January 2014 was hot. My small courtyard garden shrivelled under a relentless sun; thyme dried, oregano browned at the edges. Only rosemary thrived, and the bamboo. I stayed indoors and wrote, tracking back to another house, on a corner in Enmore. I drove past it one afternoon, just to have a look, remind myself. It has windows in the long side wall. Nice. I would have done that if I’d had the money. Should I have stayed there? How different would it have been with Jeremy had I lived a twenty-minute drive away and was not at the end of the lane? Since the bad year of 2009, little by little he’d become lost in depression, barely recognisable as the man I had loved. Not all at once, of course; these things are incremental and cumulative. The line I’d drawn, or tried to draw, was scuffed. There were times when I crossed it because I couldn’t not, and times when I crossed it because I’d get a glimpse of the man I’d once known. There were moments of harmony, when we swam in a nearby harbour pool and lay in the shade to read. And there were times, not many but a few, when he’d walk into my house and there he’d be, arms open, and by way of apology tickets to a concert. I have a photo of that Jeremy – ‘the good Jeremy’ my nieces remember with affection – taken in London in 2010 when he and I and Martha were in Hyde Park after visiting the memorial for the victims of the 7/7 bombings. With a pillar for each person killed, Martha’s friend Laura Webb among them, the memorial is simple, clear, uncluttered. Martha was weepy, Jeremy was calm, kind, and we walked on through the park: a hot day, almost Australian.
So yes, there were moments, and I am glad for them, but the movement of those years was downwards for Jeremy as his depressions became more frequent and he sank into periods of despair that left him profoundly alone, drinking too much, alienated not only from me but from all but his most stalwart friends. At his worst, he’d appear at my door, sometimes barely capable of speech. I’d feed him, ring Oliver, who was managing his hospital admissions, and send him back to his cluttered old house. Some ruthless part of me performed the care without letting it touch the part of me that was writing again. The sliver of ice that Graham Greene said lives in the heart of every writer? Not that I wanted to write about Jeremy’s depression – which is what Greene meant; where others weep, we watch and write. I didn’t want to write about it then, and I don’t now, and not only for Jeremy’s sake and his sons’. What is there to say about witnessing depression, the daily pall of its inertia, its stasis? When there was forward movement, or what appeared to be forward movement in Jeremy’s case, it was the effect of ECT hauling him out of despair and overshooting him into a manic high. And when that happened he had no interest in being around me; the coin flipped, and where there’d been dependence there was resentment.
When that happened early in March 2014 I was frankly relieved, and the relief was entirely for me. Jeremy would spiral back, I knew, and I also knew there was nothing I could do to prevent it even if I’d been the most wifely of women. If it took a sliver of ice, I’m glad of it; never mind writers, there are times when every woman could do with one – ‘in the interests of freedom’, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary the year she was writing To the Lighthouse. She’d refused to agree with Leonard that they hire a gardener, not wanting to be tied to a house away from London, all their money spent. ‘L. was, I think, hurt at this, & I was annoyed at saying it, yet did it, not angrily, but in the interests of freedom. Too many women give way on this point, & secretly grudge their unselfishness in silence – a bad atmosphere.’74 And so I stayed home and wrote, day by day, Second Half First arriving first in a scrawl in my notebook, and then on the computer, chapters printed out into a neat pile. There it was each morning, returning me each afternoon to the books I’d read all those years ago, when ‘the conundrum love propounds’,75 to take a line from the wonderful Elizabeth Bishop, was a live and potent question; this time I was reading more like an anthropologist studying a tribe of clever young women and their strange misshapen longings. And in this way, for the first months of 2014 my life was quiet, almost too quiet, with friends away, Gail in Berlin for a year, Robyn having moved to Melbourne as Helen Garner had years ago, another friend moving back to Perth, another in London. Helen Mueller was up the road, a felicitous presence, an unfolding conversation, but otherwise, for the most part, the days passed, slowly expanding to meet what was required of them by the book on my desk.
There was one welcome interruption early in the year when Libi Gnecci-Ruscone was in Sydney. Italian with an Australian mother, Libi is an anthropologist who has done fieldwork in the fjords, on a peninsula between the villages I visit and the airstrip at Tufi. I’d met her in January 2012, in Milan where she lives – I’d flown over after Christmas in London with the family. There was snow on the hills beyond the city where we walked, talking of tropical fjords that were as present to us as the city’s churches and theatres. I’d read her thesis about the ways in which traditional practices and the new ways of Christianity intersect. It wasn’t a case of one supplanting the other, but of the two co-existing, with each coming to the fore in certain situations and for certain reasons and benefits. So while they could appear contradictory, it was not confusion so much as a canny use of competing rhetorics and discourses, a nimbleness of argument that made a lot of sense to me, having seen it in action in the villages where I stayed. And not just in terms of Christianity, but more broadly the world of modernity that was pressing on them. There’d been no Digicel when Libi did her fieldwork; now there are mobile phones in the villages and the internet in Popondetta. The challenge for these villages and villages like them across the country is how to integrate, or reconcile, these two realities. It isn’t a matter of choosing one over the other, any more than it was a choice between love and career for many a young woman of my generation, or today.
