A Chair for all Occasions

I did not leave for Ahmedabad at 8am today as planned, instead I am languishing, drinking thyme tea - as Liane recommends - and generally giving myself the ‘thumbs up’ because I usually travel in the belief that a sniffle will pass, a headache disappear and a surface scratch heal before the flight has landed. This time was somehow different. The broom of lingering winter caught me in its bristles late last week, swept me along wet pavements and left me stranded on an exposed corner at a busy intersection where the pedestrian lights had failed.  I did not have a coat or umbrella – they were hanging on their hallway hooks along with my invincible self. Over the weekend the sniffle morphed into the flu, the headache into a persistent throb and a minor leg wound into a major infection requiring medical intervention. So while waiting the required 30 minutes after the prescribed tablet to eat my soup I sneaked into my office to check mail. Amidst get well messages from Gujarat a Facebook friend request from Papua New Guinea leapt out at me. It came from Vincent and from a time of treasured friendship and travel into rare territories. Time and space collapsed in a rush of memories – not of deserts but of steamy places, incarcerated mercenaries (we arrived one day before the Sandline affair errupted), small islands, vote-seeking politicians, the drama of a rubbish dump that I was sent to investigate and of my tall, pale skinned, red haired husband diving into the waves at Wom beach amidst the quasi-afraid and delighted shrieks of small Papuan children and their onlooking families.

Cruising with Vincent, East Sepik. Photo Mike Sloane 1996

I learned to love Pidgin. Petrol pump sign Wewak. Photo C Douglas 1996

Vincent Sale came into our lives during a crystal clear star-studded night at the Hawkesbury campus of the University of Western Sydney. He was then an agricultural extension student and I was enmeshed in Social Ecology. It was 1994 and we were set to change the world. The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro was over by two years; I was completing my Masters degree to carry the new paradigm forward and Vincent planned to revolutionise land management in the country of 'wantok' and the hidden implications of a system of kinship and not too different from our own of mateship. Vincent appeared before me during a social occasion, a small dark man with a huge smile and offered me his outstretched hand.  ‘Hello – I be Vincent – from Wewak in Papua New Guinea.’ I responded in like manner and in that instant a friendship was formed, unbreakable, heartbreaking and breaking the grounds of anything I have known before or since. That is also 'wantok'. From then on Vincent was our friend, our loyal supporter and mentor. He was a regular visitor to Manly, brought his family down to stay more than once and came in splendid gift bearing style to our wedding where, in full voice, he orated the occasion of our first meeting in Manly. Mike and I went to Wewak once and once only and the memories of forays into places of total otherness linger indelibly. I remember markets and 'meres', sweeping bays and bush food, kids and laughter, billums and storyboards, listening to PNG Parliamentary debates spoken in colourful Pidgin, driving over boulder strewn river beds jam packed amonsgt twenty or so others perched on the Landrover's tray and smoking 'brus' rolled into the carefully torn pages of the Sydney Morning Herald (best quality for a smoke). But what remains in uppermost layers of memory are the interpretations of everyday life as magical events - woven and rewoven until they are embedded into local lore. Such is the story of Matiu's chair.

Island village - Kairiru. Photo C Douglas 1996.

Matiu’s Chair
Vincent insisted we visit his family home so early one afternoon we set off in a ‘banana boat’ - an open aluminium 18 footer laden with petrol, food and drink – for the island of Kairiru off the East Sepik coast and two hours across the Bismark Sea - when conditions are right! Matiu with his betel stained gums took the helm with Vincent, Mike, Aaron - Vincent’s youngest boy, baby Alice and myself tucked strategically throughout the craft to maintain some kind of balance. We were late in leaving Wewak and the men were anxious about the turn of tide and wind that could render our journey dangerous in a wave beat. Our personal bodyguard, reformed ‘rascal’, Gary had kept us waiting. He did not make the journey - urgent family matters took precedence. It was a long tough ride across waters that turned against us before we reached the half way point. The island was elusive, its dormant volcanic cone surrounded by jungle and wave-lapped rocky shores hovered just out of reach. We did not land at Victoria Bay and instead went to the lee of the island and beached ingloriously just in front of Matiu’s small village.

So close yet so far the sea pushed us backwards. Photo C Douglas 1996.

