#8 Boy He Cry: An island odyssey with Roger Averill
Roger Averill works as a freelance researcher, editor and writer. He is the author of Boy He Cry: An Island Odyssey, an account of his time spent living on the remote Melanesian island of Nuakata.
Boy he Cry: An island odyssey is about two young Australians who arrive unannounced on a remote Melanesian island and ask its residents if they can live with them for a year. They live cut off from the outside world, living without electricity, telephones, running water, two-way radios or even access to an ocean-going boat, Roger Averill and his anthropologist partner adapt to life in a subsistence culture and find themselves overwhelmed by the generosity of their hosts.
About Roger Averill's talk
Roger reads from his novel Boy he Cry: An island odyssey and gives feedback on his time spent there and shares his experiences of the friendships he created and the wonderful experience he and his wife had.
The talk is 27 minutes long. It was recorded at Coburg Library on 6 August 2009.
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Transcript of the talk
Moreland City Council podcast introduction: Welcome to a ReadMore talk recorded at a Moreland City Council Library. Moreland City Council is located in Melbourne, Australia. ReadMore is a unique project by Moreland libraries that encourages and celebrates reading in the community. See council's website www.moreland.vic.gov.au for ReadMore activities like workshops, demonstrations and children's story time and where you can also download and listen to other ReadMore talks.
Roger: Thanks, Christine. Thank you very much. It's a special thrill for me to be invited to come and speak at the Brunswick Library because both my parents, who have come out tonight, grew up in Brunswick and so I've had a life long association with Brunswick, visiting my grandparents all through my childhood and I've had two stints of living here in my adult life and I love the place. So it's a great thrill for me.
I want to thank you all for coming out, and particularly those of you who haven't read Boy he Cry. It's humbling that you come out and take a chance and to listen to me, particularly on a night like tonight which is pretty blowy and horrible.
At the beginning of Boy he Cry, I write that I had always thought of life as an adventure but never of myself as living an adventurous life and how that all changed when I went to Papua New Guinea. While that is true, this change only lasted one year and that was way back in 1993. Ever since then, my life has resumed its previous unadventurous boring pattern. It's ironic that after 23 years of writing unpublished manuscripts I finally cracked the publishing caper with a travel book because in fact I am one of the least travelled people I know in a middle class kind of milieu. So I hope none of you are expecting an encounter with a seasoned globetrotter. If so, I'd like to apologise from the outset. In truth, I don't really think of Boy he Cry as a travel book but rather a book about dwelling, about learning to stay still, to live in a small circumscribe space with people who started out as total strangers.
My adventurous aberration took place, not because of me, but because of my wife Shelley Mallett who at that time was enrolled in a PhD in anthropology. Shelley wanted to research how people in a remote part of Papua New Guinea accessed and practised both traditional and Western style medicine and how this influenced or was influenced by their understandings of the self. So really I was an accidental adventurer, part of my wife's baggage. Happy to tag along and help out any way I could but fundamentally incidental to the enterprise.
Our adventure really began when having received permission from the Milne Bay Provincial Government to conduct the research we hitched a ride on a (3:07). Now, (3:08) is sort of like a catamaran made out of two huge dugout canoes with a platform across it and a tiny little outboard motor. And we found ourselves perched on sacks of Betel nut travelling at night in the open sea to Nuakata, a tiny island off the south eastern tip of PNG. Now, if I were a high tech kind of guy I'd have some, you know, PowerPoint slide here. But if you imagine Papua New Guinea sort of shaped like that and at the very end is Milne Bay and Nuakata is a tiny island off the end of Milne Bay there.
We were going to the island to ask for permission for Shelley to do her research, to ask Nuakata's 380-odd inhabitants if we could live with them. Our arrival was unannounced, for there were no phones on which we could call ahead to warn people. There was a similar lack of electricity, gas, running water, apart from a couple of creeks, cars, roads, two-way radios and boats bigger than dugout canoes. To try to make amends for the rudeness of our unannounced arrival, the next day Moses, the island's community health worker, took Shelley and I on a tour of the hamlets that dotted the coast, introducing us to the people we met along the way. Later that day everyone converged on the island's largest hamlet to take part in what was a rare event, a whole island meeting. There were only two items on the meeting's agenda, one involved a land dispute, the other, Shelley's research proposal.