I’d read Libi’s thesis after David died and my visits back to PNG became radically altered. Never again would I be the writer with her notebook and clean hands dreaming of fiction. It had been pleasant enough coasting along with David, leaving the decisions to him, retreating to the shade of a tree when the dinghy didn’t arrive or the plane was late. Let David sort it out. It was a part-formed way of being. I thought I’d understood the dilemma of post-colonial Papua New Guinea – I’d certainly read enough – but in truth I’d barely begun before I was slapped in the face, which is how it felt at the time, by the question of what to do now that David was dead and the money to support all that he’d supported was gone. Without him, what was going to happen? It was a question that came in myriad forms, many of them addressed to me – as if I had any answers, as much in shock as anyone.
Fortunately, just months before he died, David had found the young man who would take over the running of Ömie Artists. He’d been looking for a while for someone younger who could help him with the work that was gathering pace with the success of the art, someone who’d be able to do what David and I could not do again, and climb that mountain. I met Brennan King just weeks before David died, and maybe only someone as young as Brennan would have stepped in with no financial backing, no income, nothing but his wits and his youth. Being the age he was, there were those who doubted he had what it took to negotiate the tough world of galleries and curators. But David had been no fool in his selection. Brennan had worked with Aboriginal art centres before his interest turned to the Pacific, and after David died I saw him with Alban and the other Ömie who’d come down to the NGV opening. He took them to live in his house. I was still having radiation, and while those who’ve had chemo scoff at the burns and the exhaustion, with David so recently gone I was in no fit state. Brennan was young, welcoming and full of interest. He was with them every step of the way, at the opening in Melbourne with its lights and cameras, and on the buses in Sydney. He was at ease with them, as they were with him. In the two short weeks they were here, he soaked in everything they had to say, and arranged his first visit to the mountain, where news of David’s death had had a predictably destabilising effect. Was the mountain displeased again? Was the pride the young men
had taken in their bisnis to be pulled from under them? If the art was to survive this next disturbance, I knew it’d take someone young enough to walk that mountain not once but many times. What gallery owner was going to do that? There’s a story to be told here, a long one, and I hope one day it is told and told well. As to Brennan, his achievement speaks for itself when I tell you that the art has more than survived. A new generation of women is painting, a movement of vision that is grounded in the lineage of their grandmothers, as younger artists reinterpret their world both within Ömie and beyond. There have been exhibitions every year, and money is going back to the communities – not a lot, but enough. There is peace with Náapa, and Ömie art is now in public collections in the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich, the British Museum in London, the Fowler Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington. This in addition to increased holdings in Australian private collections and public galleries.76
In the fjords the questions were different and at first, I thought, a good deal easier. It was mostly a matter of school fees. Across PNG, David had dozens of children in school. Were they to lose the opportunity now that there was no sponsor? In case you think he had them at fee-paying private schools, no; fees had been made a condition of aid by the 1990s – a requirement of the neo-liberal Washington Consensus – and are levied even at ill-resourced schools in villages where families are usually large and there is little or no access to cash. So I did a whip-round of friends and colleagues, raising enough to pay for the year that was upon us within two months of David dying. It was a holding pattern, that’s all, delaying the inevitable. Individual sponsorship, as problematic as it can be generous, is no solution. Even before David died there’d been those whispers about which children he sponsored, and the question of the girls who weren’t getting a look-in. While I was earning a university salary, I could afford to sponsor more girls, and when I did I found myself embarrassed by the attention I got from the families, and the gifts of necklaces that’d come from the relatives of others wanting fees for their girls. Worse than embarrassed, I felt in bad faith, as if I was something and someone I wasn’t, feeding the notion that white means rich, turning people I thought of as friends into supplicants, distorting the relationship I’d thought I was establishing – though I suppose I wasn’t, or not entirely – on other, more equal terms. They didn’t need to read the development literature to know the significance of literacy and education; that’s why those without sponsorship were aggrieved. They understood what researchers tell people like me, that education is a key to the future if they are to protect their forests from the loggers and their reefs from the pirate fishing boats; if they are to be in a position to make meaningful contracts with those who wish to use their resources; if they are to sustain their way of life, earn their own money, enough to supplement lives rich in gardens and forest resources. Let alone if their people, and people from the many villages like theirs, are to have a voice in the governing of their own district, their nation, and not leave it to a self-perpetuating, all-too-often corruption-breeding elite. Without these voices in the mix, without voices to support the many working for good governance, how else is change to come? This isn’t my question. I might be asking it here, but it’s asked in many ways across the country, in villages and markets, in universities and offices, by bloggers and the rising generation of writers stepping into the role of watchdog and witness. Naïve optimism, you might say, and yes, maybe, when PNG is regarded as a business opportunity by those with money and power to know the value of its resources. In hotels in Moresby, I’ve heard businessmen, drink in hand, boast of deals in the high millions, while outside beyond the guards and the security wire there are people living on a few kina a day. There’s a lot stacked against this new generation of writers, but when one of them is also the governor of a once-corrupt province, and with social media gathering pace, maybe it is not entirely a false optimism.77
As to the matter of school fees and my small quandary, a significant break came with the lifting of some, though not all, fees – a change to the conditions of aid. When this happened, albeit in a piecemeal and uneven way, the teachers and the elders in the fjord villages were of the opinion that the community, the parents, the relatives, should pay the remaining fees, at least for primary school, which in PNG goes to Grade 8 (the equivalent of Grade 5 in Australia), when local education ends. That would eliminate the favouritism of sponsorship. But it left the matter of ill-resourced schools, and it did nothing for students who could, and should, go on to study at high school. Their options were either to go to town where the high schools are, or study by distance-learning. Village parents don’t like sending their young to town with its very real risks of drugs and gangs – or pregnancy in the rare case of a girl getting there. Besides, there was the cost, and where would they stay? Everyone knew what happened when students dropped out, which – with so much stacked against them – they almost always did. It was the problem of boys again: boys returning to the village touched by town angers and town ways, the glimpse of a life that closed its door to them. Angry boys make dangerous men, I was told time and again, as if I didn’t know, as if I didn’t come from a world of angry and dangerous men, many of them concealed in smart suits and polished shoes. At least gangs declare themselves.
