4

Bookanville

Just as one should never judge a book by its cover, one should never judge a library by its external appearance. I grew up near a small town in Northern Ireland called Downpatrick, whose library was never going to make any exquisite decor lists. Pebble-dashed in varieties of dirty brown, the building’s severe exterior gave little clue to the joys found within. I can trace a life’s love of reading to that library, graduating from picture books to Enid Blyton, to a brilliant but now little-remembered series for aspiring young detectives called Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, to the English thriller writer Hammond Innes, to Stephen King, to Paul Theroux, and then on to books that explained Northern Ireland’s tangled history while indicating there was a world to be explored beyond my little town. I can’t remember a lot about the South Seas in the collection, but do recall vividly an illustrated photo book detailing Thor Heyerdahl’s voyage across the Pacific in the Kon-Tiki.

Thoughts about the building and its contents came to mind when I first saw Buka’s Unity Library, the exterior of which was even more unprepossessing. The library was located behind a rusted chain-link fence on the bottom floor of a two-storey house built on the grounds of a decommissioned fuel station. Between the barrier and the house were two sets of concrete steps that led to nothing more than thin air, some sort of prescient metaphor. The house overlooked the waters of the passage, the airport that welcomed the daily flight from Port Moresby, and Buka Town’s tiny sprawl.

The library was the initiative of an Australian woman called Lesley Palmer, who was a more productive and good-natured trailing spouse than I had been. Pat, her husband, was managing a program supporting the region’s courts and police at the same time as I was in Bougainville. Each Friday night he hosted the ‘4:06 club drinks’ –‘4:06’ being a reference to the 4:06 pm knock-off time – at which various advisers working with the government would seek solace and solidarity in beer. Spurred by visits to nearby schools, and finding that often the only book to be found was the one painted on the school crest, Lesley converted the space below their living quarters into a library. She assembled thousands of books provided by supporters from Australia, affixed educational posters to the walls and created a little enclave of the imagination. Most of the library’s clientele were school-aged children. They’d line up like acolytes of the Pied Piper outside the door to gain entrance. Among the staff was Tania, an outrageously talented photographer, and Steph, a woman who wanted to be a writer but was paralysed by thinking that writing was something others did, not she. ‘Every writer in the world has this fear, this insecurity,’ I told her. This wasn’t idle flim-flam on my part; I knew exactly how she felt.

I’d finished the novels I’d bought in the airport in Johannesburg on the way over and was happy to find a library here. I found solace in the books I borrowed from Unity every bit as much as I had in those of my childhood. Although happy I had a job, I fought bouts of loneliness that felt especially acute on the many days when there was nothing to do. I missed Suzanne and I missed my boys. I didn’t want to succumb to drink, had no interest in indulging in an unhappy affair, as some had done before me, and found comfort, as I always have, in the pages of books.

Most of the books I sought out were about the history of Bougainville.¹ I supplemented these with material found in online libraries and, later, visits to the National Library of Australia, and archives in both Canberra and Oxford. I read about Louis de Bougainville,² the French navigator who sailed up the passage in 1768, naming everything around him, blithely unaware of indigenous names, in classic colonial fashion. He named the larger island after himself and the smaller one ‘Buka’ after the sound he reported was made by the people when they rowed out to his boat. ‘Buka’ means ‘who’ in one of the local languages, a not unreasonable question to ask when spotting an unfamiliar vessel with billowing sails.

The French captain did not return after naming the islands, which were left in relatively splendid isolation from the outside world until Richard Parkinson, a Danish naturalist and adventurer, arrived more than a century later to collect artefacts and natural history specimens. In his book Thirty Years in the South Seas, Parkinson wrote that he was the first white person to cross the passage between the two islands.³ While this may have been the case, we know that whalers and traders also called in on Bougainville from the early 1800s. In the mid- to late 1800s, blackbirders came, too, slavers who kidnapped islanders or tricked them onto their ships, then ferried them to Australia to work on plantations.

The Germans assumed formal charge in 1884 and divvied up territory with the British in typical colonial fashion by signing a document far away from the place itself. That document was an early forerunner to the formal documents and memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with which the present-day government seems obsessed.

