By Patrick
Matbob
Arriving for
the first time in PNG in 1966, Marist religious brother Patrick Howley felt he
had come home. He immediately fell in love with country, and found that the
environment suited his lifestyle.
“I found the
place very convivial. It sort of suited my way of life”, Br Pat, as he is known
by all who have come across him, said.
“I felt that
I was good for Papua New Guinea, and at the same time, Papua New Guinea was
good for me”.
He felt so
much at home in PNG that soon after independence he became a citizen wanting to
die and be buried in the country.
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| Br Patrick Howley, Marist. |
“I wanted to
string it out as long as I could and I was sort of preparing to die with my
booths on,” said the 88-year-old in a final interview before leaving the
country in May this year.
However,
circumstances would compel him to resume Australian citizenship in the 90s.
He had come
in 1966 at the age of 40, an energetic and fiercely independent individual,
unafraid to challenge the norms of the colonial education system, and even his
own religious rules, while having a deep appreciation and understanding of the
local people he was helping to educate. Never afraid to experiment, his methods
were often unorthodox annoying or amusing his professional and religious
superiors. Yet he seemed to thrive on challenges, and his accomplishments were
unique, such as his method of democratizing the schools under his control by
introducing the Ombudsman and government systems.
He was a
striking figure back in the early years, his balding head hedged in by snow
white mane that extended down the back of his neck. A neatly trimmed white
beard and moustache adorned his aquiline features, completed by thick-framed
spectacles. He looked more like a 1950s movie star than a religious educator.
When he
joined fellow Marist missionary teachers in PNG, he had been teaching in
Australia for 19 years and finding it very stressful.
“It was the
time of the baby boom and the classes were very large and I was working very
hard, the government was paying no money for the Catholic schools to run so we
would operate on a shoe string, and life was pretty difficult,” recalls Br Pat.
Arriving in PNG,
he found the country and the people much to his liking. The predominant
subsistent farming lifestyle of the Papua New Guineans he came to live amongst
suited him. It was the same lifestyle that he was raised in back in Australia
after his family lost their sheep farm in the depression.
“Arriving in PNG and meeting the new
subsistent farmers here, I had a lot of feeling for them, a lot of
understanding. I fitted in rather well. I was able to sympathise and understand
their attitudes much more easily than some of the others who come up here. ”
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| Br Pat with Sir Michael in the 70s. |
He settled
in at St Xavier’s high school on Kairiru and soon found that there was a basic
difference in the culture between the kids that he taught in Australia and
those in PNG.
“Kids were
very unwilling to expose themselves to taking risks and making mistakes. It was
a very powerful cultural thing”.
He tried
various ways to break the culture. A
unique method he pioneered was to introduce the parliament and student
disciplinary system run by students themselves at St Xavier’s to develop
responsible leadership among the students. He did this because the approach to
discipline in PNG schools was authoritarian and he saw that that did not help
students when they left school and had to depend on themselves. He organized
student group leaders to be in charge of things like sport, transport, social
affairs, and even finance. The disciplinary system had an Ombudsman for the
protection of students against each other and staff. Br Pat said the
parliamentary system quickly pushed elected student leaders out of their
comfort zones.
“They
treated any criticism of proposed policies as personal and wanted to resign.
They resorted to the famous Melanesian passive resistance, which operates by
doing nothing and failing to cooperate. But resignations were refused and staff
pulled the students together. Gradually they gained confidence and improved”,
he said.
The
education authorities did not like what he was doing and his school inspector
Neal Murray told him so. Br Pat ignored him.
St Xavier’s
became one of the first high schools in PNG to introduce Grade 10s (Form 4) at
the time and Br Pat recalls potential employers and institutions flocking to
the island to recruit students mainly because they could speak English.
Being an island
school, transportation was a regular problem. Br Pat organized for funds to be
raised in Australia and a 33-feet De Havilland barge was bought to ferry
students and cargo to the island. Islanders chose to name the vessel Tau-K, Tau being the local name for Kairiru and ‘K’, they insisted, was
for St Kristopher, the saint for travelers. Purchasing the vessel, the school
needed a wharf. Br Pat rolled up his sleeves and with the help of his students
and brothers, built a wharf out of coral and river stones that were collected.
Francis
Mahap, currently a lecturer at DWU was one of the students who helped build the
wharf. We would all strip down and jump into the sea to remove the corals,
Mahap recalls.
For the
first five years after coming to PNG, Br Pat did not return to Australia for
holidays like other brothers. Instead he would go into the rural areas of East
Sepik, travelling on the Sepik River, to villages and mission stations and
spending his holidays there. He learnt a lot about the people’s way of life by
living and eating with them.
Later he
demonstrated this understanding of the local people and cultures in many ways.
For instance, when St Xavier’s was having land disputes with locals, Br Pat dealt
with the problem as a local would. He went into Wewak and bought a carton of
beer then visited old Kapun, the chief of the nearby village and invited him
over.
“I’ve got a
carton of beer up there. Will you come up and help me to drink it?” he said. “We
drank the beer until we were both absolutely stonkered. We told each other what
wonderful fellows we were, and what wonderful people the Kairiruans were. We
told all the old stories. Kapun went off happy. There was never any trouble
over the boundaries for another three years.”
Br Pat says
the land boundary dispute was happening because they were not providing the
people with the relationships that they needed.
