Port Moresby’s Latest Trader—Mr Whippy

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31256, 31 December 1966, Page 5

Port Moresby’s Latest Trader—Mr Whippy

(By DA VID WHITE in the “Sydney Morning Herald.")

T HE lce ' cream vendor with his nerve-jangling version of the old English air ‘‘Greensleeves” has come to Port Moresby. Winding his Pied-Piperish way along the dusty often unsealed roads of the town, he is the last irrelevant detail of Australian suburbia to arrive on the local scene.

Mr Whippy has joined the suburban supermarket, the week - end barbecue, the drive-in cinema, the club and the pub which figure so largely in making up the cocoon-like way of life of most Europeans in the Territory’s capital. Television is one of the few dominant features of Australian suburban living that is missing.

In contrast, the indigenous inhabitants, who outnumber the Europeans by three-to-one, have little to do with this alien-world apart from the period erf formal contact while they are at work. Lack of money and lack of acceptance prevent them from moving into it easily. Their world is one of overcrowded and inferior housing. Their entertainments have to be simpler and less expensive. The abundance of the supermarket is not for them; their food more freqently comes from “trade stores” where they buy their rice, tins of meat and fish and other plain food and from an open-air market which supplies some fruit, vegetables and, of course, betel nut. The town the two groups share is not a very pretty one; it lacks the lushness and beauty of Rabaul, Lae and Madang. Captain John Moresby, who discovered the area in 1873, gave this description: “In the neighbourhood of Port Moresby the valleys were intensely rich and tropical in their vegetation, but the hills, of which the greater part of the country consisted, were perfectly Australian in their appearance: they had very poor soil, covered with large stones, scattered gum-trees, and thin grass.” There is still a lot of truth in this description, although there is little evidence of the intensely rich valleys of which Moresby wrote and aesthetically indefferent houses now cling to the sides of some of the hills. Rainy Season The hills do give the town a certain attractiveness of form but the drabness of the brown and greyish colours do not enhance this. When the “wet” starts in December the hills become green quickly but the rain lasts only for about three months; for the rest of the year the dryness forces a return to dullness. (Port Moresby is in a rain shadow and thus has a mean annual rainfall of less than 40in.) It is not that the town is devoid of attractive features. The harbour is large and its waters clear. It is particularly attractive on Sunday mornings when it is dotted with racing yachts (Europeanowned, of course). Outside the harbour, but within the protection of the outer reef which runs down the coast a few miles off-shore, are some quite pleasant small islands which are good swimming spots. And Sir Hubert Murray, the former LieutentantGovernor of Papua, pointed out probably the most compelling physical feature of the town when he wrote in 1912: “But the true glory of Port Moresby is its sunsets. Possibly one is inclined to idealise the surroundings of one’s home, but nowhere else can I remember such brilliant com-

binations of colour as from the eastern shore of Port Moresby, or better still from Tuaguba Hill.” I can find no fault with those words, 54 years after Murray wrote them.

The town is rather fragmented, partly because of the hills. The commercial centre is contained in about four blocks on a saddle of land between two hills, Paga (which is the eastern point of the harbour) and Tuaguba. It has wharves, warehouses, the main post-office, two department stores, two hotels, a cinema, a restaurant, five banks and other shops and business houses. None is more than three storeys high, although an 11-storey office block is at present being built. “Happy Valley” A mile or two along the harbour foreshore is Konedobu, where the Territory’s Administration offices are. This is a conglomeration of old and new buildings, most of which have only one storey and are of timber or fibro construction. Nestled under trees, “Kone” is sometimes referred to cynically as “Happy Valley.” The contrast between the races is demonstrated clearly by the residential lay-out of the town. On Paga and Tuaguba hills and in other areas near the commercial centre, such as Ela Beach, one finds the more prestigious European houses. Here are the homes of senior Administration officials and businessmen. It is the centre of the cocktail party belt, of the Victoria League and the C.W.A. This is undoubtedly the most attractive residential part of the town because most of it has been settled long enough for trees and gardens to have taken hold in the barren soil after careful cultivation.

But, apart from many single men and women who live in hostels close to town, most Europeans live to the north-east of the commercial centre, particuarly in the suburb of Boroko, which is about four miles away. Boroko has 3425 of the 9911 non-indigenous inhabitants of Port Moresby, according to the latest census. They live in houses which are quite large and comfortable but uninteresting architecturally and frequently in drab surroundings. The suburb has its own shopping centre with a hotel, two cinemas (one largely frequented by Euro-