So I'll just read a scene about that. While everyone else relaxed as the tension of the land mediation receded, we became more anxious. Jenny was the first to speak on our behalf, then Anne, then Marwa who had apparently recovered from his bout of malaria. With Jenny translating, Shelley tried to explain what the research would involve, why she thought it was important. This was democracy in its purest form. Everyone, old, young, male, female was free to have their say and many did. It was a disconcerting experience to listen to people discuss our fate, sometimes heatedly, often with humour and to not understand a word they were saying. Now and then someone would ask a specific question which Jenny or Anne translated in order for Shelley to answer. During a lull between speakers, the silence was disrupted by a popping sound. Scanning the fringes of the crowd, I saw kids scrambling, scragging each other for something on the ground. Eventually, like a boy in the outer who has caught his cricketing hero's six, one of the larger lads emerged from the scrum, smiling, holding his trophy aloft, a large ripe mango.
It was not long after this that Talbadar (6:03) Noah ... Talbadar means ... it's a term of respect for an older ... an older man. Talbadar Noah addressed the gathering. Standing straight, adopting the pose and tone of a soapbox orator, he said something that had the crowd in stitches. Chuckling, Anne leaned over and told me what he had said. We know what the lady will be doing, but what will he be doing? Meaning me. Smiling, showing that I could take the joke, I waited for the laughter to subside then explained that I would help Shelley with the research and would continue working on a novel, a story book that I was writing. Anne did the translating and people seemed to accept this explanation, their laughter smoothing into smiles, their heads nodding.
As the discussion continued to roam from speaker to speaker, I had no idea whether or not people were persuaded by Shelley's proposal. After Talbadar Noah's question, I didn't know what to expect when the other Talbadar we'd met in Gohea (7:02), the village that we ended up living in and we'd visited earlier that day, Talbadar Antea rose to speak. While lacking Noah's bravado and speaking in a quiet unmodulated voice, Antea's performance was in its own way no less commanding. It was obvious, even to someone who couldn't understand them, that his words carried great weight in the community. The old people paused from pulverising Betel nuts with their improvised pestles and the younger ones stopped their smirks and asides and leaned forward to listen.
This Talbadar didn't seem to be asking questions so much as making a series of declarations. Once he'd finished and had sat back down an uneasy silence settled over the crowd. After what seemed like a long time, Eric the land mediator asked a question. I love the fact that the land mediator who was also a traditional medicine man was called Eric. People began muttering to each other. I watched Talbadar Antea consult with Noah and the other people around him. He then stood up and addressed the men chairing the meeting, this time saying only a sentence or two. As he sat down, the meeting seemed to dissolve. I'd been expecting a show of hands and a (8:17) equivalent of I's and nay's. But seemingly that was it, the discussion was over, a decision had been made.
Jenny leaned across and explained that we'd been given permission to stay on the island for one year. That everyone had agreed to cooperate with the research, that we would live with the Sei family at Gohea. And that the people of (8:38) and (8:39), two of the four quarters of the island, sort of wards of the island, I guess, had offered to build us a house within two weeks and it would be built for free. For the second time that day I felt utterly humbled.
Raised a Methodist, I'd long known of the concept of grace but it was only then sitting in the dirt, feeling deeply indebted to these people I barely knew that I really came to understand the power of an undeserved gift freely given. What right did we have to arrive unbidden on this island and ask its inhabitants if we could live with them? To ask total strangers to build us a house on their land? To impose our dream on their hard scrabble reality? I asked myself these questions over and over. The only way I could begin to respond to them was to ask yet another favour of our hosts, to ask permission to address the meeting. Pausing after each sentence, waiting for Anne to translate, I said that we wanted to learn the language, to live among them and that we hoped the research would in some way benefit their community. When I came to express my gratitude, to thank them for their amazing generosity, my throat tightened, my chin trembled. Glancing down at Shelley, looking for support, I saw tears sliding down her cheeks. Swallowing hard, I managed my thank you's and sat back down to allow embarrassing applause.
The Nuakatans' offer for us to live with them, to freely build us a house was all the more remarkable when you realise that their very limited experience of dim-dims, that's their word for whites or westerners, would typically have been negative, with them adopting a deferential subservient posture in the face of the dim-dims colonial sense of superiority. So some of the old people would have had contact with Australians during the war, some ... there'd been two men on the island who were called boys, you know, who'd helped in the Navy. And very much would have assumed that deferential subservient ... and they had contact with missionaries and much the same sort of dynamic that happened. So you can imagine you have these dim-dims come and ask, they want to live with you and they'd suggested we might live up the back away from everyone and so we said, "No, we want to live," you know, and then to think that you might have to then be all deferential for a whole year.
