Our Time But Not Our Place: Voices of expatriate women in Papua New Guinea

By Myra Jean Bourke, Susanne Holz, Kathy Kituai and Linda Roach

Over the years thousands of women, mostly Australians, have lived as expatriates in Papua New Guinea. We went there at different points in our lives and for a variety of reasons. Some of us were keen to go; we were looking for adventure in exotic surroundings, seeking our fortunes, changing jobs, running away from unhappy situations, furthering our professional or academic interests. Many of us were motivated to go to a developing country to 'do good'. Others went because their partners or their parents had an ambition, an obsession or a contract. All have stories to tell.
So begins Our Time But Not Our Place in which 31 women tell us of their experiences of Papua New Guinea. Their voices are as diverse as the encounters they describe; their stories span the time between 1930 and 1990; together their responses challenge commonly held views of the expatriate condition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522865080

Book preview

1985.

Glossary of Tok Pisin and

Other Words, Phrases and

Abbreviations

Living on the Edge

Emmanuelle Carrad

Once, when I was on holidays in a small town in the south of France, I went to the post office to send a letter to Papua New Guinea. The lady behind the counter looked up at me above her glasses and said in a weary tone of voice, ‘Madame, I cannot send your letter to Papua New Guinea. It is not a country.’

‘But,’ said I, ‘I live there.’

‘I don’t think so’, she replied. ‘You must be mistaken. See, it’s not in my book! Maybe you mean Guinea-Bissau or Guinea . .. but that is in Africa.’

‘No, Papua New Guinea is situated north of Australia.’

‘Australia . . . Australia . . . Australia .. . Yes, I have it, but Papua New Guinea no, no, no .. .’

We finally agreed to use the same postage as for Australia.

‘But don’t come back and blame me if it does not get there,’ she said.

‘Certainly not, I will be back in Papua New Guinea by then!’ I replied.

My family and friends were already used to the idea that I would not come back to the strict, Catholic and bourgeois lifestyle I was raised in, when, after having disappeared for a year in Asia, I returned accompanied by a handsome Australian man.

We decided to look for jobs in a developing country. We found them in Papua New Guinea and in 1978 we moved to Wabag. Our standard two-bedroom government house had a wood stove and lots of highland cockroaches!

Quickly we met with the small expatriate community of numerous nationalities. The Australian doctor, an ex-television producer, was a workaholic, like my husband, and we spent many evenings gossiping, working and laughing! The Canadian volunteer couple and their teenage daughter who teased young Enga men and drove her father mad, while mother took refuge in books of philosophy; the white-legged English teacher in laplap, socks and sandals who got his driver’s licence by taking a test on the only road, around the unused airstrip, then went straight to drive in London; the naive volunteer nutritionist, fresh out of university, with strong political views, walking around in tight shorts, as if on a Sydney beach. She almost got raped while walking alone in the gardens surrounding Wabag; the German lady in search of the native men and raw experiences; the sexually repressed, kind but rigid ex-kiap, in Papua New Guinea since high school; the visiting old Swedish actress looking for adventure who, by chance, met the ex-kiap; the American teacher with his marijuana plants and potent rhubarb wine; the South African teenage mother of three, married to the supermarket manager, who would sail through the day with the help of some early morning joints; the Austrian man who bought himself a local bride . . . We formed an odd but close minority group.

The main institutions of Wabag were the supermarket where bad meat was sold half price to local clients unaware of the health hazards, the Wabag Lodge where a policeman was hacked to death one night, the newly built Provincial Government office, walls already covered with red betel juice, the Police Station and the Country Club.

The Club was a rough place. It had the look of a fortified house surrounded by walls with broken glass on top and reinforced with five metres high wire. That came after the Deputy Chief of Police was refused entrance because he was not a member. He had called his police friends to the rescue and they launched an attack with tear gas on the Club. It was a good place to wheel and deal after working hours with local politicians and everyone else in town, if one could get out early enough before all hell broke loose.

I was in charge of the Maternal and Child Health clinics at the Wabag Health Centre. Work should have been simple and straightforward enough! I cannot remember one smooth and uneventful day. To get the truck was the first exercise of the day. It was always being used to fetch firewood, pigs or beer, or to bring some relatives, when it was not taking warriors to the site of a tribal fight. When we had the truck, the staff would often disappear as if by enchantment, hoping that I would get tired of waiting for them!

