Steven's Window

Moving Forward

2012-01-20T12:18:00.003+10:00

I was honored to speak at Waigani Primary School Speech Day on 08 December 2011. The following is an edited version of my speech. In his book, Change Your Thinking Change Your Life, Brian Tracy says: “You can learn anything you need to learn, to accomplish any goal you can set for yourself. This principle offers the way for you to take complete control over your future.”

I urged the graduating students to take complete control of their life and future: “This is not an easy rule, but it is definitely simple,” as one would agree with Brian Tracy. Everyone can be anything they want to be once they have set their goals for themselves and work on achieving such goals.

One of the greatest President of America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, once said: “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.” In realizing our Independence some 36 years ago our founding fathers had no doubt about the future of this great nation. They moved forward with strong and active faith into the future.

I asked students to think about the journey they have taken so far. Their graduation ended one part of their journey. This year they will begin another phase of their journey onward. Their future is still ahead of them. Every grade they completed was a different phase of their lives.

Students learn to do better every grade they go in their education. It is not the end result that is important; it is the process itself that makes one learn something more important to one’s life. Going forward is only possible when one learns to go forward. Having a goal is a push to move forward.

I urged students to think about what they would become by the time they reach the university level. I spoke about two goals I had set for myself and achieved.

Samuel Wrondimi and Cheryl Winduo

I was also a proud parent that day also to witness the graduation of Grade Eight Students at Waigani Primary School. My daughter Cheryl was among the graduating students. The joy I had in seeing her graduate was also the same happiness other parents and guardians had in seeing their children pass through Grade Eight last year.

I challenged all grade eight students to perform at a higher level in which ever secondary schools they will enter this year. Our education system is for those who work hard and are willing to learn in order to reach their goals. It is not for those who are lazy and unwilling to learn. It is not for those with unrealistic expectations, but for those who are willing to learn, skill themselves, and put these to work for them, their families, and Papua New Guinea.

Waigani Primary School is one of the top primary schools in the country because of its principal, teachers, and the Board of Management who have led that school with distinction throughout the years. The school has attracted many national and international events and visitors. The school has produced Ambassadors, pilots, accountants, lawyers, engineers, archectects, businessmen, public servants, teachers, lecturers, etc.

Three years ago I was privileged to fly in an Air Niugini plane captained by a female pilot, who graduated from Waigani Primary school. That made me real proud of Waigani Primary School. The message here is: We can fly high to reach the stars.

Thank you to the principal and hard working teachers for making the school a role model school in the National Capital District and the country.

I challenged parents, guardians, and friends of the school to engage proactively next year to support and cooperate with those who run the school: “It is our school—we must give our time and support in whatever way we can to make our school the best learning environment for our children.”

The graduating students were challenged to take full control of their lives.

“The decisions that you make now will lead you to where you want to be. If you have a negative attitude in life you will always end up with negative results. If you take a positive approach in life you will end up with positive results. TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE is what I want you to do in your life. Take control of your attitude, behaviors, and actions. Those who end up on the streets, become unemployed, become drug users, become criminals, become liabilities to their families, experience negative results, and struggle to succeed are those who refused to take control of their lives.”

The students were encouraged to think ahead of the future: “Many of you here today will become the pillars and shoulders on which our nation rests on. I hope that you will lead based on the value of positive mind-set you develop now. Our country is a fast changing society. It needs all of you to contribute to its development in whatever way you can in future. The jobs that you will do in future will depend on the values you develop at this stage in your life. I am asking you today to develop a set of values that will make you become a useful member of our society.”

My concluding remarks: “I congratulate all the graduating students for completing their Grade Eight at Waigani Primary School. You are our pride and ambassadors of our school. Go out there and make us proud. Fly high to reach the stars.” Let’s move forward with strong and active faith without doubting the present.

I thanked all the teachers, parents, guardians, supporters, and friends of Waigani Primary School for making it possible for our children to stay in school and complete their education. WELL DONE.

I acknowledge Mrs. Catherine Moresi—the Principal, Mr. Toso, Senior teacher, all teachers of Waigani Primary, Dr. John Kola and all Board of Management of the School who gave me the opportunity to speak in 2011 Speech Day of the School.

Family and Friends (with Wrondimi and Wafiwa Family):
Cheryl Winduo (front left) and Samuel Wrondimi's (behind camera)
Waigani Primary Graduation
at Port Moresby National High School 08/12/2011.

For Your Indulgence 2012

2012-01-13T16:04:00.001+10:00

I asked myself if the column I created is of any value to me as a writer. I have given a lot of thoughts about it. At first I wanted to close the window for ever.As it turned out the loyal followers of Steven’s Window seem unrelenting in that the window must open again.

I did resist the temptation to open the window last year. This year is a new chapter in our lives. We have to pick up from where we have fallen and move on. The world is changing every second.

So many things happened in the year 2011 that were not brought to those who follow Steven’s Window column. I was unable to contribute anything for the column. I watched, the world go by, beginning with the political whirlwind and change of regimes in the world: Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Lybia; USA captures and executes Osama bin Ladin, earthquake in Christchurch, then Japan’s worst Tsunami and near nuclear disaster, and at the home front, the change of the guards between the Somare group and the O’Neill group, and the worst ever plane crash in PNG. It was a year of change that history books will return to time and time again.

As for me I had to operate in two different countries in 2011. The first six months was spent in Hawaii, USA and the next six months in Papua New Guinea. I had to teach in two different universities with two different systems in one year.

The first six months I held the Arthur Lynn Andrews Chair in Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii. This position was held within the Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS). The CPIS is part of the School of Asian and Pacific Studies. I was also a Visiting Researcher with the Pacific Islands Development Program within the East West Center.

Holding the Arthur Lynn Andrews Chair was the most important thing in my life as a writer scholar within the Pacific region. I was the second Pacific Islander to hold the personal chair. The Andrews Chair is one of the top awards made to an outstanding scholar of indigenous origin in—someone who had produced new knowledge to further the understanding of our people and society. In the USA such an honor is given to few outstanding individuals.

I had completed that assignment in May 2011 before returning home only to go straight into teaching courses at the University of Papua New Guinea in Semester 2 of 2011.

It was an interesting year for me. I learnt so much in a space of twelve months. In the next several articles I will share with the follower’s of Steven’s Window some of the inspirations I gathered. So many people have been asking me one question: So will the Steven’s Window open again? It is now open again for your indulgence.

As the days reeled to the end of last year I thought about many things that this beautiful country of ours has been through since the last 36years of Independence. We are enjoying the fruits of the hard work our pioneer leaders had cultivated in their effort to break free from the shackles of colonialism. The path we took has many interesting curves and bends, but we have remained steadfast in our resolve to maintain democracy at all cost.

Today the generation I went to school with is running the country.Today we are making a mark on the national political scene, in the bureacracy, and in the business world. Yet, as I reflect on this I realize this country is built on the shoulders of every Papua New Guineans who sacrificed themselves, who had faith in this country, and pushed on to get here. Everyone has contributed a pint of salt for this country.

PNG goes to the polls this year. Intending candidates and political parties are preparing their road maps and master plans for the 2012 General Elections. Many LLGs and wards are responding to the approaches of intending candidates. The campaign has started in many areas of the country even though the law says something else.

In the last several weeks leading up to the Christmas and New Year period Papua New Guineans showed the most resalient character of ourselves as a nation by observing the test of our Constitution and the parliamentary democracy we are proud of upholding since Independence in 1975. Whatever people thought, felt, and experienced since August 2011 remains safely locked away in their mental chest as moments they can return to in future if a reference is needed.

The only catch to 2011 is that I discovered Face Book. So did many Papua New Guineans. Now you can follow everything happening in the world just from your mobile. Like many others I ended up signing for my own Face Book. Papua New Guineans are using Face Book to discuss, send comments, provide commentaries, and make the social network become an agent of change. Many like me were following the news feed from Malum Nalu and the NBC reports on the latest development on the political stand-off between Somare group and the O’Neill group. Many of these moments are now Face Book history.

A commentator in one of the newspapers said it clearly: The debates in the Parliament on the destiny of this country is limited to only few leaders, but the debate in the public on electronic media is vibrant, democratic, and is the simple, ordinary people’s voices.

In the years ahead the electronic media will either strengthen or bring to end regimes that are popular or unpopular to the masses. Some of our leaders are already on Face Book—just wondering whether they are reading what the PNG public and the world is saying about them.

In opening the Steven’s Window for the year 2012 I am reminding readers that you can follow me on my blog: www.stevenswindow.blogspot.com and on Facebook. Look beyond this window to a future only you can have.

For Your Indulgence

2012-01-06T16:53:00.002+10:00

Lotus Plants, or Buddha;s Tears

DEAR FRIENDS,

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL WHERE EVER YOU ARE READING THIS IN THE WORLD.

One of my committment this year 2012 is to keep this blog busy. I will reopen the print version of this blog with The National newspaper of Papua New Guinea, starting next Friday. Here is a sneak preview of the first article for this year. Visit this blog as often as you can and indulge yourself in some creative ideas and discussions.

I asked myself if the column Steven's Window I created is of any value to me as a writer. I have given a lot of thoughts about it. At first I wanted to close the window for ever. As it turned out the loyal followers of Steven’s Window seem unrelenting in that the window must open again.

I did resist the temptation to open the window last year. This year is a new chapter in our lives. We have to pick up from where we have fallen and move on. The world is changing every second.

Read more in next week Friday's The Weekender of The National newspaper of Papua New Guinea.

Best wishes for this year to you all.

Manui Media Connections

2012-01-03T13:40:00.000+10:00

Manui Media Connections

Using Media Technologies for Cultural Expressions

2011-05-10T13:34:00.012+10:00

Young Cultural Dancer at Waigani Primary School 2009

The quick pace of electronic media development in the world has no time to wait for people like me. Until recently, more specifically, a month ago, I found myself, entering the world of Facebook as a reluctant traveller. Like so many people I know about these technological innovations that are shaping the world second by second and minute by minute. Like many people, the decision to participate in these technologies, is one of experiment and see where it leads me to.

Apart from discovering many people I know on Facebook I also realized that there are many wonderful things one could do with electronic media technologies. Apart from developing one’s own social network you can have instant communication with friends online, share conversations on common topics, post notices, links to news and information of interests, and even share photographs and videos. One could easily do that with mobile phones, laptops, or from a desktop anywhere in the world.

I have been keeping a blog: http://www.stevenswindow.blogspot.com for along time that when I discovered I could link my blog to my Facebook page I was thrilled. Now I can update my blog every week and have it linked to the Facebook as a way of sharing my thoughts and experiences as posted on my blog. Since I moved to Hawaii five months ago I hardly wrote every week or have any PNG visitors to my blog. Now with a link to my Facebook and a redesigned home page I have a slow trickle of visitors from PNG to the blog.

I have already shared two recent posts on my blog with readers and Facebook friends. Now I am posting a short videoclip of Waigani Primary School Cultural Day in 2009. The video captures the cultural pride displayed by our children in their schools. My children like other children in their school enjoy participating in their school cultural days.

This short video, I hope, will inspire others to take advantage of the electronic media technologies at our doorsteps by using them to promote cultural pride in our people. There are already hundreds of short videos on the internet, especially on YouTube. Some of them are very good that I have found them as useful teaching materials. Imagine if we have millions of short videos made by Papua New Guineans about themselves it could change the way other people see us. My favourite is this video "Moresby Modern Trailer".

Visual image is a powerful medium today. For example, PNG music videos that people enjoy watching are popular to many PNG viewers. Some of these are now available on the internet.

Making good short video documentaries that many people can access and enjoy is good, but I think making full video documentaries is one challenge for Papua New Guineans to think about. The reasons for full length documentaries are many. This year’s Oscar nominated film "Sun Come Up", for example is a video documentary about rising sea levels and the associated catastrophy on small island communities in PNG.

I have benefited from using previews of film documentaries made by non Papua New Guineans about Papua New Guinea. I am looking forward to the day when Papua New Guineans will take up the challenge to make their own full length film documentaries and feature films soon that can touched the world.

Walking on Wa`ahila Ridge

2011-05-02T08:04:00.011+10:00

One of the things I wanted to do was to walk up the ridge next to the University of Hawaii in Manoa Valley. The ridge is known as the Wa’ahila Ridge.

I wanted to get a different perspective to the one I already have walking between the buildings of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and of the Waikiki metropolitan area.

I also wanted to do this walk because the day was gorgeous for such an activity. I also live at the foothills of the ridge in the Wa`ahila Faculty Apartments.

With a perfect day and the mind to tackle the three hours hike up Wa`ahila Ridge I rang my countryman, Muguwa Dilu, from Simbu, and asked him if he wanted to accompany me on this hike. Muguwa is studying for his Masters in Economics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was happy to come along. Our walk began on Cole Street in between Manoa Stream and Wa`ahila Faculty Apartments. Our walk upwards would end where the Wa`ahila Ridge State Park is located.

We began our hike with Muguwa sharing stories about his experience of climbing Mt. William and seeing the breath-taking beautiful lakes and landforms in Mt. Williams. Mt. William is the highest mountain in PNG.

We took pictures as we climbed further up the ridge. The day was perfect for great shots of the University of Hawaii, the Waikiki skyline and backdrop, the Diamond Head, the Manoa Valley and the beautiful landscapes and plants along the way.

The joy of walking on Wa`ahila Ridge was that it gave us the opportunity to experience the natural environment of Hawaii as well as form a different impression of the place we have been calling our temporary home for some time now. It was a way of connecting with the natural environment on this beautiful Hawaiian island of O`ahu.

The walk brought us to discover that some of the plants and sites way up in the ridge were similar to those in our home country. Some places look like coffee gardens next to ironwood trees. Other places look and feel like places we’ve been to in Papua New Guinea. From high up in the ridge, you can get the feeling that the natural environment is the best place to recover from any anxieties and hangovers of the past week.

Rob Nelson of Explore Biodiversity.com writes about the plants of the pines at the State Park. “Cook pines (Araucaria columnaris) come from the Cook Islands. The name is misleading, as they are not pines at all but in the family Araucariaceae, a genus of 18 or 19 species found from New Guinea to New Zealand and Brazil to Chile. Interestingly its one of the few plants only natively found in the southern hemisphere.”

Along the track are plants such as koa, silk oak, strawberry guava and Christmas tree berries. Muguwa enjoyed the day picking the strawberry guava. I did not want to eat any of the berries along the track because I had no idea what they were. Muguwa told me that he knew about the guava strawberries because his adopted parents had one growing outside their house. I believed him, but no thanks.

The fun part of it was when Muguwa alarmed me to a biker who came down hill at a speed that shocked both of us. Further up the track more bikers were met.

Next week is the last week of the Spring Semester in the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Muguwa goes off to Washington DC for his internship with the UNDP. I will travel back to Port Moresby in three weeks time.

Making the walk on Wa`ahila Ridge on this day was the only time we have before the close of semester and the travels we have to make. It was worth it.

I am so refreshed after the walk that I am glad the walk was taken on this day.

Ples Tumbuna Long Waimea Na North Shore

2011-04-20T07:45:00.001+10:00

Taking the trip to the North Shore of O`ahu after the Palm Sunday service was such a joy. The trip was planned the night before as John, Hala, and myself sat around the Friendship Circle at the East West Center. We just decided that it might help to put things into perspective for us to drive out of Honolulu and Waikiki, a touristic metropolitant space that overshadows the beautiful Hawaiian Island of O`ahu. There’s more one could see in O`ahu than Waikiki or the modern skyscrapers of Honolulu.

Our trip to the North Shore began on the afternoon of Palm Sunday. My wantoks John Sopa, Alfred M. Riibako (Hala) and Ishmael Togamae are from the Solomon Islands. John and Ishmael have their own cars. John is studying at the Kapiolani Community College, Ishmael is a medical doctor at a hospital in Hawaii, and Hala is completing his degree in computer science at the University of Hawaii. Our other wantok, Muguwa Dilu, from PNG decided to opt out of our trip.

We began our trip without any expectations. As soon as we drove out of Honolulu and into the mountains it began to rain. The rain was a welcoming shower for us from the gods of the land. We continued with our journey driving through pineapple farms until we descend into Haleiwa. This was farm country with the rich soil that agriculturalists made good in farming, from small plots to grand scale farming.

To reach Waimea Bay we took the Kamehameha Highway. The bay is on the north, west side of the highway (at the entrance point). We drove on until we arrived at the Wamea Valley Park. Waimea Bay is located in Haleiwa on the North Shore of O‘ahu in the Hawaiian Islands at the mouth of the Waimea River. Waimea Valley extends behind Waimea Bay. Waimea means "Red Water" in Hawaiian.

In winter, Waimea and other North Shore locations such as Pipeline and Sunset Beach host a number of surfing contests because of the large waves found here. These waves are created by winter storms in the North Pacific, and their arrival on O‘ahu's North Shore are typically forecast accurately several days in advance. In summer, Waimea typically has clear and calm water. But, we were not there for the waves, but to see the place and feel it in our skin.

We walked over to the Hale O Lono or the Hawaiian Temple. This was the first time I have visited a sacred space in Hawaii. The Hale O Lono was constructed in 1470 AD and 1700 AD. The Hale O Lono site was dedicated by the Hawaiians to Lono, one of the four principal gods of ancient Hawaii. The Hawaiian word Hei has many meanings including: to summon, to capture, or to ensnare. All implies a vibration, current, and invisible energy or power. A heiau captures spiritual power (mana). The area was noted as a possible religious site in a 1974 survey by the Bishop Musuem. Excavation, identification, and restoration began by Waimea Valley archaeologist, Rudy Mitchell, in 1985, and the first major phase was completed in 1988. It is one of the most valuable historical sites according to the Hawaiian Historical Society.

I think the visit to the Hale O Lono had a spiritual effect on us. The spiritual power or mana of the sacred place must have rubbed off on us as we left. The heiau of the place must have settled in each one of us, me particularly, because of the strong sense of respect I have for sacred indigenous spaces. As we drove out of the Waimea Valley I could not get it out of my mind. I think the vibration or the energy of the place moved with us as we followed the road back to catch a glimpse of the famous surfing sights of the North Shore.

We drove west from Waimea Bay on along the coast until we hit the dirt road towards the end of the road. Behind is the Wai‘anae Mountain range. We stopped for a short photo session. We had one more stop to make at the only airstrip on North Shore.

It was here that the currents of the ocean brought to the sandy beach a friend. The vibrations of the sea swell on the shore had brought with it a large sea turtle right up to the sandy beach. I was ecstatic with pleasure of seeing a turtle near the beach. I had never seen one so close in its natural environment. In a playful yet serious way the pleasure the turtle gave me made me write on the sand: Save the Turtles. We all gathered near the sea’s edge and felt the vibrations of the Hawaiian world through the appearance of the turtle, which seemed to enjoy the sea vibrations. It was not scared of us or of being caught. It had the playful and songful dance under the vibrations of the sea rolling up to the sandy beach and receding back to the ocean.

This experience was the highlight of this trip. I can never forget it. On the way back I tried to make sense of what I just experienced. I have been teaching about indigenous epistemologies and knowledge systems and what can I say about this? Hawaiian religion is polytheistic, believing in many deities, and is also animistic in that it is based on a belief that spirits are found in non-human beings and objects such as animals, the waves, and the sky.

According to the information provided on Wikipedia: “Hawaiian religion has four prominent deities: Kāne, Kū, Lono and Kanaloa. Other notable deities include Laka, Kihawahine, Haumea, Papahanaumoku, and, most famously, Pele. In addition, each family is considered to have one or more family guardians known as Aaumakua.

“In Hawaiian mythology, the deity Lono is associated with fertility, agriculture, rainfall, and music. In one of the many Hawaiian legends of Lono, he is a fertility and music god who descended to Earth on a rainbow to marry Laka. In agricultural and planting traditions, Lono was identified with rain and food plants. He was one of the four gods (with Kū, Kāne, and his twin brother Kanaloa) who existed before the world was created. Lono was also the god of peace. In his honor, the great annual festival of the Makahiki was held. During this period (from October through February), war and unnecessary work was kapu (forbidden). In Hawaiian weather terminology, the winter Kona storms that bring rain to leeward areas are associated with Lono. Lono brings on the rains and dispenses fertility, and as such was sometimes referred to as Lono-makua (Lono the Provider). Ceremonies went through a monthly and yearly cycle. For 8 months of the year, the luakini was dedicated to Ku-with strict kapus. Four periods (kapu pule) each month required strict ceremonies. Violators could have their property seized by priests or overlord chiefs, or be sentenced to death for serious breaches” (www.wikipedia.org).

It was only later when I was uploading the photographs in my apartment that it dawned on me that what I had just experienced with my wantoks was a force of power (mana) that we must recognise as indigenous peoples of Oceania. Our physical world is connected to the spiritual world of our gods and ancestors. We sometimes forget this connection in our submission to the demands of modern Western world. As a result we experience all kinds of enslavement, imbalances, unsettling experiences, or difficulties in our lives. As indigenous peoples we need to embrace the vibrations and power produced by the energy given off from the merging of physical, human, animal, and spiritual world of our gods and environment.

This trip has given me a window of opportunity to learn about the spiritual world of Hawaiians and the intricate balance there is between humans, physical world, animal world, and the spiritual world. Peace emanates from that balance.

Language and Cultural Truth in Pacific Writing

2011-03-05T12:21:00.003+10:00

Baining Fire Dancer

I will present a public lecture as part of my responsibilities as the Arthur Lynn Andrews Chair in Pacific and Asian Studies. The public lecture is a collaboration between the English Department, the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawaii and the East West Center Pacific Islands Development Program.

English Department Colloquium

"Metonymic Function of Language and Cultural Truth in Pacific Writing,"

by Steven Winduo, University of Papua New Guinea and
Arthur Lynn Andrews Chair in Pacific and Asian Studies at UH Mānoa.

Thursday, 10 March 2011

3:00 pm

UHM Kuykendall Hall, Room 410

Most literary texts in Oceania employ English as the main language of writing. The choice of English rather than the indigenous languages is preferred for a number of reasons, but with an "overlap" of language that occurs when texture, sound, rhythm, and words are carried over from the mother tongue to the adopted literary form, or when the appropriated English is adapted to a new situation. A writer may take as evidence of his or her ethnographic or differentiating function an insertion of the "truth" of culture into text (sometimes conceived as an insertion of its essential cultural "purity"). In this lecture Dr Winduo considers how various postcolonial textual strategies are at work in the English literary texts of Oceania. He argues that insertion of indigenous languages into English texts of Oceania has an important metonymic function that has received little attention by scholars of Pacific literature.

Steven Winduo is an author, a poet, and a senior lecturer in English at the University of Papua New Guinea. He is the Andrews Chair in Asian and Pacific Studies at UH Mānoa for spring semester 2011 and a visiting fellow with the Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Center. Dr Winduo is one of the foremost writers of Papua New Guinea. He has published three poetry collections—Lomo'ha I am, in Spirits' Voice I Call (1991), Hembemba: Rivers of the Forest (2000), and A Rower's Song (2009)— and a short-story collection, The Unpainted Mask: A Collection of Short Stories (2010). He founded and edits Savannah Flames: A Papua New Guinean Journal of Literature, Language, and Culture.

The presentation is open to the public, free of charge. It is cosponsored by the UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies, the UHM English Department, and the EWC Pacific Islands Development Program.

Lunch at the Honolulu Academy of Arts

2011-02-19T07:03:00.011+10:00

Entrance to Honolulu Academy of Arts

After lunch at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (HAA), with Piet Lincoln, his wife and son, I was shown the gift shop in the HAA. Later I took a peak at the display of cultural and materials items in the Pacific Islands Collection on the second floor of the building. Piet is a linguist with a long term connection with the Banoni language speakers of Bougainville.

