My current role involves me in some relationship with the PNG Government, mainly through the Department of Community Development. It is a simple matter to make contact with politicians and civil servants here. We have several times met with the older ex-pat female Minister who made her life here with a PNG husband, and she always stops for chat when she passes. In a country with a population smaller than London's and capital city not much bigger than Bristol, Government is a rather cosy and affable affair. If politics in the west is ‘ the art of the possible' here it is the ‘art of the payable'. It is not that there is a lack of talented people at the top or any failure to absorb the professional style of the west, but quality is wafer thin and resources never close at hand.
Once inside the Department, our Disability Section is structured in the manner of civil services set up by colonial administrations all over the red-crayoned map of the Empire. There is a Secretary, a Deputy Secretary, A First Assistant Secretary and then an Assistant Secretary, whose name is Joe Yomba, and lots of lower ranks. The main purpose of these multifarious positions seems to be to ensure that money cannot be misspent. A requisition is made by the Disability Officer. It must then be passed through everyone's hands before reaching the Resources Committee and the Finance section. It then begins its long descent back through the hands of the officers before some of it arrives some months later in the bank account or pockets of the appropriate organisation.
Of course, this Fort Knox of colonial design is child's play for people raised on the principle that money is for spending and whoever has it has an obligation, nay a duty, to spend it. Thus, not long after my arrival, The Deputy Secretary and the FAS as well as several lower ranking officers were suspended for the paltry reason that they used donor funding for a big international conference to house their entire families for two weeks in a top hotel, claimed large allowances and spirited away a variety of donated electrical goods. Joe Yomba sighed with relief that on this occasion he had been out of favour and not included in the scam.
So it happened that Joe Yomba became my first and most important contact in the Department. He, it was, who dealt with life as a practical reality. If you needed the office painted, Joe arranged it; if there was a need for some quick money for an event Joe was your only hope. Now as the highest ranked official left intact he was the only contact able to make a decision. As it turned out this was to be the cause of Joe's downfall, though at the time none of us suspected it.
But, firstly, let me tell you about Joe Yomba, a man from Enga in the Highlands; a man of short, stout proportions and a champion buai chewer; a man coming close to mid-life years. At the entrance to the Department there is a guard hut. You might easily see Joe leaning on the hatch chewing his blood-red mix. On first acquaintance this would not seem out of place because Joe looked like a guard. If his hair was not an Afro-curl you might have said it was uncombed. His shoes, once smart had succumbed to years of abuse and now looked more like slip-ons because the heel backs had long since been beaten to ground level by careless fitting. His shirt had once been white and struggled, without much success, to contain the beer-nurtured belly, a task that the trousers had long since abandoned.
His buai chewing was legend. In the most important meeting, you would notice that he was missing only to see him outside the window chewing, spitting and chatting to a passing wantok. On one occasion he entered the office of my colleague, Armstrong, his mouth full of buai. As he made points in his loud and effusive manner red spots of buai juice appeared on the paper in front of Armstrong. Joe abstractedly tried to brush them off but only succeeded in smearing them across the important missive.
If I give the impression that Joe is an uncultured and uncouth lout, then I do him a disservice. In fact, he is an intelligent, engaging and well-tutored man. He has studied in Australia and still speaks some of the Russian learned in two years at university there. When you talk ‘big picture' he talks ‘big picture', when you discuss strategy, he discusses strategy.
I first saw his skills when in front of thirty threatened and edgy members of one of the big disability organisations he was the sole defender of the Government's new Policy. He listened impassively to a presentation of the possible impact of the policy upon the organisation and then calmly asked people for their reactions. Several spoke vigorously about their fears and the faults of the Government. He paused for a moment and then launched into a powerful offensive. He looked at a task set in the Policy.
“Does the Government have the capacity to do that?' He spoke loudly, with a hint of aggression. They shook their heads; murmurs of agreement.
“Do you have the capacity?' he glared around the room. Heads bowed, eyes focused on the table below.
“We must work together if we are to do anything”. The tigers were now licking the hand that fed them. In this manner he had completely tamed them and diffused the very real fear that they would be undermined by the Government's changes. This was a bravura performance, and I had to stifle the urge to shout “bravo”.
He finished his performance and asked for any questions. There were none. The mob had been gelded. Joe went outside for a chew.
If Joe had the talent to rise up the bureaucracy, he did not have the desire to escape his roots. For all of his education, Joe is a village highlander in all of his soul. Drink is his mother. He likes nothing better than to get drunk with his wantoks and hold court. For him, employment is simply the supplier of beer. Even advice from the Secretary that he could progress if he smartened himself up fell upon beer-filled ears.
