14

Odd jobs, family trips and a friend worth fighting for

Even when Suzanne’s posting ended, I remained engaged with Bougainville, as well as taking on other projects elsewhere in PNG. I would go for shorter stints, joining the Monday morning salmon-run flights up to Port Moresby with a cabin full of fellow consultants, bankers, miners and the occasional researcher. I thought of how in earlier times, PNG was a destination for the young and the spry, but now it was more a haunt for greying men with more yesterdays than they had tomorrows. Comfortably less than 10 per cent of the people on each flight were women. About the same percentage were Papua New Guinean.

In Port Moresby I worked for a spell as a consultant with the department responsible for administering the country’s complicated system of local government, the multiple layers of which resembled trifle. They construed this task as setting up committees that never met, copying and pasting old documents into new ones and giving Jesuitical answers to straight questions. It reminded me of trying to play Scrabble with a wearisome opponent without a dictionary prior to the advent of the internet, the sort of person who would claim ‘BGDSY’ was a proper word because there was no evidence to the contrary. Some things didn’t much differ, including the same disturbing problem – which was quite rational, if you thought about it – of only being able to rouse the staff with a prospect of a ‘field trip’ fully inclusive of flights, generous travel allowance and accommodation. Or, if it were a day to be held in situ, woe betide the planners if they didn’t set it up in the Lamana Hotel, all repast included, and no expectation that anyone would be either present or operational until after morning tea. (The Lamana is a colonnaded hotel complex painted in a shimmering white, with a Graeco-Roman-meets-Pablo Escobar vibe, a step up from the Holiday Inn. Until recently, it hosted female mud-wrestling competitions.)

But it was we who were the true dupes. No matter how little interest departmental employees would evince, how passive-aggressively we’d be rebuffed, how much we’d be disparaged on social media for being stupid white people, like eager beagles we’d come back for more. I did some other work with the justice program and marvelled at the indefatigable work of some of the old hands – expats and Papua New Guineans – who worked on it, all exponents of the dogged brukim bus approach to work, accepting the non-linear, stop-start nature of change, knowing how much can be cultivated and how much is beyond the immediate control of the program. This work was intangible: phone calls returned, softly spoken advice taken, reports that would not otherwise be written being finalised with encouragement, meetings held and acknowledgement of the other institutions at play. Much of this humble, quiet work cannot be easily summarised in terms of reference; much of it is hard for any one adviser to reflect upon in the course of all the reports that were the regular banes of their lives. I wrote a long report about these individuals working steadfastly in the trenches for a contracting company; sadly, I have little or no idea whatever happened to it; presumably it was flung into some long-forgotten gyre of overlooked scribing.

During many of these assignments, I’d stay at the Holiday Inn, which reminded me of the setting of Graham Greene’s A Burnt Out Case in terms of its meta-narrative about how tropical lassitude wearies the soul. Many of the denizens of the hotel’s Gekko Bar would have fitted in well in a 21st-century reboot. There was the government minister watching himself on the television above the bar in a news story about launching of a corporate plan, nodding in approbation at the sagacity of his words, and the grey-haired man who tackled a bottle of sauvignon blanc solo while typing furiously on his laptop. Most of the times I went there, I also saw a few members of the Bougainville government lounging around next to the swimming pool with its downward slope as acute as the mountain screes surrounding the city.

On one uneventful night, I had a memorable conversation. I had been reading the newspaper, which contained its usual fare: the announcement of a new framework; the signing of yet another MoU; an arcane parliamentary stoush over whether a safari suit constituted appropriate dress within the chamber, when the glassy-eyed white man next to me asked, apropos of nothing, ‘You still here?’ A woman more than 40 years his junior who had been his drinking companion had left. Close to finishing his beer, he motioned to one of the wait staff, always dressed in tennis whites, to fetch him another bottle. He was in his mid-sixties, I reckoned, paunchy like a kangaroo with a joey, and wore a chain of keycards around his neck reminiscent of the old pictures of chiefs with their collars of pigs’ teeth. His bulbous nose looked like a navigation map to one of Papua New Guinea’s great river deltas. He wore a blue business shirt and a pair of football shorts, the sartorial incongruity of which reminded me of one of those choose-your-own-uniform flip books my kids had when they were little. On nodding terms over the years, we had never spoken before. Where I grew up in Northern Ireland, the first question was always aimed at determining what religion you were. In the Gekko, it was how long you’d been here. His beer had loosened him up.

