The Best Australian Essays 2015 (21 page)

The Golden Age
is nevertheless a book that carries the quiet assurance of a classic, which it will most certainly become. Adam Phillips notes the importance of ‘the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands'. When I look into my life, I see myself sitting in a car with my husband while the Bathurst plains unroll beside us; under the changing shade of a tree with a child asleep on my lap; holding my mother's hand in the last weeks of her life. In the presence of someone – fully present, utterly connected, but being asked for nothing. It is this magical state that Joan London's new novel conjures up.

Sydney Review of Books

The Informed Imagination

Drusilla Modjeska

In July 2009, two artists from Ömie, high on the slopes of Mt Lamington in Papua New Guinea, were in Sydney for an exhibition of their barkcloth art. Early in their visit, their sponsor David Baker, then director of the now defunct New Guinea Gallery, drove them and me, and Alban Sare, the Ömie man who'd come down with them, to a shopping mall to buy shoes and warm clothes. To Alban, who'd been to Sydney before and had spent time in Port Moresby, the mall was not so strange – just larger and shinier; he liked it. For Pauline Rose Hago, the younger of the two artists, familiar only with the town of Popondetta on the plain below Ömie, the cars in the car park were enough to give her a headache. But Dapene Jonevari, a senior artist and a
duvahe
(rather inaccurately translated as chief), went into a state of shock when bad spirits congregating on the escalators stole all her strength. I do not tell this as a comic story. I mightn't believe in bad spirits on escalators, or not entirely, but I don't doubt that Dapene, one of the strongest women I have encountered here or in PNG, was assaulted by the force of a world of which she'd never seen the like. What nature of beings were the new people she'd seen often enough down on the plain, and of whom she'd heard stories, though none to prepare her for this?

Back at my house later that day, Dapene was still limp, her expression glazed. Two cups of strong sugary tea didn't seem to help. I looked to Pauline for guidance – as I had when I was in Ömie. She had been alongside me on every path, in every village, in the forests where Dapene led the women to cut the trees for their bast, in the houses where the women paint, in the rivers where we washed. Always Pauline; certain, strong-voiced Pauline. And here we were, in my place, in my house, and I was asking her for help.

‘Where is your ground?' she asked. Where indeed? At the oval at the end of my street, they poked at the hard earth with toes in new shoes. Yes, they supposed it was ground, of a sort.

‘Your gardens?' Pauline asked. ‘They are where?'

‘In the cities we have no gardens; we have shops,' I said, and Pauline translated for Dapene; a murmur, all I had to interpret was tone.

We walked along the edge of the inner harbour to a park on the next bay, and as we walked Dapene regained something of her stature; by the time we returned to the oval, she and Pauline were singing Ömie songs. It was dusk, joggers were jogging past, the lights were coming on, as they sang to a rhythm I'd heard every day of my stay in Ömie.

Back at my house, they wanted to sleep – while in the kitchen I brooded on Pauline's question, and my inability to protect them here, as they had me when I was on their ground. When they came downstairs for dinner – sweet potato and pork that didn't convince them as pig – I'm pleased to report that Dapene's strength had returned. Pauline took my hand and leant into my shoulder. ‘Sister friend,' she said, the name she'd called me in Ömie.
Sister friend
. It was a kindness, and I liked it, but in truth was I, am I, sister and friend?

These were not academic questions. I was in the depths of yet another draft of
The Mountain
at the time, struggling with the post-colonial complexities of how to write as a white outsider of a country I first encountered in 1968 when I was twenty-one. After Dapene and Pauline returned to their mountain, I returned to my desk with Pauline's question reverberating in me. Where was our ground: ours in the sense of a highly asphalted world, and ungrounded culture? Where was my ground? Mine in the sense of the book I was, or rather at that point was not, writing.