So it was that Joe found himself as the only ‘acting' senior manager at the Department. When I asked him how he was finding it he would tell me how he had learned to delegate and make encouragingly managerial replies to questions. He was learning the ‘speak' fast.
The coming weekend St John and the Blind Union had arranged to welcome guests from an Australian Blind Union and as usual approached Joe for help. He struck a hard bargain with them but agreed to fund their food and drink for the daylong event. The funding would be there before Saturday in good time for the Sunday event.
The week went well. The Blind Union confirmed the arrival of the two Australians; food was ordered, and the invitations went out to all and sundry. On Friday morning they arrived at the Joe Yomba's office to collect the money. He said he would sort it out.
When Joe checked the long snake of procurement, he found that the animal had swallowed and digested his payment request. He went to see the Secretary.
“Can you tell me what has happened to the funding for the Blind Union?” He asked the Secretary.
“Sorry Mr Yomba, the Department has run out of money, and we have had to direct the funding to more pressing needs.” Virement was common practice in times of drought.
Joe was distraught. He had promised to help and now he had been betrayed. There was only one course of action – get drunk. Joe went on an afternoon bender. By mid-afternoon Joe's belly was stressing the shirt even further and the panther in Joe's brain was straining at the leash. The Secretary was not going to get away with this.
Back at the Department the Secretary was about to leave and was having his last chat with colleagues by the entrance before leaving for the weekend. A vehicle screeched to a stop. Out spilled 3 policemen and a distressed and dishevelled Joe Yomba.
“That's the one – arrest him, arrest him.” Joe pointed vaguely in the direction of his blurred vision of the Secretary – his boss. The Secretary was somewhat bemused.
“What is this about?”
“He is corrupt, he has stolen money from the Department.”. In Joe's mind this was payback time. The Secretary's come-uppance for his witch hunt of corrupt officials. The hunter has become the hunted; the biter, bit.
“Where is your evidence Mr Yomba?”
At this point the police, who had smelt the chance of a juicy scandal and perhaps the opportunity of some financial solace, lost interest. Joe's shoulders drooped and the panther slunk off into the undergrowth to sleep off its befuddlement.
Joe was in need of balm for his troubled soul. He carried on drinking. At 1 o'clock that same night Joe was at the end of his physical and material resources. He decided to call in on St Johns.
Deep into her night's slumber the coordinator of St John was a little surprised to be woken by banging on her front door. Her bleary eyes focused upon the unfocused remains of the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Community Development.
The next day I turned up at the meeting to welcome the Australian guests, totally oblivious of the preceding events. Joe Yomba was there – his usual affable self. I smiled when he fell asleep in his chair, suspecting an over-indulged night.
On Monday Joe left for the Islands as previously arranged and returned to a meeting on Thursday. Before he got to the meeting he was handed a letter. He had joined his colleagues in the limbo of the ‘suspended' – in his case indefinitely. In PNG this means a holiday with full pay for the first five weeks. It usually means a transfer to another Department, but rarely results in being sacked. Here, if you are caught stealing five kina at a market to feed yourself you may well get beaten to death. Embezzle two hundred thousand kina and you get a new job. As the song says,
“As through this life you travel you meet some funny men; some rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen.”
Before I sent this letter there was a final twist in the tale. Joe was called in to the office expecting to hear where he was to be placed. Instead, he received a letter of dismissal. Joe's Highland instincts got the better of him. He wanted to fight with the Secretary and was restrained by security guards. The Secretary's wife who works in our offices was sent home, fearing a reprisal by Joe and his wantoks and we were told to be very careful. For some time policemen stood at the gate.
We miss Joe Yomba.
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Australian Grizzlies
I was gazing sullenly at an oversized Chinese cruiser moored in an untidy inlet, at the side of a filling station. VSO volunteers with new homes were buying gas cylinders and I was trying to find a little shade that would shield me from the sun if not the humidity. A car came in and braked sharply to a halt, adding to the untidiness. A tall, burly, aging Australian in standard short-sleeved shirt and short shorts snarled an instruction to the fuel attendant. I took an immediate dislike to him. That did not stop him approaching us, amiably enquiring about our provenance. We drove away without further thought.
The next day I was taking my first hesitant steps through Madang when the same car pulled onto the earth path in front of me.
“Hi, how you doing? Jump in we'll have a cuppa tea, and you can see my shipyard.”
