Here and There – Papua New Guine
I first visited Papua New Guinea at the beginning of the 1980s. Working for Shell, I was told the local country manager wanted some training developed for the local staff. He could see they would be replacing senior expatriates over the next few years. I was more than a little pleased about the prospect: it was one of the few places left for social anthropologists to study tribes in situations where the impact of western technology and systems was limited. Lives and lifestyle weren’t the same as they had been 100 years before, but PNG was still a relatively unspoilt place. I was no longer an academic, and when I was, I hadn’t undertaken field research. However, the thought of what I might see was exciting.
I stayed in a Travelodge in Port Moresby and did manage to get a glimpse of life in PNG. The local Shell General Manager had a house close by. Scarily, it was completely enclosed by a chain link fence, sides and top, as theft and worse was common. The streets were a mixture of disintegrating tarmac and dirt, although there was a good road out to the airport, and another to the docks. Away from the central area, housing was flimsy, making a strange contrast against the bright clothes worn by the locals. Close to the hotel was a market. It was fascinating, packed with fruit and vegetables. Quite a lot was unfamiliar, but I soon got to recognise the piles of betel nuts, faithfully chewed by most locals, who would spit the purple remains out into the street. There were some woven goods and carved wooden items, but tourists were directed to the slightly more upmarket stores on a couple of city streets.
I wasn’t focused on shopping, but on going to look at the market, I saw one of the three sets of traffic lights in town. It was a Pelican crossing, a British invention where the sequence of lights goes from green, to amber, to red (stop, of course), followed by amber flashing (which means stop unless there’s no-one on the crossing) and finally back to green. I found it rather nostalgic! However, it was also an object of fascination, and drivers would stop and admire the changing colours, whatever light was showing. I later discovered there were two other sets of lights in Port Moresby: there might have been more, but friends assured me I had seen them all. The second lights were on the road to the airport. A conventional sequence (red, orange, green, red), all equally irrelevant to drivers, who paid no attention to the colour that was showing. The third set were at the road down to the relatively new Parliament House. That set included a green filter, to allow traffic priority to go down that road. Three completely different sets of traffic lights: no wonder the locals stopped to admire them.
This wasn’t the only way in which enthusiastic westerners had intruded on the life of Papua New Guineans. In the centre of Port Moresby, there were a few multi-story buildings. They included the city’s two major commercial buildings. One of these, the Steamships store, had an escalator: I was told that when this was unveiled, they had ‘walkers’ to take people up and down the escalator, which went from the ground to the first floor. It had been a major attraction, and it was still drawing visitors when I was there. Although I didn’t realise this until I was told, but another well-known sight was a bank building. This had a lift just inside the front door. Once again, when first opened it was a popular spot for observation: locals would sit outside watching people going into the building to be ‘swallowed’ by the lift doors. For many people, these western technologies were like some kind of dark magic.
It reminded me of a film used in teaching social anthropology. This showed a partly cleared area out in the PNG jungle. There was a structure, with two levels of flooring, all made from branches and palm leaves. A man would sit on the upper floor, looking up to the sky. He had a strange device made from vine stalks, on his head. In front of him was a trampled area, devoid of trees, about fifty yards long. He was sitting in a ‘control tower’, listening to the aircraft flying overhead, and hoping to get them to land at their airport – that short, levelled area was a runway. This was one of the ‘cargo cults’ to be found in PNG. The indigenous people had seen aircraft land at the airport, and watched goods being taken off the planes. They know this ‘cargo’ would be taken to stores and houses and observed staff filling sheets of paper. These had to be some variety of magical spells, and people involved in cargo cults would find sheets of paper, fold them up, and send them off to be placed as orders.
It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that the local people were stupid or backward. They weren’t. Much of what was happening was dictated by chiefs and other tribal leaders, anxious to keep control, using the esoteric practices of the colonial invaders as actions they could appropriate and manage themselves. Fascination with traffic lights, lifts and cargo planes soon diminished. The consequences of some other activities lasted longer, as I saw in a second visit, but before I describe that, I’d like to say a little more about my first visit.
