ABSTRACT
It was ten or so years ago, on our first trip on the Sepik. To give our journey an aim, we had decided, Mondher Kilani – as much a beginner as I – and Milan Stanek, our mentor, to ask about the Second World War. Whenever we stayed in a village for enough time, we would ask the ‘elders’ to come and tell us their memories of the war. When night had fallen, a few men would gather in the house we were using and tell their stories. We had high expectations of these accounts. But they quickly turned out to be disappointing: in village after village we heard the same stereotyped story. The ‘elders’ would relate events whose interest we found hard to understand. For those talking to us, telling their combat stories – or minor events – was probably an effective way of not revealing what they thought about the relations of power or the social changes spawned by the war. We had been too quick to forget that, even though we were not Australian and, even though we had unconsciously designated a common enemy (the Japanese), in their eyes we belonged to the white man’s world. To mention the war was to raise a subject that was more painful than we had thought, relations of domination. We were forced to admit that we had not found the right method.
