75, 100 years: Unparalleled world
Still shot from video of Manus Provincial Government during the handing over Nahau Rooney’s body to her family. Source: Nayahamui Rooney
WARNING: Viewers are warned that the following program may contain images and voices of deceased persons.
Trigger warning: The audio-visual footage of a mortuary event featured in this piece may trigger discomfort in some viewers.
History and archives are often associated with Western notions of documented history, written mostly by men. By contrast, historians and scholars of and from the Pacific acknowledge that in societies where conventional written forms of documentation are not the norm, there are multiple other ways of knowing, seeing, feeling, sensing remembering, speaking about, performing, and much more, the past.
My research covers three broad cultural, political, and historic urban spaces in Papua New Guinea. In Port Moresby, the focus of my PhD, I examine the lives of a group of migrants from the Tufi region of Oro Province in one of Port Moresby’s informal settlements. In Lae, I worked with a team of scholars exploring family strategies for addressing family violence in the city of Lae. In Manus, for a decade now I have been following the local and gendered dimensions of the material and discursive dimensions of the Australian asylum seeker policy known as the “Regional” processing centre. All these projects involve some form of documentation of people’s experiences through different means and at different levels of analysis. People’s lives, both their current or past experiences, are shaped by current issues as well as the past, such as the ongoing legacies of the arrival of Europeans in the colonial period or deeper ancestral pasts.
My current project involves a more direct and personal challenge of trying to make sense of how to present in a cohesive form different forms of knowing the past that co-exist simultaneously. This project involves my parents, and specifically my mother, Nahau Rooney, a prominent Papua New Guinean woman in the pre-and post-Independence era in PNG. I have been exploring and discovering the epistemic challenges of ‘making’ or ‘doing’ or ‘performing’ the past through stories told before, during death ceremonies, long after death and the written archives. I have been challenged to think about how we capture the epicity and the archivability of PNG stories through hers and my father’s archives.
The following words are a reflection on what I think and feel as a sense of loss that is experienced by many people my age as our elders pass away. In the midst of our own busy lives, we forget that our elders embody archives, and for many of us these pasts come to life when they die, leaving us to ponder over what they have taken with them. Whilst I speak to a Papua New Guinean audience, I believe others may feel this too.
75 to 100 years, epicity
Around 75 to 100 years ago a generation was born
Sharp bamboo, maybe sterilised steel, cut them from mothers’ ancient wombs
Tiny feet preparing to walk
Cradled in bark cloth or plant fibre fabric
Maybe a plantation’s discarded hessian sack or colonial cloth
Suckling milky nurture from mothers’ breasts
Bloodlines and storylines. Fathers’, mothers’, families guiding.
They began to grow into venerable beings
Their feet bravely touched the ground
Destinies untold, they embarked on epic journeys
Around 65 years ago their footprints began to firm
Defining destinies. Behind them still in view
Their ancestral lands, hearths. Blood lined ancient wombs.
The past lived in the now, memories and stories performed.
They trickled down rivers to ocean. Footprints on pathways to another world
Sandy feet cross the ocean.
Their epic journeys led into a parallel world
Past, present, future in written form
In school they learned that led, ink and paper transformed their ways.
Transformed their pasts. Making way to new pasts.
Written form. Their ways threatened with fade.
Destined paths collided, clashed, entangled.
Eventually interwoven. They emerged newly in that parallel world.
People of their past. Rebirthed as powerful beings they traversed this earth
Astutely dancing, moving, performing. Owning. Spaces in two worlds
They literacised, numeralised. They baptised.
They also kept their ways.
Standing on their land. Marking their footprints on that ground.
Imperfect. Perfectly. Compromising. Uncompromising.
Actually! They created their unparalleled world!
Of course, they learned to read and write.
To sew and drive to teach and administer and policy-ise
The voted and contested.
They resisted and protested.
They engaged and disengaged
They sang, and danced, and fell in love.
