16

The stone pillars

By the end of the first of the two weeks of the referendum, most people had voted, and polling stations erected around town started to be dismantled. There was nothing much else for anyone to do but wait. I wrote a couple of articles for Australian blogging platforms and read a few crime novels borrowed from the library to pass the time before counting began.

However, I knew that this might be my last stint in Bougainville for a while, and I didn’t want to leave without seeing the stones.

One of the most intriguing parts of Both Sides of Buka Passage is close to the end, when Beatrice admits that she can find no explanation for a series of pillars, stones and dolmens a few feet in height that stood erect in random places on Buka Island and in the northern part of Bougainville Island. Something about these stones put this scrupulously studious anthropologist off balance. In contrast to the unleavened style of the rest of her book, Beatrice wrote about the stones in a manner almost approaching the giddy. There was nothing natural about these pillars, she asserted; they showed ‘definite signs of human handiwork’, some smoothed down into the sheen of marble and others with designs reminiscent of honeycomb incised into them. At a small village she called Tohatchi (known later as Tohatsi), she found a stone that was about six feet high, with diamond-shaped marks near the base; she took pictures of some local people standing by it, and they looked diminutive by contrast. Close by, she discovered a set of stones known as ‘A Pi’.¹ ‘Pi’ means ‘sores’, and it was feared by locals that boils and suppurating wounds would break out on anyone who touched the A Pi. Beatrice was having none of what she plainly regarded as mumbo-jumbo, and she rubbed away mud, moss and lichens from one of the stones. She told her companions that she had ‘destroyed its evil power by cleaning it’, saying in her account:

[T]hey were then emboldened to lift it out of the thicket of bush which grew round it and put it in a position where I could photograph it, and even to hold it upright while I did so … They said that now I had cleaned it they would not be afraid of it any more.²

The true meanings of these stones, and why they were positioned as they were, eluded Beatrice. Her normally voluble and loquacious informants seemed unusually reluctant to stump up explanations. ‘Were they phallic, some sort of shrines, even places of human sacrifice?’ she speculated, wildly. Why was everyone pretending they weren’t important? Most remarkably, in a place where everything had a ritual significance of some sort, she found that many people claimed not to have even been aware of these unusual stones in their midst prior to her pointing them out. This also struck me as odd. In villages where everyone knew everyone’s business and lineage, where every stone had meaning, how could stones with unusual markings not have some sort of story attached to them?

Eddie had heard of the stone pillar at Tohatsi and had visited there when he was at school. He had been told it was an arrow fired from a nearby island – but of the stones known as A Pi, he, too, said he knew nothing. I believed him. I picked him up beside the giant screen. He had new headwear: a sort of pork pie hat. We were joined by Sylvester, another ex-combatant.

We drove out past the airport and the new little strips of shops opposite; past the office of the president, the Bougainville parliament and the now forsaken government offices, one of which was the office where I had begun, the one that had once contained the voluminous files of my antecedents. The offices had been abandoned when the government refused to pay rent to one of their ministers, who had provided the building in his previous incarnation as the regional member in the National Parliament. The minister’s men arrived, told everyone to get out, and stripped the innards of the building. The walls to my office were knocked through, the untold amounts of bureaucratic miseries in the compilations of all those papers and reports scattered to the ground, stamped on, and, over time, ground down into the dust. The minister in question remained in Cabinet for a while afterwards, ‘working around the clock’ to get the government to lease the building back.

We also drove past the red roof of the new location of the Unity library, painted in the bright colours of Digicel, the mobile phone company that had sponsored its new location. On this day, as on so many days I’d seen before, there was a little queue of children outside. Leslie the librarian and her husband, Pat, who managed the law and justice program, had just left; I’d been to their leaving do the day before. It was a joyous affair, but what would stay with me the most was a speech from one of Pat’s early counterparts, now a retired magistrate. He said that in all his years, Pat was the first white man who hadn’t shouted at him.

On we went, past a pizzeria managed by nuns. The dough is made to a Viennese recipe, the legacy of an Austrian aid worker who had been here for many years and whom I felt certain was likely to leave more of a lasting legacy than I would. Just past the pizzeria came a half-built building; meant to be Bougainville’s first polytechnic, it was another incomplete project courtesy of the local MP who had sponsored the Filipino ghost ship.

An hour up the road was the village of Tohatsi, the place where Beatrice had found the stones. We had arranged to meet Joel, a secondary-school teacher and member of the clan on whose land the various stones rested, who was going to show us around. Joel was a former heavyweight boxer, and his torso was shredded like a tractor engine. Eddie had been in touch with him, and he was happy to help in return for a copy of Beatrice’s book.

Finding the stone pillar at Tohatsi was a cinch. It was standing in clear sight by the side of the road, its hieroglyphs, grooves and markings more weather-beaten now than in Beatrice’s time but still visible and distinct. The only difference was that the pillar was no longer upright but now at a precipitous 45-degree angle after a truck had smashed into it a few years before. The truck emerged second best from the encounter and was rendered immobile.

Just like the villagers back in Beatrice’s time, Joel said he had not heard of the A Pi stones either. They weren’t on the stretch of road where Beatrice had photographed and left them. The first five people we asked said they had never heard of them and gave us looks to indicate they thought we were all a little crazy. Some of those we asked were adamant: they had never heard of these stones and they were the ones more likely to know if any were around, rather than some fellow who had just arrived with an annotated copy of a big book. The local chief deadpanned that he knew of them but didn’t know where they were. A man behind him listening in on our conversation scowled. I had a rising feeling that we were being given the run-around but couldn’t quite work out why. The office-bearers of the village institution were holding out.

It was a teenage boy wearing a Korn T-shirt and carrying a bush knife who let us in on the secret. The stones did exist. There were originally four, but now there were only three, and he knew where to find them. He warned us they no longer looked like the pictures I showed him in Beatrice’s book. We drove a few hundred yards back down the road, walked into the jungle and a few minutes later came across a pit in the ground covered with bamboo reeds, coconut husks, branches, the petals from what looked like chrysanthemums, and shavings of bark. The boy pointed down and, through Eddie, explained that the stones were now buried far underneath.

Before the white man’s war, he said, the stones had been exposed for a few years ‘after some white’ had dug them up, with calamitous consequences. Throughout all the time they were visible, the people in the village had broken out in sores, boils and unexplained wounds that neither bush medicine nor drugs from the doctor could heal. Was this ‘white’ Blackwood, I wondered? Either no-one seemed to know, or no-one wanted to tell me, ruining the chance of a definitive denouement to the mystery. He went on to explain that once they had tried everything else, the villagers decided to bury the stone pillars deep in the earth and never to unearth them again for anyone who came asking about them. Were people still breaking out in sores? A few were, but not as many as when the stone slabs sat astride the earth. Would the pillars ever be dug up again? No, they would not. The photographs of the ornate swirls and pattern of lines of the A Pi in Beatrice’s book will remain the only visuals of these intriguing stones. The chief looked at me with some concern – I assured him I wasn’t planning to dig them up. I asked him if he’d voted yet, and he said he and the whole village had voted on the first day. I asked for his prediction of the result. ‘Independence,’ he said. ‘We’ll have it by Christmas’.

On the way back down to Buka, we stopped for Eddie to buy betel nut, and he pointed to two men out for a walk. ‘I bet you don’t know what they are doing,’ he said, thumbing in their direction. ‘They are making a curse,’ I replied, confidently. ‘How do you know that, white man?’ he asked, surprised. ‘Beatrice wrote about it,’ I said.

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