9

Buka’s bestseller

Of all the books nestled in the Unity library, the one most sought after was nearly a century old, written by a woman whose once house in Walton Street, Oxford, I would have walked by for many years without knowing that our paths would one day cross on this distant shore.

Her name was Beatrice Blackwood, and her book was proving so popular in the library that two copies had already been stolen, and the remaining copy was marked with a sticker carrying the note ‘Library use only’. It was for sale elsewhere in Buka. The Adventist religious bookshop was selling copies for 200 kina (A$80) and, cost notwithstanding, there were ample customers. A local impresario scanned an out-of-focus copy of the book and was selling flash drives with their contents for a discount.

The book consisted of 600 pages of small-font, dry scholarly text and was entitled Both Sides of Buka Passage.¹ First published in 1934, it had been long out of print until a publishing press in Port Moresby reissued a gorgeous, illustrated version early in the last decade. There were 80 glossy photoplates, along with maps and drawings, including pictures of the spirits of the dead drawn on the inside covers. The book offered a literary portal into the past and evoked a time when all of PNG was something of an anthropologist’s playground.

Anthropology is the study of human societies and their development. The academic vogue of what was a relatively new discipline in the 1930s originated in a desire to find a place as different from one’s own as possible, hoping that a fellow researcher hadn’t planted their gumboots there already, and write a long book about the cradle-to-grave goings-on there.

The ‘empty’ maps of PNG were regarded as the ideal location to pursue such endeavours. As well as Blackwood, there was the Pole, Bronislaw Malinowski² in the Trobriand Islands, and Margaret Mead,³ an American who conducted her research on Manus Island. The anthropologists worked alone, enmeshed in timeless academic tangles of petty jealousy, insecurity and competition over the status of their respective publishing presses.

The level of detail they sought was extraordinary. At the archives in Oxford one damp, early autumn morning, I found a 28-page guide that Beatrice took with her to Bougainville entitled Plan of Fieldwork,⁴ a detailed paint-by-numbers handbook on what to look for. Among the information to be acquired were: tribal relations; clans and subclans; personal appearance and domestic arrangements; cleanliness of teeth; types of games played and magic conducted; ceremonies; mythology; decorative art; vegetation, fauna and mineralogical properties of the soil; and the lyrics of lullabies the people sang. Skulls were to be measured, rainfall recorded daily and the temperature gauged thrice a day. The anthropologist was expected to appraise the extent to which the language enabled fine distinctions and nuances, although how such judgements and determinations were to be made by someone who didn’t know any of the patois prior to arrival was anyone’s guess.

The major focus in the guide was on sex, to such an extent that it would have made a satyr blush. The anthropologist was asked to record details of ‘caressing, sexual acts, songs … [the] character of love and love-mating … [and] brother and sister in sex’. Also, to be recorded: conception, childbirth, child-rearing, initiation ceremonies, the everyday experience of marriage.

I was fascinated by this book and bought a copy, but it took weeks of assiduous effort to finish it. The authorial voice is humourless, stern, schoolmarmish. Beatrice reminded me of the hockey captain in an English boarding-school novel, the sort of person who would take relish in tape-measuring a fresh corpse. She followed the fieldwork guide exactingly, and her writing style was, to be charitable, dutiful. I could understand why people liked the pictures, the photos and the now sepia quality of the text, but its narrative was not gripping by any means. An academic contemporary of hers acclaimed it as ‘compact, well organised and straight to point’, which, even by the criteria of the ivory tower, was a judgement that bended the actualité. I didn’t particularly want to spend any longer with the author than the time necessary to trudge through to the end of her tome.

Then I found her letters and diaries that day in Oxford, and I began to like her more and more. The woman of the letters is knowing, amusing, ironic, wry and perplexed. She uses shorthand such as ‘dope’ for information and is an expert in the zinging aside. She is amusingly disparaging about the colonial set she comes across, who, to a person, seem to be gossipy drunks with unfounded airs and graces. Her accounts of the epic feats of drinking and complex personality-based machinations within the white set are scabrous, hilarious and touching. The doctor she meets ‘is a pig-headed, ignorant individual with no more idea about what the natives [sic] are like than the man on the moon’. Mrs Haddon and her husband, who own a plantation growing coconuts on the other side of the mission, ‘are said to be very nice when sober’, but one gains the impression that such abstemiousness was fleeting. The only people not getting sozzled are the missionaries, ‘and they are duller than ditch water’. Beatrice is propositioned by a couple of chiefs and meets a woman whose father was eaten in a cannibal rite. She is given a possum-tooth necklace and asks: ‘Shall I wear it at the next college ball?’ Most of all, she is candid about herself, about the challenges she faced and the insecurities she fought on a daily basis.