From their ancient wombs their bloodlines joined their way
Powerful men and women destined to their unparalleled world
75 to 100 years later. Now. They are departing.
One by one. Returning to the other side. To the other world.
As we come to cry, we see our bloodlines past, crying to the future.
Their epic journeys appear in our stories as they say goodbye
As breath leaves their bodies, they know, their stories have turned to air.
We bid them good rest, after all the good work.
We bid them safe journey to God’s heaven.
Gifts of our past for our future, we neglected.
The writers now silent. The drums – garamut - beats, chants, songs,
Blood and other lines arrive to share stories in our eyes.
A pig. A basket of food. Laments storying life. We watch. We listen. We tell.
Garamut beats. There is nothing quiet about this time.
Tipou. Tipou. Tipou. The garamut drums beat celebrating life. Overwhelming sadness
Announcing departure, ushering, welcoming them into transition
Now beyond. They leave us searching for clues
As our tears flow, rain cleanses the ground. Their footprints filled with mud.
Words fading on rotting mouldy paper.
I reach into the water, tying to retrieve the storyline.
Too late. The voices, marks, black words immersed into the deep.
Remnants, fragments of their unparalleled world
I’ve tentatively placed my footprints on a path
I look back.
Are they there. Now? Watching me?
Come back.
I see, I hear nothing.
Nothing but now.
Now. They nod, they urge me to go on.
Insisting. Now. I must return to face the future.
75, 100 years from now.
Now I am gone.
Go forward they said. If you want to keep on seeing us.
If you feel that you need to preserve our epicity.
Then you must now explore and discover our archivability.
Forgive me for expressing my understanding of these spaces in such non-academic words. My mind tends to slip into this kind of writing when I am grappling to make sense of the fluid space between my personal world and my subject position in my research. How on this magical earth do we materially archive the knowledge and pasts embodied in our elders when they come from a world where the practice and materiality of the foreign written form of histories are not the norm? All the schooling, experiences, and research methods in the world and nothing has prepared me for the fact that I now encounter this question about the archivability of different ways of knowing the past.
I am from Papua New Guinea, I am one child, one family member of our mother Nahau Rooney. She was our family’s beloved mother and matriarch. To the world, she is an important feminine figure in the emerging pre and post-independence Papua New Guinean state. I face a challenge that I sense resonates with other Papua New Guineans of my generation. As our parents’ generation passes away, we know we are losing knowledge so deep it’s impossible to imagine. Very few of our parents generations have been captured as subjects of anthropologist and historians and added to the anthropological archives.
For the few that did learn to read and write, who entered the pre and post-independence national building machinery as doctors, nurses, teachers, bureaucrats, politicians, police and so on, they are unique because they embody the bridge between the ways of knowing our pasts and, in being the first generation to usher our societies into reading and writing, the reality that documentation is the norm in the world as we know it today. From an archival or historical perspective, for those who managed to keep some form of written records, but never published, this generation of Papua New Guineans is enigmatic. How do we preserve their stories—embodied in our ways and perhaps documented by themselves - in the forms that honour their epic journeys through these two worlds and the histories?
I feel like I have embarked on my own journey, one that is nowhere near as profound as our parents’ generation, but one that nonetheless involves trying to understand these questions about knowing and preserving the past through my mother’s life. I am lucky because she left a lot to work with and I have a job in which I enjoy relative flexibility to redirect my research in this direction. I hope to emerge from this journey with some answers to these questions and, importantly, to generate more conversations about how to preserve our Papua New Guinean elders’ stories.
Nayahamui Rooney is a researcher and lecturer at the ANU School of Culture, History & Language. Nayahamui draws inspiration from critical, decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist research methods, including creative approaches such as poetry and the practice of Manus basket-making. In 2023, she is convening Asia and the Pacific: Power, Diversity and Change, as well as Gender and Sexuality in the Pacific. You can read more about her work here, here, here, and here.