8

Town of ghosts

Eddie and I had been rattling along for a few hours by now, passing faded signs extolling road-building partnerships. We came to a fishtail in the road. To the right was Panguna, where we’d go the next day, and to the left was Arawa. We drove past some thick bushes. Eddie remembered this as a place where he had once crashed a motorbike before the conflict, after an evening of carousing. A few minutes later we arrived in the town itself, parts of which evoked elegiac feelings. Its wide boulevards still dominated, and faded whitewashed buildings with an identifiably seventies feel gave the impression of being almost ready for their former residents to return. There was a clearly painted sign to a fish-and-chip shop and forecourts to abandoned petrol stations coated in vintage regalia of Shell and Mobil. Signs remained for Australian banks that had long since closed. Pocked around walls were fading advertisements for Winfield cigarettes and for Pepsi, which proclaimed itself ‘the choice of a new generation’, the slogan of an advertising campaign from 1986.

But this was no ghost town. Local families were living now in the former mineworkers’ houses, and the market bustled, filled with vegetables, fruit, smoked fish and beach towels bearing the names of resorts in nearby Solomon Islands. Part of old Arawa had been repurposed; the squash courts in the centre of town made for ideal trade stores. There were noticeable queues outside some establishments. One was outside the ATM at the bank, another at an ice-cream parlour, but the biggest was outside a little green-tea-coloured storefront with a handwritten sign saying ‘Gold Assayer’, another term of metallurgy that I wasn’t familiar with before going to Bougainville. It refers to someone who tests metals for quality.

Beyond the town centre were little more than evocations. The jungle had reclaimed the golf course save for a small concrete island on which stood a small urinal block. Gobbled up entirely by the foliage were the pillars of a structure Eddie thought was once the site of the town’s Masonic temple. ‘We found some really strange stuff in there,’ he said, reinforcing my suspicion of the Freemasons borne of an Irish Catholic childhood. We went looking for the writer Nancy Curtis’s house, which was on the outskirts of town, but it, too, had been swallowed.

Down at the coast, at Kieta, all that remained of the sailing club at Happy Valley was a rusted swing gate. Of the sub-aqua club there was just the stencilling on a metal sign pointing directions to where it had once been. All the buildings in Happy Valley, including the yacht club, had been carted away by villagers, who used the material to build their own houses. The house of the provincial premier was nothing more than a few rusted girders. The concrete structure at the Davara hotel, site of the Elizabethan New Year’s Eve celebrations, remained, its centrepiece swimming pool filled with grungy green water, over which a swarm of mosquitoes buzzed. Squatters were occupying many of the rooms, and the hotel’s walls were daubed with graffiti depicting guns, devil masks and the pained expression on the face of what looked like a man being taken from behind. Over at the port of Loloho, we found the detritus of rusted diggers, warehouses, pipes, a metal concentrator, bits of loading trucks, copper wire, nails and brackets. Still intact was the nozzle of the pipe that would have connected into the ship’s tank to send the copper concentrate overseas.

In the stretch of water where once the Royal Yacht Britannia had moored floated a rust bucket, tilting precariously, its white, blue and red flag slumped precipitously to one side. Sitting under the trees onshore were disconsolate and emaciated Filipinos who exuded the air of forlorn castaways, which was, in effect, what they were. They’d come here months ago at the invitation of a local member of parliament to work on a fishing project but hadn’t been paid. They had run out of money and were surviving off charity from the local church. A project trajectory of such ilk was not uncommon. Bougainville has four seats in the national parliament of PNG, and its MPs were given set sums of roughly A$3 million per annum, which they were mostly free to use as they saw fit for ‘district service improvements’. The fishing scheme was not unusual: the newspapers were full of similar such schemes that were invariably launched with promises of great potential windfalls. The fish that the Filipinos caught, so the argument went, would by some unspecified means lead to an unquantifiable but always humungous quantum of wider economic progress. Like so many projects, this one hadn’t panned out as ‘planned’.¹

‘You came on that boat?’ I asked, believing them but incredulous that the vessel in front of us could have ventured safely over any meaningful stretch of water.

‘Yes, sir,’ one of the men replied. ‘But now the engine is not working, no parts are available, and we are here under this tree.’ The MP and members of his retinue who had sponsored the initiative wasn’t returning their calls. ‘Do you have any food?’ We drove off and brought back a few wan sausage rolls from one of the trade stores. (A few months later, the Philippines Embassy in Port Moresby would arrange to pay for the men’s repatriation.)

