By Sean Dorney
(Former ABC Correspondent to Papua New Guinea and veteran Australian journalist)
(Former ABC Correspondent to Papua New Guinea and veteran Australian journalist)
As
these Emerging Leaders from Papua New Guinea and Australia know and as the rest
of you may have heard I was made redundant by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
in August. In this year’s Australian Budget, the Abbot Government cancelled the
Foreign Affairs Department contract under which the ABC ran our international
television service, Australia Network. About 80% of what I did as the ABC’s
Pacific Correspondent went out exclusively on Australia Network and so the ABC
apparently agreed that at the ripe old age of 63 I was not worth holding on to.
However, thanks to what Reuben Mete told
us yesterday about the advanced age of some people he’s seen involved, I have
decided I am not going to end up on any retirement scrapheap here in Australia.
No, Reuben, you’ve given me an inkling of where my future career lies. I’m
going back to PNG to be a Youth Leader.
My journalist brother here, Alexander
Rheeney, the Editor of the PNG Post Courier has urged me to tell you about how
I got deported from Papua New Guinea and what happened after. Well, briefly,
the ABC and the PNG Government had a major disagreement over Four Corners
running an interview with a Free West Papua bush commander I had helped Four
Corners arrange. I was threatened with deportation if the interview went to air
and when the story became a front page yarn in the Australian media about the
ABC accepting censorship by a foreign Government, the ABC ran the interview and
I got deported.
I’ve also been deported from Fiji but I
can tell you PNG does it a lot better. When the Prime Minister’s speech writer
was doing up my deportation speech for the then Foreign Minister,
RabbbieNamaliu, he rang me up to ask, “Sean, when do you want to go?”
That was in 1984. By 1987 PNG had lifted the ban on me
and let me resume as the ABC Port Moresby Correspondent. Three years after, by
now Prime Minister, RabbieNamaliu, awarded me an imperial honour, the MBE, for
services to journalism and sport. I’ll get onto the reason for the sport later.
But that’s PNG – the deport you and then six years later you get a gong from
the Governor General. Fiji booted me out in 2009 and I’ve put it to Prime
Minister Bainimarama that if he’s to beat PNG’s six year standing record he’ll
have to let me back in and give me an award before the end of this month!
Turning to more serious matters, I
really welcome this initiative for young leaders from Papua New Guinea and
Australia to get together like this. People to people links are what can
resuscitate the PNG/Australia relationship. Years ago there were much stronger
links. For instance, my father, who was a doctor in the Australian Army in
World War Two, a Major with the Field Ambulance, won the DSO, the Distinguished
Service Order, at Pabu near Finschhaffen in the Morobe Province, when his unit
was cut off and surrounded by the Japanese for 11 days.
And as a child at a Catholic primary
school in Townsville many years ago we were constantly being told about the
work of the Australian missionaries in PNG. Actually, in one of those bizarre
degrees of separation instances, a nun who taught me at St Josephs on The
Strand in Townsville, Sister Rose, later taught my wife, Pauline, at the
Catholic Secondary School at Pipitilai near Lombrum on Manus.
But a lot of those links have faded away
and the ignorance about PNG in Australia these days I find appalling. One of
the reasons is that the Australia/PNG relationship gets far too neglected at
this end – especially by the Australian media.
On the flight down here yesterday
morning I read a copy of The Australian. Now, you don’t get too much coverage
of PNG in the Australian print media these days. Australian Associated Press
pulled their correspondent out of Port Moresby last year after having had a
reporter based there for more than 40 years. But there was a story in
yesterday’s Australian – not by AAP but by the French newsagency, AFP.
It was headed: “Bandits ransack PNG
airport”. And it was about how a gang had held people up at Nadzab and robbed
them. AFP has nobody in PNG so their report was all quoting the only Australian
correspondent left there, Liam Corcoran from the ABC. They did add a comment,
however, of their own calling PNG “a poverty hit country”.
I have a bit of trouble with this
constant labelling of PNG as a country of “poverty”. I’ll admit it’s true in
the squatter settlements of Port Moresby and Lae but out in the villages I much
prefer the label that somebody come up with years ago, “subsistence affluence”.
The people of PNG have fed themselves for thousands of years.
