Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  And so it was with us when we flew back over the mountains, David, Jeremy and I with young Oliver and Maya. We landed at Tufi, the plane coming in over a landscape of deep fjords and vivid green peninsulas, circling out over a shimmer of reef, before landing on the sloping grass strip. The men who met us greeted David with high fives, their baseball hats worn with the peaks to the back. Already joking with Oliver, a language of references the young understand, they took us by dinghy to their villages further east along the fjords. David was bruised, brooding – when we were alone, which wasn’t often – on what had happened, and how it might have been different. He should have got up that night when the men from Náapa had come to the village; he’d heard voices and thought it was young men trying to wake the girls. But for the rest, it was the buoyant David who turned his face to the village, and I alone saw that he was unable to relax into the ease of that beautiful place – which Oliver and Maya enjoyed so much, learning traditional dances, and tapping to a fjord reggae, that they decided to stay on after we left.

  I’ve been back to those villages many times. I’ve been back alone, and I’ve taken many people, not only friends my age, but their daughters, some as young as thirteen or fourteen, and I’ve taken Martha, sanguine when she went back alone with another young woman. The safety of this Papua New Guinea, its beauty, the strength and gentleness of its people, is a view that runs counter to everything we read. The first time Hilary came with me, we were swimming in a fjord late one afternoon. Lying on our backs in the calm, silky water, kicking gently to keep afloat, looking up at green curving into the distance, the mountains beyond, a dreamy blue-grey against the sky. Why didn’t you tell me it was like this? Hilary said. How come I didn’t know? Hilary! I said, and we laughed, pulled our goggles back down and returned our attention to Evie, who’d brought us to this part of the reef and was diving down, pointing to a bright blue starfish.

  And if you were to go to Manus right now, you would not find the hellhole you read of. The detention centre, Australian-run, is a hellhole, built of the wrong materials in the wrong location, but Manus is not. It’s an island with a strong and proud history. It has produced many of the best leaders of an independent country; it has an ethos of education and cooperation.67 It has been rocked, like so many places in the Pacific, by the seismic events of the twentieth century, not least of which, for Manus, was the American airbase built on that small island during the Pacific War. A wave of money washed in, and then washed out again. And now the next wave washes in with the detention centre, bringing complicated and contradictory consequences for the island population.

  In villages and markets hundreds of miles away, on the north coast of the Papuan mainland, you’ll hear people say that as well as the insult that a rich country should use a poor country so, it is an insult to the ground of Manus that people from a distant place should be imprisoned there. They have seen photos on social media of rubbish tips spilling outside the detention centre. Digicel reaches into most of the villages, though not to Ömie, which remains as remote, in that sense, as it ever was. But in villages with Digicel people know of the plastic that blows into the sea, the clouds of flies, the stench that reaches nearby villages. No, it is not good, they say. It is bad for Manus, and it is bad for the ground of its ancestors to have lost and angry people imprisoned there. And this doesn’t even touch the question of the asylum seekers themselves, or the context of the dangers they are fleeing, the refuge they are seeking. That is a matter of concern to me as an Australian citizen and resident, though I rarely hear it spoken of in those villages and markets. Lost, far away from their land: on those grounds alone asylum seekers should not be on Manus.

  In February 2014, early in the writing of this book, a young Iranian Kurd called Reza Barati was beaten and killed in that detention centre. Like most Australians, I knew nothing of Reza Barati when the news of the riots and the violence came through in grainy images on news reports. And other than his death, I know very little about him now. Who was this young man, an architect, twenty-three years old? What had brought him on the hazardous journey away from the country of his birth? Do any of us know him by anything other than his death? Little information gets out of this distant camp. We hear of the flare-up of violence when riots occur, but we rarely hear the voices of those detained by a system that keeps journalists at bay, requires confidentiality from those who work there, and refuses those seeking asylum that most basic of needs, to have their stories heard.

  No, Manus is not a hellhole. The hellhole of the detention centre is Australian-made, and while the material conditions are woeful, the true hell of that hole is psychological for the people detained there without trial, without voice, without hope, with all certainty removed, their stories questioned, their names replaced with numbers. The shame is ours, here in comfortable Australia. It is also the shame of a colluding PNG government. It is not the shame of that country’s people, and certainly not the shame of the people of Manus.

  12

  When I stood beside Pauline after the meeting of the duvahe on the mountain and she imagined the day she’d visit my place, anxiety had punched through me. Pauline in Sydney? What had we set in train? What else was being imagined in that rejoicing, dancing crowd? But five years later, in July 2009, there she was, indeed in my place. She had come down to Sydney with Dapene for the second exhibition of Ömie art at Annandale Galleries. The first at the same gallery had been in 2006, and in preparation for it Andrew and Michael had come to Sydney. David and I had arranged for them to spend time with a young linguist – a postgraduate from Sydney University – drawing up lexicons, Ömie word lists, standardising spellings, for use in catalogues and essays about the art. Watching them work, David and I were astonished at the subtleties of vowel sounds that the Ömie and the linguist could hear but we could not. O. Ö. Oe. Other days were spent with Mike – the anthropologist friend I’d visited in Suva, who’d lent me his diaries, and was now living in Sydney – going over the stories of the duvahe, names of the clans, their interconnections, the iconography of the designs.