How they must have dreaded the thought of us living amongst them. No wonder then that when we returned to the island two weeks later, work on the house had not yet commenced. In some obvious ways this was a major setback. It meant that for the next five weeks Shelley and I were forced to spend our days living under a lean-to in the full glare of a crowd of onlookers who daily gathered to scrutinise our every move. I say in the book it was this paradox that we were literally living outside, we just went into someone else's house to sleep. It was a windowless, you know, hut. And so we were living outside but felt incredibly claustrophobic because we just had this intense attention put on us.
While that was exhausting, the good thing was we were able to help with the building of our house. Unfortunately my carpentry skills aren't what they might be, so the benefits of my assistance were more social than practical. I've long had a theory about the relationship between vulnerability and intimacy, that without the former it's hard to experience the latter. In this way my practical ineptitude accelerated our growing intimacy with the people on Nuakata. I can well imagine that if, like my brother, I'd been handy, the men building our house would for remnant colonial reasons have deferred to me, expecting me to instruct them in the latest dim-dim building techniques. Instead, I was in awe of their capacity to harvest timber from the forest and to construct a substantial four room house largely without nails and all in a matter of weeks. This is another where my technical shortcomings, the one image that I'd like you to see would be of the house. Because, you know, you think of a bush hut, but it was actually quite a substantial ... and when it was new and shiny and gold and it was an impressive looking place. Thus I was the one cast in the role of eager pupil, not them, and this served to set the tone of our relationships, inverting to some degree the usual pattern of power between dim-dims and Papuans.
I just want to read another passage which, there was a bizarre coincidence that after, you know, what do you do, 13 years at school and four years at uni in Australia, I'd never come across another Roger. I'd met one other Roger but never in my schooling. And then we go to this tiny island off the coast of Papua New Guinea and there are two guys called Roger living on the island so it's even more unlikely than Eric being the traditional medicine man. And they pronounced Roger as Lodia and as is remnantly true with us, the thing of namesakes in their culture is very important. So to be named after someone means that you have an affinity with that person and you don't call them by their name, you call them (14:24) or namesake and so I had a (14:26) which is my big namesake and (14:28) my small namesake.
And both of those guys just happened to be really lovely dignified characters. And my big namesake really took me under his wing while we were doing the building of the house because, you know, I ... cack-handed and making these mistakes and I was the butt of everyone's joke and that was all good but ... and he would laugh along, but then he would ... when it sort of went too far he would sort of come by my side and he actually was comical at some stages where he was like a mother for me really trying to protect me when I climbed up the frame of the house and stuff like that.
So another day I accompanied ten or so, (15:17), young men, as they headed off deep into the bush up the mountain at the back of carpenter's hamlet to cut down saplings for the floor joists of our house. I walked with George and (15:29) the oldest men in the party and struggled to keep up with the younger ones who were charging ahead, yelling and waving their machetes about. We stopped a couple of times, once beside a huge dense clump of bamboo while the men discussed the merits of one stand of trees over another. Each time the decision was to move on further up the steep slope.
Between them, these young men had a mental catalogue of every tree on the island. Finally reaching a gully heavily wooded with tall straight young trees the (16:03) spread out and began felling them with their machetes. The plan was for everyone to harvest two trees each though some cut down as many as four. What moments earlier had been a peaceful glade suddenly became a manic industrial zone as everyone, having chosen their target, began chopping away seemingly unconcerned by the danger of the trees that quickly began crashing down around them.
(16:27) selected a tree for me and stood and watched awhile to make sure I wasn't in danger of chopping off a leg. Once the trees were felled they had to be stripped of their branches. I was slower than most in both the felling and the stripping but fortunately George was faster than I was slow and was kind enough to help me as soon as he'd finished dealing with his own quota. Ian (16:51) also insisted on helping me carry my harvest, taking it in turns to balance their saplings on one shoulder while using their free hand to carry one end of my load. This though quickly proved to be impossible due to the steepness of the descent. Still George and (17:06) stayed with me as the others crashed and sang and bounded their way down the mountain. By the time we re-entered carpenter's small hamlet I was totally exhausted. My shirt wet through with sweat. Regardless, I felt exhilarated, like I'd been part of some great communal event.
