Dreamers and their dreams

By JOHN FOWKE

 

Dear Ian,

 

I hope you won’t mind my using your email contact to get in touch direct.

Malum forwarded both your recent emails generated by my article Melanesian Way etc.

 I think we met briefly many years ago somewhere in Hagen or the Wahgi; I have an impression of a short, energetic and enthusiastic person.

 We are both dreamers in our own ways, both as pro-PNG thinkers who speak from realistic, up-to-date experience; and also dreamers, perhaps, from a cynic's point of view, in regard to the small likelihood of anything we express being taken to heart by large numbers of PNG'ians or, importantly, Australians.

I've been trying to get into the heads of AusAid and DFAT for a decade-and-a-half, with absolutely no success, despite the fact that an academic spy at ANU tells me that at DFAT they are absolutely desperate to come up with a new, more effective list of policies for Oz's ongoing assistance to PNG.

This has been commanded by King Kev for presentation in June 09!

 Long ol planti ol kiaps belong bipo mi les olgeta, except for a few such as yourself and my old friends Graham Pople, Chris Warrilow, Tony Pryke and Bill McGrath, and those few such as Rick Giddings, Ben Probert etc who stayed on for long in Government jobs in the belief that sacrificing a bit of dignity and tangling with the turmoil was far more worthwhile than fleeing with the "handshake," thus becoming something between a taxi-driver or a tax-accountant.

Maybe wives had a lot to do with it.

 The voices of these people, today, must be seen as irrelevant, no matter that they think they all deserve medals, for fuck's sake!

 We forget that one of the drivers of the mass exodus of Aussie public servants pre- and after independence was race prejudice and peer-pressure at the after-work, or social-club level.

They couldn't see themselves working on an equal footing, or worse, as subordinates to PNG'ians.

We were well rid of them, despite the chaos which has followed in the public service. PNG has had no post-independence racial problems to speak of, until the corrupt relaxation of the migration, logging and business laws for those who pay their way became widespread.

 Aside from the occasional uproar from academics (foreign) and PNG political circles there is a deep well of positive feeling towards Australia in PNG, as you say.

And whilst this is due to the quite wide adoption of Oz cultural and attitudinal characteristics and through sport, it is the ongoing presence of Aussies like yourself and others like myself-(Kiwi turncoat) - and our PNG'ian friends of like-mind, and our efforts to be a friendly, sociable, and an accessible source of all sorts of information, that Oz still keeps a foothold in minds and imaginations throughout PNG.

A bank of information and an emotional connection which is very much to the benefit of both countries and their future together as close neighbours.

 Please don’t imagine that I decry the Melanesian Way of Subsistance, by any means.

 My article is the first polite, and thus publishable, opinion piece, to bring out into the open the fact that PNG is held back through a cultural bias which makes it ok to lie to non-blood-relatives, to steal from non-blood-relatives and to do a lot of talking without getting to the point and ultimately to suspend or cover up what is being contended.

 These characteristics are described, euphemistically, today as “wantok sistem bilong mipela" but although this assertion is partly correct, as you and I know there’s a great deal more to the wantok system than the lies and cover-ups and nepotistic appointments which paralyse the progress of the nation at present.

The task is to filter out the elements which are spoiling PNG's efforts to engage successfully with modernity and build a healthy, vigorous and proud nation.

 Whilst all PNG'ians are entitled to bristle and even to roar loudly at these assertions by a foreigner, I have believed for many years that it all needs to be said out loud.

In fact it was said, in a more-wordy and detailed way, long ago, in a series of three linked articles which were published, either in The National or Post-Courier, I forget which, under the by-line of the current Governor General.

The GG had a weekly comment/column at the time.

He had picked the articles up from others who had received them from me by email and he published it as..."the opinions of a concerned expatriate resident etc etc..."

The articles were originally intended to catch the attention of AusAid and to encourage them to provide proper preparation and orientation for both staff and contractors/consultants entering PNG.

I worked for 11 years for Coffee Industry Corporation, and one of the tasks which I was finally able to do (with generous help from the European Union) was to turn its research and extension divisions, by far the most-expensive and inefficient parts, from a living, breathing, totally-useless model of Department of Agriculture Stock and Fisheries from the'fifties, as reconstituted by well-meaning pre-independence Aussie ex-didimen.

Men who were totally out of date in their thinking, to a small, potentially cost-effective single entity with about 90 staff,  from one which had previously used almost 500 persons plus housing, vehicles etc in similar generous ratio.

 Nothing very effective ever comes of all these efforts- but like you, I believe in PNG - in a sense I am in sympathy with the late Rev Percy Chatterton of the London Missionary Society,  whose book of reminiscences was entitled ‘Day That I Have Loved’.

 Luckily I was blessed with a wife who felt the same way.

 I continue to hold out hope and in one way or another try to influence events, so that PNG will not descend into the chaos of such world-record-holders for state corruption and poverty as Haiti under Papa Doc and Zimbabwe under Uncle Bob Mugabe.

I don’t think its going to happen, but the road to recovery is in the shadows right now.

 

Cheers,

 

John