History (source www.wikipidea.org)

Anna Rice Cooke (1853–1934), daughter of New England missionaries and founder of the Honolulu Academy of Arts, in her dedication statement at the opening of the museum on April 8, 1927 said:

"That our children of many nationalities and races, born far from the centers of art, may receive an intimation of their own cultural legacy and wake to the ideals embodied in the arts of their neighbors ... that Hawaiians, Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Northern Europeans and all other people living here, contacting through the channel of art those deep intuitions common to all, may perceive a foundation on which a new culture, enriched by the old strains may be built in the islands." —Anna Rice Cooke[4]

Born on Oʻahu in 1853, Cooke grew up on Kauaʻi island in a home that appreciated the arts. In 1874, she married Charles Montague Cooke and the two eventually settled in Honolulu. In 1882, they built a home on Beretania Street, across from Thomas Square. As Cooke's career prospered, they gathered their private art collection. First were "parlor pieces" for their home. She frequented the shop of furniture maker Yeun Kwock Fong Inn who often had ceramics and textile pieces sent from his brother in China.

The Cookes’ art collection outgrew their home and the homes of their children. In 1920, she and her daughter Alice (Mrs. Phillip Spalding), her daughter-in-law Dagmar (Mrs. Richard Cooke), and Catharine E. B. Cox (Mrs. Isaac Cox), an art and drama teacher, began to catalogue and research the collection with the intent to display the items in a museum. With little formal training, these women obtained a charter for the museum from the Territory of Hawaii in 1922, while continuing to catalogue the collection. Cooke wanted a museum that reflected Hawaiʻi's multi-cultural make-up. Not bound by the traditional western idea of art museums, she also wanted to showcase the island's climate in an open and airy environment, using courtyards which interconnect the galleries throughout the Academy.

The Cookes donated their Beretania Street land along with an endowment of $25,000. Their home was torn down to make way for the museum. New York architect Bertram Goodhue designed a classic Hawaiian-style building with simple off-white exteriors and tiled roofs. Goodhue died before the project was completed; it was finished by Hardie Phillip. This style has been imitated in many buildings throughout the state.

On April 8, 1927, the Honolulu Academy of Arts opened. There was a traditional Hawaiian blessing and the Royal Hawaiian Band, under the direction of Henri Berger, played at festivities. With the opening of the museum came gifts of many pieces, sometimes even entire collections. Additions to the original building include a library (1956), an education wing (1960), a gift shop (1965), a cafe (1969), a contemporary gallery, administrative offices and 292-seat theater (1977), and an art center for studio classes and expanded educational programming (1989). In 1999, the Academy created a children's interactive gallery, lecture hall, and offices.[5]

The original building was named Hawaiʻi's best building by the Hawaiʻi Chapter of the American Institute of Architecture and is registered as a National and State Historical site. The Academy is accredited by the American Association of Museums.

Post Lunch Discovery

In the gift shop I spotted a book entitled: Fire in the Sea: An Anthology of Poetry and Art, selected by Sue Cowing. I had never seen the book before. In the content page I immediately spotted a familiar PNG name: Kumalau Tawali, then Russell Soaba and Apisai Enos.

PNG writers appeared alongside Pacific writers such as Albert Wendt, Konai Helu Thaman, Hone Tuwhare, Kauraka Kauraka, Sudesh Mishra, Raymond Pillai, Eric Chock, Wayne Westlake, and Alistair Campbell, at least the ones that I know. All these Pacific writers appeared in the book together with some of the world’s favourite writers like Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda, William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Yasmine Gooneratne, Judith Wright, Nicholas Hasluck, Fleur Adcock, E. E. Cummings, and Margaret Atwood.

In the preface to this book, published in 1996 as a Kolowalu Book by the University of Hawaii Press, in association with The Honolulu Academy of Arts, Sue Cowing writes: “This anthology includes, I believe for the first time, a significant sample of Pacific poetry in an international collection. The Pacific Islands have long poetic traditions, and the last two decades have seen a lively outpouring of contemporary poetry, especially in Fiji, Hawaii, and New Zealand, and Samoa, that deserves to be better known with and beyond the region.”

The title of the book: Fire in the Sea is a strong imagery of Hawaiian natural landscapes formed by its volcanic activities. Cowing writes: “Just as flowing lava turns the ocean to steam and keeps on burning—fire in the sea—the best poems we hear or read take surprising, even “impossible,’ turns that change the way we see the world afterward. Poets and visual artists try to say what we would have thought could not be expressed, and they succeed, we share their deep pleasure.”

The illustrations, in the book, are from the permanent collections of the Honolulu Academy of Arts and include a few pieces by young students of art at the academy, retained over the years for the lending collection at Linekona.

In the Pacific Islands Collections of the Honolulu Academy of Arts a whole array of material culture and arts of the Pacific were on display. These are material treasures of Oceania that were donated to the HAA. Traditional arts of the Pacific are well represented in the Academy collection. Fine examples from Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia include domestic containers, furnishings, mats, tools, weapons, featherwork, fishing equipment, and musical instruments.

The Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea is represented with ceremonial carvings, ancestral figures, headdresses, instruments, containers, masks, shields, canoe prows and paddles. Artifacts from the Federal States of Micronesia include a variety of masks, utilitarian objects and body ornaments. From French Polynesia are tools, headdresses, bowls, cups and containers.

The amazing thing for me was that most of the artifacts from Melanesia are from the Sepik area. There is the Iatmul slit gong drum, a ceremonial water drum from Chambri Lakes, a Malagan figure from New Ireland, an ancestor figure with skull from the Middle Sepik, a spirit board from the Gulf Province, a mask for yam ceremony from Nuku, a headdress for yam mask from Maprik and a Kavat mask from the Baining people of Gazelle Peninsula in the East New Britain Province. Seeing these on display in Hawaii made me wonder about what the visitors to this gallery would think about Papua New Guinea after they leave. What do they really think?

I know Soaba’s Storyboard is anxious to know the poem published in book Fire in the Sea. The poem as Storyboard knows is my favorite poem: “Looking thru Those Eye-holes”. If Storyboard does not mind, for the sake of those who have never read this masterpiece by Russell Soaba, I would like to have the honor of promoting it on this blog. It reads:

Looking thru Those Eye-holes

once an artist went overseas

his father died in his absence

& was buried in the village

he followed a rainbow upon his return

& came to a cemetry

he dug in search of reality

till he broke his father’s skull

to wear its fore-half as a mask

try it/loo through those eye-holes

see the old paintings/view the world

in the way the dead had done.

Believe me, since the first day I read this poem in the mid-1980s, I have never ceased to be amazed by the power of the poem in its appeal to me. Thank you, Russ for this poem.

Kumalau Tawali’s poem published in the same collection is also another powerful poem that has the magic it has always had on me since the first time I read it in the 1980s. Here it is:

The River Flows Back

In my mother’s womb

Peace was mine

But I said “maping”

I greeted the light

And came into the world,

Saluting it with a cry.

I paddled downstream

Drifting at ease

Like Adam before the fall.

But now a storm rises before me

My canoe has swung around

I paddle against the stream.

The river my helper

Has become my enemy

I fight the river

Until my veins stand out

Until the paddle blisters my palms.

Yet in this battle I gain glory

Iwin fame

I grow name

The true essence of it.

One day I will reach the source again

There at my beginnings

Another peace

Will welcome me.

[Note: Maping in a term for greeting in a Manus language]

Soaba and Tawali are the first generation of PNG writers that I have unreserved admiration and respect for. Seeing their works being celebrated in an international anthology affirmed the poet in me to keep on writing. These two poems have influenced two of my early poems: “Lomo’ha, I am in Spirit’s Voice I Call” and “The Mother and Child” published in my first poetry collection.

My other favorite poet, Carl Sandburg, who describes poetry as (cited by Sue Cowing): “the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.” Such animals live everywhere—on islands, on coasts, and, like Sandburg, in the middle of continents.”

Am I a sea animal? Is that why I love poetry? Try looking through the eyeholes of a sea animal what would you see?

Epeli Hau’ofa is right: It is the Ocean in Us that makes us who we are and what we are in the middle of Oceania—a body of water/life around our islands.

DNA reveals new route of Pacific migration

2011-02-16T15:04:00.000+10:00

Australian Geographic had this information on new evidence on peopling of the Pacific.
By:AAP with AG Staff
February-9-2011 Share

The final major wave of Pacific migration brought the Maoris to New Zealand 700 years ago (Photo: Getty Images).NEW DNA EVIDENCE has emerged which overturns theories on how humans spread across the Pacific.

The islands of Polynesia were first inhabited around 3,000 years ago, but where these people came from has long been a hot topic of debate amongst scientists. The most commonly accepted view, based on archaeological and linguistic evidence as well as genetic studies, is that Pacific islanders were the latter part of a migration south and eastwards from Taiwan which began around 4,000 years ago.

Now, scientists believe the DNA of current Polynesians can be traced back to migrants from the Asian mainland who had already settled in islands close to New Guinea 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. The evidence was uncovered by researchers at the University of Leeds in the UK, and published in the latest American Journal of Human Genetics.

"Our study of the [DNA] evidence shows the interactions between the islands of south-east Asia and the Pacific was far more complex than previous accounts tended to suggest and it paves the way for new theories of the spread of Austronesian languages," says lead author, Professor Martin Richards.

Genetic signatures

The type of DNA extracted and analysed in this kind of study is that in the cell's mitochondria. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed down the maternal line, providing a record of inheritance which goes back thousands of years. The scientists look for genetic signatures which enable them to classify the DNA into different lineages and then use a 'molecular clock' to date when these lineages moved into different parts of the world.

"Most previous studies looked at a small piece of mtDNA, but for this research we studied 157 complete mitochondrial genomes in addition to smaller samples from over 4,750 people from across south-east Asia and Polynesia," says Martin.

"We also reworked our dating techniques to significantly reduce the margin of error, he says. "This means we can be confident that the Polynesian population – at least on the female side – came from people who arrived in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea thousands of years before the supposed migration from Taiwan took place."

However, many linguists maintain that the Polynesian languages are part of the Austronesian language family which originates in Taiwan. Martin and co-researcher Pedro Soares argue, though, that the linguistic and cultural connections are due to smaller migratory movements from Taiwan that did not leave any substantial genetic impact on the pre-existing population.

Chewing Buai and Poetry in PNG

2011-02-12T05:01:00.002+10:00

On Wednesday this week I had the honor of reading poems and talking about chewing buai, writing, poetry and performance, and about Papua New Guinea and my observation of the world. It was the best poetry night I had in many years. I thank the East West Center Wednesday Evening Seminar organisers, the graduate students of East West Center, the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, the English Department, and the Pacific Collection Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Tenkiu tru na laikim yupela nating tru.

Out Now: The Unpainted Mask

2011-01-23T08:54:00.002+10:00

The much awaited collection of short stories spanning more than 30 years of writing is now out. The collection untitled: The Unpainted Mask was copublished by UPNG Press and Manui Publishers. The book is printed and distributed in the USA by Masalai Press and online at various online book ordering services.

Product Description

Steven Edmund Winduo demonstrates his ability as a writer in this collection of short stories. The collection captures the changing social, cultural, and political landscapes of Papua New Guinea.The collection is a blend of published and unpublished short stories. The stories cover journeys people make from their unperturbed societies to ones in constant negotiation with change. These stories blend lived experience with imagined ones among Papua New Guineans.The book highlights the sometimes uncomfortable relationships and challenges emerging in different sociocultural encounters. One major theme runs through all stories in this collection: Mask. People wear different masks to view themselves and others. People have different opinions and views when viewing a mask from outside of a mask. People choose to wear a painted mask or an unpainted one. Steven Edmund Winduo is a senior lecturer in Literature and English Communication at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Product Details

• Media: Paperback Book, 284 pages
• Publisher: University of Papua New Guinea Press and Manui Publishers
• ISBN-10: 9980939826
• ISBN-13: 9789980939821
• Dimensions: 22.86 x 15.19 x 1.52 cm
• Shipping Weight: 0.38 kg

Orders can be made online using:

http://www.amazon.com/

betterworldbooks.co.uk

Infibeam.com

Orders in Papua New Guinea: visit UPNG Bookstore and purchase copy or visit http://www.pngbuai.com/

101 Goals for 2011

2011-01-11T05:05:00.001+10:00

By the time you are reading this I am on my way to Honolulu via Honiara and Nadi. It is 2011, a brand new year with many unknown experiences to discover and many goals to achieve.

I actually missed the New Year celebration in Port Moresby because I went to sleep early because of power outage. By the time I woke up it was 2.30am in the morning.

Instead of complaining about missing the New Year fireworks I openned by personal journal and wrote the 101 goals that I want to accomplish this year. I do that every year so that I have definite things that I want to accomplish in one year.

The next thing I did on the second day of the New Year was that I wrote down some of the affirmations of the goals that I set for myself. These affirmations were written in such a way that I have already accomplished my goals.

The next thing I did on the 3rd of 2011 was that I deliberately set about visualizing my future. To help me stay focused on this process I consulted Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles:.

“Visualization—or the act of creating compelling and vivid pictures in your mind—may be the most underutilized success tool you possess because it greatly accelerates the achievement of any success in three powerful ways.

(1) Visualization activates the creative powers of your subconscious mind.

(2)Visualization focuses your brain by programming its reticular activating system (RAS) to notice available resources that were always there but were previously unnoticed.

(3)Visualization magnetizes and attracts to you the people, resources, and opportunities you need to achieve your goal.

According to my inspirational mentor, visualization simply makes the brain achieve more. And though none of us were ever taught this in school, sports, pyschologists and peak performance experts have been popularizing the power of visualization since the 1980s. Almost all Olympic and professional athletes now employ the power of visualization. When you visualize your goals as already complete each and every day, it creases a conflict in your subconscious mind between what you are visualizing and what you currently have. Your subconscious mind tries to resolve that conflict by turning your current reality into the new, more exciting vision.

Since it is a New Year I have set myself some new goals for this year to get to where I want to be. I am also closing some chapters of my life. One of the chapters, unfortunately, is the Steven’s Window, your favourite column. I have given much thought about this decision before today.

I have two important reasons for this. First reason has to do with the demands of the new job as the Arthur Lynn Andrews Chair in Pacific and Asian Studies, in the School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawaii that I am taking up this year. I expect the demands of the job to take up the best part of my time in the USA.

Second reason is that I will take the next 6 months to edit a book of all the articles appearing in Steven’s Window. I plan to have the book published some time this year. I will contribute to The Weekender from time to time, but for now I have to move onto meet the challenges I have set for myself.

You can follow me on my blog: www.stevenswindow.blogspot.com. If you are a follower on my older blog: www.manui-manui.blogspot.com I encourage you to sign on to the active blog shown here.

I take this opportunity to wish all the loyal followers of Steven’s Window, a happy, prosperous, and wealthy New Year. May the goals you have for 2011 bring you greater joy and happiness! I hope that you will grow rich and wealthy in mind, body, and visions that you have of yourself.

I urged you to keep in mind some of lessons I shared with you. New Year is like a strange country you walk into only to discover that it is not what you expect. Some culture shocks, sacrifices, and adjustments, such as saying NO to counter productive habbits, need to take place before you fit into the rhythm of life in it.

One final thought: If 2010 was a tough and painful year for you then consider picking up the broken pieces of your life and keep walking to where ever you are going. Others like you are doing exactly the same. Break free from the negative past and embrace the future. Replace whatever you have given up with positive thoughts, images, and the benefits to reinforce the program you have set in your mind.

I would like to say farewell aioni-bamahuta with the inspirations from my motivator Jack Canfield.

“Set aside time each and every day to visualize every one of your goals as already complete. This is one of the most vital things you can do to make your dreams come true. Some psychologists are claiming that one hour of visualization is worth 7 hours of physical effort. That’s a tall claim, but it makes an important point—visualization is one of the strongest tools in your success toolbox. Make sure you suse it.

“You don’t need to visualize your future achievements for a whole hour. Just 10 to 15 minutes is plenty. Azim Jamal, a prominent speaker in Canada, recommends what he calls “the Hour of Power”—20 minutes of visualization and meditation, 20 minutes of exercise, and 20 minutes of reading inspirational or informational books. Imagine what would happen to your life if you did this every day.

I leave this space in The National newspaper I thank my ever reliable editor, Magaret Daure, admirable Malum Nalu, the editorial team and the management of the newspaper company for giving me the opportunity to fulfill one of my goals last year.

I have found it enriching and humbling to share the thoughts and experiences I have as a Papua New Guinea writer, scholar, and teacher.

A Reminder This Christmas

2010-12-25T12:15:00.000+10:00

December began for me with the ambivalence resulting from seeing too many traffic accidents almost every week in our city. It is a sad reminder that people are careless with their own lives. It is also a sad reminder that the irresponsible actions of careless or drunk drivers can lead to the deaths of innocent men, women, and child. The reminder we need to take heed of is that with so many drivers without proper education of traffic rules on the road anything can go wrong.

We also prepare ourselves as Christians to celebrate the Birth of Jesus Christ. We prepare ourselves both mentally and physically. Mentally we prepare ourselves to rejoice in the birth of our saviour as man to live among us. Physically we slow down or wind down in our activities or take a break from what we do every day of the year. Christmas is a time to celebrate, sing, praise, and dance to the new born King two thousand years ago in the Holy Land.

It is also a time to say thank you to God who guided us on our journey through many trials and tribulations. Let’s be the three Kings.

It is a time to say thank you to those who shared the faith, walked with us on the journey through 12 months, and made us grow in spirit and in strength to face the challenges we had encountered along the road.

Our families and friends need to know that we are thankful for their support, understanding, co-operation, respect, and company in the past 12 months.

Find the time to say thank you to God and everyone who made your life what it is now.

I take this moment to thank everyone who spent K1.00 every Friday to read Steven’s Window in The National newspaper’s The Weekender. The time you took to read my column every week is acknowledged and valued much more than you realize.

For me it is a rewarding feeling that many people across the spectrum of our society read this column every week. I know it is impossible to impress everyone, but at least in my column I am able to share my thoughts, knowledge, and experiences with the public. Whether my views are liked or not, I know that it is important to bridge the gap between what people know and what they don’t know.

In particular I would like to thank those with whom I have worked with to make a difference in other people’s lives. I am thankful to the teachers and students of the University of Papua New Guinea, The National newspaper, The Bible Society of PNG, the Education Department’s National Literacy and Awareness Secretariat, and the Office of Libraries, Archives, and Literacy, the Department of Community Development’s Task Force Secretariat on Social Protection Policy, the PNG Media Council, the National Research Institute, the University Bookshop, Theodist Stationery, the Correction Institution Services, Buimo Prison officers and prisoners, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Lae), and the Kubalia students of UPNG.

We must also thank those people who worked so hard this year to bring us happiness through religious processes, through the commitment of their kindred spirit, and through the little things they did to make the difference.

We must also thank those in positions of power who have lived up to their duties and responsibilities to see that our people have their social, political, and economic struggles addressed through proper channeling of government and partner funding. We must also thank the political leaders who made a difference in our lives this year.

In the global level many political and economic changes affect us in Papua New Guinea as well. We must thank the leaders, organizations, and governments that promote positive humanistic changes and ideologies.

We must thank those who continue to help us develop as a nation.

We must also thank those people who made important positive changes in their personal lives so that others were also changed to be good, positive, and productive citizens.

In the Good Book we read of Holy Mary, mother of Jesus visiting her cousin Elizabeth, after the angel Gabriel had visited her. On seeing Elizabeth, Mary expressed her thankfulness and praise to God for choosing her to be the mother of the Lord (Luke 1: 46-49). From Luke 1: 50-55 Mary ponders over the magnitude of her part in delivering the Son of God to the world, especially God’s mercy, deeds, power, grace, providence, goodness, and blessings to those who believe in him:

“His mercy extends to those who fear him,

from generation to generation.

He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;

he has scattered those who are proud in their

inmost thoughts.

He has brought down rulers from their thrones

but has lifted the humble.

He has filled the hungry with good things

but has sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

remembering to be merciful.

To Abraham and his descendants for ever,

even as he said to our fathers.”

Tomorrow is the 25th of December, the day of the Birth of Jesus Christ. Christians will celebrate this day all over the world as they have done for two thousand years ago. Papua New Guineans will also celebrate this important day as a Christian country.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and may you all enjoy the festive season in peace, harmony, and godly ways. Let’s fear God, let’s stop drinking any form of alcohol, let’s stop partying, gambling, and fighting; let’s stay home this Christmas with our families, and let’s make this Christmas a special one for our children to remember as the one they don’t have to cry, go hungry, fear the drunkard father or mother, or be a witness to violence.

Please avoid overdoing what you do, especially drink driving or extravagant partying and other forms of counter productive social behaviours that come with our poor interpretations of the word ‘celebrate’ in the season of Christmas when Christ Jesus was born in Bethleham.

Political Lessons from Shakespeare

2010-12-17T13:00:00.000+10:00

As this week’s political drama unfolded we asked ourselves if Shakespeare’s play Julius Caeser had a broader appeal to democracies outside of the Greek-Roman empires. Indeed, the answer lies in our interpretations of the thematic concerns of the play as well as the associations we make from the characterization, plot, and dialogic encounters in the play.

Shakespeare’s intention in Julius Caeser is to present a genuine piece of Roman history to the English audience.

“Roman history offered some of the most impressive themes available to the Renaissance, an era when political lessons were ardently sought in antiquity—themes such as despotism and republicanism, strong rule good and bad, stable and unstable realm, scrupulous and unscrupulous motives, the relations between rules and subjects (particularly the populace), and so on,” says Arthur Humphreys, an eminent Shakespearean scholar.

So what are the political lessons that we can learn from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser? What associative meanings are possible in our reading of Julius Caeser against the political stage in PNG at this time? What correlations to our own political leaders can we make to Julius Caeser, Brutus, Marcus Cassius, and Marcus Anthony?

The play is about the events that led up to the assignation of the Roman Emperor Julius Ceaser. Brutus and Cassius plot and assassinate Caeser. Their plot includes assassinating Anthony as well because he is a close aide of the Emperor. Anthony is spared the blood from the dagger of Caeser’s murderers simply because Brutus persuaded Cassius and the Plebians that Anthony is the one to take care of Caeser’s body and later extol the Emperor’s virtues and present to Rome the last will of Caeser.

Arthur Humphreys highlights some of key lessons on politics and morality as captured in Julius Caeser.

“The first and fundamental point of attention is the antithesis between republican ‘virtue’ and imperial ‘tyranny,’ both words in inverted commas since neither is a clear-cut case. Republican ‘virtue’ blemished in a way which idealizations of ‘liberty’ ignore. Casius on principle hates an overlord, yet much of his utterance suggests the ‘envy of great Caeser’ which motivates all save Brutus. Brutus kills in moral muddle, and he stands on his spotless principles while expecting to share in Cassius’ extortions. His followers revere freedom, yet they misread Rome’s prospects and are redeemed only by the dignity of their deaths. As for ‘tyranny’ that amounts merely to Caeser’s imperiousness; Brutus himself admits his moderation, and only in Cassius’s hostile bias are Plutarch’s accusations of violent ambition reflected. Caeser is by turns grand, arrogant, pompous, fallible, genial, dignified, and (in his will) generous. His overthrow proves to be a sacrilege. The second question the action poses is that of personal morality under political pressure, of private conscience under partisan strain.”