The fact that the people on Nuakata never made us feel the depth of our vulnerability, our indebtedness to them, was a measure of their generosity, their integrity. That task instead fell to malaria, cyclones and horror boat trips back and forth to the mainland. Malaria stalks Boy he Cry, as it shadowed our time on the island. Nearly everyone on Nuakata suffers from repeated bouts of Malaria which over time wears them down and is no doubt a significant factor in their reasonably short life expectancies. Fortunately, they are born with some degree of natural immunity to the disease which mitigates its symptoms a little and means they respond quickly and well to Chloroquine, one of the milder anti-malarial drugs. That in itself ... it's a good thing but it's also a bad thing because they do respond really quickly and then don't complete the course which helps the building up of the drug resistant strains.
Shelley and I, however, had no such immunity and our time on Nuakata was punctuated by increasingly regular malarial episodes and the attendant trials and traumas of self diagnosis and self medication. In fact my worsening health forced us to leave two months earlier than we'd planned and gave the impression to family and friends back home that the entire experience had been a disaster, a debacle. One of my motivations in writing the book was to redress that misconception, to show that despite our serious ill health, our time on Nuakata was in fact the time of our lives.
Once we were established in our house, our lives took on a certain daily rhythm. While Shelley attended to people's minor medical needs in the early morning, I collected water from the creek and when needed gathered and chopped wood for our cooking fire. She would then go out and talk with women about their birth practices, etcetera, or would with research assistant Wycliffe or Wyclip or Gooley Abubba, which was his nickname and that was abbreviated to Gooley. Gooley Abubba means sleep anywhere anytime. And nicknames were big on the island, most people had a nickname and they were of that kind of gentle thing that even the parents would end up calling their child by the nickname. So, yes, he became very close to us and ended up living in the same house as us and ... so he was a research assistant for Shelley. And they would transcribe and translate previous interviews and I would work on my novel.
For lunch I'd cook damper. Then in the afternoons while Shell worked some more I'd usually flake off with the (20:07), the young men, and play volleyball or just sit around and tell stories. Before the equatorial sun made its quick descent I'd cook our dinner, again on the open fire. Every night this consisted of a cup of rice or equivalent amount of pasta, one onion, one potato and a 180 gram tin of either tuna or mackerel. Twice a week we treated ourselves by adding a small can of corn or a packet of dried peas to the mix. People ask, you know, why couldn't we eat the food that was there. They were in drought at that time and they hardly had enough food to feed themselves and there was no market on the island. So there was no chance for formal exchange of food.
As we came to know people better much of our spare time, particularly in the evenings in the glow of our coveted Coleman lamp, was spent playing cards or simply talking and laughing. Humour, especially of the gentle stirring kind, was a prominent feature of our interactions. So too though were conversations about belief, God, magic and meaning. Gooley, Shelley's research assistant was and still is an intellectual, someone deeply interested in how his traditional cultural beliefs interact with those imported from western cultures. And he, Shelley and I had many fascinating conversations about his experiences of Papuan (21:29) or magic. Despite their Christian faith, or perhaps in complement to it, many people on Nuakata believe there was good (21:37) and bad (21:39). The bad they repudiated, the good they sometimes called upon or at least did not renounce.
The most dramatic discussion of this kind came about when Talbadar Antea, the respected old man who had addressed the whole island meeting, came to our house to tell Shelley some of the old legends. Now, Talbadar Antea was another remarkable guy. There's probably some really nasty people living on Nuakata but we just didn't find them, so ... but he was this ... he was kind of a legend for his generation. He would have been in his late 60s, I think, when we were there. And he was renowned for having been ... sort of singlehandedly hunted out the wild pigs on the island and he and his mate (22:24) had been ... they'd started the soccer association which was ... and netball and volleyball. And he was just a very skilled kind of character and he ended up making us ... when we first went there, there's no chairs, you know, so you really notice how much we rely on chairs. There was one old cane chair that was dilapidated and falling apart and we said, you know, "Where did that come from?" And he'd made that. And he was the only person on the island who knew how to make that, those chairs.
And so we went with one fellow up and harvested this cane. And then Talbadar Antea apprenticed this young fellow to teach him how to make the chairs. And so he made us two chairs which we paid for and used and then as is revealed at the end of the book, he made us two more chairs as love gifts. And he said they were the last chairs that he would make and that was certainly true because he died a couple of years later. So anyway, he was a very gentle man and full of integrity, which sort of made this story all the more remarkable.
Talbadar Antea rarely said or did things flippantly and because most of his words and actions carried some insight or expertise people accorded them enormous respect, like a great craftsman in whatever he did he always remained unhurried. He spoke in a soft and ... soft voice and slowly unravelled a creation story about a snake that sounded similar to the Aboriginal story of the Rainbow Serpent. At times he lost the thread of the story, stumbled over some detail or other and shaking his head, would say (24:16), "I forget. We can't remember the old stories anymore." Disappointed, but not wanting to show it, we said it didn't matter. "No," said Talbadar Antea, "I will try to remember them while I work. They will come back to me."
