Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  I met this woman and heard her story long after Murray rang to say his friend David Baker was looking for someone to go up with him to see some barkcloth art, and maybe write about it. Even if I had met her, I’d have said yes. A reason to go, and with someone who’d been many times; a large, confident man at that. It’s a tough walk, Murray warned. They’re on the top of a mountain. Was I up to it? Me? Of course I was up to it!

  Murray didn’t know much about the barkcloth, he hadn’t seen it himself. He’d had a coffee with David, who told him how he’d made the long walk up to Ömie on the invitation of a man he’d met, purely by chance, in a town on the plain beneath their mountain. Having time to spare, David went out of curiosity, and was astonished to see the cloth still being made, and used, and painted, when so much of this ancient art form had been lost – or had become a debased item for sale to tourists. Yet there it was, hanging from the walls, still in use as a textile, and painted with the colours of the forest. As far as David knew from his researches there was none from these people in museums anywhere, nor in colonial collections where other examples of barkcloth art are plentiful – though few as exceptional as this. Does he want it for his gallery? I asked. A moment of caution. There are bad stories of collectors taking art from villagers who have no notion of its value. No, Murray said, he thinks it should be in major galleries and museums; that’s what he wants to achieve. He’s not doing this for his own gallery, he’s an honourable man. Then he told me how David had run the company, his reputation as a man who didn’t rip off employees, didn’t dodge taxes – He plays with a straight bat, Murray said – and when he didn’t like the way the corporate world was going he got out, put on his boots and went to PNG.

  So there I was, on the plane that March morning in 2004 with David and an old friend of his, Grahame, who was coming to film the trip. We’d seen some of the barkcloth at David’s house in Sydney, and photos he’d taken in the villages at Ömie. I have no expertise when it comes to Oceanic art, I’d warned David; if that was what he wanted, I was not the one. But if it was a journalistic task, if it was a matter of writing about what happened and what we saw, I could do that. And I liked David, as far as I could tell on a few short meetings; there was a humour to him that softened the largeness and the confidence of a man with a moustache such as I hadn’t seen since childhood, and then only on the faces of great-uncles and strange, ancient men.

  We landed that afternoon in a barely recognisable Port Moresby. The colonial town I remembered had no tall buildings, and the map of the town was marked then by how far you were from the old colonial centre on one of its few well-defined roads: four mile, six mile, nine mile; now there’s a sixteen mile, and the suburbs and settlements stretch a good deal further than that. The dirt road (not much more then a track) that once ran into the valley where the university was built – which I could have described tree by tree – had vanished under a maze of roads, new suburbs, government buildings. The roads were potholed, the roundabouts and intersections a confusion of trucks, people hanging on the back, horns blaring. Markets with men in bright t-shirts calling out, young women shading their babies with umbrellas in the colours of the PNG flag; old women sitting cross-legged along the road with betel nuts and mustard pods laid out on a mat, bilums hung on the fence for sale; highland gardens dug in straight lines down hills that once were bare, precarious-looking mounds of sweet-potato vines. All of it, so green.

  Two days of memory, a strange overlay: the shape of the harbour, the memory of flame trees, a freeway cutting through the suburb where once our friends had lived. Gone.

  Two days of supplies: medicines over the counter at the pharmacy – there’d be sores and ulcers in the village, I remembered them from before, and everyone coughing; lamps, blankets, kettles, a tarpaulin; a long diversion for a back-up battery for Grahame’s camera.

