11

Plan A

I knew it would not just be a matter of hopping on one of the taxi boats over the passage, hiring a car and us driving there for a look-see, but the way it all unfolded still surprised me.

In Bougainville, as elsewhere in PNG, much land is ‘customary’, which among other things means one has to be invited by someone connected to the land-owning clan. If I had walked around Eddie’s village or surrounds without his permission, I would have suffered the fate of a colleague who had parked there for a walk, only to come back and find all his tyres slashed. Visitors were required to seek permission and follow customary rituals.

Kurtatchi was located outside of Eddie’s geographical area, and our trip would require the blessing and assistance of The Honourable Joseph Watawi. He was the member of Bougainville’s House of Representatives for the local constituency and lived in the sprawling township of Kokopau on the other side of the passage, where once the land had belonged to Mrs Haddon. I had run into Joseph every now and again over the years and liked him a great deal. A former mineworker and trade unionist, he was the first vice-president in the first autonomous government and, subsequently, minister for consumer affairs. At the time, he gloried in being one of two members of the unofficial opposition in Bougainville’s parliament. I liked Joseph’s slightly quaint, olde-worlde English expressions, such as ‘Holy Moses’, ‘stir the pot’ and ‘we are cooking something in the kitchen’, and his ever-present sense of puckishness. He was gregarious, pugnacious, bombastic, funny, avuncular, smart and a gadfly of the highest order. When we went to pay him homage at his house overlooking Buka Passage, he was wearing a pair of rugby league shorts and a ‘Bougainville – land of the blacks’ T-shirt, and he was cultivating a greying beard that made him look like gangsta rapper Ice Cube.

Another characteristic of Joseph was his sense of curiosity about the world and openness to the notion that something could be learned from finding out what was happening beyond his own islands’ shores. It was one of the many curiosities about Bougainville: the political class fervently desired political independence, but there was limited engagement with the outside world that could grant it. When a delegation of French naval officers arrived from their territories in the Pacific in 2018 to commemorate the arrival of Louis de Bougainville, for example, it seemed a perfect opportunity to lobby, but only a handful of politicians showed up.

Joseph had travelled a few years before to my homeland, Northern Ireland, on a delegation to look at referendums, and his abiding memory seemed to be of the bitterness he found there. ‘Holy Moses,’ he would say to me often when we’d bump into each other, as if hearing my accent triggered in him a Pavlovian response. ‘There is no forgiveness. I was amazed. You guys really still hate each other so very much. You need to arrange some reconciliation ceremonies between each other.’ He and Eddie were old pals from Arawa but on different sides from conflict times, Eddie with the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and Joseph working as part of the national government’s various interim authorities. Both were fervently pro-independence. Political differences back then didn’t stop them now, however. Joseph had recently bought Eddie a bicycle for him to travel the 20 kilometres from his home into town, but its wheels quickly revealed themselves no match for the atrocious state of the roads.

Joseph was as confident as Eddie that arranging a visit to Kurtatchi would be a doddle. He was happy to help on the condition that I’d ferry him up some Jameson Irish Whiskey from duty-free the next time I came up from Australia. He suggested a two-step strategy: a short trip down now to introduce ourselves and our objectives, and then a longer visit a few weeks afterwards, whiskey in tow. On the drive down for the first visit, we passed a thick but unremarkable stand of trees. This, Joseph said, was one of the places where young boys would live in complete seclusion for up to three months at the beginning of their upe initiation. These long and involved ceremonies continued to take up most of the boys’ teenage years, as did puberty rituals for teenage girls. With obvious allegory, a part of the ceremony for the girls was structured around shimmying up a banana tree and throwing the fruit down.

A few minutes further down the road we arrived in Kurtatchi, which seemed smaller than I had imagined it from Beatrice’s descriptions. It consisted of about 20 houses painted lime-green, built by the side of the road. The most prominent feature of the village was a giant white cross; the Christians must have got here too, after Beatrice. We found a man with a wizened faced sitting by the roadside waiting for a bus. Joseph divined serendipity – we had happened upon the village chief, a successor to the Punari of Beatrice’s time. The chief was in his late forties – much younger than I would have placed him. On his T-shirt was a Japanese manga character firing a thunderbolt from his index finger. Staying a safe distance from us were a few people looking bewildered at the sight of us clambering out of a car unannounced. I could see them all backing ever so slowly away from us, much as I back away whenever I see someone with a charity clipboard heading towards me.

The chief nodded his head vigorously when we mentioned Beatrice’s name. Whether this was because he had heard of her previously, her ghost was exerting a continued presence in the village or he thought this was the correct or polite thing to do (given our unexpected arrival, yammering about a long-dead, white-skinned woman) was an open question. We told him about the 400 objects Beatrice had traded for and their location in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. He looked surprised that a village such as his would ever have produced such a trove. He was even more astounded when I told him that some of these items were being gawped at by thousands of visitors each day. Kurtatchi looked today like a place with no statues. A contemporary anthropologist would find fewer initiations to record, no artefacts to take away but, from the look of the chief’s arms, definitely still some cicastrated people to take pictures of.

The village was built on the bones of the old one; Kurtatchi had been abandoned during the Crisis, and its people had moved back only a few years prior to our visit. The chief said he’d call a meeting the following day to let everyone know and confirmed that we were welcome to return a few weeks later. Joseph suggested we buy a pig and bring it down with us to show our bona fides. We would roast the pig in tribute to the spirit of Beatrice Blackwood, former headman Punari and the people of Kurtatchi from yesteryear and today. This was a strategy Beatrice would have heartily endorsed; she paid regularly for ceremonies in Kurtatchi so that she could write about them in her field notes. The whiskey I brought from duty-free would lubricate the event even further. Indeed, out of prudence, it might be a good idea to bring an extra bottle just in case, proposed Joseph. It all sounded good and novel to me. Two bottles of whiskey it would be. I’d also buy the chief a copy of Beatrice’s book.

In the weeks following our initial sortie, I gave Eddie five 100-kina notes for the pig, which he bought in his village. He trussed it with rope, threw it in the back of a truck, then wrangled it onto a banana boat for the quick trip over the Buka Passage. Some of Joseph’s ‘staff officers’ – another one of those wonderful olde-worlde English phrases that punctuated so much of Papua New Guinean English – put the pig in a car and drove it down to Kurtatchi. Everything seemed to be in order, and I woke up on the morning of the feast with a set of paragraph headings in my mind: type of food served, how many people, ghost memories of Beatrice, picaresque touches. I checked my phone to find a message from Joseph. ‘Get over here now,’ it read. ‘We are having a major problem.’