That first morning we didn’t speak, or rather we spoke words that were mutually incomprehensible: a look, a smile, a frown, a painting stick gesturing to the cloth, a language of movement and sign. I could, and would, have sat with them all day and let being there wash over me, making the wonder real. But no. Andrew came bustling over. He was like a tour leader. He’d done a business course for eco-tourism in Moresby, and must have been told that tourists need constant activity. So began a round of inspections and demonstrations. We were taken from garden to bush track, from river to stands of sago-palm trees; we were shown how to make fire with bamboo, and traps for pigs; we had orations from the men duvahe, histories of the war that had brought the Australians up to these villages enlisting men and boys to work on the Kokoda Track. And then, soon after the war, the mountain, a volcano that had been rumbling for years, erupted, burning the forests, destroying the villages and gardens – and somehow this catastrophe was all because of the war. Michael’s translation was vague, as if he were apologising for the old men duvahe who clearly wanted us to understand a story, a causality that Michael dismissed as the old ways – legend, that’s all. There was no time to absorb what the duvahe had said, or to sit with them and ponder, we were on to the next thing: demonstrations by the women of how the inner bark of a selected tree is beaten flat, and how the dyes were made.54
The only time I got off from all this was when Pauline and Michael’s wife, Naomi, a Popondetta girl who’d been to school and had good English, took me to the women’s wash place. Andrew sent a security guard with us – for what, why, he wouldn’t say. Another display like Thompson, who spent most of his time on the veranda of the guesthouse? But Andrew’s guards, with their bush knives and machetes and the yellow labels he’d written for them with their name and role proud on their t-shirts, were with us wherever we went – even to the women’s wash place. The guard would stay at the top of the path down to the river, his back discreetly turned, while I joined the women. They washed the vegetables from the gardens there, huge piles of sweet potato and yams; they talked and laughed, the children splashing in the small pool downstream where we dipped under to wash. It was there that I got to know the women from the cookhouse, Cecilia, Penny-Rose, Josephine, but when I tried to help they shooed me away with a hilarity I can’t say I shared; and when they did relent, they’d pick up the sweet potato to see that I’d got all the earth off it, nodding approval. When I said, Of course I know how to wash a sweet potato, and Naomi translated, such was the laughter that the guard turned to look.
Likeness and difference. I felt it every day, a dance of expectation, misapprehension, goodwill, and a self-consciousness that was entirely mine, as I resisted the white woman Missis role. No, no, not Missis. Drusilla. Dursula. I became Dursula, that’s fine; there was a Dursula in one of the higher villages – your namesake, you’ll meet her soon. Very good.
Whatever the confusions and uncertainties, one thing was clear, and that was the quality of the art itself. Each day women would hang the cloth across the dance ground for Grahame to film. Andrew would stand in front of it, with a snail shell, or a hooked vine, or the bone of a river fish, pointing to the designs on the cloth that originated with the item he held up. We might baulk at Andrew’s lessons, and we mightn’t understand the cloth hanging there in the sun, but we agreed, all three of us, that the barkcloth we’d climbed all this way to see was indeed remarkable. It hung from the walls of the guesthouse, a conservator’s nightmare as the clouds swept in leaving them sagging from their nails, still vibrant, without pride or vanity: the music of the forest, mountains, fish bones, thorny vines. Modest, simple, encompassing the complex meanings of clan history and daily existence. Even with Andrew’s snail shells and vines there on the table, I learned more about the Ömie by living beside that cloth, that art, than from all his demonstrations. Dapene’s spider web, Pauline’s fruit of the forest, Lila’s mountains – a visual language, as National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) curator Judith Ryan would write five years later, reverberating ‘with an aura of women’s inner power, blood and spirit …’55
But that was way in the future. At the time, when we were in Ömie, it was not at all clear what should happen next, and on this Grahame and David didn’t agree. Should the cloth be taken out of Ömie at all? Was it a form of cultural imperialism for David to think he, we, could ‘discover’ and then ‘save’ an art form that had survived for hundreds of years? We interfere, and we change the art. Take the art out, and we expose these people to bargain hunters and exploitation. How will they defend themselves when the buyers come up here offering water tanks and lamps and take the art and sell it for thousands? All the more important, David said, to get it into museums and galleries where it will be safeguarded and a standard set. But once prices were known, went the counter-argument, the rumours would start. That was why David was working with Andrew and the men to set up a business that would be registered and structured to benefit only the community. How secure would that prove? David would be the sole agent; the carpetbaggers would have to deal with him! But would he be there when they came into the village with their swagger and their offers and their guns? And if we do nothing, David asked, will the cloth-making last another generation? Will it join the long list of lost arts? How many of the young women are learning its rigorous practice? Some, yes, and more than when David had visited two years earlier, but even now, not many. Why? They want their husbands to bring money. They want clothes for their children, and school fees, medicines. They might have lived for thousands of years without, but times change, things change, the modern world isn’t going to leave them undisturbed. Which, from the other perspective, was all the more reason not to draw attention to them.