‘Yep,’ I replied, ‘but just a short trip this time. I’m finishing up and going home tomorrow. I’m a bit tired of all this going back and forth, and there are days when you really wonder whether all this … stuff is really worth it.’

I had had a few loosening lagers by this point, too. ‘You’ll be back,’ he averred. His tone mixed avuncularity with ennui and portent.

‘I’ve had four go pinis parties now (referring to leaving parties) but always come back. I don’t know why. It drives me up the wall most days. “Just one more year, one more contract,” I always say to myself.’

He went on to talk about a holiday in Bali planned for the end of this particular contract. Its purpose, he said, was to ‘get it out of my system’. I didn’t dare ask what the ‘it’ in his previous sentence was referencing. I noticed a wedding band on his left hand and asked him if his wife was with him. I figured him for a straight man; he had looked positively lascivious as he followed the behind of his erstwhile companion when she was walking away. ‘She’s in Melbourne,’ he replied:

I went back home after the last contract ended, and she told me she just didn’t want me around the house. ‘Just go back up,’ she said. She likes the money, but not me anymore.

It was one of the saddest statements I had ever heard. He paused and took another good swig on his bottle. ‘I’m one of those people now, you know.’

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘You know, one of those missionaries, misfits and mercenaries that always come here, always running away. Which one are you?’

The conversation unlocked something in me. Our marriage had survived Zimbabwe. I loved my wife and my boys deeply (I still do!), but all this frequent-flyer-point accumulation meant that I wasn’t spending as much time with them as I wanted. It dawned on me that this woebegone man’s tale was a cautionary one – I needed to not lock myself into this life.

As the boys grew out of babyhood, they had come to join me during the school holidays and got to know some of the friends and personalities I had made during my time. They particularly liked Bougainville; they loved the Lilliputian smallness of Buka Town, the friendliness of everyone they met, and the short rides across the passage to and from Sohano in Ezron’s motorised skiff. One time, an old lady came up to me in the Buka market and asked if she could take a photo of herself with them. I asked her why. She said she hadn’t seen a ‘white child’ in Buka since the late eighties.

The boys also stayed at the Holiday Inn, so they frequently suggested that they, too, should get a slice of the reward points I was accruing. I’d bring them into the NCOBA building and park them in offices with books and an iPad, and the staff would keep an eye on them while I’d do – I don’t know what.

They were coming up so regularly that my friend and colleague Dennis Kuiai would refer to them as the ‘junior consultants’ and chide me when I told them to shush when they were larking around. ‘In Melanesia,’ he’d say, ‘a noisy child means a happy child.’ It was when they were quiet that I should take notice, he told me, because children could sense untoward spirits which adults could not. The boys delighted in having permission to make a ruckus, and I often thought of Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes when they were with me. When they asked me what all my long meetings were actually about, I struggled to give a convincing answer.

Dennis was also a large part of the reason why I stayed engaged – he was someone worth supporting. I can remember vividly the first time I met Dennis, up at a school hall just outside of Buka. It was about a month after I first arrived, and there was a ‘Leadership Summit’ to discuss what to do about the referendum. Speaker after speaker would take to the stage and deliver impassioned oratory about the need for work to be done.

The former president of Autonomous Region of Bougainville, James Tanis, introduced us to each other. I remember the torque in Dennis’s handshake and a query forming in the irises of his eyes as to whether this person was worth investing any time in. I’m glad he thought that I was. He was a tall man whose walk revealed, faintly, the legacy of the injured foot that he had once walked with, repaired by two Bougainvillean doctors at Buka General Hospital. The operation was a success, but Dennis’s feet were still in such a condition that he wore sandals daily, and his left foot was always taped to cover sores that had never fully healed after the operation.