A dozen or so family homes lined the grassy knoll above the bay.  Each one stood on coconut trunk piles a metre or so off the ground and each one had a wide veranda, sloping thatched roof, overhanging eaves and the air slipped its cooling way through the lashed coconut slats used for floors and walls. There was not a sign of a nail, pane of glass, or metal roofing in any construction. At the edges of the settlement several houses lay in variously collapsed piles and slowly disintegrating into the land from which they came – sustainability in action. Kids squealed and chickens ran under houses at the sight of these pale strangers disturbing the tranquility. White nappies flapped in the sea breeze and a group of women were already in the cookhouse preparing our food. The only anomaly in this bucolic scene was an oversized, overstuffed, triangular plastic chair with a scalloped back and covered in royal blue and floral patterned vinyl complete with gold piping. This ‘throne’ took up the corner of the veranda just before entering Matiu's house itself. Our host insisted that we take turns in sitting on it and asked if we 'felt' anything before he told us how such an unlikely object came to be in his possession.

Matiu's outrigger. Photo C Douglas 1996.

One morning Matiu was fishing in his small outrigger canoe, several hours off shore and well out of sight of land. The fish were biting and he was just about to turn for home with his catch when he spotted a dark object bobbing on the horizon. It took some time to reach and when he did he discovered a large amorphously shaped package tied up in heavy plastic. He had no idea of the contents but lashed it to his canoe and began the labourious task of towing it home. The sun was slipping from the sky when he finally arrived to an anxious group waiting on the shore. It took several men to heave the heavy mystery package onto land and carry it up on to the grassy knoll where it was solemnly unpacked in view of the entire population of fifty or so. I try to imagine that moment as people, who live without chairs, were confronted with a grand item obviously designed to be sat upon. It finally came to rest on Matiu’s veranda where it became an object of awe, speculation, gossip and imbued with the magic powers of the spirit world as, over the next few months, everybody on the island came to view this gift from the sea and offer their version of how it came to be there.

Matiu's chair - a gift from the sea. Photo C Douglas 1996.

 ‘It is a gift from your parents (deceased)’ said one old aunty ‘They have sent to you so you can sit and watch the sun go down and think of them.’
‘It is a bribe from the government’ a jealous local official informed him – and spread the rumour around the tiny island.
'It is a gift from God for being a good Christian' his god faring neighbour told him with a certain amount of unChristian envy!
‘It belongs to a king of a faraway land’ a bright-eyed schoolboy who attended the local mission stated ‘I have seen such things in books.’
“The pirates stole it and now they will come here to find it’ offered a young man ‘we will have to fight.’
‘The spirits sent it and they will take it away again if you misbehave’ his brother in law told him in jest.
‘If you sit on it you will become rich’ and this version gathered many dimensions from miracle cures, to longevity, to sudden death!

In the end the chair will outlast Matiu and his house and nobody will ever know its true origins and how it came to be bobbing about on the Bismark Sea. We certainly did not 'feel' while anything sitting on it except minor discomfort at its slippery surface. I’d like to return one day to the island - there were many stories yet to hear - but our visit was cut short by Mike’s sudden onset of malaria. We were gone the next day leaving the chair to its new place on a tiny island with its coastline of less than less than 40 km and where people interpret their world through the interchangeable lenses of natural and supernatural realms. Today you can find Kairiru on WWW. and via Google - not via some Unix code which was about the time I first met Vincent. Now it is Facebook that brings friends back to me - another circle closes and a new one opens.

'Puk puk' carved from single log, Wewak. Photo C Douglas 1996.

The postponed India trip is now three weeks away. I hear from good sources that it is raining on the desert, green grass grows before one's eyes, the reservoirs are filled with sweet water and baby crocodiles have appeared in great numbers. Maybe I’ll get to one see a live one yet!

