RISING SEA LEVELS, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE CARTERET ISLANDS

The Carteret Islands, also known as Kilinailau Atoll are a low lying group of islands north east of Bougainville Island. The sea is slowly invading them as they sit perched on the encircling reef, just a few feet above the surrounding sea, and the global warming Industry has used the plight of the people there as an example of the ill effects of climate change.

Kilinailau Atoll from space

Leaving aside the inconvenient truth that global temperatures have not risen for the last 11 years and show no signs of doing so; or that more and more experts are questioning what has become an article of faith for millions of people worldwide, no reputable scientist questions the fact that the climate is changing. It always has and it always will, as the dynamics of the planet evolve and alter over time. What some scientists do question is the unproven assertion that human activity over the last hundred years is responsible for a massive and rapidly accelerating rise in temperature, causing everything from rising sea levels to catastrophic weather events.

One of the islands doomed to disappear

There is no question that the Carterets are being flooded by ever increasing erosion from the invading sea, or that this will continue until they disappear, and that rest of the world, including Australia is morally obliged ensure that the Carteret Islanders are relocated in a new homeland. Some have already left for Bougainville, and the rest will follow once the painfully slow task of confirming ownership of new communal land is completed.

Beaches like this one are shrinking

Attermpts to portray the islander's plight as an illustration of the fate awaiting us all unless we heed apocalyptic warnings on rising sea levels continue unabated and should be shown up and resisted.

A walk on the beach now requires wading

But despite all this, the sea is not rising at the Carterets any more than it is rising on nearby Bougainville or, for that matter on Bondi Beach as a visit to either will demonstrate. Tide levels worldwide are much as has been predicted and continue to show no appreciable increase overall, nor are they expected to do so: published tide tables for anywhere on the planet will confirm that this is so.

The inconvenient truth is that he sea is not rising: Kilinailau Atoll is sinking, and will almost certainly continue to do so because it is on the wrong side of the junction between two opposing tectonic plates on the sea bottom.

The fault line from space.(click on globe to view full size)

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The Carteret's fate has nothing to do with surface weather or global temperatures, rising or otherwise. The under sea fault alongside this island group follows the Ring of Fire which runs from New Zealand through PNG and The Phillipines up to Japan and then over to Alaska and down the Americas to Antartica with active volcanoes at irregular intervals along its entire length.
The fault is visible evidence of the result of vertical movements both up and down in the earth's crust. The huge slow-moving plates collide along it in tectonically induced conflict producing constant instability and this is what is drowning the Carterets. The earth under them is sinking and taking them with it.

Palm trees, drowned and uprooted

Telling this to the true believers is a waste of breath and no more effective than attempting to convince millions of Americans that the earth and everything on and under it was not created in seven days some six thousand years ago, but we should continue to tell it like it is, not as the Global Warming/Climate Change promoters would have us believe it is.

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SINNERS REPENT...THE END IS NIGH

With religious faith now reduced to low levels throughout the Western World except for the more fundamentalist sects which are still actively proselytising, it was only a question of time before the universal desire of homo sapiens for reassurance against extinction produced a new belief system.

The time is now, and what amounts to a new religion is sweeping the planet, gaining converts by the millions as it goes. It started out as Global Warming, a scientific theory that the earth is getting warmer due to human activity with catastrophic consequences to follow.

Global Warming was quietly discarded when data accumulated showing that for the last eleven years, average temperatures worldwide had remained level, or in some years had actually fallen. The 'warming' became Climate Change, a portmanteau term which can accommodate rises and falls in global temperatures as well as any and all climatic phenomena including seasonal hurricanes, retreating glaciers, blizzards in the arctic, floods in China, droughts in Australia and reduced egg production by battery hens.

As with its predecessors, believers in the new religion are immune to attempts to question the Articles of Faith and would exact severe penalties if they could on those who question these beliefs as did the Inquisition some four hundred years ago.

The erudite and respected scientist, Galileo Galilei was forced to discard his impious scientific theory that the earth was not the centre of the universe and that the sun did not circle its flat surface every 24 hours, neither did the moon and the stars. Galileo narrowly escaped fiery death at the stake for questioning the received wisdom of the scientific community, and he recanted just in time.

