Hans Breitmann Gife a Barty 23

work in the Kalahari, and went weekly to London to learn Bushman clicks. Then the position at the fairly recently formed department under Professor Nadel at ANU turned up. There were inspiring precedents for working in New Guinea, Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune; and several friends, Peter Lawrence, Francis West, Jack Golson, were already in the Southern Hemisphere. Ralph went to Oxford to talk to Beatrice Blackwood, who had worked with the Kuku Kuku and came back with useful advice. “She says if you want to take a cat you can carry it in a string bag”. He went for the medical and came back indignant. “The quack made me get down on my hunkers and hop round the room. Then he said - Okay, you’ll do for Australia”.

Ralph had a particular sort of integrity. He was affectionate, intelligent, funny. Of course at this time, a million light years ago, he was young and covered in rainbows. But even as he grew older and went on to other lives and other wives, the rainbows still hung around.

‘BIG-MAN’, NEIGHBOUR, TEACHER, FRIEND:A PERSONAL MEMOIR OF RALPH BULMER AT WAIGANI, 1968-72

Helga M. Griffin Australian National University

The stratigraphy of my memory of UPNG (the University of Papua New Guinea) at Waigani reveals an occupational phase which I label Waigani 1 and date 1966-75,1 although I only arrived in 1968. Waigani 1 is most notable for its educational artefacts. Up to twenty years on, most of its inhabitants are still alive in different parts of the world and, around the globe, there exists a subtle network which is sometimes activated by correspondence with, and visits to, persons at places as far apart as Bridgetown, Barbados and New Delhi, India. The epithet ‘the Waigani mafia’ has been good-humouredly absorbed by members of the original UPNG community and satirically directed against themselves. Rites of passage, especially on the death of a child or spouse or friend, activate the old links more poignantly. The clan gathers in person, by mail or telephone, and Waigani 1 is reconstructed in an out-reach of support and friendship and in the telling of stories. In the second half of 1988 the death of Ralph Bulmer united us in spirit for a mortuary singsing. The following unstudied story about this man, that place and those people, should be added to by many others.

When my spouse was invited to teach at UPNG, he left me to make the decision whether we would go there or not. It took me 17 minutes to decide to go, with a subsidiary hope at that time of being able, through study leave, to visit Europe and Asia Minor, my birth-place. Not long after our arrival, we found our neighbour’s huge and gentle presence on our doorstep to welcome us onto the campus and to invite us to one of his parties. It proved a lively introduction to a cosmopolitan community, but it was not especially memorable. Ralph Bulmer’s personality worked only slowly on us. It took me some time to appreciate his special gifts and to realise how many of us were unobtrusively influenced by him. We were his neighbours for five months and did not realise that, like Bulmer before us, we were gently being blown off course, away from our Europe-centred goals and perspectives, and succumbing to the spell of the South West Pacific.

Bulmer was a big man: big in mind and big in body, who distributed academic largesse, not just for its own sake, but to dispel ignorance and institutional discrimination. He shepherded the first group of students enrolled at university through the enigmas of their foreign education in a language not their mother tongue and in a country where secondary education had become available only recently and only to a few. He built up their confidence in their intellectual capacities against a colonial administration myth which, over more than eighty years, had maintained that pre-literate Papua New Guineans were incapable even of secondary schooling. Speaking on behalf of the academic community on important occasions, he defended it against reactionary attacks when planters hissed that UPNG was a ‘Mau Mau’ factory. He helped to make the university known internationally and to raise the status of Papua New Guineans with his anthropology.

Obliging, genial and dependable, willing to share experiences with every seeker, he was nevertheless rather remote, not because of arrogance but from a shy self-possession. There remained a distance from others which enhanced his charisma. Status went with his position, but he was so preoccupied with his discipline that he seemed detached from the power-politics that characterised UPNG as much as similar institutions. When I arrived at Waigani in 1968, Ralph Bulmer was already the big-man of anthropology, of the university and of the frontier of cross-cultural dialogue. Melanesians observing him on Waigani campus might have called him a new kind of ‘big-man’.

