2 weeks Ago By pcAdminPNG
By Paul Raffaele AS my 18 th birthday approached, 16 October 1961, I was readying myself to fly to Port Moresby to begin work with the Department of Territories administration. Boarding the DC-6B, turboprop, at the old ramshackle Mascot aerodrome in Sydney, late at night, my heart was beating fast with excitement. In those days there was no direct flight.
We made a stop at Brisbane to pick up passengers and then headed for Moresby, across the Coral Sea. The next morning, we landed at Jacksons’ Airport, little changed from when it was a vital part of the effort to fight off the Japanese war machine in World War 2. The ground staff were the first Papuans I ever saw – short stocky men with fuzzy hair, short-sleeved shirts, and barefoot.
Surely what lay before me was what I’d thrilled to in Hollywood movies, a tropical paradise, graced with dense jungle and shimmering blue sea. Territories had provided a minibus for we new recruits. My heart sank within a few minutes as we drove to the town centre.
Where was all that wonderful deep green foliage? What confronted me looked more like Australia’s Northern Territory. Scraggy bush exposed red soil terrain. I would learn later that Moresby is in a rain shadow.
However, my spirits picked up as we surmounted a hill to reveal in the distance that cinematic tropical paradise – a glinting deep blue sea over which arched a semi-circle of dazzlingly blue sky. But it was bloody hot and sweaty. In those days, Moresby was sparsely populated when compared with 2024.
Traffic on the road was scarce, mostly battered looking mini-buses. But streams of people were walking by the roadside. Koki market intrigued me as we passed by.
Unlike today’s ugly looking market, that small curve of water was dotted with picturesque lakatois. Fronting it on a strip if bare earth sat a dozen tall slender, dark, beautiful looking, bare-chested men wearing cotton sarongs and with tall fuzzy hairdos we later called Afros. Each had a scattering of tropical fruit for sale, mostly mangoes and papaya.
Almost all had hand-carved wooden combs either wedged in their impressive tangle of curls or in use as they fluffed up their hair. I breathed a sigh of relief. Our minibus skirted Ela Beach and entered the small humpback town centre, virtually deserted.
But there was a barefoot traffic cop, clad in one-piece, blue, skirt like uniform, gracefully directing the sparse traffic. On the right we passed a splendid looking hotel, identifying itself with a sign that read, ‘Papua Hotel’. I later learned that it was the town’s only posh hotel, known colloquially as ‘the top hotel’.
However, my hotel was known as ‘the bottom hotel’. In a symbolic movement, we headed down the slope and halted outside a down-at-the-heels, wooden building, the Moresby Hotel. This was to be my home for the next two weeks.
I was assigned to a small room crowded with four beds for myself and three other young recruits who’d flown with me. We were fed a soggy, tasteless, breakfast you might expect from a one star hotel. Then our minder suggested we get some sleep because we were to be taken to the administrative centre at Konedobu in the afternoon to learn our fate.
My adrenalin was surging and, rather than sleep, I decided to see the town. In the grounds was a gazebo structure which a hotel worker told me was, ‘the Snake Pit Bar’. I later learned that it was notorious for the riotous drinking sessions of Aussie gold miners on r’n’r for a few days from the mines up in New Guinea.
Errol Flynn mentions the bar fondly in his wonderful autobiography, ‘My Wicked, Wicked Ways.’ Out in the street, I spotted an enormous Papuan woman seated on the pavement and selling a bunch of papaya which we then called paw-paws. There were hardly any white people but there were plenty of locals.
My gaze, at age 18, sought out the local girls. I didn’t know what to expect and was delighted to see that most had a special kind of beauty – mysterious tattoos on their hands and faces; hair glistening with what I assumed was coconut oil; and with teeth that were whiter than white. Smiles seemed painted on their faces.
See on Friday our continuation of Paul’s first visit to Port Moresby as he navigates a capital that may seem far too foreign to a lot of us in today’s city...
Paul Raffaele is a veteran Australian reporter, he travels the world hunting true tales of wild animals and primitive tribes, preferably those that eat humans. He’s written in Washington for Smithsonian magazine, which has published his stories on Indonesian cannibals, killer jellyfish and modern pirates. His real early working life, however, started in Port Moresby and Papua New Guinea as a shy wide eyed 18 year old coming to the land of the unexpected in 1961.
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