There is a striking similarity about the Galileo Affair and the Global Warming belief system. In Galileo's lifetime, those fortunate enough to be able to afford it could buy Indulgences from the church which would dramatically reduce the time spent in purgatory after death while their sins were forgiven them. Now, sinners who pollute the atmosphere with CO2 can obtain absolution and forgiveness by buying 21st century Indulgences, now labeled Emissions Trading Taxes. Once paid for, their sins will be forgiven and they can continue to emit the evil vapour, paying as they go with more Emissions Trading Tax.

Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.

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MORE ON THE SATANIC GAS

The Evil Monsters

Here's a practical way to understand Australia's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Imagine 1 kilometre of atmosphere and we want to get rid of the carbon pollution in it created by human activity. Let's go for a walk along it.

The first 770 metres are Nitrogen.

The next 210 metres are Oxygen.

That's 980 metres of the 1 kilometre. 20 metres to go.

The next 10 metres are water vapour. 10 metres left.

9 metres are argon. Just 1 more metre.

A few gases make up the first bit of that last metre.

The last 38 centimetres of the kilometre - that's carbon dioxide. A bit over one foot.

97% of that is produced by Mother Nature. It's natural.

Out of our journey of one kilometre, there are just 12 millimetres left. Just over a centimetre - about half an inch.
That's the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the atmosphere.
And of those 12 millimetres Australia puts in .18 of a millimetre.
Less than the thickness of a hair. Out of a kilometre!
As a hair is to a kilometre - so is Australia 's contribution to what Prime Minister Kevin Rudd calls Carbon Pollution.
Imagine Brisbane 's new Gateway Bridge , ready to be opened by Mr. Rudd. It's been polished, painted and scrubbed by an army of workers till its 1 kilometre length is surgically clean. Except that Mr. Rudd says we have a huge problem, the bridge is polluted - there's a human hair on the roadway. We'd laugh ourselves silly.
There are plenty of real pollution problems to worry about. It's hard to imagine that Australia 's contribution to carbon dioxide in the world's atmosphere is one of the more pressing ones. And I can't believe that a new tax on everything is the only way to blow that pesky hair away.

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More Climate Change Hysteria

Galileo Galilei is long gone to his reward and, unlike him, we no longer risk summary execution for questioning settled 400 year old scientific opinion that the earth is the center of the universe with the sun, stars and planets revolvlng around it once every 24 hours and that's a relief.

But wait, there's more. Continue to switch on lights, iron your clothes, drive your car, cook your food using, ( shock, horror, ELECTRICITY), and we are all doomed. Furthermore, the fate of the planet and all who inhabit it will be decided in a little over 7 days if the Australian Parliament fails to pass the Rudd government's Emissions Trading legislation. Who says so ?. Respected and revered scientists from The Australian National University, that's who. These august savants have gone into specific detail on the damage about to be visited on various world renowned icons by rapidly rising sea levels caused by CO2, the Satanic Gas

The Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park and, wait for it, the Sydney Opera House are all doomed unless sinners repent and do immediate penance in darkness and silence unbroken by the noise of car exhausts, power stations or machines of any kind unless they are powered by solar, wind or better still, pedal power

The Australian National University has a photo on its web page of dangerous gases emitted by the cooling towers of an offending polluter showing evil plumes pouring from menacing red towers. This is a standard shot used time and again by the Climate Change / Global Warming industry and is fraudulent mis-use of photographic evidence to mislead and confuse.

from the ANU website

The menacing clouds sullying the innocent blue sky are not CO2, which is a colourless, odourless atmospheric trace gas. The visible plumes are H2O, i.e steam which will soon dissolve and disappear, as will, in time, this meretricious nonsense from highly paid academics who could and should find something better to do with their taxpayer funded time.

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A Magic formula for beating Global Warming, Climate Change and The Evil Eye.

It was late December 1999. I had just returned from sailing a square rigged cruise vessel from Cairns to Cape York and back again with a load of happy wanderers. It was a last voyage before the dawn of the 21st Century.