24 Helga M. Griffin

From the study of traditional societies of PNG, there emerged in the literature of the 60s and 70s a cross- cultural model of traditional leaders embodied in the notion of the Melanesian ‘big-man’, which Bulmer himself contemplated in Papua New Guinea. It was exemplified by men who had achieved power and prestige in their own lifetimes by their own efforts, and who displayed these attributes on special occasions of ceremony, trade and war. Such leaders had usually acquired their wealth in articles of trade to be redistributed, and in more than one wife to help them produce more goods and offspring. Many clansmen and trading partners who benefited from the largesse of such a man remained indebted to him in a social system in which shame could be a powerful agent of control. Developing a high degree of sensitivity to others in the community when communal action was sought, a big-man was able to give a voice in what was emerging as the dominant view in the discussion, but made it a gesture of leadership. In Bulmer’s case the trade was in goods, not of a material kind but wedded to Western education; it included an influence from Christianity that offerings should be made without an expectation of indebtedness.

Bulmer took up the post of Foundation Professor of Social Anthropology at UPNG in 1968. He therefore did not come to Waigani when the first intake of students was being prepared for Matriculation at the Port Moresby Showgrounds in 1966, but later when teaching was done in the Administrative Training College buildings. Before the grey concrete buildings of the university complex began to rise above the kunai grass and tattered eucalyptus trees of the humid June Valley, the Bulmer family had already settled in one of the compact, but spacious and well-louvred fibrolite boxes on stilts, which were standard for academic and administrative staff and their families. Many young children, like the Bulmers’, would now regard such a house as their nursery, but for the older ones it was merely an ersatz of a permanency to be reclaimed elsewhere. Academic staff by and large had not come to stay forever: they came for as long as they were wanted. Their houses were unfenced and were within walking distance of their classrooms, although most staff, including Bulmer, used cars. Bulmer is remembered for his slow, defensive driving.

The Waigani to which Bulmer had brought his family was at first synonymous with the UPNG’s teaching and residential spread of buildings, gardens, parks and sports grounds. Later it encompassed neighbouring suburbs of workers’ huts and squatters’ make-shift habitations, a small shopping centre and, eventually, after Bulmer’s time, the headquarters of the national government. For the first few years the university and the government were separated by roads and hills, with the bureaucracy based mostly along the harbour’s front at Konedobu where, at the beginning of the colonial era, the British, and later, Australian officials administered the Protectorate. After the first graduates joined the bureaucracy or private enterprise, the relationship between town and gown became more complex. Bulmer was expected to make speeches about the challenges that faced them in their rapidly changing world.

Inconvenience, discomforts, isolation and a relaxed approach to daily life in the housing estate helped to bond us compound dwellers as a group with the Bulmers and other neighbours. At the beginning of this phase, and for some years, newspapers, petrol and other essentials were at the end of 8 kms of dirt or muddy road - as the seasons dictated. We fought against impetigo, lice, worms, malaria, tropical ulcers and various diseases. It took children about two years to become immune against skin infections. Domestic gardens struggled from one wet to the next through the increasingly heavy water restrictions of the dry season. Then when the waterlessness became progressively unbearable, and vegetation everywhere was overlaid with dust, the monsoon would burst with intermittent rains from December perhaps till May; Waigani was transformed into green hills and some impassable roads. Mosquitoes swarmed back and were only evaded completely in the library and the studies in staff houses which almost alone, save for the laboratories, had air conditioning. Elsewhere the wind or overhead fans scattered our papers. It was not an ideal place for book learning.