And what did I think? Acquainted as I am with the ambivalent – too many planets in Libra, an astrologist once told me – it wasn’t hard to see both sides. It was a puzzle, a true dilemma, and we weren’t the first to encounter it. The critical question, I ventured, wasn’t what I thought, or what David and Grahame thought, but what the Ömie thought, and not just the young men – we knew what they wanted. What did the women want? The women duvahe? They were the custodians of the knowledge and the trees, and the dyes, and the designs, and the stories told through the cloth. If anyone was to ask, of the three of us it’d have to be me – but how, and when, with Andrew rounding us up for the next lesson, and Lila and Dapene never at the wash place. And even if I had the chance, how would I set about it, with no language, and only the smallest acquaintance with an art I knew had deep roots, though what those roots were I had little idea. I couldn’t even read the sky; the shortest walk turned the sun this way and that through the high canopy of trees.
All in all it was something of a relief when, on the morning we were to walk on to the next village – another five hours up the mountain – Grahame said he wasn’t going any further. Like me, he’d lain awake that night listening to rain drumming on the sago-thatch roof. The path would be slippery; how many times had I lost my footing on my way down to the wash place, and it hadn’t even been that wet. My night horrors hadn’t been about the wet, or the leeches – I had come prepared with salt – or the dangers of the road. It was my own physical capacity, or lack of it, that had me awake. The walk up this far had pushed me to an edge that had taken days to come back from. I wasn’t sure I’d make it, and then what? While I listened to the rain thump down, I’d imagined strokes and heart attacks, helicopters, thick cloud, insurance disputes. So when Grahame announced he wasn’t going further, coward that I was I said that in that case I’d stay too. We could meet David when he looped back round from the highest villages to one a mere four hours away, where dancers from all of Ömie were to gather on the night of the full moon. Thompson, also looking relieved, said he’d stay to keep the Missis safe, and settled himself back down on the veranda with his block of tobacco and deck of cards.
I spent most of those unscheduled days with the women, not only at the wash place but in the cookhouse and in t
heir houses when they came back from the gardens. With Naomi to turn the talk, and Dapene sitting with us painting the pathways of her folded cloth, instructing the younger women to paint between the lines she’d drawn, I learned new words, struggled with new concepts. I went with the women into the forest to find a tree ready for its bark to be cut and pounded flat into fabric for the art. I watched as Dapene put her hands on one tree, felt around it, and then moved to another until she found one that was indeed ready. How could she tell? That was not a question that made sense to her – any more than I could see the difference, quite clear to her, between this tree and that, let alone their readiness. But I did begin to understand that our Western notions of art as something separate, to be hung on the wall or seen in a gallery, were far removed from a world in which the cloth, its art, was woven into every aspect of their culture, their environment, their daily lives.