We hired a small, motorised boat known locally as a banana boat to take us over to Arovo Island, that weekend getaway for the diving set, with tennis courts and the helicopter landing pad. Our skipper was a teenager with a tie-dyed shirt bearing the words ‘sex police’. He wore one thong on his right foot, and the Jackie Onassis-style sunglasses he toted had but one arm. ‘Half of what it once was’ was an appropriate theme for our destination. Much of the jetty at Arovo on which had once stood hip-swaying girls in grass skirts to welcome revellers ashore (as per the promotional material) had crumbled into the sea. The old social club was a half-walled ruin. It was another place where, again, only another durable urinal remained. We stood on a concrete slab the size of two double beds, which Eddie thought was the club’s old dance floor. He looked wistful. Given the conflict that followed, I had initially thought Eddie’s memories of Arawa would be reminiscent of accounts of life in apartheid-era South Africa or the Deep South of the United States. But it wasn’t so.

Sure, he did mention that there were those among the expats who, hands-on-hips, would shout racial epithets at him and fellow mineworkers, but many of his memories were of good times chasing women of all shades here at the Arovo holiday resort. He remembered Arawa largely as a carefree time where there was plenty of food, money and merriment – in all, an Arcadia of the South Pacific. He wasn’t the only one. For many in modern-day Bougainville, the old Arawa was like a compass reading of the town to which people wanted to return.

A group of men arrived minutes after us; someone had called to tell them that a white man had chartered a boat, and they came with the intention of demanding arrival fees. Eddie waved them off. The combination of ruined architecture and default distrustfulness of white skins, simultaneously desperate and grasping, seemed to perfectly encapsulate the pensive sadness that cast a pall over so much of Bougainville.

Despite it all, there was certainly industry and activity on Arovo. That Sunday morning, even though it was early, we found about five people hacking away at the jungle with bush knives. Emerging out of this jungle like a modern-day Ben Gunn came a man who introduced himself as Bruce. He was a New Zealander, part Maori, part Irish, his body heavily tattooed. The designs were predominantly of Pacific origin, except for one on his right arm of two Kalashnikovs meeting at their tips, akin to the hastily devised coat of arms of a tin-pot Marxist liberation insurgency.

Bruce said he had returned home. Born in New Zealand, he had grown up on a cocoa plantation a little north of Arawa during the times of the mine and had found it hard to adjust when he moved back to New Zealand. He ran away from the family home, worked first as a farm labourer, then joined the New Zealand Army. He was demobbed and found work as a military contractor, fighting his way through Libya, Syria and Somalia. While in Mogadishu, he and his team (a Frenchman who had by then revealed himself as an outright charlatan, an Australian cop who didn’t seem to know one end of a rifle from another, and a fellow Kiwi who did) found themselves pinned down in an ambush. Fearing they would lose their lives, he rang his children on the satellite phone, convinced this would be the last time they would speak. The thoughts he believed would be his last were of Bougainville, of the calm of the plantation, of waters the colours of opal and lapis lazuli, and the mists that shrouded the high mountains of the Crown Prince Range.

Something clicked in Bruce, and he was determined to get back. In the middle of the night, they made their escape, crawling out over the beach into the sea and floating down shore to emerge near the UN compound, where they found sanctuary. He quit his job soon after, and his next stop was Bougainville, where he was trying to project-manage the dream of making Arova Island a resort location once again, this time without the colonial and faintly racialist overtones of earlier days.

He had been busy. He and a small team had cleared the bush around the social club and were chopping out the thick knots of foliage around the accommodation blocks (where the structure and a few of the toilet bowls were intact, one containing a freshly dispatched poo). I could see their vision: the bar and grill would serve cold beer and fish fetched straight from the waters around the island. Their plan was for this to be the sort of place where large cruise ships could dock for food and trinkets, and tip handsomely for singsing performances. It was slow work, the hardest part being getting the local chiefs together to agree on a course of action and tempering their expectations that this little venture was going to make outsized profits immediately. Bruce seemed a man entirely content with himself and the life choices he had made. I envied his sense of purpose and activity, because I experienced many days in Bougainville sitting around the administration where I felt that I had much less. He was surprised by the number of visitors he had, former mineworkers and their families making pilgrimage back to Arovo. They would point to where their favourite barstool was located and recount their old carouses. The boatload of spontaneous rent-seekers we had met on our arrival showed that achieving this vision would be tough work.

* * *

We were the only guests in the Arawa Traveller’s Inn that night. The rooms were pleasant, if bare, and the upstairs bar was of a good enough elevation to catch a wisp of breeze as the sun went down. We ordered dinner, beef in black bean sauce, rice and a few bottles of SP beer to wash it down with.