In time Waigani assumed a great deal of charm and our eyes were opened to local beauty, as Bulmer’s had been before ours. The staff houses slowly retreated behind frangipani trees, hibiscus bushes, cascading bougainvilleas, climbing allamandas, clumps of bamboo, sugar cane and stands of banana. An avenue of rain trees brought shade. Neatly mown lawns displaced toads and snakes and became little village greens for evening discussions and entertainments between staff, students and families under tropical night skies and rows of hanging lights. Students came with guitars and bamboo bands and we began to live vicariously through their stories about life in the villages. Doors were seldom locked to anyone. Conventional clothing from different parts of the world was often replaced by laplaps of colourful cotton cloths, hand-printed African-style shirts, Indian skirts and, on one’s feet, plastic thongs. We became attached to the theatrical setting of Port Moresby’s landscape with its balding, cupola hills and majestic backdrop of mountains, the low clouds and strange light effects of heavy haze, which opened and closed like curtains changing a stage set. The great winds, which dictated the wet and dry seasons, became important and romantic reference points: the great monsoonal Lahara, which brought the mosquitoes, but which regenerated the earth (the university’s summer school programme was named after it), and the great south-easterly trade wind, the Laurabada, big in Papuan memories of annual trading voyages in the pottery and sago trade.

'Big-man', Neighbour, Teacher, Friend 25

The social controls of life at home and elsewhere had been much removed on campus. At Waigani there was a lot of friendly gossip and considerable tolerance. Problems were more freely explored there than at home and the exotic environment brought romance and adventure into many relationships, especially those of single staff. Bulmer, unlike some others, did not frown on the cohabitation of female students and tutors from Australia and New Zealand with PNG students, who had come from small communities or boarding schools with exacting rules of behaviour. Here they experienced minimal interference in their personal lives and enjoyed the adventure of new alliances. Some women students, however, were pressured by male students; their kin sent messages to them not to fraternise with men from communities unacceptable to them. The Bulmers would counsel any student threatened by sorcery and any female who was raped or beaten up or generally vulnerable to chauvinism. They visited students in gaol and arbitrated in disputes between students from different parts of the country. Whenever conflicts of custom arose, Bulmer was the first to be consulted.

While most families had servants to do the cleaning, washing and ironing, the Bulmers were among the few who did not. One of their 5 bedrooms was given over to a kind of adopted son and professional apprentice living with them. We all knew him as Saem (Majnep was his family name) and saw him taking his part in family activities and chores, but especially working in Sue’s laboratory at the university or departing with Sue and youngest child ‘Kebby’ (Kenneth) for an almost daily archaeological dig at Nebira 2. At home in the Kaironk Valley, fatherless Saem had attracted Ralph’s attention by his knowledge of the bush and his fine hunting skills. He came to Port Moresby to work for Sue, and also with Ralph in his spare time. He was paid wages for his archaeology, first privately, later by the university. The relationship between Saem and Ralph blossomed into a more equal partnership than is usually found between teachers and students, as evidenced in the papers and books they were to publish together.

The academic timetable made concessions to the heat by beginning at 7.30 a.m. As Departmental head Ralph had to make an early start. At work he wore the attire, standardised by public servants, of knee-length socks and shorts which, in his case, had been cut down from over-sized trousers because he could not be accommodated by mass-production. While Sue was out at her archaeological digs during school hours, Ralph often shared his simple midday meal with a visitor. About that time each day, the Boeing 727s thundered overhead from and to Australia, and reminded us of our island remoteness. In the earlier years, lectures stopped just after midday until about 4.00 p.m., so that staff could attend various faculty and board meetings. I am told that Bulmer complained about this arrangement, which denied the busier administrators the benefits of a customary siesta, without which, he argued, one could not function properly in the tropics. After work, when most other compound dwellers began to walk with their families in the cooling late afternoon, stopping to talk to others or dropping in for drinks, the Bulmers turned to sorting out the problems of combining the care of children, two professional careers and a hectic social life.

