Precis

Sean Dorney got thrown out of PNG for his reporting, yet he received one of its top honours. He skippered its footy team and fell for a local girl. Now suffering motor neurone disease, he makes an emotional final visit.

For most Australians, Manus Island evokes a grim, now-shuttered detention centre, nothing more. But for veteran ABC correspondent Sean Dorney, it’s paradise.

It’s where he married a chief’s daughter, Pauline, after draining his bank account to pay bride price, and where the embrace of a vast extended family awaits…

People have said to me that Pauline is like a princess in Manus, whereas you’re just a commoner -– Dorney

…And it’s where Sean and his beloved Pauline are now returning, in what will probably be his last time in PNG, the country that’s defined his life.

The thing is I’ve now got motor neurone disease. I may have just two years left - Dorney

As his boat touches shore, a burly tribesman lifts the frail Dorney and carries him to the sand. Tears flow in a tempest of drums and song.

Even the smallest children are constantly dancing. I’m no longer up to the more vigorous moves – but even with a walking stick one can but try – Dorney at welcome ceremony

Sean Dorney first reported on PNG before it won independence from Australia. He ended up a household name, thanks to his reporting of political crises, disasters and daily life struggles.

Thanks too to his place in the national rugby league side.  His team mates called him “Grasscutter” for his tackling style.  It’s a sport that unites a country where 860 languages are spoken… though Pauline needed lots of persuasion.

I was thinking, do they call this sport? This is not sport. This is a bunch of dogs fighting over chicken bones – Pauline Nare, Sean’s wife

On this farewell journey to PNG, Dorney makes a special report for Foreign Correspondent. He finds nuggets of progress, like more girls getting educated. He unleashes his frustrations in trying to inform Australians about their nearest neighbour, about whom they seem to care little.

Frankly I’m appalled at the lack of coverage in Australia – Dorney

It’s his journey as a sick man to his and Pauline’s Manus clan that showcases PNG’s great treasure -- the pulsating villages where 80 per cent of its people live. They’re poor but they enjoy what Sean calls “subsistence affluence”.

In Tulu, Sean is initiated as a clan chief, a first for an outsider. Then, before Sean is carried back into the boat, comes Tulu’s healing ceremony, unforgettable in its passion and unimaginably removed from the high-tech Australian medicine to which he will return.

Manus islanders dancing/Dorney watching dancing

Music

00:00

SEAN DORNEY: For more than four decades, Papua New Guinea was my home base

00:04

Dorney on boat on river

to cover some incredible stories from natural disasters, to political coups and civil wars.

00:09

News archive. Dorney to camera

NEWS ARCHIVE: “Sean Dorney on Manus Island for ABC News”.

00:15

Still. Dorney and rugby team/Archive. Dorney rugby team

SEAN DORNEY:  I even got to Captain the national rugby league team.

NEWS ARCHIVE: “Sean Dorney sends a long pass…

00:18

Archive of rugby match

and it’s a try for Papua New Guinea”.

00:24

Dorney in bar watching rugby

00:27

Dorney in hospital

SEAN DORNEY:  Now, I’m living back in Australia and facing my toughest assignment yet – trying to beat a deadly disease –

00:33

Kids in canoe/Manus Islanders

but while I still can,

00:42

Islanders perform healing ceremony on Dorney

I’m determined to show you the Papua New Guinea that few Australians get to see and a place that I have come to love.

00:45

[Singing]

00:53

Title over boat on water:
The Village

01:05

Super over Dorney in boat returning to island:
reporter:
Sean Dorney

01:10

SEAN DORNEY: For over 40 years, Papua New Guinea has defined my life.  I’ve known it since before independence in 1975 as a reporter, husband and a father. 

01:17

Dorney and Pauline in boat returning to Manus Island

I married a proud Papua New Guinean, Pauline Nare, the daughter of a chief.  And we’re heading back to her remote home village, Tulu, on, of all places, Manus Island.

01:31

Islanders welcome Dorney and Pauline

[Drumming]

01:44

SEAN DORNEY: Today, though, it feels bittersweet. 

01:56

Man carries Dorney from boat to shore

The thing is, I’ve got Motor Neurone Disease and have trouble walking, let alone getting out of a boat.  Eventually, my whole body will shut down. I may have just two years left to live.  But this rotten disease is not going to stop me from soaking up the embrace of my extended family.

