Inspiring the Next Generation

Inspiring the Next Generation, is really what I am doing every time I get a call to address school graduations.

Yesterday (06 December 2022) I responded to urgent request from an old friend in Mr Peter Elesave, going all the back to our national high school days. Our class was Grade 11/12: 6 and Peter was our class captain.

We have come along way. Mr Elesave is now a senior teacher at Laloki Secondary School.

I was honoured to have responded to his request for a guest speaker. I admire teachers like Peter Elesave because they are not just teachers, they are special people in the formation of character for the young people they are charged with by the parents and community. The do parenting and guardianship to the young people. They do more than teach academic subjects in their classroom.

With teacher Peter ELESALA and some of his graduating students of Laloki Secondary School in the Central Province.

Comments

The first PNG Writer: Hosea Linge

With so much going on around us we tend to forget about important foundations of our history. I could not get out of my mind the much neglected discussion on the first Papua New Guinean writer. Every now and then we need to acknowledge the important parts of our history as we move forward. I would like to acknowledge the first Papua New Guinean to write a book in the 1930s. A New Irelander by name of Ligeremaluoga wrote and published his book under the title The Erstwhile Savage: An Account of the Life of Ligeremaluoga in 1932. Ligeremaluoga is from Kono village in New Ireland Province. Ligeremaluoga’s book is by all accounts the first written account by a South Pacific Islander. Most of what we know as Pacific writing is dated to the 1960s and 1970s. Last month I presented a paper at the University of Hawaii to discuss another early Papua New Guinean writer by name of Ahuia Ova of Hanuabada, who published his memoirs in 1939, six years after Ligeremaluoga’s autobiography. ...

Well Done! Nora

Melanesian writers: Regis Tove Stella (PNG), Nora Vagi Brash (PNG), Sam Alasia (Solomon Islands), USP Fiji campus, 1999. One of the outstanding playwright and poet to emerge in Papua New Guinea is Nora Vagi Brash. She remains the foremost and the only Papua New Guinean female playwright. Nora was involved with acting in amateur theatre, radio plays, and street theatre in early 1970s. Her exposure to the world of theatre in England inspired her to write her own plays on her return to Papua New Guinea. The National Arts School employed Nora as an assistant lecturer in puppetry, dance, and drama. She then moved on to become one of the two artistic directors with the National Theatre Company. Nora wrote her own scripts for the puppets using tradional stories of Papua New Guinea. The National Theatre Company toured local villages and performed in the streets. They went to the Pacific Arts Festival in Rotorua and Wellington, New Zealand. They also danced in Point Venus ...

the dull drumming, Yes of the flat drums. Thud dada thud da thud dada thud

Writer My late Kandre, Vincent Warakai, a robust scholar and intellectual, left a lasting impression on me as a Papua New Guinean with this poem “Dancing Yet to the Dim Dim’s Beat”, which was first published in Ondobondo , a literary magazine of the Literature Department of UPNG in the 1980s, when I studied Literature as a degree program. The poem was later republished in Albert Wendt’s Nuanua: pacific writing in English since 1980s , making it one of the most powerful pieces to have been written by a Papua New Guinean since Independence. Below is the poem: Dancing Yet to the Dim Dim’s Beat We have been dancing Yes, our anklets and Amulets now are Yes, grinding into our skin No longer are they a décor Yes, they are our chains We have been dancing Yes, but the euphoria has died It is now the dull drumming Yes, of the flat drums Thud dada thud da thud dada thud Yes, it is signaling, not the bliss But the impending crisis. It i...

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