In New Guinea-The Battle

Of The Boy-House

JUDY TUDOR discusses changing trends in the territory If it had been with Machiavellian forethought that someone de creed a few years back that public servants’ houses in Papua-New Guinea be built without the traditional boy-house, the results couldn’t be more rewarding.

But no doubt the main reason tor leaving off servants’ quarters is economic. Each of the ghastly, fibro cement boxes that have turned terri tory towns into architectural night mares costs more than a solid brick villa in Australia. There is also the matter of scarcity of land in main towns. So if 20 residential boxes can be made to sprout in the space formerly required for six tropical bungalows, so much the better from the planners’ point of view.

Whatever the design behind whittling publicservantville down to boylessness, the battle has now been joined. Any public servant with any pretentions and any seniority who isn’t already ensconced in something built in the safe era of the 50’s, is already down on a waiting list for an old-type house.

But what then?

Meantime he has moved in with friends or accepted, under duress, something spindle-legged and raw out in the sticks. Until something is achieved, both he and his wife will keep their ears to the ground, noting the slightest suggestion of transfers of other, better-placed public servants and assessing their chances of inheriting.

Half a dozen years ago, when the decision about boy-houses was taken, it might have been assumed that, by the late 1960’5, no Papuan or New Guinean would want to be a house servant; instead, all would have graduated into the lower echelons of the Public Service or commerce.

In fact, although the old family retainer type is dying out fast, there is no lack of domestic help, of a sort, in most parts of the territory.

Most people have someone to wash, iron and clean, even if a house-boy is no longer expected to be able to cook as well.

But where does he go when his

few chores are over for the day?

Usually it is said euphemistically that he “lives with a one-talk”, mean ing that he has moved in illegally with a friend who happens to be employed in a house that does have a boy-house or works for a firm that provides accommodation.

One of the crosses owners of boy-houses have is the task of occasionally clearing it out of brothers, cousins, uncles, associated relations and friends of their house boy. The displaced find hidey-holes with someone else and peace is restored to the backyard boy-house until, inevitably, other cousins and one-talks and village elders sur reptitiously establish themselves, to go in their turn at the next big clean out.

There is an idea current in the territory that the Administration has come to the end of providing housing for more expatriate public servants; that expatriates’ jobs will be pro gressively localised and the necessity for houses stabilised.

After a 20-year splurge, when government houses have spread over the landscape of all townships like some disease, this isn’t before time. Although no post-war house has compared with the pre-war comfort of the verandahed bungalow, in recent years, as the costs went up, the standard types have tended to become progressively more hideous and, right at the end of the line, is a split-level, fibro-cement affair of unadorned austerity.

"Things from outer-space"

When a new batch of these dwellings has just been turned out upon the raw earth they look like a huddle of unidentifiable Things from outer-space, committing some mass act of indecent exposure.

They are built on high, thin piles, about 10 feet from the ground at the rear, and under this is placed a pair of concrete laundry-tubs where

the house-boy spends most of his time.

As the rooms inside are small, here, too, are stacked in full public view the domestic impedimenta that usually goes into a tool-shed or garage. Although everyone in the territory has a car, no car-port is provided and of course there are no fences.

Mercifully in that climate, hedges and trees soon grow and greenery provides an illusion of privacy, although this is no proof against a good old domestic row or a neigh bour’s screaming children.

The campers

Some people, with home-making instincts, can make even these livable but some of the territory’s come-and-go public servants do little more than camp in these houses, using the issue furniture of beds, a table and six folding chairs. They use their money for what’s called “living it up”; or put it all in the bank against the day when they shake the last of New Guinea’s mud from their shoes.

I’m told that public servants pay less than S 3 a week rent for their houses and on that score they are doing well and have no kick coming.

At last count there were 6,500 expatriate public servants in P-NG plus 13,000 Papuan and New Guinean public servants plus 3,218 in the police force plus about 10,000 others who are government employed but not under the Public Service ordinance. This vast number of gov ernment employees and their gallop ing housing requirements, is one ol the factors that makes Papua-Neu Guinea different from every othei Pacific territory. Twenty years oi effort and hundreds of millions oi Australian dollars have moved more than mountains in the territory.

All this, plus the fact that a large section of the European populatior is transitory, rootless and with nc

real interest in the country, and you’d have to have some minor miracle if some of the superficiality had not rubbed off on the native people who seem, to me, to have gone further towards losing their identity than any other people in the Pacific.

Town Papuans and New Guineans seem now much like town Africans: Europeanised, detribalised, often aim less and apparently humourless. Yet they’re in town to stay; part of the process of social evolution and change that is taking place all over the Pacific but nowhere more speedily than in the territory.

Anachronisms

But there are anachronisms left in New Guinea in the shape of Euro peans who not only have a boy-house but a house-boy—someone who has been with them 10 years or more and has taken transfers to different stations and the vicissitudes of pro motion in his stride.

One of my friends has such a treasure who usually adapts himself to circumstances and sets himself up with a wife at each station. In places where bride-price is expected, he has frugally made do with a second-hand article. When another transfer comes up, the bride usually flatly refuses to leave her district with him so in his next new home Amoni (let’s call him) has to set about getting a replacement.

When I called on the family re cently the boy-house was temporarily wifeless but Amoni was taking a few days off in a village 30 miles away where he was trying to do something about it. The whole household awaited the result with keen anticipa tion. Unfortunately they were dis appointed.

No bride-price was required but Amoni had enlisted the services of what the man of the house called a “proper old bastard—a sort of procurer”.

On arrival at the village Amoni and the procurer had gone out and beaten a kundu, sending out the message to all the available girls that Amoni was there looking for a bride.

But according to Amoni, “meri i no like”. In fact, they had all taken to the bush to escape their fate.

He returned empty armed but unabashed. His one-talks are now working on the problem. They feel that a brideless boy-house is in complete and, more to the point, vulnerable. They fear (unnecessarily) that Amoni might get the push and that the valuable boy-house would therefore be no longer available to them as a town house and general meeting place.