We boiled the kettle on the kerosene stove and shared a cup of tea in an uncomfortable silence, handing the empty mug back to Shell, Talbadar Antea said, "I can tell you one thing from the old days, one thing I know to be true because it happened to me." The story Talbadar Antea told us was of his fishing magic. One day about 20 years ago he was collecting coconuts near his hamlet when a dwarf, an elf or a leprechaun type figure appeared from behind a tree. As the dwarf approached, he said he wanted to give Antea some of his hair. He explained that when combined with the right (25:08), incantation, which he would also provide, the hair could be used for either love or fishing magic but not for both. Antea would have to choose. A keen fisherman, happily married, the choice for Antea was easy. The dwarf handed him a jar with some hair in it and instructed him to twirl one strand of hair round the hook each time he went fishing. He taught Antea a spell to say as he prepared the hook, then disappeared back into the bush.
Reticent at first, Antea eventually plucked up the courage to do as the dwarf had instructed. Not really expecting the magic to work, not knowing what to expect, he was stunned by its power. With the dwarf's hair tied round it, Antea's hook became irresistible to fish. He'd had good catches before but nothing like this. The palms of his hands burned from constantly really in the line. Before long, exhausted, his canoe overladen with flapping fish he returned to (26:06) Bay blowing his conk shell to herald his arrival.
News spread quickly of Antea's magic powers and he soon became known as the best fisherman on the island. His catches became so great he was forced to build a larger canoe. This done, he continued to use the dwarf's hair to fill his boat with more fish than he and his extended family could possibly eat. Then one day bobbing in the water over the reef, his canoe already full of fish, he decided to cast his line one last time for the fun of it, because he could. As usual, a few minutes later he felt a tug on the other end of the line. This tug though was so violent that it nearly wrenched him into the sea. Fearing he had snared a giant king fish or a shark, he stopped trying to reel it in and instead braced himself, held firm to the line and allowed his canoe to be towed, first in one direction then another then another.
After a long battle, the creature finally succumbed and Antea began the arduous task of hauling in his catch. He couldn't believe how heavy it was, the dead weight of it. As it neared the surface, the fish seemed to have become entangled in seaweed. Then, as Antea continued reeling in the line, a human head with tresses of brown curly hair burst through the membrane of water. Panicked, disoriented, for a moment Antea thought he had killed someone. Still pulling on the line he watched in horror as the water slid from the scales of a merman's tail. This was worse than murder. To kill such a creature was to disturb the balance of things, to anger the spirit world. Antea knew instantly that it was retribution for his greed, that he had overstepped the line. What he didn't know was how else he might be punished.
Scrambling among the dead and dying fish he found his knife on the bottom of the canoe and cut the dead merman free, watching it drift slowly down into the clear blue sea Antea feared what such a transgression might mean. Seeking forgiveness, he threw some of his catch back into the ocean. Most of the fish had already died and clumped together they floated on the surface like a cloud casting a dark shadow on the coral below. Fearful, ashamed, Antea paddled back to (28:25) Bay and for the first time in months did not trumpet his return. Visibly shaken by the memory of this event, Antea told us that he had never used his fishing magic again. Unsure of how to dispose of the dwarf's hair, frightened that if he burnt it it might release some other magic power. He eventually gave it to a visiting Polynesian missionary, who dutifully removed it from the island.
What were Shelley and I to make of that story? Where should we put it? How should we categorise it, process it? All we knew for certain was that Talbadar Antea was an amazingly gentle, generous and totally sincere old man. So were we to think him delusional? A liar? And then I started wondering why cultures as different and disparate as Melanesia and the Celts or the Teutons all traditionally had cosmologies, people by witches, little people, tree sprites and mermans. I didn't come up with any answers to these questions. Still haven't. Instead they merely became more acute after Shelley and I had a firsthand experience of Papua (29:33). That thought is another story and one which I'll leave you to discover in the book.
It was similarly unsettling to listen to people on Nuakata talk about their hopes for the future, their development dreaming, as some indigenous Australians have called it. According to most measures of quality of life, people on Nuakata are impoverished. While they currently have enough land, food and water, though the latter is scarce in one quarter of the island, they have little material wealth beyond that and as I've already mentioned offer suffer from repeated bouts of malaria and live shorter and in many ways harsher lives than us. This though must be balanced against the fact that the lives they do live are undoubtedly rich in terms of human connectedness and interaction and possess qualities lacking in the materially wealthier longer lives that we enjoy and/or endure.
