of identity

Tropicalities

PI M's Editor Bob Hawkins kicks off this month with notes gleaned from travels in Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands in July.

A question

of identity

While the Forum haggled over the wording of the ‘French ter ritories’ question at Honiara in July it seemed a side issue was

emerging which will give

Island leaders something to chew over before next year’s summit.

Basically, it’s a question of whether Australia and New Zealand really qualify as 100percenters on the Forum scene.

Although one and all within the Forum delegations righteously denied that econ omic or political considerations of a wider nature had per suaded Australia and NZ to think the way they did on the French question, it was dif ficult to avoid the feeling that both were having the utmost

difficulty concealing their ‘ alter

?gos\

By and large, though re

gional stresses do show from lime to time, there is no ques tion that Island members of Forum have the interests of tone but their ocean world at leart.

The same can hardly be said )f Australia and New Zealand - and it showed in their per ormances at Honiara. It’s not ust a matter of two personali ies the Oceanian and the Vestern. There’s also the \sian’ personality which nany, Australians in par cular, will admit to today.

On the French issue, nat rally, it was white Aus •alasia’s Western personality iggling away beneath the sur

ice. Ostensibly it was telling

Jand heads of delegation to ie Forum that they should re icmber the ‘etiquette of atesmanship’, and the

angers of ‘interfering’ in

Tench sovereign’ matters.

Very much the ‘right and proper’ syndrome which Aus tralians have had thrown at then ad nauseam for some years now.

More likely, at the root of New Zealand’s and Australia’s actions was money, as New Hebrides Chief Minister Gerard Leymang suggested.

Among other places, Sec retary of State for Foreign Affairs Olivier Stirn had just visited Wellington and Can berra to advise them that they ought to work to keep the Forum’s nose out of French business.

New Zealand was much more vulnerable in terms of its

European Community deal

ings than Australia - which might explain why Prime Minister Muldoon was sound ing off even before he left Wellington for Honiara. His sick economy needs all the sus tenance it can get these days and a little market in Europe is better than none at all.

Australia’s ties with Europe are not as critical but words like ‘beef, ‘Mirage’, ‘Nomad’, and ‘uranium’ in the Australian- French context must add up to

something.

Whatever the reason. Island leaders at Honiara must have felt that if Mr Muldoon and Australia s Deputy Prime

Minister Doug Anthony and

Foreign Minister Andrew Pea cock were not exactly ‘ agin ’

them, equally, they might not

have been quite with them on the French issue.

If a scoreline could be drawn from this particular encounter, it would have to read Kanak Independence Front/South Pa cific Forum I, Australasia/ France 0.

And, with an independent New Hebridean voice likely to be in the Forum ranks next year, France might be advised to have a few more eighties thinkers in their front line by then.

A scar on

the memory

He’d been sitting quietly by himself, gazing at a half finished bottle. His friends had drifted away, one by one, to their beds. Behind them was a

long Saturday lunchtime

session which had drifted toward dusk. Around him bar trade was brisk. It seemed just about everyone had decided that weekend to descend upon Honiara, Solomon Islands capital. Politicians, bureau-

I crats, pressmen - all there for the annual gathering of heads of nations, the South Pacific Forum. There was a crowd on a culture kick, just on the way to dispersing themselves through the Pacific after a couple of conferences in Port Moresby, one to do with the South Pacific Arts Festival, another with the preservation of relics and dying arts. And there were the New Hebridean soccer players, not in the slightest deterred by the two beatings they had taken earlier at the hands of the Solomon Is landers. The mood was easy,

benign.

He stirred. Got to his feet.

Something was nagging at his befuddled mind. It seemed he was a boxer - of the diminu tive variety. Ten stone, I think he said, he fought at. And he wanted everyone to know of his prowess. No one was really interested. Everyone was pol itely tolerant. Whatever his pu

gilistic skills, they weren’t

impressing anyone. Something

more dramtic was called for.

His courage, as it turned out, could not be doubted as he proceeded to demonstrate. He snatched up a nearby middy glass and took a substantial

bite. Crunching, he spiralled

around. Slivers of glass spilled from his lips. Soon the blood followed, at first dribbling from the corner of his mouth, then a mild gush. Another bite.

