Report On New Guinea’s Progress In 37 Years

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30745, 8 May 1965, Page 5

Report On New Guinea’s Progress In 37 Years

'By DR. MARGARET MEAD, an eminent anthropologist, in the "Sydney Morning Herald.” Reprinted by arrangement.) FEW minutes ago I stood at the edge of the sea, looking out toward the reef where 20 canoes, black silhouettes against the pale dawn sky, are out fishing.

Very soon the canoes, with their crews of people of all ages, will begin to come in with a catch of fish for early-morning breakfast. Half a mile away, rising above the water of the salt lagoon, a cluster of trees marks the site where in the old days the people of Peri village lived in houses set high on stilts.

Out on the water, away from the shore, they were safe from sudden attacks by the land people and were close to their all-im-portant fishing grounds.

That was where I also lived —in a Manus house with a high, thatched roof and a slatted floor through which small objects fell into the water—when 1 first studied the Manus people, in 1928.

This is my third field trip to Manus. On my first trip 1 studied the children; and now, 36 years later, these children are middle-aged men. In 1928 1 went to study the Manus because they had preserved their old, savage ways and had not yet taken on the ideas and the religion of the West. Twenty-five years later, in 1953, i returned to find out how much they had changed over the lifetime of a generation and what had become of them as they changed. And now, 11 years later, I have come back a third time to follow their racing course toward modernisation.

Oldest, Strongest Pokanau, the oldest and still one of the strongest men in Peri, stood beside me on the shore. He may be as old as 70, but he does not know his exact age. Until 1946 nobody counted ages. As a boy, Pokanau had been reared by a wise old grandfather, and—in the days before the Australian government forbade warfare—he had been a special protege of the last fierce old war leader. Today he is the best-informed man of all his village. In answer to every question about the distant past, people say: “Ask Pokanau!” And Pokanau himself is very anxious that all he knows be taken down on the tape recorder He realises that soon there will be no one who knows the old war songs and the tales of his people's wandering as they] spread out and built one village after another in the wide seas off the south coast of Great Admiralty Island. When 1 returned to Peri in 1953 he was already the senior man of any importance in the village. Now, on my third visit, he complained that his sight was failing, although he could still see and name the faint, distant stars. But when the old-age glasses came and he tried them, he found that instead of improving his sight, they made things look different. So he threw the glasses away —and stopped complaining that he was old. Recently he asked me for the present of an aeroplane trip to visit an island he has never seen, where one of his relatives is teaching school. Formerly Manus men died young. In 1928 only one man in the village had lived long enough to witness the birth of his son's first child. Pokanau has lived to see his daughter’s daughter give birth to twins—his great-grandchildren. However, he is alone: all his contemporaries among the men of Peri have died. He says they sat too much by the fire and dried out like the fish that are smoked for sale in the market. He himself has never flinched from going bare-skinned into the chilliest wind. Born A Savage

Old Pokanau was bom a savage, knowing only the savage fighting, world of the tiny archipelago of the Admiralty Islands, off the north-east coast of New Guinea. When he was a boy, before World War 1, thq Admiralty Islands were a German possession, but the Germans had not stopped intertribal fighting. People still went to market with obsidianbladed daggers hidden in their elaborately dressed hair, alert to the ever-present danger of being ambushed by the land people with whom the Manus traded their fish for taros, yams, sago and coconuts. In his own lifetime Pokanau saw his people move from a world of small warring groups—a kind of world that would have been familiar to our own European ancestors thousands of years ago—into a present in which his people listen to the morning news broadcast over the radio much as we do. with accounts of the Olympic games, foreign election cam-;

paigns, proceedings at the United Nations. Immediately after World War IL in 1946, the Manus people took their fate into their own hands. Well ahead of the Australian Governments plans for them, they overhauled their old customs and discarded everything they felt was out of key with the modern world. Basing their thinki ing on ideas they had gained ! by watching German missionaries, isolated Australian government officials, and the host of Americans —more than a million—who went through Manus when it was a World War 11 installation, they organised an entirely new way of life. They moved to the land and built new villages, neatly set out in streets, with modern houses all the same size. In keeping with their new understanding of the world, they ;also set up very simple versions of modern institutions— I for example, a court and a bank.

