luxurious scene was decidedly different from the wild 1920s when Tom McCrann’s hostelry in Moresby displayed a notice in the saloon:
Men are requested not to sleep on the billiard table with their spurs on.
At dinner there was an astounding mixture of guests. A tattooed Scot was having dinner with an Asian engineer.
‘Glad you’re on the fuckin’ project, Wang. You’ve got a degree.’
A German trio who had run out of time were attempting to negotiate a price for the ethnic decorations on the hotel walls. A heavily-tattooed Pacific islander in a black sleeveless singlet, chiselled black beard and jeans patched with grandmother’s chintz was eating soup and tugging at his pearl earring. A Belgian photographer with a ponytail was talking to a glamorous Parisian collector of artefacts from the Maprik region who had a gallery in Aix-en-Provence.
‘Every week I ’ave ze fever on ze exact same day!’ she exclaimed in desperation.
A newly-rich Highlander was eating a roast chicken, juggling greasy drumsticks in both hands and attempting to talk on a mobile phone. Pallid Englishmen and tanned Australians were earnestly discussing football and drink. They had the weak eyes and the furtive mouths of social casualties, bolstering their own false optimism or drowning betrayals in liquor.
‘The free drinks are from five thirty to six thirty. Don’t come after or we’ll have to pay.’
‘Right, mate!’
‘They’re tough men the South African rugby team!’
‘Blood oath! Fuckin’ tough!’
‘Hides like a rhinoceros!’
‘More like a fuckin’ elephant, mate!’
‘Fuckin’ tough.’
‘Yeah. Fuckin’ tough, real men.’
‘Fuckin’ tough!’
‘Yeah, fuckin’ …’ and so on, endlessly, whilst downing bottle after bottle of South Pacific lager.
A huge butterfly enamelled in iridescent blue battened against the glass door leading out to the swimming pool. A Chopin nocturne floated across the lounge from the Papua New Guinean pianist playing a grand piano. I wandered over at this unexpected appearance of European culture and spoke to him.
‘You’re playing Chopin,’ I rather pointlessly observed.
‘Yes. I studied classical music for many years. Do you have a request?’
‘Not classical. Jazz. Can you play “Misty”?’
‘Sure. If you like jazz you might like my novel. It’s on the music stand.’
A small pile of paperbacks entitled The Blue Logic: Something from the Dark Side of Port Moresby by Wiri Yakaipoko was stacked on one side above his fluent fingers.
‘What’s your novel about?’
‘It’s a crime novel about Moresby. Plenty of it around here to write about.’ I could hardly disagree.
Chopin, jazz and crime are an odd mixture. Unexpected conjunctions and unpredictable outcomes were to become a feature of all my travels in Papua New Guinea. I went to bed suffering from a blinding headache which seemed to come from the combination of the anti-malarial drug Lariam1 and alcohol.
The next day the usual horrors were introduced quietly under the door of my room via the dailies.
A youth was chopped to death and two houses burnt down in the Kaugere suburb of Port Moresby over the weekend.
Under the banner headline ‘Patients Hungry’ we learn that patients’ food was stolen from Modilon Hospital in Madang.
A thirteen-year-old sex worker said, ‘My aunt kicked me out because she said I slept with her husband. Prostitution is fun and I get a lot of money.’ Tribal fighting now takes place with homemade guns, grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs rather than spears.
The city looks more attractive on my birthday. Red and mauve bougainvillea are flowering, Ela Beach looks inviting and the frangipani spiral down in pink and white. I decide to go for a walk. Outside the US Embassy I am almost arrested for writing down the sign NOKEN PARK LONG HIA meaning ‘No Parking’ in Tok Pisin (Pidgin).
The evolution of Melanesian Pidgin (or bêche-de-mer English, as it was popularly known in colonial days) was complex. There are many regional varieties of this colourful and witty language which originated on the Pacific plantations of Queensland, Samoa and New Caledonia in the early eighteenth century. It had emerged fully formed by about 1885 and is still evolving in rich referential complexity. Around eight hundred or one seventh of the world’s languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea. Some two hundred are Austronesian spoken in the coastal and island regions, and the remainder are Papuan spoken in the Highland areas. There are three lingua francas – English, Motu (spoken in Port Moresby) and Tok Pisin.
Outside the Westpac Bank a huge Alsatian and armed guard in a baseball cap stand in the centre of three signs warning ‘Beware of the Dog’. The brooding atmosphere of male unemployment hangs about like a miasma, and I have not seen a white face in three hours. Huge holes in the pavement and deep storm-water channels offer possibilities of serious injury. The light burst of a glowering Melanesian face suddenly smiling. At the Port Moresby Grammar School, children in pale uniforms are caged up in a security tunnel hung with plants waiting to go home. Fishing trawlers of unbelievable decrepitude are moored at the wharves. Thick, black smoke pours from their funnels, the idle crews lounging in the shade of tarpaulins or carrying huge tuna by the gills. One boy drops a plastic bag full of silver sprats that cascade over the wharf like pirate’s treasure. Six mothers breast-feeding babies inexplicably sit in the broiling sun on a concrete platform raised above a potholed road. I slip into the shade of the Port Moresby Public Library. An eerie silence reigns, but people greet my unexpected presence with smiles of surprise. Useful titles such as Australian Imperialism in the Pacific and Tuscan Cuisine grace the shelves.
A friend, John Kasaipwalova, had invited me for a birthday dinner. He is a prominent and controversial Papua New Guinean poet and writer and was a student rebel during the drive for Independence in the 1970s. He is also chief of the Kwenama clan on Kiriwina Island in the Trobriands, one of my destinations. I was collected in a Mitsubishi Pajero with gigantic bull-bars, a fantastically cracked windscreen and peeling sun filters. John has a round friendly face framed by a halo of tightly curled hair, his sensibility a rich repository of poetic image and symbolic knowledge. But entrepreneurial activities tend to preoccupy him these days, as he attempts to balance the claims of individual business and his responsibility to his own clan community. He was accompanied by Mary, his attractive Malaysian wife, and ‘Uncle Sam’, who drives the Pajero with fearsome spirit, thundering over unsealed roads past striped drums marking dark detours. While avoiding a cavernous pothole, he asked me to guess his nationality. His mother turned out to be from Sri Lanka and his father an unusual mixture of Dutch, Portuguese and Australian Aboriginal. ‘Dad’s family moved about quite a bit.’ Under an Australian bush hat he had the long grey beard of a swami and spoke with a slight Indian accent. It was a striking face, a colonial cocktail.
The shopping precinct that housed the Chinese restaurant was protected by a high security fence with bars two inches thick, armed
