Mi stori long Inglis.

The First Nations Writers Festival will be launching eight new books at Townsville Museum Tropics in Queensland on the Saturday, 31 May 2025.

Three of these books are the trilogy - A Farmer Brings On a Wife - by Papua New Guinean author - Baka B Bina.

While a trilogy is a set of three related works, it's not common for all three books to be published simultaneously. 

Publishing a trilogy all at once can lead to a loss of sales momentum and make it harder to maintain reader engagement over time. 

It's more common for the books to be released sequentially, often with a gap of months or even years between each.

This is what Mr Baka B Bina writes:

The above was sane advice that was given to me by the publisher. 

I argued otherwise as my story is a traditional cultural process that needed to be recorded and be read as a whole - all at the same time. 

It is not a suspense story that certain parts have to be kept from the reader to be installed in a later book or books. 

This is a traditional practise that must be told in its full length for it to have legitimacy as a reservoir of traditional knowledge.

I have made plenty of rash decisions before and this would be one more in the making. 

To publish all three of the books in the trilogy at the same time was my answer to my inability to open each book and close it and maintain a thirst for the reader to continue to read the second and third instalments of the books.

However, for a person to become culturally immersed with the books and story, they need to read all three books at about the same time.

I have reasoned that in academia a traditional cultural practise can be explained in dot points, laying out each step of the process. 

You can explain a single dot point until it cannot be explained any more.  But I wanted to tell stories around each of the dot points.

So the story goes beyond just explaining the dot point. It is a process that helps tell the story. 

A story, I believe, which will bring clarity and understanding. 

And so A Farmer Brings On a Wife is a series of three books expounding and expanding many dot points, each of the steps finding a girl and installing her as a wife for a son. 

The books are like instalments of short stories around each dot point or step.

I quite understand that writing in the cultural context may pose serious problems for this type of writing.

A Farmer Brings On a Wife is a continuum of relating an event that actually takes shape over time in a community and has to be concluded before a new event takes effect.

There are some days when it will be eventful and days of inactivity that may seem like nothing is progressing, but the machinery of cultural process continues and there will be a culmination of events.

There may be more than one event happening at a time and it will be difficult to place them in the story unless one has some understanding of the process.

My desire is that this customary practise be recorded forever in print and for historical purposes all in one instalment –so all three books are published at the same time.

Already there are three changes occurring as these books come into print.

• There is no longer an exchange of cooked food during the installing of the bride in her marital village. The bride price given by the groom’s family distorts that practise.
  
  
• There are a lot of defacto marriages before the bride price event and ceremony.
  
  
• The concept of the bridal fence has another twist. It is a gifting to the new bride and groom but a gift that is taken away by the bride’s people.
  
  
• The get-together ceremony, that in times before happened later in the life of the bride in her marital village, is a thing of the past as dinau marit (marriages on credit) now have taken centre stage.

Finally, the concept of going on a date is misty, the social infrastructure is not conducive for that. So a new variation is taking over in the towns and cities that has no similar equivalent in rural village settings.

Something for future romance writers to remember.

Mi no klia wonem samting em tok tasol wanpla samting mi klia.  Mi dai stori bilong mi bai dai wantaim mi. 

Mi save hamamas taim, wantok ya painim mi na mitupla sindaun drin kopi. 

Mi hamamas stori bilong mi ino popaia o igo nating.  Nau em ya, kaikai bilong em.

Mi hamamas long olgeta iken kaunim.

AG Satori of 9 Mile Morobe Block