13

Institutions new and old, seen and unseen

The culture of these people is disappearing with increasing rapidity, and their ideas on every subject are being changed day by day through contact with those of our own civilisation.

Beatrice Blackwood wrote these words in Both Sides of Buka Passage. Beatrice chose Bougainville because it had little or no semblance of state administration. Now, the place of which she wrote was gunning to become the world’s newest independent nation-state.

In Blackwood’s day, Buka boasted just a couple of Chinese-run trade stores by the water’s edge, from which she bought sticks of tobacco, betel nuts and bolts to trade for insights. Buka still had something of a trading-outpost feel. The Chinese stores were still here, selling no end of eclectic stuff, such as the bicycle Joseph had bought for Eddie, and the disco tumblers. The store names had catchy but slightly off-base names like ‘Happy Sound’ and ‘New Households Supermarket’. I marvelled at the things that would emerge from shipping containers: car batteries, hair dye (‘Africa’s best’), plastic shoes, plastic statuettes of Jesus and the saints, face cream that purported to lighten the skin, and an aftershave called ‘Angela’s choice’ that smelled of turpentine. There were noodles, biscuits, soft drinks and a dazzling array of tinned meat, which, in descending order of acquired taste, comprised corned beef, spam, meatloaf, chicken slice and a hideous concoction in a green can styled as ‘roasted goose’. Some of the stores had freezers containing chicken, sausages and a cut of meat known as ‘flaps’. In all my time there, I feared the answer too much to ever ask which part of the animal ‘flaps’ emanated from. There was an end-of-the-line feature to some of the Australian canned produce on the shelf: out-of-date jars of pickled onions, home-brand cans of tuna and baked beans.

In addition to the Chinese trading stores, there was a bakery, about 20 beer stores, about 10 dingy restaurants with saveloy sausages and chalky bananas in the warmers, a handful of hotels and the Adventist bookshop that sold Both Sides of Buka Passage. The most surreal feature, which arrived soon after I did, was a giant video screen rigged up by the United Nations, which pumped out day-and-night video messages about peace and the referendum, in a manner faintly reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. Beside the screen was a ‘referendum information office’, which was always closed. For those more interested in night life, it could be found on the way to the airport at Club Oasis, a nightclub where seats in the VIP room looked like tulips and which was owned by Bougainville’s minister for economic development, who also owned the island’s only sports car.

What would an anthropologist like Beatrice Blackwood have made of the work I was doing each day on both sides of Buka Passage? There were times I thought that I had assembled enough material for a book on the impersonations, roles and magical properties ascribed to a ghost-like form that people referenced often, invested zealous faith in but rarely ever saw. It was called the government, and she would have been as fascinated as I was by the way in which the government went about its daily business.

What would have especially fascinated Beatrice the anthropologist was just how much Bougainvilleans had metabolised all the appurtenances of bureaucratic language and development speak, but with less of the form. More than a few public servants claimed they couldn’t work effectively without job descriptions but seldom developed them. The region’s Cabinet – the Executive Council – met regularly, but notes were not always taken of their deliberations, which meant no-one knew what was agreed. Sometimes it felt as if a plan or MoU was insisted upon as being a prerequisite for every conceivable activity but was not always implemented after being prepared, the document itself sinking into an a mass of paper on some shelf.

A few weeks after my booze cruise with Eddie and Joseph, the government held a meeting to review its Strategic Development Plan 2018–22. The plan – developed entirely by fellow consultants, adorned with pictures of expectant children and coming in at over 100 pages – was certainly ambitious. It set more than 300 expansive and complex tasks for the government to accomplish, ranging from developing a database of veterans (such as Eddie) to building hospitals, to the development of geospatial databases. The ‘bureaucrat’ to ‘complex task’ ratio was less than 2:1. The title of the review meeting was a bingo card of buzzwords: ‘Review and Alignment Workshop: Strengthening Bougainville’s Governance Framework Through Partnerships to Achieve Socio-Economic & Infrastructure Development’, and naturally it was supported by ‘donor partners’. The meeting was held at the Kuri resort, another joint down by the waterfront that had a tiny pool housing three giant turtles.

