Bilas peles

If you ever go up to Nusa Island Resort, just out of Kavieng, make sure you meet the bartender.  His name is Adolf.  Pardon?  Like Hitler, you know, the Nazis? he might say, like he did to us, collecting our empty beer cans and grinning, enjoying our reaction.  If his parents weren’t au fait with the details of 20^th century history, at least they gave him a name that is unlikely to ever be forgotten.

I was up in Kavieng with my mum, who has been staying with me for the last few weeks, and a couple of my colleagues from the Centre, to run a Community Legal Education (CLE) workshop for the landowners of New Hanover Island.  New Hanover is three hours by banana boat from Kavieng, New Ireland, a province so picturesque it’s universally known as ‘bilas peles’, which, creatively interpreted, translates to ‘bejewelled place’.

This CLE was particularly terrifying for me, because I was doing three presentations, entirely in Tok Pisin!  I’d been given the introduction topics – the Constitution, the separation of powers, the hierarchy of laws.  As part of my capacity-building role, I’d planned to rejig the format to make them more interactive and engaging – pictures, questions, stories, rather than just boxes of text on a Powerpoint presentation.  But because my Tok Pisin is still in its infancy, I couldn’t be as flexible as I hoped.  Nonetheless, the participants indulged me, and the presentations seemed to go down well.

I definitely have a long way to go with the Tok, but I’m working on it – reading newspapers, listening to the radio, torturing my colleagues with attempts to talk about the weather…It helps that it’s the funniest language I have ever learned.  Having its roots in the late 19^th century sugarcane fields of northern Australia, it retains a lot of Queenslandisms – for instance, ‘bagarap’ means broken, and ‘lesbaga’ means a person with a poor work ethic. Luckily, I worked out what ‘pos opis edres’ meant, before I asked someone how on earth Latin made it into Tok Pisin (FYI it means ‘post office address’). 

All CLEs are important, but this one especially so.  Almost the entire island of New Hanover has been leased out under a Special Agricultural and Business Lease (or ‘SABL’).  SABLs are a topic for another post, but in short, they are a legal loophole for land grabbing the biggest scandal in PNG land law.  Rights to use the land are signed away by self-appointed representatives, who act on behalf of themselves only, and rely upon corruption (at worst) or incompetence (at best) of government bodies tasked to oversee, approve, or veto agreements which appear to be unjust.  Customary law is effectively extinguished for the period of the lease, which can be up to 99 years, and usually is.

The legal status of customary land in PNG is totally different from Australia.  The oft-quoted figure is that 97% of PNG’s total land mass is under customary ownership.  There is no title, just a right of ownership by the clan, passed down from father to son, or mother to daughter, depending on what part of the country you’re in.  It isn’t recorded in any books, and it doesn’t need to be won back through decades-long court cases, as they were never sly enough to pull the ‘terra nullius’ line in PNG.  

During the question and answer time, I was asked to explain the customary land ownership system in Australia.  I gave a potted account of native title (thankfully in English, although I’m pretty sure that’s not the language the Native Title Act is written in, ha ha ha!).  Afterwards, chatting with the participants, they asked whether it would work in PNG.  Definitely not, I said.  One man grunted his agreement.  ‘Look at what’s happened to the Aborigines’ he said.  ‘That’s what we’d be like, if we had that here’.

The point of the CLE workshops is to bring awareness to communities about their rights, but I am beginning to see another purpose, perhaps more important.  The workshops bring everyone together in one place, men and women, leaders and the disenfranchised, for the explicit purpose of talking about the law and land.  Some of the participants have never been involved in the decisions being made about their land, nor told of the consequences. 

The workshops become a flashpoint of big emotions – grief, anger, recriminations.  Some participants were the ones who ostensibly stood to benefit from deals with the logging company, who had signed away theirs, and other people’s, rights for a song, but were seeing none of the promised benefits.  An image that sticks with me – a woman in her 50’s, a mother and grandmother, thumping her chest and talking about her deep sorrow that was present in every moment she sat still in the workshop and did nothing, while knowing her land was being taken.

