12

Plan B and whiskey to the rescue

I found Joseph and Eddie sitting on two wobbly, once-white plastic chairs in the ‘Salty Eyes’, the parliamentarians’ house-cum-second-hand emporium that overlooked the Buka Passage. A Crystal Palace–Liverpool football game was playing in the background on a small television, and a few children were sitting around eating plates of cold rice and bully beef.

Joseph was looking stressed, lamenting his inability to get to somewhere in his very own constituency as compared to this Englishwoman from close to a century before. ‘What magic did this Beatrice Blackwood have that enabled her to come to the village of Kurtatchi and ingratiate herself so easily with the people?’ he asked. ‘How was she able to do this in 1929, when we are having such difficulties doing the same now? We made the initial visit. We properly arranged this visit. And it has completely gone to shit. My boys were nearly attacked when they went there this morning to try to get our pig back. Fucking fuck.’

What had happened the evening before in Kurtatchi was a case study in how little can be predictably planned in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. It sounded like it had been quite the night. Grouching, jealousy, suspicions, finger-pointing, shoving and conspiracy theories about our visit had erupted at the meeting and were spinning wildly in all sorts of directions. How much money was this white man paying Joseph? Just what was our real agenda? What did we want to take away? How many riches were we going to be making from writing a book about Kurtatchi?

If only they knew about the gruel-like margins of the publishing industry, I groaned, and marvelled all the more at the way Beatrice had managed to sally in so easily by contrast. The people in the village had divided into two feuding groups: those who could see the trip for the curiosity that it was, and those who saw undertows of wider, malign intent and fundamentally distrusted the intentions of white foreigners. Joseph was embarrassed. I felt for him. He, too, was a chief, from the same clan line as Punari. He’d promised to take me, and now some villagers were putting up a roadblock – quite literally – on our plans.

It was now mid-morning. The pig that had gone to Kurtatchi the previous day had been returned and was looking a tad perplexed, tied up and slung across the driver’s seat of a minibus outside Joseph’s house. There it stayed for a few minutes before Joseph asked me if he could buy it off me at cost price, which I agreed to with alacrity, having already wondered what I was going to do with it otherwise. The hog was then promptly driven off to a reconciliation ceremony elsewhere; there were many of these ceremonies taking place leading up to the referendum, villagers divided during the Crisis making peace with each other before the vote. We poured some of the whiskey I’d brought along into what Joseph said were his best glasses, which he had recently purchased from the Chinese store. As soon as the liquid struck the base of the receptacles, they lit up like deranged disco lights. ‘Neat, eh?’ said Joseph. ‘Had to pay extra to the China-man for them but it was well worth it.’ I resolved to buy some for my kids, which I subsequently did, precipitating a detailed search of the items at Australian customs.

After two glasses of the strong stuff, we settled on a Plan B. We – I, Eddie, Joseph, his sons and two of his ‘staff officers’ – would go to check out other places in Beatrice’s book, ones where our arrival would, hopefully, occasion less chance of inciting a wholesale village rumpus. Our rough itinerary would take two days to accomplish, with a night spent back in Buka in between. Our preparations were less thorough than those of Beatrice: in lieu of the bathtub, we took the remainder of the whiskey, 24 bottles of SP beer and two packets of cheese Twisties; then we hopped into Joseph’s motorised banana boat (the MV Salty Eyes) and off we went. The other bottle of whiskey we left in reserve with Joseph’s wife for the next day.

We followed the coast away from Kurtatchi, along the mangrove shoreline and towards the land that Beatrice had walked while on her way to record the details of the upe initiations. We docked at the edges of a plantation after 30 minutes of pleasure-cruising. Eddie and the officers clearing a narrow avenue through the grounds with his bush knife. The grounds were entirely overgrown, filled with lanky trees that no longer produced coconuts. Most of the plantations in Bougainville were in a similar state of disuse.