The letters and diaries have the makings of a book of picaresque journalling from the South Seas. Arthur Thomson, her supervisor and the man to whom she wrote the letters, thought they were worthy of publication. Her wary answer ensured they wouldn’t be. ‘Of course, edit them carefully and please do not leave in any of my remarks about the missionaries [and] planters, because although I heartily disapprove of both species, they both have been kind to me, and I must consider very carefully anything I say in print because it will get back here eventually’. She embodied the enduring bind of the academic, wanting to be read but feeling unable to write in a manner that would make one likely to be read beyond the narrowest of constituencies.

It is a continuing problem of representation, especially since most researchers who write about PNG continue to be not from that country. The issue remains now as it does then, namely, how can foreign (white) researchers be trusted to represent Melanesian subjects? Most of the people publishing about PNG today are academics, a small band who either know each other, or know of each other, about as well as residents of an isolated village cut off from the world by high valleys. As in any community, there are friendships, feuds, romances, quarrels over money, and places in the pecking order. I once worked at a research institution dedicated to researching Melanesia, which, when funding was cut, descended into factions and divisions as opaque and personality-based as the decisions of the governments they sought to explain through their research reports.

I’ve lodged in this academic village myself over the years, and many of the people who remain there are my friends. I was always happy to see them if we overlapped in the Holiday Inn or bumped into each other on the Monday morning flights up from Australia. Yet, here too, there would often be a difference between what was said with abandon at the Gekko Bar and what was reported in an academic paper. In person, many academics are the most chatty, gossipy, interesting people one is likely to meet; yet on the page, some can be leaden. Dogmatic conventions of academic writing prevent many from writing the way they talk. This leads many an academic author to feel duty-bound to inflict on their readers arrow after arrow of tortured and bloodless sentences, thereby consigning their painstakingly curated and passionately analysed knowledge to small print runs read by few beyond their scholarly acolytes, with at least half of whom they are likely to be feuding. Some academic writing conventions cloak everything in reference to an abstruse theoretical framework, with a prose style hostile to the vivid term. ‘I am not a travel writer, I am a serious researcher,’ harrumphs one of the Australians in Bougainvillean author Regis Tove Stella’s Mata Sara (Crooked Eyes).⁵ This is a genre in which devotees claw out the word ‘hubbub’ from a draft and nail the word ‘discontent’ in its stead. I have dipped in and out of academia because I find the occlusions of scholarly writing more of a chore than I am prepared to put up with.

At least these academic works are published, if rarely read. Some of the anaesthetised bureaucratic form I was engaging in during my time in Bougainville did not lead to publication. I’d taken to helping shoulder some of the program’s reporting burden. Compared to academia, even more of the good stuff was deemed to require excision: sensitive internal politics, accounts of foibles, zesty antics and maddening episodes – the real explanatory marrow that accounted for why the mosaic was the way it was. Instead, it was all reporting on ‘capacity development plans’, ‘frameworks’ and the like. It meant that what was presented on the page felt incomplete and inadequate. I recalled a conversation I had once in West Africa with the gender adviser to a higher-up in the United Nations. ‘I know he’s not reading my reports,’ she said to me. I was sure she was right, but how did she know? ‘Because I put the c-word in on the second page of most of them and he never pulls me up about it,’ she replied. We put a lot of work into our reports, but sometimes I felt I could have buried the translation of the Rosetta Stone in some of them and no-one would have found it. One of my favourite mordant statistics is that, of all the reports available on the World Bank website, close to a third of them have never been opened, not even once.⁶

Maybe it was the long nights in Buka, maybe it was our shared connection with Oxford, but I began to feel, to use an anthropologist’s term, a kinship with Beatrice. She was engaged in the same wrestle of what to present, and how to present it, in the same place as I was. Now that I knew her beyond her academic writing, I found her a source of solace, fascination, guidance and company. I was determined to go seek out her ghost.

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