But despite the divisions in the group, the community is prepared to start fresh and work together.  This was made very clear by the rousing, lengthy speeches given by the participants throughout the workshop, a feature of many public gatherings in PNG.  From the president: ‘The past has failed us.  But we can’t keep looking backwards, we have to unite and work together.’  Put more bluntly by the island’s governor-elect, ‘Enough of the fucking around.  We need to act now’. 

But this feeling was captured better than any oratorical flourishes possibly could by the New Hanover song, which was sung by the participants at the beginning of the workshop.  Led by the ‘Slim Dusty of New Ireland’ on guitar, a famous performer, the community’s jester, a very old man with a mouth collapsing around his few remaining teeth, the community sang the song of the island in soaring six-piece harmonies, in tok ples, Tok Pisin and English.  I didn’t think it was possible to get chills down my spine when suffocating in heat and humidity, but it is.

After promises to return to New Hanover, a last supper feast on mud crabs, and a gift of a traditional New Ireland basket from the guesthouse’s owner to Mum (or ‘mama’, as she was known, the title a sign of respect) it was time for us to head back to Port Moresby.  We were at the airport at 4.30am, swatting mosquitoes, sharing the very basic waiting area with sunburned Germans heading home after weeks of diving, and Papua New Guinean men dressed very strangely (for PNG) in ironed shirts and suit pants, probably on their way to meetings in the capital.

As we flew into Port Moresby, I looked out over the incinerator haze and bare hillsides, and felt the thing I least expected – like I was coming home.

I’m one week away from the three-month mark that volunteers are warned about before they get deployed – when, according to those in the know, the honeymoon period ends abruptly, your outlook dims dramatically and the little things that were once quirky now become deeply irritating.  I’ve been blessed with a very stable first three months here, due in no small part to the jaw-dropping view off my balcony, great friends, eating well, regular exercise, plenty of sleep, and meaningful occupation – it’s a clichéd ole recipe for mental wellbeing but it seems to be working.  

Thank you for reading for the first three months, and stick around, there’s nine more to go, and it’s not called land of the unexpected for nothing. 

East Sepik – notes on land and place

Sorry for the late post – I’m trying to average one a week, but last weekend was full of preparations for my week-long work trip to Nungawa village, East Sepik – a fine example of the ‘real PNG’ that everyone has been telling me I must experience.  Now I’m back, have had my first wash in a week that wasn’t out of a bucket, baked some thank-you cakes, had a nice cold beer, and I’m still buzzing.  If I wasn’t fully there before, I am now 100% committed to seeing as much of this beautiful, crazy country, beyond POM’s city limits, as I possibly can.

We were up in Nungawa to deliver a community legal education (CLE) workshop.  As it turns out, organising an event in PNG is mind-numbingly complex. As host, you are responsible for the food, shelter, and transport of not only yourself, but every participant, for the duration of the event, and then getting them back home.  At every turn, there are negotiations and calculations, decisions made on the fly and on an extremely tight budget.  Happily for me, my rudimentary Tok Pisin meant that I remained in ignorant bliss about most of what was going on around me, but I was deeply impressed by the equanimity of my colleagues, as almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, for instance: 

…A PMV we chartered was meant to collect us from the airport.  It didn’t.  Instead, it took a group of people who made it past the baggage claim first, and we had to wait for three hours before another PMV came along and took us the two hours to the village, arriving right on dusk, tired and hungry…

…Our contact on the ground, a local bigman, was meant to coordinate our trip and negotiate prices and labour with the villagers.  He didn’t.  He had been too busy campaigning for the upcoming election, and wouldn’t answer his phone at crucial moments, leaving us to deal with a stack of misunderstandings and awkward conversations…

…The workshop was meant to start on Monday.  It didn’t.  Only five participants had arrived by the time it was meant to kick off.  So we postponed until Tuesday, and waited around for word, workshopping plans B and C.  At dusk we found out that a PMV carrying the participants had broken down on the way, and they were stranded waiting for another vehicle.  They finally rolled into the village at 9pm, having made the last 15km in a PMV with no headlights, guided along the perilous road by two torches duct-taped to the bumper bar…

But by Tuesday, everyone had arrived, everything was in place, and we were ready to begin.  At 9am, the garamut (a big wooden drum that serves as the main form of communication for the villagers) was beaten three times, and half an hour later the participants had gathered in the venue, an open-sided hall, with a palm-thatched roof and a dirt floor.  The meeting was opened with a prayer, the blessings sealed with three claps, and the workshop began.

