10

Beatrice’s Bougainville

When Beatrice Blackwood sailed from Australia to the mandated territory of New Guinea on the S.S. Montoro in 1929, she had just turned 40, held a position as an anthropologist from Oxford University, had previously completed fieldwork among native Americans in the state of Arizona, and was closing in on her research goal of finding ‘an island somewhere in the Pacific with the least possible amount of contact with white people and go and live in it’. Funded by the unambiguously named Committee for Research on the Problems of Sex, her plan was to discern the goings-on in a ‘primitive’ society, for such was the endeavour in vogue in anthropology at the time.

Her journey took her from England around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, through the Southern Ocean to Sydney, then onward to Rabaul, the capital of the Territory of New Guinea. This final leg was ‘chock-full of missionaries’, she wrote to her supervisor, Thomson, in her first dispatch, which she penned on the Scottish thistle letterhead of the shipping company. She shared a cabin with an old island hand, a woman returning with her newborn child. In the manner of expatriates to this day, the woman was only too happy to wax knowledgeably to the newcomer about her wide breadth of understanding in such a manner as to make the tenderfoot feel apprehensive. Upon arrival in Rabaul, Beatrice spent a week in a hotel she described as being an ‘abomination of desolation’. She shared a room with a woman who was the chief suspect in a murder investigation following her husband’s death from arsenic poisoning three months earlier.

Beatrice met with Chinnery, the government anthropologist, who was facilitating her entry into what she hoped would be an impenetrable fastness. Bougainville seemed like a ready-made sort of place to fulfil Beatrice’s objective of splendid isolation. Large parts were untouched by either the governmental or missionary contact that anthropologists so dreaded, as either presence was deemed to sully their pursuit of the authentically exotic. The Australians notionally controlled the territory, having taken over from Germany as part of the settlement of Versailles.

Chinnery gave her a revolver to protect herself on location but, when she arrived, she found that the major danger she faced was tedium. The site selected for her did not match her expectations. That was the island of Petats, just off Buka Island. She found the people there were what she called ‘erstwhile savages’, living in not quite as primitive and primordial a state as she had been hoping to find. The people were at the ‘half-sophisticated-half-barbarian stage, where one doesn’t know which way to treat them, and they are overrun by missionaries’, she lamented. There had been way too much preaching and choral music, and it ‘was distinctly disconcerting to find the blighters going to church every evening and twice on a Sunday’. Anthropologists at that time were congenitally contemptuous about missionaries, my theory being that this was partially out of an insecurity that they would find the missionaries to be more embedded, well-informed and linguistically adroit than were the anthropologists themselves.¹

As my anthropologist friend Siobhan surmised, there might have been sexism in the choice of location: the men of the Australian colonial administration did not feel that ‘off-the-map’ areas were places for women. Another location, Kurtatchi, seemed to offer richer pickings. It was on the larger Bougainville Island and closer to the image of authentic primordialism that had been in her mind’s eye ever since Oxford. In her book, she renders her arrival in Kurtatchi as positively natural and matter-of-fact. Punari, the village’s headman and paramount chief for the area, invited her for a visit. She liked what she saw and paid for a house elevated on stilts to be built for her in the centre of the village, which enabled her to watch the comings and goings as if she were atop a panopticon. Beatrice brought along to Kurtatchi a servant called Ross, ‘who had worked for white people and knew what was required of him’. (Ross was named after the white man his father had once worked for.) She told the residents of Kurtatchi that her people – who lived very far away – had sent her there to see what kind of folk they were. The reason she needed to ask them so many detailed questions was to help her give a full and well-rounded account back to her own chief. ‘The natives are unspoiled and unsophisticated … [I]nstead of thinking that they are doing me a favour in talking to me, they are proud to have me and very keen to tell me,’ she wrote to Thomson. The backstory is that Mrs Haddon, daughter of Parkinson, the Dane, had helped to facilitate the visit.

Regardless of how she got there, Beatrice was a woman of clearly remarkable gifts of persuasion. She was able to persuade the residents of Kurtatchi to cough up no end of details about their customs, secrets and taboos. She persuaded young men to draw pictures of the urar, the spirits of the dead, and acquired from them bull roarers – wooden, spatula-like contraptions that, when swung fast on a rope, made an ominous rumble. Young men would come up to her, unbidden, with bunches of mulched leaves and whisper how they could be used to gain the favours of women, information exchanged for a few of Beatrice’s cigarette butts and bandages to heal their suppurating tropical leg ulcers. Young women invited her to their menstruation ceremonies, and she was present at a few births. She asked and was duly told in elaborate detail about tightly held poisoning techniques. Beatrice took photographs of the women and men who had undergone cicastration, an ornate process of body tattooing by which marks were made on the skin with flints of glass and coral, but she told Thomson that her interest in participant research didn’t extend that far. She ripped pages from her notebooks and asked the villagers – most of whom would have been holding a pencil or crayon for the first time – to draw pictures of the spirits of the dead. She collected details of the people’s diet with a view to ascertaining its vitamin content; recorded temperatures and rainfall every morning, noon and evening; and carried out body measurements. Initially, she defecated behind a bush but changed her toileting habits when the villagers found such actions prudish; feeling no necessity to maintain English decorum, she subsequently dropped her trousers to relieve herself as and when.

