Footnotes

TTfIS month I am writing from a new home, A not larger than the old one but better de signed, not far from the old one but better situated, on a rocky ridge with the sea in front and the hills behind.

From our front mini-verandah we look west ward towards Koke Bay, the scene of the last of our three missionary assignments, on the fringe of Port Moresby’s old town. Imagination’s eye carries us further westward across the bare, and at the moment brown, hills to Hanuabada, where we worked for the first 15 of our Papuan years. A further exercise of imagination carries us on another 60 miles westward to Delena, where we spent the happiest years of our lives. It is a pleasant prospect.

From our back mini-verandah the view is just as pleasant and has more human interest. For against the backdrop of the hills we look down into a valley containing the low-covenant suburb

of Sabama, housing folk from all over Papua New Guinea whose affairs have brought them to live in the big smoke. Some live in houses which they have built for themselves, while others rent houses built by the Housing Commission.

At the head of the valley is a small shanty village. Many would describe it as an “eyesore”, but to me it is the most interesting part of my hill-top outlook. A

little group of migrants from the Gulf of Papua established themselves there in the post-war years, in a clearing in what was then virgin bush. But the relentless march of what we are pleased to call progress has shattered their seclusion, and the battalions of the Housing Commission’s “little boxes” have hemmed them in. Yet, looking down on the shabby, irregularly-placed huts and watch ing the figures moving purposefully from one to another, one realises that here there is a com munity.

Sabama is much tidier, but it is not a com munity. It is an assemblage of householders, who may (and sometimes may not!) be on terms of casual friendship with their neighbours, but whose real affinities lie elsewhere, among their kith and

With Percy Chatterton

in Port Moresby

Seeing Things

From A

New Verandah

kin scattered through half a dozen or more simila suburbs—Hohola, Gordon, Waigani, Gerehu an the rest.

One wonders whether we have done the rigf thing in transplanting Australian-style suburbs t Papua New Guinea. A scheme for settlin migrants, as the shanty dwellers have settle themselves, in kinship groups rather than as in dividual householders, might have made for happier and a more law-abiding urban populatior

However, it is perhaps ungratefi of me to buck a system which ha provided us in the autumn of on days with a delectable horn

among friendly people.

J}R SANDOVER, a distir guished educationist who i currently Director of Papua Ne l Guinea’s Institute of Technology has come up with a bright “new idea. He recalls the “dame schools” of 18th century Britaii

which taught the 3Rs to village children wh couldn’t get a more ambitious education, and su£ gests that simple schools of this type might t established in Papua New Guinea’s villages.

Dr Sandover is a newcomer to Papua Ne' Guinea, and is apparently unaware that the so of schools he has in mind did exist in Papua, fc almost every village along the south coast c Papua had its village pastor —sometimes a Rare tongan or Samoan, more often a Papuan—wh was both minister of the village church, anc generally with the help of his wife, teacher of th village school. Dr Sandover’s suggested minimui equipment—a simple hut, a blackboard, slato and chalk—was all that most of the pastd teachers had. Indeed, many of them had to d

without the simple hut and conduct their schools in the church or on the verandahs of their own homes.

These schools and their teachers were enthu siastically denigrated by post-war experts. Ad mittedly, their achievements were at a low level; but as a result of their efforts many coastal Papuans became literate in their own languages and acquired some knowledge of simple arith metic enough to enable them to count their change, as one trader bitterly complained.

In the 1950 s and 1960 s the Department of Education set itself to eliminate these schools, with the result that while many of today’s youngsters are getting a far better schooling than their dads or grandads got, there are more getting no schooling at all than was the case half a cen tury ago.

Now Dr Sandover wants to revive these schools, or something like them. Perhaps he is right!

Humble as they were, they did enable their pupils to enter a changing adult life-style a little better equipped for participation in it than they would otherwise have been. And at their best they suc ceeded in doing what Dr John Gunther once described as the principal aim of education—they provoked curiosity about the world and man’s place in it.

Queensland-Papua border issue continues to arouse heat on both sides of the border, borne very odd attitudes have been taken and some very odd things have been said.

The Queensland Premier, for example, is re ported to have claimed that the people of the lorres Strait islands are “a century ahead” of their ethnic brothers in western Papua. As both areas only came into effective contact with west ern civilisation about a century ago, the implica tion is that while the islanders have chalked up a century of steady progress, the mainlanders have made no progress at all—an implication which the Mwai people on the mainland may well resent.

Onffie other hand, one island leader has urged at discussion of the issue should be carried on at island by island level in the island vernaculars, since few of the islanders have enough English to take part m discussion at a wider level. This aoesn t sound like being a century ahead.

Equally comic in my estimation is the line-up . J cler i c s on their respective sides of the battlefidd and the islanders’ new-found love for nf.u tate i Queensl and, about whose treatment ot them they have so often and so bitterly com plained m the past. y With the thesis that the islanders should be allowed to decide their own future I have no

quarrel, though in fact since 1919 very few minority groups have been accorded this privilege.

What does puzzle me is this: if it is right and proper for a few hundred Torres Strait islanders to be allowed to decide their own future, what is wrong with allowing half a million Papuans, who, like the islanders, though without their privileges, are Australian citizens, to decide their own future?

Yet when I, and others, have suggested this, we have been berated as “separatists”.

The use of the pejorative suggests that those who use it are afraid that an act of free choice for Papuans would result in a decision to separate from New Guinea. I do not think it would, especially now that the Somare Government is giving more attention to Papuan development, is pressing ahead with the Hiritano Highway, which will link the fertile Mekeo plain with Port Moresby, and is taking seriously the proposal for a Port Moresby to Lae road link. As I have pointed out before in this column, such a link would do more for the promotion of national unity than a cartload of “bung wantaim” style National Day speeches.

But the principle remains. If it is right to allow a few hundred Australian citizens in the Torres Strait an act of free choice, it can’t be wrong to allow half-a-million Australian citizens in Papua one too.