Alive in McLuhan Land

A single machine rules my waking life. It (G4 Power Book circa 2004) grinds slowly under the load of seven years’ accumulation of useful and useless information stored over several external drives and all of which I now find impossible to search and/or destroy. I do not have time to obliterate the past. This rolling stone does gather moss. I scrape the occasional clump into one or other data dump but the free space soon attracts more. In short, Geefor and I are no longer compatible - we are off key, off line and off limits. Besides, its operating system (did I say operating?) does not allow me to upgrade applications; mail waits in ‘sending’ mode until I reboot; the spinning rainbow ball sends me into my own tailspin and last night I had to abandon an attempt to book a rail journey on Indian Railway’s efficient site because my search engine has now moved into the crawler lane. I am reminded of my first forays onto the newly named ‘information highway’ when I’d sit up all night nosediving into Unix codes, losing my way completely or ending up at sites still under construction. The gritty sound of the dial up connection to the modem was music to my ears – it signaled waves! The web had me in its rip - I night surfed for months. Later I became attached to a small dog called ‘Fetch’ that dutifully trotted across the bottom of my Mac Plus ($AU8, 500 circa1987) screen retrieving bytes of both useful and useless information. Sometime later a faster model superseded this first machine. It possessed moss gathering capabilities and I bought software that opened vistas into possible worlds. Remember MacWrite? Freehand? PageMaker? Painter? And when matrix was a printing mode? Then Fetch became Gopher and I was thrust back into comic book years. More screens and boxes followed - each one larger, less expensive, yet more time consuming than the previous and the garage became a repository of dead systems. Years slipped by. Today, twenty-five years after I took the bite of my first apple, I hit the button and said ‘yes’ to the super system plus entirely new software packages - because I never did incrementally upgrade from earlier versions. I called a halt at the solid-state drive - liquidity being the main block. I do admit to a certain sense of sadness at the exodus of this old ally and I may even lose the friendly little character that pops up from time to time offering help and waving goodbye without malice when I hit its quit.  But only after I have attended to my e-waste responsibilities will I wipe out Geefor’s memory, farewell a never quite tamed panther and close the lid forever on a screensaver that came from somewhere out of iphoto and which would not be undone! So it goes. It is late again. I am not night surfing just grappling with changeover and already I feel the shadowed presence of another big cat prowling at the edges of sleep!

Cartoon by Carole Douglas, 1994.

I end this lapse into memory with thoughts from a thinker at the height of webmania:
‘Probably the most dramatic thing taking place on the planet right now in terms of future impact on society is the rapid evolution of the internet, the WORLD WIDE WEB (computer information highway that connects 30 million users in 125 countries). Nobody owns, operates or controls it. And it is invisible and does not intrude into ordinary daily life … and so everything appears to be business as usual. But the process of boundary dissolution and information transfer and the spread of egalitarian ideas, and the dissolving of rigid class structures under the influence of technology, this is all proceeding 24 hours a day quite unnoticed by most people. The McLuhanistic revolution has come. You can sit at home and suddenly anywhere in the world is only a local call away and your computer is a librarian robot cutting the way ahead of you through the informational underbrush. It’s empowering people. Whatever your field of interest, you’re no longer without community.’
Terence McKenna, interviewed in Maui Times, 26/9/1994.

I am off to a conducive community in less than two weeks time and while it might be popularly believed that no big cats remain in this part of India a few, who seem to know otherwise, claim that panthers still roam in the wilds beyond Nakhatrana (Kachchh). An elder artisan from a village so remote that the bus travels there only weekly showed me the post to which she tied her kids (goats) at night. She lured me into her tiny mud home and warned me to mind, but not be afraid of, the snake curled on the single rafter as I ducked my head to enter her room. The fat reptile kept intruders at bay and the kids slept safely away from the panther prowling at the edges of their sleep. Amjibaben later showed me its spore when we walked to the edge of the hamlet and I gathered tiny seashells – evidence of Kachchh’s up and down geological past. Her panther features in a quilt she made in memory of the 2001 earthquake where it stalks on the side of death in her tree of life. Panthers aside, there are no other big cats to be found in Kachchh apart from a tiger in a glass case in the Maharoa’s summer palace at the beach. I could not comprehend its size - this huge, majestic beast with glassy gaze staring into its own vanishing point. It was shot in Rajasthan on some pukka trophy hunt and I remember being moved to tears by a creature forever trapped in its own inglorious demise. I now decline to enter the palace and leave others to roam the curious building while I am content to wander the grounds and read the even more curious signs attached here and there.