The meeting began an hour and a half late. Following songs from a high school choir, the man who had the title of ‘Deputy Chief, Policy and Planning, Office of the President & the Bougainville Executive Council’ opened proceedings. He was a former senior officer in the defence force who preferred to be known by his military designation. He looked every inch the picture-dictionary definition of a public servant; he was always impeccably dressed in a plaid shirt, well-knotted tie and trousers held up by an RM Williams belt.

He spoke sonorously and began by telling the assembled public servants that he was putting them ‘on notice’. The first slide of his presentation showed a squashed-face emoji sitting atop the image of a glitter ball from a 1980s discotheque, inside of which was written the word ‘SITUATION’. To the right of the glitter ball was a purple arrow with the word ‘JOURNEY’, written using an eye-catching Rastafarian colour scheme, at the end point of which was a sunflower petal with the word ‘IDEAL’ in a differently sized font. Below it, the text proclaimed: ‘We make the plan of our journey to make the situation to become the ideal’. The next slide was of a large set of tubular pipes reminiscent of a cathedral organ, over which were written bureaucratic words like ‘Target/Short-Term Goal’, ‘Logic’, ‘Vision/Impact’, ‘Annual Report’ and ‘Director’.

The 20-minute presentation went on for an hour. Not once did he refer to the actual contents of the extensively put-together plan. I desperately wanted to ask the man about the logic of his circumlocutory presentation, but no-one else asked him any questions, and I didn’t think it my place to. Indeed, there were lots of appreciative nods. ‘We will start reviewing this plan on Monday,’ he thundered. He didn’t. And in the weeks that followed, no-one seemed surprised.

I thought often of my predecessors in this and other adjacent positions. In the dining room of one of Buka’s hotels was a pinboard on which were affixed hundreds of business cards of people who had gone before me, people with mysterious titles like ‘senior strategic adviser’, ‘economic development counsellor’, ‘partnership coordinator’; one didn’t need to go too far to discover the wellspring for all these visions of state being adopted by the Bougainville government. I’d go and have fish soup and white bread there some lunchtimes and look at these cards, wondering what imprints all those people had made, what indelible marks I was making.

There were about 15 of us working on this program of support to the government. We each had our quirks, our foibles and our egos. Some of us were, I’m sure, here because we didn’t want to be somewhere else; some were paying off a mortgage, while others reminded me of a comment in A Passage to India made by the protagonist, Cyril Fielding: ‘I’m delighted to be here … There’s my only excuse.’¹

Like Beatrice going off into the unknown, we had our handbooks, which emphasised the importance of developing policies, plans and procedures. We were all engaged in the same necromancy, trying to conjure up a government through the production of ever more complex plans and detailed policies.

I felt like a taxi idling at Buka airport for a short town-trip when there are, at the most, a couple of flights a day. I’d outgrown my time in Buka. Few were interested in the legal-rational advice that was our faith: let’s look at what the constitution says, let’s look at what the regulations say, let’s work out how to draft a submission outlining the issues. I found myself starting to feel like Blackwood near the end of her stay, chasing some sort of knowledge I truly didn’t need.

Too many days felt inordinate, and often I felt I engaged in as much clockwatching as public servants, clicking on the send/receive button in the faint hope of being occupied. I became so weepingly upset one day following an inadvertent breach of ‘protocols’ that a colleague prayed over me to give me God’s grace. I started writing a murder mystery novel that began with an expatriate government adviser being found with a copy of a policy constricting his throat. Apart from my brief, incomplete foray into mystery writing, the slow pace certainly gave me lots of time to read, but that liberty would occasionally reinforce my melancholy. I was suffering myself from what Everest-Phillips described as bureaupathology.

One morning, when I was scrolling around Twitter, I came across a review of a memoir called Rascal Rain, which quoted the author, Inez Baranay, as saying that the book was the hardest piece of writing she had ever engaged in.² The topic seemed apposite to my surroundings, as it related to her experiences working within a local government area elsewhere in PNG. The account certainly contains some amusing, picaresque detail typical of the genre: the clapped-out printer, the absentee staff, the outrageous expenses claims and an all-permeating aura of resigned resentment. But there is a deep sadness to Baranay’s book, as well – a sense that she herself was failing. I sympathised. I empathised.