  Not much more than a year after that visit, Andrew was bitten by a snake. He had been in his garden and, with no one there to help him, had walked back to the village, where he’d died. David heard the news on the phone from Popondetta. It was hard enough to grasp what had happened. Why was there no one else in the garden? Why hadn’t they carried him down to the aid post on the road? It was harder still to comprehend the ramifications of this next disturbance. Was it a warning? Was the mountain displeased? Who would pay the compensation? The questions swirled as a dreadful event gathered conflicting meanings. A batch of art had arrived in Sydney a few months earlier – Andrew’s last. David and I looked at it and knew at once that something wasn’t right. But what exactly? It wasn’t until later that we learned there’d been a dispute with the women, over what we were also never entirely sure, but it had to do with them feeling pressured in ways that were no good for the cloth – and as a result they’d refused to paint. So Andrew got the men on the job and had them drawing the lines with rulers he’d brought back from Sydney. Not every line was ruled, but enough to kill the music, the movement of the cloth. After more calls to Popondetta, long negotiations, Andrew’s replacement, a man called Alban, came down with another batch, and among them, as well as cloth painted by Dapene and Lila, were nioge by some of the young women who’d returned to the old knowledge, giving it new shape. We were on the road again.

  Pauline and Dapene were the first women, the first artists, to visit Sydney. It was July when their plane landed after dark, and it was cold. Waiting for them at the airport with David, I was jittery. Half an hour, an hour, and still no sign of them, a long lull with no one coming through, as if every plane had emptied. And then there they were – Pauline and Dapene, with Alban, undiminished by a journey every bit as daunting to them as our climb through the forest had been to us. I had jackets and scarves for them, but all they had on their feet when we walked out into the
night were the rubber thongs Alban had bought for them in Popondetta. Walking to the car, Dapene stopped, but no, it wasn’t the cold. She was looking up at the sky, exclaiming in her Ömie language. Pauline and Alban looked up with her. David and I did too. The stars, Alban translated, the stars are changed. They do not shine. Yes, they were dim indeed compared to the constellations above their mountain. A different world, this new people’s place.

  The next day David drove us all to a shopping mall to buy shoes and warm clothes. I thought a local second-hand shop would be easier for Dapene, but Alban had been to this mall before, and David said that at Big W they could also buy for people back in the villages. So off we set, through the suburbs of Sydney, Alban in the front with David, and me between the two women in the back. Dapene held onto my hand in a tight grasp. Pauline was interested in everything she saw through the window, until we turned into the car park with its low concrete ceiling, dim light, and lines of silent cars. No good, she said as we walked towards the mall. Not a good place. Inside she rallied and let go of my arm, but Dapene remained subdued. We found shoes and jackets and filled the trolley with t-shirts for the children in the villages, and with packet after packet of underwear. For women reliant on moss and leaves during menstruation, a pair of pants to hold them in place allows mobility, a degree of control. Into the trolley it all went. David raised his eyebrows. It’s okay, I murmured, I’d explain later. The mall had shaken the women, the queue was slow, I had a headache myself, but Dapene, though subdued, no longer needed my hand. We had only to get back to the car and we’d be out of there. But as we walked past the food outlets, surrounded that day by particularly large white people overflowing their chairs, Dapene suddenly slumped. Her shoulders folded over, she shrank, visibly, and the light went out of her eyes. Another whack of anxiety, David this time as well as me. Had she had a stroke? (She hadn’t. We took her to a doctor the next day even though we knew by then that it wasn’t that.) Not sickness, Pauline said, holding her up. It was the bad spirits on the escalators. They’d stolen all her strength.

  Back in the car Dapene slumped against Pauline. I put my hand on hers and there was no response. What should we do? Even David was at a loss. Best we go to your house, Pauline said, adding Missis in a voice also gone limp. Best we go to your house, and Alban go with David to his. For Pauline, it was the obvious answer, as it should have been for David and me, knowing the gendered nature of life in Ömie. So that’s what we did.

  ‘Will you be okay?’ David asked as he pulled up at my house. ‘Ring if you need me.’

  In this crisis, David wasn’t an option. I made a pot of strong tea, heaped sugar into the cups, opened a packet of biscuits and again turned to Pauline. Certain, strong-voiced Pauline.

  ‘Where is your ground?’ she asked.

  Outside. Yes, of course, they needed to be outside.

  At the oval at the end of my street, they scuffed at the hard earth with toes in new shoes. They leaned down and touched the grass, pressed their fingers through to the earth. Yes, they supposed it was ground, of a sort.

  ‘Your gardens?’ Pauline asked. ‘They are where?’

  ‘In the cities we have no gardens. We have shops,’ I said and Pauline translated for Dapene. It clearly wasn’t an adequate answer. Pauline looked at me again, her face a question mark.

