Just passing through - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kelly Chandler
Family and a connection to the land are the ties that bind this Melanesian nation of 200,000 people, where four out of five still live a subsistence lifestyle and kastom provides guidelines for almost all actions and events. There are around one hundred different languages – not dialects – and many Ni-Vanuatu can speak more than four: English, French, Bislama and at least one indigenous tongue. The Vanuatu Independent is trilingual, and most Ni-Vanuatu are educated either as Anglophone or Francophone, the languages of the two administrations that colonised and presided over the country before independence in 1980. The official national language, Bislama, developed in the sugar plantations of northern Queensland, for which thousands of Ni-Vanuatu were kidnapped during the shameful "blackbirding" era between 1866 and 1906.
The only means by which Ni-Vanuatu could communicate with other indentured Pacific Islanders and Aboriginal Australians in this strange environment was through a pidgin that is described as "essentially uncorrected English grafted on to a Melanesian syntax" in Jeremy MacClancy's To Kill a Bird with Two Stones (Vanuatu Cultural Centre, 1981). When the labourers returned (in seriously depleted numbers) to their villages after they were deported under the "white Australia" policy, they used pidgin to communicate with colonial administrators and traders. Slowly, with the glorious creativity and inclusiveness of Melanesian culture, Bislama evolved and absorbed phrases from French too.
Bislama has been used as a written language for about three decades, but an attempt at standardisation was only initiated in 1995. A word like "republic" can be written in Bislama in any of the following ways (and possibly others): "ripablik, repablik, republik, ripublic, republic, repablique, ripublique", according to Terry Crowley's excellent A New Bislama Dictionary (University of the South Pacific, 1996). There are no silent letters in Bislama, there is no female pronoun and everything is spelt as it sounds – and because people pronounce words differently, there is plenty of room to move. At the newspaper, I found that creative free-form phonetics filtered through all levels of communication, and into English and French as well. Any attempt at implementing a style guide would take a lot of negotiation and much longer than a year.
I knew I was getting better at the language when I conducted a conversation with the cadet entirely through the movement of eyebrows and key hand gestures. Wanting to conceal from the senior reporters her trepidation about an assignment, she ducked her head below the partition and asked: Did she have to go by herself to that press conference with three "bigmen" from AusAID, even though her English wasn't good? Could she borrow my "small recorder" so she got the quotes right? It wasn't until after the cadet left the building – nervous but armed with technology and the promise of free morning tea after the press conference – that I realised we hadn't uttered a word in the exchange. I often witnessed this kind of thing in the market, or outside the post office, or between reporters trying to slip unnoticed out of the newsroom, or while the receptionist protected someone from the debt collectors who liked to visit on payday. People just knew what was going down without the need for words.
Journalists often employed extremely curly language as a form of defence. At first I thought something must have been lost in translation as a story would journey from the spoken Bislama through the journalist's French schooling and into the English that was expected for page three. "But this story doesn't actually say anything," I was often heard to exclaim late on a Thursday night before deadline, red pen in hand, after attempting to unravel fact from hearsay and libel, all shrouded in the passive voice.
"It's OK, people know what I mean," the deputy editor would reply sagely, placing her hand on my wrist. "We don't need to write any more; the story will come out in time. I have all the facts here, but I can't say any more," she would say, patting a stack of documents. Case closed. Our newspaper, it often seemed, was a place where we marked events down "for the record" without using a news hook, or to let a crooked person know that we were on to them without elaborating on the details.
CORRUPTION RUNS LIKE A SONGLINE THROUGH VANUATU SOCIETY, and the country received mention in the Global Corruption Report issued in 2005 by Transparency International. Changes of government without elections, the re-election of a prime minister serving time for forgery, shady dealings by the Vanuatu Commodities and Marketing Board and the Vanuatu Maritime Authority were all listed in the report. It doesn't help that Western concepts like "parliamentary democracy" have been imposed on top of traditional structures of governance like the chief system. What may be described as nepotism can also, to some degree, be seen in Melanesian countries as honouring your wantoks, or relatives. Political stability, good governance, accountability and adherence to the rule of law are the concepts being introduced through largely foreign aid-sponsored reform programmes. Transparency International Vanuatu has written a primary school curriculum about good governance in the hope of instilling civic responsibility in coming generations.
There is still a vaguely colonial feel to the presence of foreign aid donors, who sing loudly about the need for self-determination, legal strengthening projects and public sector reform, but in this post-colonial landscape, donors are an inextricable feature. A level of dependency on aid has replaced the colonial administrations – aid is needed to keep schools open and prop up the health service and strengthen the legal sector. But donors often want something in return. Vanuatu is the fourth highest aid recipient in the world based on population size, according to the International Monetary Fund's September 2005 Finance and Development report, and Australia committed $34 million to development in 2005, $10 million of which shored up a budget shortfall. This extra money was delivered to the new government partly as a reward for establishing political stability, just after the visits by those three "bigmen" from AusAID and Alexander Downer in late 2004.
At the Vanuatu Independent, we were caught between integrity and the Daily Post, which harboured less of the Melanesian courtesy our journalists stood by. In print, people would be identified as Chinese even if they were born in Vanuatu, while "half caste" was acceptable and "lady lawyer" didn't ruffle a feather. Vanuatu, it seemed, skipped lightly over political correctness. Then I landed with my genderless terminology and codes of conduct expounding why newspapers shouldn't identify rape victims, or describe methods of suicide or print photographs of an infant's body savaged by dogs. But the way I went about addressing these issues was often a little abrupt (highlighting passages of offensive text and writing in red pen in broken Bislama and English why it offended me). Early on, the politics reporter smiled as he dubbed me Man Tanna because of my "strong head"; people from Tanna are stereotyped as vigorous defenders of their culture, and the landscape of their island is intensely, violently volcanic. Being given the title of a woman belonging to this island was a playful way for my colleague to suggest perhaps I could ease off, and slowly I learned to make a point through laughter and gentle nudging instead.
I felt the weight of my own post-colonial opinions acutely and often wanted to bite the hand that fed me, but I had to admit I was not a passenger. My role at the Vanuatu Independent was also loaded with power relations – it was important to AusAID that there was a credible and effective competitor to the Daily Post, a friendly media outlet that would hopefully be receptive to the good work of Australia and Australians. Across the region it is sound business and relatively inexpensive for the Australian government to build goodwill at under-resourced organisations with eager-beaver, skilled volunteer labour. I often flew the flag for the information age, gleefully imparting Western-sanctioned knowledge and straightening out deliciously rambunctious concepts with swift strokes of my sub-editor's red pen. Occasionally I even caught myself saying things like: "That's not how we do things".
THERE'S NO POINT IN COMPARING THE BAMBOO TO THE BANYAN, but the difference between me and my new hippy friend struck me two days later when it was nearing time for both of us to leave paradise and pick up our respective lives in Australia. While we shared a love of the spirit of the people of Vanuatu, his understanding of his time there seemed more honest and straight-up than mine. He had opened his heart and travelled without the emotional baggage of sustainable development, wandering through the islands accepting the generosity and warmth of villagers and wanting nothing more than a good "story-on" with whoever would sit beside him.
Although I tried to disengage from the "making a difference" ethic and simply get a sense of the shape and texture of the archipelago, I still had to fill in self-congratulatory quarterly performance reports that measured the success of my posting. I was another expat passing through. At one of the gazillion farewell parties for me and my ambassadorial comrades, one of my Ni-Vanuatu friends turned to me with a look of despair. "Oh, Kelly. I'm not going to make friends with any more Australians. I just put you inside my heart and then you leave." ♦