There were still some people around who looked as if they were long-term squatters. A man and woman came out of the bush with a jerry can to pour water on our feet: a tradition Beatrice recorded as being a means to wash away any untoward spirits that newcomers might bring. The couple and their two kids, who were hiding from us in trees just beyond the shoreline, were camped out there, fishing for bêche-de-mer, which they’d sell on to the Chinese stores in Buka. A few of these marine morsels were sitting in a blackened makeshift smoker, a saucepan with a tagine-like cover that reminded me of an upe in its dimensions. An example of French being a more romantic language than English, the literal translation of bêche-de-mer is ‘slug of the sea’. In consistency, these little slugs looked like something between a chipolata sausage and a dog biscuit, but they were a windfall for the couple. Bêche-de-mer is a delicacy in China and Japan, and the couple would sell them to small, Chinese-run stores that operated behind high hoardings of corrugated metal, the next staging post in a long supply chain that would take the creatures all the way to restaurants throughout China and Japan. I asked the man if his kids were at school, and he answered in a roundabout way. He said he hoped the money would pay for them to attend next year. ‘If I could get a shark fin, that would be really good,’ he said. This was real economic development, cash put in a poor family’s pocket and infinitely more useful than a ‘policy tweak’ or setting up a committee.

As we clambered back into the MV Salty Eyes, Joseph’s son was wiping the inside of the boat with leaves he took from a plastic bag, to ensure the onward journey would be cleansed of any malevolent spirits picked up from the plantation. As we left, he threw the beer bottles into the water, and they bobbed away like apples.

The next morning, fresh bottle of whiskey uncorked, the same technical team went onward to the island of Petats, Beatrice’s initial field site and among the places thought potentially to be one of the sites where Amelia Earhart might have crashed on her round-the-world flight.¹ A film crew from National Geographic Channel had visited a few months earlier, Eddie helping the crew out as fixer, but no trace of the aviator had been found. On this morning, our arrival was ignored entirely. After a few hours there I understood why Beatrice couldn’t wait to get away. It seemed a place remarkable primarily for how little was happening. We tramped upward to the field in the centre of the village where there was a school (its logo displaying two fat dolphins butting heads over a book) in the hope of finding someone to talk to, but there was nobody around. We heard the lilting sounds of a congregation singing: another place where the missionaries had done a thorough job. If this were a development project, the Church would have received top marks for sustainability.

‘This is far too bloody quiet,’ said Joseph. ‘Let’s go to Pororan.’

Pororan is the island farther up the coast and a place Beatrice described as home of particularly potent magic deployed for catching fish. She writes that on Pororan there were a couple of anointed men who sanded thick pebbles into the shape of a fish with impish little dots marked for eyes; they then chiselled leftward dents on the snout, which were always to point towards shore, and swaddled the fish with leaves for scales. The little fish would be thrown out into the sea; shoals of fish would swoosh towards them and into the fisherman’s net.

Beatrice herself never made it to Pororan. She was waiting by the boat at dawn for the trip to begin only for none of the boatmen to show up. Her manservant Ross explained some weeks later what had happened: Beatrice had offered three sticks of tobacco for the trip, but the sailors got the hump, as they believed that the going rate was four sticks. Instead of saying there was a problem, they simply didn’t show up, and I wondered as I read this whether there was a similar rationale underlying limited attendances in the offices of the Bougainville government. Nevertheless, somehow she managed to bring back two of the carved stone fish with her to Oxford. When I read her papers back in Oxford, I perched the two little fish either side of me as I worked. It was the first time they had been helped out of their storage boxes since she had deposited them upon her return all those years before. The little eyes on the fish reminded me of speckles on fairy bread.

Save for another giant white cross on the harbour and an unexpectedly strong 3G phone network, Pororan had the feel of a place little changed from what it would have been 90 years earlier. We walked around the island, a dander of about half an hour. There was no semblance of any government here. What Joseph and Eddie reckoned to be the majority of the population of the entire island were not on land but on the shoals, casting nets on sandbars or squatting in little wooden canoes just out to shore fishing for bonito, scooping and hooking them out of the water with a regular click of the rod. We waded into the waters to look at the boats, each of which had a little carved sigil on the front. Some depicted the beaks of eagles, others those of hornbills; they connoted respective clans of the region.

I felt a serenity about the place that I’m sure was due to knowing I was not going to have to stay too long here. I felt as far off the map as it was possible to be: Pororan was an hour’s ride from any other island. The rain began to spit down from darkening shrouds of clouds, and Joseph signalled it was high time we got on our way. We bought a few of the fish and waded back onto our boat, me walking gingerly in the hope the plastic on my flip-flops would withstand the coral underneath, and everyone else walking out as nonchalantly as though treading on satin-lined pavement.

More wiping with leaves before departing, and, as the rain began to fall, we huddled together as if this action would keep us dry. I had a minor panic attack on the way, summoning fears in my mind of what would happen if I fell off this boat, and imagining how silently and completely I would sink into the sea. We had no life jackets. Joseph dozed off just as the squall intensified, grey rain lashing us from an acute angle and waves splashing onto the boat. Eddie put out his right hand and clicked his fingers back and forth in a slow rhythm. He was doing something that the Englishwoman had also written about. He was trying – and, as it turned out, failing utterly – to chase away the rain.

