Lauaripota, proof a strong business model

By MARTIN LIRI
I WAS just little boy aged 12 to 13, maybe younger. But stories that have been passed down through word of mouth and snippets from my childhood memory trapped in my mind provide me images that illustrate some interesting memories.
Obviously at that tender age information I would have been exposed to would have been memories with little meaning at that time but they became more significant as we grow older and are equipped with improved knowledge through education and other lifetime experiences.
I am 52 years old now as I put this piece together.
My father the late Raymond Liri was a primary school teacher, who served in the Orokolo area of Gulf and parts of Central. He taught at Fane in Goilala district, Veifa’a, Inauaia and resigned from the teaching services while at Bereina Community School. The latter three are schools that the Hiritano Highway cuts through to connect to the Trans Highway of the Gulf.
But I can remember many stories that have been passed down through word of mouth. Many people didn’t really take my father seriously because of the nature of the guy. You could say he was a clown. He liked to joke, preferring to be jovial all the time. Being angry was something those who knew him witnessed little of, a rare quality that made him a very likeable person.
At the time of his death he was lowered into the grave with the nickname Baby Rex. For short he was even referred to as Baby. How he got that name was quite interesting and not really because of the kind of person he was. But that is another story for another time.
He died on the Hiritano Highway in 2001 at the spot referred to as Martin River on his way to follow up on his outstanding salary. The PMV he was travelling on lost control as it was going up the mountain. As it went back he couldn’t jump out. Even if he could to save himself, his choices had to be made in panic as he was travelling with his adopted daughter Mary Paul.
On that the cold metal bed he ended up at the Port Moresby General Hospital, even as a layman without much medical expertise, I could still deduce that he had died a tragic death by painfully watching the corpse that greeted us as we rushed to be by his side.
He may have died after being hit by the logs that been transported to Port Moresby as posts for some housing project one of the passengers had. What was he doing chasing his outstanding salary, one may ask? He had come out of retirement to teach at the Lese Kavora Primary School because being a remote area, not many young teachers wanted to serve there. The love of the profession coaxed him out of retirement, I guess.
This was the same man who during his younger years and as a newly married man, he had jumped into the sea when what was the ‘money bank’, an aluminium suitcase, had fallen into the waters. The captain of the vessel called Lauaripota, had to turn the two-hulled canoe around to rescue my father.
Jumping into the open seas would have required a great deal of courage especially when my father was the youngest of his Poro family and was entrusted with making sure the money collected from the passengers and cargo was looked after.
The Lauaripota was powered by two 40-horse power outboard motors. These were positioned somewhere towards the rear end of the canoe, which was built like a small modern-day ship with a decent sized deck, to act as the passengers’ quarters and cargo hold. A large metal rudder at the base of the vessel acted as the steering wheel and guided the 30 to 40 metre water craft.
The Lauaripota was one of the many that serviced Gulf. The others built in similar fashion also provided a similar service to the people from the province making the journey to Port Moresby.
After its final voyage and when it was dismantled, the remains of the large hulled canoes became our play centre as we mimicked a motor boat on one of its many trips up the coastline along the Gulf of Papua, connecting to Port Moresby.
So how could people from what is now one of the most under-developed provinces in Papua New Guinea get to own such a vessel? Remember it was powered by two 40hp motors, which would have cost a fair bit of money. Passengers would pay to get on the Lauaripota which serviced the Lese and Port Moresby sector.
That was the more ideal form of transportation as the roads – that we enjoy these days, thanks to present day politicians like Chris Haiveta, who made these possible, were not in existence then. In what is a five-hour trip nowadays, maybe less depending on how fast one is driving, the road conditions were so atrocious, it took even more than two to three days to get home.
One had to travel along the rubber-lines detouring off Agevairu to Hisiu village, which served as a transit point at Anna Pinu’s stores. Then you had to work your way along the coastlines villages Oroi, Nabuapaka, Poukama/Delena, drive inland past Nikura. Leaving the villages that speak the Roro language, one had to drive past the Mekeo villages of Inauabui, Eboa, Inauaia, Yeku and transit at Angabunga River.
That was a challenging sector as all vehicles from either side would have to cross the river on a barge that was powered by the current of the waters of Angabunga. The barge was connected to large steel cables and using the current would ferry a vehicle and its passengers to the other end, which was a time-consuming exercise but still an amazing piece of engineering work even by modern day standards.
Or our people from the Lese villages would make their way through Veifa’a and Papagogo villages, to use motorised double-hulled or even single hulled canoes to downstream to the Mairu River.
The Lauaripota, provided an alternate transportation option, depending on the choices one had to make those days and was also an example of how, despite the limited knowledge of the business sector, our forefathers were pretty advanced in ‘financial literacy’ and had the capacity to be generating incomes for themselves, obviously associated with the strong business models in existence through the cooperative society movement.

• Part 2 – So what were they doing right that we are not? Martin Liri is a freelance journalist.