Great Old Age Talking with Pokanau about | the past, 1 think also about my i own life. When I was a child in Pennsylvania, we made butter from big pans of milk set in a cold stone cellar, we ! studied by oil lamps and we I drove to school in a horse i and buggy. 1 remember the ! wild excitement when someone made a trip in a balloon that ascended from our local j fairground. Americans as old as Pokanau have lived through vast changes, but Pokanau himself has spanned thousands of years of man's history. When 1 returned to Peri in 1953 on my second visit, 25 years after the first trip, the young people who had been bom in the intervening years eyed me appraisingly and the old women wept over the photographs 1 brought back of their friends and relatives who had died. Now, on my third visit, the old women j wept over me because we were all old. Few of the women j are more than 60 years old; but for these people, born ' savages, soaked by rains and buffeted by winds as they fish and travel in canoes, 60 is a great old age. Sitting and talking with these old women, 1 realise keenly how much our own picture of old age has changed—no sunken checks and toothless jaws, no squinting effort to see close work with aging eyes, no tired coughing through long, restless nights. This is the fate of people who have survived I without medical care, with only magic and the guardian ghosts of their fathers to help them through a perilous childhood. Shaven Heads In 1928 these were the young women. Their heads were shaved to indicate their married state; their ear lobes were distended and weighted down with ornaments made of dogs’ teeth and shells; and they wore two small aprons, one in front and one in back, made of shredded grass. Like their mothers and grandmothers before them, Ithey had learned to support j their men’s war dances, learn- ' ed how to stand with a spear in each hand while their husbands and brothers danced.

In their lifetime they exchanged their grass skirts first for cloth aprons and then for shapelesss cloth garments Now 1 see them walking through the village dressed in up-to-date, well-fitted . cotton frocks. Their ear lobes are bare; ear ornaments of all kinds belong to the discarded, savage past The old tattoo marks have faded; occasional old sacrifications are almost obliterated. These old women are not merely witnesses to change. They have taken full part in their people’s move from savagery into the modern world.

After World War 11, when the Manus moved ashore and rebuilt their lagoon village on dry land, the oldest men and women as well as the youngest entered into the changing situation. And nowadays the very people who once quarrelled about the sale of war prisoners to cannibal neighbouring tribes argue about what shall be done with the 16 dollars left over from the purchase of school uniforms for the village children. Curriculum I Children in Peri village still I leap and gambol at the edge of sea and dive into the warm waters of the lagoon and run sure-footed up the bent trunk of a coconut palm. In the morning when they start off i for school, carrying their school clothes, they are I scantily clad, and they frolic ' in the water as they run along i the beach. But once they have arrived in school they will learn about the whole wide world—how the Japanese cook on charcoal, what a lion looks like and an elephant—and their lesson on the meaning of time will end with a discussion of how a stop watch is used to time the races in the Olympic games. Eleven years ago there were no schools in the south-coast villages. But during World War 11 a young Manus villager had been given about two years’ schooling by an itinerant chaplain. Somehow out of

