Just passing through
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kelly Chandler
Download the complete article PDF
Kelly Chandler's biography and other articles by this writer
I met a hippy on the road to Port Vila. His pale dreadlocks set him apart from the other whitey tourists who more commonly sported braided hair and irregular tans. It was Saturday morning and I was walking home from the market, laden with island cabbage and coconuts, grinning and drenched after a twenty-minute downpour.
"How's your journey?" he asked, although he was the one with the backpack. On the strength of his greeting, I invited him up to sit on the balcony to watch the sea change colour, to eat the first raspberries of the season and to hear him talk about island-hopping by cargo ship. Travellers rarely come to Vanuatu with limited funds, helping unload kava from the MV Brisk and sleeping curled up on the captain's mat next to the ship's engine. He had walked from village to village, making and eating starchy laplap with the mamas and never turning down an offer from a chief to share some supremely strong kava, which is sometimes still made in the outer islands by masticating the roots of the favourite national pepper plant.
"Is it just me or is there a lot going on under the surface here?" this West Australian asked after we'd finished the raspberries, standing in my kitchen chopping taro and cabbage like we'd been friends for years. "I feel like I have whole chats without saying a word."
I was also enjoying this experience, now that my addiction to inner-city Melbourne adrenaline was easing, but I hadn't put it into words yet. The other young Australians I was volunteering with in Vanuatu weren't really into discussions about the hurbally-burbally of collective consciousness or intuition, and my Ni-Vanuatu friends just took it for granted. Here – in this forty-year-old who was on his first overseas adventure – was my first chance in a year to muse on the more metaphysical aspects of the development work I was doing.
ARRIVING ALMOST A YEAR EARLIER IN PORT VILA as an Australian Youth Ambassador for Development, I was indoctrinated with development theory and the idea that, as a journalist trainer at the weekly newspaper the Vanuatu Independent, I would significantly lift reporting and sub-editing standards and "transfer skills" to the journalists in our newsroom. The jargon about "capacity building" had etched its mark on my vernacular, but before the end of my tenure I would discover that "skills transfer" is a two-way process – and I would come away from my year in paradise with more skills than I ever transferred.
Each year, around four hundred "skilled" young things are dispatched around the Asia-Pacific region as part of the programme: engineers, pharmacists, filmmakers, environmental educators, teachers and cricket missionaries – all of us under thirty, mostly tertiary-educated middle-class kids eager to "make a difference" in emerging economies through "sustainable development". I suspected the programme was designed more to give young Australians a chance to broaden their world-view than to bestow their professional wisdom upon needy developing world workplaces, but my ego was still massaged comprehensively. I was being offered the chance to transfer my knowledge and skills. I felt like I was part of something bigger (cue patriotic music). I was an export, an ambassador. Welcome to AusAID.
Initially, I didn't want to make a difference. I wanted to get paid to spend winter in the tropics doing something I loved – working with words. But soon I was filled with the notion that the media in the Pacific were sub-standard and that some of the answers lay in the photocopied first-year journalism school textbook from which I was planning to teach, even though I had wagged most of the lectures myself. Sure, for the previous two years I had been editor of the quarterly literary journal Voiceworks, blessed with the company of a brilliant and unruly editorial committee, as well as the finest young writers and artists in Australia. I had little experience as a staff reporter at a newspaper, let alone at a newspaper subject to the subtleties of Pacific politics and society.
Some of the journalists I was supposed to be training had more than thirty years' experience in the media, and almost every journalist in Vanuatu has at some stage been sacked by the government for writing or broadcasting unfavourable stories. Reporters are occasionally threatened by thugs connected to unhappy businessmen or politicians, and a balance must be struck between nurturing "bigmen" connections and breaking the occasional story. All reporters are intricately involved in the small-town gossip networks that keep Port Vila entertained and informed, and complex relationships requiring differing levels of respect or deference can be traced through the traditional belief systems, known as kastom.
"Sit back and watch how people interact for the first month," we were told during our pre-departure briefing. This lasted about eight working days, and then I tried to institute a bunch of changes to make our weekly production cycle run more smoothly. Not that I didn't enjoy the atmosphere in the newsroom when we tumbled into another deadline without a page-one story or lead photograph, but I suspected that with a little planning we could avoid the hysteria that regularly drove the reporters into hiding. Most of my ideas, however, were met in the newsroom with good humour and then abandoned, mostly because they didn't work, but sometimes because they created extra work – a cardinal sin in Vanuatu.
I NEEDED TO EASE INTO THE SKIN of this humid country, so I relinquished caffeine in favour of kava, which helped me to understand that nothing in Vanuatu can be rushed. There is much for a reporter to learn from the hushed conversations that take place in outdoor kava bars. Exhausted by the humidity, the stupefying residual levels of kava in my system and too much starch in my diet, I had no choice but to slow down. I let my pupils dilate fully to absorb the landscape, gave myself over to the heat and tried to understand my new friends by soaking up the surrounds. Everything was big and moved slowly – unlike in Melbourne, where discourses and weather patterns alike brushed against you urgently and moved on. Here, people gave each other space and time. Travel took forever as people stopped to share stories, or wait out a morning downpour. Rains grew powerful over hot open seas, and when a cyclone passed over the islands four hours north, the weather in Port Vila was surly and people talked quietly of distant relatives who might at that moment be hurriedly bracing their homes and crops by tying down corrugated iron roofing or cutting the tops off giant taro leaves.
It was nothing to wait hours for a meeting, and then they rarely happened in the place appointed; more likely, they would start spontaneously on the landing outside our office, or at a lunch table over curry and rice in the market, or under a mango tree while waiting for a(nother) non-government organisation's workshop to disperse for afternoon tea. If we found it hard to rally reporters for the weekly news meeting, mostly it was because the reporters were off herding "green pigeons" – spending three days chasing down a source, or hunting for a politician who had disappeared into the communications black hole of the outer islands, or waiting for an uncle to spill the beans on a simmering issue. With a daily tabloid for competition, the reporters often found it pointless writing their big stories until they knew they hadn't been beaten to it.
Secrets got out quicker than press releases. More than the midday radio news, or the daily tabloid, our weekly newspaper competed with "radio coconut", as our reporters affectionately referred to the gossip that permeates life in Vanuatu. Having enjoyed the anonymity that comes from living most of my life in a biggish city, I spent the first six months in shock because everyone seemed to know my movements better than I did – down to how many bottles of French plonk I purchased and who I drank them with. The market mamas told one reporter that Alexander Downer was making an unscheduled pit stop in Port Vila before the Australian High Commission had even dispatched the embargoed press release about the Foreign Minister's impending tour. Sitting on a big story was almost impossible – particularly when journalists often liked to reduce their workload, make some extra money or help out a tawie (friend or relative) at another media outlet by sharing news leads, copy or photographs. Competition is a difficult concept in a country where community comes before the individual.