“Over the years I’ve always loved

01:59

Dorney to camera

coming back here to Pauline’s village.  This may be the last time. 

02:30

Women embrace Dorney/ Islanders GVs

But the thing that is so good about coming back here, is you actually get to meet the Papuan New Guineans who live this village lifestyle.  Eighty per cent of Papua New Guineans still live in their villages and when you come to a village like this, you see the resilience of the people.  They look after themselves, they feed themselves, they get the fish from the sea, they get the food from the gardens,

02:37

Dorney to camera

and this is the real strength that Papua New Guinea has, and it’s one of the reasons I love the place”.

03:04

Islanders on beach

PAULINE NARE: “It is a completely different lifestyle. 

03:10

Pauline interview. Super:
Pauline Nare

A lifestyle in which I think many of us always sort of just took for granted.

03:16

Island GVs

Walking to school, walking back, I had the type of freedom that I wish and I would provide to my grandchildren. 

03:23

Pauline interview

It is, it’s very idyllic lifestyle”.

03:33

Island people GVs – cooking and working

SEAN DORNEY: The economists say PNG has high unemployment and widespread poverty, but there’s no hunger here and everybody works. I much prefer the term, “subsistence affluence”. 

03:36

Women cooking

Australians mostly associate Manus with the offshore detention of asylum seekers.  To me though, it is a place of joy,

03:56

Islanders dance

famous for its suggestive dancing.  Missionaries did their best to ban it, but they failed.

04:06

Archive. Dorney dancing

After I saw it first back in the 1970s, it became my signature party trick.

04:13

Children dancing with Dorney

I’m no longer up to its more vigorous moves, but even with a walking stick one can but try.

04:27

Children at school dance welcome for Dorney

To get a sense of what the future may hold for PNG, I figure a visit to the local primary school is a good place to start.  My nephew Alex, is the headmaster here.

04:39

Children sing anthem with Dorney

[Singing]

04:55

Flag raising

[addressing the kids at school] “I’m so pleased to be here. 

05:09

Dorney addresses school kids

You kids, you’re the future of this country.  My wife started her schooling here, and Pauline went on to become the first girl to work for the NBC in Radio Manus.  She was the first radio announcer [applause] and then she went to Port Moresby and she met me.  So, we have, we got married in 1976. We’ve got two children and three bubus, three grandchildren now”.

05:12

Alex into classroom

Alex is an exceptional teacher with his students at previous schools topping the province.

ALEX: “My hope for the school here

05:52

Alex interview

is to see the students excelling academically, by producing better results, seeing most of them going to high schools”.

06:01

Girls in school

SEAN DORNEY: One positive development, the number of girls going to school has doubled in recent years.

06:11

Dorney addresses school kids

[addressing the kids at school] “Work hard, study hard, but if you fail, just keep going.  I went to university to do economics and I failed every subject in my first year at university, because I concentrated too much on playing rugby league.  But I kept going and I got a job at the ABC, and eventually I became one of the ABC’s foreign correspondents”.

06:20

Alex and Dorney walk. Children dance welcome

06:47

Dorney in boat

06:52

SEAN DORNEY:  One of PNG’s most precious resources is its vast tropical forests. They’re in danger elsewhere but here, so far, they’re being preserved. 

06:57

Dorney in boat on river with Otto

Two beautiful rivers, Yiri and Oseu define the boundaries of Pauline’s peoples’ land.  They’re pristine.  There are crocodiles here.  And lining the banks, sago trees, one of the staple sources of food here.  There are other trees of course, tropical hardwoods much prized by the logging industry.  The spokesman for the Tulu conservation group, Otto Cho’on, tells me they’ve seen what’s happened elsewhere.

07:09

Otto and Dorney

OTTO CHO’ON: “We have a village nearby us, Drehet village where there is a logging company operating in the meantime or at the moment.  There have been talks here, or we have been discussing, if they could come in to log our area, but so far, we have not agreed.  We have decided not to engage them”.

SEAN DORNEY: “Because there’s been a lot of damage in other places?”

OTTO CHO’ON: “That’s right, that’s right.  Back there in their village they have almost lost all their trees”.

07:43

Kids walk over bridge/boat on river

Music

08:10

Port Moresby GVs

08:17

SEAN DORNEY: A world away from Tulu, the capital Port Moresby, is bursting at the seams.  With a population of upwards of a million people, it has grown enormously since I first arrived as a young journalist 44 years ago. 

