Papua New Guinea Association of Australia

On Sunday I accompanied my wife Gima to a lunch of the PNGAA, an association consisting largely of people who used to work in Papua New Guinea (and most from before Independence as far as I could gather). Gima was representing the Wantok club - a community group for Papua New Guineans in Sydney. The Papua New Guinea flag was prominent, but we were both a bit stunned by the fact that Gima was the only Papua New Guinean there in a crowd of over 200! As a musician having taught music in PNG throughout the 1990s, I was even more stunned after the PNG national anthem was played, and I overheard a long time member say that was the first time they'd heard the song. PNG has been independent for 33 years now so I was perplexed by this.

A quick look into the history of the organisation perhaps shows why though, with Keith Jackson, the current President, pointing out that the mean age is about 70 now (see this post on Keith's blog), and that the organisation started as a gathering for retired public servants. There is an interesting range of views here as well.

Only recently has the association refined its objectives and priorities with this as namba wan:

to strengthen the civil relationship between the peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea;

We had lunch with a friendly group having an amazing collective wealth of experience and knowledge. When we drove home we went straight to a friend's place to pick up our daughter, and spoke about the event. I slipped into the mistake of characterising the group as a wonderful collection of people who had perhaps lost touch a bit with modern PNG, and who were gathering to share nostalgic tales of the good old days. It later occurred to me that the Wantok club could certainly be involved to help here given the groups have some shared aims.

Our daughter had been staying with wantoks, of course, in this case at the house of a petroleum engineer who works in PNG for Oilsearch. He was educated at UPNG, gained a further degree in the US, has worked in Perth and Sydney. The day before the lunch some other friends who live nearby dropped in; one is a telecommunications engineer (again working in both Australia and PNG) and the other a pediatrician. Next Saturday we'll have a barbecue to mark the economic investment members of our community are making in Australia when they buy a house nearby, and present there will be engineers, doctors, nurses, geologists, teachers, academics and so on - all Papua New Guineans now working and living in Australia and contributing healthily to both economies and cultures. A not dissimilar range of professionals that travelled to Papua and New Guinea fifty years ago perhaps?

Amongst all the doom and gloom that no doubt circulates about modern PNG amongst PNGAA members (as it does amongst Wantok members at times too of course) surely here is a fantastic example of just how effective the contributions of the work of PNGAA members in PNG has been? in my experience no group recognises the problems PNG faces more acutely than Papua New Guineans (I heard a reference to the PM the other day as "Grand Thief"!), but there is a space for optimism too. I watched Fred Kaad's interview on the Journey into Paradise DVD last night, and was moved and humbled by his words. I don't agree with him that comparisons between then and now shouldn't be made, however, as I see this process as a particularly positive and healthy one. I believe that the Port Moresby I travel to now is a better place than the one I was born in (1967), and there are numerous political, social, cultural and economic reasons why this is so. The rural picture may well be seen differently, and this represents a major challenge for the immediate future.

I hope we can play a role in cementing some longer term contact between the groups, because as long as the PNGAA gatherings are almost exclusively white Australian, and Wantok gatherings largely indigenous Papua New Guinean, the similar aims of promoting civil relations between Australia and PNG will be impossible to meet (and the comments by Tavurvur at the end of this blog post are interesting in this regard). Anyway, we're going to to join up if PNGAA will have us!