At the beginning, I loved the excitement of travelling through the lush, evergreen mountains, of driving across deep ravines on flimsy bridges, houses made of bush material and with thatched roofs scattered among the gardens of sweet potatoes, corn and sugarcane, alternating with huge clumps of giant bamboo overhanging deep narrow valleys and fast-flowing torrents, plantations of casuarina trees, coffee and pandanus. Later on though, I grew weary of the bridges which seemed to be leaning more and more on one side each month until it became a gamble to cross them, especially on rainy days, so slippery they were. The driver, always high on buai, would laugh but the staff members would jump out of the truck and cross on foot. Once, a bridge collapsed under the truck. Because the driver had gone through at full speed, the truck hung in the air for a split second and made it to the other side. The bridge was rebuilt by the time we came back.

One night, a gigantic landslide took away a whole mountain and changed the course of the Ambon River. When we arrived, a grader was searching for children buried underneath. It was hopeless. Meanwhile, a woman, looking weary and heavy came towards us through the mud. We lifted her on to the back of the Toyota. She was in labour, fully dilated. I called the male nurse to help. No answer. He had jumped out of the truck and was looking intently the other way. That woman belonged to his clan and it was tambu for him to see her at such a time. I just had time to make the most basic preparations and catch the baby.

In general, I failed to appreciate the Enga men who led a relatively carefree life. Once, walking to a clinic, we greeted a group of men sitting and talking. ‘What are they talking about?’ I asked. ‘Pigs’, I was told. Six hours later, we came back and the men were still sitting and talking. ‘And now, what are they talking about?’ The answer was, ‘Pigs’.

However, in daily contact with the women and children, I came to love them for their friendliness and happiness despite a very tough life.

I saw women who worked in the gardens every day, miles from their homes, walking back carrying thirty to forty kilograms of sweet potato, a baby in a second bilum put on top of it and accompanied by a little child, often carried in their arms. Once back home, they still had to fetch water, firewood and feed family and pigs.

I heard of rapes as pay-backs by an enemy clan. I heard of women who committed suicide, taking their small male child with them to punish their husband, when life became too harsh.

I heard wives beaten in my neighbours’ houses, especially on pay-days, after a whole salary had been spent on beer. I saw them the next day with their black eye or a broken right forearm, the typical injury of a woman trying to protect herself.

I did see the results of bitter fights between co-wives. They would be brought into the Health Centre with a broken nose or arm, or a knife wound, blood spattered everywhere.

Some beliefs and customs could be explained by the harshness of life. For example, if a woman gave birth to twins, often the second twin would fail to thrive and it would often die. The second child was considered evil. At the clinics, we could see it coming. One twin would grow happy and fat and the second one would wither away. We gave talks on nutrition but I felt out of my depth and guilty not to be able to deal with it.

Women would deliver their babies alone, sometimes in a small hut prepared for them. There were no traditional birth attendants, only women who had had babies themselves. During the second stage of labour the woman would be left entirely alone. It was shameful for her to be seen and everybody feared the power of blood which could weaken or kill. Men kept miles away. It was very hard to get reliable information on maternal death because to mention a dead person was to call back his/her ghost. These spirits were part of the clan and were thought to be malevolent as they were angry at having to leave family and friends.

But there was also a lot of laughter, communal fun and teasing, sharing in children during work and leisure.

Women spent hours talking about bilums, differences in sweet potatoes, dreams and their meanings. To me, these issues were interesting up to a point, then I would switch off: I had to admit we were simply too different!

During my first pregnancy, I got much closer to the women. Finally I was behaving in a way which was natural to them! I delivered in Mambisanda in a small Lutheran hospital. Coming back home, four days after Nicholas was born, I had some romantic expectations of a nice warm home, dinner ready, tête-à-tête and sleep. After forty-five minutes drive in our little jeep on a bumpy road, I felt I was sitting on barbed wire. Home, sweet home, I thought. In I came. It was cold. Let’s eat. But there was nothing left! ‘I was almost going to do the shopping’, said my better half. ‘By the way, there is this consultant in town. You don’t mind if we invite him tonight for dinner!’ Hum . . . So I let it happen. At times like that I felt lonely and missed my own culture.

Nicholas was breastfed and my main fear was to develop those pendulous breasts, flopping over a large abdomen, which every Enga woman had. I still have visions of children, three or four years old standing up behind their sitting mothers, grabbing a breast, lifting it over one of Mum’s shoulders and sucking!