I hesitated and then reluctantly slid into the low seat.
Tony, it turned out, was a portal into the history and psyche of the outback Aussies who were once the masters and shapers PNG . He had been in Papua New Guinea for forty-seven years and was fast running out of the chums who had once thronged the streets of Madang and Lae – the last cowboy.
In 1864 one of the Beirne brothers left the family in Galway and took the interminable boat ride to Australia. A century later he had died the rich owner of a chain of department stores, builder of catholic churches and benefactor to a university bearing the family name. His grandsons had been raised in the harsh conditions of the outback of Northern Territory. They knew one of the neighbours to the west, they were only a hundred miles away, but they never met the neighbour to the south. At sixteen he was given a gun and sent off to spend two months in the bush with a young friend. Social events required up to two days horse riding, a drunken night and then two days back. He married his childhood sweetheart.
In his early twenties Tony signed up for a horse back cattle drive that followed the seasonal pasture from Northern Australia right down to the south. Eighteen months of four to eight miles a day, sleeping on the ground in a circus of rough riding, comradeship and danger. At one time they were poisoned by brackish water, which nearly killed them, and potholes and snakes were constant hazards. Eventually, the life of a cowboy left his back weakened and his mind opened to further horizons. A friend told him that he had a plantation in the Highlands of PNG and asked him if he wanted to join him. In 1961 he found himself in a remote highland area of Papua New Guinea in the middle of people who wore no clothes that an Australian would recognise. When he travelled around his wife joined him on the back of his motor bike and helped with the inflation of the tractor inner tube that had to be done to float the bike across swollen rivers. Eventually he acquired a truck and started to make money transporting crops to the coast, returning on unmade rutted roads with coastal provisions.
One day he was drinking with a friend in a maudlin frame of mind. He had spent 13 years in the remote wild. He was asked if would like to buy a plantation in Lae on the north coast. His decision was an instant drink-oiled “yes”. He went home and told his wife they were moving to Lae in two weeks and had to sell their belongings to raise the Australian $70,000.
By the time I met him Tony was approaching 70 years, looked 60 and lived on his own in Madang. His wife had decided she could not face another coconut and returned back to Australia where she drank like a builder, raised money for charity, partied hard, drove fast cars and walked the streets feeding junkies who called her Mum. She called them “dickheads” and left them in no doubt they should pull themselves together. In his time in Lae he had built up his transport business on land and sea and had created the only horse racing track in PNG, which he had run until his decision to leave the main business to his son and move to more relaxed Madang.
In Madang, Tony's form of relaxation was a daily low-level war with the nationals he employed to mend boats, maintain and drive trucks and run his office. He employed drivers, mechanics, scrap yard staff, office staff and boat yard staff. Catch him on a bad day and you might hear:
“I told them to weigh the motor at the scrap yard and the thieving fuckers have stolen the fixing nut, I am going sack the fucking lot of them!”
The next day you might hear about his secretary:
“Brenda – I love her to death. Yeah, I send her kids to school with a lot of others.”
During the time I saw him his mechanics had caused £1,000 worth of damage to a ships engine by failing to close the oil tap when they changed the oil, seizing the engine. The driver of one of his trucks had driven it off the road at night forcing him to send out thugs to protect the load and his long-time house man had arrived drunk with a bush knife to smash everything he could, including Tony if he had had his way.
He was full of tales of wild west shoot outs. He graphically described how his son had recently shot two rascols who had come armed into the Lae office. They had run, injured, into the road and been hit by a bus. The son had been involved in several gun fights and had been badly injured one occasion himself. Tony claimed to have used a gun a couple of times and would always have it handy in case it was required.
His colleagues in his many opportunistic business ventures were an eclectic bunch. One had been a gay Australian whose orientation was interestingly far more acceptable to the Aussie macho fraternity than a dark skin pigmentation. He was now in the last few months of his life and wheelchair bound, which did not stop rascols kidnapping him as he left the ex-pat club in Lae, leading to ransom demands, a shoot-out with the police and his eventual return. Another was a PNG Rasta man in his mid to late thirties. When we met him first he seemed amiable enough,
“That bastard is one of the biggest criminals in Madang. He would shoot you without even thinking about it. He spent 12 years in prison. He held up three banks and a business in one day. His mates were all killed in a shoot-out, and they fished him out of the sea with a bullet in his leg and beat him to a pulp.”
“How do you know him now?”
“Oh, we run a security firm together. He is also standing in the local elections.”