The entire planet was awash with doomsday warnings from IBM and some of the world's most respected scientists, all unanimous in their opinion that everything electronic ranging from PCs, Bank ATM machines and computerised navigation equipment, such as the relatively new GPS, down to the humble telephone and domestic hotwater system, would all fail on the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Travel was not advised due to the expected breakdown of most communication systems, mobile phones included. Few if any of these, had software capable of operating after December 31 1999, said the experts.

It was christened the Y2K bug, and salvation was available only after an expensive innoculation performed by IT programmers who were harvesting a bonanza of fees from banks, international phone companies, security organisations and government departments, down to individual users of electronic navigational equipment like me.

These gurus, supported by gullible journalists world-wide. became very rich very quickly as they worked their magic and re-programmed electronic equipment before the dreaded sound of midnight bells on December 31st.1999. It was a brutal and exhausting fight, but they won. The new century dawned and the ATM's continued to work; trains ran without crashing into each other and the wheels of commerce and industry turned smoothly...Crisis averted by the narrowest of margins.

I awoke on new year's day to a chilling discovery. My personal GPS, (pictured here, and now a museum piece), had been forgotten. I had not sent it back to the factory for the expensive reprogramming required to keep it going after December 31st. It was now January 1. 2000... Too late ! The dreaded Y2K bug would have done its deadly work and laid it low.

My 20th Century GPS

I switched the GPS on, expecting a blank screen to confront me with my criminal forgetfulness, but after the usual pause to collect its thoughts, up came an accurate position from the constellation of satellites, still orbiting the earth unperturbed....nothing had changed...nothing had happened... everything worked just fine.

Almost ten years on, it still does!

So, next time you are confronted by a prophet of doom waving computer generated evidence as proof of immanent disaster, climatic or otherwise, save yourself time, money and apprehension by uttering the magic formula Y2K and continue with business as usual.

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BAMAHUTA
Leaving Papua

People who lived and worked in Papua New Guinea prior to 1975 when independence was prematurely thrust on an ill-prepared and largely unwilling population by the Australian Government, are becoming a thin on the ground as the years roll on.

Most former colonies including PNG have coped with their new status with varying degrees of success, and a recently republished book by former 'kiap' Philip Fitzpatrick would be a welcome addition to any collector of stories written by the men who brought youth, stamina and dedication to the task of preparing a stone age country for political independence .

Rescued from its out of print oblivion by niche publisher Diane Andrews of Cairns, Bamahuta. Leaving Papua reeks of authenticity and personal aquaintance with the people of Papua New Guinea by a writer who lived and worked with them as a kiap in the final years of Australia's occupation of Papua from 1967 to 1973, two years before independence.

Like others who returned to PNG after 1975, including the writer of this review, Philip returned from time to time after the departure of the Australian administration, and was appalled and saddened by the shambolic and lawless depths to which the country he knew and loved had descended. The opening chapter of the book has a vivid account of an armed payroll hijack at a remote airstrip which Fitzpatrick survived after his driver was shot and badly injured. It makes gripping reading.

There is much humour and wry comment by this percipient and acute observer of mankind, both black and white, some of it racier and more personal than in books written by former kiaps like Ivan Champion, Jack Hides and J K McCarthy, but it deserves a place alongside these in the Papua New Guinea section on your bookshelf.

Brian Darcey

The once out of print book is now available from its new publisher by email at fritha53@hotmail.com

Bamahuta. Leaving Papua © Phillip Fitzpatrick.
Diane Andrews Publishing 2008

A JOURNEY TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA

Click on an image for full size viewing.

Select 'back' to return to this page.

This was once the floor of the ancient sea that covered most of inland Australia. Finned monsters swam here, gliding over trilobites and other early life forms that had retreated from the land which emerged many millions of years ago as sea levels dropped.

"There's nothing here. Let's move on." overheard from a passing traveller, was one way of looking at it, but I was mesmerised by the sheer emptiness and the absolute silence of this ancient land.
There was a time when green, underwater light prevailed instead of the hard blue sky of today; when pterodactyls soared above the water instead of the whistling kites which now circled above me in the windless sky.