  ‘There are markets,’ I said. ‘The people who have the gardens bring the food to the market. The people from the shops buy the food from them.’

  Pauline nodded, translating for Dapene again. Not much better, but sufficient this time, and yes, we could go to a market, they could see it for themselves.

  We walked on round the oval, along the front of Snails Bay, and out onto the jetty to taste the salt water, sol warra, they’d seen from the plane but had never encountered hand and foot. We walked around to Mort Bay, and as we walked Dapene regained something of her stature; by the time we returned to the oval, she and Pauline were singing Ömie songs. It was dusk, joggers were jogging past, the lights were coming on.

  Back at my house they wanted to lie down, which they did, on my bed – a good spirit bed, mercifully – while in the kitchen I brooded on that Missis. Was it a default position? The result of being here in the ‘new’ people’s city? An indication of the stress of the moment? A rebuke that I should be able to look after them – protect them – as they had me while I was on their ground? That’s when I wished David was in my kitchen, and not across the city at his house with Alban. I rang, the next best thing, to let him know how we were going. Alban, he said, was fine. He had all the cloth out on the floor and had refused a beer. Yes, we agreed, right then we could have done with each other and a bottle of red. I’ll check in tomorrow, I said, and rang off.

  When Pauline and Dapene came downstairs to eat – sweet potato and pork that didn’t convince them as pig – Pauline reported that Dapene’s strength had returned. She took my hand, put her nose to the inside of my elbow, leaned into my shoulder and breathed in. Sister-friend, she said.

  Where is your ground? It is a question that has stayed with me. Where was our ground? Ours in the sense of a highly asphalted world, and ungrounded culture? Where was my ground? Mine in the sense of the PNG novel I was – or rather at that stage was not – writing. And where was my ground as the terrain beneath Jeremy trembled and shook? In the spiral of his life with his younger son, where did I stand? Where could I stand? Did my love for him, tattered but not gone, my commitment to a relationship made late in life, require of me the sacrifices he was prepared to make – and couldn’t not make?

  Books suck. Books took me away. Books kept me sane.

  Jeremy had come to PNG with me one more time and after that I returned alone, or with friends, or a combination of both. David didn’t come again – in part due, I think, to the injury of the shakedown, in part to a shifting interest to Vanuatu that had already begun; he had art projects there that needed attention. I went with him once, towards the end of 2006 when things were at a low ebb with Jeremy and with the still-stuck book. You need a change, David said, a break; it’ll do you good. Come as my guest, he said, and I did. Jeremy was put out, very, but I went anyway and David was right, it did me good. Though I couldn’t not feel for Jeremy, still it was a wonderful trip: islands, banana boats, masked dancers, deep water and clear light. Why don’t you set the book here, David said, it’d be a whole lot easier, and maybe it would but my allegiances – my heart – were in Papua New Guinea, and the book only made sense if it was there.

  A few months later I was back on a plane to Port Moresby. I didn’t climb the mountain again, for reasons that mostly had to do with legs and strength, but I returned many times to the fjords. On the way, I’d sometimes stop in Popondetta to take messages to the Ömie who were down from the mountain, before flying on to those bountiful villages, where I spent weeks at a time sitting with the women, with the elders, in the cookhouse, or on the platform of a winhaus, an open-sided platform built beside the beach or on a ridge to catch the wind. I’d learn from the women as they made their bilums and wove mats; I’d walk with them up to the gardens, canoe with them to the next village; I’d visit the schools where David was still paying the fees of many children. I took up sketch pads and crayons and scissors and glue. Most went into the school, which from an Australian perspective was chronically under-resourced. Chalk and board, no power, workbooks for the older grades but very little for the younger children, who’d come to the winhaus after they’d canoed home from school, wanting a page from the pads, a crayon. These were children I’d seen draw in the sand, diagrams, maps, pictures, all along the beach, and the older children teaching the letters, stories, wending their way around the drawings; and the waves lapping in, and the children laughing, running into the water, and back out again to draw some more. And there they were, sitting beside me drawing on their paper until the light went.

  There were occasional whispers, hints, that David hadn’t always chosen the right students to sponsor, and all of them were b
oys. I’d try to persuade him to support others and I made the case for the girls, which was not difficult given the amount of research demonstrating that the education of girls is the fastest route to development. Sometimes he did as I suggested; but when I asked if this was the best way of supporting the village – should we set up something that gave the villages, the schools, more say – he’d defer: later, he’d say, we’ll think about it later. Like all of us, his strengths and his weaknesses were interlinked. The other side of his generosity was his need to control. I didn’t press; that was my weakness. I didn’t have the money to do what he did – though I sponsored a few girls – and there was something in David – that vulnerability shadowing his masculine certainty? – I didn’t want to cross. Besides, there was too much to lose – for me, and for the villages. So I did what I could, and in the villages I placated and soothed, and for the most part it was no more than a ripple on the surface of visits as calm as the water; canoes gliding in, crayfish from the reef, a meal as the sun set, an evening of story and bad tea, mosquito nets.