A Bastard of a Place: The Australians in Papua
A Bastard of a Place: The Australians in Papua
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781741155105 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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A Bastard of a Place
The Australians in Papua
By Peter Brune
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2004 Peter BruneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74115-510-5
CHAPTER 1
SPREADING THE OIL
1
The Australian digger moved in for the final fight. He looked at his mates. During torrential tropical downpours, they'd worn their rubberised ground sheets as capes and looked like gaunt, shining grey ghosts as they slowly waded through waist-high swamps. The lethargic flow of the brackish water had also borne the incomplete, maggot-infested Japanese corpses to softly nudge them or float slowly past. If you needed a shit here, you didn't have toilet paper, so you wiped your arse with your hand or sand or leaves and then washed it in the swamp. You took your socks off only when clean socks arrived — they'd had only one change. And hungry! Just one feed a day. To all who fought here, this was a bastard of a place.
Their otherwise silent passage out of the swamp was accompanied by the unmusical yet rhythmic sound of weary, almost unwilling, booted feet being withdrawn from oozing mire.
This area seemed to be a base hospital. Only the sick and the dying appeared to await them. They came to a timber-framed square hut, with thick earthwork up to about waist height, and an Australian .303 rifle pointing out on each side. Moving cautiously inside, they saw four emaciated Japanese huddled together. Etched in the digger's mind was the fear that whatever the condition of any enemy soldier, it was probable that he had a concealed bayonet or grenade and that he expected to die, wanted to die, and would use any ruse to take an Australian with him — death was preferable to surrender. Three of the Japanese had maggots in their mouths and eyes, while the fourth just lay with his eyes shut. The digger belted that fourth soldier on the head, his eyes opened with a start, and one of the digger's mates shot him.
The Australians then moved off to a half-finished dugout paradoxically raised above ground level. Another enemy lay across it. The digger lent over and took hold of the man's watch. His wrist moved and so the Australian's mate shot him too. They rolled the enemy soldier over and found an unexploded grenade. On to the next hut. This one was only partly built — a timber frame with ground sheets over it. Inside was a Japanese naked from the waist up, with his helmet on his lap and a grenade held to his sternum. For a moment that seemed an eternity, the two men stared into each other's eyes. As the grenade exploded and the enemy's chest caved in, the digger instinctively turned around and searched the remaining huts for movement. A few heads bobbed up and one man sat bolt upright. He was in full uniform with helmet, rifle and bayonet. In a flash the heads disappeared from view. The diggers moved methodically forward and fired shots into them. Kill all of the bastards, trust not one of them and get this nightmare over with.
Later that day the Australian was wounded and evacuated. The date was 22 January 1943.The last bastion had fallen and, with its capture, the Japanese invasion of Papua which had been halted at Milne Bay and along the Kokoda Trail, and all but smashed on the northern beachheads of Gona and Buna, was brought to its final and irretrievable conclusion here at nearby Sanananda.
One of the wounded digger's mates went to a church parade a day or so later. He knelt down and quietly observed the ritual. But after a while he stood up. The priest looked up with a disapproving stare, but the soldier merely shook his head and walked away. During that split second, the digger had lost his faith, and had come to believe that there was no one out there to help him and care for him but himself. When Australians talk of the men who saved Australia in 1942 — 43, of that time in their history when they also had to stand alone and help themselves, who fought not for the birth of a nation, but for its very rites of passage, it has become fashionable to visualise a wounded Australian being carried over a famous trail by Papuan carriers with fuzzy wuzzy hair. But Kokoda's glory constitutes but one-fifth of the Australian legend of Papua during 1942. It is an integral part of that legend, but not its whole. This is the story of Milne Bay, Gona, Buna and Sanananda as well. But also, it is the sad saga of a nation still ignorant of this great Australian legend, still largely unaware of the feats of some of its most deserving military commanders and the soldiers they served. In some measure, regrettably, it is the story of others who have been accorded undue praise.
First impressions are often misleading. As you fly closer to the airport, you notice the brown, bare hills. Your attention is drawn to a number of small, swirling spot fires dotted around the width of your vision. The locals are playing with matches or lighters again. You will get used to this. No real rhyme or reason to it. On many a Port Moresby street corner the same phenomenon is in progress. Litter, and there's an abundance of it, is piled and set alight. Perhaps it's ingrained in them: clear the land, leave it to dry, burn, plant, reap, and move on. But even if you're not going to perform this ancient cycle, you light a spot fire anyway. Ingrained. Your first impression of Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea.
And then you see the forbidding monster in the background. Not mere hills these, but a towering, mist-peaked, purple-blue mountainous wall: the Owen Stanley Range. Many Australians are not familiar with this name, but most will have at least a vague concept of the trail that winds its way over it to a distant outpost called Kokoda.