In reality, the Kaiser’s ‘rule’ consisted of little more than the occasional visit to the coast by white-suited and topee-topped Germans on their coal-fired steamers. The Germans⁴ primarily regarded Bougainville as a source of good, strong and reliable labour. ‘Buka boys’ were to be found throughout the German and British Pacific as police officers, house servants and boatmen. Hugh Romilly, an administrator in British New Guinea, wrote in 1886 that: ‘Buka men … are the finest specimens of manhood in the South Seas […] [W]herever he goes, a Buka man will always be a leader.’⁵ I photographed the quote and sent it to a few Bougainvillean friends via WhatsApp, former combatants now eking out existences doing security work for the government, for which they were rarely paid. I received replies immediately, all along the lines of: ‘Even the white man … knows we are stronger than anyone else. Independence nau!’

I also read about the islands’ underacknowledged role in Second World War, about the Japanese occupation, and the American and Australian campaigns to wrest the islands back from the Japanese, which included the troop-rallying of Bob Hope, the undistinguished military career of Richard Milhous Nixon and the baseball diamonds that American troops carved out of the cleared jungle. When the Americans held movie nights in their bases, both Japanese and local Bougainvilleans would sneak up to the fence to watch the images.⁶ By head count, most victims of the war were Japanese: according to historian Hank Nelson, more than 40,000 Japanese troops died in the islands. Bougainville itself, however, also suffered enormous losses. Nelson estimates that more than a quarter of the pre–Second World War population of Bougainville perished.⁷

I read about the search for gold and other precious minerals that long drew prospectors and fortune-hunters here, as elsewhere in New Guinea.⁸ Speckled like gold dust within the accounts of anthropologists, planters (growers of coconuts and cocoa) and naturalists, and those of soldiers fighting on Bougainville, are the stories of frequently unsuccessful prospecting expeditions that failed to dim the strong conviction that riches lay there somewhere, if only the right place could be located.

In the early 1960s, around a decade after the first government school opened, Australian geologists discovered a massive, low-grade ore body (0.6% or less), containing mainly copper and gold, but also some silver and molybdenum, and occupying a huge area in the middle of the main island of Bougainville (often referred to as Bougainville Island), near a mountain called Panguna.⁹ Locally, a key feature of the topography, a rugged outcrop called Pankiranku that was of spiritual significance to the local Nasioi villagers, was destroyed when the mine site was cleared. The pit that was subsequently gouged out of the mountain was one of the largest human-made holes in the world. The engineers laid down sets of giant piping under the concrete on the road that would connect to a purpose-built port. To house the mineworkers, two towns were built: one close to the mine site, called Panguna, and one called Arawa, built on top of a copra and cocoa plantation that had previously housed a magnificent orchid collection. Into this new town came thousands, many of them of Bougainvilleans, but also people from elsewhere in PNG and a smaller number of expatriates, mostly Australians, who created a mirror image of an Australian country town in the tropics.

Among the frequently requested books in the library were those of recent vintage¹⁰ telling the story of a 10-year conflict that began a year before the Berlin Wall fell. People here called this time ‘the Crisis’. It was part ethnic in nature, pitting Bougainvilleans against the Papua New Guinean army and police,¹¹ while other elements of the Crisis were more akin to civil war. It was a conflict in ‘which many had no proud ideas’, wrote Bougainvillean academic and novelist Regis Tove Stella.¹²

The pre-eminent chronicler of this period is a man who had an office a few doors down from mine when I worked in Canberra at ANU. His name is Anthony Regan. Regan worked on Bougainville for more than 40 years. He first travelled there in 1978 to visit his sister, who was married to a Bougainvillean, and went on to do legal work for successive Bougainville governments since 1981, including service as a legal adviser during the peace negotiations. He continues to fulfil an advisory role in an informal capacity. Regan has done more than any other person to help broaden understandings of historical and contemporary Bougainville.¹³ I like Anthony a lot; he was always a gracious colleague to me when we both worked in Canberra, and generous with his knowledge and expertise when we worked together in Buka.

There is no one answer as to how the Crisis began. As the copper gushed, elements of disgruntlement, jealousies and slights among the Bougainvilleans were morphing, sticking and intermingling into combustible compounds.