The Tree of Life and Death by Amjibah Purdisan Sodha for Resurgence, 2001

Amjibahben in her tiny hut, secure from prowling beasts, 2002.

Barefoot, defenseless, silent and hungry I wander the royal gardens of yesteryear. Images Carole Douglas 2004 & 2005

Soon I go to Kachchh - using up some hard earned air points that would expire if I didn’t and taking care of some unfinished business. At least those are today’s reasons for a top up of the kind of ‘otherness’ I need on a fairly regular basis - when I leave computer issues behind, switch off daily demands, switch on a Hindi movie on a long flight and mentally prepare myself to walk into a hot, humid, Ahmedabad night. Friends inform me that rain is elusive this year– monsoon has barely shown its edge and Kuldip asks me to bring rain please because Kachchh has seen even less. Last year in late July it rained for days on end; silver sheets of solid water hung across the highway; shepherds and flocks and herds crowded usually empty roads heading for the brilliant green tips of new grass that appeared almost instantaneously and a man in a red shirt danced in joy alongside our car, his face upturned, his drenched clothes flapping around his whirling body. We drove out to *Bhirenderia just to have chai in the rain with the locals, the truck drivers and soldiers, and to talk about the weather!
Naran was there with his brother - looking for business just as they were 15 years ago; two youths with anxious eyes standing at the roadside with embroidered finery hanging off a fence behind the chai stop. I succumbed to their charms and still own the piece I bought that day. They are grown men now with children of their own and our friendship is solid. We drank hot steamy sweet spicy chai standing under the same flimsy shelter that had withstood the earthquake and talked about the rain in the warmth of this community of friends.

Sufiyan Mohmed Khatri tests the water! Image Monsoon Carole Douglas 2010

Back in Bhuj (district headquarters of Kachchh), school kids hung out of auto rickshaws laughing as passing wheels threw up great streams of the brown water that rose up suddenly in the streets - challenging the drainage system to its limits. In the small block printing village of Ajrakhpur, mud stopped all traffic in and out and conversations were shouted across an expanse of impassable sticky brown clay. In rural villages Embroidery production virtually stopped as women exchanged needles for farming tools - taking advantage of this once-in-a-year (when the gods/goddesses are smiling) opportunity to plant crops. You can’t expect orders to be on time when the rain comes and so unfinished business is an ongoing thread in a material life that frequently unravels - and after fifteen years of coming and going I’ve learned to patch and darn. Stitches in time - more or less!

Bhuj loves rain! Monsoon 2010. Image Carole Douglas 2010.

Conversely, or perversely, we don’t want more rain in Sydney and late last week we celebrated the arrival of unseasonably temperate days as we switched overnight from wet and cold to dry and warm. For those few days however I did not sit in the sun. Instead I attended a **symposium absorbing the stories of a series of speakers from several different countries as they probed many of the issues one encounters or ponders when working with traditional artisans in another culture. In light of ideas expressed I’ll take yet another look at my own processes - at myself and at my own expectations in relation to the expectations of the artisans with whom I work. It’s time to probe a little deeper into the cultural implications - into the whats and hows, ifs and buts from the both sides of the greater story - the sum of the parts - and seek answers that always pose more questions. It is a bottomless ethical well. In the end, I reckon that knowledge only comes from understanding the dynamics of competing and complex systems that are only sometimes compatible and that’s when one grabs the moment. And runs with it. I’d like to build a holographic view of this complex interplay and as I can’t do that on the current machine I’ll wait until a certain other arrives - clean and clear of conflicts and with great empty spaces. Free of moss. Together we will make a fresh start. I will not allow it gather useless information while I am not watching. Between us, we will learn to synchronise our divergent systems - machine and human inextricably linked. We will make our entrance with feline grace and roar down highways of our own making - cursor paused on the brink and just one click away from anywhere we choose to travel and that's just about where I came in!

Connecting to the global brain. ©Carole Douglas 1994.

* Bhirenderia is the last village before the Banni region and lies just before the new permit office. No longer able to get permits for border villages from Bhuj, one now has to wait until 10.00am for the roadside office to open. Hard luck for those travelers with just one day to see the White Rann and the Black Hills and all else in between!

** College of Fine Arts (UNSW) Symposium ‘Collaboration in Experimental Design Research’

5th-6th August 2011