You land. Wait awhile. There's a vine on the Kokoda Trail called lawyer vine (wait awhile). Get caught up in lawyer vine and its associated prickles, and you do indeed wait awhile. This botanical marvel seems to have woven its way throughout the entire population. Wait awhile — so they do. The most menial task is accomplished at a pedestrian pace. Check in or out at the airport and you're at the mercy of a tired computer system prone to break down with monotonous regularity. The staff are used to it. Looks of resignation. Never mind, wait awhile. Days later, and in different surroundings, you will learn to love this Papuan pace of existence.
The motel bus picks you up or, if the driver forgets, you take a cab. This vehicle, and many others in line, would immediately cop a defect notice in any city or town in Australia. Severely cracked headlight, evidence of numerous accidents, suspension in name only and a boot that only just surrenders on the fourth attempt to a bent key. As the barefooted driver explains that it's his first day on the job, you're already missing his Turkish counterpart in Sydney.
A few hundred yards out of Jackson's Airport, you spot the first billboard: on it a warning in pidgin followed by the third-world reaper in bold type, 'AIDS'. A few more hundred yards and another billboard: 'Corruption Is Killing Papua New Guinea'. Not spot fires these, but raging infernos. AIDS and corruption.
Ahead trucks, small buses, utes and wagons abound. You get the impression that one would not make a living selling family or business sedans here. People travel en masse and every conceivable space is occupied as their vehicles disappear behind palls of smoke that would have done a naval smokescreen proud. The motel. You pay the driver and stand at the boot for your luggage. But the bent key has been bent once too often. As the unlocking ritual continues, you notice the betel nut (buai) sales across the road. The nuts are arranged on a small mat on the ground. They are about the size of a squash ball and yellow and green in colour. Hands reach through the fence, money changes hands, and the nut, mustard or pepper stick (daka) and small container of lime (kambang) are passed back. The lime is derived from crushed coral or shells. Bite the outer casing off the nut, combine the ingredients, chew well, and enjoy. The effect of betel nut chewing on a Papuan is rather like a dim dim (a Caucasian) having a few beers. The nut produces a red, pasty lining around the chewer's gums and on their teeth. After further chewing, a casual spit to the road or footpath (the end result of many passers-by is rather like a modern art canvas), and the social drug has been consumed.
Back to your luggage. Wait awhile. The driver's an adaptable creature. He's lying inside the taxi with a screwdriver and pulls the back seat out and retrieves your bags from the boot, across the dismembered seat, out of the rear door and into your grateful hands. You pass through the now opened gate and notice the razor wire around a high, graffitied fence. Nothing new about this you will soon discover; the sale of razor wire and high fences and the career opportunities for security guards are booming in Port Moresby. The people of that city do not have the safety net of social security. Many of them will have left their regional villages and therefore much of their family structure and mutual support systems. In Port Moresby they must survive on whatever they can earn from menial, spasmodic jobs — or perhaps, for some of them, from other less legitimate pursuits. To many of these people, their lives are a complex meeting of the traditional and the modern. This is 'new Port Moresby'. 'Old Port Moresby' is down around the extensive harbour and constitutes the prewar and early postwar dimensions of the city. It is an impressive and relatively picturesque area: there are homes, apartments and places of business that would do many Australian cities proud. The Australians and Europeans — and some Papuans — live there. On the edge of the harbour sits the yacht club, which is a magnificent mooring for long lines of plush vessels and an equally plush clubhouse. No spot fires, extensive litter, graffiti or betel nut sales here. Two understandably different worlds and, arguably, a poor introduction to a land and a people of such breathtaking beauty and charm.
The tourist town of Alotau, at Milne Bay, is about forty minutes by plane east of Port Moresby. As you descend through the cloud cover, you sit enthralled by a vivid, green, tropical paradise: row after orderly row of thick palm trees which appear as though nature's gardener has taken to them with a giant hedge clipper and made a systematic, dense and manicured garden. This runs right up to the tarmac and virtually surrounds it. As you check in there are two now inevitable signs: 'No Smoking' and 'No Betel Nut Chewing'. You drive to your motel along a picturesque narrow road, enclosed at most places by a wall of jungle or palms. The locals wave, smile and sing 'oooohhh' in chorus. Their local language does not contain the word 'goodbye', and so 'oooohhh' suffices. To the near north lies the rugged but attractive Stirling Range, while to the most immediate south is the stunning Milne Bay, bordered by a continuous, narrow, black-sanded beach with its vivid vegetation running right up to it. The bay's stark mountains are shrouded in a swirling mist and cloud cover. Alotau is built on the rise of a hill and is in three parts: High Town, Middle Town and Low Town. Prior to 1942 there was no town, but as that fateful year approached, Milne Bay, like Port Moresby, was to assume monumental significance to the defence of Australia.
Papua New Guinea lies a mere 150 miles from mainland Australia. It is positioned just south of the equator with its main island constituting over four-fifths of its land mass and the remainder being made up of a further six hundred islands of varying size. The main island is dominated by a rugged east — west central mountain spine with peaks at times reaching more than 13 000 feet. Intersecting this dominant feature are numerous rushing rivers and creeks which have produced, along with volcanic action, areas of rich soil inland and along parts of the coastal lowlands. The vegetation in the highlands is dominated by thick tropical rainforest, jungle and man-made grasslands. These are the by- product of centuries of burning, clearing and planting and the resultant regrowth of vegetation. Along parts of the coastline the ground is dominated by grassland and swamps. From the air the terrain appears to be rugged, impenetrable, and inhospitable.