peans and the other, which is much cheaper and shows inferior films, almost exclusively patronised by Papuans and New Guineans), two restaurants, a coffee shop, a supermarket and Chinese stores, and the drive-in is not far away. Although Boroko is considered a European suburb, it has nearly as many indigenous inhabitants. But there is a vast difference in their mode of living. For the residences of the indigenous inhabitants generally are the so-called -"boi houses," small wood or fibro structures tucked away like outhouses behind the European dwellings. Here live many of that vast band of “house-boys,” the domestic servants who, for about $6 a week, wash, dean and run messages for their European “taubadas” and “sinabadas” (“tau” is Motu for “man” and “bada” means “big,” while “sinabada” is the female equivalent). The “house-boys” provide European women with much more free time than they would have in Australia and thus enable them to engage more in social activities or to supplement the family income substantially by working. Excluding the domestic servants and those who live with them the 32,222 indigenous people in Port Moresby live quite separately from Europeans. The original inhabitants—the Motu, Koita and Koiari people (the last two of whom are linguistic divisions of basically the one group of people)—still have their villages. Timber, fibro and corrugated iron have replaced the traditional methods for houses and the people have given up much of their former gardening, hunting and trading activities to work for wages. Although the houses in these villages are sometimes reasonably large and soundly constructed, they lack many amenities.

But perhaps the biggest problem is overcrowding. The original inhabitants have intermarried with people from tribes outside Port Moresby and have thus acquired much wider kinship obligations; the result is that more and more immigrants from outer areas have come to live in the villages while they work in town. Housing The flood of immigrants—ranging from the tall Mekos of Papua, with their brightly coloured lava-lavas and sing-

lets, to the stocky Chimbus of the New Guinea Highlands—has placed a great strain on bousing resources throughout the town. The Administration has built low-cost (and often low-quality) houses for some of its employees and other Indigenous people in suburbs such as Hohola. But whether the houses have two bedrooms or are one-room “doßboxes” they are overcrowded. Barrack-type compounds are also provided for some indigenous workers by the Administration and private employers; but there is still not enough housing. Thus even the small “bio-houses” of Boroko and other European suburbs often have more people in them than European houses five or six times their size.

The most shameful examples of the indigenous housing problem are the 20odd shanty settlements dotted throughout the town. Several thousand people live in these settlements, which are built on rocky hillsides or in barren valleys on Administration or Motu, Koita or Koiari land. Made Of Scrap The houses are generally made of scrap material and have no services such as power, water or garbage disposal. The Administration would like to get rid of these shanties—of which few Europeans see much because most of them are hard to reach, particularly after rain has eroded the tracks leading to them—but there is nowhere else in the town for the people to go. This problem is not going to be easy to solve. The immigrants, frequently without education or skills, continue coming to town because of its fascinations compared with village life. The cinemas, the hotels and the other accoutrements of modern urban living are a strong magnet. The fact that they receive low pay, have to endure inadequate housing and have to leave the security of their villages behind does not deter them. Life is made even harder by the fact that food is very expensive in Port Moresby; the poor fertility of the local soil and the lack of roads to richer nearby areas mean that much food has to be imported at substantial cost from Australia and elsewhere.

The immigrants also create and have to contend with uncommon social problems. The most obvious one is the shortage of women. Many indigenous men leave their wives back in their villages during their sojourns in town, and the result is that, according to the recent census, there are 20,914 men to only 11,308 women in Port Moresby's indigenous community. C. D. Rowley, who has made a brilliant study of the modern problems of the indigenous people in his book, “The New Guinea Villager,” also points out that the new arrivals “may be bound by neither town nor village morality.” “The desperate economic situation of many leads to theft and burglary,” he says.

Fear Of Attack It is in this field that many Europeans are most conscious of the indigenous towndwellers. Many white women fear that they will be attacked and take the precaution of putting sturdy wire over windows and doors and, in some cases, even have weapons in the house, although, personally, I feel that their fears are exaggerated.

But, apart from this and a vague awareness of the tremendous political changes taking place around them, the Europeans go their own way. Life is certainly not all wine and roses for them. They, too, have to endure a housing shortage, one result of which is that people joining the Administration have to wait a considerable time before they get a permanent house.

Europeans also have to pay the same high prices for food as the indigenous people. But, to offset this, they are able to buy English, Continental and Japanese cars and such items as electrical goods at prices considerably lower than in Australia. One of the biggest drawbacks for some Europeans is the cultural void which exists in the town. There is an absence of the concerts, the art shows, the theatre (apart from a small amateur drama group) and other cultural facilities of Australian cities. Even the cinemas fail to provide any real compensation for this as they generally show only the most popular American and English films But one can argue that these cultural pursuits provide only a small part of the average way of life in Australia. Their absence would not be an enormous failing for most European residents of Port Moresby as they relentlessly build up their own microcosmic suburbia. They still have the sporting activities (every brand of football is played here and S.P. betting businesses flourish), the social pursuits and most ' the main amenities of the cities they left behind—*”** 1 to which almost all <rf thenl will return.