He endlessly tells cautionary tales about the dangers of treating locals as though they think in the same way as us. There was the German environmentalist who went to save turtles. She did not listen to his security warnings and left after six months having had her belongings stolen and paid money to people not to disturb the turtles only to find they were pocketing the money and then selling the turtles anyway. Then there was the retired fat, Australian ex-policeman who would not listen to his fellow backwoodsmen. He even drank with his workers and boasted that they respected his authority. He was eventually beaten up and died of a heart attack as a result. And what about the Australian man who ran a factory and suffered a bad beating when the staff turned on him without warning. All in all, the only way to deal with these people was to be tougher than them. Never blink, never show weakness. If that meant fist fighting with them so be it.
This was the relationship forged with the natives from the time that white people came in to administer PNG. Racism was built into the system. In the 1920s the British passed a law making sex between black men and white women a capital offence. One of the few PNG-written novels deals with the hanging of a policeman for his relationship with the missus. This law was only repealed in the 1950s. Even in the 1960s Madang had 3,000 Australians and a clear apartheid system that saw areas designated for whites only. In earlier times Rabaul and Port Moresby had similar arrangements. Now Aussies are still here making money, but in diluted form. You still hear the racist comments about ‘coons', the callous, dismissive stories of abuse or neglect of nationals, but in Tony's case it is underpinned with a deep affection for the country, its life and the people he works with. He cannot see any way he would move back to Australia until his health fails him. Much of the gruff, callousness is for the tourists and if you call his bluff, he will coyly admit his sensibilities.
When he was not fighting his staff Tony sought adventure on land and sea. On one rough trip from Lae to Madang in a bathtub with a motor the waves were crashing over the boat. Suddenly his two PNG crew members appeared at the cabin door wearing life jackets.
“We are going”,
“What do you mean you are going. Where are you going to. We're in the middle of the fucking ocean?”
“I don't care we are going.”
They wanted to jump into the sea, anywhere rather than be on the scary boat. He says he slapped the man and told him to get back to his work.
On another trip they hooked a massive shark that began to drag the back of the boat under water. Tony had to leap onto its back to cut it free. A second 364kg shark had leapt and dismantled the thick support timbers for the rear roofing.
Last year documentary makers arrived, and he flew with them in a helicopter to a more remote area close to the Fly River. People there had not seen white people since the 1970s and women asked them to mate with them to put white blood into the village. He said they had turned down the offer.
A few years ago, he had taken the boat up the Sepik River to buy cocoa and Buai (betel nut). He was alone on the boat when a gang of men attacked the cabin with axes. The story is that he threw boiling water over the leader and pushed him into the water. It wasn't so easy on Lake Murray however, where the local people had a 51% stake in a fishing boat, that visited each village in turn. Tony ran the boat, but disputes amongst villages led to the burning of the boat and the end of the project.
Occasionally, another grizzly would show up, but now the Madang Club and the Country Club have a run-down atmosphere and the feeling that life is an endless repetition of fund-raising events with the same few Aussies often accompanied by younger PNG wives and a clutch of young mid-race children. When Trevor came to visit, I asked if he was going to attend the latest fund-raiser. He threw his head back in disgust.
“Naw, I'll leave that to the women, I wouldn't go near that place.”
I asked how long he had been in PNG.
“I was bloody born here on the Sepik.”
It had not stopped the grizzly genes equipping him with all of the necessary traits and values. We talked about the difficulties of running businesses with local labour and he and Tony snorted and sorted them into geographical temperaments. The East Sepiks were the worst, difficult to calm down once riled.
“One bloke even wrote in shit on the back of the toilet door ‘Trevor is a c***'.”
“Was it spelt right?”
“Oh yeah, he could spell alright.”
POSTSCRIPT
I always called in on Tony when I passed through Madang. On one occasion he showed me that his trousers were hanging loose on his once ample body. He said he was going back to Oz for some treatment. The next time I visited the shipyard they told me that he was not coming back – he had died, the last of the cowboys.
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A Corner of A Foreign Field That Is Forever England
I found myself thinking that I was glad I never had the opportunity to join the Diplomatic Corps. It was rather the same as my ageing and changing view of the privilege of private education. As a young man I resented the gross over –representation of public-school people in the establishment posts of Government, army and church. Now in late middle age I breathe a sigh of relief that someone else was reared, trained and led to those very responsibilities that I would find intolerable.
Now, against my better judgement, here I was sweating like a highland pig, toiling up a steep road towards the sky and the home of the British High Commissioner. It was an evening for holders of British passports and if I am honest, it was the thought of a night of free wine that had persuaded me to come, along with the possibility that I might find some useful work contacts in the elite of the ex-pat community.