Five elements emerged. The first was frustration that the government of PNG, which became independent from Australia in 1975, was receiving the bulk of royalties from the mine,¹⁴ with only a dribble going back to Bougainville’s provincial government. Element two involved the dissatisfaction of landowners close to the mine with low payments for the use and destruction of their land,¹⁵ and, particularly, with the uneven distribution of this money among different groups, suffusing the mountainscapes and valleys with jealousy.¹⁶ The third element was the Bougainvillean mineworkers’ unhappiness with the terms and conditions of their employment, especially as compared to the conditions enjoyed by expatriates and ‘redskins’ (Papua New Guineans from other provinces).¹⁷ Fourthly, tensions were bubbling between Bougainvilleans and migrants in PNG who had arrived in search of income opportunities.¹⁸ Bougainvillean salaries were the same as those of the ‘redskins’ (all of them far lower than those of expatriates). There was however, some resentment about Bougainvilleans not being promoted into BCL (Bougainville Copper Ltd, the mining company in question) low and middle-level management positions, which were held by redskins. Moreover, standards of housing were graded from low to high ‘covenant’ (as elsewhere in colonial PNG, including Port Moresby), and those employed in low-status jobs (all being ‘redskin’ or Bougainvillean) had access only to ‘low covenant’ housing.

These four elements fused with a fifth factor, the underlying unhappiness among some Bougainvilleans at being part of PNG in the first place. A sense of distinctness and separateness predated the opening of the mine.¹⁹ In 1962, local leaders told a visiting United Nations delegation that the Australians treated the Bougainvilleans like dogs, and that the administration of the islands should be turned over to the Americans, of whom there were still fond memories after the Second World War. Australian government patrol officers who visited Bougainvillean villages around that time describe in their reports the conversations they had with village chiefs, who said Bougainville should be left alone and not form part of any other country. Independence was their singing flame.

Later, in the national libraries in Port Moresby and Canberra, I found assorted copies of the Arawa Bulletin, the town’s weekly newspaper. The Bulletin is filled with no end of delicious, newsy nuggets familiar to anyone growing up in a small town in the 1970s or 1980s, with their own idiosyncratic island twists: kids’ puzzles about Tok Pisin terms for commonplace words, recipe tips (12 things to do with sweet potato), an anonymous column in which no end of scurrilous gossip was aired, and an over-the-top set of passive aggressive letters to the editor, signed off with pre-internet noms de plume such as ‘Dissatisfied’ or ‘Waiting an Explanation’. Here’s a representative example:

The Queen’s visit to Bougainville and especially Arawa was a very exciting time for everyone but I must express my disappointment at the very poor representation of the Arawa group of Brownie guides. (‘Disappointed’)

Excessive alcohol and its ill-effects were perennial themes. Much of the editor’s postbag in May of 1979 revolved around a labyrinthine ‘he-said-she-said’ as to whether a bacchanalian bevy of Hash House Harriers had gatecrashed a teenage girl’s birthday party or had been invited to it.

There was a lot of politics in the Arawa Bulletin nonetheless. Wedged between the reports from the squash league and the darts ladder in one of the April 1975 editions was a one-page advertisement labelled the ‘People’s Decision’, stating that Bougainvilleans were insecure about joining with PNG and would prefer to go it alone. A few months later, the provincial government did just that. Bougainville made a ‘Unilateral Declaration of Independence’ in 1975.²⁰ However, a country can only become ‘independent’ in the view of the world if other countries recognise it. Bougainville’s declaration of independence went unnoticed. Australia, New Zealand and the rest of the world ignored it. I could find no record in newspapers (apart from the Arawa Bulletin) that the declaration ever took place.