Our minds worked in similar ways: finding out paths by asking questions, going to documents to see what they said in black and white rather than just making something up. He had a keen mind that always sought to learn more. He wrote, and he wrote well. He would write long, detailed documents that he’d send on to his minister. He’d sign the letters he wrote in a distinctive way: ‘In the Service of Our People’. He wrote papers; he loved to have his thinking challenged. He came prepared to meetings, read voraciously and always relished an opportunity to correct my written English. He had a developed knowledge of the Peace Agreement. What I valued also about Dennis was his realism. His dream was independence, too, but he was practical enough to know that it couldn’t just be wished up, as in a letter to Santa. It would require hard, boring, assiduous, nuts-and-bolts work.

Dennis was a Swiss Army knife not only in a bureaucratic sense: he worked on collecting some of the weapons still in Bougainville,¹ trying to engage Eddie and his cohort so they felt included, drafting concrete ideas as a basis for substantive discussions with PNG, dampening down frustrations that bubbled up among the veterans with Bougainville’s stingy peace.

He had taken over the department in Buka after his predecessor was dismissed. Formally, his office was inside one of the administration’s old dongas, but his receiving room and operations centre was a piece of concrete wall half-shaded from the beating sun by a tiny, overhanging ledge next to the giant pothole; it was beside a shipping container filled with papers thrown in randomly over the years and constituting the government’s archive.

Dennis was far from the only hard worker in the administration at Buka. There were others I worked with whose work ethic and drive I admired tremendously: Ephraim, for example, a young man who worked with Dennis and who always seemed to be overlooked for trips to Port Moresby because he wasn’t connected enough; Zoe and Rooney at the Lands Department; and a young woman called Daphne, whom we coaxed and coached regularly to have faith in herself. We once spent half a day helping Daphne organise her thoughts into a speech for that unforgettable ‘strategic planning alignment review workshop’ – George and I played the equivalent of judges on a talent show to rate her practice performances, and she delivered on stage with aplomb. I loved working with these people; they relished being challenged and given alternative ways to think about issues, inspiring in me the will to do my best by them.

Still, it was no easy place to work, as the rise and fall of Joseph Nobetau showed. Nobetau served as Bougainville’s chief secretary from late 2016 to August 2019. He was from the southern town of Buin, close to the bottom point of the main island and the sea border with Solomon Islands. A former diplomat, Nobetau had previously been Papua New Guinea’s acting chief migration officer. The arc of his career as chief secretary can be charted in the compendium of press releases, updates and reports he published during his tenure, which are, inexplicably given his fate, still on the website of the government that would go on to dismiss him. Unlike the official reports I was writing, which were very much of the ‘on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other’ school of exposition, Nobetau’s reports were written with the feather-ruffling abandon of a man in charge.

In his dispatches from his early months he strikes a glass-half-full approach. According to his first quarterly report,² his early work is ‘already showing dividends’, notwithstanding ‘immense challenges’. But after a few months, the enormity of the task he has taken on emerges. By his second report, he is writing about the ‘number of individuals and groups within the public service actively engaging in disruptive and corrupt activities’ and notes the apparent sense that government is too often envisioned as a piggybank from which to take money as and when the whim arises. He notes the culture of claims: public servants putting in receipts for vehicle hire, cash advances, phone credit and ‘travel to the Holiday Inn for frivolous reasons’. He says to a gathering of public servants: ‘The reality is that many of our public servants don’t do as much as they should. In fact, some just don’t bother coming to work’.

Nobetau undertakes an audit of the payroll to find a ‘Murder on the Orient Express’-style scenario in which many of the public servants have been the beneficiaries of additional allowances. He discovers ‘ghost workers’ on the payroll, sucking out funds in excess of over 18 million kina (just over A$7 million) per annum. He refers six departmental secretaries for investigation; Board of Inquiry member Ila later finds there are causes to dismiss all but one of them for various rorts involving allowances and expenses.

This Frank-Serpico-of-the-South-Seas routine won Nobetau no friends. Politicians can talk about going after corruption in the abstract, but when the people being booted out, suspended or placed at risk of being visited by the Fraud Squad are your kin, your cousins or your brothers or sisters, and one worries whether the next policeman’s knock might be for you, then nothing is likely to dissipate your fulsome support faster. The politicians went on to dismiss Nobetau for being guilty of an offence not on any known statute book: ‘undermining Bougainville unity’. (In 2020, a court found that his sacking was unconstitutional.)

