Papua New Guinean Highland violence is not found in the beautiful Island Provinces

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A carving by the great New Ireland  (Papua New Guinea) Master Carver, Edward Sale, from the island of Tabar contemplates the Polish winter 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2556469/Witch-burnings-Papua-New-Guinea.html

I am not entirely sure of the motivation of the Daily Mail in running this sensationalist story today (12 February 2014) apart from a gratuitous and prurient need to shock and sell newspapers. It is a grossly unfair picture of the great majority of warm, hospitable and friendly Papua New Guineans I met on my travels. Melanesian culture is one of the most ancient and most harmonious on the planet. I can see the same exaggeration in operation extrapolating violence to the majority of Muslims from the murderous absurdities of extremists. But it sells newspapers and the media are satisfied they have technicolor copy.

The study of isolated cases of perversion considered as being the behavioral norm in Western society (as presented by the Daily Mail) would give a curious picture indeed of the lives of 'quiet desperation' most people inhabit. I would be interested to hear what a Melanesian anthropologist might make of our society - Henley Royal Regatta for example!

You may have come across another story around the same time last year (8th April 2013) the content of which I found deeply shocking although unsurprising in view of my studies and travels there. Perhaps it is the annual PNG shock-fest on the part of the Mail. Certainly it paints a grossly unfair picture and ruins tourism. Non-Europeans are seldom caught up in this sort of thing and most of the country is fervently Christian. People have been gasping about PNG since Captain Cook briefly passed by there aboard the Endeavour in the days where there was a passion for the 'ocular proof' of cannibalism.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2305638/Two-women-tortured-beheaded-using-witchcraft-murder-teacher-police-looked-unable-help.html

I was shocked to read of the rape on KarKar Island (April 21st 2013 ) The following describes it :

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312416/Papua-New-Guinea-gang-rape-U-S-academic-32-attacked-armed-men-hacked-hair-bush-knife-tied-husband-naked-tree.html

The author Michael Moran on KarKar Island in 2002 - happier and more peaceful times. Such a beautiful part of the world and such friendly people. I find the present reports of violence hard to understand. 

It seems that Highland Papua New Guinea has become very dangerous indeed. I must say I really did not find that at all - quite the opposite in the Island Provinces but then I travelled there ten years ago. The Island Provinces are not the Highlands. PNG is an enormous place and cannot possibly be considered as homogeneous. That is the problem. An inappropriate Westminster style of government has been grafted upon a culture made up of a huge number of culturally significantly different tribes lumped together as 'Papua New Guinea'.

In my book Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific (London 2003 - and still in print) I seriously, rather than sensationally, examine in great detail the fascinating subject of witchcraft and sorcery in Papua New Guinea. Such beliefs still live strongly in many hearts despite the predominantly fervent Christian society that prevails. Often both beliefs are held in tandem by certain individuals. I also examine in detail the complex question of cannibalism - another subject grossly distorted in significance.

http://www.michael-moran.net/pages/books/beyond_the_coral_sea/index.htm (English)


http://michael-moran.net/pages/polish_editions/ZA_MORZEM/index.htm   (Polish)

I wrote this book specifically about the rarely described beautiful and peaceful Island Provinces of Papua New Guinea (as opposed to the Highlands). My book was the first in 100 years since the great work by Richard Parkinson entitled Thirty Years in the South Seas. I was so proud the book was short-listed for the 25th and final Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 2004. 

Also see for some beautiful Melanesians rather than those wretched pictures...

http://www.michael-moran.com/2012/09/solomon-islands-and-papua-new-guinea.html

Incidentally the demise of this prize is a great and unremarked loss to the world of travel writing. It made some attempt to maintain high literary standards in this peculiarly English  genre. Now we swim in a welter of mediocre travel writing (with a very few notable exceptions). Publishers steer well clear of travel authors today. Anything trivial, 'quirky', egocentric or on a motorcycle (or all four) is in vogue with little or no serious, detailed cultural or historical input concerning the vast areas travelled and the people who have inhabited them for hundreds of years.

Holocaust Memorial Day January 27th 2014

Click on photographs to enlarge for a superior image (Nikon F 2 and Fuji Film)

Approaching Auschwitz on the Ferry in 1992

Winter sunset at Auschwitz

Crematorium remains at Birkenau

Zyklon B crystals Majdanek Camp Museum 1992

Detail at the Children's Memorial at the Jewish Cemetery, Warsaw

Unkempt Jewish Cemetery at Lesko, south-east Poland

The compression of time into an instant image. A photograph of Hungarian Jews exhibited among the trees of the the 'Little Wood' at Birkenau in the self-same place where they were assembled to sacrifice their lives for an insane racial theory

Behind the main Birkenau camp there were two more crematoria, Krems IV and V. They were considerably smaller than II, and III but were still of sufficient size to kill many people each day. 

The area was cordoned off with barbed wire. Branches of leaves were woven thickly into the wire to deaden noises and shield the crematoria and gas chambers from view. The first view is of the path leading to Krematorium V that began operations on April 4, 1943. It had a cremation capacity of 768 corpses in a 24-hour period. The ruins of the structure are at the end of a path. People were either brought here by truck or were forced to walk about a mile to what has become known as 'The Little Wood'.

Ghosts of Warsaw inhabit  Próżna Street

On this day you may wish to read my description of and reflections on a rather gruelling and bleak visit to Auschwitz/Birkenau in the early 1990s (before it was sanitized as a tourist attraction) from my literary travel book on Poland  A Country in the Moon : Travels in Search of The Heart of Poland (London 2008).

