PNG: Ripping yarns from the birth of a media industry

Rowan Callick, Asia-Pacific editor of The Australian
OPINION: SYDNEY:  The newly arrived young  advertising manager from London was determined to make his mark on what  he viewed as a risibly basic marketing scene in Papua New Guinea.

He posed his wife and a young PNG woman in front of a new model Japanese car that was coming on sale. So far, so predictable. His  mistake was that he had not yet any sense of the readership of the newspaper whose ads he was selling.

This was Wantok - a name meaning one talk, someone who speaks the same language, which in a country of 812 languages means a relative, someone close, a term also extended to mean a friend or mate.

Wantok remains the world's only pidgin newspaper, written in the PNG standard version of Tok Pisin, which has derived from a confluence around Melanesian grammar forms, with words from English, German, Malay, Chinese and other languages.

The ad man was initially pleased with his cosmopolitan-looking ad. Until the letters started rolling in, written often on pieces of scrap paper.

"Why are those women standing in front of the car?" one sceptical writer asked. "Could it be because they are positioned to hide dents in it?" Another took a different tack: "Are those women for sale as well? Do they come together with the car for the price in the advert? Or can they be bought separately?"

The former Londoner has learned a great deal since then. He later moved to Port Vila, where he now runs, with considerable journalistic and  commercial courage and expertise, Vanuatu's best media organisation.

Journalism highlight
For me, working with Wantok, and with the wider group of sister publications that rapidly joined it within the Word Publishing group, was the time of my journalistic life.

Wantok had been founded by a heroic but humble American Catholic priest, Frank Mihalic, who had worked in a leper colony, shot  crocodiles that threatened village children and written what remains the standard dictionary of Tok Pisin while recovering from TB. He was later commissioned to translate the Constitution into PNG's most spoken  language.

His aim with Wantok was to help rural people - easily most of the population - to understand the changes shaking up PNG as it hurtled towards independence in 1975, and to encourage them to read in their own language.

A priest running a centre for delinquent youth told Mihalic about a Papuan kid, abandoned by his parents in the Sepik region, who had wandered into trouble, but showed some talent in drawing. Mihalic took him on, and Wilson Jada remains Wantok's cartoonist to this day, now one of the most famous illustrators in PNG.

Another comrade of Mihalic's, Englishman Kevin Walcot, who had taught in India and PNG, began to get involved and introduced a broader vision: to provide each core, emerging market in PNG with a publication aimed at helping it understand its changing world.

I became the first professional journalist to be caught up in this gathering whirlwind of publishing initiatives. I had earlier answered an advert in Britain's Press Gazette seductively headlined: "World's Worst Paid Journalistic Job." I was earning 35 kina a fortnight.

One afternoon, I was deputed to meet the Queen, who had just arrived from Australia. Surprisingly well informed about local politics, she and Prince Philip were relaxed and chatty, and soon decided to extend the occasion from a mere handshake to a long afternoon tea session.

They were intrigued by the copy of Wantok I brought to show them, and the prince could not resist claiming some expertise in Tok Pisin. Oh yes, I asked doubtfully, what is your favourite phrase? He answered immediately: "Gras bilong as bilong kakaruk . . . Chicken feathers." Not bad, actually.

Next to be launched was New Nation, a brightly designed, full-colour news magazine for young people. It built up a loyal following but failed to attract advertisers. After about 10 years it folded, but decades later, the remains of well-thumbed copies can still be found in sparsely stocked high school libraries.

Then we launched The Times of Papua New Guinea, the first paper to be computer typeset in the country, but more important, the first to introduce investigative journalism.

Michael Davie, the elegant writer who was then editing The Age, came to Port Moresby to launch the paper, whose founding editor was a West Papuan, Franz Joku. Inevitably, The Times upset people in power, who were not accustomed to facing so many rude questions.

The first big investigative campaign was about corruption in the burgeoning logging industry. I was called at 6am one day by a disturbed forests minister, a former army commander, who asked, not entirely politely, what exactly we were up to. A judicial inquiry later found him guilty of 83 charges of corruption and lambasted "the reckless destruction of forests and a plan to systematically cheat [the landowners] of their rightful profits".

Sinclaire Solomon, who did much of that investigation, and I then obtained a printout of the entire list of thousands of PNG individuals and entities awarded shares in Placer Pacific's much-anticipated gold float. We scanned it for familiar names. One address recurred, that of the People's Progressive Party, founded and dominated by then Finance Minister Julius Chan.

Solomon rang cabinet to get his response. No calls could be put  through, he was told. When he explained what we had unearthed, he was  put through. The Ombudsman Commission soon launched an inquiry.

We focused heavily on training. Frank Kolma, an early recruit, was a natural. His parents, in the Jimi Valley in the Western Highlands, had  seen the first white people arrive there, and he wrote movingly about taking his mother to see the ocean for the first time. When a colleague left for Hong Kong, Kolma's contribution to the farewell was a poem by Robert Browning he had memorised.

Many of the leading journalists were women, with Julia Daia Bore, now a top reporter with The National, editing New Nation, and Anna Solomon, who was to head the whole organisation, editing first Wantok, then The Times.

Word Publishing is owned by the Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran and United churches of PNG, and this local ownership base has helped to protect it from political attacks. The odds against success were immense. There is still no road from the capital to any other major centre, so publications must be distributed, expensively, by air. It is crucial to deliver them to Jacksons airport early for connecting flights or sales are lost. One night I was woken at 4am when the driver had got drunk and smashed the truck, so I had to drive to the press and rush the papers to the airport.

Power was - and is - unreliable, and for some time the whole team would shift from one staff member's home to another, carting computers and paste-up boards around as blackouts came and went in different parts of  the city. Finally, a reliable back-up generator was the only answer.

My closest mate was, and remains, Joe Koroma, a former high school teacher from the Highlands who was PNG's first newspaper columnist, with a seeming direct line to the stories of the person on the street.  When the charismatic deputy prime minister Iambakey Okuk died, the outpouring of grief from his fellow Highlanders brought PNG's cities to  
a halt.

We closed the office doors as rioters and looters seized the Hohola area. I was taking a German aid emissary through some figures when a Highlander burst into the office. He was covered in grey mud as a sign of mourning.

"Do you want to see the pictures or shall I write the story first?" asked Joe, as the German almost passed out with fright. - The Australian/Pacific Media Watch

Wantok niuspepa website