Eddie spoke about the prospects of an independent Bougainville. The vote was drawing close, and he was confident it would be a thumping majority for independence. Bougainville’s current halfway-house political arrangements had delivered little, and better times were ahead. He was bullish, his argument similar to one advanced by most Bougainville leaders: ‘We have cocoa, we have fisheries, we have gold and we have copper,’ they would say. ‘Bougainville is far better off without Papua New Guinea.’ And without independence, what had they been fighting for?

Eddie was spot-on when it came to Bougainville’s ample natural resources. There was copper and gold in the hills above us worth an estimated A$60 billion,² and Bougainville sat slap-bang within some of the richest waters for tuna fish in the world. As much as I wanted to embrace Eddie’s optimism, my internal reality check resurfaced unbidden: what the place didn’t have was a functioning administration that could deal with the complexities of resources management and of using the revenue generated to fund hospitals, schools and roads. Sometimes I felt there was an almost hallucinatory quality to these conversations about independence. Eddie and the others could see something tangible and thought it so easy to do, whereas before my eyes it was all a blur.

I woke early the next morning and went for a jog before the heat became too intense, speeding up whenever I passed groups of inebriates drinking beer and home brew, and swaying to the sounds of death metal emanating from the tinny speakers on their mobile phones. In most cases I was ignored in a good-natured sort of way, but sometimes, after running about 20 metres past them, I’d hear ‘White man!’ and a chorale of guttural laughs that followed. I didn’t feel threatened, but it reinforced how much my skin colour carried clear and sullen associations in this little town. Unlike Buka, or anywhere else I’d been in PNG, this town also had no Chinese trade stores or shops. Local Bougainvilleans had chased them out. Of their autonomous government there was no sign, but of this being a town in a Bougainville nation there was no question.

After breakfast, we went to the park where the Peace Agreement was signed in 2001. The signatories had been carried aloft on bamboo chairs to the signing ceremony through what was by then a ruined place. It was quiet that morning, just a few drunks sleeping it off under the shade of a metal piece of public art in the shape of a globe, which reminded me of the lakeside sculpture in Canberra that marks the various voyages of Captain Cook. On this globe, the entirety of the Americas had been torn off. We then drove out past Arawa’s airport to look for General Sam Kauona, one of Eddie’s colleagues from the Crisis, but he wasn’t at his home on the beach. He must be off on another film shoot, I speculated with a grin. A few years previously, Sam had played a starring role in a Discovery Channel series about an Alaskan family who travelled to Bougainville to find gold. Entitled The Legend of Croc Gold,³ the series unfolded like the plot of a Shirley Conran novel, reinforcing the image of PNG as a place where the jungle drums beat and a large broth of bones is on the boil. Sam hammed it up in the role of wily chief. No gold was found, and the family departed empty-handed and empty-pocketed. It was fun to compare and contrast the daft confection on TV with the reality. The show presented the family as living in a jungle camp when they actually lived in the Traveller’s Inn’s competitor hotel, the Gold Dust.

On to Panguna, and an encounter with two old men on duty at the Morgan Junction checkpoint, which comprised an assemblage of metal cast-offs from the mine site itself, including a ‘DANGER – KEEP OUT’ sign filched from the old explosives stores. The men were in charge of a rusted boom gate at the beginning of the turnoff to the alpine road; the barrier was down, and it was clear it wasn’t going to be raised until we paid what one of the men described in Tok Pisin to Eddie as ‘200 kina white man’ fee (about A$80 at the time) and to me, in English, as a ‘peacebuilding facilitation charge’. The money, he dissembled, would be put to various community goodwill projects, and when he issued the receipt, he labelled his exaction as a ‘no-go zone entry tax for foreigners’. The receipt was issued in the name of the ‘Kingdom of Papaala’ – which, in tangible terms, consisted of not much more than the checkpoint itself. A certain Noah Musingku,⁴ who called himself King David Peii II of Papaala – named after President Momis’s forefather – ran this ‘kingdom’. This was a man who had once presided over a pyramid scheme that ensnared many residents of Port Moresby. He lived to the south and wore, it was said, a crown smithed from Macedonian gold. This ‘king’ issued his own currency from a printing press once guarded by Fijian mercenaries. He made government out to be so magical that it required no work. A journalist from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) filed a story that when he’d once visited the self-anointed king, he found him typing on a computer unconnected to any power-source.⁵

Then onward, up the road still as smooth as chiffon, to Panguna. I’d heard and read so much about this place, knew how long it had been abandoned, but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer magnitude of its scale and desolation: roofless cathedrals of metal that once housed ball mills, compactors that made the copper into a liquid concentrate, towering conveyor belts, giant slabs of concrete on which there had once been mess halls for hundreds of staff at a time. The whole ensemble reminded me of the abandoned mining colony in the movie Aliens. The complex went on for miles in every direction, a scurry of feeder roads, lanes and abandoned buildings. Much of the metal had been taken already, sold on for scrap.