The ground I thought I had for the book that was not yet
The Mountain
was an approach to writing that had begun with
Poppy
, a fictive ‘biography' of my mother. It had been there that I'd found a voice that felt authentically my own, and during the 1990s I had become an advocate for the first-person singular – the ‘I', and the ‘eye' – as a way of uncovering, or recovering, occluded feminine experience. With
Stravinsky's Lunch
, I articulated this use of the first person as a ‘method' – if that's the word – that could draw together the imagined and the informed, the fictive and the researched. It was by bringing the imagining self to the gaps in the record that the writing self could reclaim the overlooked and under-recorded lives and work of women. Imagination – both imaginative embellishment and fictive methods – could thereby meld, as it were, with biographical and autobiographical writing to give shape to lives for which the record was fractured and uncertain. The ‘informed imagination' of the first person had become, in a sense, the ground of my writing and I took it unquestioned into writing about PNG. It was a while before I understood why that ground proved unstable.

1.

The barkcloth artists of Ömie are now recognised, in the words of Nicholas Thomas, as ‘the most brilliant living exponents' of a ‘great world art tradition' that once stretched across the Pacific from New Guinea to Hawaii. But in 2004 the Ömie, a small group of less than 2000 people, were impoverished and demoralised; only the oldest women were still painting. I was there with David Baker, who had seen their art and had been invited by a small group of young men who wanted to start a business that would bring status and pride as well as cash to this depressed and marginalised group. David was there not as a small gallery owner, but as a sponsor – or potential sponsor – for he recognised that this was art that should be in major gallery collections. I was there, apart from my own interest which was considerable, so that I could write of what turned out to be a critical visit – which I did in a catalogue essay for
The Wisdom of the Mountain
, the major exhibition of Ömie art at the National Gallery of Victoria that opened in November 2009, four months after Dapene and Pauline's visit to Sydney. By then Ömie Artists was a community business registered in PNG, money was returning to Ömie from sales, including to most of the major state galleries in Australia.

In the catalogue I described the long, steep walk up to Ömie; the ridges, the forests, the gateways to the villages. I described the day I sat with my notebook while David Baker met, in formal meeting, with the
duvahe
. I wrote of the tension between the responsibility felt by the
duvahe
to safeguard their traditions and the community's need for money for school fees, for lamps, tarpaulins and nails, maybe even a tin roof and a tank one day. I wrote of sitting with the women
duvahe
, Dapene among them, as they spoke of the young women who no longer saw the value of learning the exacting art of the cloth, of young men who needed purpose if they weren't to drift into town and find trouble. Even through the processes of translation, I could understand that well enough. And I knew very well the onerous responsibility faced by David. Did he do nothing, in which case the young men would try selling the cloth to tourists on the Kokoda Track, and if that failed, would the art of this exceptional but marginalised group fade away as the art of so many neighbouring groups had done? Or did he step in as sponsor, another white ‘saviour' – there's a long history to that particular trope. Could he/we avoid the sorry path too often trod by good intentions? Could we safeguard the art, and the interests of the Ömie, or was that, too, part of the whiteman fantasy?

A lot was at issue for the Ömie, for us outsiders, and – as it turned out – not only for the Ömie of the high villages who had maintained their art, but also for those lower down the mountain, who'd given up their cultural practices, including their art. Was this how they were to be rewarded for their move to the missions? We hadn't even left the last village when trouble showed itself. Naïvety and good intentions walked us slap into a ‘shake down', a demand for money in the form of an arrest that stretched over two days.

Good material, you might say. An excellent predicament for someone wanting to give a lived shape to a post-colonial experience. But had I tried to write of these events by using my usual approach, was my imagination sufficiently informed to write of what any of this meant to the Ömie, to the
duvahe
, to the young men, indeed to those who felt slighted and aggrieved? The answer, obviously, is no. To write of it only from our perspective, would I not be falling into the worst trap of outsider writing about PNG – placing myself, or ‘us' the white outsiders, in the centre of the frame? I'd read enough colonial memoir and fiction to know the dangers of that narrative – the white adventurers deep in the interior of Papua, suddenly endangered, rescued by their own resourcefulness and the good office of ‘natives' who take their side to defeat, or outwit, angry tribesmen. It wouldn't take much of a twist to have a story straight out of the NSW Bookstall melodramas and romances of the 1920s and 1930s that were among the first to commercialise the uninformed imaginations of Australian writers and their readers. Colonial memoir and fiction casts a long shadow.