Most of my impressions of Bulmer were those of a woman standing in the wings, who saw much of the setting but only a small part of the action. I saw a man who seemed able to mix comfortably in any circle, who was modest about his considerable learning and who was not nervous about what he did not know. He was nevertheless even more a towering figure who seemed only just to have emerged from the bush. His voice was typically Posh Southern English. Until I was corrected recently I was convinced he was the son of an Anglican bishop. In his early middle age at Waigani, he would brood myopically from thick spectacles beneath the huge cranium, his chin jauntily sprouting a trim, dark moustache and a beard which looked as if it had been grown in a fit of absent-mindedness. Bulmer however presented himself tidily. While a seasoned meditator in the ashram of nature, he was alert to any interrogator on almost any topic. His retorts seemed always reasonable and carefully considered and annotated with evidence and sources. He was almost totally unflappable unless, perchance, you mentioned the woes of Northern Ireland and probed the Achilles heel of his not totally subdued imperial heritage.

Ralph’s interest in antiquities stemmed from his maternal grandfather, an archaeologist-architect. His mother told of Sir Mortimer Wheeler coming to her parental home when she was a teenager. Ralph had a love- hate relationship with archaeology. ‘Disinclined to get his hands dirty’, as someone noted, he would never dig for Sue or anyone else but took a vicarious interest in a perceptively sited and well-done archaeological excavation, provided it had a professional mandate. He brooded over Sue’s digs and the corridors that she opened downwards from current to prehistoric societies; their ethnographic analogies spanned thousands of years. Somehow the very fragility of the evidence on which suppositions dangled were a challenge to Ralph’s agnostic habit of open-ended scholarship. His preparedness to believe drew also on the faith on which he was reared, not in any ecclesiastical sense now - because he would dismiss for himself both the dogmas that defied rationality and the thoughtless religious practices that established exclusive domains. What others did was their concern. His faith was generalised as an act of hope in humanity. Kindness was its particular expression. One could hear him pontificate on his wife’s work to other scholars in her presence with that unselfcritical assurance that sometimes causes cracks in the masonry of a marriage.

26 Helga M. Griffin

Bulmer had been married before but brought no children to his marriage to ‘Suzie’, who had defected from sociology in the USA in favour of archaeology in New Zealand. The Bulmer daughter Alice and sons David and Kenneth were much loved by both parents in what seemed a secure household.

Sue laughed her way loudly through their hectic domesticity, their house being frequented by an endless stream of visitors, especially foreign academics. The Bulmers deliberately went without a domestic phone for the sake of peace on weekends. Ralph’s voice was an oracle in the higher social and educational echelons and Sue was persuasive about her work. A notably responsible parent, Sue also took up issues of civil liberties with the campus community and made a memorable speech when an explosive weapons removal squad was called to meet concerned parents, whose children had been found handling, souveniring and storing (in linen presses) ammunition left in the high grass of Waigani since World War II.

She and Jim Griffin fought hard to persuade the Education Department to site on campus the multicultural primary school which the Education Faculty at UPNG needed as a demonstration school for trainee teachers. The Bulmers embraced the proposal to send their children to a school where half the teachers and students were Papua New Guineans and half the rest. As these teachers had no experience in handling an open classroom approach, parents who supported the school were opting for quality of life experience rather than pedagogical window dressing. A man like Bulmer, with an exceptional education as a child, must have influenced others to be adventurously egalitarian. Ralph’s standing and influence, I would argue, was extended by his marriage and family life. He is fondly remembered for taking his children frequentiy to the weekly picture show and staying with them; which makes the point that the attendance by Ralph and Sue at the many lectures, concerts, plays written by students, plays performed privately by staff, meetings of concerned adults and celebrations of Melanesian mumu feasts set a seal of approval for these sorts of communal involvements. Any insights into the Bulmer household, their work as professional scholars, and Sue’s concern for civil liberties came from my weekly shopping trip with Sue, who had soon noted that our family had no car or drivers. On many a night, as their neighbour briefly, I heard earnest discussions with visiting scholars at their dining room table drift off into the night.