Parched yellow spinifex and mitchell grass now scrabble for space on the dry,red earth with an occasional stunted gum tree, the only other sign of life.....and then this !

and this

and this

Lawn Hill Gorge, a green oasis almost at the Queensland/Northern Territory border. A hidden chasm which nurtures a lush, green tropical micro-climate. Where fish, turtles and freshwater crocodiles thrive. I launched my canoe and took this last photo in the late afternoon, just before sunset, when the red walls of the gorge caught the last rays of the setting sun.

I'll be back !

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'What's in it for us' ?

PANGUNA
A personal perspective.

Arawa Town, Bougainville Island. Looking south towards Kieta
Taken from my aircraft. P2-BFD

Single-liners which altered the course of history are legion. 'Peace in our time' : 'Let them eat cake' : 'The winds of change' etc. One from an Australian politician, delivered on the lawn of the District Commissioner's house at Kieta on Bougainville Island is another.
The speaker was C.E.B. Barnes, a not particularly distinguished member of the Australian Government of the time. The leader of a delegation of tribal elders had asked him, in Pidgin ,"What's in it for us?"... 'it' was a mine in the mountains of central Bougainville which was on land tilled and cultivated by its native owners.

The Minister for Territories got off to an inauspicious start with the word 'Nothing' followed by quotes from the Minerals and Mining Acts and the dictum that mining royalties paid to the government could be distributed at its absolute discretion, and might, or might not, find their way to the landholders on whose property they happened to be. He went on to describe the compensation which could be claimed by dispossessed landowners. This tactless reply was the trigger for everything that followed; culminating in the violent events which terminated the short, unhappy life of what could have been a successful joint mining venture with the people of Bougainville.

My just-published novel BOUGAINVILLE BLUE has a description of this encounter. I was there, when Minister C.E.B. Barnes answered a polite query from a dignified village elder with a technically accurate but insensitive reply; to the consternation of senior field officers present when he used the loaded word "Nothing"
The mine, focal point in the conflict between Bougainvillians and the governments of both Australia and Papua New Guinea, was the trigger which crystalised and gave form to an endemic resentment of outsiders, which had existed on this mountainous island since its first contact with the outside world. Germans, Japanese and Australians had been left in no doubt as to the wish of the people for them to simply go away, leaving the owners of the land to continue their lives unhindered. Control by these various colonial administrations had been tolerated, but never accepted.

The Bougainville Provincial Government relied for its authority and finance on the national government in Port Moresby, but became increasingly vocal in its demands for autonomy. It was even more insistent in its demand that the income from the Panguna Mine be considered as its, by right. Since the mine was now providing PNG with half its entire revenue, this met with a blanket refusal from everyone from the Chief Minister down, but talk of secession just grew louder and more hostile. "The land and all that is on or under it is ours. Close the mine and leave, or we will destroy it and you," was the message.

The Panguna. mine

Isolated acts of defiance escalated into open rebellion which included attacks on plantations, sabotage and armed assault on machinery and workers at the mine, and widespread violence along the length of the island. Explosives, stolen from poorly guarded magazines were used to destroy power lines and pumping stations along the ore pipeline to the port. Specific demands from what had now become a disorganised rebel movement in virtual control of most of the island were made. The succession of events and the personalities involved are fully documented elsewhere. I need not repeat the story of the years of conflict, the thousands of lives lost or the numerous failed attempts to defeat the rag-tag Bougainville Revolutionary Army, which culminated in virtual victory for the rebels over the well armed forces sent to subdue them...suffice it to say that the rebels won !

Bagana Volcano near Panguna

In May 1989, the mine was permanently closed. All but a handful of its thousands of workers, white and black, left the island. Plantations, once the main source of prosperity and employment for the entire island, lay derelict and untended. The port with its massive powerhouse, wharves and ore processing plant, was totally destroyed by fire and explosives. The town of Arawa was systematically looted and demolished by armed gangs who roamed its deserted streets, secure in the knowledge that police, army and all forms of government control were no longer there. The hospital, the schools, the supermarket, the rows of suburban houses, and every other sign of the former foreign presence on Bougainville lay in smoke-blackened ruins. The rebels controlled the entire island. They occupied the remains of what had once been the head office of the mine overlooking the rain-fed lake which part-filled the abandoned open pit and its millions of dollars worth of machinery, and equipment.

Panguna. 2008.

