Martyn Namorong and Julie Bishop in Canberra, 2015,  before Bishop became Australia's foreign affairs minister

MARTYN NAMORONG

"You were once our coloniser. You created institutions. All on our behalf. And yours too, let's be honest" - Martyn Namorong

In 2015, under the auspices of PNG Attitude (and, of course, our generous readers), the young Martyn Namorong – one of the most perceptive critics Papua New Guinea has produced - made his first visit to Australia.

Ding Chee's shop was attacked and looted by a racist mob, which rampaged for four hours. There was little hindrance from police

CHEK LING
| Pearls & Irritations | Edited extracts

MELBOURNE - It happened 133 years ago. Yet the Chinese Question remains, having now mutated to the China Question.

Meanwhile the burden upon the Chinese as scapegoats, at the altar of racial purity in the first instance, cultural cohesion a century later and more recently the issue of national sovereignty continues unabated.

MAEBH LONG
| Ples Singsing

HASTINGS NZ - In the winning essay of the Tingting Bilong Mi 2020 essay competition, Illeana Dom brings her readers into her old school library.

As she walks us past the library shelves, she points out absence: the lack of new works by Papua New Guinean authors in the non-fiction section; and, in the fiction section, the difficulty in finding any works by PNG authors at all, such is the dominance of international writers.

United Nations women candidates workshop, Port Moresby, 2012. If training does not pragmatically address the socio-cultural barriers facing women, it is likely to be a complete waste of time

MICHAEL KABUNI
| Academia Nomad

Disclaimer: If your goal is advocacy for women’s rights, please don’t read this article. It will offend you. If you get offended easily, don’t read. But if your goal is ‘winning’ an election as a women in Papua New Guinea read on - MK

PORT MORESBY - There is the idealistic, modern, Western way of doing things. And then there is the Papua New Guinean Way, the Melanesian Way.

In electoral terms, one of these is clearly much more effective than the other.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

PHILIP KAI MORRE

KUNDIAWA – Papua New Guinea needs to reform its outlook on development by changing our behaviour so as to transform our society.

But so much of the planning for us - planning that uses foreign concepts and ideologies - does not work.

A planning matrix needs to be home grown and an integral part of our holistic development.

Something of a metaphor. Ulli Beier with monkey idling in the shadows on his shoulder

ED BRUMBY

MELBOURNE - It is 52 years since I attended Ulli Beier’s classes in African literature at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Now as then, and like many others, my view of him remains conflicted.

Maebh Long has laid bare, eloquently, his hypocrisy and deceit which, back then, was a matter of considerable gossip, on and off campus.

A hauskrai at Divine Word University in Madang

SARAH KUMAN
| Twitter @KumanSarah | Edited

PORT MORESBY - At customary events like a hauskrai [mourning] everyone knows their place.

There are the aunts who married and returned, and who lead the crying and the tokples [vernacular] funeral chanting.

They even chew buai [betel nut] and smoke while the pastor is praying. No one would dare challenge them.

Tumai Mumu - a warrior and clan leader of great acumen and, in time and when it suited, assistance to the colonial Administration 

ROBERT FORSTER

NORTHUMBRIA - Tumai Mumu, who featured in PNG Attitude a month ago (‘Pax Australiana: Techniques of Pacification’), was a contradictory character and perhaps an extraordinary opportunist.

He was headman of an important group of the Goilala people and lived in a village immediately behind Tapini government station.

This is where I was when, in 1974 he volunteered to me that in his youth, during an ambush, he had killed 24 men and possibly a greater number of women, he could not sure.

LISE DOBRIN

CHARLOTTESVILLE - I got to know Bernard Narokobi while doing research for my dissertation in linguistics in his home village of Wautogik in the late 1990s.

While the old people there taught me about the language, Bernard taught me that I was participating in a knowledge exchange.

Just as his son Vergil had gone to study at Cambridge University, I had come to study at the University of Melanesia.

Beach scene on Mahur Island (Schneider Photography)

SUSAN R HEMER

Tracing the Melanesian Person: Emotions and Relationships in Lihir by Susan R Helmer, University of Adelaide Press, Adelaide, 2013, 329 pages. ISBN 978-1-922064-45-5. Free download here

KEITH JACKSON WRITES - Dr Susan Hemer lectures in development studies and medical and psychological anthropology at the University of Adelaide and her book, Tracing the Melanesian Person, resulted from a year spent in the Lihir group of islands in Papua New Guinea.

The incident it tells of occurred in May 1998 when Hemer was about halfway through her doctoral fieldwork in Mahur, the northernmost of Lihir.

