Soon after my
return I took a trip to Bougainville to run a workshop for teachers of Buin
Secondary, Bana Secondary, and Tonu Secondary. It was also an opportunity for
me to travel through the no-go zone area right into the Panguna mine site. What
remains now is only a memory like a bad scar, yet the film has kept alive much
of the glory days of Bougainville in my visual memory.
The film was
produced in early 1980s and released in 1983. Tukana’s release came seven years after Papua New Guinea gained its
Independence in 1975. Three years before the 10th Anniversary
celebration, the timely production of the film helped asked deep questions
about the direction to which the country was heading to. The film also helped
in reawakening national consciousness by asking the important question of who
is to be blamed?
In Tukana, Albert Toro wants Papua New
Guineans to view themselves in order to understand themselves and others in
their societies. Using film, Toro encapsulates the many issues and challenges
in addressing the issue of imagining a community made up of cultural,
linguistic, and biological diversity. Papua New Guinea is reimagined through
the eyes of the filmmaker. Tukana is
a mirror of Papua New Guineans about themselves. At the time of filming Tukana, Bougainville was also basking in
the limelight of major mineral boom, quality lifestyle, and the fast pace in
which changes were occurring in the rural villages of Bougainvilleans.
Bougainville like other Papua New Guinean societies had to deal with its share
of social and cultural conflicts. Young people alienated from their village
communities and people moved further and further away from their people,
turning to modern lifestyles, western culture, and corrupted by the allure of
modernity.
In 1984 Toro
observed: “With the absence of Papua New Guinea films, a reliance on imported
movies has been a great influence on the socio-cultural structure of the new
generation. The cowboy heroes, kung-fu heroes, violence and detectives are all
imported and in that Papua New Guineans, especially the new generation are
identifying with the models and characters; celluloid heroes, that hail from
different cultural backgrounds; thus, the population through this false
imitation derived from these films. Nothing has been done to remedy this,
except to increase the number of police and cry out about the increasing
lawlessness. In fact, as many of the audience may be aware, teenage violence,
rape, stealing and robbery, and other types of urban behaviour stem directly
from the undermining of the old ways, where justice was swift and clean and a
real deterrent for the sake of village cohesiveness.”
“Tukana is based on a story by Papua
New Guinean Albert Toro and on a screenplay co-written by Albert Toro with
producer and director Chris Owen. Owen is well known for his many documentaries
about Papua New Guinea, including Man Without Pigs (1990), Bridewealth
for a Goddess (2000), and Betelnut Bisnis (2004). Entirely in Tok
Pisin (Papua New Guinea pidgin) with English subtitles, Tukana explores
challenges faced by villagers on Bougainville and Buka islands in the early
1980s, as western-style schools and a growing economy increasingly interfered
with long-established customs. “Traditionally education was the responsibility
of our ancestors,” a voice-over explains early in the film. “Today western
influences have changed all that. After years away at school, students become
strangers.” Tukana traces how one group of school-made strangers, Tukana
(played by Toro) and his friends adapt—and fail to adapt—to the many changes,” according
to Houston Wood in his book on Native Features: Indigenous Films from Around
the World (2008)
One
of the dominating issues that run through Tukana
is about the land, development of land, and the land tenure in Bougainville
societies, even in the greater Papua New Guinea, for that matter Melanesia. In
all of Bougainville, except for Buin, women own land, following the matrilineal
customs. This is not specifically alluded to in the film. The very issue of
land escalated into a major political and social crisis in the 1990s, which
affected the Bougainvilleans.
“In May 1989, six years after Tukana was released, Bougainville Island
was rolled with a civil war that lasted over a decade and caused as many as
20,000 deaths. Tukana provided a
prescient examination of the conditions that lead to this conflict. Current
agreements to create an autonomous Bougainville region headquartered in Buka
have ended most of the chaos but not the continuing tensions between
generations in these and other Pacific Islands. This topic is likely to appear
in the Indigenous films of Oceania for many years to come” (Wood 2008:156).
If
indeed the issue of land has a central role in the civil war conflict in
Bougainville, the various efforts of the women of Bougainville to restore peace
and normalcy on the Island meant the traditional values attached to land remain
stronger than the introduced laws of land development and promises to uplift
the lives of people in their participation of modern development initiatives.
Land holds the strength of a people. So too are the connections Bougainvilleans
have to one another in their various relationships as they move around,
cultivate, and expand in their land. People are rooted to their land. With
peace restored on the Island people returned to their land for support and
sustenance, for rebuilding and relocation. Bougainvilleans reclaimed their
rights to the land out of which most of the land now remains with the people.
Albert
Toro is mindful of his role as the first Indigenous filmmaker in Papua New
Guinea in the 1980s. Tukana’s
insertion into the national psychology of Papua New Guinea meant Papua New
Guineans have to pause for a moment to reflect on the path that they have taken
since Independence.
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