(Photo: Vlad Sokhin) I’ve been travelling and storytelling from Papua New Guinea since 2009. I first visited for The Age/SMH, reporting on the catastrophic maternal death rate, and on the impacts of the then new and much hyped ExxonMobil-lead PNGLNG project in the highlands. On numerous return visits, I’ve circled back often to go deeper into these issues and others: women’s representation, human rights, corruption, political failures, health and disease and, most recently, climate impacts and climate justice. PNG is beguiling, surprising, confronting, endowed with vast wilderness, immense resources, and the most culturally diverse population on the planet. Reporting from PNG is deeply challenging, humbling, and rewarding. It provokes deep questions around the usefulness and adequacy of our ‘outsider’ reporting models, and asks what might be done to improve them. These concerns surface often in my writing, most recently in this piece for The Monthly*, in this essay for Meanjin* – which draws on more than a decade of reporting on the issue of women’s political struggles – and this discussion in Inside Story with eminent Pacific scholar Professor Katerina Teaiwa. (*Paywalls. If you are a PNG or Pacific journalist, researcher or activist, contact me and I will send you copies.)
Notebook & Narrative by Jo Chandler