Sharon Davis - "With our traditional languages stolen, along with our land, we took the way the gudiya talked and decolonised it"

SHARON DAVIS
| IndigenousX

“If you attack my language you attack me, because what I am and what I know and believe and feel are all mediated through language” – Jack Dwyer

CANBERRA - Self-proclaimed 'citizen journalist', social media 'personality', and convicted abuser of women, Avi Yemini, tweeted a video of Western Australian Premier, Mark McGowan sending a vaccination message to Western Australian Aboriginal communities that was also translated into Aboriginal English (AbE) by Aboriginal Interpreting WA.

CHRIS OVERLAND

ADELAIDE - The article by Baka Bina, ‘The Taxing Art of Translation’, has recently stimulated much comment and discussion in PNG Attitude.

Accomplished writers like Michael Dom, Daniel Kumbon, Phil Fitzpatrick and others have offered their own insights and perspectives on the problems inherent in translating Tok Pisin into English.

JEAN ZORN

NEW YORK - Bernard Narokobi, who died in March 2010 at the age of 72 after a short illness, was a political and jurisprudential philosopher of great seriousness and stature. That makes my memories of his irrepressible irreverence especially sweet.

One such memory: Bernard taking his afternoon nap on the wall to wall carpeting of the Law Reform Commission’s way too elegant offices.

The Commission was Bernard’s brainchild, established at independence by Papua New Guinea’s Constitution – a document full of Bernard’s views and ideas – to try to infuse the legal system of the new nation with Melanesian custom.

A postage stamp showing the spectacular Wawoi Falls in the Kikori River Basin which is on the tentative heritage list area. Unfortunately logging has now extended right up to the falls

JOHN GREENSHIELDS

ADELAIDE – I have to thank Chris Warrillow for correcting me as to the location of Sir Hubert Murray’s gravesite.

He saved me a frustrating visit to Bomana on my next trip to Papua New Guinea.

I’ll go to Badihagwa instead, bearing a K5 tradestore sarif to cut the grass.

Yamin Kogoya - "Papuans have been dislocated from the centre of their cultural worldview and placed on the fringes of the grand colonial narrative"

YAMIN KOGOYA

CANBERRA - The colonial notion of ‘civilising primitive Papuans’ has distorted Papuan perceptions of the world and themselves.

This distortion began with how New Guinea and its people were described in early colonial literature: unintelligent pygmies, cannibals and pagan savages –  people devoid of value.

Not only did this depiction foster a racist outlook but it misrepresented reality as it was experienced and understood by Papuans for thousands of years.

Michael Dom - "The success of the Crocodile Prize helped to develop our country’s literature"

MICHAEL DOM
| Vernacular Traces in the Crocodile Prize:
| Part 1 of an essay in five parts

English translation by Ed Brumby | Tok Pisin original follows

LAE - In 2010, Keith Jackson AM and Philip Fitzpatrick came up with the idea of establishing a national literary competition in Papua New Guinea – the Crocodile Prize.

Writing on Keith’s website, PNG Attitude, some of us supported their idea. In recognition, I gave them the name, ‘Grand Pukpuk’.

By way of background, these two men lived a long while in PNG in pre-independence times: the time of the patrol officers.

First Contact

CHRIS OVERLAND

ADELAIDE - Robert Forster’s recent article on the pacification of the Goilala region set me thinking about why the imposition of Pax Australiana in Papua New Guinea was so strikingly different to the colonial processes followed in South America, Africa and South East Asia.

By way of context, readers need to understand that European imperialism was almost invariably imposed by force, often with catastrophic results for the indigenous population involved.

Johannes and Rose Kundal,  30th wedding anniversary,  2009

PHILIP FITZPATRICK

‘Legend of the Miok Egg: A True Enga Family Tale’ by Daniel Kumbon and Johannes Kulimbao Kundal, paperback, independently published, $26.24. Available here from Amazon Australia

FOREWORD - As an Australian who has enjoyed a long association with Papua New Guinea I tend to assume that I know a lot about the people and their cultures.

It is only when I read books like this one that I realise my knowledge is limited.

Joe Herman - a childhood of secure simplicity and positive affirmation of what we were

JOE HERMAN

SEATTLE, USA - The modern mirror had not yet arrived in Enga.

Indeed, it never occurred to us that such things even existed.

We relied on each other to remove unwanted specks and smudges from our face.

PHILIP FITZPATRICK

TUMBY BAY - I come from a generation born in austerity. ‘Make-do’ was the order of the day.

In those what seem now like ancient days, Christmas represented something that now seems irretrievably lost.