Part of the Centre’s core work is to run CLE programs to educate customary landowners about their rights under PNG law, starting with the Constitution (‘mama lo’) and going right down to the individual acts.  As well as the educative aspect, landowners can have their questions answered and get on-the-spot legal advice. 

In Nungawa, the main concern is the operations of a company which is logging in a nearby forest and transporting the logs on massive trucks on a road that runs straight through the village.  Like many unsavoury operators in PNG, the company got an ‘agricultural’ lease on the land, ostensibly for planting oil palm.  But it’s become apparent that the oil palm plantation is a ruse, and the company’s main operations are the logging of valuable kwila trees, which they transport as whole logs to the wharves and ship to Malaysia for processing.

By getting an agricultural lease instead of a forestry lease, the company bypassed the necessarily regulatory requirements under the forestry acts which make sure that the operations are transparent, sustainable, and importantly, that the customary landowners have given their free, prior, and informed consent to any operations.  None of this happened, and the company now has a 99-year lease over the landowners’ land, and with the support of local police, are doing whatever they want with impunity.

It was spine-chilling to watch as the landowners learned how the law worked, how it was meant to protect them, and how badly they had been cheated and exploited by the company.  The purpose of the CLE program is to raise awareness, not to aggravate situations, but by the time we left the landowners had resolved to start blocking the road and were discussing ways they could seek some redress for the situation.

The abuse of the agricultural and business leases (SABL) loophole over the last 10 years has led to almost 5 million hectares of customary land, 11 percent of PNG’s total land area, ending up in the hands of corporations.  The problems in Nungawa village are not unusual and are repeated in likely hundreds of communities across the country.  A special report into the SABLs is due to be released this week or next, but knowing the vast gap between promise and delivery in PNG, I am not holding my breath.

As a newly-arrived volunteer who barely knows my arse from my head when it comes to how the Centre / PNG / environmental law works, the CLE program was as educational for me as it was for the participants.  Given the low level of literacy in the village, the program was delivered entirely in Tok Pisin and mostly verbal, and it was quietly thrilling as every day it got easier for me to keep up with what was being said.  By the last day, the villagers kindly indulged me and I was up on my feet doing a presentation in stilted, terribly accented Tok Pisin.

The most important thing I got from the workshop was a deeply felt understanding of the importance of land in PNG.  In Australia, land is primarily an asset, something that you can borrow against, that you can build your life on, short as it is.  Having Torrens title makes you the rightful owner of your patch, even if it’s just the tangible part of the framework the State has chosen to utilize to order, categorise and monetise land.  As we learned in legal theory (and as I tried to extrapolate upon in my extremely convoluted and now woefully dated 2008 essay about real property in Second Life) land, like all property, is best viewed as a ‘bundle of rights’, each of which can be separately or jointly exploited at the whim of the current owner.

In PNG, ‘Where you are from?’ is always the first question everyone asks each other (that is, if the answer isn’t immediately obvious from one glance at your face).  Your ples (place) is your identity, birthright, safe haven and resting ground, your dependant and your guardian.  When everything else fails, you can return home and your ples will provide for you. 

Even in Australia, in every place I have lived, including the farm where I grew up and which has been in my family for generations, I have never felt anything like this connection to land.  I have always felt like I was a visitor, just passing through.

Being in Nungawa, on the beautiful Sepik Plains, being shown around by the customary landowners, learning about their land and the deeply offensive idea that it had been taken from them without their consent, I was struck by how, in contrast, Port Moresby is a ‘nothing place’.  People come here – they’re not from here.  Even if a person is POM born and bred, they won’t admit to it – they’ll gloss over the details and say they’re from Central Province, or refer to their mother’s or father’s ples instead.  This ownership vacuum probably plays a part in Port Moresby’s crime problems.  With no-one acting like its parent, it’s no wonder it goes feral sometimes.