Petzstorme: A women's organisation in the context of a PNG mining project

Jacklynne Membup, Community Relations Department, Lihir Gold

Martha Macintyre, Centre for the Study of Health and Society, The University of Melbourne

Introduction

In this paper we discuss the role of a woman's organisation in developing a community response to the social changes associated with a large gold mining project in Lihir, a group of four islands in New Ireland Province in Papua New Guinea. Martha Macintyre has been working in Lihir since 1994 monitoring the social impact of mining, and Jacklynne Membup has been employed since 1993 in the Community Relations Department of Lihir Gold to coordinate a women's organisation that assists Lihir women to adapt to the changes resulting from the project. Like all such large projects, the Lihir mine is bringing about enormous social and economic changes, to which people have to adapt extremely quickly. From the outset the company encouraged women's organisations, partly because official policy in PNG requires mining companies to build into their projects certain social amelioration programs that will assist people and reduce negative impacts. The island-wide women's organisation formed in Lihir is called Petztorme, a term meaning 'working together' in the local language.

Before the development of the mine, women in Lihir had lived in villages scattered around the coast of the main island and on the three small islands just off the coast of Lihir. The society is organised into matrilineal clans, so that descent is calculated through women and land was managed through women prior to the mining development. As has unfortunately often been the case in PNG, men assumed control in the negotiations with the company and women's rights over land were ignored. This had occurred in Bougainville, and neither the PNG government nor the mining companies learned the hard lessons taught by the exclusion of Bougainvillean women as custodians of the land.

Forming Petztorme

The formation of Petztorme brought together women from different villages who until that time had had very few links except through marriage and kinship relationships. They were therefore not accustomed to working as a single group or even to considering themselves as 'Lihirians'. Indeed, the word 'Lihir' is not the original local name of the place. The name of the main island is Niolam and 'Lihir' was the name of the language. Now, however, 'Lihir' has taken over and people have become accustomed to thinking of themselves as Lihirians. The impetus for that shift and for forming the women's organisation came from the churches, which provided the only basis for island-wide combination before the beginning of the gold mine project. Accordingly the two major women's groups, the Katolik Mamas (Catholic Mothers) and the United Church Women's Fellowship, formed Petztorme, initially to promote awareness about what was happening in connection with the mining development. The aim was to provide a forum for discussing what sort of changes were going to occur and how women might respond to them.

There was fairly deep antagonism between the Catholic and the United Churches in Niolam when Petzstorme was formed. The United Church is very small: the total population then was about 6,000 people, of whom approximately 5,000 were Catholic and 1,000 belonged either to the United Church or to one of the small Pentecostal churches. Pentecostal church women have only recently become involved in Petztorme. The Catholic-United Church tension, which has deep historical roots, has unfortunately infected the organisation. Resentment stems partly from the fact that the United Church villages, which identify wholly with that church, are the most distant places from the mine in Lihir, and so their inhabitants receive fewer of the benefits. But tensions worsen when the views of the Protestant woman are not accepted because they are outnumbered.

Problems, agenda, achievements

Petztorme has attempted to function on a wide range of issues. Its basic role initially was to serve as a way to bring women together for information sessions. Attempts to think about what might be the problems people would have to face, and how to be pro-active consumed a lot of attention in the early period of the mining project. The company, recognising that problems would arise, tried to get women to talk about them and devise their own responses. Two problems that became particularly obvious in the first few months after construction began were the enormous increase in beer consumption and the violence and social disruption that accompanied drunkenness. Violence occurred not only against women but between men. Before the project there had been relatively little beer available on the island. Domestic violence was mostly hidden from view, but the lack of inhibition when drunk meant that men began hitting their wives publicly, a thing that had rarely happened in the past. In a sense, a private and unacknowledged problem that had existed in Niolam before the development of mining was now brought into the open. For many women it was extremely humiliating to be beaten up in public in their village and there was widespread concern.

It therefore became a priority to devise ways of responding to violence — to empower women to see it as a crime and to take issues of violence to the village court. Petztorme encouraged women to develop strategies appropriate to their own communities, both to protect themselves or to have some form of refuge. Some villages decided that going to the house of the catechist was the best measure; in others there is a house where a woman and her husband were prepared to protect battered women. This is a very difficult issue in Melanesian villages, and often men will not allow their wives to take in even a relative. Just such a dilemma was expressed by Solomon Islander Jully Makini (formerly Sipolo) in her poem 'Wife-bashing', read to the 1998 Melanesian Women's Workshop at which this paper was originally presented:

Impossible to go back to Dad

Sis doesn't want to get involved

Can't stand sister-in-law's tongue

The police don't want to pry

I don't like this cruel treatment from hubby

But where can I go? (Sipolo 1986, 12).