The play is based around the ambiguities of Caeser who sees himself as a demigod and fallible man, monopolist of power yet the essential axle of Rome’s wheel. Rome is to Caeser what Caeser is to Rome, an indivisible pack that suggests that Caeser is so sure of himself that he even refuses to have personal body guards accompany him, just before his death.

The political development in PNG of recent times, especially under the current regime, brings to mind such ambiguities closer to that of Caeser’s regime. Papua New Guinea much like Rome under Caeser’s emperorship nurses its wounds from hurried legislations and policy directions, lacking sustained, intelligent, and moral debate. As a result the parliament was found to have breached constitutional requirements. Supreme Court rulings on a number of cases are as follows: The Australian-PNG ECP program, the Integrity of Political Parties, and the Appointment of the Governor General this year. The Supreme Court rulings have given integrity back to the people, whose Constitution was breached by its own leaders, and some form of relief and trust in the Constitution it has set for itself at Independence in 1975.

The country is now a stage with an Acting Prime Minister, Acting Governor General and soon Acting Chief Justice when the Chief Justice goes on holiday. The events that led up to this are not limited to the Prime Minister stepping aside to allow a properly instituted Tribunal to investigate allegations of misconduct in office, the unconstitutional appointment of the Governor General, and the Speakers actions of impartiality in Parliament during Parliamentary sessions.

The Ombudsman Commission, the Opposition, Governors Luther Wenge and Bob Danaya and their Provincial Governments, the NGOs, Community Based Organizations, and the populace have made it their business to hold leaders accountable for their actions and decisions that affect the lives of Papua New Guineans.

Issues of corruption and unconstitutional politicking characterize the current regime to the point where the only hope left for people is to depend on the courts to intervene on their behalf. In order for the courts to reach a just and fair decision it relies on its integrity and Independence. In the major decisions of the Supreme Court this year overturning the table where leaders were so sure of themselves, the panel of judges have carefully read, analyzed each case thoroughly, considered the consequences of their decisions, and offered their verdicts on the issues before them. That in itself is maturity, strength, and Independence of the Judiciary.

It is hoped that justice will continue to prevail in the land. Our justice system must continue to serve the greater good of Papua New Guinea. The greater collective good or the interests of the people of this country must come before individual interests. The courts must not compromise their integrity to the interests of few leaders and powerful individuals. It is assuring to read by Thursday that the courts will perform their functions as required by the Constitution.

We hope this political drama viewed through Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser has taught us a lesson in what could go wrong when political leaders ignore the consequences of their actions, expectations, ill-advised decisions, and most important of all using political expediency as an excuse to stay in power.

Media Awards is for Excellence

2010-12-16T13:55:00.001+10:00

In this year’s Media Awards, the judges dropped several categories of awards. The main reason is that in those categories only one entry or no entries at all were submitted. This does say a lot about the organizations and media companies’ obligation to those hard working media personnel such as journalists, broadcasters, and TV reporters, programmers, and producers. For a start we don’t have a crowded media industry as illustrated by two dailies, one weekly, two TV stations, and a handful of radio stations. Nominating media personals and programs from these media organizations should be an important responsibility of a responsible media industry. The people who work so hard and with tireless commitment to achieve excellence in their respective media should be rewarded and encouraged to set the standard for excellence.

It is also fulfilling to see some of the students I had a part in their formative education at UPNG receive award in this year’s Media Awards night. Congratulations to them and other winners.

I make these remarks as someone connected to the media industry as a columnist in one of the dailies. If every organizations and media companies can submit their nominations in call the categories for the awards then a high percentage of excellence is achieved.

Talking about excellence I think some remarks as a reader, listener, and viewer is in order. The issue of language and stylistics need also to be addressed in bringing out excellence in quality of writing in newspapers. A reader is easily distracted by poor handling of language. Editing and proof reading of newspapers must be meticulous before they are printed. So many poor lexical errors in writing lower the standard of excellence. The challenge is to maintain excellence in stylistics through high standard of editing and proof reading.

TV presenters need to have clear, voice, and language training before they appear before the cameras. Nothing is more distracting than the poor voice inflections and improper pronunciation of words. Poor lighting on subjects distracts concentrated viewing of TV news and programs.

Radio broadcasting has been around for ages. Difference in radio personalities and approaches are necessary, but voice choice and program control are also necessary to bring out undistracted presentation. Listeners switch stations easily because they cannot bear the way some radio personalities carry on with trivia and unimportant conversations.

Having said that let me return to what I think should be included in next year’s Media Awards. In my view the Media Awards should include Best Editorial in a newspaper, because of the function editorials play in making the most important and sharp statement as the newspaper sees it. I also think the overall quality and presentation of a newspaper should also be considered. The award should also include the commentaries and columns of newspapers as these are written by people other than journalists employed on a full time basis by the newspaper companies. These commentaries inform, educate, prompt, and disseminate knowledge to a broad spectrum of society, helping to initiate political action, enlighten the way people see and do things, and inform people about knowledge that improve their understanding of the world and their own lives.

The media awards should also include the best TV programs that are creative, innovative, and illustrative of the kinds of TV programs that Papua New Guineans like to view. Television and other electronic media in Papua New Guinea are recent innovation that influence people in very profound ways. The total participation of Papua New Guineans in this technology driven media is still developing. Future awards may include categories such as TV documentaries, programs, presenters, and innovative community media programs.

For radio programs I think a survey of the listening public on what radio station they tune to often, and what programs on radio are important to them should be the basis for nominating a radio station or its programs for awards. The public should be the judge on this and not the judges of the media awards. I bet some of the judges might not be radio listeners at all. All radio stations must submit their entries for the Media Award. Having the same station or stations win awards every year does nothing good to setting of standards in radio.

As I remember Mr. Toguata’s comments on this year’s awards, the judges’ decisions were based on what they have before them. If nominations of competitors were made then these were judged accordingly within the categories they were nominated under.

A challenge to the Media Council of PNG is to recognize the benefactors of the Media Council funding through its Community Initiative Programs. I think an award should be created to recognize the media initiatives in our communities and also programs that promote the role of media in the development of Papua New Guinea. Recognizing community initiatives should promote a receptive, responsive, and an enlightened community to media technologies and influence. It would also show the development partners and partner organizations that their funding has achieved the desired result.

So many people are critical of media ethics and standards, especially the politicians. Maybe the Parliament or any critics of media should sponsor an award for ethics and standards of quality in next year’s awards to make the point that this is the kind of ethics and standards they are bragging about. That should set the benchmark for other media organizations and companies to strive for in their conduct. It should also demonstrate a sense of ownership of what people want of media in terms of ethics and standards to follow.

The views I make here do not necessarily reflect those of the daily newspaper that I contribute as a columnist. The views expressed here are made in appreciation of the media’s role and function in our society. The awards made this year, no doubt will, improve and raise the standards of excellence expected of media personnel and media organizations.

The challenge is to remain on top without compromising to the unwitting demands of our societies.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

Development of Indigenous Jurisprudence

2010-12-03T10:17:00.000+10:00

The government has done well as a responsible government in this year’s budgetary allocation in investing in the human resource capital of the country. The education sector received the highest budgetary allocation this year, which in itself is a political statement of the government’s medium term development policy. By allocating the highest funding to our education system the government has reinvested the earnings from the country’s natural resources and from the taxes it collects from its citizens.

The government has also considered the legal education of our people to be of utmost importance. Its budgetary allocation for the construction of a new law school at the University of Papua New Guinea is major investment in the education of our legal experts. With the construction of a new law school the government is well assured in producing a steady supply of graduates who can meet the expectations of the government and people of Papua New Guinea.

This new School of Law will need additional funding to increase its teaching staff capacity, attract practicing lawyers as adjunct lecturers to impart their knowledge and experience to law students, fund research and publications and develop a research library within the School of Law.

A major challenge for the government now is that it must invest in the development of law in Papua New Guinea. There are aspects of our law that need more development, elucidation, and refinement. For example, so far the development of customary law as part of the underlying law has not been a successful story. Our courts and lawyers rely on the common law in most of cases before the courts.

The Constitution itself is clear on the place of custom in the underlying law. Owen Jessep, a legal scholar describes custom as the “elusive” partner in the underlying law of PNG. No matter how slow it is for custom to have a fully developed role in the underlying law the future of an indigenous jurisprudence based on custom is a slow evolving process.

Owen Jessep (1998), among others, continues this observation: “In what is now almost a quarter of a century since Independence, there has been no shortage of complaints about the lack of progress in developing an “indigenous jurisprudence” (the expression used in s 21(1) of the Constitution), that is, the failure of custom to achieve its rightful place as a primary source of the underlying law.”

The trend has continued to the present day with more concerns raised by the judges and some lawyers. Finger pointing seems to suffuse and frustrate the efforts to develop indigenous jurisprudence.

“Some early criticisms focused on the apparent ignorance or laziness or antipathy of expatriate lawyers and judges towards custom, and the failure of Parliament to pass the legislation contemplated in Sch 2.1(3) of the Constitution.

Other analyses have referred to the quality and content of education given to Papua New Guinean lawyers, the assumed superiority of common law principles, and the reluctance of practising lawyers to look outside the confines of their common law training. In addition, technical problems of proving the existence of custom and the lack of any consistent judicial methodology in dealing with issues of custom have been highlighted.”

The then Chief Justice of PNG Amet CJ argued that the idea of an indigenous jurisprudence had become simply “meaningless rhetoric or cliché”, and that, instead, there still prevailed in the Papua New Guinea legal system “an umbilical cord of dependency upon principles of the Anglo-Australian common law and equity”. This sums up the position of judges in their view of the poor development of the underlying law based on customs.

In 1983 the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea published a monograph on customary law in Papua New Guinea. “The Customary Law Development Project” according to the editor, Richard Scaglion, “was designed to provide the basis for developing a Papua New Guinean legal system based on Papua New Guinea values, customs, beliefs, perceptions and institutions. It was expected to gather customary law materials with a view to developing such materials along national policy lines and integrating any underlying principles discovered into a self-reliant and uniquely Melanesian national legal system.”

Developing an underlying law based on custom is a cumbersome process requiring more than a legal process to deal with it. The development of the underlying law based on custom is a constitutional direction. In the 1980s the Supreme Court came under criticism for failing to incorporate custom into the courts decisions following the Constitutional directions.

The Chief Justice shifted the blame to lack of time and resources: “In his 1983 National Court opinion in The State v Paul Pokolou, Sir Buri Kidu responded to the criticism by some legal practitioners that the Courts are failing to take custom into account and also failing to develop the underlying law as required by the Constitution. The Chief Justice placed the blame on the legal profession for failing to produce evidence or the material necessary for the judges to use to recognize custom. “Judges have not the time and resources to undertake their own researches in most cases and it is unfair for lawyers to expect too much from judges who are already overworked and under rewarded.”

The Chief Justice also criticized Parliament which “has failed to perform its duties as given to it by the Constitution.” Thus, he made it the responsibility of the legal profession to raise issues of custom and on the legislature to incorporate custom into the underlying law.”

One suggestion is to fund the research and publication of customary law in Papua New Guinea. Law students can return, if they wish, to their own communities to collect data on customary law, which can then be published and made available as evidence of customary law in Papua New Guinea. In the PNG Legal information from PacLII Database, customary law is missing. Maybe here’s where the funding of research of customary law will find its home and serve the need for the development of an indigenous jurisprudence.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

Performance and Leadership Success

2010-11-27T09:49:00.000+10:00

Sometimes I think leaders need to sit down and read a good book on how to lead. In many of our work places leaders perform below the expected moral level. There are different explanations for their poor performances.

It could also be that they struggle with understanding themselves as leaders who lead through service, moral intelligence, and with clear achievable goals.

It could be that their appointment in the first place was anything, but rigged with fraud, nepotism, and misjudgment of their true character.

A leader is someone who must understand the importance of team work and must maintain an attitude of respect for every member of the team. A leader is someone who consolidates the productive spirit of the team rather than someone who divides and rule. A leader works with the team, not against the team in a company or organization.

In their book Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance and Leadership Success, Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel explain what an effective leadership is: “the best leaders are not the charismatic or heroic types lionized in years past. According to the latest research, they are ‘quiet leaders’ who accomplish great things modestly and without fanfare. Leaders at the perennially great companies all share a common trait—humility. They inspire high performance in others through their sensitivity to their followers’ needs. The best leaders think “we,” not “I.” They are, quite simply good people who consistently tap into their inborn disposition to be moral. They follow a moral compass—even when it’s tempting not to.”

A long-time friend of mine explained to me that he had left the school he was teaching in because he could not work with the headmaster and his close associates. According to my friend, the headmaster had, since his appointment, become insensitive to the views and needs of the teachers of the school. To maintain power and control the headmaster replaced subject heads of department with junior staff members who know nothing about the institutional history or the culture on which the reputation of the school was built on. Many of the replacements were teachers who accepted the imposing figure without being critical of the decisions deployed by the headmaster. The result of these decisions saw complete breakdown of cooperation and collegiality among staff. The values they held as a team no longer mattered. The headmaster’s preposterous attitude and lack of leadership qualities forced my friend to resign.

There must be a moral compass to guide a leader to achieve the desired outcomes as envisioned in the strategic plans and goals set in the beginning of their leadership. Without such a master plan, leaders tend to go astray, become aimless, and appear ruthless in their deployment of power to achieve total control. Such leadership is undemocratic. What it does reinforce is a master -servant relationship to the detriment of the cooperative spirit and morale of the work force.

Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel explain that leadership power is a double-edged sword. “Certainly, you can use power to accomplish worthy goals through others that you could not reach on your own. But there is something about power that makes it potentially dangerous as it can be helpful. Power is addictive. Using power activates brain chemicals called endorphins that create a highly enjoyable physiological state. Power can provide pleasure much like the satisfaction offered by food, sex, or vigorous physical exercise. Most people in formal leadership positions value power. But some leaders crave it. It is easy to get accustomed to the perks of the leadership role.”

Before anyone in leadership position gets carried away a reminder is in order. The power to lead is both manifests in the organizational structure and those who follow a leader. Lennick and Kiel remind us that “leadership power is not just asserted by the leader—it is given to leaders by followers. Followers allow leaders to be powerful. Because leaders have power, followers are careful about how they present information to their leaders.”

“Research has demonstrated that the higher one goes in an organization, the more distorted the information they receive. Followers provide information that they believe leaders want to hear and censor information they fear would upset or anger leaders. The more heavy-handed a leader is in his or her use of power, the more distorted the information they are given. But even benevolent leaders who are careful in their use of power have trouble establishing accurate communication channels because followers’ strong tendency to defer to the leader’s position power, independent of the leader’s actual behavior.”

Leaders need to understand such power dynamics in order for them to lead a proactive and cooperative work force. Without doing so leaders tend to hide behind the deployment of power without needing to worry about the negative consequences of its impact.

The caution issued by Lennick and Kiel is that if leaders continue along this path then they can achieve negative results: “When leaders make mistakes, it is difficult for followers to tell them so. Many organizational cultures discourage interpersonal feedback, even among peers, so imagine how reluctant most followers would be to openly criticize the actions of someone with great power. This leaves most senior leaders operating in a feedback void. Their accomplishments might be praised, but their personal flaws are not brought to their attention.”

“The absence of appropriate negative feedback,” continues Lennick and Kiel, “about our leadership behavior can leave us with the mistaken notion that we are far better leaders than we really are. Without accurate information about the business and about our own capacities, we are at risk making a big mistake that can lead to a devastating business outcome. Workaholism can reflect a subtle abuse of power. When you insist on doing everything yourself rather than delegating work, you deprive others of opportunities for development and their own share of power.”

Lennick and Kiel are right. Use power with caution: “Leverage your power to accomplish morally positive goals that also produce higher business performance.”

Change Your Responses

2010-11-19T12:07:00.001+10:00

The kind of person I am now is because of the decisions and actions I took in the past. The kind of person I want to be in future depends on the decisions and actions I make now.

If I make the right decisions and took the appropriate action now then the outcome will be as I had visualized it. That is the kind of lesson, personal development experts like Jack Canfield, author of The Success Principles. I have followed Jack Canfield’s success principles the very day I bought this book in a bookshop in Christchurch, New Zealand, 5 years ago.

I had shared one of the success principles in this column some time back in the beginning of the year. Since these principles have changed my life I would like to share at least one principle from time to time.

This week I would like to share part of Success Principle Number 1: Take 100% responsibility for your life. A friend of mine said to me one day that I needed to take control of my life instead of trying to please other people. I am successful in many areas of my life, but equally failed in many other areas of my life. I lived through life in a fast lane without taking control of it.

I listened to other people but myself. I battled through the problem of alcohol in my life. I wrote many books but I was unable to complete them for publication. That sounded more like the life of Stephen King, the one writer who had similar problems before he did something about it. I applied for higher status jobs, but found myself performing below the expectation of the prospective employers or those serving in appointment committees.

My mind was all over the place. I would do anything for anybody without worrying about where such decisions led me to.

My life then arrived at the critical junction three years ago. The next move I made would, either devastate me or save and reinvigorate me to find a new leash in life. I returned to Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles and re-read it in order to make critical decisions to change the direction I was heading. Slowly I began to make some of the changes.

First, I gave up on alcohol to the shock of many people who never thought I would do such a thing. Now I am into the third year of a sober life.

Next, I decided to focus on my family and give some quality time and attention. That was a relief for everyone in my household.

I followed through with restoring some spiritual sense in my life again. I began to renew my faith in the church and finding more strength in my personal and family life.

I soon decided to go back to school. I enrolled for the law degree program and juggled that with my job. That decision had done more good than I ever thought. Now the doors that were closed to me before began to open, revealing more opportunities in front of me.

The days when I relied on borrowed money to get me from one day to next are gone. Now I have enough coins to buy food for the house, have my betel nuts, and filling the fuel tank of my car at a respectable level.

There are many areas in my life I have made changes to since following Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles. I sometimes buy the book as a present for friends I know need some changes in their lives.

All these may sound preachy, but at least I am happy to share with the loyal followers of this column, something positive that could change their lives as well.

Here is one of the commands in Jack Canfield’s Success Principle Number 1.

“Everything you experience today is the result of choices you have made in the past…Everything you experience in life—both internally and externally—is the result of how you have responded to a previous event…You only have control over three things in your life—the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take (your behavior). How you use these three things determines everything you experience. If you don’t like what you are producing and experiencing you have to change your response.”

And then Jack Canfield reminds us again what people have been saying all along but we ignored the wisdom: “Change you negative thought to positive one. Change what you day dream about. Change your habits. Change what you read. Change your friends. Change how you talk.”

“If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got,” Jack Canfield continues with his advice, “If you are an alcoholic and you keep on drinking, your life is not going to get any better. Likewise, if you continue your current behaviors, your life is not going to get any better either. The day you change your responses is the day your life will begin to get better.”

Some of Jack Canfield’s commands are: First, you have to give up blaming other people for your problems. All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you—Wayne Dyer;. You will never become successful as long as you continue to blame someone or something else for your lack of success.

Second, you have to give up complaining. The circumstances you complain about are, by their nature, situations you can change—but you have chosen not to. So make the decision to stop complaining, to stop spending time with complainers, and get on with creating a life of your dreams.

Third, you’re complaining to the wrong person. Learn to replace complaining with making requests and taking action that will achieve your desired outcome.

The Kumuls need Jack Canfield. Hire him next time. Use this: www.thesuccessprinciples.com

USP Announces International Competition to Launch USP Press

2010-11-13T15:25:00.001+10:00

May 2011, the University of the South Pacific will be launching its publishing arm that will be known as the USP Press.

The goal of the Press is to publish high quality research and writing on issues related to the Pacific Islands, or the islands commonly known as Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.

Toward this end, the University wishes to announce an international competition seeking manuscripts in the following categories:

USP Press Literature Prize ($3000) will be awarded to the overall winner from the following categories.

The winner in each category will receive $1,000.00

Fiction ($1,000)

Poetry ($1,000)

Drama or Screenplay ($1,000)

USP Press Non Fiction Prize ($3,000) will be awarded to the overall winner from the following categories. The winner in each category will receive $1,000.00.

History, Auto/Biography ($1,000)

Sciences ($1,000)

Social Sciences/Humanities ($1000)

Best Children’s Book ($2,000)

The competition is open to all nationalities and closes on 15 February, 2011.

The prize money will be in American dollars

Each submission must clearly indicate the category in which it is to be considered.

All submissions must be in hardcopy. Online submissions will not be accepted.

All submissions should be addressed to:

The Chair, Board of the USP Press,
Professor Vilsoni Hereniko,
Oceania Centre for Arts, Culture and Pacific Studies,
The University of the South Pacific
Private Mail Bag,
Laucala Campus, Suva, Fiji.

For enquiries, write to
hereniko_v@usp.ac.fj

The Development Dilemma

2010-11-13T14:52:00.002+10:00

Culture and Human Resource Capital, UPNG 2010

Everywhere I go I hear the words LNG in many people’s talk. So much buzz is made on this economic promise that seems to drive a certain agenda of development. In Port Moresby and Lae there is a building boom. Lae has moved into converting old houses into multiple blocks of flats. Port Moresby has grown into a mega for multi-storied buildings. They are eye catching and startling in a way. The government is proud to see this development, quickly declaring to the people that LNG is here and Papua New Guineans have to cash into the LNG or else they stand to lose out on the benefits. The conclusion I seem to have is that the LNG excitement has also promoted an even growth in our society.

I may be slow in seeing the benefits, but I am circumspect with the use of words like development, economic independence, and cost and benefits. We have to understand some of these words are used by certain people to promote a certain kind of agenda, ideology, and notions about what they consider to be right or is the truth. This does not have to be the case for others.

In thinking about this issue I came across J.R.E Waddell’s paper “The Development Dilemma: Self-Reliance or Dependence?” published in the collection From Rhetoric to Reality? Papers from the Fifteenth Waigani Seminar on Papua New Guinea’s Eight Point Plan and National Goals After a Decade. The book was edited by Peter King, Wendy Lee, and Vincent Warakai.

“The most important quality of a word like development,” writes Waddell, “is that it means all things to all men, thus enabling people with divergent views to think that they are talking about the same things. In such a situation, the rich and powerful can impose and implement their own definition of development and at the same time convince the public that the latter’s interest are being served. They can say that development is taking place even in a country where, according to my definition, economic development plans have failed conspicuously, because they define development in terms of Gross National Product or Gross Domestic Product per head. Indeed, a glance at any text book or United Nations publications should convince one that the division of the nations of the world into categories such as ‘developed’, ‘less developed’ and ‘least developed’ is based almost exclusively on ranking by GDP per head. Other criteria have been used but have never quite replaced this basic one.”

The rich and powerful is a term that applies to the world’s rich and powerful nations, but can also be used to make reference to sectors within a politically Independent nation that another contributor to the book cited above, Peter Fitzpatrick, describes as “the national petty bourgeoisie” who have consolidated their presence in the political and economic chambers. In 1985 Fitzpatrick lamented the absence of such a social class, arguing that Papua New Guinea is certainly no banana republic.

Fitzpatrick argued that “the Eight Aims in operation present a picture of marked success and almost equally marked failure. The key to the success of the Aims is in their character as a charter for a technocracy; much of their failure lies in their not responding to the interests of the national petty bourgeoisie.”

“The conflict between the between the technocracy and the national petty bourgeoisie”, Fitzpatrick continues “has been central to the making and to the operation of the Aims. It has been the basic division in national politics. The conflict persists but it is one that the technocracy must win. The state occupies a central position which the technocracy uses to consolidate its class power. In this, it blocks any challenging advance of the national petty bourgeoisie, even at the price of tolerating and encouraging foreign domination of small-scale and middle-level enterprise. This same situation also maintains the power of the peasantry; but in its ‘natural’ state of ethnic division. Part of the centrality of the state lies in its ability to contain the peasantry.”

