Sketches of mateship

THERE are so many things that can be said about friendship, about mateship.
Friends or mates just come and go, but there are one or two who just linger on in our minds for quite some time.
We look around in search of why that is so, and the justification comes to us in a moment shared, a common ordeal encountered, or a funny sight beheld. So we turn around in search of a witness, someone who truly can share that particular moment with us, and there, sure enough, however brief the moment, is that friend or mate we are meeting for the first time. And the incident, either funny or serious, becomes our permanent point of reference.
When storyboard tries to recall a man called Jack Metta, his mind goes racing back to the year 1977. Ah, that was the time when the PNG Kumuls thrashed France! Jack did not come clearly to his mind then, but the radio commentator did take the trouble to mention each player one by one in just letting PNG know who was responsible for the country’s victory over France. The next day storyboard goes to work and he’s sharing a few details of that game with a young French colleague at the workplace. “Well,” says the Frenchman, “PNG players are kind of light in body build, they need toughening up to get used to the international manoeuvres of crush and crunch, smash and dump…” Even so, storyboard could not help but helplessly watch his young French colleague struggle with the notion of conceding defeat. 
That year, of course, storyboard published a short story called “Ijaya: songs from a Melanesian shanty” in Australia, and the highlight of that story was PNG’s ascension to the international arena of participation, not only in sports but also in others areas of activity. The story was re-published in Brown Review somewhere in New England some years later and was well received. But the fact remains that those responsible for bringing out such sentiments of assertion and patriotism were men like Jack Metta. They were special people in their special field of individual professionalism doing all they could to put PNG on the world map.
Some many years later storyboard would get to know Jack Metta much more closely. It was through The National Weekender column, Root Mettas. Not a week went by without a copy of The National Weekender on storyboard’s desk just to check what Jack had to say about the Gulf side of our modern day society, but particularly those stories that took one to the rural setting, the difficulty of life encountered there, and the return to the city for more of those rice and flour bags for so and so’s bride price, some compensational settlement or other. And then the inner aspects of a closely knit family setting somewhere in the heart of the city where furniture consisted of empty kerosene drums as seats, discarded timber off-cuts as bedding and shelves, scrap iron for roofs and walls and the most convenient patapata under a mango tree. Then of course tea served quite often with little or no sugar and milk (tea kavakava) and bakibaki or rice with roku if one was lucky for dinner. All that followed by a half-empty fortnightly wallet and a hundred or so relatives to entertain. Dear oh dear, not to mention the leave pay packet being used up in a far shorter time than the period it was intended to cover.
Through Root Mettas the inner soul of our urban settlements was brought to life, its moments of unsettled anxiety, and its ready surrender to certain indulgences that sought to destroy the body and spirit, yet quite often at the end of it all came out that quiet voice of a counsellor setting us back into the straight path. Here truly was the wise counsellor himself in action.
The most memorable moment for storyboard came in 2005 during the PNG Writers Workshop organised by the National Cultural Commission at the Holiday Inn, Port Moresby. At a break during the workshop storyboard, John Kaniku and Jack Metta met up outside for a smoke and some buatau, if possible. Ensuring that the security personnel were not within reach storyboard set about rolling a tobacco in a newspaper for Kaniku (it must have been a horse race segment of The National newspaper), and as he did so Kaniku fished out a betelnut from his basket. The problem was that Kaniku had no teeth left to break open the betelnut with so who could have done the honours but Jack Metta. Ah, talk about mateship. Storyboard will never forget that day.
Jack’s presence for his mates always read patience and caring. He was there, physically, to ensure that everything was in order. He was the sort that would accommodate rather than correct or reprimand. And he was so quiet and gentle as a man his mates would often wonder what was going on in his head. But whatever that mystery was it always came out in Root Mettas.
Henry Lawson, the famous short story writer of the Australian bush, wrote an interesting piece called  “A Sketch of Mateship.” In that story we find two interesting mates. There is Bill, the careful and thoughtful one and then there is Jim the careless one. When Jim does something wrong like misusing Bill’s money, Bill simply does not explode. He merely lends Jim another dollar and walks in with him to the bar for a drink. Every time storyboard reads that story he associates the character Bill with his mates like Jack Metta, John Kaniku, Bernard Kaspou and so many others who’d now passed on. We could print that story here just to feel the sentiment of mateship and the true spirit of the word itself. But due to space we can only say that Jack had been a great mate, and the most accommodating one at that. We believe he is somewhere up there among the brightest of stars and smiling away as we read this.