  Two days in Port Moresby, and two evenings of long-ago friends, and new ones, David’s and mine, writers from the university, whom I’d read but not met. On the first night it was beer and fish and chips in the hotel bar. I was on a high, and I don’t drink beer. On the second, a dinner at a house on Paga Hill overlooking water and reef, the road winding up, fragrant vines hanging over the wire-mesh fences, a guard-post at every gate. Our hosts were Roslyn and Mekere Morauta, she an Australian whose freckly skin had accommodated the sun, he a senior and respected politician, once Prime Minister and then, in 2004, the Leader of the Opposition. Among the guests at the long table overlooking the water, was a man whom I’d once sat next to in history classes, still as charming as ever he was, now Foreign Minister, and a Sir, like our host. Again the strange workings of memory, the young figure of memory there in the face, in the eyes of this portly man. Memory fading, reorganising itself, catching up, the overlay that lets us be all those things at once; not like a town, where one thing replaces another, at first a breach, a shock, until you realise that maybe that long-ago town does exist still, a palimpsest, an underlay with the new buildings growing tall around it, its roads multiplying, but still, somewhere, itself. That was what I wanted to see, and in the faces around me that is what I saw. I was drunk with the pleasure of it, for all that the conversation would drift away from us visitors back to the politics of a place I hardly knew any more.

  The next day took us in a small plane north over the mountains to Popondetta, an exercise in Second World War history, flying over the Kokoda Track, more or less, not that it can be seen through the canopy of rainforest; half an hour in the air over mountains that would take days to traverse by foot – strong boots the least of it – until the land eases, undulating towards the coast where the Japanese landed. Maybe they are our friends, a Yorkshire-born missionary had said when he saw the warships that had made their way through the reefs. He was mending a deckchair he used on the local outriggers that took him from village to village.52 I often think of this when the coast comes into view and the plane lands, as it did that day, on a long military strip, a remnant from the war, like the machinery rusting in tall grass and encroaching wild sugar cane. More green, but this time a lush, extravagant, tropical world, not the savannah around Port Moresby.

  From the runway we could see Mount Lamington, where we were heading, its great bulk clear against the sky with only the highest peaks gathering cloud around them. I looked at David. Up there? He put his hand on my shoulder. Up there, he said. When we get there you’ll be pleased. If I get there, I thought, but did not say.

  The town of Popondetta is built around a flat grid of streets with utilitarian buildings, corrugated-iron trade stores, warehouses with high counters where you hand your money through metal bars, men with guns standing guard as you look through to the cavernous interior stacked with boxes of biscuits, bully beef, dried milk, tins of cocoa, axes, blankets, candles, kerosene. On the streets a dull surliness, piles of rubbish, betel-nut sellers, eyes averted, cigarettes for sale laid out singly. Groups of people loaded with bags of rice waited under wide trees for the trucks that serve as buses, PMVs they’re called.53 More supplies. I stood back as David negotiated, notebook in my pocket, wary. Then to the police station – I wasn’t expecting that – a demoralised two-storey building where we were met in the scuffed yard by a senior officer. He shook David’s hand enthusiastically, asked when we’d be back and assigned Thompson, a reservist, to accompany us to Ömie. Was it really necessary? Or a kind of leftover colonial gesture? Either way, something about it made me uneasy. I could see the prisoners in a wire enclosure, a cage, some of them off their heads with something – drugs? anger? despair? – a glimpse of a dangerous underbelly. Then there was a woman at my side. It’s okay, she said, they can’t get out. She was in uniform, the most senior woman in the district, she said; her name was Roma, and she was the wife of Thompson, our reservist escort. She was pleased, she said, to see her husband doing something. Make sure he comes back four kilos lighter. How was I to do that? I laughed, and she laughed, one of those womanly sighs. Men. What to do with them, she didn’t know. L
ook at him, she said. We looked across in time to see her overweight husband issued with four bullets, two cans of tear gas and a pair of boots. He knotted the bootlaces together and slung the boots over his shoulder, which is where they remained for most of the trip.