Washington talked about these issues more directly too. Washington was one of Gooley's brothers and someone we had a lot to do with. One day in the lead up to a soccer match between (30:39) and (30:40), two of the wards on the island, a working bee was organised to cut the grass at the primary school soccer field. The grass was about this high. When the volunteers from (30:52) arrived somewhere near the appointed time, which no doubt was very vague, we discovered our (30:57) counterparts were nowhere to be seen. Rather than start the job on our own, the field was covered in knee high grass and was to be cut by hand with machetes, we sat in the dirt and whittled away at driftwood while we waited.
As Misark fashioned a chunk of grain wood into the image of a dim-dim boat, I satisfied myself with the simpler pleasure of shaving curls of reddish timber from a stick. Having honed one end of the stick to a point I put the knife down and began digging at the dirt with my spear. "Dig far enough, you might find gold," said Washington. I jabbed at the ground in a frenzy, eyes boggling with gold fever, dirt flying. "Oh, dim-dim," said Sorti. "True," added Washington. "What?" I asked, returning my excavation efforts to a sustainable speed. That's what they say, true. "Under that mountain there," he said, tilting his head in the direction of Mount Tanalabwa. "Huge what?" "Gold deposits." "Maybe, (31:57), who knows?" I said. "We might be Papuan millionaires," said Misark, one arm reaching skyward holding his dim-dim boat aloft, sailing it towards this bright horizon. "Is that what you want?" I asked, cutting through the laughter, changing the tone. "Maybe," said Washington, "Then we could buy TVs, get a (32:18) Soccer Club uniform." The others became excited, adding items to the shopping list. "A speedboat," said Sorti. "A plane," suggested Noeli. "No, no, a helicopter," said Misark, whose boat now transformed, hovering, banking, propelled by the thwap thwap sounds coming from his mouth.
Noticing the unease in my laughter, Washington asked, "Lodia, what do you think?" (32:43), "I don't know," I said, turning my attention back to the digging, stalling for time as I thought about what to say. "I know you want all these things, why wouldn't you? And perhaps you can get some of them. But in the world of dim-dim everything comes at a cost. There is always a price to pay. You understand?" Washington nodded, inviting me to continue. "Say they found gold on Normanby Island," which was the large island nearby, "Perhaps you (33:12) could get work in the mine there. And, yes, you would earn some money, though not much, but then you would have to pay for somewhere to live, for food. There wouldn't be much money left for fun things and the cost for you, the price you'd pay is your lifestyle. No more sitting round telling stories, building (33:29)," sailing canoes, "playing volleyball. You'd be working dim-dim time, eight hours a day down a hole in the ground doing what the bosses say."
"If they found gold on Nuakata, that would be better, yeah?" said Misark, his driftwood sculpture now stilled in his lap. "(33:45), it is true," I said. "That might be much better. Then the mining company would have to pay you money to use your land. But how much would you charge them?" "Two million kina," said Misark, beaming at the prospect. "But that wouldn't be enough," I said. "You'd be selling them everything you have. If you gave ... if they gave you 2M kina and you bought your speed boats and your helicopter, in a few years all that money would be used up and after the mine was finished, maybe in 20 years' time, you might be left with nothing and the gardens that you and your ancestors have lived off for hundreds of years might be spoilt." "How much then?" asked Washington soberly, as if a deal were in the offing. "You're talking to the wrong dim-dim," I said. "I'm no good with money. But once you enter that dim-dim world you have to think like a dim-dim. The mining company would try to pay you as little as it could but you'd have to make it pay more, much more. More money than you can imagine. Then once you had the money, you'd still have to think like a dim-dim, you'd have to invest it so it would be there for your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren."
To this point everyone had been listening intently, their heads nodding. But at the mention of investment, their faces went blank. Knowing little about the subject myself, I tried in vain to explain how banks work, about capital and interest. Then an analogy came to me, one I'd probably read somewhere, "It's like your yams," I said. "The seed yams are what you keep ... that you keep are like the capital, the money you invest. And the yams you eat are like the interest, the money you live off. So the bank's like a yam house, somewhere to keep your seed yam safe." "So you don't eat your capital," Washington said quickly grasping the concept. "(35:29), yeah, that's right," I said.
