new heritage

War wrecks: PNG's strange new heritage

From GUS SMALES in Port Moresby Papua New Guinea, as befits a new nation, is seeking the return of rare artefacts and traditional art removed by nearly a century of overseas col lecting, Germany, Australia and the US all have items of PNG art which the New Guineans cannot always find to day in their own country.

The brake has been applied at home to the steady outward flow of carvings, sacred objects, and other valuable art forms. The Chief Minister, Mr Somare, is a trustee of the National Museum and Art Gallery which now has wide powers over deals involving traditional artefacts.

Anything ruled to be culturally valuable, rare or old and irreplace able cannot be exported and is sub ject, too, to internal controls.

But now a new and strange “cultural heritage”—call it what you will—is emerging which has nothing to do with the museum or with the products of the black man’s art, religion or culture. It concerns the new attitude of many village com munities to the tattered wrecks of wartime aircraft which have been littering the country for 30 years.

Once, as almost complete aero planes with complex parts to be had for the picking, the wrecks were ob jects of interest and, occasionally, of intense fear. The fear was often based on superstition linked with the deaths of crew members and the belief that their spirits might live on in the wrecks.

Later, the wrecks became nothing but a nuisance, fit only to be cleaned up like rubbish or stripped of their more valuable materials. The aero planes went through the salvage workers’ melting pots in their hun dreds, emerging as shiny ingots of metal.

But now the comparatively few wrecks which remain are acquiring an intangible sort of value which is being protected to some extent by many of the village communities near the wrecks. This has nothing to do with the white man’s growing mania

to restore old vehicles and equipment.

What is happening is that village communities in PNG which once saw the wrecks as no concern of theirs— or a source of cheap building material —are suddenly taking interest.

"Hie village people don’t have the white man’s urge to tear the wrecks up by the roots, refurbish them and display them as history. But along the north coast of PNG’s mainland and in the islands region there is a growing movement to protect the wrecks as they lie and to tell—or in vent —stories about their back grounds.

White salvage workers and collec tors can no longer walk in and carry

the wrecks away without a by-your leave, There is no doubt that a degree of commercialism and tourism interest is involved in the village attitudes fanned sometimes by inflated ideas of value which have in turn grown from the interest of white collectors But it goes deeper than this The passage of time has put a certain local historical value on some of the wrecks.

There have been two recent out cries over interference with wrecks and government officers are now thinking in terms of “village rights” as well as in terms of formal salvage rights which might be involved.