Years later, these compound elements became quicksilver in the hands of Francis Ona, landowner from near the mine site and a university-educated surveyor who became a haul-truck operator at the mine because it paid better. Ona was in his early thirties. He formed a group who called themselves the Bougainville Revolutionary Army – BRA for short, the name a nod to the zeitgeist of the times. In 1988, Ona and his team used dynamite pilfered from company stores to blow up electricity pylons, as well as committing other minor instances of industrial sabotage. Their initial stated aim was to create pressure for an improved share of royalties, and better terms and conditions for themselves, but soon their cause took on a nationalist dimension, connecting back to ideas of independence and referendums.²¹ Some dubbed the rebels ‘rambos’ after Sylvester Stallone’s character in the movie Rambo: First Blood Part II, which was being shown in a regular loop on the island’s one TV channel.²² Macho naming conventions may have been inspired also by the weekly diet of ‘rock ’em, sock ’em’ movies on release at the cinemas up in Panguna. In the closest Arawa Bulletin I could find to the beginning of the Crisis, the films being screened were action–adventure fare, including Kampuchea Express, Eye of the Needle, Forgotten Warrior, Arctic Heat, Bruce Lee: We Miss You and Nine Deaths of the Ninja.

The response of the Papua New Guinean security forces was akin to pouring water on an electrical fire. Their actions served less to restore order than to further inflame resentment and discontent.²³ Bougainvilleans fled into Arawa from villages around the mine, some of the internally displaced taking up residence in the grounds of the country club. The club’s committee was outraged, but not for the reasons one might expect. An emergency meeting was called, the upshot of which is recorded in one of the last issues of the Arawa Bulletin. ‘Displaced villagers will not be allowed to go on the golf course and the tennis court,’ the committee decreed. The committee’s snootiness was rendered irrelevant soon afterwards. A week later, the expats were evacuated, and the giant mining operation shut down. Over 30 years later, it is yet to reopen.

In May 1990, Ona declared Bougainville independent, with him as its leader. Australia issued a press release denouncing the rebels, while other countries ignored this declaration as pointedly as they had Bougainville’s first. The declaration of independence was published in a special edition of the Arawa Bulletin, along with photographs of dancing bands and scouts with flags. He typed out presidential decrees on subjects as wide as the dates of public holidays and onerous visa entry requirements. He or his emissaries wrote letters to Australia, New Zealand and the Swiss ambassador in Canberra seeking international recognition but received no reply. Sporadically, from 1992 onward, leaders travelled to Geneva and Vienna to present their case to the United Nations, and to a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in Harare, but there were few indications that any country supported this would-be breakaway nation’s aspirations.

* * *

Winkling out the story of what happened as the Crisis unfolded is challenging. This was not a conflict with set-piece battles, battlelines or clear sides. ‘It has seemingly deteriorated into total confusion, so that not even the people of Bougainville can tell you what the situation is,’ wrote an Australian Marist priest in a letter to his family.²⁴ In the months and years that followed, hotels and clubs were looted and burned, and shops ransacked; mining company cars were stolen, driven drunkenly around until they crashed and were stripped for scrap metal. The security forces burned houses and abused people at checkpoints; they heartlessly dangled some unfortunate people from helicopters, then flung them into the sea.²⁵ This was not even a conflict with two clear sides. As Anthony Regan writes: ‘The bitter internal conflict between Bougainvilleans undoubtedly caused more death, injury, trauma and destruction than the conflict between the PNG forces and Bougainvilleans.’²⁶

Ona and his self-styled government continued to make pronouncements, but over the years he receded from view, the stage ceded to politicians whose focus seemed to be on setting up grandly titled new structures and arguing about who should occupy them. Ceasefire agreements came and went, each lauded as ‘historic’ despite rarely lasting long enough to justify the term. Seen to be failures at the time, they would, ultimately, lead to the structuring of an agreement that would last.²⁷

In an archive at ANU in Canberra, I found the personal collection of Father Kevin Kerley, a Catholic priest who was one of the few expatriates to stay in the region during the Crisis. His archive was a glorious jumble. He had kept each and every newspaper story of those years from the Post Courier and clippings from the occasions when the Crisis was written up in the Australian press, along with details of every mass he had said, the numbers of confessions he had heard and baptisms he had conferred, not to mention varied ephemera such as ID cards, permission slips to buy altar wine, old Catholic mission magazines and a large collection of soft-plastic biscuit wrappers. Most of the stories were from the Post Courier and written in its reliably breezy style. They told of ‘militants and cops trading fire’; peace initiatives lauded always as ‘historic’; politicians complaining, urging, vowing and slamming; new committees set up and then forgotten; questionable uses of funds; and politicians squabbling over positions on ‘authorities’ that had very little authority.