The town of Kieta, once the island's administrative hub, was destroyed in the fighting along with its outlying suburb of Toniva, and Aropa airstrip is still unusable and derelict. An uneasy calm has descended, with ill-equiped and under-funded government offices now operating from makeshift premises in the ruins of Arawa. A small airstrip has been built along the beach near the town. Random shots at incoming light aircraft still occur. Movement outside the town is still controlled by the rebels, whose approval, seldom granted, is needed before venturing further. The Panguna valley is still very much a 'no go' area..
Years have now passed since the closure of the mine. The bitter civil war which took thousands of lives has not yet ended, despite official pronouncements to the contrary. Peace talks, interspersed with vicious firefights are still the way things are on far-from-peaceful Bougainville. Rumours regularly surface about a possible revival of the mine, fueled more often than not by opportunistic promoters from the less respectable fringes of the mining and exploration industry, while Port Moresby, with troubles of its own, seems content to let Bougainville make its way as best it can along the separate path the victorious rebels chose for it.

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BOUGAINVILLE BLUE....... THE BOOK

One's first solo flight...first storm at sea... first love affair... first ?. are all destined to lie deep in one's memory, never to be forgotten, but a first book is up there with all of the above. So it was with me today after hearing "Congratulations. You are now a published author" from my patient and ever helpful publisher, Diane Andrews who can be contacted at

dianepithie(@)gmail(.)com after removing the brackets to foil the spammers.

Readers seeking a historically accurate and detailed account of what has become known as The Bougainville Conflict won't find it in Bougainville Blue. It's an allegory, a story based on what happened on Bougainville, when an avalanche of men and machinery descended on an island still recovering from being fought over by the armies of East and West in World War Two.

I was there as the clash between Bougainville and the Western World and its material values grew ever more violent. Others who were also there for the short, unhappy life of one of the biggest copper and gold mines ever built, may draw comparisons with the actual conflict which engulfed the island and its people during this time; but it was not my intention to depict actual individuals or historic events in the novel, and I have not done so.

Bougainville still lies in ruins with the hard-pressed and dysfunctional government of Papua New Guinea still unable to bring itself to accept the unwavering wish of the people of Bougainville to govern and control their island. Until this is accepted, and real control over the land and its mineral wealth is given to the people; to coin a phrase; the blue on Bougainville will continue.

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SYNOPSIS. BOUGAINVILLE BLUE

A novel based on some of the events which occurred on this isolated tropical island after the arrival of thousands of strangers and an avalanche of heavy machinery.

Australian expatriate planter Richard Robinson and his wife Ruth lose their plantation after its forced resumption to build a new mining town.

Josip Nugui, the first of his people to go to Australia for an education; law student turned insurgent who tries to stop the mine and succeeds, at the cost of his own life.

Rod Burgoyne; American geologist and mine manager faces opposition led by Nugui which grows into armed rebellion.

Governments in New Guinea and Australia fail to cope with the industrial onslaught on one of the last almost untouched islands in the South Pacific.

Not a detailed historical account of what happened, and to whom, this is a work of fiction based on some of the actual events seen at first hand by the author when the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the government of newly independent Papua New Guinea fought each other to a standstill; one of the biggest mines of its kind in the world was closed forever, and black and white alike were caught up in a whirlwind of anger and bloodshed which very nearly resulted in the permanent disintegration of the newborn nation of Papua New Guinea.

ONE MAN'S KINGDOM

'KING' CARSON OF NUGURIA

A Life

He came back to his island home with his mother and sister at the end of World War Two . They were returning from wartime exile in Australia to Nuguria Atoll and the devastated wreck of a coconut plantation. His father, Lewis Carson was one of the Australian prisoners-of-war lost at sea when the Japanese ship Montevideo Maru was torpedoed by an American submarine while transporting them from Rabaul to Japan for use as forced laborers
Nuguria is one of the Polynesian outliers which ring Papua New Guinea. Its people are handsome, golden-skinned islanders; their original Polynesian heriditary characteristics have been modified by Micronesian and Melanesian genes contributed by arrivals from visiting canoes from Kapingamirangi Atoll to the north, from New Ireland to the west, and perhaps by visits from the ships of passing seafarers ranging from Admiral Zheng He's fleet on its voyage of exploration in 1421, to later ships carrying European explorers as they charted the legendary Pacific Ocean

Graeme Carson

The short-lived 19^th century German presence in the South Pacific made Nuguria plantation an attractive prize after Germany's defeat in the First World War. The victorious Australians seized it with alacrity, unceremoniously ejected the former owners with little or no compensation, and sold it, along with hundreds of other similar assets, to their own returned veterans. One of these was Lewis Carson, father of Graeme.

