Pacific Series. Canberra: ANU Press, 2022. xix, 158 pp. US$30.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9781760465438.
Gordon Peake’s latest book, Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation, draws on his four years as a development advisor with the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG). His engagement spanned a critical period in Bougainville’s recent political history: one that culminated in the 2019 referendum, when 97.7 percent of those who voted did so in favour of independence from Papua New Guinea. Although non-binding and subject to ratification by PNG’s national parliament, this result put to rest any lingering doubts about the strength of aspirations for self-determination on the part of Bougainville’s population.
Unsung Land provides a rare meditation by a seasoned scholar-practitioner on the realities, ironies, occasional absurdities, and, ultimately, the limitations of international development work in social landscapes as complex as those in Bougainville. Peake’s role as advisor was to help the administrative functioning of the ABG, specifically through facilitating the transfer of powers from PNG to Bougainville as part of the special autonomy arrangements under the 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA). As Anthony Regan points out in his foreword to the book, this process has been seriously hindered by limited capacity and low morale on the part of a tiny Bougainville public service “devastated by the conflict and its aftermath,” (xvii), as well as by enduring capacity issues and, in some cases, active resistance, on the PNG side. The effect of these constraints on Peake’s ability to fulfil his designated mission is recounted in his characteristically humorous but sobering account.
Growing up in the shadow of the Troubles in his native Northern Ireland, Peake has a deep personal investment, as well as a longstanding professional interest, in issues of recovery and restoration following prolonged and devastating conflict. His work as an adviser, analyst, and development practitioner has taken him to post-conflict settings in different parts of the world. A gifted writer and raconteur, his award-winning first book, Beloved Land, drew on his experience in newly independent Timor-Leste. Like its predecessor, Peake’s new book defies easy categorization. It is eclectic by design, interweaving travel accounts, histories, vignettes, and personal reflections that make for an absorbing and entertaining read.
While touching on complex issues of social and political transition that have spawned a vast literature, including his own contributions as an independent scholar, Aspiring Nation is not intended as an academic study. Peake rejects conventional academic and policy-oriented writing styles as ill-suited for conveying the depth and range of his personal experiences in Bougainville and other comparable assignations. Instead, he sets out to bring a human-centred lens to an endeavour that in official accounts is all-too-often focused narrowly on institutional transformations and rendered in the technical and impersonal language beloved by development professionals.
Readers are taken on a lively and idiosyncratic journey through Bougainville’s past and present and provided with a vibrant portrait of an aspiring nation anchored in Peake’s experiences and background. He writes with empathy and humour about the places and cast of characters encountered along the way. His poignant tour of Arawa’s ruined landscape is interspersed with reminiscences from current and former residents recalling the town’s heyday when it serviced the giant mine at the centre of the main island and the decade-long conflict. In addition to new friendships and others met in person, we are introduced to a number of historical figures. These include Beatrice Blackwood, an eccentric English anthropologist who undertook ethnographic fieldwork in Bougainville in the first half of the twentieth century and whose book Both Sides of the Buka Passage remains the most popular item in Buka’s only library. Uncovering her private diaries in a musty corner of an Oxford library, Peake finds a striking dissonance between the richness of her personal recollections and her published scholarly works, one that chimes with the dissension between his own lived experience and that conveyed in the technical reports he dutifully churns out as a development advisor.
This dissonance between official accounts and the complex local worlds that remain largely invisible to outsiders like himself, lies at the heart of Peake’s Unsung Land. Beyond the evident dysfunction and low morale encountered in government offices in Buka, he catches glimpses of another social reality shaped by very different institutions and rules of the game to those he is familiar with. Peake’s self-doubts grow as he recognizes that the government structures he is focused on are but one set of institutions, and far from the most significant for most of those around him. Reflecting on his time in Bougainville on the eve of his departure, he notes that, “The faintest of encounters made me think that I was getting it all wrong, or at the very least, I was missing an important part of the big picture. In being too close to the ragtag pantomime of the administration, I was missing an appreciation of all the proceedings that were occurring backstage, all the things that were hidden from my eyes” (121).
While raising as many questions as it seeks to answer, Gordon Peake’s Unsung Land remains an impressive achievement. It is an unusually thoughtful, entertaining, and well-written book that should appeal to a broad audience, including those with an interest in international development and post-conflict recovery, as well as followers of developments in Bougainville and PNG and the wider Pacific.
Sinclair Dinnen
The Australian National University, Canberra