In a catalogue essay I could distance myself – the narrating ‘I' – to a role of observer, reporting what had happened in a visible sense: the meetings, the tensions, the varying points of view as they were stated in relation to the matter of the cloth leaving the mountain, translated, and transcribed into my notebook. An inadequate research method, an anthropologist would say, but adequately observed (if not informed), I hoped, to the task of reporting the process that brought the cloth to the National Gallery of Victoria five years later. To attempt more than that, how could ‘our' story – on the basis of a short visit – be told without the view of the Ömie, let alone the view from the Ömie, becoming ever more occluded? What was their view, what did these changes mean for them?

The problem, I was beginning to see, was the inequality between the white narrator and the post-colonial subject.

2.

The first intimation that I was moving towards fiction came with the character of Milton, the young Papuan writer who appeared on the page with a raised fist and a gift for language. He took me by surprise. He arrived unheralded and sat uncomfortably with the imagining ‘I' that was trying to wrest some control over the mess on my desk. I mightn't have expected him, or known what to do with him, but I knew exactly where he came from: those early years at the University of Papua New Guinea before Independence, when, in the words of the great Samoan writer Albert Wendt, indigenous writing across the Pacific began, and ‘gained its first euphoric power and
mana
alongside the movements for political independence'.
¹

I had the good fortune to arrive there with my young anthropologist husband in 1968 as this surge of creative energy was beginning. While my husband tutored, I enrolled in classes with young men (mostly men) who knew that theirs would be the generation that would take this complex country of many languages into nationhood. For someone not long out of an English girls boarding school, that was extraordinary enough. More signifi-cantly for me, I found myself in classes with students who were
writing
. They were writing plays in which plantation labourers rose up, and Papuan girls ran from the altar of white betterment; poems in which copra workers threw down their sacks and
kanakas
spoke back; short stories that lampooned missionaries and traders; essays in the student newspaper that called administrators and colonists to account.

It may be in the nature of memory that experiences that come to us when we are very young, and not yet equipped to interrogate them, remain the most vivid. It is, I think, for this reason that Milton arrived on the page so readily. He is a student when we first meet him. A play he's written is about to be performed at the university. Rika – the young white character onto which I could split some aspect of my learning and unlearning (though not my autobiography) – takes her camera to rehearsals. ‘Publicity shots', they called them, a grand term for a play to be put on in the canteen, but why not? When the
South Pacific Post
censors the photos, she and Milton stand firm together. The old-timer whites might call the university a Mau Mau factory, and condemn girls like Rika as traitors to their race. But right then, at that moment, Rika and Milton are united in the belief that the radical changes that were coming – literature for him, love for her – would eliminate prejudice and – who knows – even render them the same, people under the skin. There would be painful reckonings to come, of course, for them as characters, and for me, writing, trying to write them.

Over my desk I had these words from Albert Wendt: ‘The
post
in post-colonial does not just mean
after
; it also means
around
,
through
,
out of
,
alongside
and
against
.'
²

Looking back, those years in PNG in 1968–71 changed almost everything about my life – and, because of that, I suppose, lived on in me as a core to the book I was to begin more than thirty years later. The impulse was frankly autobiographical, a vanity I admit, though it was also more, for there was something about that country and that time that had entered my blood and I wanted – vanity again – to bring PNG back into ‘our' imaginative consciousness. For over the decades between the cultural surge of those years leading into political independence and the century's end, it seemed to have seeped from fictional view. Once Australian journalists had flown up to investigate black writing; Australian publishers had published writers from there, and wanted writing from here about there. Randolph Stow's
Visitants
and Trevor Shearston's
Something in the Blood
were both published in 1979, an outsider response, it could be said, to that powerful moment when
alongside
could join with
against
. Even these, our own writers, our own novels, have fallen from our collective memory. While more and more sophisticated work came from the pens of anthropologists and historians, fiction seemed to revert to old ways of seeing.