Most of us knew little about Ralph’s background. He seldom spoke about his private life. Once as the Bulmers were getting ready for study leave, I was privileged to get a glimpse of his early days. I had come to give help, as we always did for each other on campus. It was evening, the children were in bed, the parents cool in laplaps and thongs, Ralph stripped to the waist. Cockroaches hastened about a cockroach metropolis and Ralph opened up about himself. Clearly the religion of his youth was still a strong influence and symbolic bridge with Christian and non Christian believers. He valued the egalitarian ethics of the New Testament, its concern for social rejects, the poor and disadvantaged, the messages of hope and of social justice. The older sacred scriptures, with their rich poetic symbolisms, had provided him with a key to so much Western literature, analogies with tribal and clan-based societies, and were an object lesson for oral history. As historical narratives of embattled groups of survivors, these books were easily translatable into a colonial situation. Bulmer confessed that he had lacked the intimate warmth of a primary mothering because he had been sent to a boarding school at eleven. His Anglican schooling at Christ’s Hospital had been chosen for its rigour and quality, as his father understood them to be. Later his university studies veered away from paternal influence. Ralph’s scholarship to Cambridge was in modem languages, but he decided to do zoology. On inquiry he found that he could not enter zoology with language studies at school. As his friend Kit Houlden - a friend from Christ’s Hospital, and subsequently a lifelong friend - was doing anthropology, so he did too, hardly knowing what it was. Bulmer must have startled the snow-bound Lapps of his first field work as much as when he later astonished the Western Highlanders, when one day he dropped out of that unfamiliar balus, a helicopter, into a clearing in the bush. He reported, with scholarly detachment, how he had terrified the mountain people when he first approached them with a gesture of peace. Having never seen a white man before, they mistook him as an emissary from their ancestors, perhaps a bringer of cargo. At Waigani he became the bearer of another sort of cargo.

Three other incidents with Bulmer stand out in my memory. Sue had organised me - a so-called housewife - to take our children to a school picnic at 417 Mile’ with Ralph. On the way home he was at the wheel with our combined nine children in the back of his station wagon. Conversation between us had been slight. We were both shy and did not know each other well. The conical hills of Bomana passed by against a paling late- aftemoon sky. Groping for a comfortable conversational topic, I asked him to tell me who were the anthropologists who had influenced him most. His words took off like a spirit bird from an open lake heading with elegant assurance towards a safer home. Four names chime in my memory of that eloquent performance, with a few notions still attached to them.

There was James Frazer of The Golden Bough, who was for Ralph the great precursor of anthropology. I recognised the reference because undergraduates of my generation in the early 50s were still influenced by literary and cultural allusions to his work. Frazer had liberated religion from its various ghettos by making it a generalised human concern beyond ecclesiastical bondage; sectarian boundaries between religions were more

'Big-mari, Neighbour, Teacher, Friend 27

the function of environment and culture than approximations of absolute truth. Then there was Margaret Mead. Although Ralph heartily disliked her ‘fact-bending populism’, and her imperious manner in putting down stroppy (and ungrateful) UPNG students who criticised her and deplored the way she took credit for the work of her gifted husbands he nevertheless acknowledged her importance for having popularised anthropology and its humanistic message that every culture has its own rationality of behaviour. He may even have attempted to imitate her educational impact. Sue pointed out to me recently by letter however, that “there were few people who could get an automatic ‘rise’ out of Ralph: just mention Margaret and off he would go, gnashing his teeth!” Nevertheless Ralph’s more accepting appraisal of Mead chimes loudest from my contact with him. This suggests he was anxious not to over-influence the uninitiated learners.

