Time dims even the most vivid memory. Like a well-loved family black-and-white album, the memories of my experiences during an assignment in Bougainville in 1996 are dog-eared, worn and have lost clarity.
After nearly 30 years the timeline has merged with the jumble of other assignments I undertook in the region (the Sandline crisis and an excursion to West Papua to meet the resistance movement over the border). It feels like a monochrome film with the edits all mixed up.
When I visited Bougainville for the first time, the conflict had already been raging for eight years, flaring up and settling down, breaking into factions, cruelty and atrocities, only to flare up again. After Francis Ona, the leader of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army, unilaterally declared independence in May 1990, the Papua New Guinea government imposed a blockade on the island which was enforced using Australian-supplied Iroquois helicopters and Pacific-class patrol boats.
We came across graffiti in abandoned classrooms that showed helicopters firing down on people in the jungle. It was a dirty war with numerous reports of abuses against the Indigenous population and combatants. As one survivor of the crisis told me, “The towns became too dangerous – we just took to the bush and hid.” The blockade meant that everything was in short supply.
The soldiers I met during that first trip had kept me safe and escorted journalist Lindsay Murdoch and me into the jungle. I had a sense that it was a dangerous assignment, but I had no idea just how dangerous until meeting one of the fighters again. More of that later.
The jungle on Bougainville is fast growing and almost cartoonishly dense and green. It had just about reclaimed the entire town of Arawa on the eastern coast of the island. Arawa was a ghost town during the crisis as all the inhabitants had fled to the safety of the hills. It was an old Bougainville Copper Limited company town and now marked the front line with the PNG defence forces occupying what little was left. The prefabricated houses, burnt-out hospital and solar hot water heaters on roofs were all Australian made. It gave the town a strangely familiar feel, like you could have been in a north Queensland coastal town.
We had to negotiate with the PNG defence forces to cross into BRA-controlled territory. The road south of town was no man’s land and was marked at the outskirts by a heavily sandbagged roadblock and nervous-looking PNG defence force privates. A few miles outside Kieta we pulled over and waited. After some time a rebel patrol materialised out of the thick jungle to escort us.
Rommy Joel was a young BRA platoon leader when I first met him. He looked like a rebel from central casting, sporting dreadlock hair beads and holding a captured M16 assault rifle. He also had the kindest eyes – from the outset, I never felt threatened by him.
He led us deep into the hills via a circuitous route where we felt we were travelling in circles, which for security purposes we probably were.
I distinctly remember the heat and humidity. The thick jungle and constant danger made it feel close and claustrophobic. I was cautioned about what I could take photographs of: nothing that would give away their position, no communications devices, and some of the fighters were off limits. Luckily Rommy was not on the banned list so I concentrated on him. He was such a great subject.
We jumped on to the back of an old ex-mine ute to travel further. Rommy sat in the back as we sped along the coastal road. He escorted us almost all the way back to the PNG lines at Arawa. With a casual wave he disappeared into the jungle, and that was the last I saw of him.
That is until he drove up from his home in South Bougainville to see us in mid-May 2025. I recognised him straight away – he may have aged, but he had the same kind eyes. When I showed him the old photograph of him in the ute he was annoyed because, as he put it, “no more Rasta hair”. “I’m old,” he added. So am I, Rommy, so am I.
He told me he and his men remembered me because “you were the whitest man we had ever seen”. He also said that none of his men would accompany him to collect us all those years ago because they thought it was too dangerous, or as he put it, “the war was very strong at the time”.
Even after 30 years it was a sobering fact to learn. My impression at the time was that these were tough boys, hardened by the jungle and the war. If they had thought it too dangerous, it obviously was a lot more risky than I had known at the time. Probably just as well I didn’t know.
The most poignant moment of our reunion for me, however, was when Rommy introduced us to his young granddaughter Lolo.
Rommy was trained as a boilermaker by the mining company before the crisis – he had given up a life of relative comfort and fought in a nasty civil war. He had fought for an independent homeland and future generations, defending his fellow islanders. Here he was all those years later, older and as full of strength and pride as I remembered, and with him, the latest member of his family. This was brought into sharp focus later that day when we attended the reburial of some of his fellow fighters who were exhumed from a mass grave in the north of the island. Time had not dimmed the emotions; the shadow of that conflict was a long one.
His fellow BRA Bougainvillians have lost friends and family and years in the jungle. They deserve their independence – I hope for Rommy and Lolo that they get it. I will be forever grateful that he kept me alive all those years ago.
• Mike Bowers is a photographer and host of Talking Pictures on ABC’s Insiders. This project was supported by a grant from the Melbourne Press Club’s Michael Gordon Fellowships