More crunching. It was dif ficult to tell if the bleeding was getting worse. All the time talk

ing. Half a middy glass gone.

It seems there was no pain. By this time someone had slipped away. A call to the police. The paddy wagon was on its way.

More crunching.

He wasn’t getting the atten tion he needed. Funny how people will turn their heads away even when they’re see

ing something they will prob

ably never see again. So, no one was impressed with a middy glass! How about a beer

bottle? Canine rasped harshly

around the neck of the stubby.

A chip flew but the neck held.

Another crunch. Outside in the car park the paddy wagon had arrived. He went almost quietly. Only when the doors slammed behind him did he re alise he was trapped. Neither

Australia’s Doug Anthony at the Honiara South Pacific Forum meeting ... if not ‘agin’, perhaps not exactly ‘for’ either. Photo: Un Tak Fook

„ his boxing skills, nor his bloody glass-eating penchant, could get him out of that one.

A couple of days later, when I described the incident to some Solomon Islander friends, they showed no sur prise but commented that he must have been from Malaita where people ‘know how to eat glass’.

Through dark

glasses brightly

Honiara is an easy-going place.

Not gushingly friendly. Cer tainly not unfriendly. It’s got a smattering of impatient, frus trated whites who are far too ready to blame everything that goes wrong on their Solomon Islander hosts. It’s got a drink problem, but from my obser vation not nearly as devastat ing as Papua New Guinea’s.

It’s got an inordinately large number of taxis most of them rust-buckets - for such a small ‘city’. And it’s got honest taxi drivers if the one who came to my attention is anything to go by. An expensive pair of sun glasses were left in a taxi by a man from Bellona. Lost and forever, he assumed. Next Jay, on the main street, a taxi milled up beside him. ‘Hey,’ ;aid the driver, ‘l’ve been look ng for you. You left your passes in my taxi yesterday.’

When ‘OK’ is

really just ‘Ok’

Everything may be A-OK on apua New Guinea’s second opper mining project but, for he record and for the edu ation of so many publications have jumped to con lusions, the project is named fter the Ok Tedi, its meaning iver in the language of that re ion of PNG’s Western Prov

ice. Okay message

nderstood?

Olivier Stirn’s

>mission

France has no specific stake in hese territories (in the South ’acific) which cost France in conomic terms, more than hey return .. .’ Words of the Tench Secretary of State for : oreign Affairs Olivier Stirn.

At Stirn was certainly not 'eing dishonest about France’s

dand territories costing more

than they return at the mo ment. But he most certainly was dishonest by omission. He might have mentioned that by virtue of possessions in the South Pacific, and with the introduction of 200-mile econ omic zones, France controls the third largest ocean area of any nation in the world. And we’ve all heard how much that kind of sea estate can be worth.

Mary Olmsted

on ‘localisation’

Mary Olmsted, United States ambassador to Papua New Guinea, who left Port Moresby recently, was lavish in her praise of the ‘solid, steady change and progress’ achieved in PNG since independence in 1975. However, the dean of the Port Moresby diplomatic corps did sound a few words of warn ing on the question of localis ation or the lack of it.

She told me: ‘There have been instances of rethinking on localisation. This has been a live issue ever since I arrived

here. Alternatively, they have

said we are localising too fast, or else we are not localising fast enough. And I expect for the next 20 years they will be alter nating between those two theories. I sometimes think that Papua New Guineans don’t ad equately appreciate the re sponsibilities on them in living up to the demands of localis ation. It’s right that they should want the jobs localised, but it is also right they should im prove themselves and take on greater responsibility and be

more conscientious about car rying out their responsi bilities.’

Ms Olmsted, who spent five years as head of the US mission in PNG and was dean of the diplomatic corps since the departure of Australia’s Tom Critchley early last year, is'suc ceeded by Harvey J. Feldman, who has had extensive experi ence in diplomatic service in

Hilda Lini’s hard

task in Vila

Hilda Lini, 25, for the moment, is lost to journalism. But this New Hebridean lady, as

refreshing as a mid-morning

sou’east trader, may well be taking the hard way into a life time of politics. T may be going back to Port Moresby to pack my bags and head for Vila,’ she told me at Honiara in early July. At the time. Miss Lini (she demurred at Ms), sister to New Hebrides Deputy Chief Minister Walter Lini, was in the Solomons capital to attend South Pacific Forum sessions and to meet friends from home and New Caledonia.

