et al. (Edited by) Bourke - Our time but not our place: Voices of expatriate women in Papua New Guinea

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Contents

Acknowledgements

The editors sincerely thank all the women who replied to our invitations, especially those who took up the challenge to write. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the following people: Sue Andrews for being one of the instigators and for her participation in the project; Michael Bourke and Hartmut Holzknecht for technical assistance; Robbie Kituai for his patience and good humour in sharing his mother with the project; Val and Rob Brown for their beach house; Bryant Allen and Michael Bourke, assisted by Milton, Dorothy and Michael Tang Mow, for interviewing Tang Mow Yau Hing in Wewak; Ping Cheng for translating from the Szeyup language used by Tang Mow Yau Hing; Mavis Yen and Tin Culnane for facilitating Pings translation; Louise Denoon for helping to organise the Sydney workshop; Chris Bourke, Michael Chalmers and the many other project wellwishers and enthusiasts, especially our families.

Foreword

Over the years thousands of women, mostly Australians, have lived as expatriates in Papua New Guinea. We went there at different points in our lives and for a variety of reasons. Some of us were keen to go; we were looking for adventure in exotic surroundings, seeking our fortunes, changing jobs, running away from unhappy situations, furthering our professional or academic interests. Many of us were motivated to go to a developing country to do good. Others went because their partners or their parents had an ambition, an obsession or a contract. All have stories to tell.

The editors came together with enthusiasm and motivation to compile an anthology of such stories. We were not looking for women whose ideas and attitudes matched our own. Rather, we were hoping to elicit a wide range of personal perspectives and experiences. To this end, we conducted creative writing workshops in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane. There was such an overwhelming response that not all of the stories could be included in this volume.

The writers were in Papua New Guinea from as early as the 1930s through to the present. Some stayed for only a short period of time, others spent a large portion of their lives there. A few still remain.

Although contributions are from women of Australian, British, New Zealand, Chinese, French, Irish, German, Dutch and North American backgrounds, this list is not representative of all expatriate women in Papua New Guinea. It would have been interesting to have included women from, for example, Africa, India and the Philippines.

The writers chose to present their experiences in the form of essays, diary extracts or letters, memoirs and fiction. Some focus on incidents, issues or characters while others review the entire period of their sojourn in Papua New Guinea.

Readers will be drawn to share with the writers their exhilaration, dismay, guilt, fear, excitement, love lives, awe of landscape and sense of isolationgeographical and emotionalas they come to terms with life in Papua New Guinea. They will encounter birth, death, cargo cults, wilful and worthy servants, and discover unusual approaches to bridges that must be crossed, another use for brown paper, the importance of a bottle of gin and that porklers is not an innovative name for pigs. Cross cultural tensions and a sense of otherness are overriding themes pervading all of the writing.

This anthology will challenge commonly held views of the expatriate condition and especially the place of expatriate women in Papua New Guinea. It can be seen as a prism through which expatriates may view themselves.

Whilst not all writers chose to look back through rose-coloured glasses, we noticed a reticence to dwell on law and order problems and the vulnerability that many expatriate women felt in their day to day lives. As visitors to Papua New Guinea, were we unwilling to be critical of our host country? Or is this simply explained by the human tendency to leave painful memories hidden?

Jean Bourke

Susanne Holzknecht

Kathy Kituai

Linda Roach

Pen Portraits of
Contributors

Josephine Bastian

We were in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea in 196970, when my husband was working with the International Biological Program, first on Karkar Island and then at Lufa. I wrote a book about this period called Paper House Wind House. The story, Meri had a Baby, Aye my Lord, is extracted from it.

Helen Bayes

Helen Bayes grew up in a Quaker family in England and migrated to Australia in 1966, aged twenty-two, as the first step in an exploration of the world. She got stuck in Australia, then went to Papua New Guinea in 1981 to conduct a Review of Recruitment Procedures for the Public Services Commission. She lives in Canberra with her husband and three children.

Paquita Boston

Paquita Boston, BSc (Adel. Univ.) was twelve years in Papua New Guinea and her husband Chris, twenty. Her brief job in Lae as a botanist in 1968 brought them together. After a false start in New Guinea they now farm near the Ord and Gascoyne Rivers in Western Australia.

Myra Jean Bourke

In early 1978, I overheard: What did Mike Bourkes wife use to do? I survived the ensuing identity crisis and now offer an answer: taught at Rabaul Secretarial College in 1971-76; married Mike and accompanied him to the Eastern Highlands; had two sons; studied; taught part-time at Ukarumpa High School; acquired many and varied friends; and sadly left Papua New Guinea in 1983.

Celia Bridle

In 1975 we left the UK for Papua New Guinea because we were fascinated by it. I worked as an art teacher and illustrator and John Perkins, my husband, worked as an agricultural officer. We lived in Rabaul for seven years and were particularly interested in traditional dancing and singing.

Muriel Brookfield

Muriel Brookfield is a geographer. She has been a geomor-phologist in the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, an Associate Professor in Canada, a development researcher in the Pacific, and a part-time ornithologist in Canberra. In 1958, in Papua New Guinea, she was a good academic wife, that is, her husbands unpaid research assistant, investigating labour and migration statistics.

Emmanuelle Carrad

Emmanuelle Carrad, a French national, went to Papua New Guinea in 1978 with her Australian husband. She worked in Wabag, Goroka and Port Moresby in various capacities in community health. She is presently Program Manager of the Indonesian National Eye Care Program of Helen Keller International, and is completing a Masters degree in Medical Sciences from the University of Queensland.

Sally Clarke

Sally Clarke arrived in Port Moresby in February 1956. She and Peter were married there one week later. Peter was attached to the Commonwealth Attorney-Generals Department. Daughter Jane was born in Port Moresby hospital in 1957. The family left in March 1958, on transfer to Melbourne.

Sister Jo Devlin

Born in 1937, at Aghavrin, County Cork, Ireland. In 1959 I joined the Sisters of St Clare, the feminine branch of the 750-year-old Franciscan Order. We focus on prayer in a simple, cloistered lifestyle. In 1971 I took part in establishing the first community of the Order in Melanesia, at Aitape in the Sepik region. This was to be our temporary home and twenty years later, here we still temporarily are.

Rosalie Everest

Early in 1957 my father established Arau Coffee Plantation in the Eastern Highlands. That year my mother, my four-year-old sister and my four-week-old self flew by small aircraft to a dirt airstrip near Arau. For the following hours journey to the plantation my mother was carried in a chair strung on poles, my sister rode the shoulders of a labourer and I travelled by basket.

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