‘I’ve come to see Samarai and Kwato.’ I pulled up a worn chair.
‘Ah, it’s so beautiful there. We’ll go together, you and I, to Kwato. Many people used to come, but there are few visitors now.’ The cards flopped softly onto the table. He scarcely noticed if the game ‘came out’ and took even less interest. Time seemed to have come to a shuddering halt. I realized with alarm that nothing was actually going to happen in the next five minutes, the next hour, for the rest of the afternoon, for my entire life if I stayed on the island for long enough. My own arrival was the main event of the week. I needed to slow down to Melanesian time. It was quiet in that room and baking hot. The ceiling fan motors had probably burnt out long ago.
‘Dinah will show you up to your room. Then come down and have lunch,’ he suddenly said.
A petite village woman with a beautiful smile gestured for me to follow her up what was almost a grand staircase. The central carpet had long since disappeared, but the unpainted wooden strip in the centre was a ghostly reminder of some past attempt at luxury. We took the right flight of the staircase and passed through two bare rooms with flaking paint. Broken lampshades, mattresses and lumber lay abandoned on the floor in a corner. Her bare feet noiselessly brushed the cracked lino. A long veranda opened off a landing, but the bleached scaffolding hid any view. She pushed open the door to No. 8, a large room furnished with a double bed, a single bed, a dressing table, a wardrobe and a fan. It was clean and comfortable with screened windows against mosquitoes. French doors opened onto the veranda. I looked through the maze of planks over the former swamp to the few colonial buildings that had survived the destruction of the war.
‘You share the bathroom and toilet,’ she said in excellent English and showed me the most basic of conveniences. I noticed a sign in red letters under a sheet of discoloured plastic on the wall of the shower: ‘For hot water pull string.’
Dinah smiled again and disappeared. A corridor led out to what I thought was a rear entrance, but I found that the stairs had been removed and a twenty-foot drop into empty space yawned below. In a shed I could see a wrecked dinghy. I wandered back into the stifling room and sat on the bed. Glancing up I caught sight of my reflection in the glass. A crumpled traveller, sweating heavily, weighed down with notebooks and maps, wearing a sand-coloured colonial shirt, a planter panama and blue suede boots. Overdressed for the occasion I thought. I noticed there were no locks to the door of room No. 8 as I went down to lunch.
‘Where were you born, Wallace?’ I had poured myself some livid green cordial and was helping myself from a platter of reef fish and bananas.
‘On Logea Island, near Kwato.’
‘Really? Some people feel that Kwato was where the nation of Papua New Guinea began.’
‘Certainly it was.’
The legendary island mission station of Kwato gives rise to strong passions and controversial opinions. Many of the most distinguished people in public life in the national government attended this mission school. Wallace often lapsed in and out of pidgin which confused me on occasion. Fervent Christianity was obvious in every sentence.
‘The people of Milne Bay and the islands wantim Word of God, very much they wantim. Charles Abel tried to make a new Papuan society that was Christian and educated for working. He taught us boat-building and metalwork. Mainly discipline and concentration he knock it in their heads. Young people don’t want these things now.’ He dealt the cards to himself all the time he spoke, cultivating chance. Dinah was clearing away the remains of the lunch.
‘Respect for custom certainly seems to be passing away.’
‘Gone. Gone now. Young people are too lazy to keep kastom alive. Prayer is the answer to all problems, Michael. You must pray. Even when they stole my television and wrecked my boat I prayed.’ He began to hum a hymn tune I vaguely recognised.
‘Did you get it back?’
‘No. God didn’t want me to watch any more television. It was a sign. I read and write more now.’ His fatalism appeared to be the final tremors of a departing soul.
‘Is anyone else staying here, Wallace?’
‘Yes. Two government ministers. The Prime Minister has stayed here. The High Commissioner in London, Sir Kina Bona, he stayed here. They all know me. We had hundreds at a celebration not long ago. I built a dancing and picnic area beside the guesthouse. Did you see it? That was before the Englishman betrayed me.’ He had stopped the mindless card-dealing and actually looked at me, animated yet with traces of anger.
‘Who was that? What did he do?’
‘Not now. You go out and look at our beautiful island. We’ll talk tonight.’
‘Fine. I’ll have a look at your dancing area.’
‘Ah, yes. Do that. Not many come here now, but in the future we’ll once more have many people …’ His voice trailed away as if he had lost confidence in the remainder of the sentence.
‘I tried to have a shower but there was no water.’
‘No, that’s right. You must tell us first and then we will turn on the pump. Guests usually shower after meals.’
‘I see. Well, I’m going now. See you later on.’
‘All right. Will you come up to the hospital with me sometime? I need some more tablets. Arthritis they say it is.’ He drifted in and out of this world, bolstering himself with prayer and medicine. I dragged the heavy fly-door open and walked out into the fiery furnace of Samarai.
A coral path shaded by coconut palms and pines encircles the island. It is known as Campbell’s Walk after the Resident Magistrate who constructed it in the early 1900s using local labour from the prison. The transparency of the porcelain-blue water is transformed to a deeper cobalt as it reaches down China Strait and out towards the impenetrable mainland and pearly lips of Milne Bay. Small coves with upturned canoes invite fishermen to dream on the rocks. Fibro shacks nestle into the sides of slight hillocks waiting to be consumed by the exuberant palms, bananas, ferns, frangipani and hibiscus. The sound of an electric train instinctively caused me to search the horizon until common sense prevailed and I realised it was the sighing of the pines on the island of Sariba. Two women were cooking over open fires in a kitchen hut adjacent to a narrow beach where a gleaming new dinghy with outboard motor was knocking on the tide. The picturesque schooners and yawls, sails bellying in the wind, carving like swift blades through the currents, have long since disappeared.
I had been walking for only fifteen minutes and was already halfway around the island. One of the most distinguished visitors to Samarai was the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. He was delayed here in November 1917 while waiting for the cutter-rigged launch Ithaca, which would take him to the Trobriand Islands. His favourite occupation on this walk was to read Swinburne and write his private diary in Polish. It revealed him as a man who had embarked upon a profoundly personal quest.
Malinowski was born in Kraków, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia in partitioned Poland in 1884. The family would spend part of each year in the Tatra mountains in the Polish summer capital, Zakopane, a resort which became a haven for artists and intellectuals. Around 1904 he read Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a vast collection of myths and magic from around the world, which inspired him to become an anthropologist and writer. Despite frail health he studied mathematics and physics, being awarded the highest academic honours in the Hapsburg Empire – sub auspiciis Imperatoris1 – when he graduated in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków in 1908. The deputy to Emperor Franz Josef personally presented him with a gold-and-diamond cluster ring at an opulent award ceremony in Kraków. In 1910 he moved to London where he began anthropological studies as a research student at the London School of Economics. He met and corresponded with eminent anthropologists at Cambridge, became a staunch Anglophile and is generally considered to have created the modern subject of British social anthropology.