Miss Lini had come from Port Moresby where she had been studying journalism at the

University of Papua New

Guinea. But, with some firm ing in Vila on the still tentative decision to hold general elec tions on October 17, the call

had come to return home and challenge, on behalf of the Vanuaaku Party, the oppo sition in the Vila Town Open constituency. At the last elec tion in the New Hebrides, in 1975, all Vila seats went to non- Vanuaaku Party candidates.

Miss Lini recalled events of 1975 when there was little con trol exercised over those who could vote and those who could not. ‘Four planes flew in from Noumea,’ she remembered. In all, she estimated, about 600-700 people filled up the hotels of Vila and then voted, none for her own party. Add to those the votes of the ‘Chinese, French and Vietnamese, who, at the time, were all anti independence and voted for the French party,’ and, said Miss Lini, Vanuaaku did not have much chance.

Like other New Hebrideans in Honiara that week. Miss Lini was quite confident in her assessment of the percentage of the nation-wide vote the Vanuaaku Party would win in the elections. Fifty-five per cent? ‘Perhaps, maybe more,’ she said. The figure generally bandied about at the time was around 65%.

Assuming the prognostica tions to be accurate, what did she think of the chances of the differences between the Fran cophone and Anglophone el ements in New Hebridean society being settled? ‘The way I see it,’ she argued, ‘the French and the British should just leave the New Hebrideans to discuss things and sort them out by themselves. French and

English speaking New Hebri

deans could solve things quite well.. . New Hebrideans get together and agree on things

quickly and they understand

each other.’ The trouble always comes, she said, when the French and British start inter

fering afterwards.

Interview over. Miss Lini and myself joined forces to question the New Caledonian independence advocates and, immediately afterwards, Papua New Guinea Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ebia Olewale who, himself, had just finished talking to the New Caledonian indepen dence reps. (It gets a bit like a roundabout at these Island get-

Washingtons Mary Olmsted hands her ‘Dean of the Diploma tic Corps’ mantle to Tokyo’s Yamaguchi

Asian countries.

The new dean of the diplo matic corps in Port Moresby is Japan’s ambassador, Koichiro

Yamaguchi.

togethers.) Yes, said Mr Olewale, PNG would support the decolonisation of French possessions in the Pacific. No, said Mr Olewale, PNG would not support the idea of an

independent West Irian. Why,

asked Miss Lini, did he adopt these apparently contradictory views? Mr Olewale’s reply, in diplomatic and legal terms, was quite correct: Indonesia’s suzerainty over West Irian was

accepted by the United

Nations and had been decided by a plebiscite among the West Irianese people. (Those who were in West Irian for the 1969 ‘Act of Free Choice’, including myself, w'ould dispute the find ings of that plebiscite.) There was no UN approval for the French position in the South Pacific, said Mr Olewale.

Irrespective of the official Papua New Guinea rationalis ation of these two situations, it was clear from this young New Hebridean’s questioning that there’s going to be added press ure on France’s remaining Pa cific colonial possessions if the likes of Miss Lini win their way into the New Hebridean parlia ment.

M US eUm move “ ia

dt Port MOfOSDy

meeting in Port Moresby in ear iy July of the Council of the Third Pacific Festival of Arts a dopted a resolution by the cu rator of the new Tahiti Mu seum Franqois oilier, that an ‘ a ssociation of museums of Oceania’ should be established ]vir Ollier sees an urgent need for a Pacific-wide organ isation which would help to present a more united front in t^e protection of Islands cul ture 0 n June 30 Mr Ollier’s mu- S eum, an imposing structure at Pima auia, was officially ope ned. Areas of the museum are devoted to the natural environment, prehistory and arc haeology, material culture, social and religious life and pos t-European history,

