17

The result of all this

The counting and announcement of the result took place at the high-school hall on the outskirts of Buka where I had first met Dennis.

I had been tweeting pictures from Bougainville during the referendum weeks: the flag flying from various incongruous locations; a positive review of the bakery’s meat pies; a picture of the dusty pizza oven that had stayed under the steps of Reasons for the last four years because it was too heavy to carry up the creaky stairs; a picture of Eddie and some other ex-combatants looking gruffly into the camera, along with his potted biography. This diverse photo-play brought me into the orbit of Bloomberg, The Times of London and various Australian media outlets, each hoping for someone to give them on-the-ground reactions to the result. Endeavouring to be of service, I went down to the count with a fully charged phone and, crucially, the passcode to get me access to the Referendum Commission’s satellite wi-fi connection.

One of the first people I ran into was the Honourable Joseph Watawi, wearing a new camouflage green hat bearing the words, ‘Fish tremble when they hear me roar’. Various diplomat types dressed in official-looking safari jackets milled around. Eddie strode in a few minutes later, and shortly afterwards, a caravanserai of worthies arrived: Bougainville’s president, various ministers, sundry members of Bougainville’s House of Representatives, and the Papua New Guinean minister for Bougainville affairs. Also present were six of the seven referendum commissioners who had organised the referendum, all bedecked with official shirts. Bertie Ahern, former Irish prime minister who headed the independent commission that managed the referendum, was slathered in so much sunscreen he looked like the corpse at a wake. After a bit of milling around, we were ready to start. By now, the humidity levels in the hall were close to 100 per cent.

We started half an hour later. First there was a prayer, then there was a preacher, then there were anthems, then there was a statement thanking every conceivable person, and then the former Irish prime minister stood up to announce the result.

It was a landslide. Of the more than 180,000 votes cast, 178,000 had opted for independence. It was, with only one exception (South Sudan), the largest ‘pro’ vote for independence in any such vote anywhere in the world. Some cheers echoed within the hall, not cacophonous by any means and then, soon afterwards, about 20 women in the middle of the hall broke out in a hymn.

I’d been expecting euphoria, but the initial reaction seemed oddly muted.

My phone lit up with requests for on-the-ground favours. I felt as excited as Beatrice would have been when she received the occasional letter exclaiming delight in her work. ‘Can you find some people to talk to?’ was always the request, so I lined up Joseph and Eddie, filming them on my iPhone as they talked like seasoned media professionals. They were relishing their place in the sun. ‘All along the desire for independence was in my blood,’ Eddie said to a CNN reporter in Hong Kong. ‘It was what our ancestors always wanted … they wanted to make sure the issue of fighting for independence was put to rest.’ He was utterly sincere.

I drove into Buka expecting car-honking scenes of celebration and flags flying even higher than before, but there was nothing; the town was settling back into its quiet slumber. It reminded me of driving on a Christmas afternoon: so much effort put into preparation followed by deflation. There was nothing to indicate that a referendum had even happened. The beer shops were still shut, and even the mashed-up religious banner was gone. I went home, fixed myself a soda water and squeezed in a lime.

* * *

I left for Port Moresby a few days later, departing from Buka on the lunchtime flight. That morning I’d gone into the office to see Dennis, who was typing his resignation letter. I’d brought another bottle of whiskey up, intending to give it to Eddie, but thought, on balance, Dennis deserved it more. ‘I’m leaving,’ he said, meaning stepping aside, and I told him I was, too. He showed me the detailed resignation letter he’d written the night before, soul-penetrating in its sharp, sorrowful intensity. We shook hands. We should have hugged. He is the best of good men. Unlike Beatrice and me, he had no boat to get on, no plane to catch, no book to write. My contract would run out in April, and I didn’t plan on renewing it. I had planned to write a travel book about PNG and Solomon Islands and had Eddie lined up to accompany me. Little did I know then how 2020 would unfold.

The terminal was sweaty bedlam. Referendum staff were heading home; the check-in machine was buggered up, so the staff were writing out tickets and luggage stubs by hand. I was glad to get my bum on a seat in the cabin. The route we would be taking was rare. Instead of banking immediately out onto the Solomon Sea for Port Moresby, we were bound for the airport in Arawa to pick up additional passengers. We sailed over the Buka Passage, and I looked down onto the dusty road cut out of the lush green. We would have passed Kurtatchi soon after but were too high up to see it. On our right was the Crown Prince Range that the German administrators named from afar, and within there, somewhere, shrouded by clouds, was Panguna.

Arawa’s airport had been built to service the mining operations. Closed for many years, it reopened in 2014. A small jet was parked on the airport’s apron, the plane of the prime minister of PNG, who was (I was following the events on social media) addressing a rapturous crowd at the park in Arawa. His name was James Marape. Marape had been finance minister but had resigned, assembling a coalition to topple the incumbent and taken over himself. He was a Sabbath-observing Seventh Day Adventist whose aspiration was to make his country the world’s ‘richest Black Christian nation’. His works were twists on donor speak. Upon taking office, he’d published his ‘Marape Manifesto’, an eight-page collection of high-sounding phrases and catchwords spliced from the books of the Bible and tomes of aid bureaucrats. The document outlined 10 broad goals ranging from ‘We will endeavour to build our military, our police, our correction services into self-sufficient and disciplined revenue earners for our country so that they keep our external borders and domestic economy secure’ to ‘The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will be the God of Papua New Guinea’. It rounds off with a concluding statement to chill the hearts of report-writers all over Moresby: ‘These mantra, aims and manifestos are from the core of my DNA and not from data, statistics or policy evidence.’

A large part of me saluted the prime minister for having the courage to put his unvarnished thoughts down on paper. Few political leaders in any countries do that, and there was none of the fakery here that appears in other official government documents, few of which give the impression of having been read by the people named as having written them. His manifesto showed Messianic faith in the power of the state, despite all evidence to the contrary. There were no nuts-and-bolts details in his manifesto, no tarrying on details such as who was going to do the work or how it was going to be done, nothing about boring subjects like planning or logistics. It was just all going to happen, somehow, like a miracle. One of his advisers told me that Marape sincerely believed that he had been put on this earth to fulfil God’s plan.

On this particular day, the man whose country Bougainvilleans so emphatically voted to leave received a hero’s welcome and arrived brandishing a dummy cheque for 50 million kina (A$20 million). He spoke in beguiling aphorisms about ‘economic independence’, finding a ‘sweet spot between independence and autonomy’ and about how he, as a simple man, didn’t have an opinion on Bougainville’s future. Eddie was down there in some unspecified security provision fashion, and I hoped that for once, he’d be paid for his services. A years-long research project lay in trying to disentangle the contradictions of it all.

As we flew on for Moresby, I thought about Beatrice, the ghosts of Australiana in Arawa, and Bougainville’s uncertain future. By few objective criteria could it be said that Bougainville was ready to be independent if one took as one’s start and end point the government in Buka. But looking at the men and the villagers who had buried the A Pi stones, their compatriots with shovels and trowels up in Panguna, or the fishermen and women at Pororan, I wondered if such air-conditioned judgements really mattered. Government was entirely absent from all their lives. They expected little or nothing of it, be it an administration in Buka or Port Moresby, and they received little or nothing in return. These were the true institutions.

Bougainvilleans are people who are, to all intents and purposes, already autonomous and independent. Will it really make a material difference to the people’s lives which government sits far away? Holy Moses: it will not.