In order to develop a training course for Papua New Guineans I realised I would have to start from scratch. Depending on a series of case studies from a training handbook wasn’t going to work. I decided to develop a simulation, and created a new region in PNG, with an airport, oil terminal, sea-based unloading dock, and a scattering of villages close to the Shell facilities and the city. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t too unlike the real situation in Port Moresby.
Once this new geography had been explained to the participants, I allocated them roles in a Shell ‘management team’, having split them up into three groups. Once everything was clear, I slowly revealed strategic challenges, personnel issues, and a couple of accidents (including a break in the fuel line from the dock to the mainland) for the groups to address. Almost immediately, they began to compete against each other, even though I never asked them to do that. It could have been a training course in Melbourne. It was a great week.
It also had its moments. At one point, when they were exploring a ‘disciplinary’ issue, I could see one of the participants looking very glum (he later became a general manager for Shell in PNG). “What’s up?” “This guy, causing trouble, all this talking, it’s the wrong way to do things.” “What would you do?” “Get a bit of 4×2, take him to the back of the sheds, and belt the living daylights out of him”!! It was hard not to be sympathetic: was I trying to turn him into a European?
Looking back years later, I am aware of how much I missed. I did speak to the course participants outside of workshop time and learnt a little about their lives. What I didn’t understand was the level of corruption, lost hope and misery. All that would become evident years later, when I was invited to work with a PNG statutory authority responsible for managing natural resources. I already knew about the appalling behaviour of BHP at the Ok Tedi mine, the consequence of discharging around two billion tons of untreated mining waste into the Ok Tedi River from tailings which had been inadequately treated and unsafely dammed. The failure caused severe environmental damage along 1,000 km of two rivers.
I quickly learnt BHP was far from being the only exploitative big business operating in PNG. The task I had been given for the resources authority was to help them develop a strategic plan for the next five years. It wasn’t hard to see they were under pressure when I arrived at the head office: it was in a compound, surrounded by a chain link fence, topped with razor wire, and a guard with a (rather old) rifle at the gate. The agency was worried that bands of locals would try to break into the offices, using force if they had to, seeking compensation.
As the agency’s major problem was explained to me, the reason for their concern was alarmingly simple. A major Malaysian timber company was operating in PNG. It would go to a village where it would make an offer for the trees surrounding the village. At first the villagers would be reluctant, as the trees were central to their livelihood. However, the timber company staff kept raising the price on offer (which remained very low) while facilitating the discussion with dozens of crates of beer. Eventually, the proposal would seem too good to refuse. All that money, instantly, for their trees. The headman and elders agreed, signed up, and received their cash, and then the Malaysian corporation came and cut down the timber. It was ruinous. The money was quickly spent, much of it on drugs and alcohol, the land was rapidly cleared and horribly degraded. I was told it would take 20-50 years to re-establish any viable arboreal agriculture on a sustainable basis.
Once I understood, I was angry. We set to work, trying to identify ways to warn the villages, and to explain why the deal was so one-sided. The task was huge, as there are several hundred languages spoken in PNG, and thousands upon thousands of villages scattered through the highlands. The staff of the authority were committed but very small in number. Language barriers would be close to impossible, and the process of getting staff from one village to another would be slow and challenging. Access to equipment and funds was limited. Finally, from what I was told there was every reason to believe several politicians in the government were paid by the Malaysian company to ensure little happened.
We worked hard to develop some strategies, but by the end of the exercise I was now angry and ashamed. Angry because of what was happening, and ashamed because I knew what little I had to offer would have marginal impact: this was the political-corporate complex at its worst. We couldn’t stop the Malaysians. As we were planning, they continued and are probably still at work, gradually destroying much of the natural resources of the country.
Papua New Guinea today is Australia in 1800. It isn’t a country, so much as an administrative fiction. It occupies half of an island. The other, western half was Irian Jaya, part of Indonesia, more recently renamed Papua. At just under 180,000 sq miles (Australia has just under 3m – 17.3 x PNG), it is the 3rd largest island nation in the world, after Australia and Madagascar (although Greenland, which is legally part of Denmark, is larger than Madagascar). PNG is the 54th largest country in the world. It has a population of 9 m people. (Australia has 26 m). The capital, Port Moresby, is similar in size to Canberra, Lae has around two hundred thousand people, and Mount Hagen is the 3rd with a little under 50,000 living there. Around 90% of PNG’s population lives in tiny villages.
