*Footnotes

How Lonely Is

The View

From The Top?

the earliest days of white settlement in Papua New Guinea, there has been a tendency among the white men, a tendency shared alike by government officers and missionaries, to build their houses on hills, preferably at the top.

Traders, of course, were exceptions to this rule, since their livelihood depended on their living cheek by jowl with their potential cus tomers.

There were cases, too, in which no hills were available Dam, in the Western District of Papua, is one of them. But, where a suitable hill was available, the “Residency” was pretty sure to be sited at its top; and missionaries all too often followed the same practice. Sometimes the missionaries got there first and grabbed the most elevated site—a shocking situation most detri mental to sound government.

Anyway the Residency and the mission’s “Big House” were pretty sure to be sited in

elevated positions, from which, as a former missionary colleague of mine once rather snakily com mented, their occupants could look down on their feudal re tainers.

Currently, in Port Moresby a new snob suburb is being de veloped on Touaguba Hill, a lofty and previously unexploited hill top in the middle of the old town.

Its residents will be able to look out across the Coral Sea and down

on the harbour, the town, and the busy swarm of lesser mortals. On this eminence the Papuan Chairman of the Public Service Board and the District Commissioner, Central District, are already prestigiously established. And here is currently being erected the most prestigious dwelling of them all—a $72,000 Prime Minister’s Lodge, for a country which as yet hasn’t a Prime Minister, and in a town which the second House of Assembly rightly or wrongly considered should not remain permanently the nation’s capital. More “prestige homes” for Papua New Guinea’s public and private elite are likely to go up there in the near future.

By way of comparison it may be noted that

the Housing Commission’s low covenant houses cost from $4,000 down to about $l,OOO, and that a substantial proportion of Port Moresby’s in digenous work force cannot even afford the modest rent charged for the smallest and cheapest of these dwellings and consequently live in shanty settlements.

Conscious of the problem, the commission’s drawing boards are running hot in an effort to

produce designs which can be built for even less than $l,OOO, and the designers are setting their sights on about $5OO as a possible base level.

But back to the $72,000 job.

How will the denizens of the shanty settlements and the low covenant suburbs view this newest and shiniest “house on the hill”?

I do not think that they will necessarily resent the fact that it is bigger than theirs. The idea of

a “big” man living in a big house is not new to them.

When I was posted to Koke, Port Moresby’s native market area, in 1957 to establish a new mission station, my wife and I lived for a while in a small low-cost house (destined later to become a Papuan pastor’s house) while the “big house” further up the hill was a-building. This time it was not at the top of the hill as our mis sion land didn’t extend that far, but it was as near the top as it could get, with a fine view over the market and out to sea.

I had by that time become uneasy about the traditional house-on-the-hill, and one day I voiced my unease to the Papuan foreman who

With Percy Chatterton

in Port Moresby

was superintending its erection on the site.

Rather to my surprise, he disagreed with me.

“No,” he said, “you’re wrong. You are a leader of our church, and as such you will have many important people coming to see you. We want you to five in a good house so that you will have no cause for shame, because your shame would be our shame too.”

It is probably this sort of feeling which prompts village congregations to build large, impressive-looking homes for their village pastors.

Incidentally, that house at Koke is now occupied by a Papuan minister who is doing the job I used to do, and I do not think that anyone resents his

being there.

What all this adds up to, I think, is that the idea that men of stature, whether in church, state or private enterprise, should live in large, and even prestigious, houses is one which is not un acceptable to Paguinean sentiment. Paguineans will not resent it if their national leaders live in big and even by their standards luxurious houses; indeed, they will want them to live in such circum stances that they can entertain important visitors from other countries, as well as from within their own, without embarrassment.

The gap between $5OO and $72,000 may, of course, be regarded as excessive. But the real problem raised by the house on Touaguba Hill is not that of size and cost, but of segregation.

It is, as I have said, not uncommon in a Paguinean village for one man to have a larger and better house than his neighbours; he may be a pastor, a kinship group leader, a sorcerer—or even a business tycoon, for there were go-getters in Papua New Guinea long before the white man came, and there are more of them now. But his house is in the village, cheek by jowl with those of his less eminent fellow tribesmen. Even the government officer’s “residency” and the mis sionary’s “big house”, though not right in the village, were not as a rule geographically remote from it, and their occupants were not isolated from the rest of the community.

The encouragement given to Paguinean leaders to isolate themselves geographically from the hoi polloi is a phenomenon which has blos somed since 1964. The under-secretaries of the first House of Assembly and the ministerial and assistant ministerial members of the second were given the opportunity of occupying high covenant homes in suburbs which were still predominantly white enclaves. As far as I know, only two, John Guise and Lepani Watson, resisted the temptation.

Even when, in the second House, John Guise became Speaker of the House, taking precedence over all but the Administrator and the Chief Justice, he clung resolutely to his small cottage

in the low covenant suburb of Hohola, where he lives among his fellow Paguineans. His instinct was probably right, for there is no more astute politician in Papua New Guinea today than Dr.

John Guise.

For nearly a century in Papua New Guinea the terms “affluent” and “non-affluent” have been synonymous with “white” and “brown”. This phase is now passing away, and we are entering one in which both affluence and non-affluence will be found housed in brown bodies. This is inevitable, and will only be harmful if the gap between the two groups becomes too great.

It is said that the gap between affluent and non-affluent nations is widening, with the possi bility of dire consequences. That between affluent and non-affluent Paguineans is certainly doing so.

If the gap becomes physical and geographical as well as financial, the seeds of revolution could be sown.

No one minds our national leaders becoming more affluent than their fellow citizens. At least, I hope not, because we won’t get able men as our leaders unless they are allowed to become so. But it will be a sad day for this country when its leaders become segregated from the common people in affluent enclaves, members of a Paguinean version of the cocktail circuit.

One of the greatest of the many perils threatening this embryo nation may be that of the leaders getting so far ahead of the led that they disappear from sight.