Nuguria was Graeme Carson's fiefdom. He ran the atoll as a benign but absolute ruler, and totally dominated its inhabitants, as did his similarly placed counterpart, John Clunies-Ross on Cocos in the Indian Ocean. Force of character and an absolute belief in their right to rule was a characteristic of both men, and this was accepted by the islanders until influences from outside sewed the seeds of discontent. The Winds of Change have now made anything remotely resembling this state of affairs unthinkable and much ink has been spilt reviling the discriminatory attitude and the paternal mindset of those early times, but whether the total absence of aid, assistance or basic governance for Nuguria which now prevails is in an improvement is a legitimate question.
Like many of his contemporaries, Graeme Carson accepted responsibility for the health and welfare of every individual on his property, in his case, all 58 islands on the twin atolls which made up Nuguria. He was administrator, doctor, nurse, mechanical engineer, book-keeper, unofficial arbitrator in disputes over land, unofficial matchmaker between partners from different families, and an occasional pugilist when a dispute demanded strong action.. His small ship was used to transport patients to Rabaul for hospital treatment free of charge and he arranged and paid for places in the prestigious King's School in Sydney for several young Nugurians. In short; his word was law, and government regulations and decrees from distant Rabaul ran a bad second to on-the-spot decisions by the freehold owner of Nuguria.

Carson's family lived on Tekani Island about 3 miles from the airstrip in a house built by his father, and the Nugurians occupied the adjoining island of Busureia. As well as providing money in return for labour or locally harvested copra and trocas shell, Carson was the only source of medical treatment on the atoll and the only authority to turn to in disputes. The nearest government official was many days sail away. Communication was by tenuous HF radio link to Rabaul on New Britain using the radio in the plantation office surrounded more often than not by a group of attentive bystanders. The artificial boat harbour lay immediately in front of his house with retaining walls formed by stacked mushroom coral heads overlaid by clean white sand. This tiny harbor sheltered schools of small bait fish in addition to the dugout canoes used for transport in the lagoon. In the early 1960's, he used his own labour and materials to carve an airstrip out of the narrow island at the southeast end of the atoll: 2,500 feet long and surfaced with a thin grass cover over coral rubble, it allowed fast and easy access to outside medical aid together with much faster mail delivery. It also produced a stream of official visitors from government departments in Rabaul whose insistence on correctly completed paperwork was not always welcomed by the busy owner of the atoll !

Boat Harbour. Tekani Island

. Graeme Carson married his first wife, an Australian girl, who gave him a son, Timothy. His mother, who lived on Nuguria as an undisputed matriarch, clashed repeatedly with her, and the marriage ended in divorce. Carson remarried, this time to Tetau, daughter of an heriditary Nugurian clan leader. She bore him another six children. The redoubtable Eileen Carson co-existed in wary but resigned amity with Tetau, until the matriarch's death by drowning after a fall from the seawall during a violent northwest gale.
Political independence for Papua New Guinea in 1975 marked the start of a revolt by young islanders against what they now regarded as the exploitation of their homeland. The easy relationship between Carson and the islanders began to deteriorate into open hostility, often fueled by outsiders who now began to arrive on Nuguria as the invitees of islanders returning from school in New Britain and Bougainville.
He applied for citizenship of the newly independent Papua New Guinea, renouncing his Australian citizenship in the process. While it was never officially spelled out, Australian passport holders who tried to continue in business in Papua New Guinea soon discovered that it was nearly impossible to do so in the face of official harrasment by newly promoted government officials, determined to exert their newfound authority. One of the unforseen consequences of this change in nationality left his family divided into those born before he became a Papua New Guinean citizen and those born later. The former were able to get Australian passports and move freely between New Guinea and Australia: the latter, as citizens of PNG, were only able to visit Australia for brief periods on tourist visas. This did not allow them to enroll in Australian schools, or to obtain access to medical treatment and other benefits, which their older siblings were still able to do.