Returning to my digging thinking about it some more, I added, "It's so hard though because you people need to make up your own minds about all this. I could tell you what I'd do, I wouldn't worry too much about the dim-dim world. I'd just try to get better medicine, more equipment for the school. But that's all right for me, I've got dim-dim stuff. I know what dim-dim life is like. The problem is you don't so how can you choose? Who can you trust? Most dim-dims like the dim-dim life much more than I do so you can't take my word for it. Maybe you'd be like most dim-dims, (36:04), who knows? I don't know."
The young people from (36:08) strolled up behind us and our discussion ended with (36:13) taunting us, saying we were lazy for not having started on the grass. The conversation about the future of Nuakata continued though at other times with other people. Whenever the topic arose, I felt encouraged that people were actively thinking about it and that Shelley and I could furnish them with the perspective of two misfit dim‑dims to add to those of the missionaries and the mercenaries they'd already encountered. The more information they had, I thought, the better. But I also felt uncomfortable about voicing my opinion, because the truth was I had no answers to the problems of development in places like Nuakata. I couldn't help wondering how much longer could a subsistence culture survive in the era of globalisation. Wasn't dramatic change inevitable on Nuakata?
At its best, development economics is dedicated to the alleviation of poverty, the reduction of maternal and infant mortality rates, to improving the health and increasing the life expectancies of whole populations of under privileged people. It's hard to argue against these objectives, who would want to? Yet my experience of living on Nuakata made me wonder, how do you compare life expectancies across culture? In a place like Nuakata where extreme poverty is not an issue and the lifestyle allows people, though it must be said, men in particular, to spend endless hours telling stories and jokes, playing games, singing, being with their family and friends. Is it necessarily automatically a tragedy that people there are old by the time they're 40? That they'll probably die in their late 50s or early 60s? If time is experienced subjectively, if a week on Nuakata can to a dim-dim like me seem like a month, how long has a Nuakatan lived if they die at 60?
How do you compare a year in the life of someone in urban Australia who feels that the hectic demands of their lifestyle leave them with no time to spend with their family, to do what they want to do to, to that of someone on Nuakata for whom time, like life, is defined by the ongoing outworking of a web of relationships? Isn't this something of what we mean in the west when we say time is money? Didn't we long ago trade our time for another currency? Don't we now eat our time, wear it, bank it, invest it in houses that still stand long after we're dead? On Nuakata when someone dies, people say, (38:33), which means their time is over. Perhaps for dim-dims having as a culture exchange time for money, our time is in a sense over before it begins. Can we be so sure that what we have, long lives filled with busyness and things and other people's entertainment is what everyone else wants, needs?
Of course there's so much in dim-dim life that is wonderful, nothing more so than the general reduction of pain and suffering, our prevailing good health. But should we be so confident in assuming that our path is unambiguously one of progress? To where is dim-dim life progressing? And if the people of Nuakata were to choose that path, what price would they pay for better health, longer lives for the goods and gadgets of dim-dim life? Is the answer to this question like the one Jesus gave to the rich man who asked what he must do to inherit eternal life, but in reverse? Do the Nutakatans have to give up all that is rich in their lives, their connections to the land, to each other, their culture, to thread of camel through the development needle, to inherit a healthier materially wealthier life? And if those bonds are broken what will take their place, commerce, consumerism, Christianity, television, the Internet? What will save Nuakata from the fate of so many Aboriginal communities in Australia, communities cut adrift from their past, floating, sinking in a dim-dim defined future? To adapt another quote the Nuakatans learnt from the missionaries, what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their way of life?
As I say in that passage, while living on the island in the mid 1990s, I thought the pressures of globalisation and (40:14) rendered the Nuakatan way of life unsustainable. That inevitably their subsistence lifestyle would be swallowed up and incorporated into the global economy. Sixteen years later I'm not so sure. Partly because things haven't changed there a heck of a lot in those 16 years, which surprised me. Now more than ever people are coming to understand that it is our high growth, mass consumption lifestyle that is unsustainable. So much so that it threatens the very planet. So maybe rather than impose our concepts and measures of quality of life on Nuakatans we should be looking to them for inspiration as we search for ways to wean ourselves off our addiction to material possessions.
Perhaps as they understandably covet and aspire to benefit from some of our technologies, to own some of the luxuries we possess, we should also aspire to something of their material simplicity. Of course the real injustice of the situation is that while the Nuakatans' lifestyle consumes so little of the earth's resources and emits infinitesimal amounts of carbon compared to ours, they are the ones most immediately vulnerable to global warning. If sea temperatures continue to rise at the current rate, the reef around the island which provides them with fish will die within the next 20 years. Higher sea levels will threaten the easily inhabitable land between the coast and the mountain. And changed weather patterns are already having a negative impact. Unlike when we were there when the island was in drought, last year they experienced record rainfall which resulted in many people's root crops rotting in the ground.