Unfortunately, it all seems to be the result of modern human beings having a remarkable ability to subvert good things into bad things.

When PNG became a nation in 1975, it had high hopes of building a better society and Michael Somare seemed to be the right leader to do it

KELA KAPKORA SIL BOLKIN

PORT MORESBY – I want to talk about the kind of people who aspire to be national leaders and what might make them good leaders or not.

Leaders shape our local level governments, districts, provinces and ultimately our entire nation.

But the poor results on the ground are evidence that many of them, perhaps most of them, have not served our people well.

Johannes Kundal and Rose with grandson Victor at their 30th wedding anniversary in 2009

PHILIP FITZPATRICK

TUMBY BAY – In between finishing my latest novel and starting a new one I’ve been proofreading a fascinating autobiography by Johannes Kundal.

Johannes is a member of Enga Writers Association and his book, The Legend of the Miok Egg, is being edited and readied for publication by author Daniel Kumbon, who founded the group.

A few extracts have been published in PNG Attitude over the last year or so.

The splendid house for Mana Dau and her relatives begins to take shape

PETER KRANZ

MORISSET - Earlier this year Rose and I discovered that Rose’s mum, Mana Dau, was being abused by some distant and nasty relatives at the place where she was living in Lae.

It wasn’t just verbal bullying either, Mana had some of her teeth knocked out and the whole situation was untenable.

Men of Enga (Joe Herman)

JOE HERMAN

SEATTLE - The word arrived quickly that Pambene, a cousin in neighbouring Pumas village in Enga Province, had been assaulted and severely injured by tribesmen over a land dispute.

As expected, my oldest brother Yandapae and two cousins retaliated and forcibly took a large pig from the culprits as compensation.

Chief Lapakio Kambu with Rose (left)

DANIEL KUMBON

WABAG – I was delighted when an extract from my book, I Can See My Country Clearly Now, was used in the recent English comprehension test for the Grade 12 Papua New Guinea national examinations.

At the time, I wondered if any Enga students noticed they were being examined on an extract from my book.

I’m sure most of them didn’t because they don’t know the book exists.

ANDREW WARNER
| Language Magazine | via Ples Singsing

MALIBU, USA - Papua New Guinea, frequently heralded as the most linguistically diverse place in the entire world, is in the middle of a language crisis.

According to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, the youngest generations in the nation are using Indigenous languages far less than ever before, instead opting for English and Tok Pisin, an English-based creole language.

Girls from Nukutoa village, Takuu, in the Mortlock Islands - one of four Polynesian outlier atolls off the east coast of the Bougainville

KUʻUWEHI HIRAISHI
| Hawaii Public Radio

HILO, HAWAI’I - New linguistics research by  suggests the original settlers of the Hawaiian Islands came from a small chain of low-lying atolls just east of Bougainville.

Language professor William ‘Pila’ Wilson of the University of Hawai’i has uncovered evidence that Hawai'i’s first inhabitants may have migrated from Papua New Guinea's Mortlock Islands .

City dwellers take shots with skyscrapers in the background or holding a whisky or SP. Others stand in front of 5-door cruiser or in their office. As a bush writer and adventurer, this scene is appropriate for me and where l think l belong

PAUL MINGA
| Ples Singsing

PORT MORESBY - My late mum, Agatha, would tell me stories of what transpired before her eyes in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was a time when pioneer Catholic missionaries established mission stations and schools in various parts of the Wahgi Valley and further into the Jimi and other places.

Cane swallowing, also known as 'drin kol wara'

SHIRLEY KOMOGI
| PNG Insight

PORT MORESBY - ‘Last Real Man’ is a documentary film that captures the sacred cane swallowing ritual of Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands Province and took six years to produce.

After extensive consultation, negotiation and research, Ruth Ketau convinced the elders from Sakanuga village in the Bena area that she should become the first filmmaker to record the Neheya initiation, a cane swallowing ritual.

The Outback Pub, by Margie Langtip

CHRIS OVERLAND

ADELAIDE - While I think Phil Fitzpatrick is over-egging the pudding in Australia – Not that Great a Country, I believe it is true to say that Australia is not a 'great' country.

Phil referred to many of its faults, which is fair comment I suppose, but there are some virtues.

In relation to climate change, every one of Australia’s eight states and territories has now committed to being carbon neutral by 2050.

Inner-city latte-drinking basket-weavers (Sky News)

PHILIP FITZPATRICK

TUMBY BAY - Let’s be honest.  Australia is an insignificant world power sitting in isolation at the bottom of the planet desperately clinging on to an increasingly tenuous notion of Western hegemony.