Bronislaw Malinowski, on the other hand, was a particular influence, who had provided an object lesson to all field workers by his long field research. Armchair speculation was not good enough. One had to become saturated with the culture one hoped to record, become part of a community while remaining also an observer. This simultaneous involvement and detachment had become a blue-print for fieldwork. Then came Claude Lêvi-Strauss, who had propelled the discipline, with great flair, towards the dignity of a natural science. Lêvi- Strauss was beginning to verify his hypotheses that the people of pre-literate societies employed scientific ways of thinking in the ways they classified animals and plants. (When later I attended Bulmer’s Inaugural Lecture, I realised that I had been privileged to hear an early rehearsal of some of it.) After we got home he immediately lent me L6vi-Strauss’s autobiography. Ralph responded to interest at any level of sophistication, because the people he associated with were not confirmers of his identity. Status was not important to how he wished to be regarded.

The second memorable occasion was a party at the Bulmers’. Many students and tutors came with glitter in their hair from another party. Janet Fingleton recalls how the case of beer that Bulmer was carrying on his shoulder collided with the overhead fan: a warning to all who carried children on their shoulders. Inhibitions were nevertheless relaxed. We all stood back as Ralph performed the dance of a ‘rainmaker’, inducting a young woman into a ritual (which was of course ‘out of culture’). For a man so heavy, he was remarkably light on his feet. This was not science: it was fun.

Ken and Amirah Inglis might have noticed that Bulmer was not omniscient when, at their table some time later, Ralph declared during dinner that he could identify the regional habitat of variants of the Australian language as spoken by any Australian schoolgirl he might happen to meet on his journeys. It is intriguing that he chose females for this imaginary experiment. I once saw him stop his car as an Australian woman was carrying out a rubbish bin from a house where men were known to live and speculate on whether it was a traditional set of relationships that underpinned this action. By the time of the Inglis’ dinner party, 1972, I had become a student of Ralph’s foundation year Social Anthropology course. While people tended to mix more with their immediate colleagues, parents with the other parents of children of the same age as their own, and professors with each other - in a community where there was much mixing - the Bulmers became much more familiar with me socially because they fraternised with students. My previous year of formal prehistory had involved me with Sue at the margin.

In 1970 the first graduation and the ANZAAS Congress were held at Waigani. The university was becoming an international showcase. Students were writing their own plays, laughing at Melanesian foibles and hitting out at what an activist student from Bougainville, Leo Hannet, had called since 1966 the troika of planters, missionaries and administrators. The Waigani Seminars became an annual thinkfest, with a different theme provided each year by one of the departments. Visitors came from many parts of the globe to watch and perform. Art workshops grew up on campus, guided by the Beiers2 with experience in art-halls-of-fame and third world villages. Students went back home to undertake political studies and campaigns, to collect oral history, to study each others’ customs and report on technology and indigenous agriculture. In assignments the homegrown and academic were blended. By 1972, therefore, the university was well on the move and in ferment. Among other things Bulmer taught me that Tok Pisin was an exciting language to be respected and that it was a privilege to be an onlooker at the birth of a nation. In a small measure we participated. Most adults on campus voted for the first successful woman candidate, a Papuan, who entered the House of Assembly because she was a woman and for the academic candidate for the Port Moresby City Council, which he had helped to establish, because it would involve Melanesians in decision making. Students were becoming politicised. Black power and feminism became at once confusing, contentious and liberating. African studies began to attract interest through visitors and began to be established by the appointment of a professor with a background in Africa.

Bulmer’s interdisciplinary interests were matched and copied by others. Lecturers, researchers and students attended seminars in different disciplines. Anyone who cared could know what research was being conducted by anyone at the university and could interact with the researcher if the skill was there.

About this time I became aware that I had lost the desire to look for my specific origins. I no longer wanted to visit Europe specially. Particular personal experiences were becoming interchangeable with wider

28 Helga M. Griffin

reference points that bore little external relationship to my acculturation. I began to become aware of a new set of internal relationships. From UPNG I got glimpses of a far older cradle of civilisation and I began to intuit, what Kenelm Burridge has written about Australian Aborigines so perceptively (1973:3), that by learning what it was like to be a hunter-gatherer, we were rescuing part of our heritage as human beings; that by reflecting on this mystery we are also looking at the continuity of hunter-gatherers with the men who stepped onto the moon. The analogy with Papua New Guinean subsistence gardeners was obvious. The same question can be posed in most places. It seemed particularly basic and ancient here. Bulmer’s influence in helping us to articulate it should not be underestimated.

