7

The road to Arawa

At what felt like each kilometre of the bony road of yellowed dust from Buka Town towards Panguna and the old capital of Arawa, Eddie Mohin pointed out vanished landmarks of the Bougainville conflict. Imperceptible to my eye, they were as real to him as the navy-blue University of Oxford cap on his head. This is the part of the road where a helicopter strafed us; this is where there was once a defence force post that we attacked in the dead of night; this is where one of our comrades was shot; this is where we captured this person; this is where I kidnapped the man who is now the region’s president; this is where I played the guitar and sang with the peacekeepers who came after the ceasefire; and there, over to the mountains, far away, beyond lie the two rivers where the tailings swept out to sea.¹

‘Tailings’ is a word I had not heard before I went to Bougainville. It is a polite term for the sludgy and toxic by-product of mining operations. More than a billion tonnes of such slag were dumped into two of Bougainville’s rivers – the Jaba and the Kawerong – during the 17 years of the Panguna mine’s operations.² It killed off the fish³ and the river crocodiles, and created a moonscape of silted high banks, along with a massive, toxic delta in the ocean at the mouth of the Jaba River. Sores, skin disorders, continual gastric problems and high rates of miscarriage remain to this day as grim legacies of the tailings.⁴

Eddie drove one of the big yellow 10-wheel haul trucks at the mine and, later, was a commander in the BRA. He became a member of the team that negotiated the Peace Agreement and, subsequently, a member of the commission that developed Bougainville’s constitution. A poet, a guitarist, sometimes an evangelical preacher, he was reputed to have been a bit of a hellraiser back in the day. Eddie wore an array of hats and baseball caps so frequently that I was always surprised when on rare occasions he took one off to reveal a shiny, bald head.

Eddie’s life was more serene now. He and his wife Fidelma tended their ‘gardens’ – a patch of land in a clearing of jungle with coconuts, taro and green vegetables, a few kilometres walk up a steep mountain path from their house. He ran for parliament a couple of times but never had the money required to secure the votes. He was in his fifties but still sinewy, a person of clear stature and authority. If any problems arose in Buka or surrounds, the police would call Eddie, not because they suspected him of any involvement, but because his moral authority and reach outweighed their own. Sometimes he did odd jobs for the Bougainville government, for which he was rarely paid, out of a sense of duty to his long-gestating nation.

I had met Eddie at one of the workshops at the Lands Office, and we’d spent some weekends walking in Buka Island. We would start near his village, passing through overgrown plantations, past stones, trees, and markers that carried meanings to his clan, towards little knotted tree shelters high up on the mountain slopes and waterfalls, places where he said the spirits gathered at night. He’d go immediately before me on our perambulations, bush knife in hand, thwacking away bush and carving out little steps in the jungle floor to help me down vertiginous descents that would dissolve with the next rains. These walks were frequently challenging. Once we went with the ‘tax and revenue’ adviser and feared he would not be able to deliver on his efforts to improve the government’s dire revenue position because the challenge of ascending an acclivitous, muddied mountain slope threatened to provoke in him a massive heart attack.

Eddie’s village was Kahule, located about 20 kilometres from Buka Town over scrabbled, holed and jagged stone that formed part of the ‘Buka Island ring road’. It was a village of about 100 bush huts made from wood, palm and rattan, and a school painted red with no books and no windows, but with small signs atop the doors overwritten with words emanating from another era, such as ‘common room’ and ‘duty prefect’. In the village hall, handwritten organisational charts for various village committees were on display, all of which Eddie appeared to sit on.

We passed through the rusting detritus of the Second World War on our walks: bits of tanks, cylinders, aeroplane propellers. Eddie said his father remembered the flashes and noise as the planes roared overhead. Before all the armies left after the armistice in 1945, soldiers buried much of their armaments into the soft ground at Torokina, off the west coast, and abandoned incapacitated vehicles right where they had stopped. When seeking to arm himself for his war, Eddie and his contemporaries had asked their fathers where the machine guns, rifles and pistols were hidden and dug them up, using mechanical know-how acquired from the mine to repurpose turrets from downed planes, and bits of metal, into weapons. The samurai swords the Japanese left behind proved useful for both ceremonial adornment on the rare occasion that a journalist came visiting, and for close-quarters lancing.

Visiting Kahule provided me with a reality check on life in Bougainville – its precarity, its obligations and its costs. This was an expensive place, even by Australian standards. A round trip on the rattletrap cattle truck that people stood in to get into Buka each day cost the equivalent of A$5–10. No-one was rich by any conventional standards, and people spent their days up the mountain with bush knives, tending their gardens. Everyone wore second-hand clothing. I’d pass Eddie some money for his guiding, but no matter how much it was, it felt insubstantial and never enough to cover the expenses of his life.