* * *

As 2019 began, I found myself spending less time in Bougainville itself and more of my allocated time in Port Moresby. I was there to participate in something grandly called a ‘Post-Referendum Planning Task Force’.

The idea behind the initiative was sound: it foresaw the two governments getting together to work out what would happen to this corner of the country once the vote occurred, and to prepare for the constitutionally mandated post-referendum consultations. This touched on other important matters.

What would be the attributes of an independent Bougainville, if that were to be the choice at the referendum? What would be the attributes of Bougainville if it had greater autonomy, which was the other choice before voters? How long would a transition take? How could Bougainville finance itself?

The question of finances was crucial. A three-day, necessarily tedious tax and revenue summit had been held on the matter in 2017, but the technical recommendations had gone unheeded. Instead, the government was fixated on get-rich schemes. These schemes rolled on; they included a Bougainville airline, a seaweed business and investment in one of the Chinese supermarkets in Buka Town. (The latter certainly benefited the owner of the store; one day he closed up and took whatever money he’d made with him.) Close to the end of my stay, an Australian who bred Arabian horses came in with a proposal to take over the mine.

The format for this task force was a good one. ‘Technical officers’ would meet first, then prepare documents for politicians, who would make decisions. The problem was that, save for the industrious Dennis and a handful of others, not enough technical officers had the technical knowledge to make decisions, nor did they come prepared, so every meeting took on a quality as circular as the tables we were meeting at. Meetings started hours late; we would then break for ‘morning tea’, which quickly morphed into lunch. The politicians would make oratory statements such as, ‘We need to make decisions as leaders,’ but they rarely did. This was reinforcing dysfunction once again, and bedecking the event in a grand title obscured only some of these troubling realities.

The meetings would be held at the city’s grand International Conference Centre, built by the Chinese a few years previously in advance of a multination summit. For reasons I didn’t pretend to fathom, some of the Chinese staff seemed to stay on with the building long after the summit was a distant bureaucratic memory. It always fascinated me as to what their actual role must be. On most of the days we met, one of them would arrive in the room clutching an old-fashioned camera, take a few snaps and leave. I’d love to know what they did with those photos; did they append them to breezy reports back to Beijing reporting how the building was still being used for important meetings, or were such reports more analytical, describing events as they were?

Certainly, an honest accounting of those times would note the nature of such meetings, whose focus was on pedantic technicalities. Objections were raised to things previously agreed; no-one had all the documentation, and the relevant people frequently didn’t show up. ‘A wonderful week of progress’, the reps from the United Nations, responsible for sponsoring the event, acclaimed. The UN had engaged the services of two facilitators, who flew in from London and Manila; and leaving aside the usual effects of jet lag, it’s probable they felt foggy throughout. Each month they’d set tasks for ‘technical officers’ to undertake, and each month there’d be a beautifully constructed and implausible reason why less had been accomplished than had been expected.

I thought often of FR Stockwell when I sat in the back row of this cavernous room. Stockwell was a ‘Queen and Country’ man of the old school, station chief in Cairo and Khartoum after the war, and the grandfather of a friend of mine who writes historical crime novels.³ Stockwell had a wonderful maxim about political meetings:

Decide before you have a meeting whether it is meant to achieve anything substantive. If it isn’t, hold it in a good hotel. If it is, hold it in the desert, at noon, with no shade, and nowhere to sit.

Stockwell would have known the pack drill for this sort of meeting well. Around and around we’d go on the same old okey-doke, the minute hand on the clock pushing slowly upstream.

* * *

It was when I got the notification I’d been upgraded to platinum-elite status that I knew for sure I’d been spending way too much time in the Holiday Inn. I could feel my belt tightening from a combination of hash browns and Gekko house wine, and my lips felt a little chapped from too many scalding flat whites sourced from the hotel’s belching self-serve coffee machine. I could feel my languor rising, looking around at so many others engaging in forlorn pursuits. Change was in the air for Bougainville as the referendum neared, and for me it was a sign that I, too, was shifting out of that to which I’d perhaps become too habituated. But I wanted to stay to see what was going to happen.

---