Carolus (Charlie) Ketsimur is quite a fella. He left his native island of Bougainville in the late sixties as one of the first Papua New Guineans to train as a journalist with the then Australian Broadcasting Commission. When PNG gained its Independence in 1975, Charlie was one of the country’s senior journalists.
Early in his career, he married an Australian – a contract not often entered into in those uninviting colonial days – and had a couple of lovely children. His great passion was music – especially jazz. I left PNG in 1976 and lost touch with Charlie. Only now has the rest of his story come to light.
Like so many of those sixties marriages, mine included, the original did not last. Nor did the journalism. With Bougainville Island falling deeper into civil strife and despair, Charlie returned home to be with his people and live in the small town of Tinputz, on the north-east coast.
Here he married again, this time to a Bougainville woman who tragically died. Charlie started a small business, a music store. He struggled against an island divided, an economy in tatters and bouts of ill health.
But Bougainville rose from its despondency – and so did Charlie. He was one of the architects of the Bougainville peace agreement and, in addition to his own business enterprises, he’s now chairman of the Tinputz Council of Elders, a respected company director and Minister for Commerce and Communications in the interim Bougainville Provincial Government.
After a long absence, Carolus Ketsimur arrives in Sydney tomorrow and we’ll go out and enjoy a leisurely lunch and catch up on the missing 30 years. Life has a habit of sometimes dealing out these very pleasant, very special moments.
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