Evenings were a fertile time for gathering stories. The villagers were ‘afraid to walk in the bush after dark, as there are devils in there’, so they crowded around her house and told her stories. She gave old copies of the English Sunday broadsheet The Observer to the men of the village, who used them to roll up their tobacco as they talked. Blackwood collected 91 verbatim reports of the villagers’ actual dreams, told to her in the early light of morning when she’d wander around the village asking ‘if anyone had any dreams the previous night’. She happily pried into every villager’s sex life and penned accounts of her interviews entitled ‘The homosexual maniac’, ‘The man who didn’t know about sex’, ‘The man who copulated with a dog’, ‘The woman caught with a lover’, ‘The impotent man named Wasein’, ’The unfaithful wife returns and a man is killed’ and ‘The woman who had sex with a banana’. Extraordinary stuff: I couldn’t imagine asking any person in Bougainville such questions about the inner recesses of their interior lives, lest they throw me headfirst into the fast-moving current of the Buka Passage. And what reception would a South Sea Islander be given if they showed up in an Oxford college putting forward inquisition as a methodology?

Beatrice travelled extensively in her year in Bougainville, with a haversack on one shoulder and her tabby cat, Felicia, often on the other, and a long line of what she called the natives behind her carrying her bed, table, chair, typewriter, pots and pans, food boxes and a bathtub that would be used for collecting rainwater for drinking. When the people of Kurtatchi would travel to other villages for ceremonies, she arrived in tow with the men, brandishing a spear and blowing on a conch shell as the occasion demanded. She went hunting with the men for possums in the forest. Some of her stories reminded me of Indiana Jones, the 1980s movie character modelled on the academics of Beatrice’s time, who boldly went into parts unknown looking for fortune and glory.²

In return for stories, dreams and items, Beatrice traded sticks of tobacco, loin cloths, calico and metal bolts bought from the Chinese trade stores in Buka Town. Along with her fieldwork diaries, accounts, maps, drawings and pictures, she packed over 400 items in her seachests and lugged them back to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The haul included shells, pottery, spoons, a spatula, a leaf, fishhooks, stones carved to look like fish, panpipes, over 40 specimens of human hair, paddles carved with human faces, a canoe, the three bull roarers, and a wooden musical instrument registered in the collection as a Jew’s harp, a term that has happily gone out of circulation in the years since. She sneaked back two deformed skulls and resisted the urge to dig up any more, lest the missionaries catch wind of what she was doing. These and other items were given to the Pitt Rivers Museum, where she worked as curator from her return in 1931 until her death 44 years later. In the spirit of devotion to her research, Beatrice would don some of her collection for the annual college ball.

In my visit to the museum, I found a few of her gathered items out on display and the rest available to view upon request, with the exception of the skulls, their current location being unknown. In a well-lit room around the back, a curator laid out for me many of the other artefacts from storage onto sheets of sheeny white paper. The items looked as fresh as if Beatrice had just deposited them. I donned white woollen gloves that made me feel like a snooker referee and was particularly fascinated to see the two upe that she had brought back. The upe formed the centrepiece of three initiation ceremonies from which a boy becomes a man and looks, she wrote, like the headwear of the urar, the spirits of the dead. It was a hat of tightly wound straw that the boy’s hair would grow into, to a point where the hair reached such a length the upe could fit snugly on his head. Blackwood was the first to write about these shrouded ceremonies in her book. In her diaries, she wrote how some boys, each sporting an upe, would sit under her verandah at night and scramble for a few drags on the cigarette butts she flicked out of the house.

As already noted, the upe is now the central symbol on the cobalt flag of Bougainville, and although the ceremonies were still taking place, I’d never seen the hat before in real life. They are remarkable constructions. Each was about a foot in length, the colour of straw with ochre-coloured block patterns. I traced my fingers on its grooves and folds, felt the nobbled texture of the straw and wondered at the amount of time it would take to fill in the insides. My hair grows quickly, but even Samson would have been challenged to grow tresses that reached this deeply inside. Having to balance the upe in such circumstances without it falling off would have constantly been an immense challenge.

An elderly woman was in the exhibit room with me. She was working as a volunteer cataloguing exhibits and testing the patience of the staff by continuously asking them elementary questions about how to use Microsoft Excel. The woman remembered Beatrice near the end of her life. I vainly hoped to elicit some sort of searing ‘across the generations’ insight, but all the woman could remember was that the old anthropologist liked drinking strong tea. Such are the challenges entailed in chasing ghosts, but they also reflected for me the ephemerality of all our work. It was Bougainville to which now fell the responsibility for keeping her memory aflicker.