These observations were made 10 years after Independence in 1985. The situation 35 years on has turned out to reinforce the dilemma Waddell had in mind at that time. “How is ‘development’ to be redefined so that it accords with the needs of the have-nots rather than the haves?” Waddell asked at that time. “The most important step is to turn conventional thinking upside down and start with people rather than the economy as a whole,” was Waddell’s answer.

“If we think solely in aggregate terms,” Waddell adds, “we shall merely reinforce an inequitable and inappropriate system established by and for foreigners. If we accept the inherited economic system as datum, an unalterable given, we shall immediately be concerned with the need to generate massive amounts of foreign exchange and expand cash-cropping and the extraction of minerals and timber—activities which bring in foreign exchange and budgetary revenue but do not necessarily bring net benefits to the population at large.”

Since this observation 25 years ago our people have not done any better in area of small business developments, but rather have become mere spectators in the increased Asian domination of wholesale and retailing business. The national petty bourgeoisie has emerged as the small political and technocrat elite with millions of people’s wealth diverted into personal accounts, and political decisions have been made for the convenience of few powerful individuals defending a degree of accrued interests in business, political power, and maintenance of flawed bureaucracy based on biased appointments to senior positions that does nothing more than a show of puppetry. Instead of technocracy resisting the influence of the national petty bourgeoisie it has compromised itself as revealed in many of the Parliamentary Audit Committee reports in recent years.

In writing this I am asking myself one simple question: Why bother? The answer is not as simple as it seems. Understanding development in the academic sense is not the same as development in the lived experiences of our people.

Failure of Traditional Safety Nets

2010-11-05T16:42:00.007+10:00

Roadside fish market at Yonki Dam area, EHP

The general sense of a failure of the traditional safety nets in PNG can contribute to an impoverished society. The traditional forms of authority no longer matters to the post-independence generation. A host of uncanny hooliganism throws its dark shadows on what remains of the traditional structures of power. It is the perfect recipe for chaos, crime, violence, and unlimited threat to life.

Traditional safety nets support social notions of care for elderly, looking out for each other through an elaborate wantok system, communities and hauslains maintaining peace, harmony, and respect for each other and their properties, and promoting sustainable communities with happy people.

Many of our young people are stranded in the crossroad between introduced ways and traditional expectations. Young people stray into alcohol and substance abuse, aggression, and violence. Violence against women and general disrespect of older people and traditions mar our everyday lives. Disruptive social behaviours have become the norm.

Subsistence farming is too hard and labourious to many people. Fast money through street vending of cheap Asian goods and betel nuts coupled with a variety of informal sector activities draw the rural population to flood into urban areas. The consequent result of this is over population, over-crowding, congestion, and suffocation to every nerve of development in our evolving democracy.

In the academic sense, our traditional idyllic village societies are no longer the same village societies we left asunder a while back to move into the modern world.

Global trends and fluctuating economic conditions force our people into scratching deeper into the skin to make ends meet. Already the income earning Papua New Guineans are stressed out. Their social obligations to support other members of their families and communities are becoming thin. The Government tax regime without any rebate is too harsh on individuals.

What we can do, however, is to reframe, rethink, or reinvent the elements of our traditional societies that are effective as social protection safety nets. Some of these are retrievable through various programs within the ambit of community development, cultural and social advocacy networks, and through various community-based initiatives in agriculture, law and justice, literacy and knowledge transfer activities, and in health and education.

We already have in place many such activities, thriving with or without the support of government, church agencies, and international development partners and organizations. The challenge is to have them work together through an enhanced policy framework that delivers service as well as protection to all Papua New Guineans. The state can then without haste perform its democratic function of service delivery to its citizens.

The question that begs an answer now is whether our traditional safety nets of social protection and social services have failed in today’s PNG societies. That is the million Kina question.

The answer to the question is so critical in understanding the work undertaken by the Department of Community Development through the National Taskforce on Social Protection Policy and the Secretariat. Right now, PNG has no Social Protection Policy.

The Secretariat, headed by Mr. George Wrondimi, was tasked to research and report their findings on the possibility of a Social Protection Policy for PNG. The result of that report should help the National Taskforce, chaired by Secretary Joseph Klapat, to persuade NEC to set up the Social Protection Policy.

The Secretariat’s work is strengthened by a number of international organizations (World Bank, UNICEF), development partners (AUSAID, ADB), and local organizations (INA), institutions (UPNG, NRI, PNG Medical Research Institute), and various local community groups and individuals.

Department of Community Development Minister, Dame Carol Kidu, Secretary Joseph Klapat, and Mr. George Wrondimi and his team should be applauded for taking on this mammoth task with the promise of bringing positive change to our societies.

In line with their strategic plan, the Secretariat organized a workshop on the Social Protection Policy at the March Girls Resort in Gaire Village last week. The workshop involved the Focus Group and the researchers for the development of the Social Protection Policy. A report prepared by the Secretariat was the focus of the workshop. The final report will serve the foundation for developing a Social Protection Policy for Papua New Guinea.

At this stage the basic premise driving the push for a Social Protection Policy is that many Papua New Guinea societies are no longer able to buffer against the onslaught of dramatic changes sweeping through the land.

The observation that the traditional safety nets for protection against social, cultural, economic, and global political shocks on small communities is weakened to the point of being useless as a safety measure or utility to service the needs of the fragile communities. The risk is that a whole wave of negative impacts on our communities can stunt growth and cohesiveness in our societies.

The need is for the intervention of the state to use its instrumentalities in the service of its people. At the outset, the State has initiated the process through a NEC decision for the Department of Community Development to set up a Taskforce and a Secretariat to research and propose a model of social protection policy that is home-grown and relevant to Papua New Guinea.

Among several key issues considered in the workshop, there was a general feeling that the report of the research group must “stress the complementarity between core social protection provision and other policy areas, such as health, education, social services, agriculture and labour policy. Social protection programmes will be critical in supporting human and economic development outcomes across all sectors. At the same time, ongoing commitment to strengthening the quality and reach of essential services is required to ensure that social protection gains are maximised. Coordination and partnership across all sectors will ensure that social protection and other sectoral policies mutually support each other.”

Prudence tells me that caution must be exercised in the development of a Social Protection Policy for it to be realistic, do-able, and achievable. Such a policy must aim at finding a balance between successful universal models and indigenous models.

Coping with Tides of Change

2010-11-04T10:12:00.001+10:00

Big Brother's Help is Social Protection

The big question asked now is whether Papua New Guinea needs a Social Protection Policy? I, like many others, think that after 35 years of Independence and Statehood our people have seen the tide of change swept their villages away, created a rift in the social and cultural fabrics of life, economic necessity has driven many a village folk out of town, and created an urban chaos that threatens to normalize tribal behaviors and attitudes against the ever changing, vulnerable, and fragile modernity that many have started to embrace in a reluctant way.

In the 1980s when we celebrated the 10th Anniversary of our Independence we seemed to have done so with a strong sense of assurance about ourselves as a nation, young, strong, free, and with a strong population of about 3 million people. Since then the populations has tripled and the social and cultural woes seemed to have entered the stage without us noting its double edge sword. This coupled with the fragile political and economic imperatives that drove through the eighties and nineties saw a swell in urban population, trendy urbanization, and infrastructural development that ate up what used to be ‘free land” with its hasty housing development, conspicuous commercial centres, and strengthened the resolve to crime by those deprived of social and economic equality.

I have lived through that period in Port Moresby only to reflect on it to see the need for Papua New Guinea to have a National Social Protection Policy.

The 35 years of rapid transition from stone-age through to the processes of colonization, modernization, and globalization has had significant negative impact on the traditional social safety nets and social protection systems in PNG societies.

In recent times concerns were raised on the development of macro resource projects such as the Ramu Nickel and the LNG projects. The development of these projects are widening the gap between the (few 20 %) haves and the majority (80%) have-nots. The country is becoming a wealthy nation—an experience, which in itself poses as a shock for those who are ill-prepared to encounter the surplus cash flow situation in their lives, particularly the resources owners. This is already happening to the resource owners.

If the abundance of wealth is mismanaged and distributed unequally throughout the whole spectrum of society, the poorer segments will continue to have fewer assets, savings, or opportunities to fall back on and advance in life. Such a scenario will increase the level of poverty among the majority of the country’s vulnerable population.

The rapid growth of the country, in terms of population and modernization, and the increasing demands on suppliers for basic goods and services has also increased risks associated with individual lifestyle, cultural identity, economic management, environmental dependency, good governance, and the overall impact of the development process.

The government’s efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals and the dreams outlined in the government’s Vision 2050 will fail if the trend described above continues.

On the 26th June 2009 the National Executive Council, based on a join submission by the Ministers for Community Development and Treasury, made a historical decision in terms of its general policy direction on human development and poverty alleviation initiatives in the country.

The NEC Decision No.97/2009 of its Meeting No.04/2009 established a National Taskforce, comprising eight key line departments to initially conduct an investigation and report on a suitable model of Social Protection policy for PNG. The recommendations contained in this report will form the basis of a new National Policy on Social Protection that will be developed in Phase Two.

The National Taskforce on Social Protection (NTSP) comprises the following economic and social sector ministries or departments:

Department for Community Development (Team Leader)

Department of National Planning and Monitoring (Deputy Team Leader)

Department of Treasury

Department of Education

Department of Health

Department of Agriculture & Livestock

Department of Labour & Industrial Relations

Department of Provincial & Local Level Government Affairs

The National Executive Council requires an investigation on a policy framework and a report submitted back to NEC with relevant recommendations on suitable forms of Social Protection Model (s) for this country.

The state has a mandated responsibility to intervene now by directly assisting families and communities in areas where their own resource capacities have been exhausted or depleted as a result of the ever-increasing demands from the poorer and disadvantaged members of their families.

Traditional social safety nets are weak in many parts of the country over time. External intervention is needed to revive it. In parts of the country where traditional social safety nets are still in practice, empowerment of the families and communities are necessary to enable them to sustain these forms of social protection models.

Safety nets are a highly recommended form of social protection model for traditional PNG societies.. Traditional safety nets have many advantages. Traditional safety nets are practiced nationwide. The basic principles, concepts, and their benefits are familiar to individuals, families, and the society at large.

The safety nets, according to the World Bank provides immediate redistribution of wealth and reduces poverty: “they allow households to invest in their children and their livelihoods, they help households manage risks, and provisions of safety nets can handle redistributive concerns thoroughly thereby enabling governments to make more efficient policy choices in other sectors.”

The decision to develop a national policy on social protection is also part of the government’s ongoing efforts towards meeting the 2015 MDG on Poverty Alleviation. It is not a one-off policy initiative, but an over-arching strategy to eventually alleviate poverty and improve quality of life for all Papua New Guineans, as spelled out in the Vision 2050 National Development Strategy.

Experiences from other countries indicate that social protection has multiple roles to play and hence contribute significantly to improving productiveness of the people and nation building. Social protection is a long-term investment on human productiveness for nation building.

We look forward to the outcome of the Task Force on Social Protection Policy in Papua New Guinea.

Language is a Living Museum

2010-10-22T14:18:00.000+10:00

Is it hard to see that this country needs to have its own National Language Institute to train Papua New Guineans as linguists and literacy workers to serve as custodians of our Indigenous languages and as a special task force responsible for shouldering the national burden of eradicating literacy? We no longer can afford to lose many more of our languages. We are struggling with the slow pace in eradicating literacy. Language and literacy are the two sides of the same coin that we have not invested enough resources to develop.

The National Language Institute can serve other purposes as well. It can serve as the central point in facilitating research, development, symposiums, translations, and publication of such data that pertains to the status of language, the linguistic properties of our languages, and the evidence of the intellectual or epistemological foundations of our languages and cultures. The Institute can also serve as the center of cross fertilization of languages and involved in developing policies that concern themselves with language, literacy, and culture.

I am not the first to call for a National Language Institute. In the 1980s and 1990s, prominent linguists, the late Professor Otto Nekitel, and the then UPNG Vice Chancellor Joseph Sukwianomb made impassioned plea for the government to set up the Institute to no avail.

The difficulties we have in saving moribund languages, increasing our literacy rate, and poor protection of our biolinguistic diversity necessitate the establishment of a National Language Institute. This should also be one of the medium term goals of our national developmental plan. The Institute should to be set up as a fulfillment of our National Goals and Directive Principles, Basic Rights, and Basic Social Obligations.

In addition we need to create a law to protect our languages and enforce or reinforce the use of our languages in whatever form, medium, and where possible in our changing environment. Right now, even with a Language Policy in place no one seems to attend to it or own it for the greater benefit of all Papua New Guineans.

The importance of our national languages is taken on face value without there being any concerted efforts to see the development and protection of our languages. Our language diversity is closely linked to our biodiversity that without attending to the specific demands for protection, development, and sustainability we can lose cultures, knowledge, and people in this tide of modern changes on our shores in the form of economic development, negative social changes, media communication technologies, and the rush to modernize ourselves.

Papua New Guinea is a land of language diversity and biodiversity. An international scholar Tove Skutnabb Kangae (2003) observes that knowledge “about how to maintain biodiversity is encoded in small languages because it is their speakers who live in the world's biologically (and linguistically) most diverse areas.” The consequence of “killing these languages (or letting them) die is that we destroy the biodiversity in these areas.”

Linguist Peter Muhlhausler (2001, 135) argues that “our ability to get on with our environment is a function of our knowledge of it and that by combining specialist knowledge from many languages and by reversing the one-way flow of knowledge dominating the world’s education system, solutions to our many environmental problems may be found.”

We can also take action to slow the rate of language and biodiversity extinction, and better understand the needs and ways of the indigenous people’s knowledge systems. Muhlhausler (2001, 135) is correct in pointing out that to see the continued survival of our species we need to recognize the importance of “learning from local knowledge, such as learning from the insights and errors of traditional rainforest dweller or desert nomads.” Such knowledge is embodied in our Indigenous languages as uncovered by many linguists and researchers of Papua New Guinea languages.

Muhlhausler (2001, 136-7) observes that as “Enga are becoming dependent on foods imported in tins and containers, as their children have to attend government schools where they are expected to acquire nontraditional knowledge (which leaves little time or opportunity to acquire the full traditional knowledge), and as the habitat of much of the indigenous fauna and flora is destroyed to make way for coffee plantations and gardens in which introduced food is grown, as well as for roads, towns, and airstrips,” the language itself is under threat of losing the indigenous knowledge. He adds further that many studies on other Papua New Guinean language “point to very much the same development.”

Several international linguists observe that few studies have looked at interactions within or among language and of the functional relationships among languages. The study of languages at this dimension is described as linguistic ecology. Where indigenous subsistence activities are abandoned the “specialized syntactical structures and their associated vocabularies” are left to no use (Zepeda 1984). Nabhan argues: “In most cases, however, it remains unclear whether retention of lexemes associated with the knowledge and use of biodiversity has fared any worse than overall lexical retention within an imperiled indigenous language (Spicer 1986, Wurm 1991; Hinton 1994; Nabhan 2001: 146-8).

It is important that we give some thoughts to language and biodiversity in our country. The world of the indigenous people is viewed through their language, which Nettle and Romaine (2000, 14) describe as a window, a living museum or monument that losing one language we also lose one culture: “It is a loss to every one of us if a fraction of that diversity disappears when there is something that could have been done to prevent it.”

Instead of depending on international organizations and institutions to document, study, and translate our languages we need to set up our own National Language Institute.

Discussions are taking place among various stakeholders and interested parties along this line of thinking. What is needed is political action and will to see that the National Language Institute or PNG Institute of Languages is set up for the people of Papua New Guinea and their descendants in the future.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

Activities of Our Ancestors

2010-10-15T09:39:00.002+10:00

This week I am inspired to write about the origin of domesticated plants in New Guinea after learning of the significant discovery by archaeologists Prof. Glen Summerhays of the University of Otago and UPNG’s Dr. Mathew Leavesley, at Kosipe archaeological site. Congratulations to both of them as well as to Herman Mandui from the National Museum and Art Gallery for a spectacular job. The UPNG students who worked with them deserve praise for making the discovery of the century.

The discovery is significant enough to warrant an extended story about the activities of our ancestors. It is our ancestors’ story as much as it is ours. There is more we need to discover about ourselves. I have always been a keen enthusiast for the peopling of the Island of New Guinea and the domestication of plants. The island of New Guinea is truly a world of its own basked in the mysteries of this world.

Domesticated plants in New Guinea were introduced from the Southeast Asian train. The traditional food crops introduced from Southeast Asia include starch staples such as Colocasia esculenta (Taro), Dioscorea alata (Long Yam; Greater Yam), Dioscorea esculenta (Common or Round Yam; Lesser Yam); from Tropical South America the introduction of Ipomoea batatas (Sweet Potato) from Southeast Asia the introduction of Musa (Eumusa Section) or the banana. Two of the secondary crops introduced from Southeast Asia are the Psophocarpus tetragonolobus (Wind Bean) and the Lablab niger (Hyacinth Bean).

The entry of these crops, with the exception of sweet potato, to New Guinea together with domesticated animals is thought to have gone back to more than 50,000 years. The entry of the sweet potato is so recent and is dated to the arrival of European colonialism in island Southeast Asia, which began in the early 16th century. The introduced plants were domesticated together with plants indigenous to New Guinea.

According to the archaeologist, J. Golson of Kuk fame “agriculture could have begun independently of Southeast Asia” since the “starchy foods….could have been the staples, with edible grasses and leafy green vegetables providing minerals and fats; Pandanus trees supplying fruits or nuts rich in proteins and fats, together with other unlisted nut and seed bearing trees; and sugar cane an fruits as intermittent energy sources.”

The following food plants are indigenous: Starchy food such as Musa (Australimusa Section) or banana, Dioscorea bulbifera (yam), Dioscorea hispida (yam), Dioscorea nummularia (yam), Dioscorea pentaphylla (yam), Metroxylon spp. (sago); edible grasses such as Setaria palmifolia (for shoots) or Fox-tail or Bristle Grass; Pitpit (Tokpisin) and Saccharum edule (for inflorescences) or Pitpit (Tokpisn); Leafy green vegetable (Kumu in Tokpisin) such as Abelmoschus (formerly Hibiscus) manihot or Aipika (Tokpisin), Amaranthus spp. (native spinach; Amaranths Coleus); Coleus sp, Commelina spp. Oenanthe javanica; Rorippa sp (Native Cress), Rungia klossii, Solanum nigrum; Nuts and fruits such as pandanus spp. (Screw Pine; Pandanus) and Rubus rosifolius (Native Raspberry). The indigenous plants were either domesticated or were naturally growing or transplanted in gardens from the bush.

The pattern of cultivation of these plants suggests that people in New Guinea were for the most part aware of the abundance of starchy food crops and plants that are easily cultivated to produce sufficient supply of protein and vitamins for their survival. This could explain their early horticultural activities around cultivated agriculture, and reliance of the forest, swamps, and grassland to sustain their livelihood. “It is a reasonable inference from archaeological record,” Golson agues, “that the human settlement of New Guinea began before agriculture of any kind was established in the island.”

“The early communities” Golson continues, “must have lived off the wild resources of the land” as indicated by in various ethnographic studies. It is important to keep in mind that the crop variations in time and space, varies greatly in New Guinea. Some of these plants were cultivated in different time periods and at different levels of topography and climates. The example of banana is that it can only grow at elevation of 2200 m where as sweet potato can grow very well at higher altitudes.

It is generally held that the history of New Guinea agriculture at large has been one of adjustments in response to a variety of circumstances, including the introduction of new plants. The New Guinea agricultural system, for the most part includes shifting cultivation to enable its tuberous crops to be cultivated.

According to Golson the persistence of shifting cultivation throughout the tropical world, under different climatic, physiographic, soil and vegetation regimes, serving a bewildering variety of cultivated plants. marks it out as a highly successful adaptation of forested conditions.

In agreement is the view that “partial or complete clearance of vegetation, burning the debris, the temporary cultivation of an assemblage of crops in the cleared area, and the clearing of further forest for new gardens while the old plot is abandoned to fallow under regenerating forest” helps regenerate the ecosystem (Clarke 1977; 1978; Golding n.d.: 44).

“The complex inter-planting of a diversity of crops,” Golson argues “reproduces the ecosystem diversity of the rainforest from which the garden is cleared, and to which it will shortly return.” The advantages of this polycultivation system is that “it supplies a variety of foods to diversify the diet, which comes to maturity at different stages during the life of the garden; it provides a continuous ground-cover that cuts down the need for weeding and checks erosion; and it reduces the threat from crop diseases and pests to which monocultural plantings are prone.”

Golson observed further that this forest fallowed cultivation is self-maintaining, has no need of external energy or nutrient sources, and produces a greater yield for every unit of human energy than other agricultural systems.

Tropical rainforest with its species diversity and high biological productivity, can flourish even on the poorest soil, because a large part of the nutrients is contained in the biomass itself and their recycling is rapid and efficient.

Agriculture in New Guinea began in the lowlands before entering the highlands.

Blue Eyed Angel of Kusaun

2010-10-13T16:20:00.003+10:00

Yauwiga displays his medals of honor. Courtesy of Bikmaus Journal published by IPNGS

The only famous Papua New Guinean fuzzy wuzzy angel with a blue eye happens to be Paul Yauwiga Wankunale from Kusaun village in the Kubalia area of the East Sepik Province. I grew up marveled at this tall, well built, giant of a man from my area; legendary in his lifetime for his bravery in the Second World War, fighting alongside the Allied forces on Guadalcanal, Buka, Rabaul, Madang, Morobe, and the Sepik.

Warrant Officer Yauwiga was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, Bravery Award, and other such medals for his valiant war efforts. One such campaign is described in Lorna Fleetwood’s book, A Short History of Wewak: “On 27th March 1945 Yauwiga was with an Australian Infantry Brigade (A.I.B) party at Aravia. It was learned that an enemy party of about eighty Japanese was approaching their camp. While the A.I.B escaped with their codes and essential equipment Yauwiga took up a defensive position with just three rifles. He and two other soldiers managed to keep the Japanese at bay for fifteen minutes, exhibiting great bravery. In two years Yauwiga killed fifty-seven Japanese.”

Yauwiga lost a hand and both his eyes when holding a grenade used as a signal for Australian planes to drop supplies. No one showed him how to use it. He spent three months in a hospital in Canberra. He was given the eyes of a motor cycle accident fatality. One eye grafted well and Yauwiga became a very rare being, a Melanesian with a blue eye.

In The Bishops’ Progress: An Historical Ethnography of Catholic Missionary Experience on the Sepik Frontier, Mary Taylor Huber notes: “the major figure in Wewak and its immediate hinterland in the first years after the war appears to have been Yau[w]iga…who was also a war hero, and whose decoration ceremony in 1948 was witnessed by some 30 Europeans and 80,000 natives from near and far.” Yauwiga’s war exploits is an exemplary military valour deserving far more attention than is observed.

Yauwiga was more than a war hero to his people. He was a catalyst of many transformative changes in East Sepik right after the war. Yauwiga’s contemporaries Ludwig Somare Sana and Pita Simogun were articulate leaders in their epoch, taking the bull by its horns to wrestle it until it came under their feet.