Back in the 19th Century, Australia was similar. It had a small number of cities, and the country had been divided up into independent British territories. Most of the country was occupied by indigenous people, almost all living in tiny bands, mainly peripatetic, with hundreds of dissimilar languages. Few could understand neighbours living fifty miles away. Of course, there was one major difference from PNG. Most of the Australian land mass was desert, and only in the north of the country was there a subtropical jungle; Papua New Guinea is wholly semi-tropical, and almost the whole of the country is forested – or it was.
The similarities go further, of course. The British felt they had control of the whole country, and in 1901 established the Commonwealth of Australia, carving up the country into six states and one territory The ACT, the Australian Capital Territory, was created some years later. Most of the indigenous Australians, occupying most of the land, had no idea what was happening, possibly assuming that if they kept themselves to themselves, things would continue as they had for the previous 50,000 years. They didn’t, of course. In both countries disease and drugs (mainly alcohol to begin with) ravaged the local people. The only difference is that Australia began that process long before it began to take hold in PNG.
Meanwhile, plundering of natural resources continues unabated. Australia has been treated like a vast quarry: dig up the ores and the coal and sell them overseas. Bottle the gas and sell that overseas. Allow livestock to graze and sell the animals overseas. Grow produce and sell that overseas. If only we could bottle the beaches, we would sell those overseas, too, but almost unfortunately (because it’s a long trip), tourists have to come to Australia to enjoy the beaches, swim off the Great Barrier Reef, and go surfing.
Papua New Guinea has been treated like another bonanza, ripe for exploitation. Chop down the trees, sell the timber overseas. Mine the resources, sell those overseas. Unfortunately, the beaches are limited, so tourism is pretty small key. There isn’t a Great Barrier Reef, and farming is hardly viable in the largely mountains terrain. Bad luck, PNG, not all that much to be exploited, so grab what you can, then leave it to muddle along. Let’s be honest: Australia lives next door, and we simply don’t care. What did I say before? I was angry and ashamed, and I still am. We are far too immersed in enjoying our laid-back lifestyle, living off the back of the quarry and farm, to spend much time thinking about our neighbours. Just recently it took us a year to send the first and pathetically small number of Covid vaccines over.
Several social anthropologists have been up into the highlands of PNG and studied small communities. Many villages are still relatively inaccessible, and some still live much as they did thousands of years ago. Those that do have rich cultures, practice sustainable agriculture and livestock management. Every year that goes by, more and more are drawn into engagement with ‘modern’ business, modern lifestyles and modern capitalist economic practice. How much time do we spend helping them with managing what is an almost inconceivable transition? Almost none, just a little less than our small investment in working with many indigenous communities in the north and west of Australia . We are not good neighbours to the people of PNG; to be honest, we don’t behave like neighbours at all.
I should be more than ashamed. I should be embarrassed. I could have worked on projects or for agencies that are trying to help Papua New Guinea and its population manage the transition into the modern world, but I didn’t. That is a pretty huge failure to put alongside what I have achieved in my working career. It doesn’t obliterate what I’ve done, but it puts my activities in a rather unforgiving light. Like Australia, I could have done more.
I have had the good fortune to visit Papua New Guinea on a few occasions. I met some outstanding people, like that manager who wanted to get a bit of 4 by 2 and sort out a poor performer. Make no mistake, he was a great manager, and became an excellent country manager for the company. The staff of the government agency were trying to make a difference in an appalling situation, and they worked against the odds to save the villages they contacted from being overwhelmed. They didn’t give up. I went back to my life in Australia, and moved on to other projects, leaving PNG somewhere in my past. I am in many ways representative of Australia and its relationship to Papua New Guinea. We see, we understand the issues, we attempt to deal with small projects that might make a difference, but we are unable to do more than that. The issues are too great, and we are inadequate in the face of what needs to be done. Largely abandoned, PNG tries to move forward without us. It’s not a good story.
