Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific. Michael Moran
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He returned with an old recorder that had suffered the ravages of high humidity. The volume was either deafening or scarcely a whisper. Only one speaker was working. The songs were commercial and South Pacific in flavour, but professionally produced. The voice was very musical.
‘She calls herself “Salima”, which in Suau language means “canoe float”.’
‘Does she live on Samarai?’
‘No. She’s in Port Moresby now. All the young people leave the island to find work. My wife left too.’
Again he appeared to be wrestling with terrible dejection and unseen demons. The light went out of his eyes. He returned to playing patience. I battled with the volume control, not wishing to destroy the silence of the island night.
I had almost finished dinner when the two government officials returned from their seminar. They nodded towards me and padded upstairs. I had noticed with surprise their tiny travelling cases on the chairs of their open rooms. They rapidly caught up to my stage of dinner and introduced themselves as Napoleon and Noah. One was from the Sepik, the other from Morobe Province.
‘What’s the subject of your seminar to the councillors?’
‘Standing Orders. We need to explain the basis of the Westminster parliamentary procedure.’
‘My goodness, that must be quite a task.’
They glanced at each other suspiciously, sensing criticism.
‘They’re intelligent men. Serious men. The problem is just one of language. You know there are over eight hundred languages in our country. Explaining the concepts behind the English procedure is most difficult. Old English is a strange language for us. Standing Orders are supposed to make parliamentary business easier but in our culture … more difficult … some concepts mean nothing to these people even in Tok Pisin. Independence came before we understood how the system worked.’
They both looked dark and fierce with an almost excessive masculinity, as if it was my fault, then they smiled. Such extremes.
‘We’re having a party to celebrate the end of our mission tomorrow night at the Women’s House on the hill. You’re invited. And you, too, of course, Wallace!’
He was gathering in the flaccid cards as he thanked them, pleasure struggling up to the surface. The officials rose quite suddenly from the table and headed off to the evening session at the hall. Another hand of cards fluttered down. Wallace turned to me.
‘They always stay here, the ministers. Soon I will redecorate the entire hotel.’
He looked around the flyblown walls, the stump of his arm more than symbolic over the cards.
‘I plan a stylish refurbishment here. God will bring the cruise ships. Thousands of tourists will visit Samarai. You’re just the first of a great wave.’
I switched off his daughter’s music. Mass tourism on the scale of Fiji or Vanuatu is an impossible, even undesirable dream on Samarai. The situation seemed ineffably melancholic.
‘I’m sure you’re right. Well, I think I might go to bed, Wallace. Could you switch on the water pump?’
‘The pastor will be here in the morning. Everything will be fine.’ His voice trailed away as I climbed the bare stairs.
The air in the bedroom was hot and thick. Garish streetlamps lit the window covered by a thin curtain printed with a tropical landscape hung upside down. I switched on the fan and went for a shower. Huge cockroaches crawled up from the drain but fled as the water fell. I pulled the string that promised hot water but with no result. A blessed coolness bathed me, the effect remaining for a full two minutes. I was slightly worried about being unable to lock the door and decided to sleep with my passport and wallet under my pillow.
I had felt insecure about my personal safety and possessions ever since my arrival in Papua New Guinea. There is something in the air that combines with the menacing expression in the male Melanesian face that is unsettling to a European. The dark and brooding sensibility of the men in particular, creates an ever-present feeling of threat. I felt my presence was tolerated but deeply resented. Smiles shielded a deeper animosity; an ancient impenetrable psyche lay behind those dark eyes. I was not wanted here, the past was resented and there was jealousy of my imagined riches. Covetous glances settled on my belongings. Serious health risks could not be avoided. So came upon me the first temptation to abandon the whole enterprise and return to Sydney. This was to become a common feeling I was forced to fight. Only the idyllic beauty of the islands, the complex cultures and the occasional warm personality kept me travelling. Wallace was a truly good man, but what had it brought him? Theft, vandalism and betrayal. I lay on the bed and stared at the fly-spotted ceiling. The lonely Anglican bell marked the passage of European time. A solitary bird was singing, a species that sings after sunset for the entire night.
Whispers below my window woke me. I could see some youths had clustered around the marble obelisk and were looking up at my window and pointing. I remembered the Catholic priest at Alotau. ‘They know where you are, if you’re asleep, he hasn’t locked his door … oh yes.’ They wandered away at length and the memorial was bathed in moonlight.
The story of how this obelisk came to be erected is one of the legendary tales of this Province. It began with the cannibalistic murder in 1901 of one of the first missionaries to come to Eastern New Guinea, the Scotsman, the Reverend James Chalmers. He was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson who described him as ‘an heroic card … a big, stout, wildish-looking man as restless as a volcano and as subject to eruptions’. He was as much an explorer and adventurer as a missionary. The title of his book Work and Adventure in New Guinea (1885) describes his attitude to missionary activity succinctly. On one occasion tracing a journey on a map in a village hut, he noticed that drops of liquid had begun to fall from a bulky package lodged in the roof. Grandmother’s remains were being dried by her grandson. In many parts of the country the corpse was not buried immediately after death but retained by the family, placed on a platform outside the hut, perhaps smoked and stored or the remains given to the children to play with. In this way the relatives clung to the spirit of the dead for some time after the passing of the body. ‘It quite spoiled our dinner,’ Chalmers laconically commented later.
His book is full of bizarre cultural descriptions. One of the most celebrated is that of the ‘man-catcher’. This was a hoop of rattan cane attached to a bamboo pole that concealed a spike. The hoop was slipped over the head or body of the fleeing victim and then suddenly jerked tight. The spike would penetrate the base of the skull or spine, neatly severing the spinal cord. Ernie had told me during our talk on the wharf that Chalmers carried a Bible under one arm and a shotgun under the other as the instruments of conversion. Certainly not your average missionary, more an aggressive soldier of Christ unwittingly preparing the ground for the arrival of the colonial service.
The charismatic Chalmers was known as ‘Tamate’ by the people of Rarotonga. He was a fine figure of a Victorian gentleman and possessed a head as noble as that of the composer Brahms. Both his formidable wives succumbed to malaria. He writes of having to exhibit his chest to the warriors on numerous occasions each day. One friendly chief offered his wife a piece of human breast at a feast, declaring it a highly-prized delicacy. Chalmers wryly observed that this was the end of his chest exhibitions in that part of the country.
In 1901 the London Missionary Society schooner Niue set sail along the coast of the Gulf of Papua from Daru. It anchored off the ironically named Risk Point on Goaribari Island near the mouth of the River Omati. This area was well known as one of the most dangerous parts of New Guinea, an area of torrid mudflats and swamp crawling with tiny crabs and fierce cannibals. Early on the morning of 8 April some warriors with faces and shaven heads painted scarlet, their eyes ringed in black, paddled out to the vessel in a fleet of canoes and persuaded a landing party to come ashore. The unarmed Chalmers and his young and inexperienced assistant Oliver Tomkins, together with ten mission students from Kiwai Island and a tribal chief, landed from the whaleboat in a creek close to the village of Dopima. Chalmers had attempted to convince Tomkins to stay on board but