Book 111: West Papua = Western New Guinea = Papua (English): Last Wild Place (Rosemary I. PATTERSON)

 

Carmen Young tries to still her galloping thoughts and surging emotions as she and her exciting new boyfriend neck passionately in the back seat of the Boeing 737 that is about to land in a part of the world she had never expected to visit yet [sic] alone move to accept a job. Jayapura, West Papua had not been in the vision plan she had imagined nor had the exceedingly handsome, young Dutch/Indonesian descendant in the seat next to her.

 

As I said in the post on Xinjiang, people of the same culture can find themselves with totally different experiences of freedom and history depending on which side of an arbitrary colonial border they find themselves on (and you only have to glance at the ruler-straight border down the centre of New Guinea – except where it is briefly displaced by the Fly River – to know that it is arbitrary). For a quick history of this Melanesian territory – it was part of the Dutch East Indies but stayed with the Netherlands after the Asian part of the colony won independence. After Sukarno’s konfrontasi campaign, the Dutch had to hand it over to Indonesia. The locals were supposed to be allowed to confirm or reject Indonesian rule in a UN-supervised so-called “Act of Free Choice” in 1969. In the end, instead of the entire population, just over 1000 delegates were allowed to vote and allegedly pressured into accepting. The bulk of the population had no choice. The OPM guerrilla movement arose to fight the Indonesians and the military retaliation has been heavy-handed and counter-productive. Flying the independence Morning Star flag will lead to a jail term. It seems most Papuans want full independence but they have dim prospects of achieving it, especially since a million Indonesians have been resettled from overcrowded Java and Bali, Indonesia is desperate to hold onto the rich resources, and the rest of the world has little knowledge of the problem (even in today’s democratic Indonesia, foreign press is effectively banned here) or interest. Like Tibet, the province has been divided.

Native Papuans have experienced racism both here and in other parts of Indonesia (to their credit, many good-hearted Indonesians have protested against a particularly ugly incident against Papuans in Surabaya last year, and been influenced by the “Black Lives Matter” movement).

The history of the messy nomenclature of both the western (here called West Papua) and eastern (Papua New Guinea, independent from Australia since 1975) parts of the island is too complicated and confusing to go into here…

Anyway, it’s time to discuss the present novel, Last Wild Place.

Here we are deep in the jungles of self-publishing land. The cover is amateurishly printed so that the back cover blurb is half illegible because of the picture. There are factual inaccuracies: on the very first page the writer says that New Guinea is the world’s largest island (that is Greenland). There is no such language as Papuan (there are hundreds of languages on this island). There are innumerable typos. The author loves capitals! (Why would you capitalise words like yaks, dance, cannibals, paranoid, cyanides, international episode?) In one sentence we have

“Carmen cannon [sic] believe her eyes as she, Gus and her mother arrive at what looks like a luxury hotel in one of the Hotel’s [capitalised] land rovers [not capitalised]”)

 

There are quite a few misplaced apostrophes. Then there are examples of gauche writing:

“She tries to warn Gus that he has to stop arguing with her mother.

                ‘Gus, you’ve got to stop arguing with my mother.’”

 

The heroine Carmen (sometimes spelt Carman) always seems to be wincing and sighing.

As for the plot, it is not really thought out and sometimes a bit ridiculous – well it does have that in common with many other thrillers! (”every Army plane in west Papua is being sent to shoot down any helicopter resembling the cargo plane the soldiers reported seeing”). Carmen basically takes up a career in tourism to get revenge on her mother for childhood neglect (not just from rivalry). Her mother is stupid (wearing high heels for a jungle expedition), arrogant and blind. Among her plans to kick start tourism in this contested region are a Revue (like a kitschy Hawai’ian-style tourist show), including a “Tahitian hula” (hula is Hawai’ian) and a “Tahitian fire dance” (which is Samoan); and the said jungle expedition for a group of seniors which doesn’t go as planned. They see soldiers with AK-47s burning huts (but the soldiers don’t see them!) The first week of the tour is skipped over, and after they have been kidnapped by separatists and rescued by helicopter (despite the best efforts of the dastardly Indonesian military) we don’t find out what happened to them. Much of the story doesn’t make sense, such as the crocodile attack. At one point Carmen is more scared of remaining in “a foreign place by herself” than being “at the mercy of some helicopter pilot she does not know anything about.”

It is such a shame, because this is such an important subject which really needs to be known by the whole world, and this may well be the only West Papuan novel at the moment. What a pity the author didn’t get a friend to look over the manuscript, or better still pay a proof-reader. It could have been a worthy tale with more careful writing and production, and fleshing out of the story. As it stands, I’m afraid it’s the worst novel I’ve read so far and I can’t recommend it.

 

PATTERSON, Rosemary I., Last Wild Place: an adventure novel set in West Papua, BookSurge, 2009, ISBN 9781439256763