However, I have to agree with some of
the discussion we have had when on the subject of food security. There was a
suggestion yesterday that perceptions are important and one of the problems is
that some believe there is prestige about imported food while the healthy
reality is that PNG home grown food is far better for them. My wife, Pauline,
spent last Saturday re-fertilizing her aibika patch in our garden in Brisbane.
The discussion here reminded me of my
very first visit to Pauline’s village on Manus. We had been married only a
matter of months and when Pauline’s mother and father had come down to Port
Moresby for the wedding, I had withdrawn almost all the money I had in my bank
account and paid Pauline’s father bride price in quite a large stack of 10 Kina
notes. He took the money back to Manus and - to enhance my prestige - he
distributed almost the lot to all those who had something to do with Pauline’s
upbringing.
The people were so impressed we were invited to
function after function in the village where Pauline and I would be seated at
the top table and fed the prestige food – bully beef and rice. Those poor
people out there in front of us, who seemed to be looking longingly at our
plates, had to eat their everyday food – lobster, fresh fish and vegetables
straight from their food gardens! I’ll tell you, I wanted to be down there!
One aspect of this gathering I was
pleased to see was the involvement of indigenous Australians. Some years ago, I
was invited to Canberra to speak at a function at Parliament House. The theme
of my talk was that we white Australians have a misconception about how we are
seen in PNG and the rest of the Pacific. We think we are seen as the success
story, the wealthy neighbour benignly helping out those less fortunate countries
around us who are desperate to emulate us. I told that audience that many
people up in PNG and out in the Pacific Islands don’t share that perception.
Rather, they see us white Australians as very late comers to this part of the
world. It’s almost as if we were a rascal gang from a faraway province who
invaded the neighbourhood took over the biggest house, forced the long-time
residents into a humpy in the back yard but who now we are attempting to
lecture to everybody in the neighbourhood about proper behaviour.
The other subject I was pleased to see
raised on a few occasions was sport. Papua New Guineans love their sport and
they are good at it. I think that if the Wallabies had played Will Genia at
halfback in every game of their recent tour to Europe we might have won more
than one out of the four tests we played against Wales, Ireland, France and
England!
Jessica Siriosi spoke about how
delighted she was about how the Bougainvilleans had performed at the recent PNG
Games. After that session I went up to Jessica and told her that when I first
played for theKumuls in the year of independence, 1975, our captain was a
Bougainvillean, Joe Buboi.
I was hugely honoured when in the
following year, 1976, I was elected by my teammates to be captain of the
Kumuls. Our only game that year was against a country New South Wales side and
my opposing half-back was a teenage Peter Sterling. We won the game and I
scored a try. But it was memorable for two other reasons as well. This was all
when Pauline’s parents were down from Manus for our wedding and Pauline’s
father carried his tomahawk with him everywhere in his billum – even into the
grandstands at the Lloyd Robson Oval. At one point when I was tacked rather
ferociously by these NSW Country forwards, my brother-in-law, Pana, had to
restrain Pauline’s dad from coming down onto the field with the tomahawk to
attack them!
Also in that game I learnt what harsh
critics Papua New Guineans can be. I attempted a cut-out pass but,
unfortunately, it cut out all of our players and was intercepted by the Country
NSW winger who went and scored under the posts. A voice from the crowd called
out, “He’s just trying to help his wantoks!”
Finally, I must also congratulate Papua
New Guinea on something I had not realised before this gathering here at the
Lowy Institute over the past two days – PNG’s brave attempt to try to abolish
prostitution. You may be surprised to hear that because I was too! And I am not
sure it is working all too well because of the lack of effective policing but
it is the first time I have heard about that regulation that no woman in PNG is
allowed to be undertake employment between 6pm and 6am!
I would like to thank the Lowy Institute for inviting
me down here for this Emerging Leaders Dialogue. Rebuilding people to people
relationships is the key to improving the whole Australia/Papua New Guinea
relationship. It is a great initiative. I hope you people all keep in contact
from here on because that will be the real strength of this venture. Deepening
and widening the links between us. Perhaps even getting to the stage where we
can become wantoks in both friendship and mutual respect.
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| 2014 Participants of the Australia Papua New Guinea Young Emerging Leaders Dialogue. |
