Praying for Sunshine, Waiting for Rain

INTERVIEW AND REVIEWS

Why write this story?

Visits to PNG

I visited Papua New Guinea many times between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s in my capacity as an official of the Australian government’s overseas aid program. Many of my visits were to lowland areas—to the capital Port Moresby, to Wewak on the north coast and its hinterland on the Sepik River, to the harbour towns of Lae and Madang, to Rabaul on the island of New Britain and to Bougainville Island further to the east. These are all places of constant heat and humidity, and of malaria. The highlands I found to be very different, with clear air, cool nights, manageable daytime heat and a malaria risk far lower than elsewhere in the country, and it was obvious even to my untrained eye that the highland soil was rich and productive. The highlands were without doubt my favourite part of the country.

Why did Europeans bring ‘cargo’ to New Guinea and not the other way around?

I read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years shortly after it was published in the late 1990s. I was persuaded by its argument that the differences in development between the earth’s peoples are largely due to the accumulated results of environmental factors—first and foremost the availability of domesticable plants and animals that made possible the transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, which in turn allowed rapid increases in population. With larger, more concentrated populations came differentiated social roles and political organisation, and social specialisation led to inventions such as metal tools and writing. Exposure to diseases originating in domestic animals enabled the development of resistance to such disease. Europe was where these developments progressed the furthest, and by the 15th century Europeans were ripe for the spur of competition between their various states to push them to explore and conquer the globe.

Guns, Germs and Steel has quite a lot to say about New Guinea; indeed the question that the book sets out to answer—why did technology spread mainly from Europe to the rest of the world and not the other way round?—comes from a Papua New Guinean man whom the author met on a local beach while researching bird evolution in the 1970s. However, it was only when I re-read the book after I was no longer working in overseas aid that its treatment of New Guinea really caught my attention. The reference to the highlands as ‘...an island of dense farming populations thrust up into the sky and surrounded below by a sea of clouds’ (p. 304) seemed particularly apt, and I was intrigued to learn (or to re-learn) that the New Guinea highlands are generally accepted as one of the small number of sites where agriculture arose indigenously, rather than being imported from elsewhere (p. 303). Had this fact been at the front of my mind during my visits to PNG I would certainly have paid far more attention to the farming practices of the highlanders.

German influence in New Guinea

The north-eastern part of New Guinea, including the highlands, was a German colony from the 1880s until the First World War. Signs of this history remain, with place names ending in ‘Hafen’ (harbour), ‘Ort (place) or ‘Berg’ (mountain) and a large stock of Lutheran churches. My interest in German language and history spurred me to read autobiographies of some of the earliest Lutheran missionaries, and I was impressed by their dedication to their missions in very difficult circumstances and their attempts to find a way through the linguistic maze of the country—with hundreds of languages, New Guinea has one of the highest concentrations of languages in the world (Diamond, p. 306).

The history of the Lutheran missions led me to the broader history of the European incursion into the highlands, which took place in earnest only in the 1930s. Until this time the existence of a large population of indigenous people with developed agriculture living in what seemed to be wild and inhospitable mountain country was largely unknown to the outside world. From a European perspective, the New Guinea highlands were one of the earth’s last frontiers.

Australia and New Guinea

Australia became the colonial administrator of the Territories of Papua (the south-eastern part of the island of New Guinea) and New Guinea (the former German colony in the northeast) in the early 20th century. Australia oversaw the merging of the two Territories after World War Two and then their independence as the state of Papua New Guinea in 1975. The two countries therefore share an important history. Within this history, first contact in the highlands, given how relatively recently it occurred and how unexpected it was, occupies a special place.

Why a fictional account?

While many accounts of early contact between Europeans and highlanders have been written (a short Bibliography is appended to Praying for Sunlight, Waiting for Rain), I felt there was room for a new fictional account. In particular, I hoped that choosing as the protagonist a young woman, and one who was somewhat sceptical of missionary work, would enable me to present a different perspective on what had been largely a man’s world in which Christian missions had played a pivotal role. Ellen’s story is the result.