We drove through the ghost slopes of the once mountain of Panguna and into the pit itself, with its phosphorescent and polluted pools of water – the purple, blue, azure and green colours on display the result of chemical coagulation – and rocks discoloured into kaleidoscopes of green and dark blue by the copper. From the lips of the mine to its base, the drive took 15 minutes. Back in the day this was a 24-hour operation of noise, heat and light, as three shift crews worked in diggers to excavate the soil and load it into the giant compressors for sorting. Not now. The mine was silent. But it was still active. Indented all around the pit site were brown tarpaulins held up with wooden poles. Close to each of these tents were three or four people hacking at the rock. Old men, middle-aged men, young men, and boys who looked as young as 10 were attacking the rock and soil with shovels and trowels; some were using their hands. They bundled up the rock onto their stomachs and then cradled it onto a griddle where one of the team would wash the soil off in the hope of finding trace elements of gold, or even a chunk. We talked to one of the teams – a man called James, two of his sons and their cousin – who said they’d been working on their patch of slope for more than two years. Each man was bare-chested, sweat rivulets dripping from their shoulders and chests.

And it was deeply hazardous work they were engaged in. Apart from frequent landslides, the risks that came from sticking hands deep into toxic soil on a regular basis were immense. The men and children worked with mercury for separation of the gold from the rock. Working incorrectly with that element could lead to mental illness, death or serious injury. This is what is quaintly termed ‘artisanal mining’.⁶

It was a world away from the technological and mechanical implements used on Panguna in the 1970s and 1980s. The fossickers stayed for weeks at a time up at the Panguna site, mauling, grabbing and scrabbling at the rock, then headed into Arawa to the small hideaway stores that weighed, assayed and paid them in cash for their wares. It could be lucrative. Gold worth more than A$40 million leaves Bougainville each year, a tiny amount compared to what it would be onsold for, a tiny amount compared to the billions’ worth of gold still in the ground. More than 10,000 Bougainvilleans engage in this work.⁷

We asked James how much he was making. He didn’t volunteer a direct answer but said he was able to pay for school fees for his younger children and other relatives back in the village; his comment triggered a memory of an evocatively titled academic article – a rare thing in itself – that I had read some time earlier. The article was entitled ‘Paying a School Fee Is a Father’s Duty’.⁸ James didn’t look affluent, and if earnings were truly equated with hard labour, he certainly had more than earned his share; I didn’t begrudge him one cent. I peeked inside his family’s tent on the way back to the car. There were two bits of shipping pallet for the miners to sleep on, a couple of rusty pots and pans, two cups, an exercise book with a picture of a bird of paradise on the front, and a candle bearing the image of Our Lady of Fatima. Immediately outside the flaps of the tent, a small pyramid of sweet potatoes was stacked, with a fresh-looking Bougainville flag on top.

On the way back home, Eddie and I talked about whether the mine would ever reopen in the manner in which it had once operated. Bougainville Copper still exists as a company; Rio Tinto divested itself of its shares in 2016, and the governments in Buka and Port Moresby are each 36.4-per cent shareholders, but progress towards reopening the mine has stalled, although there has been no shortage of companies angling for the chance to start it up. It has been shut for more than 30 years now. However, that estimated A$60 billion of minerals sitting under the soil represents the best chance Bougainville has of being able to fund its independence.⁹

It would be costly and risky to reopen. Not counting the expense of the environmental clean-up, there would also be the costs of replacing equipment, ensuring the site is safe, refurbishing transport corridors and hiring staff, including the consultants, advisers, engineers, lawyers and others who don’t actually work the mines but are essential to its well-oiled wheels. And then, the laws. Bougainville’s mining laws are in place already – they constitute one of the powers that have been drawn down¹⁰ – but many others would be needed, too, to cover everything from work visas to environmental remediation, and to ensure that adherence to these laws did not languish in the magical jungle of paper tigers, enforced by a team of effective bureaucrats. A fully operational mine, along with its seed money for independence, still seems a far-off prospect. There has been progress on this, at least. In 2022, the Bougainville government and landowners from the Panguna mine area reached a joint resolution to reopen the Panguna copper and gold mine. It is the first step on a long road, but an important one.

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