Very early on women decided that they wanted to be a part of the mining project as much as they could, to have access to some of the benefits it brought. Petztorme attempted to deal with these aspirations, but one of the main problems they had to face was the passive opposition of the mining company to employing women in any but very lowly jobs. Mining companies are male dominated in all cultures and very few women work for them. This is especially so in PNG, where even fewer women work in mining than do in Australia. The mostly white men who run the mining company understood the desirable goal of employing local people to mean employment of local men. Equally, there was great resistance on the part of Lihirian men to having women in the paid workforce. Of course, in keeping with ideas of employment that come from a male-dominated industry like the Australian and British mining industries, the jobs that were made available to women were all very low-paid and menial: cleaning up after and doing laundry for the workers who lived on site in the men's quarters; helping to prepare and serve food. They were the two main areas in which women were employed, and they involved very little training — it is hard to advance your career washing sheets all day.

Men therefore were taken in far greater numbers into the training programs, while women who wanted to train often met resistance from their own families. So there was a kind of double-barrelled gun loaded against women in the matter of employment opportunities. There was particular hostility when when women took, or attempted to take jobs that were seen as masculine by both expatriate mine workers and Lihirians, such as driving big trucks, or even small trucks, and working at the mine site in jobs that required women to wear trousers. Women wearing trousers became a symbol of male concern. Even if they were cleaning rooms and did not wear trousers, the idea that they might do so became the major excuse used by men to keep women back in the village.

Many difficulties thus arose from routine opposition to women's involvement in the workforce. Eventually, though, the employers began to notice that the few women who really resisted family pressures and took traditional mining jobs did not drink and so did not crash the vehicles; they were very careful workers and did not turn up late to work with hangovers. In the simple sense that women worked and conducted themselves differently from men, they gained some small advantage in the employment stakes. A few women trained as secretaries and clerks and they get better wages than many untrained men. This has to some extent made life easier for other women, particularly as Petztorme encourages younger ones to apply for positions that are not the most menial and lowly paid, and places pressure from within the company organisation to provide training for women. At the community relations level of the company, the women's section has been particularly active in trying to encourage women to apply for jobs where they can receive training and earn better wages.

Working in Community Relations

In the Community Relations department we conducted a survey in which Petztorme members collected the information. It emerged that not only were women better workers than men when given the opportunity, but that women did different things with their earnings. The amount of money that men spent on beer varied between fifty and ninety per cent of their weekly earnings. This was during the early construction phase, when there was a kind of fury of beer drinking, which has since levelled off a little. I found it very interesting that women, on the other hand, gave about the same amount of money to the church and to Petztorme and other women's organisations that men tended to spend on beer. New church building projects and such like have flourished, mainly financed with the money that quite young women earned as laundrymaids, cleaners, etc. At present, still very few women are employed, but those who are employed are often relatively highly paid in secretarial positions — they are clustered in the usual positions that in an Australian company would be seen as women's work.

The promotion of women's roles in decision-making and employment has been a major concern of Petztorme, but the organisation has also supported a number of money-making projects for women. Women observed that men's furious beer drinking was swamping the island with cans, which quickly filled with water and turned can dumps at the back of villages into mosquito breeding grounds. So Petztorme set up a can-crushing project which generates money with which they hope to buy a truck to facilitate the work of the organisation. It takes a long time, though, to buy a truck out of crushed cans! Women's activities all fall into the 'self help' category and mining company support for men's business ventures has been far greater than for women's. Women also took over management of the market built in the new township as another source of income. Petztorme is currently trying to encourage women to to supplement their income by growing produce for regular sale at the market.

The work done by the women's section of the Community Relations department includes a very important educative component. It not only promotes education about social change and adjustment, but education generally, and encourages girls to continue at school, with financial assistance from the mine. I think it is very important that women are seen to be the ones who throughout the community promote education and encourage people to apply to the company for assistance with scholarships at all levels: from elementary school right through to tertiary education. As the population expands and people recognise the need for qualifications when seeking employment, so more young girls are choosing to stay on at school.

We want to stress that in spite of Petztorme's many internal conflicts (largely due to the pre-existing splits in the community and the speed with which members of the organisation have had to adjust to working together on issues of common concern), it nonetheless does provide a unifying group to deal with the most serious modern problem — the emergence of dramatic social inequalities. Prior to the arrival of the mining company there were not real inequalities between people in Lihir. Everyone had access to land and sea and most people lived pretty much like their neighbours. The influx of compensation payments and wage labour has altered that balance extraordinarily. It is largely through women's organisations that attempts are being made to ameliorate the conflicts arising from inequality.

References

Sipolo [Makini], Jully 1986, Praying parents: A second collection of poems, Honiara, Solomon Islands, Aruligo Book Centre.

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