08:20

Music

08:38

Police/Security guards

SEAN DORNEY: Crime was already an issue then, but these days it’s worse, and security is a growth industry.

08:45

ABC’s Port Moresby bureau

This is the ABC’s Port Moresby bureau from where I covered a multitude of stories. 

08:5

News archive montage. Dorney's news reports

There was the volcano that destroyed much of Rabaul,  the horrific tsunami that killed two and a half thousand people in the West Sepik Province, political crises that regularly saw prime ministers thrown out through motions of no confidence and the longest ongoing tragedy, the ten-year Bougainville civil war.  Sir Julius Chan tried to end that by hiring African mercenaries through a British company, Sandline International.

09:01

Dorney's book 'The Sandline Affair'

But the PNG Army rounded them up and booted them out.

09:36

News archive. PNG army, Sandline

09:38

News archive. Dorney deportation

I was booted out, too.  Deported from PNG in retaliation for an ABC story the government objected to.  But they let me back

09:41

Still. Dorney MBE with Pauline

and six years later, I was given a gong, an MBE. 

09-52

Eric at ABC bureaus

There used to be four full time Australian correspondents based here, now it’s down to just one – the ABC’s Eric Tlozek.

09:57

Dorney with Eric at bureau

“Eric, in 1984 the government decided to boot me out of here over a story relating to the Irian Jayan border.  You’ve been threatened with deportation, haven’t you?”

ERIC TLOZEK: “Yes, yeah I have the letters I can show you. 

10:10

Super:
Eric Tlozek
ABC Correspondent

Hand delivered deportation letters over the student shootings in 2016 and the subsequent political crisis.  Corruption allegations about the prime minister have been big news for a number of years and there was enormous sensitivity about them”.

10:22

SEAN DORNEY:  I feel it’s crucial that Australians are told about what’s going on in our nearest neighbour and former colony.

10:37

News archive. PNG Earthquake

NEWSREADER “The death toll is expected to rise from Monday’s earthquake in Papua New Guinea”.

NEWS ARCHIVE: “Families, homes and gardens were swallowed up by the ground when the powerful earthquake shook these mountains”.

10:45

Eric and Dorney at computer watching footage

ERIC TLOZEK: “As you can see, this moonscape just appears and there were people living there and that was their food gardens, their pigs, everything was in this area that is now just completely disappeared, it’s been buried”.

10:56

SEAN DORNEY: “It actually appals me that the Australian media in general has not paid the attention to this disaster that it should have done”.

11:08

News archive. Eric report

NEWS ARCHIVE: “This highway goes towards the quake epicentre.  It’s one of many roads…”

11:16

SEAN DORNEY: Eric has since moved to a new posting, but says this is has been the best job he’s ever had.

ERIC TLOZEK: “It is one of the most interesting countries in the world

11:20

Eric and Dorney

and the amazing thing about it, is that it’s accessible.

11:30

Stills. Eric photographing men

You know, people are so welcoming.  They want to show you their culture, they want to discuss the changes that are happening in their country because as people like to say,

11:33

Eric and Dorney

my grandfather was a cannibal and now, you know, I have, I am on Facebook and my cousin flies a plane, you know, [laughing] and, you know, my brother’s an engineer.  You know, I mean where else in the world do you find things like that?”

11:41

APEC Haus

SEAN DORNEY: Right now, Port Moresby is preparing to host world leaders at the APEC summit in November.  It’s a huge deal for PNG.

11:54

APEC signage/Roadworks

Australia and China appear to be in competition over who is going to pay the most to help make it happen.  You can hardly move in Moresby for the Chinese roadworks.  I suspect the new ABC correspondent will be spending a lot of time reporting on China’s increasing influence. 

12:05

Dorney with O'Neill

But Prime Minister Peter O’Neill says China’s interest is welcome.

“There seems to be some concern in Australia at the moment about China, and not only Papua New Guinea, but the rest of the Pacific.  Is there a reason why Australia should be a bit worried about

12:28

China’s influence?”

PRIME MINISTER PETER O’NEILL: “Well, firstly we have no security arrangements with China.  Ours is business.  If Australia stops doing business with China, we will stop doing business with China.  But I think everybody’s doing business with China.  We have to continue to export our resources like oil and gas and copper and gold to China like Australia and everyone else”.