An afterword recalls how upset Baranay felt by the reaction to her work; reviewers of her book castigated her for cultural imperialism and for being insufficiently respectful of ‘culture’. To me, the book read like a woman writing unsparingly about what she saw and felt, but it also exposed the dangers of writing. She wrote the equivalent of Blackwood’s letters and paid the price.

Baranay’s reality was sometimes our reality, which we wrote about in the modern-day equivalent of Beatrice’s letters: WhatsApp messages to each other. We worked for the equivalent of what Beatrice had excoriated: ‘They’re all scared stiff of the emissaries of the League of Nations, who know nothing of the conditions here but lay down all sorts of impossible strictures and limitations.’ For ‘League of Nations’, read Canberra, New York, Wellington. The very style of reporting that was required – arid, adhering always to a technical plan – did not enable disclosure of the very real, often unplanned and sometimes unexpected victories that emerged in the course of the long durée.

Occasionally, some people from past pursuits showed up for a week or so: consultants working in peacebuilding and conflict resolution, academics topping up salaries and chasing relevance by drafting research reports. We’d meet down at Reasons, where the pizza oven was still below the stairs, or in the lodge with the old business cards. It was always fun to catch up with the visitors. Bougainville was slowly emerging as a topic of interest with the referendum edging closer, but I often felt we had neither the syntax nor the vocabulary to describe what was going on. Ingrained in the domain of the academic is the need to reach evidence-based conclusions, develop sets of recommendations for what should happen, and triumphantly draft an article or report that they were certain would be read and actioned – to see the world as an entirely logical domain. There was less about how to deal with the complexities of the ordinary, the mundane occurrences of the everyday: what to do about absenteeism, petty jealousies, the heat in the offices being so great that it induced lethargic doldrums, the pressures of having family members coming asking for money, and the interwoven effects of these and many other factors. The visitors were here to help, we were here to help – but were we helping?

* * *

I went for a dusk walk around the little 15-minute looped walking track on Sohano, passing the old adviser house where I had first lodged, and skirting the yapping, snarling dogs at the turn of the small incline. To my right was a Japanese Zero on its plinth, a memorial to that country’s war dead, overlooking the Tchibo rock in Buka Passage. Further along the track were a Marian shrine, a rusted car and, to the left of wide-canopied trees filled with flying foxes, the old Buka hospital, which now housed the Department of Health. The final landmark on my circuit was the row of raised houses where many of the ministers that made up the Bougainville government lived with their families. I was trying to puzzle out in my head the goings-on of the Strategic Development Plan meeting, turning over what an anthropologist would make of it, searching for paragraphs and words for ways to understand the performance of this government, with its precisionist phraseologies of corporate plans, strategic plans and sector plans, when I stopped in my tracks. To my right, sitting on a rock and staring at the islands in the Solomon Sea beyond, was a teenage boy looking as if he had stepped from a photoframe in Both Sides of Buka Passage.

The boy was wearing an upe of purple and ochre, and I resisted the temptation to whip out my iPhone and take a picture of him as if he were an exhibit in a zoo. I lacked Beatrice’s chutzpah. When I walked around for another loop, the boy had gone.

This faintest of encounters made me think that I was getting it all wrong, or at the very least, I was missing an important part of the big picture. In being too close to the ragtag pantomime of the administration, I was missing an appreciation of all the proceedings that were occurring backstage, all the things that were hidden from my eyes.

Seeing the boy made a connection with a book I had enjoyed deeply some months prior. The book was Underland,³ an exploration by the British nature writer Robert Macfarlane of the worlds beneath our feet, worlds that we don’t privilege because we don’t tangibly perceive them. In one of the most memorable sections of the book, Macfarlane travels deep underground to a laboratory where scientists are trying to use tools to discern dark matter, an element that science recognises as existing – estimates vary, but it makes up approximately 30 per cent of the Earth. Despite this, scientists still struggle to develop the tools to be able to glimpse it, never mind plot out its topographical lines and contours.

Thinking about Macfarlane’s description of dark matter, and the boy-becoming-a-man wearing the upe, started to make me acutely aware of all the things around me in Bougainville that I didn’t have the instruments to see.