On one current reckoning we sit in seventeenth place on the world power scale, just below Switzerland and just above Turkey.

Papua New Guinean lime pots and lime sticks in the Auckland Museum

BARBARA ANGORO
| Duresi’s Odyssey

AUCKLAND - A few weeks ago, during the school holidays, my daughter and I visited the Auckland Museum, spending a great deal of time in the Pacific section.

A couple of the artefacts brought back childhood memories – including the gourds for putting lime in and the special lime sticks (spatulas) for dipping into the lime to add to the crushed betel nut and mustard.

Members of PNG Women in Politics at Nahau Rooney's haus krai (Michelle Nayahamui Rooney)

DOROTHY TEKWIE &
MICHELLE NAYAHAMUI ROONEY
| DevPolicy Blog

CANBERRA - Papua New Guinea’s national elections are coming up in 2022, and the national women’s political empowerment movement is gaining momentum again.

PNG women leaders will drive the direction and pace of these debates.

Facebook's curt message to the 60,000 members of a heritage site that curates historic Papua New Guinean photographs

KEITH JACKSON

NOOSA – A couple of months ago I ran a piece, ‘Racist’ Facebook doesn’t get the picture, which told how Facebook had blocked a wonderful site, ‘Taim Bipo, Photo History, PNG, Papua & New Guinea’, devoted to safeguarding the photographic heritage of this most photogenic country.

The reason it had blocked the site was because some of the images it showed were of breasts and, for all I know, nipples and penis gourds.

Pacific Islander slave labour on a Queensland sugar plantation (State Library of Queensland)

JOHANNA MARIE & STEPHANIE DOOLE
| ABC Wide Bay

BUNDABERG - The stone walls that stretch along Bundaberg's farms are a stark and lasting reminder of the history of slavery in the region, but the community has taken a step forward to begin the healing process.

In an Australian first, Bundaberg's mayor Jack Dempsey is issuing a formal apology to the region's South Sea Islander community for the practice of blackbirding.

Marie Reay wrote the the first, book on women’s lives in the PNG Highlands. It was not discovered for 50 years (Noel Butlin)

FRANCESCA MERLAN

Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society by Marie Olive Reay. Francesca Merlan (ed). ANU Press 2014. 268 pages. ISBN 97819250212155 (paperback). Link here for free download

Marie Reay (1922-2004) was an Australian anthropologist, best known for work in the New Guinea Highlands. The manuscript for Wives and Wanderers was discovered in 2011, seven years after her death and 50 years after she had made her last amendments to it. Editor Francesca Merlan did a fine job in bringing it to publication and providing a valuable and stimulating Introduction. Some edited extracts follow - KJ

CANBERRA - Wives and Wanderers presents vivid, ethnographically based narrative of the lives of women of the Wahgi Valley in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea.

Marie Reay explores the experiences of courting, attraction, love, marriage, and the combination of male dominance and barely restrained female resentment and rebelliousness.

LUKE PEARSON
| IndigenousX

SYDNEY - I run a media, training and consultancy company called IndigenousX. It is 100% Indigenous owned and staffed.

We work on local, regional, national, and international projects; we run training workshops on anti-racism, digital strategies, and media training.

Haus Tambaran, Palambei, Middle Sepik. Duncan Gavin argues that PNG’s Parliament House should not be called a Haus Tambaran

DUNCAN GABI
| Aunamelo Independent Blog

MADANG – Papua New Guinea’s parliament house is one of the world’s most fascinating examples of public architecture.

The building incorporates various structural features found in PNG but the design that dominates is the architectural style of Maprik in East Sepik Province.

Westminster system spared Papua New Guinea nothing, not even the Speaker 's wig

PAUL OATES

CLEVELAND – It has taken me a long time to reach an understanding of what the problem was leading up to Papua New Guinea’s independence.

At the time, in the 1970s, the thought process was that the Westminster system works for us in Australia, this we can impose this obviously working system as a unifying force for a people and their many hundreds of cultures.

MICHAEL DOM

LAE - How do we return Papua Niugini to a culture of Melanesian cooperation and how can the common people make those in power behave responsibly?

According to the evolutionary perspective, the birthplace of democracy was the tribe. Indeed, tribalism is sometimes referred to as ‘primitive democracy’.

Road building,  Pindiu,  Morobe District,  1965 (Frank Haviland)

JIM MOORE

WARRADALE - In the late 1960s, as a young kiap based at Mt Hagen Sub-District Office, I was assigned to supervise work on a new feeder road.

