15

Referendum days

After various delays, the referendum took place throughout two weeks in late November and early December 2019. I arrived in the middle of the first week to find little Buka Town enjoying its place in the sun. ‘CNN, BBC, the Australians – they have all been here,’ said a man who came up to me at the market, hoping I was a journalist and that he could be interviewed. He was disappointed to find out I wasn’t. I asked his forecast for the eventual result. He was sure it was going to be a thumping majority for independence and repeated a similar version to Eddie’s and Joseph’s arguments: riches on the land and in the sea, and good times ahead.

The little town was spruced up beyond recognition. Grass verges had been trimmed, and the storm drains long clogged with cans and bottles, and coated with red betel nut expectorant, as well as Christ knows what else, had been cleaned up. Even the giant crater in the middle of the main government offices had been filled in and the sliding gate repaired. It was a tangible demonstration of how much Bougainvilleans could accomplish and how judging the place on the performance of its inert government alone would be a mistake.

It felt like a nation-in-waiting.

The Bougainville flag was everywhere. It flew from lamp posts and cars, from every cranny of every ramshackle building in town. The Chinese owners of ‘Hot Rooster’ had put two flags on either side of the chicken that was dressed in a blue majorette’s uniform, giving two thumbs up. Even the inflatable 10-foot-high Santa Claus outside the pharmacy had one tucked in between the fold of his thumb and index finger. The flag was inscribed onto earrings and necklaces and stuck onto the front of sunglasses in positions so prominent as to half blind the wearer. Comfortably 50 per cent of the town was wearing various black acrylic T-shirts that bore the flag, along with proud appellations such as ‘Black Power’, ‘Black Pearl of the Pacific’ and ‘Land of the Blacks’. I bought some T-shirts for myself and my two sons – all ‘Made in China’ – in one of the small stalls in the little park in the centre of town.

Beside the park was the most extraordinary cloth banner depicting the gold head of a Babylonian king, a purple body, brass-coloured thighs and legs of clay, representing the Holy Roman Empire. It was quite the most extraordinary banner I have ever seen. The preacher who used to bellow sometimes at the market had erected it, and I went to ask him where he got it. He told me it was a gift from God.

I found the referendum to be exceptionally well organised and managed, an opinion reinforced by the positive comments coming from the large range of observer missions that fanned out across the region during the two-week polling period.¹ Each night, hundreds of people would gather with flags outside the police station as trucks, creaky buses and little flotillas of boats brought in the ballot boxes from polling stations all around the region, where they were to be stored in the safe beside the cells, after closure of the polling stations, until counting began. Down near Kurtatchi, young men came out from clearings within the forest wearing their upe to cast ballots before heading straight back into the glades. There was a sense of this being the most important and cathartic of community and political events, a culmination of a process many years in the making.² Throughout Buka, little Catholic shrines and crosses had been repainted and lights affixed to them. ‘Joyous’ and ‘excited’ aren’t the first adjectives to reach for to describe Buka Town, but they were the descriptors that best encompassed the mood during those referendum days.

Moreover, this joy was fuelled by nothing more than soft drinks and coconuts. Anyone looking for beer, altar wine, that rasping Captain Moresby whiskey or even a swig of home brew was out of luck. A booze ban was in place and was observed assiduously by all. It was an incredible indication of what could be regulated and enforced in Bougainville when there was community support. As Anthony Regan, Kerryn Baker and Thiago Opperman observe:

The success of the referendum as an electoral process is in large part due to the strong community support for the referendum process … The impact of the remarkable engagement by Bougainvilleans in awareness and reconciliation and other referendum-related activities cannot be [overestimated].³

I met Eddie on the deck at Reasons, overlooking the water, where he was drinking a Coca-Cola. The pizza oven was still as it was in 2016 but was now covered in dust, and the beer fridges were as empty as an open tabernacle. Eddie looked contented. These weeks had been a destination for at least 30 years, and they were the result of the work undertaken by community leaders like himself in the previous years. I asked Eddie what he thought the result would be; he was bullish that it was going to be for independence. ‘No-one is supporting “greater autonomy”. That’s just the same rubbish that we have now. It’s independence, for sure.’

There were two choices on the ballot before Bougainvilleans: ‘independence’ and ‘greater autonomy’. We had spent days in those various Post-Referendum Planning Task-Force meetings trying to elaborate the definitions⁴ of these terms, but to no avail. It didn’t seem to matter very much on the ground, however. I had lived through the vote to ratify the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland, Brexit in the wider United Kingdom, and gay marriage in Australia – all of which saw impassioned people making ‘pro’ and ‘con’ arguments – but for this referendum there was no campaign at all, no-one making an argument for sticking or twisting, no-one who seemed bothered about questions of financial viability.⁵ There was much active campaigning on independence, and no-one seemed to be making the case for greater autonomy. As Regan, Baker and Opperman observe in their analysis of the referendum period, the absences of any ‘anti-independence’ voices would have been unthinkable even a few years earlier and represented a remarkable turnaround from the divisions over Bougainville’s political future that helped partly fuel ‘the Crisis’ and which continued following the Peace Agreement.⁶

While the riches under the ground would be enough to bankroll a place of this size. The mine remained resolutely shut, serving in the referendum as little more than an arresting backdrop for news reports. No concerns were apparent as to who was going to do the work, or the lack of people with public administration skills to work through and set up new government arrangements. No-one in Buka was descending into a discussion of such encumbrances.

I called into one of the government offices to collect a commemorative T-shirt, which came in 3XL and gave me the look of one of those men in Weight Watchers advertisements wearing an old shirt to illustrate the number of pounds shed. Inside the office, the standard lethargy prevailed. Someone was typing out with one finger a letter to the minister on behalf of the cleaner requesting extra allowances; the man beside him was simply staring inertly into space. Everyone here, too, was confident of a vote for independence.

‘What happens next?’ I asked.

‘We’ll work on that next year,’ the man staring into space answered, with certitude.

---