As I arrived, I was greeted from a distance by a waving figure. It turned out to be Mike, a young Tari man who had been guarding me and my belongings until his mysterious disappearance one night some two months ago. He had moved to guard some well-heeled people just opposite the British High Commission. I sat, waif-like on a curb by the gate chatting to Mike as Pajeros, Hi Lux and Land Rovers drove past me and entered this corner of Britain in a foreign land. At last, a big tonka parked by my feet and I was greeted by two party goers, who turned out to know Wolfgang in the remote mining area of Tabubil.
“Oh yeah, we know Wolfgang. He provided a sweet on our last progressive dinner.”
I smirked inwardly at the thought of what the locals, some discovered only in 1965, might have made of such a suburban ritual.
Inside things did not improve. I was asked if I had brought my passport by a pushy Australian woman. Of course I hadn't. I made a dash for the wine table like a desiccated John Mills staggering from the desert into the oasis.
I looked for a suitable companion, but everyone there looked like me. Men in their later years distinguished only by the size of their bellies. How could I choose? Then I spotted a young woman who had recently finished with VSO but stayed on for love. She would do for a start.
We were joined by a serious, guarded, and knowledgeable man. He was one of those people who had a knack of wrong-footing your casual party remark by quoting some obscure erudite fact and it was no surprise to find I was talking to a highly qualified librarian from Queens University, Belfast. Asking for personal information sent him scurrying back behind his suspicious squinting eyes and I welcomed the interruption of a pleasant-looking older man. Jim had entered my life.
Jim was a character you could not have invented. He was a man, somehow out of his time and certainly from a world I had never entered. Jim should have lived a hundred years earlier, but fitted perfectly into a passing ex-pat Papua New Guinea that I had experienced only through the eyes of Australian bushmen.
To say that Jim was English was an understatement, except that he had spent few of his sixty-six years in England. He was slight man with a slim frame and a thin, almost pretty face, lined but not scoured by age. His full head of light, grey hair was not combed but remained neat. When he spoke his gentle, carefully enunciated, public-schooled sentences almost stumbled into a stutter. He constantly asked unanswerable questions,
“Do you know the Damiani Princes of Georgia? Are you familiar with the Nova Scotian sail-fishing boats – they have the largest sail in the world? You know something about tanistry?” the subject matter would almost always be so esoteric that you found yourself invariably feeling foolish and answering that you did not. He fixed you with an enquiring stare as he waited for your answer and as you admitted defeat he always looked surprised and then searched for a way to continue the explanation without causing you embarrassment – a quintessential English gentleman.
I often pointed out to Jim that his experience of life was rather unique and not part of my world or many others. He would raise his eyebrows and furrow his brow as if this was the first time that such a thought had entered his head.
It turned out that Jim, although born in Scotland, was a member of the Courtney family that had once been masters of Tiverton Castle and much of the south-west. I seemed to remember that it was the Courtneys who were responsible for the murder and defilement of the residents of Poughill Manor. Els and I had once been told a ghost story during dinner with friends at the manor. The Courtneys had arrived to make peace with a feast and when the heavy doors were opened had run amok, killing all living beings. At the funeral they farted, pissed and tipped the body from the coffin.
Jim was not interested in hearing about the Courtneys of Devon and was far removed from his ancestors' manners. Here was someone with hundreds of years of breeding. Someone, I was told in my youth, was my natural superior just as Papua New Guineans were taught to feel the same about the white man. But Jim had rejected the weight of his past and the privilege it conveyed even if he had never lost the demeanour that went with it. Jim, you see, had been expelled from Winchester.
His story was an unusual one. Born in a family forever Royal but outcasts as Jacobins on the wrong side of the rebellion he grew up thinking that eccentric paths through life were the experience of all. His uncle had joined a Greek rebellion, learned the fiddle in Albania and was recruited by the intelligence service in the second world war as one of the few Albanian speakers in Britain. He later became lead violinist in the London Philharmonic.
As a noble family, Europe was their home. As Jacobins, foreign armies were the route to army careers. A grandfather was Aide De Compte to some French Noble.
Thus, from his isolated and secluded mansion on the borders of Scotland Jim had no other view of life. In the library he came across a letter from Durrantwater, the last noble to be beheaded in Britain in the seventeenth century. There was also a letter from Gladstone thanking a great grandfather for help in his first election campaign as an M.P. His leisure reading was Strand magazine. Father was a member of the class-ridden Colonial Service Police in Palestine and treated the family as he treated the natives on his home visits. He once berated his son for sending home a request for money owed to him,
“Behaving in such a manner means that you will not be welcome in any gentleman's club in Edinburgh.”