Eddie came into town a few days each week, either cramming himself into the rattletrap truck that bumped and ground its way through the craters on his road or catching a banana boat. We would meet up at ‘Ralph’s kai bar’ for a meat pie, chicken and sweet potato chips. He’d talk about how he was going to do some security work for the government. I’d ask him if he’d been paid for the previous work.

I felt for Eddie. He was a talented man, and his story of dashed potential and sputters of paid work was commonplace. There were too many men like Eddie in modern-day Bougainville, men who spent day after idle day with too little to do, scrawny reward for years of conflict and dedication to the singing flame. If anything, the generation younger than his were in an even more wretched state. I’d see many of them every day in Buka. The clothes they wore were vintage cast-offs from Australia and elsewhere, bearing images of rugby league teams, Baywatch stars, a young Kylie Minogue, forgotten political campaigns for local councils and national office. I once saw a young man wearing a red ‘Kevin ’07’ T-shirt, the Kevin being Kevin Rudd, twice prime minister of Australia, the ‘’07’ referring to 2007, the year Rudd won a federal election for the first time. The young folk would loll up and down the main drag, standing underneath the awnings of shops to snatch some shade, eyes deadened. These walkers up and down are known by the shorthand of the ‘lost generation’,⁵ an entire swathe of the population who missed their schooling because of the Crisis. While referenced frequently as a problem, there are so many of them that it is hard to know what to do with them. They are like one of Bougainville’s volcanoes: smouldering.

I was curious to see Arawa, and Eddie had offered to be my guide. I relished trips like this, as they made me feel more alive than being in the office, and I presumed Eddie was glad of a break from the usual routine. We had crossed over on the one-car ferry from Buka Island that morning and headed down the road. The ferryboat was painted gun-steel grey and had once been a landing craft used by the Papua New Guinean army during the Crisis. It was called the Buka Babe, and on it the fresh, cobalt-coloured flag of Bougainville, with the distinctive upe at its centre, flapped in the breeze.

We passed an abandoned coconut plantation, and I asked Eddie about his grandfather, ‘Kerosene’, who had once worked as a manservant there. ‘Kerosene’ wasn’t his real name; a white man had given him the moniker, a bastardisation of ‘Tsorohin’, the name of the village on Buka Island from which he hailed. The white man was called Robert Stuart. He had arrived in Bougainville in the 1920s and stayed here for 40 years. Stuart wrote a vigorous account of his japes and antebellum attitudes as a copra plantation manager and owner in a memoir entitled Nuts to You (1977).⁶ It evokes a distinct time-capsule quality of the era in which Eddie grew up, when strict separation between the races prevailed and whites in white suits ran the roost, applying an approach to people-management that could be characterised as: ‘Don’t give them too much for Christmas because it’ll only make them soft.’

Are things really that much different now in independent Papua New Guinea?

Dual pay and conditions between expatriate and nationals has been a perpetual issue across many sectors in PNG. Scholars have identified as much as a 9:1 gap between salaries, a ceiling described as ‘more like concrete than glass’.⁷ In the last decade, cracks in this ceiling have emerged in other traditionally ‘expat’ prominent industries such as mining and accounting. Yet, in development, wage imbalance seems harder to shift.

Away from Bougainville, I would co-research an academic article that explored the experiences of men – both ‘local’ and ‘international’ – who work or have worked in the development sector in PNG.⁸ Their multiple narratives showed how a combination of pay variations, different cultural vantage points, and bureaucratic dynamics left both constituencies feeling inconsequential, diminished and disempowered. Decades on from the time of Eddie’s father, there may be more similarities than we would like to believe, including in the industry in which I was working.

I had been behind the steering wheel so far, but Eddie suggested that he drive over the torrent at Aita, which was about the halfway point of the three-hour drive. I was happy to give up the driver’s seat. He had more experience in circumnavigating river crossings than I did; besides, having him at the wheel meant there was less chance we’d be accosted for fees for the crossing. The bridge spanning the river had collapsed some time previously, and now men gathered on either side demanding money, although it was not exactly clear to me what service they were providing. The leader of these opportunistic men had the oddest of nom de plumes it is possible to conceive of. His given name was Laurence, but he luxuriated in the nickname of ‘The Black Pussy’, which indicated he was either a supremely confident fellow or not across the finer subtleties of idiomatic English. The man himself wasn’t there that day, and we were waved through by three inebriates wearing T-shirts of, respectively, Iron Maiden, Slayer and Rage Against the Machine.