When it came to high school, the village preference was for distance-learning, which meant students could study from workbooks sent to villages from the Education Department. There were still fees to be paid, a charge for each subject, which makes it hard for parents who rely on fishing and gardening, but at least the boys were in sight. But where were these students to work each day, and how were they to maintain their focus, their study through four long years, with no supplementary resources and little supervision beyond that which could be given by already overstretched primary teachers not trained in the syllabus? And what about adult literacy, high on the list of priorities at every evening discussion after the meal was done and we sat talking, insects flying into the lamp, children leaning on the end of the table.
More than torches or even lamps, it was books I’d be asked to bring next time, and news magazines; books about other places, books about people like them, living in places like theirs; books for the school, books for the little ones. And so, around the table at night, from my earliest visits I’d ask the questions that had us imagining, conjuring up the possibility – the idea – of a book house. Imagine, just imagine if there was a place where the distance-learning students could study, and adults could learn to read, and the school could use the books. Imagine if there was a place where the old people could tell the stories of before, and the young ones could write them down, and the stories could live in that place, stories for the future. So much imagining, so much talk. And if anyone had told me five years ago that I’d set up a small foundation, I’d have laughed. Me? The writer who likes to say the best thing about writing is that you can do it in your pyjamas? And yet, the obvious, perhaps inevitable, outcome of all that talk was SEAM Fund, which came into being in 2012.78 We’d raise the money to build that book house to support all forms of literacy, and work with the needs of the community.
But imagining is just that; there’s a chasm between an idea, even an obvious one like this, and the realising of it. Yes, I’d hear from every side, the need is great, but be warned: many have failed. It’s expensive getting materials in, and how will you resupply? Who will manage the resources and fix them when they need it, as inevitably they will? Who will teach? And if you do get something in place, will it still be going in a year’s time? Daunted, I’d report back on the talks I’d had in Port Moresby with people from research centres and universities, from NGOs and the Education Department, with those I’d known back in our long-ago student days. There was almost always someone in the village with an answer for every contingency; if not, silence would fall and everyone would look at me. And then the t
alk would start again, and the imagining. Words are powerful drivers, which of course I well knew, and still I let them loose, conjuring up a literacy house for the village with the sigh of the night air around us, in the lamp light each face an unfolding story: Joseph the elementary teacher who saved from his pay for the tin roof that is now on the school’s roof; Euphemia with the next baby in her bilum, who did Grade 11 in Alotau and longs for more; Jackson, who keeps his books safe in a plastic bag; Lancelot, who’s teaching himself to read and is determined his boys get the education he didn’t; fierce Barbara who’s managed to get one of her sons to Grade 8, and now what? It was like wading into water that looks calm enough and finding yourself pulled along by the current. An irresistible current, sweeping me out of my depth.
And not only me, but friends I took there. Of the ones you’ve met in this book, Virginia, who I stayed with in Stoke Newington while Patrick was dying, came with her daughter Sylvie; I have photos of Sylvie, aged fourteen, jumping with the children from the low-hanging branches into the deep water of the fjord. It was seeing through Sylvie’s eyes as well as her own that made Virginia co-founder of SEAM with me, and I couldn’t have done it without her. Sophie came, and her daughter Jessie – who won an essay competition back in London with a story about an encounter with a pig. Martha was there that time, and Sylvie again. And then Martha went back on her own, spending hours at the school to which children from five villages canoe each day. She took photos of their paddles, big and small, leaning against the school wall during lessons. Dream children to teach, she said, and having taught in a school on the outskirts of Leeds, she knew what it was to work with children who were not easy to teach.79 She also knew how much would depend on the training we could provide, the partnerships we could make, not only with the education authorities but with the new literacy projects that were starting up in the towns and settlements. She went back to PNG for a month and set to work. It was like a puzzle, she said, with many pieces needing to find a new shape. But to do the research, make the first steps towards turning talk into action, we’d need someone on the ground. And that would take money. And David was dead. And fundraising is tough, especially for a place so little understood.
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