  In the dark hotel dining room that evening, over a meal enjoyed only by the three Ömie men who’d come to meet us, David told a story about a man working in the town’s tourism office who’d ripped him off on a dinghy trip. It was an expensive price but David had paid up, thinking it’d get him where he was going, a day’s journey along the coast. The man had been full of helpful advice: yes, there could be problems, but he’d make sure, for David, very good his work in the villages, he could count on him, etcetera. But when David got to the coast, there was no sign of this man, and the men who had a dinghy waiting at the wharf had only enough zoom – fuel – to get halfway, which is where they expected the journey to end; it was all they’d been paid for. A complicated story of negotiations and looking for the man who’d done the original deal, and finding a relative, and another dinghy waiting, another relative, more money, double the cost he’d paid to the man in the tourism office. Michael, from Ömie, shook his head. He knew of this man. No good true. And he grinned when David reported that on his return to Popondetta he’d written a letter to be circulated round town, naming the man, shaming him. It was a warning, David said. He wasn’t getting ripped off again.

  That was only the year before, and all I could think was that we’d been all over town; the man from the tourism office would know we were here. Was David crazy? We were about to get on a road – the one and only road going north – and the man would know that too. He’d have us held up – if not tomorrow, then on the way back. Is that what Thompson was for, and the display outside the police station? Popondetta had spooked me, the four bullets had spooked me, and large, cumbersome Thompson’s boots.

  It was not a good night. A small hot room, bed bugs, the guards, with their guns, smoking under the light that shone in through my window. In my head, keeping me from sleep, was just one phrase, over and over, a dangerous road. I couldn’t shut it down, I couldn’t reason it away. I knew it was Martin Luther King, though not then where it came from exactly. A dangerous road, again and again, until it morphed into the yellow brick road from The Wizard of Oz, and strange dancing figures were tapping their way into the room where I lay alone with the bed bugs, all courage gone. All I could see was a dream image of a man with Martin Luther King’s face dead on a track. Then David was banging on my door. I must have slept; it was morning. The truck’s arrived, he said. I opened the door, and there was the sky, the sounds of a town starting its day. The night horrors retreated, but the road remained, and we were to travel it; no turning back.

  The truck, an open-backed utility, didn’t look too knocked around. A solemn driver stood beside it. He was to take us north towards Kokoda until we reached a side road that turned eastwards into the mountains. On David’s map this small road went for a few kilometres past the village at the junction, but Michael said no, the driver would take us all the way to the river which, on the map, was a long way from the end of the road. Michael’s English was good, he’d been to the mission school in Popondetta, he hadn’t had to pay. Not like now with fees, he said. It’s hard for children to go to school. On the open tray of the ute, two plastic chairs were tied with rope to the back of the cabin, their seats about level with the low wall of the tray, nothing to stop you bouncing right out. No way was I sitting there, and when Michael gestured to the rather collapsed-looking seat in the cabin, I took advantage of being the only woman and got in with him and the driver. David and Grahame sat on the floor of the tray in among the piled-up cargo, Thompson poised himself on the rim, a bunch of men who needed a lift climbed on, and off we set at a stately pace.

  The driver leaned forward over the wheel, circumnavigating potholes, corrugations, creeks that had washed the road away. Very good, Michael said each time we went up on the bank to let a crowded PMV thunder past. No danger there but dust and grit. Sometimes a driver coming towards us would stop to talk to our driver, horns blaring behind us – which is how we heard there was a sick woman in the next village. Yes, we’d call in to see her, and yes, the ute would take her to the hospital on its return. And so it went, all morning, through patches of forest, over bridges, past densely planted palm-oil plantations, until we turned off the road towards the river that marks the boundary of Ömie. Just as on the map, the road became a track as soon as it passed the village near the junction, and disappeared into a walking path through thick undergrowth. We lurched down a steep bank, crossed a creek, wheels spinning, the men jumping off to push, and on we went at a steep angle until the driver stopped. Finish, he said. I saw his point, but the Ömie who’d come whooping through the trees towards us were pushing at the ute, slashing at the undergrowth to clear a path, arguing with the driver. No further. Finish. We clearly had to walk and, besides, there was the sick woman to consider; she hadn’t looked good with her hard swollen breast and a tiny baby who couldn’t suck.