A blueblood

on blue bums

Reviewing Friendly Islands: A

History of Tonga (edited by Noel Rutherford) in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Husein Rofe writes; ‘Where Queen Salote was characterised by her height, it is the girth of the present King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV that attracts more attention. He is active despite his weight and a keen student of anthropology and other sciences. According to Australian friends, this led him to interrupt a Seventh-day Adventist who was maintain ing an imaginary racial re lationship between Westerners and Tongans. The King, refer ring to a characteristic of new born Tongans, spoke up in a booming voice: “If you are right, where do our blue bums come from?” ’

Mapping Pacific’s

Tower of Babel

A large multi-coloured language atlas of the Pacific re gion is currently under prep aration in the department of linguistics in the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific Studies in conjunction with international agencies. The task involves

codifying some 2000 languages

of the Pacific. The aim is to

produce a simple and easily

understandable presentation of the language picture of this

linguistically complex part of

the world for use by scholars, governments and other

interested agencies.

Professor S. A. Wurm, head

of the department of linguis tics, who is one of the two gen eral editors of the atlas project, describes it as a massive under taking. Now in its second year, the project will take another three years to complete. It is a joint undertaking of the Aus tralian Academy of the Humanities and the Japan Academy. Several inter national agencies, such as UNESCO and the Inter national Union of Academics, have shown an interest in the

project.

The other general editor of the project is Professor Shiro Hattori of the Japan Acad emy.

The university newspaper, ANU Reporter, quotes Pro fessor Wurm saying: ‘Some language groups belong inherently to the Pacific area and are exclusively or almost exclusively located on the islands (including the island continent of Australia), while others are marginally associa ted with it, whereas others abut on the Pacific area geographi cally but have their main con nections elsewhere. ‘Three distinct language groups (three groups of languages which show no con nection with each other) consti tute the inherently Pacific languages. The largest and most widespread of these is the Austronesian group with 800 languages. The second group is constituted by Papuan (or non- Austronesian) languages of the New Guinea area and number over 700. The Australian Abor

iginal languages constitute the

third group and are over 260 in number.’

Hilda Lini ... advocate of the West Irianese cause. Photo: Bob Hawkins

Tahiti’s new museum ... moves to start a Pacific association

The inherently and mar

ginally Pacific languages num

ber close to 2000 and constitute about 40 per cent of all the languages in the world. Almost all of these languages are con centrated in the south-western and western corner of the Pa cific area: this is the area of the greatest concentration of dif ferent languages in the whole world.

Apart from a broad appeal, the atlas will show the changes in the pattern of language dis tribution in recent years no tably under the influence of European contacts. This will be done by providing two dif ferent maps of certain areas one presenting the pre- European situation and the other the present picture.

Islanders and

life in NZ

Pacific Islanders who migrate to New Zealand appreciate the higher living standards and employment and educational opportunities, but dislike the violence, the high cost of living, and the prevalence of alcohol.

These are among main points to emerge from a report by the Department of Labour on the work experience of Pacific Island migrants in the greater Wellington area, writes Bill Gasson.

The findings are based on answers to questionnaires dis tributed to 353 working Island migrants in an area that rep resents about 18% of New Zealand’s Islander popula tion.

Auckland, the world’s big

gest Polynesian city, offers a

greater scope for such a survey, but, as the report points out, limited resources precluded a wider survey. Five Islander groups from Western Samoa, Niue, Cook Islands, Tokelau

md Tonga were surveyed.

Why do Islanders like New Zealand? Here are two views: I like the freedom of move ment here. As long as it is vithin reason, there are fewer

inventions binding you than

)ack home;’ and ‘Here in New Zealand nobody tells you what o do or say. You are your own naster and no one looks over iur shoulder to see what you ire up to.’

‘People here are very violent.

All the arguments turn into fights and it is very frightening to walk the streets, especially at night,’ one woman said.

While many Islanders felt there were no aspects of life that disturbed them, the report

said the widespread perception

of violence was based not so much on its prevalence as on the lack of social control over

the activity.

Then there was the con sumption of alcohol of which many Islanders had little pre vious experience. One elder said; ‘These people here drink all the time after work, in the evenings, after sport, in the weekends, at meetings - I don’t like it, especially for the young ones. That’s all they see and they do the same.’