Put Out into the Deep

Muschu and Kairiru Island from Boutique Hotel, Wewak Hill

An excerpt below is a teaser of the forthcoming personal memoir....

We were excited, sad, and also afraid of the journey. There were a lot of people on Wom Beach that day. The crowd was there to see the journey we were to take across the sea to the island known as Kairiru. Most of the year seven boys on the school barge had never been on a boat, let alone have any experience of the sea. The atmosphere was one of anxiety, despair, and trepidation. We just imagined where we were going to on this first boat trip. Our parents probably held their own fears at bay about releasing us off to a strange place. We held on to anything on the boat that can keep us steady and safe. 

The moment I stepped onto the school barge I knew the journey to the world beyond familiar shores had begun. I was excited more than worried, as might have been the case with many of the new faces I was on the boat with. I was fortunate that I had three other cousins travelling with me on this trip. We were starting year seven together so we could look out for each other.

The boat left Wom Beach on reverse outward to the open sea. From the barge we waved to our families and relatives on the beach, who became smaller and smaller until they disappeared in the mass of land we had just left. The boat we were later to become accustomed to as our link with the mainland was named Tau K. The boat was an old Australian navy barge donated to the school. As Tau K positioned itself between the Wewak mainland and the Muschu Island the sea began its initiation of the boys who would accept the sea as an important element in their lives.

I tried to ignore the sea spray on us. Some of the boys suffered seasick along the way. The journey from Wom Beach was almost an hour and a half before we saw the Shokailal Point and the St. Johns Seminary. St Xavier’s High School was hidden from us for most of the journey until we navigated around the western point of the island.

Teaser cover of forthcoming personal memoir

St Xavier’s High School started in 1932, when it started as a small catechetical school in Marange, near Boiken mission station. Lawrence McCane FMS wrote about the Marist Brothers and their part in setting up the St Xavier’s High School. In Melanesia Stories: Marist Brothers in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guiea 1845-2003, published by the Marist Brothers at the Divine Word University, Madang, McCane writes that the language of instruction at that time was Tokpisin language for the students. According to McCane (2003) Father Andreas Mueller, S.V.D. was in charge of the school for the first few years until he decided to move the school to Kairiru Island, a move he deliberately masterminded to stop students from drifting back to their villages. Bishop Loerks, the first Bishop of Central New Guinea (Wewak area, west of the Sepik River) had set up his mission headquarters at St Johns Seminary in 1928. St Xavier’s High School was set up on sixty acres (twenty-four hectares) of land, with gentle slopes running from the mountain into the ocean. Brother Patroclus Appeldorn, a German SVD Brother and two Holy Spirit Sisters assisted Father Mueller from 1936 onward until the invasion of Kairiru Island by the Japanese during the Second World War in 1942. The tragedy that unfolded in 1943 was that the Japanese executed all of them including Bishop Loerks and Father Mueller on board the Japanese destroyer Akikaze Maru. St Xaviers and St Johns Seminary were obliterated during the war as the war progressed. Brother Patroclus was spared from the execution as he was away in Marienberg was the Japanese invaded Kairiru Island. He returned later after the Second World War to rebuild St Xavier’s High School. Soon after the war Fr. Leo Arkfeld, the American missionary from Nebraska was appointed as the replacement for Bishop Loerks. Fr. Arkfeld began his work in the middle of the Second World War in 1943, starting in Lae, and gaining his flying license as a pilot in 1948, earning his reputation in later years as ‘the flying Bishop’ of Central New Guinea. Bishop Arkfeld appointed Brother Patroclus to return to Kairiru to rebuilt St Xaviers. Father Frank Mihalic SVD was later appointed by Bishop Arkfeld to join Brother Patroclus. By late 1948 St Xaviers was re-opened for students to return to the school. The Marist Brothers arrived in 1959 almost 11 years under the SVD missionaries in the likes of Brother Patroclus and Fr. Frank, who had done more in rebuilding the school to a level accepted by the Bishop.

 Brother Baptist Faulkner and Brother Canute Sheehan were the first Marist Brothers from Brothers of Melbourne Province, Assumption College, Kilmore, set up the Marist presence in mainland New Guinea, starting their teaching at St Xavier’s High School. They started teaching Standard One to Standard Nine. From this humble beginning the School went from the Australian curriculum on English, Mathematics, History, Geography, Science and Religious Studies to the PNG curriculum in later years.

It is this first journey that remained vivid in my mind after so many years. I can never forget that trip that changed me, shaped me, prepared me to face the bigger challenges, and let me to become someone I never thought I would become. It is this first sea journey that linked me to the world beyond the doors of my ancestors. It was this first sea journey to Kairiru Island that served as the link I made between my parents’ world and the world beyond our immediate environment.

The world that I was born into was the deep forest in the Prince Alexandra Mountain Ranges. It was a world of the mountain people. It was a different world to the world of the ocean going people. I had made the bridge between the mountain life and the sea world.

I chose to attend the St. Xavier’s High School instead of Brandi High School in Wewak. I chose to attend the Catholic Marist High School because it would help me to stay focused on my studies. The decision to attend St. Xaviers was done without the consent of my parents. Many of the classmates I had in Mongniol had applied to Brandi and Mercy College Yarapos to begin their year seven.

My parents had nothing to do with the choice I made on which high school to attend. I was a decision maker at the age of 13, without knowing where the road led would end. I was confident of myself. I became literate, conscious of the world around me, and knew that I will become someone important someday.