this experience he also came ito understand the idea of a school. Then when the Peri people went to work to make 'their village modern, he set ! up a kind of shadow school in I preparation for the “real” school that was to come. The children were sorted by size, i They marched into the largest building in the village where they sat down on benches: and their teacher, preparing the way for the real teacher who was to come, taught them to recognise letters and numbers. Today Dritakow, one of the boys who attended this first, preliminary school (but who, in fact, spent most of his time out fishing), has been trained to teach the kindergarten children. Ten years ago a real teacher was sent to the neighbouring village, and the Peri children poured across the narrow shallows to the mainland to attend his school. Dritakow was one of the brightest of these childi ren; given a real start, he | skipped ahead. Now he I teaches the six-year-olds about weights and measures and, during the recess, how to play farmer in the dell. Just now the children are also practising to sing “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” for Carols by Candlelight. For the last year Peri village got its own Australian teacher, a man who before he became a teacher had been an actor and a producer, and for a time the protocol secretary of an Australian diplomat He will tape-record his pupils’ singing. If they do well enough, the programme will be broadcast from a radio station to cheer Australian mainlanders over the progress that is being made in their Trust Territory and to encourage children in other parts of New Guinea to learn to sing European songs. Teachers, Nurses Thirty-three young people are away from Peri village. Some of them are already teachers; others are in training to become teachers or nurses in technical schools in Rabaul, Port Moresby and Lae. One is in a preparatory school in Australia. Several will soon be ready to take college entrance examinations. Parents who in their own childhood never expected to sail out of sight of land and knew almost nothing about the world outside their archipelago now encourage their children to go away to school—a six-hour airplane trip—and are proud of their progress.

For they feel—and they are right—that they themselves prepared for this new world in which education, medical care and selfgovernment are normal expectations. They organised the first school so that the children’s minds would be clear—so that they would be ready to learn—when a real school came. They set aside a house as a hospital before the first midwife was trained. They began to tax themselves, and set the money aside as savings for community expenditures, at a time when there was no bank and before the government was ready to authorise elections for a local council. In the revolutionary period that began in 1946, the oldest grandmothers went along with the changes. They removed the dogs’-tooth earrings from their ears and let their shaved hair grow. They learned, with everyone else, to sit in orderly meetings and to discuss differences of opinion about the next steps, instead of screaming at each other and threatening physical violence when they disagreed. In Manus the grandparents and the parents changed together; there was no real break between the

living generations. And as the children went to school, older men also learned to write—in pidgin English, a lingua franca made up of English words set in their own Melanesian grammar. And now old Pokanau has asked for an airplane trip as a present. Yet once, for him as for his ancestors, a canoe voyage of perhaps 20 miles was so dangerous that people wept when a canoe set out to sea across a reef, and they wept again to see the returning canoe safely beached with all its crew alive. But the Peri school children are learning English. For a knowledge of English will make it possible for the 2 million people of Papua-New Guinea, who speak more than 500 different languages, to talk with one another (and with the people who come to the territory) and work together toward the independence they have been promised. Sattelite Age When John Glenn flew over Australia and the people of Perth all turned on their lights as a greeting to him, the children in Peri village were listening to the broadcast—part of the same world Americans belong to. Because their parents and grandparents and all their neighbours in the village have taken part in the transformation of life in Manus, the children can say, “I would like to fly in a sputnik” (using “sputnik” to mean “satellite”), and describe the world they could see from an orbiting capsule, and at the same time realise and express, their love for their village world.

Studying a people like the Manus gives me a sense of what we and our own children are capable of accomplishing. In our own lifetime—even in the lifetime of the youngest parents in America—the world we were born into has been transformed as fast and almost as unbelievably as the Manus world. Jet planes, hydrogen bombs, Telstar and other communications satellites, and new cures for ancient ills have created a new present and a new future. In this new world all children —whether they are growing up in the cities of America or in the villages of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea —are being drawn into a unique relationship to one another as they watch the satellites that flash on their orbits around the globe. Homework In Peri village, people are planning to build a special council house where the children can also go to do their homework undisturbed. Next year perhaps an experimental class will be formed to study the “new mathematics.” Far away in the United States, parents by the thousands are attending school at night to learn the same “new mathematics” that their children are studying in the daytime and that Manus children may study very soon. It is good to stand here at the door of my house in Peri village, talking with the men and women 1 have known so long. They say, as a matter of course, “But you remember him! He was one of the boat crew who took us from Balawan to Lou.” They do not doubt that anyone can remember an event, such as this trip between two islands, that took place as long ago as 1928. In spite of all the changes that have taken place, these memories, sharp and clear, unite two worlds that are literally 36 years and figuratively thousands of years apart. Here in Peri, talking and listening, where a whole people have moved without losing their sense of continuity. I realise again how important it is to recognise both our common human capacity for change and for creating continuity in change.