lindsay Bond emails me a clip from the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s about ‘o jogo bonito’ (‘the beautiful game’, a slogan coined by the late Brazilian footballer, Pelé). Lindsay has uncovered a belated but bountiful pride in the sport. “Maybe I'm the last to learn,” he writes. “I'm sending [this email] to my mob. Keep onside! Mary is from Mosbi (Kira Kira) PNG and Cairns (yeah, NQ).” Such luminescence from Lindsay is a real collector’s item.

OZ CRINGING TO USA POSES PROBLEMS FOR PNG

The Australian government blusters in denying it, but the recent cosying (or is it toadying) up to a pugnacious USA is making our relationship with major trading partner China much more difficult. That seems to be a price we’re willing to pay (that’ll be tested when the payment is exacted). Furthermore, our decision to take sides and yield some of our sovereignty to Uncle Sam will also necessarily escalate pressure to conform on PNG and the Pacific Islands.

NOT AT ALL WHAT WE’RE CRACKED UP TO BE

“White Australians like to think of themselves as an egalitarian and frank people, despising pretentiousness, while basking in a reputation for larrikinism and mateship. But this is all a front, papering over a culture that is deeply racist, excessively masculinist, and incorrigibly populist. Indeed, from its very beginnings, white Australia has been a morally backward society. And there are no signs that this is abating. Its moral backwardness is disgustingly on show in the No campaign against the forthcoming referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.” Link here to Dr Allan Patience’s challenging analysis of the Real Australian.

NOT SO HAPPY PACIFIC FAMILIES

Joanne Wallis nails it when she writes in The Conversation that “the contradiction between Australia describing the region as its ‘Pacific family’ (sic), yet making it difficult for Pacific peoples to visit, has generated frustration in the region.” Although the word ‘frustration’ seems a bit mild to me. ‘Generated bloody fury’ would be my take. Especially as most Pacific countries offer Australians tourist visas on arrival.

POETRY FOR THOSE WITH HEARTS FOR PNG

Joseph Tambure is an aviation engineer with MAF in Mt Hagen, and a poet whose work in PNG Attitude has won continuing praise. He has just joined Raymond Sigimet and Chips Mackellar in writing poems about the scaling down of the blog as it was. “Through you, many of us are realising our potential talents to be writers,” Joseph wrote. “May our written words and yours live on for generations, as is meant to be.”

TROUSERLESS IN OBO: ON BEING ‘BIG PAT’ LEVO

When working for Ok Tedi, before he became a senior journalist in Port Moresby, Big Pat and a workmate were deployed to Obo station on the Fly River to report on a new fish filleting factory. It was to be a short visit in a small single-engine aircraft but, after they reached Obo, the big rains came. “During the week we were there,” the great man writes in his occasional blog, Adventures of Big Pat, “the water level rose and half of Obo International was under water.” There was no way the plane could take off.

FROM DEPUTY SHERIFF TO BRANCH OFFICE CLERK

Writing in the blog Pearls and Irritations, Mike Scrafton, former senior Australian defence official, says the Albanese government’s most recent move to cuddle closer to the USA by allowing Australia’s intelligence function to be colonised by US ‘analysts’ (spies), further abandons its sovereignty. “Generally nations jealously guard sovereign control over the intelligence product,” Scrafton writes. But this control is being diluted in Australia.

BENDING THE RULES BECOMES A NATIONAL SPORT

The PNG police commissioner says the Pandemic Act gives him power to intervene in a range of issues affecting the country - including the current fuel shortage – and, in Academia Nomad, Michael Kabuni writes that this is extending the commissioner’s power way too far.