Click on link for a preview or free download of the chapter:

https://www.box.com/s/jsdvnc9120cic9h7m24f

Words are insufficient to confront what happened there on any rational human level. Can faith in our human race carry us through a realization of the implications for post-war history and the ubiquitous disrespect for human life that has been its consequence?

There is such a danger that the familiarity of this profoundly evil conception has made too many people indifferent, or as we have seen most recently, actually in irrational and self-serving in denial that the Holocaust occurred at all. Such men are creating yet another opportunity for nameless aggression towards our fellow man and the incomprehensible cruelty and murder of untold numbers of innocent children. We have regressed to living once again through the Old Testament. 

The great author W.G. Sebald, one of the most original voices of our time, believed that we as 'civilized' human beings have not yet been able, or more frighteningly, even desired, to come to any mature spiritual or moral terms with what actually happened during those terrible, almost unfathomable years of insanity. I agree with him completely and until this happens the barbarians who have already breached the walls remain a murderous force within the castle grounds. 

And no, I am not Jewish or even particularly religious, simply human and horrified.

The recent photographs of atrocities in Syria have a ghastly familiarity do they not?

The metaphor changes, the landscape and cultures alter, religion enters the frame but the terrifying and brutal inhumanity of man to man remains the same. 

The price of freedom seems always to be so unconscionably high.


A Country in the Moon : Travels in Search of The Heart of Poland (London 2008)

http://www.michael-moran.net/poland.htm     (English)


http://www.michael-moran.net/pages/polish_editions/Kraj_z_Ksiezyca/index.htm (Polish)

A Viking at Gallipoli - The Diaries of Captain Nikolai Theodor Svensen of A Company 15th Battalion (Australia)

I have always felt that the broad notion of 'allies betrayed' has bound Poles, Australians and New Zealanders together in spirit however complex and many-sided the actual historical truth. 

The husband of my great-aunt Lillian (the sister of the subject of my present biographical project Edward Cahill  - also a fine pianist) was Lieutenant Nikolai Theodore Svensen ('Theo' to the family). Originally from Norway (born in Larvik), he emigrated to Australia and completed his schooling in Brisbane and became a survey draughtsman. Major N.T. Svensen (his final rank) was an incredibly eccentric and talented gentleman. I use the word advisedly as he was descended from a distinguished Norwegian shipping and ship-building family who fell on hard times and emigrated to Australia when steamships supplanted sailing vessels. 

He first served in the Boer War with the 1st Queensland Mounted Infantry and had over ten years service with the Queensland Rifles Regiment. At the outbreak of the Great War he enlisted in A Company 15th Battalion AIF on 30 September 1914. His unit embarked from Melbourne on board the Transport A 40 Ceramic on 22 December 1914. He was wounded in the face and chest at Gallipoli on 10 May 1915.   Evacuated from the peninsula in November 1915 with enteric fever he was repatriated to Australia in 1916. Svensen retired with the honorary rank of Major.

Portrait of Captain Nikolai Theodor Svensen (1878-1966) of A Company 15th Battalion (Australia) wearing the Queen’s South Africa (Boer War) Medal and 1914-1915 Star, the British War Medal and Victory Medal.

Portrait of Captain Nikolai Theodor Svensen (1878-1966) of A Company 15th Battalion (Australia) wearing the Queen’s South Africa (Boer War) Medal and 1914-1915 Star, the British War Medal and Victory Medal.

When landing at Anzac Cove he kept a meticulously detailed diary in minute handwriting in two small volumes covered in dark green leather (which I treasure) of the formidable event even during the very moments it was taking place. 'A bullet has just landed eight inches from my foot.' he coolly scribbled during the very landing itself with the grace under pressure of a Nelson. An extraordinary document.  Captain J F Walsh (left) and Lieutenant N T Svensen (right) leading files of A Company, 15th Battalion during a march through Melbourne, 17th December 1914 shortly before embarkation. Two children are in the right foreground. Svensen was an obsessional and perfectionist professional soldier throughout his long life. He played exciting table-top war games of Napoleonic and Great War battles with me lasting weeks. We used detailed painted regiments of paper soldiers moving according to a throw of dice with small cannons that fired tiny wooden pellets. Each battle was written up in a ledger and soldiers that had distinguished themselves were decorated accordingly and promoted. He told me blood-curdling stories late into the night of 'Johnny Turk' (as the soldiers referred to the enemy) when I stayed with he and Lilian as a child over a period of years whilst my father was studying medicine at Queensland University. These years spent in that eccentric environment as a child go a long way to explaining why I turned out to be the odd creature I feel myself to be. Major N. T. Svensen prepares to fight a Napoleonic battle. He was a pioneer of  international Table Top War Games and as a child I was drawn into this world. Hence my love of the 1993  ITV series Sharpe one of the finest television series ever made on any subject

During these memorial years of the Great War, I have decided to write up the unique account of his personal campaign at Gallipoli which as a commissioned officer was of an intensity of detail unrivaled in my experience. On the new blog (not this post) I shall lodge photographs and extracts as I discover them during my researches. 

This posting is simply in the form of a communique.

Further material, photographs and updates on Major N. T. Svensen can be found at this blog address: 

http://www.gallipoliviking.blogspot.com/

Major Nikolai Theodor Svensen (1878-1966)