Yauwiga succeeded in destroying the practice of sorcery in Nagum Boiken villages. In each village a two-to-three meter deep hole was dug where all the powers and sorcery tools like plants, bones, lime, ginger, stones, and other items of sorcery were buried. Only the old men opposed him here and there. But Yauwiga made the refractory ones stay the whole day long in the hot sun until by evening they showed some pliancy.

Father Andreas Gerstner, the Catholic missionary anthropologist, in charge of the parish covering the immediate hinterland of Wewak records his admiration of Yauwiga as a messianic figure: “this unusual man…undertook a war against old heathen spirit cult and has had up to now wide success. Beginning in 1947 and then up to February 1948, he has already undertaken one reform expedition to his own people, two in the Wewak region, one in Boiken region, and one on the island of Kairiru. On each of these trips he stayed three to four weeks. Delegates from many different villages accompanied him. After arrival in a new village, Yauwiga would first give a speech. He asked all the men to give up their spiritual and magical paraphernalia and whatever other things were known as causes of conflict and feud. He said, ‘So long as you keep the old things, you think only of them. You threaten with sorcery, quarrels, and fighting. A new time has come for us. We will better ourselves and follow the whites of the Administration and the Mission.’”

Was this Yauwiga’s way of avenging the rebuke and shame he received during his initiation into the maiye sorcery society? It is said Yauwiga had failed his assignment, as an apprentice maiyenduo, to bring back to normal senses a young woman victim of sorcery, who was still in a state of trance. He went against the rules and code of the maiyenduo society, resulting in his rebuke and banishment.

The knowledge of maiye saved him during the war. It earned him the reputation as a one man army. Yauwiga used the maiye knowledge to ambush and kill many Japanese during the war. He was invisible to his enemies because he used the maiye spells and powers to great advantage.

In the film Angels of War, Yauwiga speaks proudly about his bravery.

In the first years after the war Yauwiga advocated bisnis with a campaign for reform of village society. Yauwiga had the support of his people who worked on a variety of projects, including salt extraction, a coconut plantation corporative, and a sago-processing operation. It is said Yauwiga purchased a saw mill from the government.

Yauwiga had a vision for the future of the Sepik District. He organized the Boram school in Wewak. The Boram school was his brain child, inspired from the discussions he once had with wounded soldiers from Samoa and Fiji he met in the hospital in Canberra. Elders from Kreer village gave him land to build the school, with the help of his own people from Kusaun, Porombe, and Ulighembi.

The famous pupil of this school is our Prime Minister Grand Chief Sir Michael Thomas Somare.

Yauwiga died in 1982. He was given a military service and buried conspicuously on his land at Marinumbo.

Yauwiga fought for his country.

He had the vision to develop his people through education, through various business ventures, and developmental activities. Given the atmosphere at that time Yauwiga had the leadership persuasion that is poorly acknowledged and given recognition for its accomplishments.

Yauwiga’s individual gallantry in World War II, his post-war visions, and pioneering leadership legacy is best honoured if a foundation or scholarship is set up to continue his dream.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

Learning Within Prison Walls

2010-10-08T14:40:00.002+10:00

The inmates and the CIS officers at the Buimo prison outside of Lae welcomed me as an old friend in my visit to their space last week. I was there to facilitate a workshop on proposal writing and basic report writing. The workshop is a joint project involving the Bible Society of PNG, the Correction Institution Services and the National Literacy and Awareness Secretariat of the Department of Education.

A year ago I facilitated a writer’s workshop. Out of the writer’s workshop the first anthology of prison writings is ready to be published. The book is a rare work as it brings together the writings of prisoners and warders who attended the course. In this year’s workshop I worked with them to come up with a tentative title for the book. The book is the first of its kind in the country.

Seeing the participants from the last workshop again was reassuring in a lot of ways. Since the first workshop a lot has happened at the Buimo penitentiary. There was a mass break-out, the former commanding officer was replaced by a new officer, one of the participants had passed on, one was shot during an escape operation, some were released, and some have a couple of months before their parole. Buimo prison is located on an ideal spacious landscape with a relaxed atmosphere. At least that is the first impression one gets on a visit to the prison site.

It was easy also to get to know the participants on an individual level. As individuals they displayed their intelligence, creativity, and cooperative spirit. In knowing them as individuals I realized that sharing with them my knowledge and skills of writing was one small way of skilling them to organize their own lives. Through the practice of organizing themselves they will take control of their own lives. I shared my knowledge of writing with prisons, warders, and others as a fulfillment of a higher calling.

Inmates like Apollo Kesu, Malum Nathan, and several of the CIS officers like Jill Tulo and Arnold Juvai make working in prison very rewarding. Our learning environment was more than just a workshop environment. We started off a day with fellowship before moving into the training sessions. I appreciated the mornings of fellowship with beautiful gospel music and inspiring choir performances.

In each session of the workshop we learnt to adjust to the flow of things in the classroom and in the prison environment. By noon on Thursday a new development occurred in the main prison compound. The inmates had staged a protest against the authorities in prison. It was revealed later to me that the inmates have been living in overcrowded conditions and wanted to get out as quick as possible. The prisoners took the liberty to register their complaints by hijacking the officers during a lunch hour. This strategy was a new dangerous development in the prison system. Something is not right.

We waited in patience for any changes to the situation. Nothing changed in the afternoon. Most of our participants belonged to the main compound of the prison. They were disallowed from returning to the workshop. It is not in our favour to complain. Most of the things that I wanted to cover were done in the morning session. I have to make adjustments to the program for the next day.

Teaching in a prison environment requires a lot of patience, respect, and understanding. Transmitting useful values to help people live a purposeful life is a challenge. So many people take life for granted. Many people live a life imprisoned by negative values and false sense of themselves. The obvious display of this crisis is evident in the way people disrespect others, ignore basic rules of cohesion, and break the laws that govern our conduct, behaviour, attitudes, and collective will to create a better world for ourselves.

The Bible Society of PNG runs the prison literacy project in several prisons around the country. The project has helped many inmates to see light at the end of the tunnel. The prison literacy project is led by Doris Omaken and assisted by Jill Pijui. They are supported by Augustine Huaembukie in Lae. I became part of their team because Doris and Jill were at one point students in my class at the University of Papua New Guinea. The important reason for working on this project with the Bible Society of PNG is that the work we do is one little drop of water in a bucket of developmental challenges we face as a people, a nation, and a Christian country.

The Bible Society works in partnership with the Correctional Services, the National Literacy and Awareness Secretariat (NLAS) and other stake-holders such as the University of Papua New Guinea and Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). This work is supported by international charitable organizations associated with the Bible Society of PNG.

The government must not turn a blind eye on the importance of this rehabilitation work. It has the potential to transform troubled individuals with burdens to become better and productive citizens after they are freed from the penitentiary. The prison literacy project is a beacon of hope and courage. The hope is that inmates will find a new path, direction, or destiny. The courage is that it takes few courageous individuals to work with people the society considers dangerous.

My hope is like that of the prisoners and CIS officer during the recent workshop. They want classrooms to learn in and a multi-purpose resource centre. These particular needs were expressed in some of the proposals written during the workshop. Instead of spending money on high powered firearms for the CIS the money should have been used for the purposes expressed above.

The final point I now make is that we all must do our part to help others who need our help most. We must do our part in supporting organizations and groups working in literacy programs within the walls of PNG prisons.

Poetry and Performance

2010-09-27T11:29:00.005+10:00

When you have the lights beamed right into your eyes the immediate thoughts are for you to run. The best you could do is move away from those bright lights. You are immediately looking into the darkness. You know there are people there. You cannot retrace your footsteps back. You are the center of focus. Right now you have to say something quick. That was the feeling I had last Saturday at the Waigani Arts Centre during the poetry recital evening.

It was an evening to remember. The poetry recital and musical arrangement from the talents of our students under the watchful eye of our Sanguma , Tony Subam, made the evening memorable. Tony also gave an impromptu recital in the evening to my amazement. The students from MIAC showed the musical talents through their original compositions. The evening jazz set the scene.

I had invited a couple of writers, especially poets living in Port Moresby to turn up for the poetry recital. It turned out that only Nora Vagi Brash and I were the ones reading our works. In between poetry reading we had traditional and classical mix of music played by PNG’s own Edward Gende, the serenading jazzy music of Cowley Laeka played on saxophone, and Gideon Kiyowavadulu’s flute and kuakumba music.

The poetry recital was part of the Port Moresby Arts Extravaganza weeks organized by the Waigani Arts Centre with support from the National Capital District Commission.

Seen anything like this before?

We did not attract as many people as expected; we understood most people were exhausted in that week of Independence. I had to attend the Independence celebration then the East Sepik Provincial Day at UPNG. It was the most tiring week. Many people were too spent to attend the poetry recital night.

The night was magical for me because this was a performance on stage that had me startled, a little afraid, and nerving in that the darkness all around me made a sense of the existential mood. It was so Becketian that all I could think about was get my lines in order before I exit. Yet, the awareness that in that darkness the appreciative, questioning, curious, and expectant audience held you in the center of their eyes. They are there in the darkness waiting for the next word, the next announcement, the next line, and the performance. Once delivered you have this sense of accomplishment. Then you are ready for the next performance. Within an hour you are done. It is over. You sigh with relief.

I recount these feelings on stage to give readers the feeling of watching live performance theatre and the recitals of poetry. Attending theatre performances and watching life performances are inspirational moments in an individual’s life. The artistic talents and stage craft are special elements in theatre performances.

Another observation that my colleague, Leo Wafiwa, of the journalism program who went along for the recital, made was very apt: “Writers must make time to read their works to the public,” he said. “What good is it if you write a poem that never gets recited? Poets must read their work.”

Indeed, writers must promote their own works and give others the opportunity to know their writings. One can be a good writer, but if that writer does not recite or share their writings using the many mediums of delivery, such as public recitals or collective performance with other artists then their writings will remain in the closet, obscured, and vanish in the lost archives of libraries. I know many Papua New Guinea writers like that who are very brilliant writers, but who never get recognized because their do not get to recite and promote their works in public.

I think the future also of poetry in Papua New Guinea is to work with musicians to develop a kind of PNG version of dub poetry.

Dub poetry is a form of performance poetry of West Indian origin, which evolved out of dub music consisting of spoken word over reggae rhythms in Jamaica in the 1970s.

I remember Benjamin Zappaniah, the British dub poet who visited the country. He was guest in my literature class at UPNG and gave a memorable recital of his poetry to an appreciative audience. Zappaniah was also a musician who performed with the Bob Marley and the Wailers band.

We have many styles of performance in our traditions. We have oratory, chorus, chanting, rhymes, and lullabies in our oral traditions that we can draw from to develop our own unique models of performance. Some of our traditional songs are useful as performance on stage. A good example of that was the performance given by one of the performers during the poetry recital night.

An idea to develop is to get some of our musicians and writers to give a performance that is traditional and contemporary. The performance I am thinking about is something more artistically tuned and performed for a receptive audience such as that we had at the Waigani Arts Centre.

Traditional Central Dancers at UPNG

The important point that I am making is there is more we can develop in terms of the art and cultures of Papua New Guinea. Let us not lose sight of other forms of arts and culture that our people and country is in no short supply of. Let use develop, support, and harness our arts and culture in a way that makes out people appreciate their identities as Papua New Guinea.

Without culture a nation cannot claim a political identity. Nationalism is a defense of a nation’s cultural inventions. Nationalism vindicates its own inventions by politicizing its culture. A nation is denied of its identity once culture is separated from it.

We know that a culture is, concretely, an open-ended, creative dialogue of subcultures, of insiders and outsiders, of diverse factions that enables continuous reinvention of itself against that which challenges its form.

For a nation to differentiate itself from others it often relies on its cultural foundations to do so.

The Constitution and Independence

2010-09-26T17:41:00.008+10:00

35th Independence Anniversary celebrations at UPNG 16 September 2010

The celebration of nationhood is one moment in our lives when we celebrate our Independence from our former colonizers. We think of Independence as a political event that changed the political landscape in Papua New Guinea. We also think of Independence as an act of orchestrated collective will to free ourselves from the shackles of colonialism. In every celebration we renew our strength and vision to be a progressive and free nation. Our sense of nationhood is refreshed, revitalized, and re-energized in such a way that whatever we do we resolve to abide by the Constitution that holds us together.

The Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea is the single most powerful document in this nation. It is the source of law, state, politics, and the foundation upon which the visions of the nation was engraved in. Since Independence in 1975, one would think by now the Constitution should become available to every citizen of Papua New Guinea.

UPNG student celebrates 36 years of PNG Independence

Every Papua New Guinean is entitled to a copy of the Constitution. It is important for Papua New Guineans to have the Constitution in whatever form or format. Some of the money earned from developing the natural resources of Papua New Guinea must be used to reproduce the Constitution in different forms and formats for all Papua New Guineans read, hear, or use in their daily lives.

After 35 years of Independence the people of this diverse nation must renew their belief in the nation. The nation as a concept is in need of some serious rethinking and reframing. It is to the best interests of a nation to have its people know the foundations on which the nation is founded on. It is to the benefit of the people of this nation that the Constitution is made available in different forms, formats, and languages. Every Papua New Guinea has the right to read, see, hear, and use the Constitution to develop and prosper as a proud, informed, and free person.

The Constitution is the voice of the people of Papua New Guinea. The Constitution speaks from time to time when its foundations are challenged, tested, and hijacked. It remains the most powerful document in this heterogeneous society with a thousand tribes. If every citizen has the right to know the Constitution then it means the government must do everything possible for its people to have a copy of the constitution.

Center of performance at UPNG

If the Constitution is a single most important document in our nation we must also observe one day in a year as the Constitution Day. Since the fifth and final draft of the Constitution was adopted on 15 August 1975 we should observe that date as the Constitution Day. Such a day will insert in the minds of people the importance of the Constitution. It will also be a day for us to remember those who founded the Constitution.

Many young people in schools are familiar with a portion of the Preamble made as a national pledge, but the full Preamble is never known to many people. Then there are the National Goals and Directive Principles: (1) Integral Human Development, (2) Equality and Participation, (3) National Sovereignty and Self-Reliance, (4) Natural Resources and Environment, and (5) Papua New Guinean Way. Our performance in each of the category is good, but we need to do more. There are specific areas that need more work.

UPNG students celebrate their cultural dances during 35th Independence Anniversary

Our Basic Rights or the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual, we enjoy as citizens also form the Preamble of the Constitution. We observe the following rights and freedoms:

(a) life, liberty, security of the person and the protection of the law; and

(b) the right to take part in political activities; and

(d) freedom of conscience, of expression, of information and of assembly and association; and

(e) freedom of employment and freedom of movement; and

(f) protection for the privacy of their homes and other property and from unjust deprivation of property.

UPNG Oro Student celebrates Independence

At this time we need to ask how many times we have stretched these rights for our own individualistic, political, social, cultural, and economic inconveniences. We also have the Basic Social Obligations to fulfill:

(a) to respect, and to act in the spirit of, this Constitution; and

(b) to recognize that they can fully develop their capabilities and advance their true interests only by active participation in the development of the national community as a whole; and

(c) to exercise the rights guaranteed or conferred by this Constitution, and to use the opportunities made available to them under it to participate fully in the government of the Nation; and

(d) to protect Papua New Guinea and to safeguard the national wealth, resources and environment in the interests not only of the present generation but also of future generations; and

(e) to work according to their talents in socially useful employment, and if necessary to create for themselves legitimate opportunities for such employment; and

(f) to respect the rights and freedoms of others, and to co-operate fully with others in the interests of interdependence and solidarity; and

(g) to contribute, as required by law, according to their means to the revenues required for the advancement of the Nation and the purposes of Papua New Guinea; and

(h) in the case of parents, to support, assist and educate their children (whether born in or out of wedlock), and in particular to give them a true understanding of their basic rights and obligations and of the National Goals and Directive Principles; and

(i) in the case of the children, to respect their parents.

All citizens have an obligation to themselves and their descendants, to each other and to the Nation to use profits from economic activities in the advancement of our country and our people, and that the law may impose a similar obligation on non-citizens carrying on economic activities in or from our country.

HAPPY 35TH INDEPENDENCE CELEBRATION PAPUA NEW GUINEA!

Reframing Indigenous Knowledge

2010-09-14T13:27:00.000+10:00

Indigenous knowledge systems in PNG embodies our way of life, our belief systems, our cultural practices and the very social political foundations that weld our relationships to one another.

To have a sense of what indigenous knowledge is we turn to a new PNG book: Reframing Indigenous Knowledge: Cultural Knowledge and Practices in Papua New Guinea. The book was released last month, even though it took five years to have it published after a conference organized by the Melanesian and Pacific Studies (MAPS) of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences , University of Papua New Guinea in 2004. The following people had their papers published in the book.

Peter Baki, then Secretary of the Department of Education opened the conference with his challenge on promoting indigenous education in Papua New Guinea. Baki discusses the reform school curriculum, which considers indigenous knowledge systems, and ways of doing things in Papua New Guinean. He challenges tertiary institutions to use indigenous knowledge systems and research methodologies to make decisions and policies to transform Papua New Guinea from the old to the new.

Dr. Linus Yamuna of the University of Goroka discusses the role of the Centre for Melanesian Studies. Institutional structures must be developed to enable the process of indigenous studies to be institutionalized. It also enables the institutions to become sites of indigenous knowledge repositories.

Julie Forster considers the challenges of operating as an indigenous scholar within dominant cultural boundaries. Forster attempts to situate the problematics of having to negotiate multiple identities in multiple sites of cultural contestations as the coordinator of the BA program in Aboriginal and Islander Studies at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. As an indigenous scholar with identities that are coexistent as an Aboriginal and Papua New Guinean, her struggles are often multiple, given the situation that negotiating all these identities are never that easy.

The late Paschal Waisi discusses the epistemological systems of the Lau’um people of Lumi district, in the West Sepik Province. Most people talk about knowledge as something that is already given. The question of how knowledge is produced must be addressed before other epistemic questions are considered. Waisi identifies the Lau’um term for wisdom called pingis and demonstrates how knowledge or wisdom is produced in the Lau’um society.

Sam Kaima discusses dispute settlement and avoiding retribution in the Wantoat area of Morobe province. Kaima draws from his own experiences and observations during the time he was able to move in and out of his own society.

Multiple ways of knowing and versions of ‘sik’ in Modilon General Hospital is the subject of Alice Street’s paper. Street, from Cambridge University, was at that time doing research in Madang. Street presented an anthropological account, which recognizes the multiple constitutions of reality in Madang General Hospital—that gives form to the image she began her paper with, without reducing it to a singular narrative.

Tom Hukahu, at that time a postgraduate student at UPNG, discusses traditional astronomy used by islanders in the East Sepik Province. Hukahu discusses the importance of learning the knowledge systems of a society through listening to stories told by elders and knowledge experts in a given indigenous community.

Sauka Pauka discusses his research on teaching of traditional scientific knowledge in high schools. The primary purpose of the research was to investigate the sources of explanations and understanding of natural phenomena in terms of their cultural and school science experiences.

A database on indigenous traditional medicine in Papua New Guinea was created in Papua New Guinea. The Pharmacy program of the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Papua New Guinea and the Department of Health were responsible for this project. Prem Rai and Simon Saulei discuss this development.

The inextricable link between language and environmental knowledge is the concern of Sakarepe Kamene. In his paper he discusses the interdependence and co-existence of language, culture, and environmental knowledge of the Zia of Morobe, Papua New Guinea. The discussions given by Kamene reflect his long term developmental research activities developed within in his own Waria society or the Zia language group of Morobe Province.

Linguistic research and development of community awareness in a Madang village is the subject of Catherine Levy, then from the Divine Word University. Levy discusses her involvement in developing information and community awareness program in the language group that she worked with in Madang. Indigenous communities can use their own knowledge systems to develop tools and skills they can use to understand the modern world.

Naomi Simet of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies (IPNGS) discusses traditional dances as a form of constructed knowledge. Dance is an important form of indigenous knowledge system embedded in the ethnic cultures of the indigenous peoples. This knowledge is owned by elders of a particular ethnic group and is passed on to the younger generation. This knowledge is maintained and manifested in dance performances. Simet discusses the Pikinamp dance of the Chambri people in the East Sepik Province.

Don Niles of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies (IPNGS) discusses his research on the study of chanted tales from the highlands of Papua New Guinea. In parts of Western Highlands, Enga, and Southern Highlands provinces, there are extraordinary poetic creations, sometimes referred to as “chanted tales”. These sung stories encapsulate many types of indigenous knowledge: history, people, environment, customs, and music.

Finally, Masio Nidung gave the framework in which to protect indigenous knowledge. She concludes: “The upshot of all this is that PNG needs to have a broader policy on all aspects of intellectual property rights taking into account emerging issues of genetic resources, traditional knowledge and folklore in a coordinated way that we have our own information and resources system set up for a better culturally oriented society.”

Librarians and subject masters in high schools and colleges must have this book in their libraries.

The book is now available at the UPNG Bookshop. To order a copy you can email me using the email address given below.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

Looking Through Indigenous Lens

2010-09-04T10:23:00.002+10:00

Port Moresby Public Art Scene

Often human society is such that a man’s life is celeb rated more after his death. The success and accomplishments of an individual are never talked about much, rewarded, or celebrated in the days that individual is alive. We may feel let down as humans, but that is the way it is since creation.

In our midst and days of our lives the experiences of death, loss, remorse, and haus krai, people have come to develop subculture of pay respects or show your face to the dead for two hours only and forget the experience for the rest of your life. It’s again another of those human frailties we have to live with. We only remember the dead for two hours of respect. No body seems to care after that two hours whether you have lost a loved one or some dear and respected person in your life. That’s what we do as humans, is probably the best comfort one would get when people forget our losses.

I have never forgotten one person, from a list of others long gone in life and in death. That person is the late Paschal Waisi, a student and teacher of Melanesian Philosophy and Indigenous epistemology. The late Waisi taught Melanesian Philosophy at the University of Papua New Guinea until is death in early 2009. He died during his research trip to his beloved Lau’um society in the Lumi District, of Sandaun Province.

This scholar and philosopher of Melanesian epistemology has never waivered in the promise of seeing the study of Melanesian philosophy, a promise he shared with his mentor, the late Bernard Narokobi. Waisi developed a course in Melanesian Philosophy at UPNG and left without seeing a list of graduates who would promote the ideas of Melanesian philosophy. Now a vacuum is left, because both proponents of this Indigenous epistemological system are no longer around. There are few people, I can say, who are passionate true believers and students of Melanesian philosophy as these two men were.

I had the honor of associating with the late Paschal Waisi as a friend and his principle supervisor during the days he studied for his Masters degree at the University of Papua New Guinea. He completed the degree within the time required. On completion of his MA degree he proceeded to prepare the publication of his MA degree thesis. One of his examiners felt that the late Waisi’s MA thesis was more like a PhD work. That encouraged Waisi to approach the UPNG Press and Bookshop to arrange the publication of his MA thesis.

The book was published and released recently. It is entitled Looking Through Ancestors’ Eye-Holes , a title resonating Russell Soaba’s masterpiece poem “Looking Thru Those Eye-Holes”. In his own words Waisi explains that he had written the book about the epistemological system of his own people by looking through Lau’um eye-holes.

“This book is on epistemology, mind-body-spirit, and social ethical forms of the Lau’um people, West Sepik…The aim of the book is to expose the Lau’um epistemology, mind-body-spirit, and ethical forms of life… The study concerns itself on the nature of knowledge in Lau’um… The second issue is about preservation. Modernity entices the hearts and minds of the Lau’um people to move away gradually from their traditions…The book selects and explores the main cultural forms that are influenced by modernity. It discusses the experiences of the Lau’um culture heroes and heroines. It reveals the main elements of Lau’um pingis (wisdom). It reveals the body-mind-spirit and social ethical relationships. The book aims to encourage a productive engagement with the Lau’um epistemologies, spiritual, social, and ethical dimensions of living.”