It led off the Hagen-Togaba main road and heading north towards Bukapena in the Mul Council area, perhaps eight kilometres out of Hagen.

Part of the construction through a small hill had resulted in a cliff 10-15 metres high that had to be reduced to allow the road to be widened using the stock tools of the time - picks and long-handled spades.

STEPHEN CHARTERIS

CAIRNS – Michael Dom is right (Two questions long struggled with) in asking how can Papua New Guinea return to cooperation and how can the common people hold power to account and keep it responsible?

No one doubts the absolute necessity for a strong well-governed and administered political centre.

A modern nation state does not exist without it.

Sweet potato farming in the Southern Highlands - communal sharing for mutual benefit is the Melanesian Way

MICHAEL DOM

LAE – Power, power, power. Yeah, sure.

In Papua New Guinea subsistence agriculture is a basic mode of living, resources are communally shared and political power is gained and maintained by the assurance of mutual benefit for all.

It can be challenging to understand that the infant national character (that which emerged through parliamentary democracy) doesn't know what to do about the vast wealth made available to it.

STEPHEN CHARTERIS

CAIRNS - Patrick Angrai’s article, Death of a Teacher, hit me hard too. Firstly sadness, then anger.

Death in childbirth, through lack of timely referral or resources, is so horribly common in rural settings and often goes unreported.

As Arthur Williams has said, how can this happen in such a resource rich country?

A glasmeri witch-finder repudiates her previous accusations against an alleged 'sorcerer'(Anton Lutz)

KEITH JACKSON

‘Sorcery accusation-related violence in Papua New Guinea: The role of glasman/glasmeri as catalysts of accusation and violence’ by Miranda Forsyth, William Kipongi, Anton Lutz, Philip Gibbs, Fiona Hukula & Ibolya Losoncz, Issues Paper 36, National Research Institute of PNG. July 2021. Link here to the full research report

PORT MORESBY – A National Research Institute report says many incidents of sorcery-accusation violence in Papua New Guinea are triggered by glasman or, less commonly, female glasmeri.

A glasman or glasmeri (witch doctor) is a person skilled in interpreting and using supernatural forces, including the identification of people who are sorcerers.

KEITH JACKSON

NOOSA - My romp through Tok Pisin the other day brought some amusing embellishments from readers.

I've packaged these into this brief piece, along with other information about how you might pursue an interest in this most eloquent language.

When Phil Fitzpatrick returned to Papua New Guinea in 1997, more than 20 years after he had finished his service as a kiap (patrol officer), he worked in oil and gas exploration and, later, in social mapping.

Sign 1
 Public announcement. Don't pick the flowers. [Don't] dump rubbish everywhere. This is a school!
Sign 2
Read, think, speak and write English

KEITH JACKSON

NOOSA – One of the great pleasures of entering Melanesia’s linguistic gateway is to discover the realm of Tok Pisin, with its animated rhythms, vibrant style, and idioms as creative and colourful as a political promise.

Melanesian Pidgin emerged in the south-west Pacific during the late second half of the 19th century on copra and sugarcane plantations to which labour was imported from Melanesia, Malaysia and China.

An unmaintained road in Lae PNG's second largest city

GRAHAM KING

YUNGABURRA - The Collins English dictionary defines the word ‘maintain’ as the ‘to keep in proper or good condition’.

And, of course, it is a standard procedure for a successful business to always allocate funds in its budget for repair and maintenance.

Potholes must be filled before they become enormous craters; engine oil must be changed according to the manufacturer’s schedule; tyres must be replaced when worn out. And so a very long list goes on.

FR GARRETT ROCHE

DUBLIN – Some people who read the article on Fr Clement Papa and his family may be wondering how it happens that six brothers came to have six different surnames.

Anthony Kunump, Thomas Webster, Paulus Ripa, Joseph Palimi, Jeffrey Pup, Clement Papa - all with different surnames and all sons of the same father, Pius Pi Kumbamung.

The late Sir Buri Kidu, with his wife Dame Carol Kidu, is considered to have exemplified the Melanesian gentleman - ""Quiet, but confident with his profession / An honest expression and eyes that don’t lie"

MICHAEL DOM

LAE – It is my observation that true Papua New Guinean gentlemen respond with quiet confidence, not in brash retaliation.

In 2016, writing to encourage creative and intellectual contributions to the theme of 'The Perfect PNG Gentleman', I wrote:

The article was inspired by the prose poem 'Perfect Gentleman' by Dolorose Atai Wo'otong, which is good to reflect upon in the current situation relating to the University of Papua New Guinea.