The White Plantation Dream

The White Plantation Dream

The white pioneer episode in Papua was brief [and] will soon have disappeared completely … Hardly a structure will be left standing or an original planter’s name remembered. … Their white history will recede into memory…. And among living Australians too the ‘Papuan planter’ experience will soon be extinguished. These outcomes could not have been known in advance of course, however inevitable they seem now in retrospect (Lewis 1996)[1].

I made the adventurous move to live in the Territory of Papua New Guinea (TPNG) on a working plantation. I had less-than-no-idea of what to expect. Luckily, my husband had lived in Indonesia, so he knew the sorts of clothing and equipment needed and had some idea of what TPNG might be like. He bought a new camera, sunglasses, hats, jungle boots for work and shorts and shirts. I packed my trousseau and our wedding presents – sorbet glasses and spoons, serving dishes, elegant china, and crystal. Very practical – not. But it was all so well packed in tea chests by my mother and I that not one thing was broken. You can see how funny that is when you learn that our house was an unlined fibro bungalow with almost no furniture and no glass in the windows. Delicate gold parfait glasses and long spoons… oh, and I couldn’t cook either.

 ‘The ship ground towards Port Moresby,’ I wrote back then, ‘it was black all around with thousands and millions of glittering stars. Slowly, slowly, bright points of light under the horizon moved towards us. The air smelled different from anything I’d smelled before, humid and musty at the same time, with a sweetness of flowers. The sky grew grey, and we saw the lovely rolling hills, a flush of orange in the east flung the grey sky westwards and for nearly an hour the sun climbed the hills lighting up the hilltops and then shone on the little port. Such brilliant greens, interspersed with white houses, and sudden bursts of orange-red bougainvillea. Such strangeness already.

When the ship berthed in Port Moresby we were met by hundreds of Papuans, a handsome lot, except that their ears looked a little moth-eaten due to the fashion of cutting holes in them. The older people had red teeth from chewing betel nut with calcium.’ Most of the men wore a ‘lap-lap’ which was a piece of cloth tied around the waist that went down to the knees. If that wasn’t odd enough the white men wore shorts, with long socks to the knee and normal shoes. It all looked most strange to southern eyes.

Key Largo was an old movie of the time and the Port Moresby Hotel, where we stayed a few nights, had a flavour of the Florida Keys. The room was in a sort of drowsy half-light to keep it cool; ceiling fans rotated slowly and did very little but disturb the hot and humid air around us; plantation shutters on the windows added to the semi-darkness; and a large, white mosquito net was tied up in a bundle hanging above the bed. We were given strange fruit to eat; paw-paw and mango were not available in 1962 Sydney. 

We went by boat, the ‘Motorina’, along the south coast of Papua, with civilisation and 1962 modernity disappearing behind us. In some places there were lovely little white-sand beaches, in others the bush and mangroves grew down to the sea’s edge. One evening we visited a lady in her jungle house;bamboo floors, rattan walls, and holes for windows. These people were comfortable sitting on the floor, legs out in front, but it was a bit of a problem for me. 

Mamai was a beautiful plantation set among tropical hills. Planted to rubber trees, coconut trees and cocoa plants. At the time we thought it must have been a goldmine to its owners, but on reading The Plantation Dream[2] I've learned that most of those plantations were not profitable at all as they could not compete with wider world markets that were less isolated and were serviced by regular transport.

I had also written that we were thrilled when we saw our house on the plantation. That is not my memory of it now. It was unlined fibro, painted green inside, only shutters propped on sticks for windows, and there was very little furniture. There was no electricity, so we spent our evenings in the glow of Tilley lamps. And it was a mile away from the other two houses on the plantation. But it was big, and we soon had it looking nice. We did have a lovely view over the rubber trees and a great garden that someone had loved as it was full of bougainvillea, hibiscus, magnolia and other flowering trees and bushes. The home appliances were a kerosene refrigerator, a wood fuelled stove, and two grinning young men.

I often thought my life on that plantation would have been much the same as my grandmother’s early years in Gundagai, an Australian country town. The one big difference between my life and Granny’s was, of course, having help in the house. I didn’t have to milk the cow, collect wood, light the fuel stove, light the Tilley lamps as my Granny did, boil the washing outside, or iron with the flat iron. My two young men did those tasks. They did it cheerfully too. It was nicer for them than the boring and hard work of picking coconuts or tapping rubber.