The journey continued in this character-building vein for hours, and I was happy to see the Tchibo Rock, which signalled we were close to Buka Town. This large outcrop in the passage looked like one could land a mini-helicopter on it. Beatrice recorded its story in her book. Tchibo was the name of a person who died when caught out by the fast-running waters of the passage and fell under the rock, his spirit carving the channels that break the reef and allow ships and boats to pass in and out. This was not the rock’s first resting place, she’d written. The stories she recorded told that in each place Tchibo tried to move to, the urar chased it elsewhere. Beatrice had taken a picture of the rock, and no matter how many times I looked at it, it always seemed to be a different place in the present than it was during her time. Maybe it was my whiskey-goggles, but it seemed to be in a perceptibly different part of the passage that day.

Seeing Tchibo made me realise we were close, and I felt like kissing the rickety deck of the Salty Eyes upon arrival. When we got there, Joseph’s wife had made fried rice. She began to cook the fish from Pororan. Joseph sent out for two more bottles of locally produced whiskey, a challenging tipple that smelled of paint stripper and bore the ironic title ‘Captain Moresby Premium Whisky’, and an equivalent number of bottles of altar wine.

An impeccable time for us to venture into talk about politics and whether Bougainville was likely to get its independence. Everyone was confident that Bougainvilleans would vote in overwhelming numbers for independence, but then what would happen? Other countries in the world needed to recognise one’s country as independent for it to be a truly independent nation.

‘Those bloody Australians don’t want us to be independent, that’s for sure. All you bloody advisers are about as useful as a rugby team with no ball,’ Joseph said, swaying like a prop-forward late on a medals night. As it turned out, he was trialling a line he’d later use in a press release.²

As is the wont of the conversations of inebriates, our natters veered off in various unlinked directions before we somehow found ourselves talking about Manus Island, the site where Beatrice’s rival, Margaret Mead, did her research, and that served as a major US base during the Second World War. Until 2021, Manus was known for being home to an ‘asylum-seeker processing centre’ that housed close to 1,000 Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis, and other unfortunates scooped up from boats bound for Australia and dumped on Manus against their will. It was the most wretched, cruel and callous policy imaginable; the aim was to make conditions so awful that it would dissuade future refugees from making the journey.

‘You ever heard of Behrouz Boochani?’ I asked Joseph.

‘How do you spell his name?’ he asked and started to look him up on his phone.

Boochani was a Kurdish journalist from northern Iran, then dragooned on Manus. He was writing articles and tweets about the everyday brutalisations he and his fellow detainees suffered in the course of his incarceration. Later, he would write a wondrously expressive book, No Friend but the Mountains, the title bearing a dual meaning, referring both to their plight and to a mournful Kurdish adage reflecting the perpetual condition of Boochani’s people as a people without a state.³

‘Bougainvilleans better make sure they have more friends than the mountains,’ I said, feeling pleased for drawing what I thought was a searing parallel after our booze cruise. Profundity aside, the reality was that no nation seemed interested in recognising Bougainville as independent; even the referendum itself was advisory in nature, not determinative. Matt Qvortrup, a British academic who visited during my tenure, revealed a memorable finding from his research, which pointed to an unexpectedly strong correlation between the act of holding an independence referendum and actually attaining independence.⁴ His finding surprised me. I had assumed the connection would be based on the percentage of votes cast in favour, the peacefulness of the poll and the probity of the process – but it was none of these things. He found that when would-be nations had the backing of at least one permanent member of the Security Council, a ‘yea’ result in a referendum led to independence. When they didn’t, nothing happened. Neither China nor France, Russia nor the United Kingdom, nor the United States seemed very interested in Bougainville, nor did any other country. I often thought that Bougainville’s best chance of getting independence rested on courting China in the hope that this would have the effect of enticing other countries to pay more attention to them. Both Eddie and Joseph had been to China, Eddie as ‘bodyguard’ to the president and Joseph on a number of occasions on what he twinklingly called ‘sightseeing tours’. We jabbered ramblingly on for another hour before I called it quits. ‘The next trip we make we go to the stone pillars,’ said Joseph, and I stumbled onto the MV Salty Eyes for the sober boatman to ride me home, back to Sohano. We rounded the Tchibo Rock once more, and I recovered from my hangover three days later.

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