Back in the village, sitting on the platform of a house where the women were painting, I’d ask more questions, notebook open, as if that way understanding would come. I’d think I’d grasped something, and then realise that I hadn’t. How do anthropologists do it? Words are hard to find when they come from one way of seeing the world and are carried across to another, where even the experience of forest and sky, everything we share in the physical earth we tread, can shift register and meaning. Sometimes Dapene would become firm and cut off my next query, back and forth over the same point as I watched her paint the cloth, folded on her knee, turned this way and that. She’d tell me the name of the design as she painted, no explanation, just a name, which I was coaxed into repeating until my tongue worked its way around it. How did she decide where to start? Did she have a pattern for the whole when she folded it to paint in sections? Was there a pattern to folding? I couldn’t work out how she did it. The design when it was finished didn’t break into the small sections of the folds. Dapene put down her stick. She held me tight around the wrist, no breathing in: this was a rebuke that told me how dumb my questions were. The cloth, it knows, she said. The answer of an artist. ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’56 That’s Cézanne, and with him too I only dimly comprehend its import.
It was time to close my notebook, and for a good bit of that unscheduled time I did. Instead of trying to get every word, everything transcribed – a process that mostly showed me how much I had wrong as I re-encountered what I thought I had grasped – I gave in to doing nothing more than sitting, watching, being. For someone of my disposition, given to over-thinking, it was not easy, just to sit – that failure with Zen – and I can’t say I succeeded entirely. The days passed so slowly, the hours, the minutes, my attention could lapse and I’d be mulling again: thinking, ordering, rethinking. I suppose the Ömie were too as they tried to get the measure of this white woman from a world that was at once powerful and woefully ignorant. What did they say when I was not there? What did they make of what I said, translating my words into their ways of thinking? More impossible questions, which set off another round of pondering, interpreting.
Back on the veranda where Thompson was playing cards with the men, his rifle propped in the corner, Grahame and I would compare notes, or just sit quietly with the barkcloth on the walls around us, not trying to interpret. His days were spent with the young men he hadn’t had a chance to know while Andrew had kept us on the hop; we relaxed, both of us, into the pace of the village. When the food came over from the cookhouse, the table Andrew had built became an easier place. David had told us that on his previous visit the men had eaten on the floor, everyone in together. With the table – another innovation from bisnis school – came a formality, without enough room for everyone. And so had begun a muted tussle about who could and would eat with us. I wanted some of the women from the cookhouse to join us, but that upset the men; the women shook their heads and went back to the smoke and the cooking fire. Grahame had thought David let too many of the young men eat with us; David didn’t want to be the one to decide who was there, or not. Those who had English took one priority; those who were quick to sit down took another. I didn’t like the exclusion of the women, while I, being white, got to eat at the table, and was stopped by Andrew if I went to eat in the cookhouse. Stay, David said, or it will shame him.
In compensation, on the night before David left for the high villages, I arranged a special dinner with the women. We ate on mats on the veranda, and for this meal I had saved the last of the packets of tuna we’d brought from Australia – most of which had been eaten by the men crowded round the table. The women gave the tuna close attention. Yes, it was good, but where did it come from? It was like tinned fish, I said, from a shop, a trade store. They looked dubious. Which river was it from? I did not know. They asked about my garden, and I tried to describe my Balmain courtyard. No! They tutted and laughed. A garden smaller than the size of the guesthouse? It was not possible! Like Popondetta I said, some people have small gardens beside their house, that’s all. No laughing this time, a sombre tutting. That night was the first time I heard us called the ‘new’ people. They, with their gardens and their mountain and their cloth, are the ‘old’ people.
