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 20th 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 19th 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.
Papua New Ginnivan 