Amboin Patrol Post, New Guinea;
1969

Amboin is the dream come true of every English schoolboy. A twenty-one-year-old patrol officer, with bush hat, flag & constabulary armed with rifles & bayonets, administers a neat little village of thatched houses in orderly rows, gardens, flowers & government buildings, including his own thatched house in bachelor disorder (with paperback copy, on the floor, of How to Avoid Matrimony) and a large calaboose filled at night with prisoners in red lap-laps, most convicted of "disorderly conduct contrary to Sec. 30(D)" but quite happy with the food & excitement of big city life, which includes a bugler - all this in a lovely mist-filled valley with dazzling birds & butterflies, the nearest European settlement being Angoram, about a hundred miles away, and villagers in the opposite direction using stone axes.

Around midnight, I was awakened by a local sing-sing, complete with traditional drums & two-tone flutes, but the song was "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore, Hallelujah," sung to a very fast beat, echoing throughout the hills & valleys. I suppose children learned it at mission school & taught others, including elders who, even in New Guinea, sometimes prefer to join the young in their experiments rather than sit around the depressing men's houses filled with skulls & bad art.