Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
In the fruit section of the supermarket half watermelons sat, richly pink inside, coolly green outer skin. These colours occur on a colour wheel in positions that appeal to us. We find them pleasant. Nature uses all her tricks to enable her partners to continue the continuation of her bounty. Flowers are in colours bees see well, some seeds are sticky or have prickles and hitch a ride on a host, birds eat berries and seeds that go through the digestive canal, then get deposited and grow elsewhere.
So the watermelon gets bought and the cycle of life continues. Except not for this watermelon. This one proudly and assertively proclaims, SEEDLESS. How convenient. Seeds can be such a nuisance, they create a problem, do you bite into the fruit, then swallow them or spit them out? Or do you poke them all out, an almost impossible task and if there’s just one left, that’s the one you crunch on, bringing a shudder of displeasure. So sensibly, that potential for upset has been removed.
My mind goes to a community that would be horrified at this practice. I was a member for six weeks as a teacher on the island of Bougainville, an Autonomous Region of Papua New Guinea. I had come here as the result of a sad event, the death by suicide of my son. I called him Stuart and his family name was Hill. He reinvented himself as Pip Starr and after being a nurse and a student at the Victorian College of the Arts in the Drama Course, he decided what he wanted to do with his life was to be an activist documentary film maker. He was a happy baby and child, during his teenage years he was a loner to a degree, then depression and anxiety became his companions in his twenties. This didn’t stop him, but may have influenced his choice to work in this area, mostly alone, as writer, cameraman and editor.
After making films including stopping uranium mining on aboriginal land in Kakadu National Park, the breakout of asylum seekers from the Woomera Detention Centre, Reclaim the Streets for bicycle riders and looking at the conditions that amount to slavery for people growing coffee for our consumption, it made sense that he would turn his attention to global warming and climate change. His research led him to information about a population of about two thousand on a group of atolls called the Carteret Islands. No one seemed to be paying any attention to them, despite their land being so seriously degraded with the incursion of sea water that they couldn’t grow any vegetables or bananas, staple food for them, and were existing on fish they caught and rice and a few vegetables that were intermittently supplied by the Bougainville Government.
The Council Of Elders were working with Ursula Rakova, an island woman who had been educated in PNG and New Zealand and whose passion was to use her skills to resettle those being displaced. Stuart went there, filmed what was happening and showed the footage to organisations who could bring their resources to publicising and helping the situation. This included a speaking tour of Australian cities and it was in Melbourne on a chilly June night that I met Ursula and others at Fitzroy Town Hall. They spoke simply and movingly about the reality of their situation. The audience responded, offering assistance. I felt the need to do this too. After the meeting Stuart introduced me to Ursula and, knowing that I had been a volunteer teacher overseas, suggested that I do that at a school Ursula had recently established on Bougainville.
Nothing was decided that night but I remembered this conversation later. The struggle my beautiful boy was having trying to live up to the commitment he thought he needed to live by proved too much and he took action to resolve the pain he was in. I knew that I wanted to continue his work in some way. I couldn’t do what he did, but I could contribute by using my teaching skills. I contacted Ursula and it was arranged that I would go to Aita in central Bougainville. Getting there was an adventure, the airline lists many flights a week but the majority never eventuate, so it’s a challenge to find one that is actually operating. With the air journey accomplished, next there was a road trip in a four wheel drive fording about twenty rivers. Mostly there were the remains of bridges that had been there but were ruined during the fighting that became a virtual civil war.
The school had four classes ranging from preparatory, two grade ones and a grade two. The teachers were not from the area so they did not speak the same language as the children, they used either pidgin or english. I was restricted to english only. There was no electricity, I was being housed with a local pastor, Jonah and his wife Jane. There was a small shop in a hut which sold Coco Cola, warm and at an exorbitant price, as well as two-minute noodles and tinned fish and meat. The fighting in the country seems to have interrupted many systems including the growing and producing of food. The teachers were each allocated a plot of land and they were expected to grow their own food. This they did but most day’s lessons finished with an appeal to their classes to bring them food.
So it was that one day a child brought in a watermelon. With a hot climate and no refrigeration, it needed to be eaten quickly, so that night it was cut up and distributed to the teachers, Pastor Jonah, Jane and myself. However we were all given strict instructions not to throw away the seeds. These were the fulfilment of the promise that every seed has in it, the potential of new life. Where does the next generation come from if the circle of life is broken? How do seedless watermelons renew themselves and would the teachers at Aita think that this doing away with the annoyance of seeds was progress? I doubt it.
hh.starrhill@gmail.com