Page updated:
Monday, 13 August 2007

Journey to the highlands...

DAY 2 - 4: Sojourn in Lae

Tom is of the short, stocky and strong build characteristic of PNG's highland people. There is occasional enmity between highlanders and the coastal people who inhabit Lae, but like many highlanders Tom has made the city his home. He's a 'Mr Fixit' type of character who has contacts and knows how to get things done. Educated at the Australian National University, Tom, it seems to me, is the type of character PNG needs to get things moving.

We drive to the University of Technology - Unitech, as it is known - and stop outside the one-storey accommodation building where I will spend the next three days. The manager insists on preparing me a full meal despite being well past meal time and despite my protestations about it being too much trouble. On the television in the sitting room I notice Channel Nine, beamed straight from Australia. It seems another world there.

Sprawling settlement by the sea

Lae is a sprawling settlement on PNG's north coast. There's the ubiquitous corrugated iron buildings found throughout the South Pacific, a modest business district and a ring of suburbs with both 'permanent' and traditional houses. Unlike Port Moresby, which must be the only capital city in the world without road links to the country it administers, Lae has developed thanks to its road connections to the settlements along the PNG north coast and into the highlands and its air and sea links with the many islands off the north coast.

Chinese restaurants are the places to eat and they seem to be frequented by the town's business community. To get into one for lunch next day we pass through two doors and past a guard. This, I learn, is the familiar and everyday as is the crime it is supposed to protect diners from.

Village supplies

'Village supplies'... the sign on the front of the building announces its purpose. In the shopfront below women sell the cast-offs of the region's affluent society - second hand clothes from Australia.

It is the rear of the building I am interested in, however, the depot of the Can Care Lae Project. The NGO I work for is assisting the project after having obtained funds from AusAID, the Australian government's aid funding body.

My purpose in being here is to assess progress made by the project and produce a monitoring report. I look around - there is the crusher-bailer machine and there the small furnace that Tom spent project funds on in Brisbane. He explains that the furnace is not operating at present because it is being converted to burn waste oil. A bit polluting, I think, but what happens to the oil otherwise?

I see the large pile of beverage containers and other non-ferrous waste metals destined for the crusher-bailer or the furnace. The crusher-bailer is a hand-operated press that compresses cans into square bales. By the side of the building, ingots melted and cast from waste metals are being stacked until there is enough of them for shipment. With the crushed and bailed cans they will fill a shipping contained destined for a buyer in Brisbane. The trade in waste metals is international and price the project receives for their recycled metals is set a world away on the London Metals Exchange.

A man carrying a huge sack of cans that he has collected from the streets walks up to the building. A staff member weighs them, pays the man in Kina and enters the transaction in a ledger. Systematic record-keeping, I note, observing that the project, at least, puts a few Kina into the pockets of locals and keeps a few people employed turning waste into income.