nets

Plans for going away this weekend fell through and I am at home. Which, as it turns out, is a good thing: the end of the week coincided with something I knew was coming: culture shock. You know the theory and have seen friends’ experience it. But being a traveller, not someone who has really lived in another culture, you didn’t know how it would go for yourself. And it’s taken 4 months but in this past week, kid, it’s been a textbook case: insomnia; irritation; dissatisfaction; lack of self-awareness. It’s nothing to do with PNG itself – or with a desire to be back in Australia; it’s just feeling tired of being different, of having to explain things you would normally assume, all the time, every day. Grrr…(The other annoying thing is that you can’t take it seriously; it’s not a drama, it’s you behaving like an idiot.)

Plus, even you – with your good protestant ethic – have been forced to admit that you have been working too hard. And going out a bit too much (who would have thought, but you go out more here than you did in Adelaide). So yesterday I had my first Saturday at home base in about 6 weeks, maybe longer; it felt strange and new. And good. And finally I have time to get round to writing two papers I’ve been thinking about, playing with different ideas about history and what they’re used to do. One is based on a place near Orokolo in PNG; this is a shot of women fishing there with keve. When schools come through, women run past the shore with their nets and scoop out the fish. It’s not so different from what we do with stories about the past: events occur, we knot together stories to scoop them up, to keep them from slipping away.