I thought of the household where I was now boarding, adjacent to the old adviser house. Head of the household was Ralph Christensen, a man who would not have existed without the mine, because without it there is little likelihood that his parents could have met. His father was Swiss-German and had come to work in Panguna; his mother was from Buin, in southern Bougainville. Brought up in Arawa, Ralph attended boarding school in Brisbane and served an apprenticeship in a Michelin-starred kitchen in Geneva. He was Buka’s serial entrepreneur, a man in perpetual motion, and he spoke nineteen to the dozen about his business plans. Ralph owned the town’s bakery and its meat-pie shop, which was located beside the Hot Rooster, and he had a Roman candle of diverse business interests: fisheries, minerals, refrigeration, construction and a barge that crossed the Buka Passage. He was also the owner of the region’s only jet ski, hopping on which was the highlight of my kids’ visit to Bougainville. I liked Ralph. We were the same age, but he was already, to use the old saw, well on the way to becoming a Buka institution.

His was no nuclear household. Along with Ralph’s wife, Judith, and four children there was a sizeable cast of people who stayed and worked in their home, all related in some way: John the gardener; Philomena the general factotum and de-facto ‘housekeeper’; Ezron the boatman; and a rotating-cast crew down at the dock on Sohano and on the scrubby patch of waste ground down by the Buka waterfront to which Ezron would scoot back and forth multiple times each day, his last nightly journey ferrying over his father, Peter, who was manager at the bakery, to bring back the day’s takings. Ralph employed hundreds in his businesses, all of whom were connected through kin or recommended by kin, part of wider clan networks. Ralph’s set-up wasn’t formalised: no-one had a formal job description, no-one adhered to a quarterly plan, yet it was a much more organised and effective institution than anything officially deemed governmental in Bougainville.

In the Sisyphean work I was involved with in Bougainville, ‘institutions’ was synonymous with government institutions, but I would come to see this as too narrow a definition because it focused solely on what could be seen, what occupied a concrete space, what could be lamented for its absence. It didn’t cover what I couldn’t see. As Sinclair Dinnen, who had worked with me in Bougainville all those years earlier, has observed, ‘The analytical separation between academics [and] practitioners’ in this line of work ‘remains a wide one’. One set treats it as an exercise to be located within a wider historical canvas of thousands of years, and the other as a set of budgeted activities to be judged between the cyclic rhythms of completing the monthly time sheet.⁴

Academics have a much broader definition of institutions than do aid programs. In academia, the most prominent definition of an institution is that of the economist Douglass North, who defined them as ‘the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction’. He continues:

They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct) and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). Throughout history, institutions have been devised by human beings to create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange.⁵

According to these criteria, the Bougainville government’s institutions were just one type among many, and far from being the most important. It’s just that the others weren’t visible, didn’t organise themselves into glossy brochures with ministerial forewords that the likes of me would pen. One of the most important ‘dark matter’ institutions is the clan system that stretches over the length and breadth of Bougainville, cutting across its 21 distinct languages, eight sublanguages and 39 dialects.⁶ Anthropologists who followed in Beatrice’s shoes would map its outlines, rules and strictures, and observe its complexity. None ever seemed to feel they got their descriptions entirely right.

Like the upe-wearing boy that evening, these institutions only revealed themselves glancingly and incompletely: carvings of clan symbols resembling hornbills and eagles on the boats at Pororan, Joseph on his plastic chair, adjudicating supplicants at the Salty Eyes, meetings that Eddie would drop everything for and head off to, threaded bonds of those who had fought together in the resistance, the churches whose services always started on time.

It also helped explain why other parts of the program in which I worked – parts provided grants for water and sanitation projects and the like – seemed to be faring much better in terms of impact and effectiveness. For a start, they were delivering something tangible and needed, but they were also working with the grain of actual institutions, i.e. the leadership structures at the community level. We, by contrast, were working with an ‘institution’ that was less substantial, less well founded, and alien in terms of its hierarchies and ostensible goals.