Panning in this golden river always turned up a gleaming nugget. On one occasion he started to talk of being sent home from Kenya at the age of six with his four-year-old sister as they needed schooling.
“We were put on a troop ship called the Carmarthen Castle. The mate was given a phrase book of Swahili.”
“Why Swahili?”
“We couldn't speak a word of English.”
“You only spoke Swahili?”
“Of course. (pause – enquiring look of puzzlement at my misapprehension) You see children in East Africa were brought up by native nurses who could speak little English.”
To make matters worse these two little unaccompanied alien waifs were not met at the docking of the ship. Instead, they were put on a train with labels on their neck to be met by Uncle Kit several hours and many stations later.
Uncle Kit, it turned out was Godfather to several abandoned children including a gaggle of Georgian Damiani children. His family name, Swinton, could be traced in an unbroken line back to 6 th century Norse-sounding kings of bits of Scotland. This, Jim, assured me was pretty unusual. He explained that the family had been on a long parabola of decline from heady days long past. The Laird lived somewhere near Brechin on the border.
The upshot of this introduction to life was a young adolescent with all of the Jabobite rebelliousness of his forefathers. At the age of 14 years, he was expelled from Winchester. His crime – bunking off school. However, this was not a trip to the park for a quick Woodbine. He had, in fact, hitch-hiked to Friesland in the Netherlands. On a previous occasion his escape bid was foiled by General Lord Tedder, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Winchester School, who recognising a pupil pulled over in his Rolls Royce to give him a lift back to school. The school thus refused to be responsible to his absent father and agreed an amicable parting. He ended up at a Grammar School in Northamptonshire living in digs with a part-time job on a trawler.
At fifteen years he decided that he could not bear the father or the weight of tradition any longer and took off with his now fourteen-year-old sister to hitch-hike to Lebanon with £20 in his pocket where he stayed with diplomatic relatives and learned about boats. He only ever spoke to his father three or four times after that.
I wondered how his meandering life had shipped him up on PNG shores. By eighteen he had raised the money to take his A levels in Lebanon after teaching himself through books. He wanted to go on to university. As a non-mature student, he needed his father's signature to apply to British Universities. Father did not think this was a good idea.
“Before you think about university, I want you to join the army to learn some discipline.”
Jim took the next boat out to Canada. Somehow, he passed through Vancouver, and Quebec before he found himself at Nova Scotia University working equal amounts of time at wage earning and study. A degree led to a PhD opportunity in Queensland. Trips to a then remote man-haus in the Highland Simbu Province filled him with a desire to do an anthropology doctorate, but he ended with a study of Queensland Educational Systems.
That was more than twenty years ago. Since then, he has worked with a Maori claim to land in New Zealand and worked in various policy making positions in PNG. As First Secretary to the Health ministry he drafted legislation and knows everyone in the tight circle of political influence and corruption.
I spent Xmas with Jim. He lives in a quiet settlement suburb with no security guard or locked gate. In the several small buildings on the terraced site live up to fourteen people; most are children between two and 18 years.
“How many of these children are yours?”
“One”
Jim tries to explain. Several are children who somehow ended up at the compound and decided to stay. This is not as strange as it seems because the idea of parenthood is not a fixed point. There are many situations where children are informally adopted by other family members or others but still keep in regular and close contact with biological parents. I found this during my stay in the Trobes where people were brought up by mother's sister or by whoever had the means to support them. Father and mother are widely used terms given to relatives or through respect to older people. I gave up trying to understand and tucked into my Xmas dinner with my fingers.
I asked Jim if he thought he would ever return to Scotland. He tells me that if he went back, he would probably be a landowner and Laird. He doesn't want people in Scotland to know if he comes back. He will just slip in quietly – the last PNG King of Scotland.
POSTSCRIPT
The lovely side of PNG showed itself as I waited for a PMV home. I stood slightly nervously waiting for a PMV. I was in a vulnerable spot with only a woman selling Buai and smokes at the side. She Looked my sack material bag and shook her head. She then emptied her colourful bilum and held it out to me and pointed to my poor bag
“Em I nogut long white man like yu.” she offered her bag.
I smilingly explained that I had the bag to make it look like I had nothing to steal. She nodded and we parted friends, me with a warm feeling.
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