Waisi’s book is one of the new books published by the UPNG Press and Bookshop under Univentures. The book has 117 pages and is printed in the United States under an arrangement of the UPNG Press in partnership with Masalai Press of California. The cover work is impressive and should catch the eye of the reader.

I know that the late Waisi would have been the happiest man to see his MA thesis converted into a book. In PNG, Waisi is probably one of the few individuals who converted his academic research done as an MA thesis. What if all Papua New Guineans published their MA theses? Would it create a body of knowledge that is indigenous? I left that to the better judgment of our indigenous scholars.

Steven’s Window pays tribute to a friend, colleague, and indigenous scholar who may have left us, but we will continue to remember him because he left us a book to read about his own people and about himself. Even in death the late Waisi is asking us to look through the skull of the dead, the eye-holes of our ancestors, to see the kind of society or world we are carving for ourselves. We need a serious re-evaluation of ourselves, our decisions, and our visions. Are we moving away from PNG or indigenous Melanesian Ways in a radical way on a one way train or are we merely paying our 2 hours of respect to the dead and our ancestors? Whatever it is, one thing is for sure, our people have lived on the Island of New Guinea for more than 50,000 years. We have plenty to write about to teach the world why we have survived for so long.

Looking Through Ancestors’ Eye-Holes (2010) is a post-humous publication. I think the author would have agreed with me, if he was alive, that we need more Papua New Guineans to convert their MA and PhD theses to books for the sake of developing understanding of our Melanesian societies.

More important to this issue is that indigenous scholarship and publications are absent in the discourse about our societies, knowledge systems, and peoples. We need to publish more books written by Papua New Guineans.

One way of developing an enlightened understanding of ourselves is to read the books written through sustained research and scholarship by our own sons and daughters.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

Book Publishing and Reprinting of Books

2010-08-28T15:52:00.000+10:00

Regis Stella's new novel 2010

Last week we launched a number of great old books during the Buk2Buk Fair staged before the Waigani Seminar at the UPNG campus. The reprints of some of the classics include Sana: Michael Somare’s autobiography, two books written by Amirah Inglis: Karo: The Life and Fate of a Papuan and Not a White Woman Safe: Sexual Anxiety and Politics in Port Moresby 1920-1934, and a number of other books of note to Papua New Guinea. All these books are now on sale at the Unibookshop.

In opening the Buk2Buk Fair, the Pro Chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea and the Chairman of Univentures, the business arm of UPNG, Mr. Camilus Narokobi, challenged Papua New Guineans to write more books. The establishment of the Univentures saw the amalgamation of the UPNG Press, the Unibookshop and the UPNG Printery come under one business umbrella. It is noted that the book trade business is only one aspect of the Univentures Inc.

Mr. Narokobi wasted no time in announcing that a niche has been created to increase the publishing of books written by Papua New Guineans in all works of life. He encouraged Papua New Guineans to write their histories, publish their researches, and have their philosophies and treatises published with UPNG Press. What was impossible twenty years ago is now possible for many Papua New Guineans to publish their books.

In the first day of the Buk2Buk Fair, Peter Trist an old friend of UPNG and NBC reminded us again that UPNG was the centre of arts, writing, and publishing in the late 1960s and 1970s. The period defined by the vibrant arts, culture, writing, and theatre performances. Trist was involved with the setting up of the National Arts School, the National Theatre Company, and had a lot of impact on the radio drama programs in the 1970s. Many of us remember Peter Trist as the voice of Doriga in our favourite school radio program on NBC in those days.

I first met Peter Trist at Sydney University during a conference on decolonizing Papua New Guinea. We then read Nora Vagi Brash’s famous play: Which Way Big Man. It was a memorable event because among the participants at that time was Sir Paulias Matane (who was not yet the Governor General) and the late Renagi Lohia, then PNG High Commissioner to Australia. We also had the opportunity to visit Ulli and Georgina Beier’s home at that time for a memorable dinner hosted by Georgina on behalf of her husband.

Peter Trist spoke on behalf of the 88 years old Ulli Beier and his wife Georgina. Ulli was unable to attend because of medical grounds. Trist had those of us present: the second and third generation of artists and writers, thinking in a serious way about the creative potential of this country, its writers, artists, and scholars with untapped talents and skills. The question is how do we develop the arts, culture, and book publishing on our own and go the next step? Some of us have tried and others gave up looking for publishers to get their books into print. The social, political, and economic realities of the 1960s and 1970s were different then. It was only after Independence in September 16th 1975 that the enthusiasm died with writers no longer writing and participating in theatre performances.

Malum Nalum interviews Peter Trist at the Buk2Buk Fair, UPNG

The first day of Buk2Buk Fair had only the guest speakers and a handful of curious students. It appeared the logistics, publicity, and marketing of this event was very poor. Second day began with a clash of events in the same venue. The proceedings of previous the 2008 Waigani Seminar was launched by the Vice Chancellor, Professor Ross Hynes, on the second day. In the confusion someone asked where the about the connection between the Buk2Buk Fair and the Waigani Seminar. UPNG can do better with better coordinated logistics, organization, schedule, publicity, and marketing strategies.

The non-attendance of academics and students on both days leaves much to be desired for an institutional event. Academics must participate in the production and dissemination of information and knowledge through their publications. Publication of research papers and books is the measure of quality academics and programs offered in a university. University education is value added and where that added value is missing serious questions about quality must be asked.

Reprints of law books, history, Papua Pocket Poets, and many others were released this week. The School of Sciences, the School of Medicine and Public Health, and the School of Business Administration launched their new publications. A few serious academics are publishing their researches and course textbooks. What are the rest of them doing?

Dr. John Evans, the Manager of UPNG Press and Bookshop knows the challenges of the book trade in PNG. Under his management we should move forward to a future where our writers and other citizens can benefit from their creative and intellectual labour. We can see more PNG books published in the coming years.

The decision for Univenture to respond to the need for local book publishing, printing, and marketing has a silver lining. It has created an opportunity for publishing and reprinting of PNG books.

The prospect of increasing book publishing volume and the opportunity for writers to earn money from their books is more promising than it was in the past. Having a book published now with UPNG Press means the book is distributed in PNG, the Solomon Islands, and in the world through its agents in USA, Australia, or through the Amazon.com electronic marketing system.

Various small independent publishing ventures are teaming up with UPNG Press to take the book trade business to the next level. Among the small independent self-publishing houses is Manui Publishers set up to publish my own books and those written by others. More details on Manui Publishers are available on my blog: www.stevenswindow.blogspot.com. PNG writers can now seek out the opportunity to publish their books with UPNG Press in this co-publishing arrangement.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

First Word to Last

2010-08-20T11:09:00.002+10:00

Take the advice of successful writers if you want to become a great writer. In his book on the art of writing, the science fiction writer, Stephen King has plenty of advice to give to a novice writer.

He says: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

King is a slow reader, but makes sure he reads at least 80 books in a year. The book list is crowded with works of fiction. He does not read fiction to study the craft of writing fiction, but to enjoy the stories told in these books.

“Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.” King relates how a book that he read in grade eight changed his life. The writing was so poor King felt he could write a better book than the book he read at that time. King went on to write master piece horror stories that fill up a book of 300-500 pages.

Knowing what you are writing and for whom you are writing provides the barometer for good measured writing.

“Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of the believable characters, and truth-telling…So we read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read in order to experience good styles. You may find yourself adopting a style you find particularly exciting, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

These words of Stephen King are difficult to erase from my mind. Good writing is positive, enjoyable, and enlivening to a reader. Bad writing is depressing, unedited, and difficult to digest without complaining.

To write well one has to make the distinction between good works of literature and bad writing that suffers from poor stylistics or simply poor understanding of the mechanics of writing. The principles of writing are the same in all genres.

The same advice is also dispensed to students and others having difficulties in writing.

Reading is the tool to good writing.

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or tools) to write. Simple as that,” is the bluntness of Stephen King to would be writers and people having difficulties writing.

The writing styles of others can help a writer to develop his or her own styles of writing. One advice to those with manuscripts ready for publication: Before asking anyone to read your work ask yourself if you have a winning style of writing that is influenced from a writer you admire. It is said great artists are imitators of their masters having studied the works and styles of the master for many years. Good writing is an imitation of good writing styles. The only way to know the writing styles of others is to read the writings of other writers, especially the most successful writers.

As a teacher of writing, editing, and publishing I have always used one book that explains good writing from bad writing. Many writers, academics, journalists, and editors use William Strunk and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style to improve their writing styles and techniques. The book also reveals the words and expressions commonly misused in our writings. The main components of the book are the eleven elementary principles of composition and eleven elements of style.

Over the years I have introduced the book to students studying literature, English, language, journalism, political science, public administration, and chemistry. This year I have a handful of students from the Law discipline.

During Lahara sessions and in various workshops I get the opportunity to introduce The Elements of Style to teachers, curriculum writers, designers, writers, administrators, and others interested in improving their writing styles and techniques. William Strunk Jr. first published the book The Elements of Style in 1919. In his own words Strunk describes good writing:

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoids all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.”

The little book on elements of style has done wonders to many who were introduced to it. In E. B White’s words:

“In the English classes of today, ‘the little book’ is surrounded by longer, lower textbooks—books with permissive steering and automatic transitions. Perhaps the book has became [sic] something of a curiosity. To me, it still seems to maintain its original poise, standing, in a drafty time, erect, resolute, and assured. I still find the Strunkian humor, a delight, and the Strunkian attitude toward right-and-wrong a blessing undisguised.”

I recently came across a wonderful little book by Lynn Bahrych and Marjorie Dick Rombauer called Legal Writing in a Nutshell, inspired also by Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I recommended it to law students who are studying writing, editing, and publishing with me. I hope others will find interest in the book as well.

If you cannot attend a class on writing, then read a book on good writing to help your writing.

Whether one is writing fiction or non fiction the principles of good writing styles make a lot of difference in what a reader wants to read. Good writing entices and holds a reader from the first word to the last.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

Waigani Seminar a UPNG Tradition

2010-08-16T16:33:00.000+10:00

The 2010 Waigani Seminar will take place between August 19 and 20th at the University of Papua New Guinea Main Campus. The theme for this year is Customary Land Tenure and Evolving Democracy in Papua New Guinea. The Waigani Seminar takes place every two years. Many leading legal experts, development consultants, academics, researchers, and customary land owners are expected to meet at the Waigani Campus this month.

The organizing committee had decided that this year’s seminar will only run for two days. Past seminars lasted for a week at most. With time reduced to two days it is expected that the seminar will consider the Government’s position in relation to the PNG Vision 2050 Vision, the legal perspective and how laws can effectively govern and protect landowners, the social and cultural complexities of customary land ownership, models of sustainable life systems and sustainable land use and the crucial training for effective land administration.

As interesting as the academic discussions are during the seminar days UPNG has several creative activities that form part of the 2010 Waigani Seminar. The first activity is the Book2Buk2 activities involving writers, publishers, authors, editors, and professionals in the book trade industry. The discussion has several key individuals who will discuss the various aspects of book trade, publishing, marketing research, and book sales and distribution in PNG. Some of the possible speakers, include big names such as veteran radio personality, Peter Trist on behalf of Professor Ulli Beier and Georgina Beier, S. K. Ghai, Tom Mosbi, Professor Ted Wolfers, a long time PNG friend, Dr. Greg Murphy, Mr. Nimo Kama, Dr. Linda Crowl, Dean of Arts at the Divine Word University and long time publications fellow of the Institute of Pacific Studies at USP (Fiji), who had assisted many Pacific Islanders to publish their books in the 1990s and early 2000s. Dr. Crowl has also written her doctoral dissertation on the politics of book publishing in the Pacific Islands.

The Book2Buk2 will take place before the main Waigani Seminar. Many Port Moresby based writers, editors, and publishers will participate in this event. Dr. John Evans, manager of UPNG Press and Bookshop tells me that a significant number of new books will be launched during this event. A major sales and promotion of reprints of important publications on Papua New Guinea will also take place during this time.

Participants in the Waigani Seminar will have the privilege of seeing the first performance of No Free Land, a play based on the original short story written by this writer. The adoption for stage and performance of the play are led by the tenacious duo: Martin Tony and Motsy Davidson of the Melanesian Institute of Arts and Communication (MIAC). The play will feature the creative talents of the theatre arts students at UPNG. This play is the first major play written and produced for stage after so many years in silence. Participants will appreciate this creative presentation of the same issues dealt with during the two days of serious academic presentations. A must see for all.

I have one challenge to the organizers of Waigani Seminar. Publish all proceedings of the 2010 UPNG Waigani Seminar. The publication of Waigani Seminar discussions can serve as important references for those involved in advising government on customary land tenure and developing policies to guide the government in fully capturing the evolving democracy in Papua New Guinea. We don’t want another missing reference in the list of works that should have been consulted for the development of this country.

Lesson learnt is that we have yet to see the publication of papers presented in the Waigani Seminar of previous years. Having a seminar without publishing the proceedings defeats the purpose of spending so much money, resources, and time only to have nothing concrete published to reflect the discussions that took place.

If the organizers of the UPNG Science 2009 conference can publish the proceedings of this important conference organized by the School of Natural and Physical Sciences and the School of Medical Sciences and Public Health then a high bench mark was set for the organizers of the Waigani Seminar to consider. Publish the proceedings from the 2010 Waigani Seminar right away. The long-term impact Waigani Seminar has is on the publication of its proceedings and not so much on the verbal presentations during the seminar days.

If I am one of the paper presenters at the Waigani Seminar I would want to see that my paper is published so that it becomes available to a wider audience. As a scholar I am more conscious of the importance of having my work published than to just present my paper to a small privileged audience without making an impact on the wider society. The publication of early and later years of Waigani Seminar papers has created a single corpus of literature on the development of Papua New Guinea that many scholars, students, policy makers, advisors, consultants, and government officers use for their purpose to advance the government’s programs and directives.

The task of publishing the Waigani Seminar papers should be made easier if paper presenters leave the final copy of their papers with the organizers for immediate publishing. Many speakers have the tendency of presenting their papers and leaving no final version of their papers for publication. The organizers must insist that all paper presenters have their papers ready for publication on the day they present their papers. No excuse for revision of papers after the Waigani Seminar should be allowed. Such people will never submit their papers for publication. I say this based on the experience of organizing and presenting papers in many conferences.

Finally, the Waigani Seminar is for everyone. It is open to the public to attend and absorb the intellectual stimuli generated every day. It is a seminar for everyone. This year’s seminar on customary land and evolving democracy is useful to anyone interested in the issues and challenges concerning the same. At least attend one session if you can.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

Matane Factor in PNG Books

2010-08-06T14:10:00.002+10:00

I made an honest mistake last week. I said this year was the 20th year of celebrating the National Book Week. An email message from the Governor General of Papua New Guinea gave my head a little jolt. My immediate thought was that His Excellency, the Grand Chief Sir Paulias Matane, our Governor General was about to summon me for making the mistake. I should have written it is now 30 years of celebrating the National Book Week.

Sir Paulias Matane is the Patron of the National Book Week and a Board Member of the National Libraries and Archives Board.

It is appropriate for me to share in this week’s column my admiration for Sir Paulias’ untiring role in promoting a book culture in Papua New Guinea. Sir Paulias has written more than 42 books. Over the years he has helped many Papua New Guineans to publish their books.

Kum Tumun of Minj (1964?) and My Childhood in New Guinea (1972) were the first books His Excellency published. The publication of these books encouraged the Grand Chief Sir Paulias Matane to write and publish more books than anyone in Papua New Guinea. The transformative power of books that His Excellency counted on had done wonders in his life and in many people who admire his writings and life as a role model statesman.

Sir Paulias began reading and writing at the age of 17. He counted on books to take him from the jungles of East New Britain Province to the Government House at Konedobu. The illustrious writing life of Sir Paulias Matane began in 1957 as a teacher at his former Tauran Primary School in New Britain. He became the headmaster of the school between 1958 and 1961, before returning to school in 1962. He became a school inspector for three years (1963-1966) in Minj Sub-district of Western Highlands Province.

Sir Paulias is a connoisseur of books and anything to do with books, reading, writing, and libraries. The admiration and respect I have of Sir Paulias as a prolific writer comes no where near to the record number of books published by one single author in Papua New Guinea. Sir Paulias began publishing fiction in the late 1970s before moving into publishing non-fiction books ranging from autobiographies, travel narratives, family histories, cultural dialogues, and motivational works. Most of his later works were published India and circulated around the world.

Sir Paulias Matane has two new books coming out soon. The first one had the ubiquitous title: From Jungle House to State House. The two new books will bring out the experiences of making the journey from his beloved Viviran village to serving as the Governor General of Papua New Guinea for two terms. I have always admired the vivacity and tenacity of his Excellency when it comes to writing, reading, and publishing books. Whether it is a conversation on books or just talking about books Sir Paulias has that unstoppable passion that many of us wish we have.

The celebrations this week around the country have come to an end, but not the writing life of His Excellency. He writes every day as revealed to me during a video interview I had with him for a video project I am working on. He still keeps the diaries he kept as a young man finding his path in the world.

His Excellency is also a very religious man with values that are measurable by any Christian standards. In the last chapter of Ripples in the South Pacific Ocean, we recall Aimbe’s speech to his family and people:

“I believe in most of the teachings in the Bible. The Bible is the best book you can find in the world. It is a good guide to our everyday lives. If we live by the words in it, the kind of lives we will lead will be different—we will be full of love, consideration for others, happiness, and all the good things. Wouldn’t it be nice for us to live like true Christians? If everybody in the world lived like this we would have no problems—lawlessness. We would live in peace and love each other. We would become brothers in the true sense of the world.”

It is refreshing and assuring that Sir Paulias too lives a life of serving others before his own family or tribe. His leadership, wisdom, solid experiences as a public servant and statesman, and his disciplined time management is exemplary to many Papua New Guineans. His Excellency is now serving his second term in office as the Governor General of Papua New Guinea.

In this column, I salute Sir Paulias Matane for continuing to write more books that young Papua New Guineans can count on to become good citizens. I say this with conviction because many students who passed through the Literature program at the University of Papua New Guinea had to read Aimbe, the Pastor or Ripples in the South Pacific Ocean, as a required text for their degree program.

In his own words Sir Paulias invites Papua New Guineans to participate in the book culture development:

“Because of the experiences some of us have gained in writing and having our books published, we urge all Papua New Guineans to write. There are many things to write about like cultures, history of families, clans etc. Books could be factual or novels.”

What a better way of ending the National Book Week this year with such words of wisdom. This column shares Sir Paulias’ encouraging view expressed above.

We have many things to write about. We have many books to write. So let us write thousands of books that represent our unique experiences as Papua New Guineans.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

Count on Books... Read

2010-08-04T13:33:00.001+10:00

The National Book Week is in the first week of August every year. Since 1980 Papua New Guinea has observed the book week in style. Schools all over the country celebrate the importance of books with various activities in creative ways. This is the twentieth year of the National Book Week.

The Office of National Libraries and Archives is the coordinating agency for the National Book Week. The theme for this year is Count On Books…Read. It is an encouraging theme for everyone to count on books as an important foundation of their lives. Counting on books is for young learners in schools, educational institutions, and for all Papua New Guineans. National development must go hand in hand with the development of a book culture in Papua New Guinea.

Counting on book is a slogan for everyone. It is not only for students, teachers, and those involved in education. Books are important to everyone in the world. Books are for the employed and unemployed population. Books are for those who live in towns and in villages. Books are for the professionals and non-professionals. Books are for men and women, boys and girls. Books are important to the young and old. Books are counted among the instruments that changed everyone’s lives. No one can deny that they have never read a book, except for those who have never been introduced to the transformative powers of books.

Many successful Papua New Guineans have counted on books to bring them to where they are now. One of the books that I draw my inspirations from is Sana, our Prime Minister’s autobiography. I occasionally read the Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare’s autobiography to remain inspired and motivated to be a great leader like our Prime Minister. One of the inspiring part of the Grand Chief Sir Michael Thomas Somare’s life is that very early on in his life, our Prime Minister had counted on books to pursue his dream.

In this column I want to share that part of our Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare’s life with Papua New Guineans who have not read Sana, his first and only autobiography. He writes about his education in Dregerhafen Education Centre:

“I was greatly encouraged in my studies when, in 1954, I won the South Pacific Commission’s Literature Bureau Competition. We were asked to write about our favourite book. I won the prize with an essay on Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition. The following year I received the Forsyth Examination Prize, forty dollars worth of books—a new and unexpected treasure.”

Come to think of it, here was a young school boy at the age of 18 making an important decision to make books, writing, and reading an important part of his future. Participating in the literature competition, writing an essay about his favourite book, and winning a major international prize of books, gave him the impetus to look beyond the horizon to a future unknown to him.

The Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare counted on the new and unexpected treasure in books to move on to Sogeri in 1956 where he met Grand Chief Sir Paulias Matane, Sir Alkan Tolol, Aisea Taviai, and Sir Ronald Tovue. His first job after graduation from the Sogeri Education Centre was Utu School in New Ireland where he taught English, geography, and social science.

He then had taught in Brandi High School in 1959 and later at Tusbab High School in 1960. In 1962 the Grand Chief returned to Sogeri for one year to get his Queensland form four certificate.

He returned to Madang to teach at Talidig Primary School in 1963, before joining the publications section of the Education Department. In this job he contributed legends and short stories as well as write simple scripts for the Education Department’s program, Listen and Learn, which was broadcasted on the ABC.

The fascination with radio led him to join the Department of Information and Extension Services as a radio announcer with the newly opened Radio Wewak. If he was not reading the news in English and Tokpisin, the Grand Chief went out as the information officer to collect news, interview people in the rural areas, and to collect stories. This was the time the Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare became politically active, a moment in his life that would launch him into the national political scene in later years. The rest is history for young Papua New Guineans to emulate.

I share this part of our Prime Minister Grand Chief Sir Michael Thomas Somare’s life at this time of celebrating the National Book Week because many people need to know the importance of books. The Grand Chief stood on the back of books to make the journey from a humble beginning to greatness as the founding father of the Independent nation of Papua New Guinea, as its Prime Minister, and with it came other respects such as the longest serving parliamentarian in the Commonwealth and the favourite son of the Sepiks.

Many avid followers of Steven’s Window will note that every week I share what I read from books of importance to me. Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare’s Sana, is one book I keep as a treasured book in my personal library. Sharing part of his early life in this column would not have been possible if I did not have the Prime Minister’s autobiography at my disposal.

I count on the importance of books, writing, reading, and literature. I have invested my life in books as a writer and as a teacher in the field of literature. Sharing some of these books weekly in my column is a way of contributing to the knowledge bank of this great nation.

This year’s National Book Week theme: Count On Books…Read is a command to Papua New Guineans to use books as instruments of liberation from the prison of illiteracy and poverty. Papua New Guinea will become a literate nation if it counts on books and reading as an important development foundation.

Email: sewinduo@gmail.com

The Missing Reference

2010-08-04T13:04:00.000+10:00

Street vending a sign of poverty and poor human development

I happen to have in my collection the book edited by Ila Temu entitled Papua New Guinea: A 20/20 Vision. The book was jointly published by the National Centre for Development Studies in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University and the National Research Institute. Among the contributors to this book are Rupa Mulina, who discussed the monetary and fiscal policy in Papua New Guinea; Miria Ume, who wrote about the development of physical resource development infrastructure; Kila Ai discussed the experiences of national planning, along with Desh Gupta and Henry Ivarature who discussed the political and economic issues on restructuring decentralization, and Lauatu Tautea’s interesting discussion of the missing link in human resource development.

