Our Sphere of Influence: Rivalry in the Pacific by Jonathan Pearlman

Author:Jonathan Pearlman [Pearlman, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760641542
Google: Lx9QwgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 45420620
Publisher: Black Inc Books
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE PAPUA NEW GUINEA AWAKENING

Inside the forgotten colony

Sean Dorney

Between 1974 and 1999, I spent twenty years as a journalist in Papua New Guinea. Following that, I spent fifteen years reporting on and from the Pacific islands, with a visit or two back to Papua New Guinea each year. Unfortunately, not long after the ABC made me redundant in 2014, I was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. It has severely limited my ability to type. Whereas once I was a ten-fingered typist, I am now down to two fingers, and even that is laboured. For my recent birthday, my wife, Pauline, and my two children bought me Dragon voice-recognition software. I could not have written this essay without it. But it is not perfect – especially with unfamiliar words.

I have been transcribing the extensive notes that my late mother wrote in longhand on our family history. In the mid-1970s, I spent three years on secondment from the ABC to the newly created National Broadcasting Commission of Papua New Guinea. My mother wrote about how, in 1975, she and my father came to Port Moresby to watch me play as a halfback for the national rugby league team, the Kumuls. Dragon made a stab at autocorrect. “Kumul” is the Melanesian Pidgin word for “bird of paradise”. However, according to Dragon, the national rugby league team is not named “the Kumuls” but “the Criminals”.

That software quirk amused me, but it also annoyed me on a number of levels. Given the limited and often one-dimensional coverage of Papua New Guinea we get today in the Australian media, many Australians could probably be forgiven for believing that “the Criminals” may be an apt name for any group representing Papua New Guinea. Yet it is far from true. Crime is almost non-existent in my wife’s village of Koropalek, on Manus Island, where the people live a predominantly subsistence lifestyle – feeding themselves from their gardens and the sea, and beating sago.

It is not only the Australian media that gives Papua New Guinea a bad rap. The BBC ran an article last year claiming that 70 per cent of Papua New Guinean women can expect to be raped at some stage in their life. Over the years, I have met and worked with a significant number of Papua New Guinean women, and spent weeks at a time living in my wife’s village. Unless the sample of women I know is completely unrepresentative, that figure is a ridiculous exaggeration. Rape is definitely a problem in the congested cities and towns, as is gender violence. But some 80 per cent of Papua New Guineans still live in villages, and rape is so socially destructive that, in the village setting, it would be met with immediate retribution. Last year, the ABC sent a camera team with Pauline and me to her village on Manus. During our visit, we produced two programs – a half-hour Foreign Correspondent and a forty-five-minute documentary for the ABC News channel. Pauline and I are often

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.