The Mountain

Drusilla Modjeska

Random House Australia Pty

First Published by Vintage in 2012

978 1 74166 650 2

Reviewed by Linda Kenni, Research Officer

‘The Mountain’ is a story about how lives, personalities and cultures are drawn together, across continents and tribal borders. It is a story about love, loss, giving, taking and about finding one’s calling in life, in a changing environment and circumstances.

Split into two parts, the initial setting is pre-independence Papua New Guinea. Here the author, Drusilla Modjeska draws on her personal experiences to bring the characters to life, reflecting the prejudice of sections of the community of colonial masters; and the hopes and aspirations of the indigenous population, from house servants, to University students, a foreign educated academic to the hero of independence, Michael Thomas Somare.

The main character in Part 1 is Rika, who finds a new life and love in the most unlikely of places. Rika, leaves her native Holland and her sorrows to travel with her husband, Leonard, a film maker, to ‘Papua’ to film the lives of villagers on ‘The Mountain’. The marriage was somewhat hasty, and whilst Leonard is attentive and a gentleman, the decision was made to escape from the shame and memory of the past. In Papua, away from everything in her past and in a completely new world, Rika’s creativity, senses and ‘spirit’ are awakened, and she establishes herself as a photographer of note.

She meets and befriends Martha, Laedi, Milton, Jacob and Aaron, people whose lives will intertwine in the most intriguing of ways. While Leonard is on the mountain filming, she becomes drawn to Aaron, the young foreign trained academic. White prejudices against interracial relationships, especially of white women with Papuans, leads to Aaron’s brutal bashing and subsequent hospitalisation. As Aaron is recovering, Rika is always at his bedside and comes to realise that she cannot deny true love and that the honorable thing to do is to inform Leonard in person. She makes the physically and emotionally challenging trip to the Mountain and as weeks pass, she learns about the lives of the villagers and is drawn to their passion for life and customs, including their sacred bark cloth paintings. She finally finds the moment to inform Leonard, who is heart broken.

After returning from the Mountain, and after seeing off Leonard, Rika makes a life for herself in the Hohola suburb of Port Moresby with Aaron. Laedi who is a ‘hapkas’ (mixed race) and her lecturer husband, Don, an Australian also move to Hohola, along with Martha and Peter. Here, the author takes us through the emotions and challenges of the push for independence through the eyes of a wife (Rika), whose husband, Aaron, is consumed with the work he is doing alongside Michael and the others. The author excels in touching on the peculiarities of Papua New Guinea, none more so than the passion for Rugby League which often spills onto the streets.

Rika attempts to fit into Aaron’s culture and family, spending time and understanding life at the villages in the fjords. She finds that the one thing that will bring about her acceptance is to bear him children. Alas she finds that she is infertile. Added to her woes is Aaron’s increasing focus on government work after PNG achieves self government in 1973. And in yet another twist as part one comes to an end, a hapkas child, called Jericho, who Leonard had fathered with a villager from the ‘mountain’ enters her life, and the lives of her friends. Bili, Laedi’s daughter also enters the scene as a bubbly character, an independent and strong child.

The second part of the story commences in 2005 and centers on Jericho, attempting to piece together and learn about his early life in PNG, having grown up in England after Leonard came for him and Rika following Aaron’s death in 1976. He had made one short trip back as an adolescent, but did not take a liking to the place, nor had he found the need to discover his roots. In the intervening years, he and Rika  had visitors from PNG, one in particular, a soul mate, was Bili. Bili had by now become a successful environmental lawyer, a champion of landowners cheated of their resources and land.

Again the author successfully captures the peculiarities of modern day PNG: unemployment, poverty in settlements, poor infrastructure, exploitation of helpless landowners amongst a host of issues. Through the eyes of Jericho, she also captures the attempt by villagers on the mountain and in the fjords to hold on to their culture and yet seek business ventures to earn an income to educate their children and to look after their basic material needs.

The story sees Jericho discover his roots on the mountain and come to accept why he is referred as ‘the Gift Child’. He is able to gain the villagers’ acceptance of his business idea to sell their much revered bark cloth paintings not by the hundreds but to select galleries and museums. And as all good stories should end, he and Bili find a way forward to overcome distance to keep their love alive.

This is a must read for all Pacific islanders. The book provides an interesting insight on one Pacific country, and provides Pacific islanders an opportunity to understand and picture what it must have been like in their own country and as well as other Pacific countries, during the colonial time and just before independence.

This may prompt people to find out more about how things were during the pre-independence period in their own countries. By doing so, they may be surprised to find out more things they did not know before or compare their country’s struggles (or their old people’s struggles) with those of other countries and see the similarities and differences between them. For instance, I do know Michael Somare, and I have visited PNG many times but knew nothing about him being the main person behind PNG gaining its independence. I did not know that Highlanders in PNG were the first to arrive in PNG and used to live near the coastal areas until the arrival of the Centrals or the Papuans. But through reading this book I came to understand a lot about PNG that I did not know before and which was very interesting because now I can compare the PNG of today with the country it was over 30 years ag

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