Bulmer’s department employed men and women, though he once confessed to me privately, that he did not like employing married women, because they had two sets of commitments: their professions and their families. Ralph considered a normal day’s work 16 hours, and no mother could put in 16 hours a day in her profession on top of looking after husband and family which, in his old-fashioned way, he took for granted. He nevertheless found himself extremely fortunate with his one married woman staff, who had been appointed before his time. He had often delegated important administrative tasks to her and found her totally efficient. He had no objection to hiring women professionals as long as they didn’t have families to look after: he certainly hired some outstanding women. When he was my teacher I found that he made use of other staff within his own lecture programme, not to lighten his load, but to make the point with students that anthropology is open to different approaches that may be equally valid.

During Waigani 1 Anthropology had been accorded a high profile from the beginning. Bulmer’s dynamic team of teachers had lessons for locals and outsiders by rendering exotic cultures normal and by exposing the rationality that underlies every traditional social system, even if some of the practices encountered seemed cruel by our norms; by analogy, however, the mirror was turned on oneself.

In 1972 Bulmer had chosen leadership in Melanesian societies as a core theme which was linked to other disciplines because it was of national importance. These core themes would change from semester to semester, or year by year, in order to rotate familiarisations within the discipline among his students, rather than leave them all imprinted with his own preference. He then related other important components of any Melanesian anthropological study as signposts in our learning, getting his co-lecturers to sketch in societies they had studied, fleshing them out, so that one had a feeling for place and people as well as theoretical considerations involving trade, kinship, religion, magic and sorcery. One lecturer had worked in the Trobriand Islands and therefore provided a dialogue with Malinowski. Both he and Bulmer pointed out how modem sports like cricket in the Trobriands, and football in the Highlands, had become substitutions for various kinds of traditional conflicts. In the Trobriands cricket was preceded by elaborate church ceremonies with strong animistic influences; in the Highlands a football match had to conclude on an even score to sustain that principle of ‘equivalent reciprocity’ which seemed to govern everything Melanesian. Bulmer was a lucid communicator who taught, for example, the graduations, variations and relationships between magic, sorcery and religion. He spoke of people’s beliefs in the supernatural powers of some sorcerers (he believed in them himself) and of the homicidal trickery of others. With the enthusiasm of an artist who makes every performance a new one, he taught like someone quietly telling a story without grand gestures or verbal gymnastics, preferring always concrete to abstract English. A fellow student, Elizabeth Thomas, reminded me recently by letter of the spell Bulmer cast with his lectures on sangguma (sorcery): “One could never forget the wonder of it, the hushed voice, the glimpse of mystery”.

Elizabeth Thomas, then already a university-qualified physiotherapist, and a few other students, including me, were in a position to compare university studies we had undertaken in Australia in the early 50s before we married while still young. In the early 70s we experienced a broader, richer educational environment at UPNG, where Bulmer and other academic staff, who had been hand-picked for their likely empathy with Melanesian students and their commitment to learning, created a special ambience which we felt privileged to share.

Anyone wishing to know more of the origin of UPNG should read Ken Inglis’s essay, “Education on the Frontier: the First Ten Years of the University of Papua New Guinea”, which I discovered after I had written this account. “What is certain”, says Inglis, “is that the experience of living on the edge of another civilisation, glimpsing Melanesian communities however briefly and superficially, being carrier of European learning to people for whom it is both alien and necessary, alters one’s perception of self and of the world. Like old soldiers”, he cautioned, “old Waigani hands have to take care not to become bores; they are wise to do most of their reminiscing among themselves, in company enriched now and again by old pupils” (1980:91). Metaphorically these pupils are now members of the clan. “The mortuary feast for an unimportant person”, wrote Bulmer of the Kyaka Enga, “is a small-scale affair and is often postponed to be held at a feast for others recently dead. In contrast the mortuary feast of an important man is likely to involve his whole clan” (1965:144). I can feel Ralph’s ghostly presence over my shoulder, somewhat embarrassed by this eulogy:

'Big-man', Neighbour, Teacher, Friend 29

“We need more stories, and of a different kind,” I can hear him say to the other mourners, who rise to declaimtheir part one by one.

