Portraits of our broken neighbour
Rosalie Higson
April 01, 2005
THE Australian Government is preparing to launch an extensive rescue package for Papua New Guinea. Our nearest northern neighbour is crippled by poverty, its basic services in disarray. In December last year, PNG Police Minister Bire Kimisopa admitted that his force was corrupt and dysfunctional. Meanwhile, the population is expected to double by 2020 and an AIDS crisis looms.
The country is also a target for international gun-running, drugs and, possibly, terrorists. In the capital, Port Moresby, unemployment is 70 per cent. Schools are empty, jobs are scarce, but drugs and guns are plentiful. Bodyguards are de rigueur, to guard against robbery, carjacking and kidnapping by the notorious raskol gangs.
On the eve of the 30th anniversary of independence, a new exhibition titled PNG, at the Australian Centre for Photography, documents all this. The work of Australian photojournalists Stephen Dupont and Paul Blackmore is being shown alongside screenings of three groundbreaking documentaries by Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, including the Oscar-winning First Contact.
ACP director Alasdair Foster included the feature-length films, which deal with PNG’s past and present, because he wanted to put the exhibition into context.
“I think Australians have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to New Guinea,” he says. “I wanted to go beyond the exotic, I didn’t want the images pigeon-holed because they are not simple. I want people to ask questions.”
Blackmore has chronicled societies from Eritrea and Egypt to India and Siberia. His challenge was to meld the beauty of PNG, the exotic location, with the contemporary reality of what’s going on.
“The country is right on our doorstep and part of the reason that the [Australian] Government is putting all that money into it is because they don’t want a lawless state. In a rough sort of way, it’s our own little Afghanistan,” he says.
Initially, Blackmore went on assignment for French journal L’Express, and found the place in a worse state than he could have imagined.
“I was very surprised by Port Moresby, at just how bad the law and order situation was there,” he says.
His brief was to spend a few weeks taking pictures and examining why the Australian Government has returned after 29 years of PNG independence. He went to the Highlands and Bougainville, and photographed the Australian Federal Police.
Back in Port Moresby, Blackmore worked early in the mornings, travelling in taxis and walking the streets without any trouble.
At last year’s Independence Day ceremony, he found little cause for celebration: “The Governor-General and 40 of the military all lined up on the main oval in Port Moresby. The oval is completely bedraggled and there was hardly anyone in the stands; the people who are there are being held back by the army with guns. It’s a very sad situation.”
He was further saddened by a mass burial of infants abandoned at Port Moresby morgue. “Either the parents had died of AIDS or were too poor to pay the morgue fees. I photographed this burial of 20 babies and for me that was the end of the story that I wanted to tell – when a government can’t even look after its young, its dead young . . .”
The Economist recently ranked Port Moresby the worst capital city in the world in which to live and Dupont met some of the people who make it so. He ventured deep into gang territory to get the pictures that became his series of raskol portraits.
“I’m drawn towards frontier-like places and places of conflict – and there’s a lot of conflict in New Guinea,” he says.
For the past 17 years Dupont has been documenting political and social developments in Afghanistan, the Middle East, East Timor and Indonesia. He was also interested in PNG’s colonial history and “the mystique of the tribal thing, the hundreds of different tribes and the wildness of it all”.
Dupont’s aim was to do a story on the gangs, but he didn’t know how to go about it until he stumbled on a tribal war in one of the city’s most dangerous areas. “This place, without me knowing, happened to be one of the most violent settlements. No white people, not even locals, go there. It’s a no-go area.”
He was travelling with a local MP and went along as she tried to break up the dispute before it erupted into full-scale tribal war.
“They knew her, but they didn’t know who I was,” Dupont says. “'Who is this guy coming in to photograph us in the middle of this war?”’
To do his work, Dupont had to surmount intense suspicion: “Naturally. I mean, these guys are criminals. Definitely people thought I was undercover working for the AFP. But I had the confidence and the trust of their leader, so he’s the guy I stuck to quite closely. Having that authority was my ticket in without being stabbed or shot.”
The raskols couldn’t believe that a white person had walked into their community uninvited, Dupont says. They considered him very crazy or very brave. He ended up photographing about 60 of the 120 members of the all-male gang.
“I come from a photojournalistic background, so for me portraits is a new thing, exciting,” he says.
It took him a week to convince the gang to pose for him. “I felt like I had something, a way that I could show the human face of this gang, caught up in the whole struggle that the country is caught up in – poverty, unemployment, illiteracy,” he says.
“A lot of them are young kids, about 12 and 13. They’ve all got homemade guns, they make their own weapons, custom-designed. They’ve got this really interesting arsenal of home-made weapons, all gaffer-taped up, like something out of early Australian bushranging.”
Dupont can’t support the gang violence but says he can see the size of their problems: “For me the portraits were a way of showing it, using the gang to show this society on the brink of anarchy.”
PNG is at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, April 8 to May 22.