Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

About this time last year I returned from teaching and research assignments at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. In the course I taught over there I included a component on native features films. The first film I showed was Tukana: Husait I Asua? 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 10 th Anniversary celebration, the timely production of the film helped asked deep questions about the direction to which the country wa...

Late Dr. Regis Stella.PNG writer and scholar His father was killed during the Bougainville Crisis. After the Crisis his mother and sisters fled in-land and settled at a plateau on a rolling hill at Bana in the Nagovis area. They planted coacoa to regain their strengths and lives back. Last Christmas he returned to the village to put up his mother’s headstone. On leaving the village to Port Moresby, the late Regis Tove Stella told his sisters that it was the last time he would return home alive. Instead a few months later his body was flown back to his village to lay next to his mother. For two nights and two days the people from all over the area to mourn his passing. On the week he died I did a book review of his latest book: Unfolding Petals: Readings in Papua New Guinea Literature , which would have been launched a day more if he had remained alive. Dr. Regis Tove Stella was someone I shared part of my life with for the better...

The threat of international intervention and involvement of Sandline mercenaries in the Bougainville Crisis was sabotaged by a military faction. On the economic front the Papua New Guinea Kina was devalued, government’s external reserve was depleted, and a slow decline in economic growth began. Social conditions and lifestyles of people changed: increased rural urban drift, overcrowding and overpopulation in urban centres, increased law and order challenges, uneven development between major centres and districts, and the increased number of young people out of school without formal employment. This social political canvas served as the context for my colleague, Dr. Regis Stella, a Bougainvillean, to write Gutsini Posa or Rough Seas, his first novel. Dr. Regis Stella completed the book through a writer’s fellowship at the famous University of Iowa Writing School in USA. The Institute of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji, published the book in 1999. Since its...