The climate of Papua is hot and humid and dominated by high rainfall all year long. The wet season is usually between October and May and, apart from Port Moresby, which is in a rain shadow, the rainfall is very high indeed — especially by Australian standards. (Milne Bay, for example, has an annual rainfall of some 200 inches.) The temperature and humidity in the highlands is high during the day, but can plunge during the nights, while the coastal lowlands remain hot and humid all year round.
The fact that there were at least seven hundred different languages in the country prior to the onset of the Second World War demonstrates both the isolation and therefore the diversity of the people — a direct consequence of the nature of its geography. In hundreds of isolated little parts of the country small clans or tribes of people existed and were based on 'kinship through blood, marriage, or adoption'. The term 'village' is misleading in its Papuan context: such groups lived in as small a group as three or four families, while others might be a part of a hundred or more family units. All clans had access to their land on which subsistence crops were grown: taro, yam, sago, sweet potato, bananas and the various leaves of numerous vegetables. Meat was procured from the hunting or catching of marsupials, reptiles, fish and pigs. The land was used through an almost ageless cycle: clear, allow to dry, burn, plant, reap and move on within the bounds of your land; allow the soil to rest and repeat the cycle.
The system that bound the people of a clan or tribe together was — and still is — wantok, which is the pidgin word for 'one talk'. Thus, language and the kinship derived from it provided the Papuans with their welfare system. Wantoks provided food, goods, hospitality and additional security, and functioned on the basis of unqualified reciprocity. A critical component of the wantok system was — and still is — 'payback'. Payback is the retribution exacted from other clans for a perceived wrong. It may have to do with disputes over such issues as land, women or goods. In the case of women the conflict might be concerned with the non-payment of 'bride price', the agreed price payable in goods for the marriage between a man of one clan or tribe and a woman from another. Payback was also the cause of continual warfare between clans. Wars and even skirmishes would continue until equality of suffering or of material loss was agreed upon. Sometimes formal compensation was paid. In some regions, war was as much a test of manhood as it was a means of resolving disputes, or in other cases, it was as a means for supporting allied clans who had grievances. On occasions, cannibalism was practised (often for no other reason than the need for protein). Women might be taken during such confrontations and forced to marry into the victor's clan, or they might be used in intermarriage to strengthen the relationship between clans in a given region. Accompanying the use of war as a means of payback, was the use of sorcery as a commonly employed tool of revenge. Until the advent of white influence in Papua New Guinea, trading took the form of travel and exchange by sea for coastal and island dwellers and, inland, the interchange of goods between clans in the same or nearby regions. The stone axe, bamboo knife, bow and arrow, the spear, the sling and the gardening stick were the most common implements of war and/or agriculture.
By early November 1884, New Guinea had been divided into three areas of European rule: on 3 November of that year the north-eastern section was proclaimed a German protectorate; three days later the south-eastern section became a British protectorate; and the western half of the island remained under Dutch control as part of the Dutch East Indies. In 1906 the British dependency became an Australian territory and was duly named Papua. With the advent of the Great War, Australia seized from the Germans the northern portion of the eastern half of the mainland and New Britain and the islands from Bougainville to the Admiralties. The Australian Prime Minister William Morris Hughes, using the great sacrifice of his countrymen during the First World War as a strong bargaining tool at the Peace Conference at Versailles, managed to secure an Australian mandate over the former German possessions. The mandate began in 1920, and during the following year, the Australians established a civil administration over it. To claim land and send administrators to Papua and the mandated territory was one thing; to subdue the people and nurture the dream of wealth and prestige for Australia had already been shown in Papua to be no small task.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Bastard of a Place by Peter Brune. Copyright © 2004 Peter Brune. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,List of Maps,
Part One: Kokoda,
1 Spreading the oil,
2 The deep thinkers,
3 Dog River,
4 Theatre of war,
5 Bert and Doc,
6 Courage feeds on hope,
7 God, King and Country,
8 Both sides of the valley,
9 ... The devotion of a mother,
10 ... Calmly brave,
11 Modern day disciples,
12 I'll fry his soul ...,
Part Two: Milne Bay,
13 Outpost of the Empire,
14 Spirits good here,
15 Left high and dry,
16 Pig's arse you are!,
17 Time for a Capstan,
18 The glassy stare of death,
Part Three: Gona — Buna — Sanananda,
19 ... Come up here and bloody try!,
20 I know they'll fight,
21 A vulgar public brawl,
22 This is not a mob!,
23 Both immediate and enduring,
24 I've never got over it,
25 ... Nine, ten ... out!,
26 Intensively trained,
27 The passing of comrades,
28 Dancing to the beat,
Notes,
Bibliography,