I loved the unvarnished Beatrice of the diaries, where the self-assured woman of the book reveals herself to be beset with the foibles of academics from time immemorial. Insecurity and self-doubt gnaw constantly. She wonders about the utility of all the cases of material she was collecting. She wakes up with panic attacks about how she is ever going to write a book about a society she doesn’t understand. She wonders frequently what the point of it all is and if anyone will read her book. ‘I hope my days or most of it [sic] are spent in the acquisition of knowledge, but I don’t know that we are any better off when we’ve acquired it,’ she writes, close to the end of her year in the then territory.

You can almost hear the self-doubt rattling like hot water coursing through an old pipe in wintertime. She compares herself unfavourably to her fellow anthropologists and wallows in their perceived slights. She worries in particular that her words aren’t ever going to strike the literary high notes of Malinowski. She grouses about having to collect a medley of objects and totems to keep on the good side of her superiors at Oxford. I empathised entirely with her complaints of getting bored with material while knowing that much more polishing of it was required before it could be published. She reveals how she feels isolated and often deeply lonely. She longs for the theatre, newspapers and Sunday drives to English pubs. Her only friend is Felicia the tabby cat.

Beatrice deliberately took herself into the far-beyond to find people as different from herself as possible, then felt thoroughly lonely, as she had nothing in common with them. Haven’t many of us felt an insatiable curiosity to travel away from our home and its mundane familiarity to discover the new, only to recoil with surprise at the unbidden discovery that the distance we put between those we left behind and ourselves provides not solace but deeper awareness of why our connectedness matters?

If we had met in a bar in PNG, I’m sure we would have had a wonderful time, swapping absurdities until the trellis was rattled for last call. I’m sure we would have had a great time rolling our eyes about the pomposity of government and some of the people who constitute it. She was scathing about the way the colonial officials gilded their progress reports to the League of Nations in a manner not l dissimilar to the contortions I and others of my ilk were performing in our reports. Even her descriptions of people feel similar. The C-grade-quality district officer she meets – ‘He is a self-important individual who feels it incumbent upon himself to exercise his authority on every possible occasion’ – reminded me of one boss in Buka whose intellectual comfort levels didn’t extend far beyond beaky perusal of the monthly timesheet and mumbling into his moustache about the importance of adhering to unspecified ‘protocols’ that supposedly governed our interactions with Simon and his colleagues.

Despite all this, I imagine that this night in the bar would have ended with us both in a woebegone state. The letters and diary entries for Beatrice’s last months are sad. She exhibits clear signs of melancholic staleness. The droll humour that previously characterises her letters has ebbed away. By this point, Punari appears to be in a huff – she indicates in her letters that he had been cuckolded by another. That would explain her sour mood and may well be the case, but I also wondered if he’d slunk off because he had grown tired of continually answering her probing questions. By the end of her time there, it is clear she is ready to leave. There is not one reference to her feelings upon departure in either her diaries or her field journals, or to the ultimate fate of Felicia the tabby cat. In one entry, she is collecting rainwater measures, and in the next she is on a clipper bound for North America, sharing time on deck with a troupe of professional wrestlers before voyaging on, back to Oxford. Writing the book left her flat, but it was positively reviewed in all the right journals, the status of words from peers more important than a royalty cheque. Much of what she expresses in her letters – the self-doubt, her questioning the worth of her endeavour – resonates with many of us who feel the tension between the pull to pursue a passion we care about deeply, and the pushback from a world more inclined to celebrating banality.

The more I read of Beatrice, the more curious I became to see Kurtatchi for myself, the place where this stranger wandered unannounced and mapped the most intimate details of peoples’ lives. It was a place still so seemingly off the map that it still didn’t feature in either contemporary charts or Google Maps. Part of this was academic curiosity. In the years that followed, Beatrice Blackwood’s work was held up as the baseline against which all researchers assessed change in Bougainville. In that spirit, I wanted to see how much the place had changed in the years since the first publication of Both Sides of Buka Passage, years that had seen the Second World War; the arrival of a large-scale mining operation and, with it, an influx into Bougainville of people from elsewhere in PNG and abroad; the end of the Australian colonial administration; two unilateral and almost completely unacknowledged declarations of Bougainville independence; an always uneasy relationship within PNG; a 10-year conflict; and now, 15 or so years of this cheerless peace. The other reason I wanted to see Kurtatchi was that I was bored of simply hanging around in my house reading books and going for the occasional run and hamstring-testing bushwalk through the hilled forests of Buka Island on the weekends.

‘You ever been to Kurtatchi?’ I asked Eddie one day. ‘Kurtatchi? I’ve passed by,’ he said, ‘but no problem getting there. It’ll be easy to arrange.’ It was not, and in that dwells a tale of modern Bougainville.

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