Nicholas often accompanied me. For the walking clinics, Myriam, househelp and babysitter, carefully carried him in a bilum, up and down hills, across hanging bamboo bridges. He would sleep non-stop, then come out warm as cake ready for his feed. I attracted attention when I breastfed, especially from the elders who, short-sighted, would sit very close to see if I really could do it. It was believed that white women only bottle-fed their babies as did the wives of the first missionaries and this explained why white babies were so much fatter and healthier than Enga babies. I practised what I preached and exclusively breastfed, then fed Nicholas banana and pumpkin for months. He grew so fat that the women believed that I hid bottles and baby food in my house!

Work at the Health Centre was always interesting. One day I opened a steriliser and found sweet potatoes boiling next to the syringes. I called John, the senior aid post orderly. ‘You can’t do that’, I said. He replied, ‘Who are you to talk to me like that? You could be my daughter.’ And he walked off. But the same orderly also expressed regret about the good old days when the Health Centre, managed by a white doctor, was clean and efficiently run! At times it was difficult to apply western medical ethics to the Enga customs. For example, one day as I was walking through the medical ward, a very ill and sad woman, nursing a baby, attracted my attention. She was holding a dehydrated baby tight to her bandaged breast. Suffering from an advanced breast cancer, the mother was dying and custom dictated that the baby die with her. It was heartbreaking.

When on call, I loved jumping out of bed to deliver a baby. One night there were four deliveries one after the other, and no electricity! Women relatives would give advice through the door of the delivery room and would peep in through door and windows. Once I was pushing back a woman trying to force her way in, because another one was delivering her baby, when I realised she was holding a prominent belly and could hardly walk. I got her in and she flopped on a mattress on the floor. I quickly scrubbed and just got baby and placenta, then went back to the first one still in labour on the bed. There were problems with staff who did not always come when on call. One woman miscarried and bled the whole night. She was found in a pool of blood early in the morning with a haemoglobin count of less than four. Surprisingly, she survived.

During our nutrition education talk we advised mothers to start feeding with solid foods at three to four months. After two years, an Enga nurse explained: ‘You know, we only start feeding children when they have teeth [10-12 months in Enga]. If you feed your child before then, it is because the mother feels pregnant, which means that she has had sexual intercourse with her husband soon after birth, which in turn is most shameful.’ The first child should be walking and talking before the second one is born. Indeed, women feared sexual intercourse and pregnancy when lactating because the man’s semen, then the urine or faeces of the foetus might mix with the breast milk and poison the baby. For years, I had virtually been encouraging them to have intercourse soon after birth!

We also dealt with family planning. I remember a lady who came with her husband to get the pili. The next day, a very irate ‘real husband’ turned up, threatening to break our necks. We learnt that he did give her a thorough beating later on. Interestingly enough, if a woman got pregnant from another man, the husband usually recognised the child as his. The Enga believed that to have intercourse once was not enough to procreate. Expectant parents had sexual intercourse more often than usual to build up the arms, legs, head and strengthen the baby.

Because of my husband’s job, we met a lot of consultants or should I say they often came to dinner. There were several kinds: the paternalistic older men who would kindly ask about children, how I liked it in Enga, how nice the food was, then went on with their business for the rest of the evening as if I were tapestry or a serving hand. There were the young romantic ones who would cry on my shoulder of their love of France, the beauty of the country, the food, the language, the fashion, the culture, their lost first love (who had been French, of course) and how they loved my accent. Then there were the aggressive ones, who would ask me why the French were so arrogant with their bombs in the Pacific and their colony in New Caledonia. I sometimes fuelled their anger by commenting that it was not a colony but French territory (it never failed)! And then there were the few with whom I slowly became friends once we were able to overcome the Australian brashness and my feeling of inferiority in this male-dominated world.

I understood English well enough but sometimes daydreamed and pretended I could not follow the conversation. It gave me great internal freedom and rest after a working day, two hours of peeling a mountain of fresh vegetables, cooking on the wood stove and taking care of baby.

I now realise how much violence there was all around us. Tribal warfare affected all aspects of life. Wabag town was frequently the scene of tribal fighting. Once, with Nicholas on my hip, I joined a large crowd walking towards a cliff overlooking the site of a fight. Our group was excited and happy. ‘Look, here is a warrior coming down.’ ‘Oh, one has been hit.’ ‘Hey, this one is pulling all the kaukau out!’ ‘Move back, they are shooting arrows at us!’ cried someone, which they were, so I left and went down to the Health Centre. It was a mess. Outpatients was flooded with people wailing and crying, coming and going. The smell of dirt, sweat, pig grease and blood was worse than usual. I found the Provincial Health Officer bent over one of the warriors who had an arrow sticking out of