Canoe. Nuguria Lagoon

After 1975, the plantation industry throughout New Guinea went into a rapid decline. Labour became hard to get, and even harder to control. No plantation was immune and production of copra and shell rapidly fell nationwide. A rise in nationalist sentiment as the new and hopelessly unprepared nation tried to continue the sophisticated administrative practices of its former colonial masters affected Nuguria and every other agricultural and commercial enterprise in the country. Inexperienced and under qualified clerks and junior tradesmen were shoe-horned into senior administrative positions in government and private enterprise, usually with disastrous results.
Life on isolated Nuguria Atoll was slower to change and the coconut groves which covered most of the 58 islands in the group still produced copra. The reefs continued to yield commercial quantities of trocas shell and Carson still owned and controlled the atoll, but his sway no longer held to the extent that he could decide who could and could not live there. Outsiders including missionaries from some of the fundamentalist Christian sects arrived. They succeeded in proselytising the more impressionable islanders, persuading them to discard traditional ancestor worship and replace it with their own aggressive brand of Christianity. Schisms developed, sometimes dividing families. One breakaway group moved to the southern end of the atoll and built a new village restricted to the newly converted.
A few short years after Independence, most of the expatriate population of New Guinea was either selling up and moving out, or adapting to the new regime and learning to accept bribery as a normal business tool. Carson, now a citizen of Papua New Guinea, stayed on and adapted as best he could, but labour was now unreliable; production of copra and trocas shell continued a downward spiral and his bank started to deliver threats of foreclosure, only deterred from actually doing so because, by government decree, plantations were now unsaleable to non-nationals and credit for PNG citizens to purchase them was no longer available due to the high rate of failure by those who had.

Family Group. Nuguria

Nuguria is no longer a working plantation. 'King' Carson is dead and the islanders are now left largely to their own devices with only sporadic official visits from the dysfunctional Papua New Guinea government. The airstrip, hacked out of the jungle by teams of villagers and plantation labourers is overgrown and no longer useable. The cargo ship which brought regular supplies and medical assistance to the atolls is broken down and unseaworthy and Nuguria can now only be reached by a hazardous dash across the miles of open water which separate it from New Ireland in small workboats or outboard-powered sampans which occasionally risk the crossing, or by a PNG Defence Force patrol boat. The atoll is now notionally administered as part of the Bougainville Province, but Bougainville, wracked by internal divisions carried over from the civil war which led to the destruction of the huge open-pit mine at Panguna cannot govern itself, let alone concern itself with distant Nuguria, which it has effectively abandoned.

In early 2002 Carson was voyaging from Nuguria to Nissan Island en route to Buka at the Northern end of Bougainville in the plantation workboat MV Eileen, when he collapsed with what was later diagnosed as a severe cranial occlusion. His crew continued on to Buka where the former hospital, now reduced to an aid post with limited medical equipment still existed. After a long delay, he was evacuated by air as an emergency patient to the Catholic Mission Hospital at Vunapope on New Britain, where he was treated for the stroke which had left him partially blind and unable to speak distinctly. Months went by and his condition did not improve. He and his wife Tetau flew to Australia, the nearest source of skilled remedial treatment for a stroke victim; but the delay in obtaining specialist treatment had, by now, resulted in permanent damage. Although still active, he spoke with difficulty, he could not write or type, and his vision was poor. As a Papua New Guinean citizen, he was only granted a three month visa by an unsympathetic Australian High Commission in Port Moresby, which also endorsed the visa of this former Australian citizen and member of The Royal Australian Naval Reserve "Not to be renewed or extended." Medical treatment in Australia was cut short when his visa expired, and he returned to New Guinea and to Nuguria where he died in May 2004.

He is buried alongside his mother on Tekani Island near the deserted and abandoned house where he lived and worked for most of his adult life. The trade wind still stirs the palm fronds above the graves and frigate birds circle high overhead, as they did when he and his sister lived there as children on this lonely Pacific atoll on the edge of the world.


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