  It took more than two hours to reach the last village. Just to get there had been a long, slow climb – not steep but relentless. At the village, green coconuts were tapped open with the back of a bush knife. I sat on the platform of a shade house, lay back, closed my eyes and could have slept for a week. But no, we were off again, down a steep bank to the river, Michael holding tight my wrist as we waded across onto Ömie land. Ömie ground. The start of their mountain. Steep. Forested. Beautiful. Daunting. Above the river were signs of once-cleared forest, grown over. Coffee, Michael said. What happened? For a while it was good, then the coffee prices fell. No good. No? No. Up we climbed, and then down, one ridge after another, and at the bottom of each was a stream – the next welcome soak in cold water – then up the next ridge, steeper, higher. The sun was way past its midpoint. Michael’s brother Andrew, who’d met the ute and seemed in charge of everything, kept saying, Walk faster, Walk faster, as if it were possible, which it wasn’t, although David reached the top of each next ridge way before me, sometimes before Grahame as well; he’d be sitting there with the men smoking their trade tobacco, and he’d stay with me as I caught my breath before they were all off again, whooping through the forest. Reduced to the muscles of my legs, I followed step by step, notebook forgotten, attention only to the next foothold, the next steadying tree root. Two hours, more, three, the forest canopy above, the path below, that’s all I saw; maybe the brain closes down when all that’s required are our feet. I noticed nothing as we walked – faster, faster – through Náapa, the first of the Ömie villages, though not a barkcloth village.

  Where I most needed to attend, I saw nothing.

  The light had almost gone when we arrived at the first barkcloth village. Clouds that had been wisps on the peaks had thickened in the valleys. We’d heard a roll of thunder, and then the drums as we climbed the last ridge before the land opened out to gardens and pathways lined with flowers. Smoke from the roofs of houses was drifting up behind a hedge; the gateway to the village was hung with a large painted barkcloth. Small girls with dots of ochre across their cheekbones came through the gate, took my hands, clasping the hem of my shirt. They were wearing the painted barkcloth wrapped around them as skirts. The gate opened. David and Grahame went through into the village. The men who’d walked up with us dropped their cargo and joined the dance. Then it was my turn, led by the small girls to the women dancing inside, every one of them dressed in barkcloth – ochre and black, dull red, orange, a surprising yellow – their voices rising over the drums. As we approached the houses, a woman of about forty whom I’d come to know as Pauline tucked a handful of herbs into my sleeve, drew me into the dance, my feet in wet boots clumsy as she beat the time on my arm, and somehow, I have no idea how, I was danced into the rhythm of another world.

  We woke the next morning to the sound of birds and a village waking for the day. The clouds had gone, the sky a pale dome stretched tigh
t above the peaks, a wash of yellow towards the east. It was hard to believe Popondetta and its anxieties were but a day’s journey away, so still and calm and beautiful was that morning light. Outside the guesthouse two older women were sitting on mats painting. One had her cloth spread in front of her; the other had hers folded on her lap. Lila and Dapene. They called me across to them, patted the mat beside them, inviting me to sit. These women were the duvahe, a word Michael gave as chief, inadequate as a translation, for their authority came not from lineage but from wisdom, uehore, a moral clarity, an authority that, when you are sitting beside them, is strangely palpable. I sat where they indicated, and they took my hand, put their noses to the inside of my wrist, then to my elbow and breathed in with a long sniffing noise. I came to love this greeting, their noses pressed higher along my arm until by the time I left, they breathed into my neck and shoulder as if to smell the sweat of me. Several years later, when Dapene was in Sydney for the opening of an Ömie exhibition, I saw how unerring she was about whom she greeted this way. In a crowded gallery, when she needed me as close by her as she or Pauline had been by me when I was in their world, she greeted few people like this, Jo Bertini, and writers Beth Yahp and Gail Jones among them, Janet Laurence when they went to visit her studio, artist to artist. For the rest she took the custom of our world and accepted a hand with nothing more than a touch of hers. But with those few, she lifted their hands to her face, turned them and breathed into their wrist and elbow.