Bittersweet Read Free Page A

jumped and landed, one bare foot to each side of the root, to firm the loose soil around the root.
    It was a hot day at the start of the wet season, the perfect time to plant trees. The sun was almost overhead, and the clouds for the daily downpour were starting to mass up. The temperature was hovering around the century mark on the Fahrenheit scale, and the humidity was close to 100 per cent, but the labourers kept up a steady pace, back and forth, filling the cleared ground with future trees. As they went they chatted and laughed, but they never slowed their pace, except when they returned to the road. Then they stopped briefly to drink water or to cut a small piece of sugar cane from the lengths on the back of the truck, before the root-carriers took a new load of roots, and they set off again.
    These were convict labourers, planting an export crop for a nation that did not yet exist, a crop that would one day provide the emerging nation of Papua New Guinea with foreign exchange. In Pidgin English, the creole language of the area, these were kalabus slaves . They had all committed violent crimes in the highlands and had been sent to serve their sentences on the coast in a gaol, which had somehow acquired the name ‘calaboose’, though with a local spelling—and a far cry from the original Spanish calabozo , which is a dungeon. Creole languages have few rules, and words mean whatever you like, so these were kalabus slaves.
    The forestry officer standing with me explained that just one old man supervised the kalabus slaves, but they accepted that they were in the kalabus for a reason, they knew they would have good food and shelter that night, and the work was less boring than sitting in Boumana gaol. They knew they were a long way from home, and they had little idea of how to get there, so they were content to work out their sentences.
    Soon the daily rains would come, just after midday, and the men would all scramble onto the back of the truck and return to their nominal prison. When the rain stopped they would tend the sugar cane, bananas and other plants in the small prison garden. While they called themselves kalabus slaves, it was an example of how an adopted word had mutated when it was taken into Pidgin, he said.
    â€˜But they really are slaves, aren’t they?’ I asked. ‘I mean, they’re made to work, and they get no pay . . .’
    â€˜Not really,’ said the man. ‘They get a bit of money, more than they’d get in gaol, but that’s beside the point. By the time these trees are thinned, this’ll be an independent nation, so when the thinnings are made into veneer, they and their kids will reap the profits, not us. Besides, you’ll see convicts planting trees in Australia as well—it’s the normal thing.’
    Then he gave me a piece of advice that older men have been giving younger men for as long as humans have used forced labour. ‘Watch how you go,’ he said. ‘You’re very new here, and you’re full of noble thoughts, but this is what we do and how we do it, so don’t go saying too much, because some people won’t like it. Now the rain’s coming, so let’s go.’
    I turned my back on one of the last slave lines in the world, and walked back to the truck, with the sweat pouring off me. As I walked, I chewed on a piece of thick sweet sugar cane, a traditional New Guinea garden delicacy that one of the convicts had cut for me with the heavy, razor-sharp machetes they used. At the back of my mouth, the sweet juices commenced an attack that 40 years later would demolish a left molar tooth and leave me in a dentist’s chair, musing about Shakespeare.
    IN THE DENTIST’S CHAIR
    Twenty years later, half the teak trees were thinned to make second-rate veneer, giving the other trees more room to grow. Another 20 years, and the mature logs were coming out of the plantation. At the same time, after half a