Those young men, always called ‘boys’ which I hated, were sent to us by the plantation manager, chosen randomly from ‘the line’. ‘The line’ was the group of 20-30 men indentured to work for a pittance for two years as labourers, tapping rubber, collecting and husking coconuts, and picking the cocoa fruit when it was ready. Most came from the New Guinea highlands and were completely different from the coastal Papuans. They were shorter and burlier and had fuzzy black hair ­­–– hence the name ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’ given to them during and after World War 2 when their bush skills and loyalty saved many Australian men’s lives. They were housed in primitive tin huts which must have been unbearably hot, especially as they came from the lovely cool tropical highlands. They were not allowed to bring their wives and children to the plantations. They were given some rations and expected to buy extras from the store run by the manager’s wife. According to Lewis[3] this was often more profitable than the copra, rubber, and cocoa. I thought at the time they got a raw deal. Despite the disapproval of ‘enlightened’ people, the house-servants had a much more comfortable life than the line boys.

 One time I saw Tumu with a bottle of instant coffee and a big bucket of water. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Bikin copi’— making coffee in Police Motu, the Lingua franca of the time. I think the concept of instant coffee was fairly new to him! Another time I thought that I would make a cake. Usually my houseboy would do this, but in a rare burst of domestication I set to work myself. It wasn’t a great success. ‘Hahaha,’ said Kuru, ‘making canoe cake.’

Night times the drumming began. I rather liked it. One or two of the ‘boys’ would begin and the others would join in, sometimes singing and dancing to the drumbeat. They would bedeck themselves in leaf-fronds and decorate their hair with feathers from the birds-of-paradise. Their dancing was more like jumping up-and-down on the spot but must have had some meaning for them.

I don’t remember being bored in the two years I was on the plantation. I do remember putting on weight, because you see, the manager had a cow. And the cow gave us milk and cream. And I learned to like a little bit of coffee in my cream. 

I learned to cook (but not cakes), coached and refereed a ladies basketball team, and tutored the children of the other family on the plantation. We played cards at night, and I had 10 new library books sent down every week from Moresby. I sewed on my manual sewing-machine, played with my Australian stamp collection, and read my library books. And I had all my dogs. I was so happy. I’d always wanted a dog. My sister had one and I was very jealous of that, so now I had three dogs. 

We ordered all our supplies from a catalogue over the two-way radio. The little supply plane, a Tiger Moth, flew in once a week, weather permitting, bringing our exciting provisions. We’d hear the roar of the jeep as the manager went down to meet the plane at the grass strip airport, and hurray! There were our supplies as ordered, my new box of books and most exciting of all, our mail. It was a rare week that someone in our families didn’t write.

I often dream of the plantation. There is always a bit of fear in those dreams, though I don’t remember being frightened of anything at the time. I dream that a big city has grown up there, or that it is even more isolated and decrepit than it really was, or that all the houses are ‘proper’ houses now, not fibro shells as ours was, or tin huts for the line boys. Strange dreams to have. 

I have no idea what the plantation is like now. I don’t think younger generations would be happy to live as we did, and I’m sure that they would not approve of that colonialist lifestyle. And I hope we’d all cringe at the endemic racism and exploitation. TPNG is now independent, and any photos I see of Port Moresby show modern buildings. No more Key Largo hotel, no more indentured labour, I believe that betel nut chewing is frowned on and discouraged, and there is probably no more primitive manager’s housing even on isolated plantations. There may even be proper housing! One thing is certain, that rather idyllic lifestyle has gone for good; frozen in the minds of the few white planters who lived there. There are no more white plantations; that dream died with the difficulties of competing on a world market that is better equipped for economic competition, with the independence of TPNG from Australia, and with the expense of employing white Australians to manage them. 

Vale my Papua.

[1] Lewis C S, The Plantation Dream: developing British New Guinea and Papua 1884 –– 1942, 1 (Canberra: Journal of Pacific Studies). 1996. 

[2] Lewis 1996 205

[3] Lewis 1996 292-296