To The Point

With

Percy

Chatterton

To The Point

We have recently acquired some new Papuan neighbours. Their employer has had a house built for them on a block adjoining ours—not a very large house, but a well designed one for its size. The design includes a small kitchen with a conventional fuel stove. But most mornings, and quite often in the afternoon too, I can look across and see a little camp fire, with a kettle or a saucepan on it, burning briskly on the ground outside the kitchen.

rHERE are probably two reasons for this. One is that fire vood is getting harder and harder o come by in Port Moresby, and i camp fire uses less wood than a del stove. The other is that Papu ins coming to town from the villages end to re-create their accustomed vay of life in their new surroundings.

To many such people the idea of iving in a house is a new and strange >ne. In most Papuan villages people lon’t live in their houses—they leep in them, and take refuge from he rain in them.

But they live for most of the time jutside them, either on a verandah )uilt out in front of the house, or m the ground underneath, among he spindly piles which hold it up, )r on what the Motu people call a mtapata —a platform of bamboo or ight timber raised on posts two or hree feet off the ground. This may )e built in the shade of the house )r of a convenient tree nearby, or t may have a roughly thatched roof >ver it.

Ghoulies, ghosties

Here the daily business of living ;oes on. Here meals are eaten after >eing cooked on a camp fire on the 'round nearby. Here family con caves take place, and siestas are aken in the heat of the day. Here lad sits mending his fishing net, vhile mum, with her little daughter’s lead on her knee, searches the small nop of hair for insect life which, vhen found, she disposes of deftly.

Night falls. The fires die down, fhe family retires to the house to leep, securely shutting all the doors ind windows to keep out the ghoulies md ghosties and things that go bump

Building houses that Papuans like to live in

in the night, and incidentally the fresh air, too.

There is pathos in the sight of people like these trying to adapt themselves to life in a brick cell with holes (euphemistically known as breeze bricks) in the wall, instead of windows—holes which can only, with great difficulty, be made secure against the urban ghoulies and ghosties, often more terrifying than the rural ones.

There is pathos in the patapata built alongside it, with a few banana plants set around it to screen it from the public gaze, and from that of imperious officials who might order it to be demolished.

There is pathos in the sense of insecurity which comes from having as neighbours folk with whom one

has no ties of kinship or even of language.

These are the factors, quite as much as the physical shortage of low-cost housing, which cause so many of the immigres to gravitate to the shanty settlements. TTiere the insecurity of their squatter status is compensated for by the fact that they can settle among their own kith and kin, and, from materials they can buy or scrounge, build the kind of house they like to live in.

The result of their efforts is a shanty which externally is an eye sore to the fastidious European, but which inside is a good deal more roomy and comfortable than some of the Administration’s efforts.

What sort of houses do Papuans like to live in? Until recently it

• Even in the shanty settlements, the Papuan houses are usually bigger than his one, which has only one room and live-out area with an earth floor.

had not occurred to anyone in auth ority to ask this question. One gets the impression that most of the designs for low-cost housing have been prepared by architects commut ing by car between an air-conditioned drawing office and an SB,OOO bun galow in the predominantly Euro pean suburb of Boroko.

Now the situation has changed, and the Department of Public Works has established a Buildings Research Unit which, with some help from the CSIRO, is looking into two re lated questions: What sort of houses do Papuans like to live in, and how can local materials be used to give them these houses at prices or rentals which they can afford to pay?

This unit has already begun to pro duce some very promising results.

Attractive prototypes

At Sabama, a low-cost housing area in Port Moresby, it has built some very attractive and liveable-in prototype houses, far in advance of anything yet achieved by the use of more orthodox designs and materials.

Some of them are built of stabilised sarth bricks, others are timber frame buildings with walls of selo —strips af sago-leaf midrib plaited into sheets on simple looms. One, per haps the most promising of all, combines the use of these diverse materials.

The Indian architect in charge of this work has also introduced new ideas from Asia for simple and :heap, but hygienic toilets and stoves which don’t waste firewood.

All this experimental work is aimed at producing a larger house for less money by the use of uncon ventional methods. When I visited :he unit recently I saw plans and a model of a house of nearly five squares which it is hoped can be miilt, in Port Moresby, for $750.

This design includes a large, semi enclosed live-out area, something which should be regarded as an es sential part of any house intended for Papuans.

In other parts of Sabama there are “self-help” areas, where men who are earning a steady wage can get a block of land and a loan to enable them to build a house for themselves. One Papuan I know has built himself a first-rate five room house under this scheme.

Housing commission

But, on the whole, the scheme has not been a success, since most of the applicants were found not to have a sufficient assured income to qualify for a loan. As well, a man building his own house in town can not call in the help of a large circle of relatives in the way that his coun terpart in the village can.