I quickly checked the reference section of the Papua New Guinea 2050 Vision to see if this book was consulted. To my surprise this particular publication was not one of the books cited as a reference. I am usually fuzzy when it comes to references that people consult to form the basis of their arguments. The references in a paper, report, or book are usually the first indication that the author or authors are likely to make sense of what they are talking about. The references also act as a guide to the substance of the subject to be covered in the essay, report, or book. If a reference is missing then the obvious question is why was it considered as unimportant enough to be excluded from the list of works consulted?

Lauatu Tautea’s discussions on the missing link in the human resource dilemma strike me as a key ingredient in making Papua New Guinea develop. We can have all the natural resources and proactive leaders behind the wheel, but a nation with a poor human resource development index is one always in conflict with itself because those who are suppose to follow or do their part are not doing so. In a day so many laws are broken in deliberate disobedience. People drive through red lights, roundabouts, and crossings without stopping; people stop their automobiles right in the middle of the road, taxis, buses and humans use service stations as bus stops. People do not care if the national flag is in tatters, or if we shoot each other at the airport. I am beginning to think our nation is in the slumber mode as we navigate through uncharted future without taking with us the lessons of the past.

Tautea’s view is that the undue emphasis we place on developing Papua New Guinea’s natural resources and the failure to recognize fully the importance of human resource development in the development matrix is the source of our confusion and slow pace in moving forward.

Tautea argues that the recognition of the importance of human contribution to the production process is as old as economic theory. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, considered a man’s talent to be part of his fortune as well as that of the society he belonged. Ricardo’s labour theory of value, says Tautea, assesses the performance of a firm on the basis of three factors—land, labour, and capital and used factor prices to measure their relative contribution to the production process.

In classical Marxist theoretical explanation the output of capital is measured by the input of the raw materials, both in its quantitative and qualitative values. Tautea takes on this principle by aptly stating that the relative value of commodities are determined by the comparative amounts of labour required to produce them and that the different qualities of labour embodied in production value of the good depends on the comparative still of the labour and the intensity of the labour input.

To break this down for readers, the relative success and progress a nation enjoys depend very much on how much capital investments and in what manner or form it invests its capital resources in to get the output it desires. To follow Tautea’s argument here we must think of quality labour force as a human resource which requires sufficient capital investment to develop it to a qualitative standard, as an input into the production process to get a quality output. The progress of a nation is measured also by the quality of its labour force as in the economies of South and East Asian countries such as Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. These countries share the common characteristic of not having access to natural resources, but capitalized on the investments they made to develop and effectively use their human resources.

In the same book that I draw my discussion here, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Honourable Chris Haiveta, writing in the forward pages declared his cautions of Papua New Guinea: “While we certainly have plenty of policy challenges to work through, I do not accept assertions that we are completely on the wrong policy path or that major deviations from the current path are necessary. We are but a small way along the path of what will be many further years of hard policy slog.”

Aside from outlining the government’s Vision 2020, Haiveta said that since Independence various regimes have had their day in designing and declaring their own visions or strategies for the progress of the nation: “There has been no shortage of views on either Papua New Guinea’s long-term vision or its short to medium term objectives and strategies. All governments since independence have consistently published these at least annually (and often more regularly) in annual Budget and planning documents. Perhaps at different times we have had the wrong set of visions, objectives and strategies.”

The skepticism I have of Vision 2050 is perhaps foreshadowed in this Haiveta statement in 1997. Many policy statements, visions, and development strategies were developed in PNG. Some of these include: Look North Policy, The Matane Report, the Green Revolution, Vision 2020, and the so-called short-term to medium term development objectives and strategies. The lessons learnt then should be our reference.

More than Imaginary Lives

2010-07-21T13:33:00.000+10:00

Media Literacy Workshop Participants in SIL Ukarumpa, 2009. Photo credit: Steven Winduo

Writers are never at home with themselves because they live a thousand imaginary lives. Interesting moments do arise with the meeting of fellow writers and others who admire writers. Often, one is left wondering how a Papua New Guinean writer makes sense to other fellow writers. How then does a writer relate to others, especially to the readers of their works and tribal members?

The declaration: “So you are a writer. What do you do?” is used by those who do not know what a writer does. Many people tend to think a writer is someone who lives in the world of imagination without any sense of reality. Many people tend to think of a writer as someone who has no time for other interests or occupations in life, except the world of the books.

I have lived my life as a writer for the last 25 years. I don’t know the reasons I became a writer or the reasons I chose to write. All I remember now is that my teachers introduced me to the wonderful world of creative writing in national high school that changed my life in unimaginable ways. That’s what it was, just creative writing. Writing is something no one chooses to do to earn a living or to make money. Creative writing is something people do as a hobby or as an extra-curricula activity.

It is not something the English teachers or anyone would recommend for a student to consider as a serious career. Be something else might be the answer if the teachers detect a budding writer in the making. And, they are right in many ways. There is no economic sense in becoming a writer in Papua New Guinea. No one in Papua New Guinea is a fulltime writer. Many of our writers have a primary salaried job (outside of our writing life) to put bread and butter on the table before we sit down to write the work that we hope to publish or recite to others with keen ears.

The decision to write comes with the notion of consistency. Consistency enables a writer to remain committed to the art of writing. The opportunity to publish a work is not easy or writing a piece that survives the test of time is not laid across the pathway of a writer.

It is the sense that one writes because that’s what one is passionate about or likes doing to breathe in a world congested with so much tensions and anguish. Choosing to write is a decision to remain focused on the act of writing itself, a process of self-expression and self-representation that brings into focus the general experiences of human society. A writer is seen as someone who is also speaking about the experiences of others.

I had an interesting life as a writer. Apart from publishing my works in local and international literary journals and anthologies I have read my poetry on NBC and ABC, in universities and schools such as Sogeri National High School, Gerehu Primary School, Gordon Secondary, POM Grammar, and Port Moresby Institute of Education.

The universities I have read my poetry include UPNG, University of the South Pacific (Fiji), University of Queensland, James Cook University, Sydney University, University of Canterbury (NZ), University of Hawaii (USA), University of Minnesota (USA), and Alberta University (Canada). Some of the places I have read my poetry are interesting and memorable that the experiences leave me satisfied as a writer. In Canada I read my poetry to a packed room on the second floor of a noisy cafeteria on the campus of Alberta University. In Townsville I read my poetry in the Townsville Art Gallery. With Suva based writers I read in a pub called Traps in downtown Suva, Fiji. In Minnesota I read in a writer’s loft in downtown Minneapolis, and in Hawaii, in the conference room of the Hamilton Library of the University of Hawaii. In many of the international fixtures I have had the good fortune of being sponsored by my hosts in those countries.

The decision to become a writer carries with it a social responsibility. Getting paid for what I write is not a salaried life, but one that comes in drips and drabs. In the days when the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) paid writers for writing and reading their works I earned enough to pay for my younger siblings’ school fees and my own basic toiletries while I was still a UPNG student.

In the life one chooses to live as a writer, one has to deal with others who come into your life as girl friends, then wife, children, grand-children, and a countless hosts of relatives. Seeing a cheque in the mail does not mean that you deposit it in the bank and wait seven days to three weeks before withdrawing. You know you have to deal with the incessant nagging from the wife to have part of that cheque, then the children want this and that because the last time you promised them a bicycle or a Nitendo and you never kept the promise. And what about the grand-children?

The relatives and your communities do not care where you get the money. The social obligation you have is to support them by way of school fees, haus krai, custom, bride price, fundraising, church contributions, and what else? Any way the thing is, the life of a writer has its costs and benefits calculated into its design that the best strategy for a writer in Papua New Guinea is not to be a full-time writer, but to have a salaried job to support your writing life.

I handle these demands as a writer by expanding the things I can do as a writer, not just writing poems and reading, but selling my skills and knowledge as a writer/editor to individuals and organization who can pay for consultation, writing workshops and clinics, copyediting of reports, papers, and books. A writer’s life is more than an imaginary one.

Writers in a Wasteland

2010-07-10T16:29:00.003+10:00

Picture: Regis Stella (PNG Writer), Nora Vagi Brash (PNG playwright), and Sam Alasia (Solomon Islands writer)

in USP campus, Fiji.

The intensity of the emotions I felt in losing my mother 20 years ago surfaced a day after the anniversary of her passing. I felt the intensity in the words of the poem that came to me on that day. I began to compose the poem with the keyword “special” as I sat alone in the car outside Taurama SVS shopping area. It is not the method I use in writing poetry, but a spontaneous outpouring of the refined subconscious I have been living with and breathing for the last 20 years. Later, in the comfort of my home, I tried reciting it without writing the poem. The recital was flawed, but the poem in memory of my mother remained uneasily lodged within my subconscious that whole Saturday.

In connecting with the subconscious where poetry resides I met T. S. Eliot reciting The Wasteland as if he was standing next to me beside the Gavamani Road linking Manu Autoport, Korobosea, Kirakira, Sabama, Pari, and Joyce Bay. I became aware of the urban decay, the wasted lives, and the poorest worming out from wherever they are to split the remaining trees of the Motuan Savannah landscape as firewood bundled up for sale. Eliot continues in that memorable utterance: “Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit/There is not even silence in the mountains/But dry sterile thunder without rain/There is not even solitude in the mountains/But red sullen faces sneer and snarl/From doors of mudcracked houses.’ In that moment I had to ask Eliot what it all means, the voice behind those words vanished into thin air. I was left to decipher the meaning on my own, but self-assuredly as a poet.

Did anyone ever mention to Eliot that being a poet is a lonely affair often tagged as a misunderstood life? No wonder Eliot kept his job as a banker, a job that carries with it the burden of trust the society have on bankers. No so for the life of poet whom no one trust or let alone give any recognition for serving as unofficial legislators and Ombudsman of society. Poets say all they want to say, but no one will listen to them. Choosing to be a poet is the decision one takes to remain misunderstood, so much so that one is free to write those deep inner thoughts as a therapeutic exercise if not as an outpouring of anger, disappointment, anxiety, remorse, lament, or praise.

But as they say, once in a while the lonely poet needs to reconnect and find meaningful connections in the company of fellow travelers out there. One such moment was the writers recital held at the Port Moresby Arts Theatre on 26th June 2010 around 2.00pm. I popped up there without any invite only so that I can reconnect with fellow writers in Port Moresby such as Nora Vagi Brash, Abba Bina, popular known as Mr. Shit, Dr. Alfred Faiteli, Scott Waide, Grace Maribu, Lady Judith Bona, Robson Akis, and other new faces. Nora, our much loved playwright, had a nice way of describing my

appearance as from the woodwork, though not personally at me, but at the collective in the likes of my colleagues cocooned in a superficial shell of aloofness.

For what it’s worth I recited three poems from my third collection of poetry: A Rower’s Song (2009). One of the poems read was entitled: “Urban Natives”, a piece intended as a critique on transferring our tribal ways and stubborn backwardness into metropolitan spaces: “We brought the village to town/We are the urban natives/We will never return home.” I tried linking this poem to the most important question asked by Associate Professor Eric Kwa in his class on the Constitution of PNG: “What does it mean when one speaks of my basic social obligation as a Papua New Guinean?” I don’t know about others in that class, but to me the question goes to the heart of what it means to be a Papua New Guinean.

Did I say poetry written by Steven Winduo, or the Anuki neighbour across the page with his weekly doses of Soaba’s Storyboard are fulfilling their basic social obligations to themselves, to their families, and their communities? One need not read the Constitution to understand what the basic social obligations are for every Papua New Guineans. Or should we?

I sacrificed six months of my salary to self-publish my poetry collection so that I can fulfill my basic social obligations to take initiative to make a living. I have sold a few copies of my book to the Michael Somare Library, the UPNG Bookstore, Theodist, and the National Library, but the rest are beginning to gather cobwebs in my study until such a time when Papua New Guineans have come to their senses that buying a book written by a Papua New Guinean is also a basic social obligation.

Whether they appreciate it or not I made it my business to give complimentary copies of my poetry book to NCD Governor, Honourable Powes Parkop, Honourable Charles Abel, Member for Alotau and Minister of Tourism, Arts, and Culture, Honourable James Marape, Member for Tari Pori and Minister of Education, and His Excellency Mr. Teddy Taylor, American Ambassador to PNG, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu.

The trouble with being a self-published PNG writer is that the company one keeps always turns up as the very weak foundation needed to survive as an author. Writers can do well in Papua New Guinea if the principle of basic social obligations is observed by everyone when it comes to financially supporting writers to have their works published and sold.

The advice I would give to anyone thinking of writing books is that it is a long road to travel without the financial support of friends, relatives, acquaintances, and strange-bedfellows, all the more reason to find the company of a writers collective such as the ones organized by Lady Judith Bona, Nora Vagi Brash, Grace Maribu, and the Waigani Arts Centre in Port Moresby.

Text Books Galore in PNG Schools

2010-07-10T16:08:00.002+10:00

Young Waigani Community School Dancer

In a show of unspoken satisfaction on the Education Department’s efforts to have sufficient learning resources provided to Papua New Guinea primary schools the Waigani Primary School was again chosen to host the launch of the 2010 Textbooks Distribution. The event was no small event considering the presence of the senior officers of the Department of Education, representatives from NCD schools namely Boreboa, Noblet, Hohola Demonstration, Wardstrip, Carr Memorial, and the Diplomatic presence of the Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Papua New Guinea Ambassador Aldo Dell’Arriccia and his Excellency the French Ambassador to Papua New Guinea.

Credit must go to the Headmaster Mr. Kala, the staff and students of the Waigani Primary School for demonstrating the leadership in setting the benchmark for facilitating national educational events such as the launching of the National 2010 Textbooks Distribution. I say this as a proud parent and keen observer of educational activities in the country. Thumbs up for Waigani Primary School.

I must also take this rare opportunity to congratulate the Delegation of the European Union for its commitment to the education of Papua New Guineans. This is the largest-ever partnership between the Government of PNG through its Department of Education and the European Union distribution of textbooks in PNG: 2.6 million volumes delivered to the schools throughout the country.

The EU-funded Education, Training and Human Resource Development Programme (ETHRDP) provides PGK 83.1 million for the supply of more than 2.6 million textbooks to schools in all provinces throughout the country. The Curriculum Development and Assessment Division (CDAD) of the National Department of Education is managing the distribution.

More than PGK1.8 million has been allocated for the distribution in National Capital District (NCD). Most of the schools have already received their textbooks.

The Provincial Departments of Education are in charged of the distribution in their respective provinces.

The Education Training and Human Resources Development Program, with a budget of 39 Million Euro (PGK137 million) is in its third year of implementation. The main areas of focus are school-based leadership and management, provision of teacher training scholarships for rural communities, textbooks and library material provision, and community participation in vocational education.

The program is firmly placed within the framework of the National Plan for Education 2005-2014 and the Integrated Community Development Policy 2007. It is closely coordinated with other development partners, particularly the AUSAID financed Education Capacity Building Program (ECBP) and the Basic Education Development Project (BEDP) the New Zealand and European Union financed PRIDE Project as well as other initiatives financed by JICA and UNFPA. The National Department of Education supervises the entire Programme under the guidance of a Programme Steering Committee.

On behalf of the Government of PNG, the Minister of Education, Honorable James Marape thanked the European Union, the France Ambassador and all other development partners for financing the purchase and distribution of books to all primary schools in the country.

“The government acknowledges and expresses its gratitude that this large Education Program will be implemented directly by the Department of Education utilizing existing government mechanism and system in the distribution and delivery of these services. This is indeed strengthening and enhancing the Government’s capacity in the operation and financial management of donor funds,” said Mr. Marape.

Mr. Marape added further, “This is indeed contributing to PNG’s overall performance in terms of implementing the aid effectiveness plan of action, as agreed upon in Kavieng in February 2008 between the Government of Papua New Guinea and Development Partners through the execution of the PNG Commitment on Aid Effectiveness, a national response to the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the 2009 Accra Agenda for Action for Action. These are both international agreements that more than one hundred Ministers, Heads of Agencies and other Senior Officials adhered and committed their countries and organizations to continue to increase efforts in aid harmonization, alignment, managing aid for results with a set of actions and indicators that can be monitored.”

I was happy that the European Union and the Education Department chose Waigani Primary School for this national event. As a public advocate for books, literature, and education I had the personal satisfaction of knowing that some of my concerns regarding the provision of teaching and learning resource materials to our schools around the country are taken on board in a practical way.

Having a school without books for children to read is not a practical idea. Children expand their knowledge through reading books. The kind of reading practice I have in mind is both reading based on the curriculum and reading done outside of the school activities, especially reading done to enhance learning skills and improve knowledge of the world.

Some of the books listed on the European Union textbooks list include books published by Pearson Educational, Oxford University Press, Niugini Crossroad, Mel Publishing House, and the Melanesian and Pacific Studies (MAPS) of UPNG. Some of the books that I want to see the children of PNG read are included on the list. The question is whether the books on the list were actually included in the books distributed to schools. I am aware that the two books published by MAPS were never reprinted or ordered for inclusion in the books that were distributed to schools around the country. They would have made great reading and inspiration for PNG students because they were written by two leading Papua New Guinean writers. I note several PNG writers on the list, but not all.

One final point to make regarding books and reading is that the books are as good as they come if they are kept in a modern library building that can stand against severe weather conditions, theft, vandalism, disrespectful individuals, overcrowding students, and poor managements. A library is the natural space for books.

I hope the European Union, other development partners, and the Department of Education will help Waigani Primary School build its first modern library to house the books and provide a reading space for children.

Solomons, Bonito, Shells and Tsunami

2010-07-02T11:31:00.000+10:00

After Vanuatu, the Oceanic Discoverer entered the Solomon Islands waters, beginning at Santa Anna, where a fiesta of activities, were staged to welcome us. As soon as we anchored the early morning had begun on Santa Ana. This friendly Island is 7.5km off the San Cristobal’s eastern tip, and 77km from Kirakira. Formerly called Owa Rafa or Owa Rah, the island is a raised coral atoll. From certain aspects Santa Ana can look like a peaked cap. Mt. Faraina, a 143m plateaus in the centre, dominates the whole island.

After the welcome we moved to the entertainment area. The tourists gathered in a small shade, made of timber and corrugated iron roof. The entertainment began with panpipe music, a women’s dance, and a couple numbers on fishing rituals. Santa Anna Islanders are very good carvers and bead makers. Most of the woodwork is made from hardwood and ebony trees. The carvings depict the life of the islanders such as fishing and myths about sharks, bonita, and other marine life.

From Santa Anna Island we sailed into Langa Langa Lagoon on the big island of Malaita. Alite Harbour is in Langa Langa Lagoon, a magnificent lagoon of small islands, surrounded by mangroves, sandy beaches, and tall coconuts. Langa Langa Lagoon is famous for its artificial islands. One of these, Laulasi is 400 years old. This is the Headquarter for shell money manufacture as well as for ship building. There are also skull shrines. Centuries ago the people of nearby Malaita built islands in Alite Harbour as protection from the inland bushman. Known for trading shells as money, the village still uses this traditional currency for bride price. Malaita Island has a large and mysterious hinder-land, a sort of reservoir for old ways. The highlands rise to 1303m at Mt. Kolovrat. Many people worship ancestral spirits, and still have more sacrificial faces and tattoos. Many have blond hair.

We visited the Busu Cultural Centre to a fanfare of activities, including being treated to a traditional shell money making show. The organizers of the Busu Cultural Centre thought about everything from welcome ceremony, to collecting, and recording all the money made from the tourist. After the tourists leave the organizers would convert the Australian or American currencies into Solomon Islands Dollar before paying the owner of a product sold during the tourists visit.

From Malaita we travelled across to the Florida Islands where we stopped at Rodderick Bay. Our stop here was brief, but warming in that the villagers welcomed us with open arms, even though they were so upset with another tourist company that abandoned its cruise ship in the harbour after it ran aground on the reef. The ship, tilted to the side on the reef, looks like a broken glass stuck to the ground with its sharp dangerous edge sticking upward.

I was out in the sea and islands so long that I had lost sense of days that going into Gizo did not seem like a weekend. Through out the journey we visited only islands and isolated lagoons in various countries. This was the first time we had come ashore a modern township. The Oceanic Discoverer anchored in its harbour on a fine and calm Saturday morning.

After breakfast we went ashore to Gizo. A bamboo band welcomed us on arrival at the shore. I did not realize that it was a Saturday on Gizo. We went ashore and looked around the small township. We were welcomed by a group of Tamure dancers in the Gizo Hotel.

I asked the agent representing the Coral Princess Cruises in the Solomons to show me where I can change some money. I had only US dollars. I was lucky as I found out I can change US dollars at the reception of Gizo Hotel. So I changed US$20.00 into Solomons $140.00. That was a lot of money to pick up a few things that I could get hold of.

We walked around the township of Gizo for a while. I also met some Papua New Guineans living in Gizo. One of them was my colleague, Regis Stella’s elder brother. It was good to meet him. I also met Jully Makini, a fellow poet from the Solomon Islands in Gizo. So it was nice to meet them in Gizo. We sat on the beach side outside the Gizo Hotel and talked for some time before I returned to the Oceanic Discoverer.

As soon as we arrived on the ship a group of PNG government officials from the Department of Immigration, NAQIA, and the agent representing the Coral Princess Cruises joined us on board. The officials had just arrived from Honiara to Gizo airport, located on one of the small islands next to the town. Since we were to enter PNG waters for the first time the officials had to process our papers before crossing over to PNG.

A brief stop at Kennedy Island was necessary before crossing into PNG waters. I went with the tourists to the island. where we enjoyed a bright and beautiful day on the Kennedy Island has natural crystal sandy beach, untouched reefs, and clean clear waters. Kennedy Island was named after John F. Kennedy, who along with his crew, was run down by a Japanese Destroyer Amagiri. The island is preserved as a marine reserve, but serves as a popular tourist site. There are no people living on the island, except for artefact traders who visit the island regularly. I even had my first scuba diving lesson here for which I was to receive a certificate later.

It was only 48 hours after we left Gizo that the Tsunami wiped out everything we saw and captured in our memory of Gizo. Ironically, this island went under the Tsunami when it arrived on the Island on Tuesday. The Tsunami went passed us on the day we anchored in the safe harbours of Milne Bay waters.

Gizo will remain in my mind as a precious pearl lost to Tsunami.

Melanesian Magic on the Beach

2010-07-02T11:15:00.001+10:00

The unfavourable weather denied us the opportunity to go ashore on Tanna Island in Vanuatu. We stayed on board the Oceanic Discoverer. I just watched in disappointment as the inclement weather kept us at bay. That night I felt seasick for the second night. This was part of the job, I assured myself rather than complain.

By the time we arrived at Ambrym I was up and ready for the day. I felt much better. It was the first time on this journey that I was very comfortable. I had had a good night’s rest. In the morning I woke up to the calm waters off Ambrym. As we journeyed into the bay I realized that since we are in Vanuatu waters I felt much more at home.

Ambrym Island is an interesting island. Ambrym is a volcanic island. The Explorer took us ashore to Ranon Beach. Ranon has a black sandy beach. Volcanic eruptions deposited their volcanic elements around it.

A welcome ceremony was performed on our arrival. As part of the official party I was given a present of a wooden garamut carving. I was very surprised with this gesture. We then walked to the dance area where we sat down around the big dance area.