I guess if I were to think about what I hope readers of Boy he Cry might take from the book, it would be a sense of the unexpected depth of connection that Shelley and I developed with the people on Nuakata. And rather than give you the short answer, I want to finish by reading a few more excerpts which provide a fuller more satisfactory explanation, one that reveals much about my ongoing feelings towards our friends and (42:11) family on Nuakata.
As I said, Gooley was Shelley's research assistant and we became very close and one of the things that their culture is still small enough and contained enough, even though it's obviously influenced by western and other cultures, but most men on the island, by the time they're in their, you know, late 20s, early 30s, would be expected to be able ... they're generalists, they haven't specialised. So they would still be expected to be able to make a canoe, to fish, to make a garden, to build a house, to play soccer, sing. So everyone can do those things to greater or lesser degrees and, as I've mentioned, Gooley was more the intellectual type and his practical skills, they were considerably better than mine but he, you know, he was one of the ones that was flaking off when we were building the house.
Coming down from the shelter, Gooley announced he was going to work on the canoe he was building. Curious, I asked if I could go with him to have a look. Seeming surprised by the request, he nonetheless said, "Yes," and led me along the path in the opposite direction to Gohea, past (43:43), the hamlet where his sister Ghateli and her husband Kippam and their young children lived. Leaving the rutted path, we walked a short distance through the bush then came to a clearing. Like a vision, rays of sunlight streaked through the dense foliage furnishing the chiselled rosewood of Gooley's canoe. The crown and foot of the tree were lying where they had fallen. The emergent canoe lay between them. Surrounded by a mount of chips and long curled shavings of reddish wood, the half built boat looked like it was floating on a sea of flames.
Astonished by the beauty of this scene, I couldn't stop myself from telling Gooley how striking I found it. Standing in the canoe, digging at the wood with an (44:25), he laughed and said he didn't see it that way. "Things for us are either (44:31), good, or (44:33), bad. We don't worry about beautiful or not beautiful." "So when you look at (44:39) Bay when the sun's shining and the water's blue, you don't think that's beautiful?" Still hacking away at the wood, not looking up, he said, "(44:47), nope. We think maybe it's a good day for fishing." "Really? What about women? They all look the same to you?" Gooley stopped caring, laughing his hoarse smoker's giggle, he looked up at me with a glean in his eye and said, "Some women (45:03), some women, (45:05). Every man makes his own decision." So this sort of was a recurring thing, the canoe.
Our conversations with Gooley were not always about matters of culture and belief. Often we'd talk more generally but also more personally. One night Shelley asked him if he thought he'd ever marry. Looking sheepish, his eyes cast down at his chest, he said, "I was married once in 1982 to a woman on East Cape." We'd known him for a few months by then. "(45:50), true?" I asked, excitedly, trying to absolve him of any sense of guilt. To let him know that unlike the missionary dim-dims we did not consider divorce some sort of sin. "Yes," he replied, smiling. "And my father too." We all laughed. Gooley from nervousness. Shelley and me from shock. Exaggerating her look of astonishment, Shelley said, "You humbugger, you're a sly one you are Gooley Abubba. A boy or a girl?" "(46:17), a boy, Wellington, that is his name." "How old is he?" Pausing, counting up the years, Gooley said, "Eight. He's just a little younger than Siddem."
Shelley still couldn't believe what she was hearing, that Gooley had kept this information from her for so long. She grilled him with relish as punishment. "So where does Wellington live?" "With his mother's family on East Cape," which is on the mainland. "Is he at school?" Like proud fathers everywhere, Gooley said, "Yes. And he was top of his class in preschool and last year in Grade 1." "Has he ever come to Nuakata," Shell asked, excited at the prospect of meeting him. "No, never," said Gooley. The laughter leached from his face. "His mother and I don't get along too well so I don't see him very often. It makes me sad to think of him." Later in the conversation, once she'd had time to absorb these revelations, Shelley returned to her original line of enquiry, "So do you think you'll ever remarry?" Gooley smiled at her persistence. "There is one woman who wants to marry me but I've told her she has to wait until I've finished translating the Bible." Pausing a moment, smiling, he added, "I don't think I'll ever finish that translation."
Moreland City Council podcast outro: We hope you enjoyed this ReadMore talk presented by Moreland Library's ReadMore project and Moreland City Council.
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