All I thought about at that time was to become a lawyer. In those days a lawyer was the same as a magistrate in court. It was the power that they wielded in their robes, courtrooms, court rituals, and the decisions that they made regarding a man’s life that rubbed off on me in a permanent way. I made up my mind to become a lawyer then. How and what I must do to become one I had no idea. I held on to the idea as the inspiration to succeed in school at least for the four years I was on Kairiru Island.

Such an idea was packed into an old suitcase marked with red and black strips around it. The suitcase belonged to my mother. It was my mother’s idea. I did not have much to pack. All I had was a new bed-sheet, a new towel, two khaki pants, two shorts, two shirts, and a pillow. As a carry-on I had one of those small green rucksack, a favorite of mine in the late 1970s. I had only what I can take with me to last for the whole year in school away from home. In later years I swapped the green rucksack for a side-hung bag made from a used 10 kg Trukai rice bag. We also carried with us a bag of taro or yams to supplement the school diet of rice, sago, and sweet potato (kaukau) with canned mackerals.

After two hours on the rough sea we arrived at the jetty. It was a relief to get off the boat, to stand on hard soil, to feel the roughness of the earth again. The feeling was one of purpose now that I was back on land. The jetty was connected to a gravel track linking the St. Martin’s Primary School and the St. Xavier’s High School. An airstrip for planes to land separates the primary school from the high school. A tractor made its way to the jetty. It was a beautiful place with clean lawns, coconuts, scattered iron roof buildings, slopping green hillsides, and a towering mountain reaching the clouds. It was perfect as a getaway from the mainland.

Out Into the Deep from Wom Beach

Across the narrow passage is the Muschu Island, more flat than the Kairiru Island. The two islands a closer to each other that I would one day swim with my cousin across the narrow passage. Kairuri is mountainous that it rains often, filling the Lake on the summit with water that flows down both sides of the island. It is believed that the water from the lake, known as Malanges, also flows through an underground tunnel across the passage and comes out on Big Muschu station. That is possible given the proximity of the two islands.

At least the first experience of living away from my father’s house prepared me to stand up on my own two feet and to fend for myself. I accepted the experience as the foundation of my later life. In many ways the moment I stepped on Kairiru Island I knew I was going somewhere. The first years on the island had done more to shape me in mental strength as well as in physical strength. The third element that was instilled into my life was spiritual strength that would define the kind of person I became in my life. Religion, mental preparation and strength, and hard work were solid foundations for my cohort. Discipline, humility, poverty, and perseverance are keys to high achievers.

The school motto is Duc in Altum means “Put out into the Deep” (Luke 5:4).  My generation thought it meant “Reach for the Stars”; even to this day many former students tend to think of the motto as “Reach for the Stars” though it means “Put Out Into the Deep” as it comes from the Gospel of Luke Chapter 5 verse 4.

There was no lowest for us. No one was lowest to another. Always aim for the highest results. Highest points are the measure of the ideal student in St. Xavier’s High School in those years. We scored our own individual highest points in different fronts of our lives.

I scored my own highest points in literature without realizing it. By the time I started grade seven in 1978 I read stories and books Papua New Guineans wrote and published in the early 1970s. I took great delight in learning about the world outside of my own through these writings. I read Paulias Matane’s Aimbe, the Challenger, Vincent Eri’s The Crocodile, and Sir Albert Maori Kiki’s Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime, books that became important to me later in life. In The Night Warrior and Other Stories from Papua New Guinea edited by Ullie Beier, I read stories such as “ “The Night Warrior” by Wauru Degoba, “A Bride for Hwekao” by Lazarus Hwekmarin, “The Bird Calls” and “Matuda’s Departure” by Arthur Jawodimbari, “Tax” by John Kadiba, “Our Mouth” by Kumalau Tawali, “Man on the Moon” by Lazarus Hwekmarin, “Riotous Soccer” by John Saunana, “Seduction” by Maurice Thompson, “The Portrait of the Odd Man Out” and “Glimpse of the Abbys” by Russell Soaba, “He Took the Broom from Me” by Meakoro Opa, and “Betel Nut is Bad Magic for Airplanes” by John Kasaipwalova. All these were part of the pioneering Pacific Writers Series published by The Jacaranda Press, in Brisbane, Australia. I read those stories and others published in New PNG Writing and Kovave. I also read Albert Wendt’s Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree and Sons for the Return Home. I began reading stories and books written by Asian and African writers.

Grade 7 Leo Class outside School Library. Teacher: Bill Braba.

The St Xaviers library was one of the best school libraries around the country at that time. The school library was the best in the province. The architecture was unique reflecting a traditional ‘meeting house’ from the Maprik area. The library building occupied the best spot in the school, built on the slope overlooking the school, and out into the sea and Muschu Island. It had the total command of the view. It looked like a church on the hill, but this was the school library. The pyramid-structured library occupied the top hilly side of the school. The school library was a hub of activities every day except the weekends. The popular books among the students were Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Allan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, Daniel Defoe’s Robson Crusoe, and Vincent Eri’s The Crocodile. There were others that we read at this time. Our seniors were responsible for introducing us to these novels. In a way my introduction to literary works were limited to what we were introduced to in high school.

I delved into the literary world of books without realizing I was preparing myself to be a writer some day. The world of literature opened itself to me but the word “Literature” and what it means now, was never part of the vocabulary in those days. If I knew what I know and live now it would have been a different story altogether. All I knew at that time was that the world literature belonged outside of my reality, perhaps in the world of Europe as it would be later introduced to me as closely aligned with the British literature of the 16th century to those of 18th century. Little did I know that literature itself was transformed from a high culture to one that would become an instrument of political agitation for Independence in PNG.