It was also that night with the women that I heard again the story of the war and the volcano. Lila, the duvahe, had been a small girl when the mountain erupted in 1951. She had walked for two days with her grandmother to the government camp further north along the road to Kokoda. She’d learned to paint from that grandmother. The mountain had blown in the other direction, to the north, to the other side, but thick ash and flying rocks had landed on Ömie land. For a week before the eruption, the sky had been dark and the bush animals – cassowaries, bandicoots, snakes, even wild boars – had come in from the forest, into the villages; the rivers were sucked back up into the mountain, or ran too hot to cross. The mountain was angry. Unhappy. Naomi and Pauline translated. Lila named the Ömie who were killed, not as many as there were on the other side of the mountain, where the missions were and the land less rugged; many, many people were killed there, Lila did not know how many. On the Ömie side, the forests had caught fire, the gardens were covered in ash; it was a year before the rivers ran a normal temperature. Old people died in the camp, away from their land. It was not good. And all because the mountain had been unsettled by the angry spirits of soldiers killed in the war, lost and wandering about, unable to find their way back to their own ancestors. Too many of the men who knew how to look after the mountain had been taken away to work on the Kokoda Track. All those white-men soldiers, some no more than boys, left dead, carried dead, and the Japanese, dead men lying in the forest, dead souls upsetting the mountain. Yes, it was very big work for the duvahe.
This was not legend; this was history, another view, another interpretation, which, told by Lila that night on the mountain, made perfect sense.
And afterwards? What then?
This was what Lila wanted me to know. Her hand had hold of my wrist, her eyes didn’t let me move. The women were very quiet, the children leaning against their mothers were still. It was then that I understood the division between these villages and the Ömie at Náapa, the village to which I had paid no attention on the long walk up. There they had understood this cataclysmic eruption as a rebuke, a punishment, for not having gone fully enough to the missions. In contrast, I understood Lila to be saying, the Ömie we were visiting had moved their villages higher, where the missions would not come, higher and further; their appeasement was to paint. Our mountain. Our art. At Náapa there was no more painting. The missions came, the people there, our relatives, Lila said, do not like that we paint; they wanted trade stores, oh it was no good, and they planted coffee, and their rivals across the river, some of them married to women from Náapa, took the money. No good.
And now? I asked. We are very happy that you have come. Would they say otherwise? But I understood why the security guards were there, and why there’d been a disturbance a few nights before which had woken us, only briefly, but not Thompson, who snored throug
h it all. Andrew had passed the event off as something nothing, but no, it was not nothing; it was men from Náapa, relatives some of them, wanting money. Have they gone? Yes, for now, they have gone. That night with the women I asked if this trouble with Náapa altered how the duvahe thought about the cloth leaving the village? Maybe, Pauline translated. Lila and Dapene nodded their heads. Náapa was a problem. But their own young men, they, too, were a big problem. Not the old men, the young men. They’re all stirred up. Gardens, fences, hunting, it is not enough. They are shamed in Popondetta, bush kanakas nothing. They are shamed when they walk on the road and do not have the money for the PMV. They want pride. They want a bisnis. David says bisnis can come from the art. Is this so? Pauline asked. Maybe, I said, an answer that was no answer. David a good man, she said, a strong spirit. And I understood that they needed an answer from me, which I couldn’t give. I couldn’t tell them that an art bisnis would bring money and solve the problem of the young men; nor could I cast doubt on an option that was well in train, a possibility that existed only because of David and the resources he had to make it happen – were it to happen. I sighed, I said general things – that there were many people in Australia who were interested in art from PNG, that David was a good man, he wasn’t here to make money for himself. The women sighed. The young men, they said, a big problem true.
And the young women? I asked. Do they want to learn the art? Before David came, before Andrew went to Moresby, did the young women learn the painting? Some, maybe. And now that David’s come, do the young women learn? They’d been dressed in painted nioge for the demonstrations, though often enough Dapene slapped at them, a correcting hand. Some like the cloth, yes. For some it is the old way, and they do not want. They want warm clothes, they want trade-store cloth, it is better for the babies. It is cold when it rains, which it did that night, thumping down, keeping Grahame awake, deciding not to go with David on up the mountain.
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