NOTES

1. Waigani 1 ends when political independence was granted to Papua New Guinea in September 1975. The Bulmers left UPNG at the end of 1973, the year when I was away. Without binding them to my memory of events, I would like to thank Ann Chowning, Jim Griffin and Amirah and Ken Inglis for editorial advice and comments.

2. The Beiers, Uili and Georgina - publisher of poets, encourager of artists - were at UPNG from 1967 to 1971, Uili as senior lecturer in Literature, Georgina at the university’s Cultural Centre.

REFERENCES

BULMER, R.N.H., 1965. The Kyaka of the Western Highlands, in P. Lawrence and M.J. Meggitt (eds), Gods, Ghosts and Men in Melanesia: Some Religions of Australian New Guinea and the New Hebrides. Melbourne, O.U.P. pp. 132-61.

BURRIDGE, Kenelm, 1973. Encountering Aborigines: a Case Study: Anthropology and the Australian Aboriginal. Sydney, Pergamon Press.

INGLIS, K.S., 1980. Education on the Frontier: the First Ten Years of the University of Papua New Guinea, in Stephen Murray-Smith (ed.), Melbourne Studies in Education. Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, pp.61- 92.

WHAT IS THIS MAN UP TO? A KALAM VIEW OF RALPH BULMER

Ian Saem Majnep Kaironk, Papua New Guinea

INTRODUCTIONI’m going to talk about Ralph Bulmer’s 28 years of working with the Kalam.1I’ll talk of the things he investigated when studying our way of life. How people hunt and eat game

mammals, how they shoot and eat birds, how they obtain wives, how they make war, their gardening and economy. These were the kinds of things he was interested in, every aspect of our culture. He was concerned with trade and exchange of game mammal furs, bird of paradise plumes, green snail and white cowry shells, and the places people traded with, between Kaironk and the Asai Valleys, Kaironk and Simbai, Kaironk and Maring. He went and observed these activities and when he understood Kalam ways, he recorded them in various books and papers which went to many countries. Now people overseas have heard of my place and I want to tell something about how Bulmer did his research, and about what we Kalam thought of him.

A lot of anthropologists, linguists, geographers, biologists, archaeologists and other scholars go to remote parts of Papua New Guinea to do research. These people are very single-minded, very determined. When they go to the field they leave their wives or husbands and children behind; they put them out of their minds. And they don’t worry about the risks of working with uncivilised people, they don’t think “Will they come and kill me?” They just get on with their work, studying things, observing things first hand. That is how Ralph went to my country.

In the 18 provinces of our country there are about 750 separate languages. Even in my subprovince, Simbai, several languages are spoken, each in a different area. The main divisions are between Kopon (Kobon) in the southwest, Harway (Haruai) or Wyapk and Alamo in the northwest, Gaj (Gainj) and Malrj (Maring) in the east, besides Kalam.

There are really two Kalam languages, two families of dialects. One, Etp Mnm is spoken in the Simbai Valley, from Simbai to beyond Kumbruf, around Waym in the Kaiment Valley, and in the Upper Kaironk. The other, which I speak, is Ty Mnm. Variants of this dialect are spoken in the Asai Valley and adjacent areas and by the Womk and Gobnem groups in the Kaironk. In Ty Mnm, if you want to ask “What are you about to do here?” you say “Aw/ ty gng gebanl (Here what going-to-do you-are-doing?)”. In Etp Mnm you say “Eby etp gng gspanV2