BOLD LIFE

BOLD LIFE leads a convoy of busses speeding along Ela Beach Road.  Even from my balcony, half a kilometre away, I can tell it’s BOLD LIFE by the name emblazoned on the windscreen in foot-high yellow letters.  All the PMVs in the convoy have their hazard lights flashing and horns blaring.  In the second vehicle, what sounds like a brass band is punching out a military tattoo.  They speed around the corner and the horns fade into the other sounds of the city.  

A BOLD LIFE sighting is a challenge and an omen.  Follow its lead and live your life right to the corners of your existence.  But also remember that life happens but once, and your time is finite.  And in PNG, death comes in equally bold form. 

Death seems to happen more often in PNG.  The statistics definitely back it up: life expectancy in PNG is 20 years less than Australia (according to the World Bank, Australia is 81.85 years and PNG 62.80 years), a shameful difference for countries mere kilometres apart.

But this perception about the frequency of death is also rooted in society’s response to it.  Death isn’t private and hidden, with people alone like islands in their personal grief.  Here death is public, visible and all-encompassing.  It commands your attention, your money and your time.

An announcement of a death draws notices and obituaries in the two daily newspapers, expensive and ostentatious, from every part of that person’s life.  Then there is the hauskrai, the period of mourning held at the family’s house before the burial, a carefully-observed ceremony of presence and grief. 

Like in Australia, an industry has sprung up around traditional funerals.  An afternoon’s drive in Port Moresby will take you past a funeral parlour at Six Mile, which advertises its services as “Dove Funerals: Make it One to Remember!” and at Nine Mile, a billboard screaming “A1 Coffins”, with a picture of a coffin on it, hanging large above the intersection.

Sometimes, there is repatriation of the body across oceans and continents, through tours of cities, to the papa graun, the customary home, the final resting place.  In Wewak, East Sepik, I watched a coffin arriving as checked baggage on an Air Niugini flight.  The dead person’s family waited behind the hurricane wire as the coffin was unloaded.  Then they came forward to claim it, quietly sobbing, to place their hands on the dark wood and around each other, before loading it onto the back of a PMV and driving it back to the village.

My taxi driver taught me a lot about death.  He has grieved for many important men over the last year.  One was a distinguished pilot, one of PNG’s first, a dashing man who flew planes to exotic locations and had lots of wives (or so the story goes – I think ‘wives’ is putting the gloss on it slightly).  He and the taxi driver came from the same village in the Western Highlands.  

My taxi driver showed me the front page of the newspaper, which had a photo of the pilot’s coffin being greeted in traditional style by bare-chested women covered in mud, sitting on the ground, weeping. “Ol igat brukim bel stret” he explained.  Which doesn’t translate literally (and I think it’s an idiosyncratic Highlander expression) but basically means people suffering gut-wrenching sorrow.

My taxi driver and the women weren’t just grieving for the pilot.  They were grieving for the hole that his death left in the community.  They had lost an important man who had brought status and honour to the clan.  He had supported them financially, and represented them on the world stage.  He had made them proud.  It would take generations for another person like him to come along.  “And his sons are still kids” my taxi driver said sadly.

In Port Moresby, death brushes past you, even in places purposely built to shield you from the vagaries of life in the capital.  Recently, I was at the Yacht Club, a members-only club on Fairfax Harbour foreshore whose main clientele are the crusty white men of the resources industry. 

As I watched, a group of people got off a boat, came up the jetty and hurried past our table.  They were carrying a body on a stretcher, wrapped in a tarp, brown feet sticking out the end.  At the back, a white man, clearly in shock, stuttering out an explanation.  And then they were gone out the gate into the carpark, and the after-work crowd went back to their beers. 

A similar thing happened while I was on holidays with my family.  On Christmas day, I was in New Ireland Province off an island out of Kavieng, doing the best snorkelling of my life.  The sea was clear and the fish were everywhere.  But underwater, and on the far side of the coral reef, we couldn’t hear the banana boat overloaded with people that sped up to the island, or hear the wailing as they unloaded the cold body of a drowned boy. 

The boy had been visiting his islander family for the first time.  He was from the mainland and had never learned to swim.  No-one in the village knew first aid, so they went to the first place that did – the tourist accommodation on this island, run by an expat couple, half an hour away by boat.  By the time they laid him out on the picnic table and started CPR, it was too late.  So they collected his body, placed it gently back on the boat, and took off to the hospital in town.

Back home, if someone dies by drowning, the law can require a coronial inquest to be held, to figure out the circumstances leading up to the death and to make recommendations to change the law.  The intention is honourable – every accidental death is unnecessary and gives society an opportunity to prevent the same thing happening again.  But in PNG, that boy will be buried, the family will grieve, and nothing will change.

An obituary to the pilot has been stuck on my fridge since the end of last year.  It quotes a poem by John Gillespie Magee, which goes:

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings…
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod/The high untrespassed sanctity of space/Put out my hand and touched the face of God”

I think it’s beautiful.  I see it every day before I leave the house.  Being reminded of my mortality puts my life into perspective.  Like BOLD LIFE, the obituary is a challenge to live life boldly in the time I have.  And make every one of those 20 extra years count.