When The Garamuts Beat—A Memoir of Fifty Years in Bougainville
I’ve had an intense year editing a memoir that was written by a German priest, Fr Franz Miltrup, in 1989. Fr Miltrup wrote about his 50 years in Bougainville Papua New Guinea (PNG); it is where I grew up and where I shall always regard as my spiritual home. Franz Miltrup went there as a young priest in 1938, and wrote about the peoples’ customs and culture, and Australia’s colonial administration over a period of great social change. He was imprisoned in the jungle for three years by the Japanese and narrowly escaped execution twice. It’s a fascinating story originally written in Tok Pisin and in places, difficult to follow. Whoever bound the pages together put some upside down, and others out of order. On top of this, Franz Miltrup didn’t always clarify when the incident he was writing about, happened.
What a challenge but a joy to work on! I feel I the story really well now, and hope that the English translation makes for easy reading without Miltrup’s voice being lost. It is a tricky thing when a piece of writing has to be translated into another language.
Fr Miltrup’s memoir was self-titled My Fifty Year in Bougainville which is an accurate description but not the most exciting so, without overstepping my editorial remit I wanted to give it a title that did justice to the work. Fr Miltrup wrote an incredible story filled with tales of adventure, faith, and peril. He told it like it was. The events he wrote about covered all the emotions; there are parts very moving, some tragic and terrible, others funny. The title that kept knocking in my head was When The Garamut Beats with the sub-title being ‘a memoir of fifty years In Bougainville’.
The garamut is a hollowed out tree trunk plugged at both ends with an open narrow slit at the top. It is beaten only by men using a long wooden rod. The sound is deep and travels through the bush for several kilometres. In remote areas of Melanesia, Garamuts are still used to transmit important messages. In the early days they could herald a warning or a celebration. Fr Miltrup mentions the Haus Garamut (meeting house where garamuts are kept) throughout his memoir. He knew what their beats meant. He was a fluent speaker of Telei, the language of the Buin people in south Bougainville.
I was hoping to get a publisher interested in the book but this was proving to be a very slow journey. Without any success to show for it I decided to self-publish. I didn’t have an open-ended period of time to run down rabbit holes as many of Fr Miltrup’s colleagues, family, and friends, are getting on in years. I self-published a family history book that was accepted in some independent bookstores, including the Queensland State Library book shop and Libraries Tasmania so doing another seemed the best approach for this particular project.
This memoir has wider appeal that family history, but I acknowledge it might still be limited. In the book, along with Miltrup’s memoir, are short biographies of people mentioned in the book, plus first-hand accounts of selected wartime experiences in an appendix. These have been cleared with the appropriate approvals. My target group of readers are people living in PNG or who have lived there, and know what a fascinating country it is, plus anyone interested in the Pacific and its social history. PNG is our nearest neighbour and it never ceases to surprise me how little the Australian press wrote about the ten-year Bougainville Crisis, a dirty catastrophic civil war only a hop, skip, and jump, across the Coral Sea.
My apprenticeship as an independent self-published writer has tested my skills to the limit but I’ve loved it. I taught myself to use Affinity Publisher, albeit the typesetting and proofreading has been huge, but it kept costs down. I paid someone to professionally design the cover, and have had a couple of readers go through the manuscript: a resource I really valued. Personally, I’ve gone through the manuscript countless times. In the beginning I was looking for spelling errors and sentence construction. One sweep would focus on page numbering and Table of Contents, another on headers, another on widows and orphans etc. Grammar, styles for dates, and spelling of certain words whilst ensuring consistency, are part of the minutiea that kept me awake at night.
At last I’m at the stage where I will be sending the PDF file to the printers before the end of the week. Including the Index, the book is 387 pages front to back. It’s late in the process but I’m now putting my mind to letting readers know where things are and how to order a copy. You can send an inquiry through my author’s website www.leonardstories.com.