At the dancing area the mask dancers and the main chorus of the dance performed a couple of numbers. The villagers performed the famous Rom dances. It was one of the most striking ceremony and the costumes were extraordinary. The Rom dances seemed too familiar. I thought the dancers resembled some of the dances of the West New Britain area of Papua New Guinea. The masked men were covered from head to the toe with grass skirts made of dried banana leaves, a mask carved out of wood, and some palm leaves on top of their masks. The main core of the dancers, who were inside the circle created by the masked dancers, wore small tapas that covered most their hips and genitals, similar to the shell kambang dancers of Telefomin area in Papua New Guinea.

Following the dance an exhibition of sand drawing took place. Sand drawing is also very intricate and Ranon is the home of sand drawing. This area of Ambrym is famous for its fern carvings and tamtams (slit gongs). There were three acts featuring two Ambrym magic performances and a sand drawing. The finale of the performance was a solo bamboo flute player.

With the show over we left the dancing ground and walked back down to the beach. On the roadside near the beach front the villagers had built small stalls in which they sold artefacts such as carvings, animal miniatures, bamboo flutes. The woodcarvings were spectacular. The tourists bought some of these as souvenirs.

The village youth band strummed out a few local numbers sung in Bislama, in the local Ambrym vernacular, and in English. The band was truly a popular village band. Their strumming seemed to resemble some of the string bands of Papua New Guinea. Guitars, ukuleles, a base cello made of an empty wooden box with strings tightly stretched to a short pole. The vocals went from base to very high-pitched voice. Not so different to some of the coastal villages style of entertainment in Papua New Guinea.

Ambrym is considered Vanuatu’s sorcery centre. Sorcerers are treated with great respect. Many islanders have seen too many unexplained happenings associated with sorcery. I immediately put up my guard by taking extra precaution as I would when I visit a place where sorcery is known to exist. I don’t think the European tourists were scared of sorcery, but I was. It does not matter whether I am in PNG or in Vanuatu, sorcery is sorcery. I had to be careful in my negotiations.

I decided to walk with some of the crew to the Ambrym lower secondary school. The school was built next to the shore on a raised hill. From land this must be the best view, but the view from the Oceanic Discoverer is similar to the view of St. Johns Seminary on Kairiru Island in Papua New Guinea.

Our walk was distracted by two men busy making their Kava drink. One of the men pounded the Kava roots in a specially made container made out of an arm length PVC pipe stuck in the ground..The pounding instrument was a long iron bar that fitted the pipe. The other man squeezed the pounded Kava into a dish. They kept on doing whatever they were doing on our arrival.

Ambrym has the twin volcanoes of Mt. Marum and Mt. Benbow. They are usually shrouded in smoke and cloud for the best part of the year. The sky above the infernos glowed in red in the night as if to scare strangers.

We sailed onward to Champaign Bay on Espirito Santo Island the next day. This was the island where the PNGDF campaign flushed out Jimmy Stevens, the infamous rebel leader. I had little enthusiasm about this history as I was more interested in talking to owner of Champaign Bay, a well kept and managed beach without the support of the government.

The owner was approached many times by multi-millionaires to sell off the Bay, but he refused the offer. If he sold Champaign Bay then the villagers, who depend on the income generated from tourist visiting the Bay free-of-charge, would no longer benefit from it. It means the villagers have to pay to participate in the tourist industry. As long as Champaign Bay remains with the traditional landowner the villagers will continue to earn income to meet their basic social and economic necessities.

I can see the reasoning behind this position as it supports an indigenous Melanesian economic perspective. As long as traditional land remains with the traditional owners everyone in the community will derive their sustainability from it. Once it is sold, traded, or that the transfer of ownership is negotiated, a whole community can lose out on gaining any economic benefits.

A Melanesian Odyssey: Ouvea

2010-07-02T11:02:00.000+10:00

Melanesia, a concept developed out of the need to categorize, a particular group of people with certain characteristics, distinct from the other groups, namely the Polynesians and the Micronesians, who occupy the vast expanse of Ocean known as the Pacific—another term first inserted by Europeans to describe the huge body of water dividing the East and the West.

In daily use of these terms we forget to ask ourselves if we really know what we are talking about. We say we are Melanesians, but it is difficult for us to describe what it means to be a Melanesian. The easiest route for our response is to list Papua New Guinean features of customs, belief systems, and traditional way of life. That is probably where our understanding of what it means to be Melanesian lie. It is never stretched far enough to include other Melanesians in other countries. Melanesians are scattered across the south-western Pacific islands with many distinct languages, cultures, and unique political experiences that differentiate them.

In the next series of articles I will share my experience as a Melanesian tourist on board the Oceanic Discoverer—a Cairns based cruise ship traveling through the Melanesian Islands of New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and PNG. I have long wanted to talk about this experience in this column to highlight the importance of tourism and share the experience of a Melanesian odyssey with readers.

The Chief of one of the tribes on Ouvea Atoll of New Caledonia bid us farewell after our visit there. When I addressed him as Chief he replied, he acknowledged me as his brother. I was saddened that we had to leave his beautiful coral atoll. Earlier on our arrival, a village party welcomed us on the beach in front of the magnificent St. Joseph’s Cathedral at the Catholic mission station. After a welcome address by the Chief, our tour leader thanked the people of Ouvea for allowing us to visit their beautiful island.

Ouvea is an important island in the political history of New Caledonia. It was here that the resistance to French colonialism was more radical. On 22 April 1988, just days before the French presidential election, a group of Kanaks captured the gendarmerie at Fayaoue, Ouvea’s capital, and killed four gendarmes. They took 27 hostages, 11 of whom were released, while others were transported to a cave near Goosana, in the far north.

Ouvea was declared a zone militaire and all communication and transport was cut. More than 300 soldiers were flown to the island. Captain Phillippe Legorjus, head of France’s elite antiterrorist squad, began negotiations with the hostage takers. During attempts to secure the hostages’ release, Legorjus was captured, but was freed after coming to an agreement with the group’s young leader, Alphonse Dianour, on a date of release for the hostages. It was set for after the presidential election.

On 4 May, three days before the election, Captain Legorjus had two guns and a set of handcuff keys smuggled into the cave. In what was code-named Operation Victor, the military then stormed the cave and reported ‘at least 16’ people dead, all of them Kanaks. The following day, the figure was revised to 21, including two gendarmes. Later, allegations were made that four of the Kanaks, including the leader, Dianous, and Waina Amosa, a 19-year-old who had been sent into the cave to deliver food, were killed after they had surrendered.

It was also claimed that the military tortured and beat civilians from Goosana during the operation. The human rights group Amnesty International took up the case, and France’s Minister for Defence later announced that ‘acts contrary to military duty have unfortunately been committed’. One gendarme commander was suspended but no judicial action was taken.

After the cave assault, 32 Ouvean prisoners, including Djubelly Wea, a local independence movement leader and FULK (Front Uni de Liberation Kanak) supported, were flown to France to face trial. This was despite a previous assuance from the French High Commission in New Caledonia that trials would be held in Noumea. Wea was eventually released and the others were given amnesty as part of the Accords de Matignon. Wea returned home to find that his elderly father had died shortly after the hostage crisis. His father had apparently been beaten and left tied up in the sun by the military, and was soon regarded as the ‘20th victim’ of the Ouvea massacre.

Exactly a year to the day after the cave assault, Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Yeiwene Yeiwene were assassinated on Ouvea. They had come for a ceremony to end the 12 months of mourning for the 19 Kanaks killed at Goosana and were about to address the gathering when Wea fatally shot Tjibaou. Yeiwene was killed by another gunman. One of Tjibaou’s bodyguards then shot Wea. All three were buried in their tribal villages—Tjibaou, 53, at Tiendanite on Grande Terre; Yeiwene, 44 at Tadin on Mare, and Wea, 44, at Goosana.

In June the previous year, Tjibaou had signed the Accords de Matignon that guaranteed a referendum on New Caledonian independence in 1998. Some Kanaks were unhappy with the agreement, and continued to call for an immediate independent Kanaky. Wea, a former Protestant pastor and journalist, did not like the agreement. He had no-compromise policy on independence and was embittered by his father’s death. He also blamed the FLNKs (Front de Liberation Nationale Kanak et Socialiste) for failing to act over Ouveans’ demand for an international inquiry into the military’s alleged atrocities.

The assassination of Tjibaou and Yeiwene was the last act of political violence in New Caledonia.

I left Ouvea behind in a cloud of heavy Oceanic winds and currents. All I could think about was the hope that one day the Chief of Ouvea and his people will join hands and dance with other Melanesians as a free people of this great Ocean.

I sat on the deck and looked back to Ouvea disappear into the horizon as we headed for Vanuatu.

The Kanak Apple Season: Dewe Gorode

2010-07-02T10:48:00.000+10:00

The Kanak Apple Season is a book of short stories by the Kanak writer Dewe Gorode. The book is a selection of short stories written in French by this prolific national figure and one of Pacific’s powerful woman in politics, Dewe Gorode. She was born in 1949 at Ponerihouen on the central east coast of New Caledonia.

The Kanak Apple Season is an anthology of selected short fiction penned by the Francophone speaking Melanesian of New Caledonia, whom I had met briefly in a conference on Indigenous epistemology in Suva, Fiji back in 2006. The book was published in 2004 by Pandanus Books for the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the Australian National University. Peter Brown translated and edited the collection with the assistance from Australian Research Council, Australian National University, as well as the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in New Caledonia and the French Embassy in Australia.

The Kanak Apple Season interested me for a very good reason. For a long time, the syllabus on Pacific literature in our regional universities has not included any of the Indigenous writings from the Francophone speaking Pacific countries. As far as I know this has been the case until this decade, we began to see the emergence and exposure of the literature of our French speaking Pacific brothers and sisters such as Ma’ohi writer of French Polynesia: Henri Hiro, Chantel Spitz, Flora Devatine, Loiuse Peltzer, Taaria Walker (Mama Pere), Titaua Peu, and Celestine Hitiura Vaite; Ni-Vanuatu writers such Grace Molisa, Sam Ngwele, and New Caledonian writers such as Dewe Gorode, Wanir Welepane, and Pierre Gope. It brings home the point that the Pacific Ocean is home, to both English or French speakers, that our discussions of Pacific writing, cultures, and knowledge systems must include Indigenous authors in the French speaking countries as well as English speaking nations. Reading the writings of our fellow Pacific Islanders, whether these are in French or English, we can come to understand and appreciate each other’s social, cultural, and political conditions and experiences. The answer to the question how much do we do each other as Melanesians or as Pacific Islanders is possible through reading books by Indigenous authors.

Dewe Gorode has a lot to do with the resurgence of Kanak cultural consciousness. Her first volume of poetry Sous les cendres des conques (1985) appeared in the midst of the troubled years of New Caledonia. Gorode was heavily involved in the political history of New Caledonia. In the late 1960s and 1970s she became politically active by joining the Foulards rouges (Red scarves) movement, set up by Nidoish Naiseline, a grand chef from the Loyalty Island of Mare. She later formed, with the Elie Poignoune, the Groupe 1978, in memory of the Kanak revolt of that year under chief Atai. In 1976 she founded with others the political party PALIKA (Pari de Liberation Kanak), and has remained a leading member of the party. She was interned twice, second being for inciting violence and armed revolved through the publication of a tract written in the wake of the death of a young Kanak protestor.

Gorode continued her political work in PALIKA, with a special attention to the setting up of schools designed as an alternative to the French education system to teach Kanak children about their culture and in their own Kanak languages. In 1984, after the formation of the FLNKS, she became a representative for external relations and as such made many trips to speak at international conferences of developing countries and the non-aligned movement, United Nations’ committees (New Caledonia was pit on the UN decolonization list in 1986) and women’s groups. After the Noumea Accord in 1988 she formally entered politics at the territorial level, in May 1999, as an elected representative to the New Caledonian Congres, where she assumed the portfolio of Culture, Sport and Youth Affairs. Since April 2001, she has been Vice President of the New Caledonian Government.

Introducing Dewe Gorode now is important to me. Dewe Gorode continues to conduct a dual career that is cultural and political in her life that just reading the stories she wrote in The Kanaky Apple Season, I am reminded of the committed writing, in the sense of writing being a political tool, that is used to address particular political concerns of a writer.

Peter Brown, in his introduction, to Gorode’s writing says: “Indeed, her writing, like her career as a teacher, is an act of cultural politics. Her double heritage, Paici and French, can be seen in her texts, which reject exoticism and facile dichotomies in favour of a critical evaluation of and creative engagement with culture that often involves her in a transgression of boundaries….Her writing is a mise en scene of kinship relations within the Kanak world, an attempt at a reinterpretation of history, and an interplay of aesthetic forms that catch the unfamiliar reader off guard…, multiply narrative perspectives and to some degree ‘kanakise’ the French language.”

In reading Gorode’s The Kanak Apple Season a strong sense of kinship among Melanesians holds us together, inspite of the political history and geographical dispersals we find ourselves in. I kept thinking about an experience I had on Ovea, meeting a chief who made sure to register with me that we are brothers even though we live in two different countries with different histories. And in some sense, being in New Caledonia in 2007, felt like a strange country, but the kinship recognized through the Melanesian identification renews that ancestral connection.

The Kanak Apple Season is a remarkable collection highlighting the ethnic complexities of the colonial past of New Caledonia. Dewe Gorode draws her inspiration from the heritage of blood-line, family, cultural traditions and colonialism. Peter Brown sums up this collection nicely: “Modernity and tradition, kinship in Kanak village setting and the problems of contemporary urban contexts, women’s liberation and custom, political action and explorations of being, are all at stake for Dewe Gorode in this collection of stories.”

Transforming Mindsets Through Art

2010-07-02T10:32:00.003+10:00

We often assume that our tribal art expresses the symbolic commemoration of ancestors and the representation of clan spirits. Masks and carvings are supposed to stand for such figures, making them become the canonical icons of primitive cultures that predate the arrival of Europeans. Appropriating them to suit the modern fashions, uses, and in institutional adaptations raises the question of incongruity. The perceived notions of cultural conflicts and contradictions are underscored by one simple rule: culture is always in a flux and so too are our needs, perceptions, and notions of who we are and what we do to maintain that identity in the face of change.

In his book Oceanic Art (1995) Nicholas Thomas explains the significance of our tribal art: “Ancestors and deities, however, are important not simply because they are dead or divine, but specifically because legends concerning their accomplishments frequently account for the ways in which life, work and political relations are organized; they might describe the origins of a society, in the case of creator-beings and founding ancestors, or in a localized sense, tell of more recent human ancestors, whose deeds are often the basis of claims to land, rank or ritual authority.”

A reader of this column wanted to know how much of our traditional art forms and designs are transferred into the modern textiles and fabrics used in Papua New Guinea. Beyond personal use, there are visible expressions of the public taste for local art and designs on laplaps, tee shirts, bilums, and other everyday material items.

Our traditional material cultures and art forms have also been institutionalized in various places such as in the Parliament, in various churches, educational institutions, and on the legal tender of Papua New Guinea.

The observation of a day in the week reserved for traditional wear seems to have vaporized into thin air, leaving us wondering how serious we are when it comes to the promotion of art and culture in our country. We need to do more.

Consider this: would it make a difference if UPNG decides that for 2011 graduation the gowns and hoods will adorn the traditional art and design of PNG? My views are reserved, but that decision to institutionalise PNG art and design on UPNG gowns remains with the powers that maybe.

I am thinking of art forms and material cultures as the embodiments of many cultural narratives that form the national storyboard of Papua New Guinea as a land of thousand tribes, thousand parliaments, thousand peoples, with thousand cultures and thousand traditional knowledge systems. Our ancestors have lived in this land for thousands of years without a written culture, but which by no means make our people less developed or less intelligent than others.
“Given the narratives of various genres are prominent in both oratory and everyday talk in Oceanic societies,” says Nicholas Thomas, “ it would not be surprising if art forms that possessed no obvious narrative content for an uninformed outsider were, nevertheless, understood as bearers of stories. This can even be true of objects that do not represent deities, protagonists or places that figure in myths and traditions: Queen Salote of Tonga said, ‘Our history is written in our mats’, referring to the exchange relations, kinship bonds and links between aristocratic titles that would be connoted, to the knowledgeable person, by particular fine mats. These artefacts bear their histories, as do Maori taonga (treasures) and high-ranking Trobriand shell valuables.”

There is more to say about the embedded narratives in our tribal arts and material culture that we draw inspirations from to tell our contemporary stories, but our interest now is how we can also package these to serve our need for positive national imageries. Take the storyboards of the Kambot in the East Sepik Province, which have been sought after by many people in the world. The distinctive openwork carvings have no obvious antecedents in traditional art forms in the Kambot area.

“The closest parallels” says Nicholas Thomas “are in filigree plaque figures, from Maprik villages such as Roma, further up the Sepik on the northern side of the river; travel associated with plantation work may have brought Kambot artists into contact with Maprik carvers or their products. They have been produced specifically for sale to tourists since the 1960s and have proved popular, partly because they convey something exotically simple that appeals to collectors. The most prominent figures are usually crocodiles and groups of men paddling canoes, and is probable that myths of origin and migration are referred to, although the meanings attached locally to carvings have not been documented.”

Some of our art forms are now twirled into the bilum designs. It is fashionable these days to give a bilum as a gift to someone. A recent publication: Twisting Knowledge and Emotions: Modern Bilums of Papua New Guinea, compiled and edited by my colleague, Nicolas Garnier, attests to the remarks I make here on bilums as the bearer of art and local narratives that we are too happy to share with visitors to our country.

Garnier observed that bilums have become an important economic source of income for many women: “From an economical point of view, making of bilums, amongst other resources, have provided an opportunity for women to participate in cash economy, such as tourist market which, although limited, contributes to creating a “national” identity of bilums.”

We have to move away from thinking of indigenous art as “associated with cult activities, or within transmission of sacredness, or within the statuses of powerful individuals”, says Nicholas Thomas (1995). “Some arts forms were primarily connected with the propitiation of spirits; many certainly aimed to evoke their presences; but others were ancestors and even recent white intruders. Oceanic art possessed not a single presentation, the embodiment of ancestors and storytelling: it incorporated all these things and more.”

Changing negative attitudes of ourselves can take place if we shift our attention to using our art forms. Art can be used as a powerful tool to transform mindsets today.

Harvesting the Arts and Culture

2010-07-02T10:28:00.000+10:00

Our arts, literature, and cultural knowledge systems were employed to define the nation we are proud of today. If we need to make the Vision 2050 work let us put our money into reaffirming our sense of what it means to be a Papua New Guinean through our arts and literary culture. My boldness in making this statement is derived from the foundations set by our early writers and artists.

Under Ulli Beier's guidance, young Papua New Guineans used writing, drama, poetry, and arts to capture national sentiments and to promote PNG cultures. Beier’s book Decolonising the Mind is not just a memoir that recalls the Beiers' time in Papua New Guinea; it also tells of the activities and people with whom they associated during the period leading up to independence. It covers the vibrant period of literature, art, performance, writing, and publishing at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG). This was a time of quick planting and harvesting of the literary and artistic talents that the Beiers stumbled into, waiting as it were to be nurtured, given impetus, and made to bloom.

From subtle nationalism to fiery anticolonial resistance; from imagining one's own community to living in one that is about to be independent—those were the moods of the period. Those Papua New Guineans that the Beiers influenced—such as Albert Maori Kiki, Vincent Eri, Kumalau Tawali, Leo Hannet, Mathias Kawage, Akis, Taite Aihi, and Ruki Fame—have all shown that the arts and literary culture have a purpose to serve the people of Papua New Guinea.

The main thread of the book is about the impact of the university on culture and identity in Papua New Guinea between 1971 through 1974. Ulli Beier is telling us his story about what happened in between those years. After spending many years working to promote the art and literature of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, Ulli and Georgina Beier came to Papua New Guinea in September 1967 to teach at UPNG.

One of the first Papua New Guineans they met on their way to the country, late at night in the departure hall of the Brisbane Airport, was Sir Albert Maori Kiki. Ulli recounts that encounter: "On the plane we had a brief conversation. His name was Albert Maori Kiki, he said. He had been a patrol officer to the Australian administration, but he had recently resigned from that position in order to become the secretary of a new political party. I asked him what part of the country he was from and he said: "Well, you wouldn't have heard of it, it's a very small place on the Papua Gulf called Orokolo" (22). Such openness on the part of Maori Kiki led Ulli Beier to help Kiki publish his autobiography, Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime (1968), a book that would trigger a wave of excitement, not only in Papua New Guinea, but internationally as well. The second autobiography that Ulli had a hand in was Sir Michael Somare's Sana (1975).

Ulli Beier also passionately recounts his work with pioneer UPNG students, then referred to as the "boys' university." He discusses establishing a relationship with Allan Natachee, the Papua "Poet Laureate" (12-19), developing the UPNG creative writing course, and starting a publication series called the Papua Pocket Poet series (43-50). From the creative writing class, Ulli recalls: "One of my first and most fascinating students was Vincent Eri. He was a mature student, 31 years old, who had been an education officer. He had twice visited Australia and had been to a conference in Teheran. In 1966, he was sent to Malaysia to represent Papua New Guinea at a writer's conference. This experience inspired Eri to write his first and only novel, The Crocodile (51-60), which was also Papua New Guinea's first novel, published in 1971.

Then, in later years, Ulli was inspired to establish the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. Ulli was supported by his wife, Georgina, on his mission to accomplish this dream—or perhaps it is better considered an awakening. Georgina provided mentorship and guidance to artists, sculptors, and textile designers in the studio behind their house. This was the beginning of what later would become the National Arts School, an icon of an era rich with artistic flowering. The Beiers also helped to foster the work of pioneer artists at the Center for New Guinea Creative Arts and formed a close relationship with the center's Mathias Kawage, who became the most original and prolific of all PNG artists and brought contemporary PNG arts to the world.

The book is dedicated to John Gunther, first University of Papua New Guinea vice chancellor, and to Kawage. Ulli also devoted his attention to theater, and joined Peter Trist and Frank Johnson in the founding of the University Drama Society (which also included Professors Clunnies Ross, Leo Hannet, and Arthur Jawodimbari). The first plays were Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, Euripides' Alcetis, and a sketch in Pidgin entitled, Em rod bilong kago (Road of Cargo) by Leo Hannet (staged in April 1968). Later plays, however, were written by peoples of Papua New Guinea--Rabbie Namaliu's The Good Woman of Konedobu, Cannibal Tours (later turned into a brilliant film by Dennis O'Rourke), Arthur Jawodimbari's The Sun, Kumalau Tawali's Manki Masta, and of course Ulli Beier's two plays They Never Return and Alive (written under the pen name M Lovori).

The memoir is written with passion and honesty. As expected, it is a book rich with vivid recollection and dedication to the arts, artists, writers, and people of Papua New Guinea. It gives these pioneer artists the place they deserve in PNG history. Equally, I think, Ulli Beier deserves a national recognition by way of a Logohu Award or an honorary doctorate from UPNG.

The reminder here is that our nation is in dire need of the artistic, literary, and cultural energy to move it forward.

Note: The original review was published in The Contemporary Pacific. vol. 19: 1 (Spring 2007).

Steven's Window

2010-06-28T13:09:00.000+10:00

Dear Friends,

Welcome to my new blog. I hope it will continue to keep you connected with my world.

The new blog was created in place of the old blog: Manui Publishers, which was created using my previous gmail address. After someone hacked into my old gmail account all access to my previous gmail address and blog were denied.

I will have all the articles published in Steven's Window of The National updated in this new blog.

I hope you will enjoy it.

Happy Reading.