And then, a twist. In an effort to end the war, which by then was close to its tenth year, the government of PNG paid millions to Sandline, a firm of British ‘security consultants’, to win the war for them.²⁸ Their efforts ended in farce. The ‘consultants’ were arrested by the Papua New Guinean army they had gone there to work with and slung into gaol. The prime minister of the time, Sir Julius Chan, stood aside. A ceasefire – the tenth – was agreed to in 1998, and this one finally stuck.²⁹ After four years of negotiations, the Peace Agreement was signed in 2001.³⁰

This war’s grim literature is poignant. In Lloyd Jones’s novel Mister Pip – shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 – the sole remaining expatriate in Bougainville after the fighting begins uses the only book remaining on the island, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, as the source material for teaching a class of orphans in a bush school outside Arawa.³¹ While not to be regarded as akin to the historical record, it’s a book marinated in the most stirring and poignant magical realism and made into an equally compelling film, starring Hugh Laurie and filmed, in part, on Bougainville.³² (After the book was published, Jones set up a library in Arawa, hoping to contribute to a legacy of literature.)

Some of the most affecting writing comes from Bougainvilleans themselves. Journalist Veronica Hatutasi’s Behind the Blockade chronicles the buckling collapse of middle-class life on the island.³³ In one chapter, she’s sipping gin and tonic in an Arawa hotel, in the next, drying her children’s tears when there is no Christmas. ‘Santa Claus will not come because no planes are coming to our island now,’ she recalls telling her children. Before the Crisis, Father Christmas used to arrive in the mining company’s chopper to dispense gifts.³⁴ Now, helicopters were full of trigger-happy soldiers, not something to encourage children to notice. There’s little need to go much farther than the title of one of Leonard Fong Roka’s self-published books to get the gist: Brokenville.³⁵ His rough-hewn but grimly compelling stories feel like an almost unending descent into petty violence and village jealousies.

In the telling of the late Regis Tove Stella, an academic and writer from Bougainville, it was a conflict with little or no moral soul. Stella’s novel Gutsini Posa (Rough Seas) lets all the protagonists have it.³⁶ The rebels, he writes, were ‘initially inebriated by nationalism’ and ‘lacked discipline, with people doing stupid things, shooting each other for trivial reasons, stealing from villagers, committing suicide, raping women’.³⁷ Penagi, the book’s central character and anti-hero, joins the rebels at the end of the book. He intervenes when he sees a fellow fighter pinning down and raping a 15-year-old girl. The commander is furious. He tears into Penagi for freeing the girl. To the rapist he says not a word of reprimand.

Stella depicts government forces as equally drunken, volatile and irresponsible, siring children and quickly abandoning the mothers, responsible for midnight knocks from which people never return. He renders the politics in Port Moresby as even worse. High-minded army officers talk principles and the importance of obeying rules, but forge letters to secure Penagi’s release from prison. Near the beginning of the book, a character in the novel describes Bougainville as a land of ‘terrified hearts and shattered dreams’, and by the end, PNG is depicted as a place of ‘false hopes and broken dreams’.³⁸

No-one knows for sure how many died, either directly in the conflict, or from preventable diseases and starvation. The estimated number of Bougainvilleans who perished ranges from 3,000 to 20,000.³⁹

Although the Crisis ended with the Peace Agreement in 2001 and the new government was formed in 2005, scar tissue from the conflict – rivalries, old and complicated divisions, grudges and jealousies – endured. Divisions between regions about the allocation of resources have carried on.⁴⁰ The statistics on domestic violence are jarring: 80 per cent of Bougainvillean men have committed intimate partner violence.⁴¹ A study sponsored by the United Nations revealed that just over one in four people had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD):

Many women said they were raped the first time they had sex … One in three of the women who first had sex under 16 years had been forced or raped.⁴²

The study came with the obligatory ministerial foreword, an obsession in all of PNG. The minister or, probably more accurately, the United Nations (UN) staffer who would have drafted the remarks on his behalf, wrote:

This study will help us design and target more effective programs for the health and safety of the people of Bougainville, and we hope it will be used by all of our development partners in this shared goal.⁴³

I was never able to find out whether such programs were developed.