Till now the problem of providing houses at all levels has been handled by a Housing Division of the Trea sury. But an ordinance recently passed by the House of Assembly has cleared the way for the estab lishment of an independent housing commission, on the same lines as the already existing Electricity Com mission.

The housing commission, when set up, will have no easy task. It will inherit some dreary rows of “little

boxes”, which it is perhaps not too unkind to say should never have been built. And in the new houses it builds it will have to be continually sensitive to changing needs.

I have used the phrase “the sort of house that Papuans like to live in”. But Papuan living patterns are no longer static; they are changing all the time.

The traditional Papuan house con sisted of one large all-purpose room, which at night became a bedroom by the simple process of spreading sleeping mats on the floor.

Where considerations of cost limit the size of the house, this is still the most advantageous way of using the available floor space, and many Papuans are still quite happy about this style of living.

But as they become more sophis ticated and adopt the use of furni ture—chairs, tables and beds—it becomes necessary to split the avail able space up into rooms. And as the children begin to grow up and go to high school, a place where they can do their homework becomes a desideratum. (Over)

• Many of Port Moresby's Europeans live in houses such as these at Boroko, They are worth $1O,OOO each and more.

• Three types of Papuan houses cur rently being built in Port Moresby.

At left, a frame house with walls of plaited "selo". Centre, the prototype of a small stabilised-brick house.

Right, a self-help house, built with the help of an Administration loan.

So living patterns change all the :ime, and sometimes the old overlaps the new, as, for example, when, though there may be one or more tiedrooms, some members of the family, or perhaps visitors from the lome village, bed down in the living room.

One type of house which the new :ommission might well consider building would consist of a live-out irea and one large room capable of ?eing divided up by light and easily erected partitions, which could be noved around to suit the needs of he occupants.

It must not be overlooked that a lew generation of “townees” is emerging in Papua and New Guinea.

Phese are young people who were >orn and have grown up in town, md have never known village life.

They have been educated in town ichools where the pupils are drawn rom a score or more of different ribes. They have intermarried across ribal frontiers. They have shed >ld customs and adopted new ones, fhey have shed old prejudices and naybe acquired some new ones, fhey are a new phenomenon, and, if may be allowed to plagiarise St. ohn, it doth not yet appear what hey shall be. But they, too, will lave to be housed.

Unorthodox approach

When the Housing Commission has lone its best and, within the limits f what is economically possible, has rovided Papuan and New Guinean Dwnsfolk with the kind of houses hey like to live in at the kind of ent they can afford to pay, or has iven them loans with which to build heir own houses, we shall still be 2ft with a hard core of shanty wellers who cannot afford either of liese alternatives.

These are the casually and irregu arly employed unskilled workers, /ho cannot rely on being able to eep up either regular rent payments r regular loan repayments.

The suggestion has been made that 3 meet this situation we need not nly low covenant areas but also o covenant areas. Here the land /ould be divided into small blocks nd minimal essential services— /ater stand-pipes, sanitary facilities nd garbage disposal—would be pro ided, A small all-in charge would e made to cover rent and services, nd the tenants would be left to ut up their own shanties according 3 their taste and means.

I understand that this rather un rthodox approach has been used /ith success in some other parts of tie Pacific.

Would this arrangement be any improvement on the present shanty settlements? I think that it would be in several respects. First, even the minimal essential services I have mentioned are at present lacking in most of the shanty settlements.

Second, the shanties would be ade quately spaced instead of in a tightly packed huddle. Third, with secure tenure the tenants would be more likely to improve their shanties bit by bit until they begin to look like real houses. There is no incentive

for them to do this so long as they are liable to be ejected at any mo ment.

I have heard it said that such an area would become a hotbed of crime. This is poppycock. I live in an area where there are several shanty settlements, and in my experi ence their inhabitants are among the quietest and most inoffensive of our citizenry. I feel pretty sure that the police are called to the local villages far more often than they are to the shanty settlements.

Curly case

Can the land be found on which to implement such a plan? In Port Moresby this is certainly not going to be easy. The people of the Motu and Koita villages, the original land owners, have already disposed of a substantial part of their tribal land, and are very conscious of the value of what is left.

They are even challenging the validity of the Administration’s title to some areas which have long been regarded as Crown land. One of these is “Newtown”, once the locale of Port Moresby’s golf course, and since the war the scene of quite a lot of commercial development.

Two Hanuabada groups, one Motu and one Koita, are now rival claim ants to its ownership, A nice curly case for the Land Titles Commis sion.

So it may not be too easy to find a site for Shangri-La, as the no covenant project has been nicknamed.

But it’s worth trying.

Papuan houses like these, built entirely of local materials, are rare today in Port Moresby or its vicinity. This picture was taken at Hanuabada, Port Moresby, before the war.