‘They think all white people have plenty of money,’ said Eddie, ‘and you’ve always come here to take our riches.’ It seemed impossible to escape one’s skin colour here, and there was certainly enough recent history to support such a view: the prospectors and fortune-hunters who flocked to Bougainville to search for gold,⁹ and the planters who came to try their luck at making money from coconuts and cocoa, were only the beginning.

The gold and copper discovered in the early 1960s on Bougainville Island were found near Panguna, in the mountains of central Bougainville, about 15 kilometres from the coast and a one-day upward slog through thick jungle. To bring roads to a roadless jungle, helicopters ferried parts of bulldozers for assemblage onsite, along with diamond-tipped drills forged to burrow deep into the precipitous slopes. What was found exceeded the highest expectations: it was among the largest bodies of copper ore in the world. To extract the copper required shifting 11 million cubic metres of land and the creation of a road descending steeply from the cloud-covered mountain to the coast in a place where most villagers had never even seen a car, let alone earthmovers. Helicopters whirred and bulldozers clanked, as tradies drawn from all over the world dug the pit and paved what was named the ‘alpine road’.

The initial residents of Arawa were predominantly men, many of them roistering, trailblazer types. Through some dogged internet searching, I met up with a post-war German immigrant to Australia now living near a riverbend close to the coast south of Sydney, in a house with wooden panels, a walled library of VHS videos and the faint odour of Old Spice.¹⁰ He had been an accountant for Bechtel, the company responsible for building the town and the infrastructure, and when I met him he had been running a website for a while, putting up pictures from the early days. The frequency of the posts is slowing now: many of the old hands are in their seventies and dying off, some from the skin cancer occasioned by melanomas on their back, the result of too much swimming and beach cricket out in the remorseless, beating tropical sun.

His tales of the 1970s and 1980s were Rabelaisian, and he told them with a brio that he thought he’d lost. He told of drunken games of snakes and ladders, in which as much as a month’s wages could be staked on the outcome; competitions for who could string together the longest posy of ring-pulls from beer cans, and something called a beer snake made from plastic vessels – all epic tales of drinking. It was no small wonder that anything was accomplished at all. The men had nicknames like ‘Stretchy’, ‘Spud’ and ‘Chopper’. Many sported droopy moustaches; in some cases these were paired with amply sized guts. At least a few seemed to be fleeing the complications of personal lives elsewhere. This man’s name was Peter, and his English was perfect, but he reflected on the fact that so many of the Australians in Arawa had been unable to read or write in English. Many were recent immigrants from non-English-speaking parts of Europe, and the complex engineering instructions they were given had to be delivered through pantomime-style miming actions. In the early days it would have been a place of not insignificant heterosexual frustration. There were approximately 10,000 men and 10 single women at the mine site during the construction phase. The single men lived in small convertible huts plastered with self-waxed pictures from Playboy magazine.

The newcomers brought old grudges with them. When the ecologist Richard West visited Arawa in 1970, two years before the mine opened, he wrote in his book River of Tears that many of the Australians there had come directly from then-Yugoslavia and divided themselves along Serb and Croat lines.¹¹ His account of a Sunday morning in the Arawa of that time is vivid: broken beer bottles, crushed beer cans and Bougainvillean children who were heading for a choral festival being followed around by braying construction workers. ‘How can you expect the native (sic) to have any respect for us?’ an Australian engineer lamented to West.¹²

Arawa was designed and built according to the idealised image of an Australian country town, which was tempting to the company executives, miners and business owners, and their families. It had wide boulevards, playing fields, squash courts, a swimming pool, a golf course, a public library, an interdenominational church, a Masonic temple, a choice of hair salons and cinemas, and the largest supermarket in PNG. At the time of its completion, the output of the new thermal power station equalled twice the total amount of electricity generated throughout the rest of PNG. This was tropical adventure with flared trousers, refrigeration and all the creature comforts.

Prominent visitors came from far and wide. Queen Elizabeth and family (including honeymooners Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips) visited on the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1974. The wharf was lowered by 12 inches (30 centimetres) to save the royal party the exertion of having to step down from their launch onto the shore, and a wooden lavatory seat was flown in by special charter the day before because the one in the guest room where the Queen and the Prince were to stay was found to have a crack in it. Prince Philip drove up to the mine himself in a Land Rover via the recently laid alpine-grade road.