Just because I couldn’t see much of these local institutions with my eyes didn’t mean that these institutions weren’t there. It’s just that I could see them only indistinctly, if at all. I simply wasn’t a full member of the clan, and I was too immersed in my own rites and ceremonies, ones that I was seeing ever less reason to have faith in.

The political scientist Volker Boege has called Bougainville a ‘hybrid political order’,⁷ a distinct variety of ‘peace’ and ‘State’, one that is a mix-and-match between institutional forms. Boege was drawing on a deep well of scholarship. Joel Migdal,⁸ whose work Strong Societies and Weak States I read when I was at college, wrote about the struggles of administrations to become the institutions in society because the informal ones all around them are stronger. Other scholars have been writing about other parts of Melanesia in similar terms for years. But this all points to a gloomy epiphany. There are articles and books that sketch out how places like Bougainville operate, but we are not always willed to put that understanding to much practical use.

* * *

In the spirit of Beatrice’s anthropology, I decided one day to find out if there was an origin story behind the most prized piece of apparel in Bougainville: the death metal T-shirt. To be sporting a fresh Korn, Slayer or similar T-shirt, or a picture of a skeleton marching out of the grave, was a sign of status and prestige. My research approach was less methodologically exacting than that of Beatrice: I put out a call on social media and asked for help in boosting my understanding. I knew of bands named Black Ops and the Blackout Band, but what were the names of others? My knowledge increased: others were called Ozium, Dishonoured, Shadowfools, Living Death, War X, Flag of War and Tatai Force Aquafire, the last of which, when I listened to them, sounded like the soundtrack to a military coup. The government’s chief of protocol, a neighbour on Sohano, was the drummer in another band, Mortal Revenge; his Saturday afternoon practices stress-tested my noise-cancelling headphones.

‘You ever seen the meme about the Bougainville starter kit?’ Ken Imako asked me one day over Zoom. ‘Essential items are a Metallica T-shirt, some big safety boots and a backpack.’ I hadn’t really thought of the prevalence of steel-capped workman’s boots until he mentioned it, but it was true. I’d been introduced to Ken through Twitter. He was the drummer in DarkAsidE, the name a damned good play on words.

We had arranged a Zoom chat. I expected to see him in Bougainville but found him in his spare room in Brisbane with a giant set of drums in the background. Ken was an arbitration lawyer in his early forties and had moved to Brisbane with his wife. As a child he had been evacuated to Port Moresby just as the Crisis began and was educated in the capital. It was just before Christmas; he had a grizzled holiday beard, was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and reminded me of a younger Paul Giamatti.

Ken thought the preponderance of death metal was another legacy of the mine:

A lot of the workers that came to Bougainville were blue-collar types and brought with them albums of now-forgotten Aussie pub rock like The Rose Tap and The Angels. The mineworkers left and the music stayed. These bands were like a gateway drug, and we moved onto harder things: AC/DC, Metallica, Slayer. With the music came the fashion associated with it. So … in addition to the music being brought in, from the mineworkers came the fashion. The jackets started off with the flares, you know, the bell bottoms and skinny jeans so tight that they threatened impotence to the wearer.

It’s … like we latched onto it from that point. It’s always, sort of, been in the blood. It’s fascinating to me now that, you know, a lot of the kids still wear those types of clothes, but they don’t listen to the music. It’s just another way of setting us apart.⁹

I forgot to ask Ken about the equally ubiquitous red bandanas: certainly some pub rock antecedents influenced that apparel, but I wondered how much Sylvester Stallone’s bandana-wearing character Rambo may have had something to do with it, too.

As far as my musical preferences go, I am more of an alt-country, stuck-in-the-1980s type of person, and I asked for starter music to try to get across metal. It made me feel old; I started to sound like my father, complaining that I couldn’t hear the lyrics for all the strangulated din. One of the few songs in which I could discern the words was Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’, in which they sing about going ‘to never-never land’. It struck a chord. From the lost generation to the empty words of ‘becoming the ideal’ presentation, gaps in knowledge, understanding and resources abounded. Yet, what was lacking was compensated by an unerring sense that independence was the right thing to aspire to. While we advisers and aid workers bustled about, ‘working hard’ on things that were hardly working, Bougainvilleans and their ‘underland’ institutions could see a never-never land that we simply could not.

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