Understanding the past to keep up

keep up with the present

Muttu Gware and Steven Ahi are playing for big stakes. The survival as a distinct social unit and the material progress of over one thou sand people in five villages close to Lae depends upon the effectiveness of Butibam Progress Society and Ahi Association.

Gware leads the society, which was formed several years ago to bring before the Supreme Court a claim for land, including what is now part of the city of Lae, alienated during the colonial era. The association was formed in 1972 to link the villages and promote their economic and social interests.

The land claim goes back to the 19305. Neither representations to the kiap nor legal proceedings have so far been successful and the people are now exerting political pressure to obtain redress. While many of the people of Butibam, Ahi-Hengali, Kamkumung, Wagang and Yanga hope to retain their traditional way jf life, realists like Gware know that their only hope lies in becoming urban developers of their remaining iand and any land restored to them.

The population of Lae, Papua New Guinea’s second city and main in dustrial centre, is growing at a rate jf more than 10 per cent per annum, Butibam and Ahi-Hengali are less han two km from the centre of the city and almost engulfed by the urban spread. The other villages will soon share the same fate. lan Willis tells the story of the Lae (after whom the city takes its lame) from when their ancestors, he Kawa from the north-east coast if the Huon Gulf and the Ahi who led from tribal enemies along the Vlarkham River, settled in the area ibout a century ago until now that he Lae are a minority among the :osmopolitan, predominantly Mela lesian, population of an urban area vith more than 50,000 inhabitants.

European and Asian labour re :ruiters, gold seekers and traders vere soon followed by German ifficials and missionaries.

This book recounts some of the eprehensible acts of the early foreign ntruders, of economic and social liscrimination by many of those who ollowed them, and of the villagers’ eaction and adjustment.

As the Lutheran missionaries, specially Gottfried Schmutterer who ived among the Lae from 1911 until 1935, had by far the major impact

on the people’s lives until World War 11, the author pays particular atten tion to the interplay between tradi tional beliefs and ways and Christian teaching and conduct. In the context of urban development, from the mid thirties when Lae became the main airfield for the goldfields and, follow ing the 1937 volcanic eruption at Rabaul, the Mandated Territory’s capital through the war years, which saw as many as 150,000 troops in the Lae-Nadzab area, to the last two decades when modern commerce and industry became firmly established, the author deals with the many aspects—economic, social, psycholo gical and, more recently, political— which are often lumped together as ‘culture contact’.

He shows that the people have not only been highly resilient after the first shock of realising the incongruity of the missionaries’ teaching and mores compared with that of other foreigners, but that they are also making a successful adjustment to the kind of society and economy which is now emerging in their country.

This book is most welcome as more and more traditional communities are being absorbed into urban growth and are facing problems similar to those experienced by the Lae.

Emotional insistence on retaining the traditional way of life at all costs is as great a handicap to nationhood as wanting to obliterate the past in order to create a wholly alien society.

The current generation of Papua New Guineans needs to have a full understanding of that past in order to better cope with the present and the future. lan Willis who has lived among the Lae and been involved in some of their affairs has brought scholarship and empathy to telling them ‘as it was’. —Harry Jackman

(Lae—Village And City. By Lan

Willis. Published by Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1975. $10.80.) • Peter Livingston, who spent 30 years in Papua New Guinea, and has recently returned to Sydney after a study visit to Yugoslavia, is holding an exhibition of his oil paintings at the Gregory Galleries, Pacific High way, Hornsby, Sydney, from Septem ber 20. The paintings are surrealist, with some PNG scenes and prices range from $l3O to $3OO.