“Kapun
needed the opportunity to argue about the land and talk about the land, because
it is a verbal society, not a literate society. Whenever a land problem arose
again, there would be another carton of beer. It was a question of establishing
relationships. If your relationships are good, everything runs sweetly. If the
relationships are bad, nothing runs. That is vital to any understanding of
Melanesia”.
In 1977, Br
Pat returned from holidays in Australia and got a surprise appointment. He was
asked to become principal of the new Passam National High School which was
being established. Passam had problems with incomplete infrastructure and the
appointed principal had resigned. Education inspector Neal Murray told Br Pat:
“As Inspector I know that you have the toughness and resilience to make a go of
it”
Br Pat took
control of the situation. He gathered his staff members and together they
decided on what sort of students they wanted to produce at this pioneering
institution. Aware that they were not getting the cream of PNG graduates which
were snapped up by other national high schools, the expectations were moderate.
“Our
preference was a friendly student who related well with others and the staff,”
he recalls. Another unusual and controversial thing they did was to do away
with all school rules. He said they wanted to avoid the ‘them (staff) and us
(students)’ situation. They finished up with four school rules.
1. Student must attend school
2. Student must take their share of work
parade
3. The school motto: Nuo Yekende, m’ne Yekende meaning I must respect myself and I must respect
others.
4. Students must use their common sense
The
education authorities did not like what they had done, and advised them to make
a list of expellable offenses. Br Pat responded that expellable offences were
criminal offences any way, and if the education authorities failed to enforce
any of his decisions, he would take it to the courts. They did not like this
either.
At Passam,
Br Pat introduced the Ombudsman to deal with student and staff issues but not
the Parliament system. Again he worked on improving relationships with the
surrounding communities by holding a special meal twice a year for the leaders
of the villages. But not everyone was satisfied and Br Pat says he was told
later by a villager that they had ‘made poison sorcery against him five times’.
The villagers were disappointed that he did not die.
An
interesting sorcery case he had to attend involved a student from one of the
Highlands provinces. Br Pat was told that a sorcerer had ‘poisoned’ one of the
students. The students said they knew about this because the victim looked sick
and had not reacted when they stuck a needle in the back of his neck. Br Pat
reacted quickly by approaching a local villager who had a reputation as a
sorcerer and he agreed to help.
“He went
inside his house came out with a rather dirty looking glass; put some water in
it; scraped some bark from a tree nearby; and called his five-year-old son to
come and piddle into the glass”. Some of the mixture was poured into the
student’s mouth and after about 20 minutes, the student began to vomit and his
eyes and face changed and he was not sick any more.
“When we asked him, what had happened he explained
that four men had been walking along the road and with a gesture had
immobilised him. They took him into the bush and told him that he was to return
on Sunday afternoon and that he would be dead on Monday morning”.
Br Pat says that the friendly sorcerer had broken the
chain of sorcery that leads to death.
After Passam he joined Divine Word
Institute and in 1987 introduced the cultural day which is now an annual event.
Br Pat made his greatest contributions
on Bougainville during the crisis when he went there in 1994 to run a course on
conflict resolution. On Bougainville he ran a number of courses for the people
and met John Tompot from Siwai who attended one of his trainers course. Br Pat
found that John had been doing conflict resolution using the traditional
methods he had learnt from his ancestors.
“When he described how he had satisfied the
parties in a murder case, I knew that we had found the ancient restorative
justice process. What I had suspected, restorative justice proved to be the
true ancient process of conflict resolution in Melanesia”. He scrapped the personal development section
of the course he had been using and adopted the restorative justice process
that he learnt from John.
Working on Bougainville, he needed the permission and
assistance of the PNG army and found Walter Enuma and former PNGDF commander
Jerry Singirok cooperative and helpful in the work he was doing.
“During
the years, I saw quite a lot of Walter and found him a good soldier and
possessed of sound common sense”.
With
Singirok and Enuma’s support and help from local chiefs and people, the peace
program was being implemented with success as far as Buin on the south.
However, Br Pat says when the military replaced Enuma with another officer, the
peace efforts broke down again eventually resulting in the Kangu beach
massacre. He captures his Bougainville experiences in his book Breaking Spears and Mending Hearts published
in 2002.
The Foundation also contributed to work of restoring
peace in parts of PNG such as in Gulf and Central provinces. It was while
working in Central Province that he met Sinaka Goava, a member of the
Foundation, who asked him to help write a book about his father – Goava Oa. The
book Crossroads to Justice: The life of
James Goava Oa and Sinaka Goa was published by DWU Press in 2007. It is a
powerful story outlining the injustices suffered by two Papua New Guineans at
hands of the colonial masters who regarded native people as savages, deficient
in intelligence and trouble makers.
Br Pat spent his last 10 years in PNG at DWU teaching
restorative justice and conflict resolution in the Flexible Learning
Centre. In 2016, he would have clocked
up 50 years in PNG. He had stayed as long as he could in the country he loved
defying his ailing health and superior’s directions to retire to a retirement
home in Australia. Finally, this year he struck a deal with his superior and
moved to the Marist old people’s home at Ashgrove in Brisbane.
He smiled while recounting his superior’s words. “I will make you a deal. If you have
to come south and you die in Australia, I’ll have you cremated and send the
bones back and we will bury the rest of you in PNG”.
“I
said that’s a deal”, says Br Pat with a twinkle in his eyes. “Actually it
doesn’t mean a great deal because when I die, I die, and God is not fussy
whether I am buried here or there or anywhere else”.
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