Writers lived in and visited Arawa. Nancy Curtis wrote a book for young readers set in Bougainville and sponsored by the company about the adventures of a boy called Little Chimbu.¹³ (In Little Chimbu in Bougainville, the boy is rescued by the company helicopter after falling into a slurry pit.) Hammond Innes, a Scottish adventure–thriller writer whose books I’d once borrowed from my local library, also showed up a year after that book was published, seeking inspiration. All Innes’s books were set in lands that to a child raised in rural Northern Ireland seemed impossibly exotic and distant. His books brought him fame, and his approach was to parlay his renown to secure an all-expenses trip and then structure a story around the visit. I don’t recall reading his book set in Bougainville when I was younger, but it made for eerie reading when I read it during my time there. Entitled Solomons Seal and published in 1980, its plot revolved around how the untold riches of the mine uncorked the elements for a shifting and shapeless conflict.¹⁴ Part of the book was set on Sohano, the little island that was my Bougainville home. The novel’s character list included British mercenaries who arrived in Bougainville with weapons hidden and seeking access to the islands’ resources. When published, reviewers deemed it diverting but far-fetched, yet most of his outlandish plot would turn out to be presciently clairvoyant. Innes’s fictional mercenaries, however, were more successful than their real-world counterparts.

By the time Innes visited Bougainville, Arawa had settled into its rhythms. The Australian expats brought caricatured names from British colonies they aspired to recreate. The strip of coast where the sailing club was located was known as ‘Happy Valley’. It was a town of resolutely bourgeois pursuits. There was a country club, a Lions Club and clubs for squash, golf, cricket, diving, darts, pottery, jazz and every other conceivable hobby. The Returned Services League (RSL), with its ‘Cork and Fork’ restaurant, was one of the most humming places in town. There was a penchant for theme nights, such as the Guy Fawkes ball over at the RSL (‘Come dressed for plenty of arson around’), and the Elizabethan-themed, knees-up New Year’s Eve bash at the Davara hotel, complete with a picture of a headless Tudor queen in a halter-neck top carrying her own bonce. Food was reassuringly bland. ‘Nothing will be too hot and spicy!’ assured the advertisement accompanying the ‘Mexican fiesta’. Santa Claus would arrive to the kids’ Christmas party in the mining company’s helicopter to enact the same gift-dispensing ritual Veronica Hatutasi would one day have to dissuade her crying children from longing for. A short boat ride away from Arawa was the holiday island of Arovo, with its beach bar, nightclub, tennis courts and helicopter landing pad.

Families lived in the centre of town in purpose-built houses, while the single men lived in small convertible huts dotted around. Roles were disaggregated by gender. Sporting either tight-at-the-crotch shorts and knee socks or bellbottom trousers, the men would jump into Volkswagen vans and head off to work. Their partners – big hair and make-up liquifying in the heat – held a dazzling array of coffee mornings. Once a month there was a women’s discussion group, where topics for debate included: ‘Can married women have men friends?’ The employees of the mine were earning more money than they could have dreamed of back in Australia. There was so much money sloshing around that unscrupulous real estate agents would come up from Australia to swindle people into buying blocks of land on floodplains there.

Arawa and its surroundings was not just home to white expatriates. Men from elsewhere in PNG arrived to take up jobs at the mine. The Bougainvilleans called them ‘redskins’ because their skin was more brown in hue than their own deep black skin.¹⁵ My colleague and friend George was one of the newcomers. He had returned to Arawa for a funeral the year before my visit, the first time he had visited in more than 40 years. Seeing the town now, and comparing it to what it was in his heyday, saddened him immensely.

The picture that emerges of Arawa at its peak is of a boozy and good-natured place with varying levels of gaucheness, hijinks and poorly disguised marital affairs. For the Australians, this was as deeply insular and intolerant of difference as any small town in Australia of its time. A friend of mine lived in Arawa as a little girl, and her childhood memories included seeing adults getting steadily more and more smashed at weekend parties while she and her brother grew fidgety and tired, waiting for the grown-ups to finish with their merrymaking and drunk-drive home. I tried to contact some of the Australians who had lived in Arawa at that time. Many of them didn’t want to talk to me, as was their prerogative. One explained that my inquiries were bringing back too many happy memories that had long since been wrenched away. ‘One weekend we were playing golf, and a few weeks later we were being evacuated,’ another said, poignantly. Many struggled to return to living in reduced financial circumstances when they went home, and a fair few found it hard to find work again. Arawa was an irrecoverable time. I was curious to see what remained.

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