12:44

O'Neill press conference

NEWSREEL: “Papua New Guinea is very fortunate to be part of the APEC process.  There are clear benefits from the support that we are receiving and China is the biggest supporter of our country”.

13:06

Cars driving to rugby

SEAN DORNEY: It’s not China that preoccupies most people here, they’re more interested in the footy. 

13:25

Rugby match

Music

13:31

SEAN DORNEY: In a country that speaks 860 distinct languages, rugby league is a great unifying force. 

13:34

Dorney at rugby

To look at me now, you might not believe it,

13:46

Archival. Dorney rugby, in bus

but I had great success as a half back in the 1970s.  I played five matches for the national side and had the great honour of being elected captain by my teammates in my final game. 

13:51

Pauline in stand at rugby

Pauline was not so impressed the first time she saw me play.

PAULINE NARE: “I was so shocked

14:10

Pauline interview

and I ended up sitting in the lady’s toilet for the rest of the game because I was just shaking, thinking do they call this sport? This is not sport.  This is a bunch of dogs fighting over chicken bones”.

14:17

Dorney at rugby match

SEAN DORNEY: Alone with marrying Pauline, being a past Kumul captain has given me a profile in this country that still opens a lot of doors,

14:30

Asylum seekers file footage

especially when I want to broach sensitive topics like the so-called Pacific Solution with PNG’s top politicians. Peter O’Neill says he doesn’t regret allowing Australia to use the Manus naval base as a processing centre.

PRIME MINISTER PETER O’NEILL: “If I did not offer the solution,

14:44

O'Neill interview

there will be certainly more deaths of children and all the people on boats who were going to Australia.  The boat travelling and smuggling of people from Indonesia and other parts of Asia to Australia would not have stopped.  So, we offered it as a humanitarian effort to try and stop that”.

15:02

Manus GVs. Rain

SEAN DORNEY:  Back on Manus, the remaining asylum seekers are now free to roam around the provincial capital, but none have ventured as far as

15:23

Clan initiation ceremony

Pauline’s peoples’ land.  To my surprise and delight, Pauline’s brother Bernard, now paramount chief of Tulu’s nine clans, has decreed that I be initiated as a chief of his and Pauline’s clan, the Petepwak.  This is a real honour.  It’s never been done before for an outsider.  Augustine, the clan spokesman, seemingly berates Pauline for having left the village.  But then he welcomes us back.

15:35

Augustine presents Dorney with bags, shells and the dog’s teeth

These things, the Manus bags, the shells and the dog’s teeth are traditional currency.

16:20

Dorney addressing ceremony guests

 “My heart is beating fast.  I’m so, so happy and the best thing I ever did in my entire life was meet this one here.  Pauline.  She has been the greatest wife you can imagine.  I perhaps have not been the best husband. It has been a wonderful thing for me to have visited the village, stayed here over the years a number of times, but also being married to Pauline has given me an understanding of Papua New Guinea that other reporters do not have.  And so I would just like to thank everyone here for being so friendly and so happy, and also for laughing when I try and do the Manus dance”.

16:43

Pauline at ceremony

PAULINE NARE: “I’m a Papua New Guinean and I’m Manusian,

17:43

Pauline interview

and I’m a Petepwak woman and being a Petepwak woman is my identity. It’s very important to me and it’s a nothing to everyone out there, but for me it’s my status. It flows in my veins.  Everything up here is about the tribe that I was born into”.

17:51

Pauline dances with women. Men play guitars and ukuleles

18:14

SEAN DORNEY:  In PNG most villages have one of these, they call them a string band.  Tulu’s best string band composed this song about Pauline and me and the ABC.

18:23

Men sing and play song about Pauline and Dorney

SINGING: “We thank you Pauline Nare for bringing your husband home. Foreign correspondent Sean Dorney who worked for the ABC”.

18:37

Pauline walks

SEAN DORNEY:  Pauline though keeps my feet firmly planted. She’s definitely not one to join all the others in telling me I’m a great bloke.

19:03

Pauline and Dorney

PAULINE NARE: “Ah yeah… conniving, never home, forgets people’s birthdays… yeah, is never considerate.  I believe that I married down instead of up”.

19:13

SEAN DORNEY: “You did. I mean you come from the land-owning clan, the people who own so much of the land here and your father was the chief”.

19:29

PAULINE NARE: “Yeah no Dad wasn’t happy.  Dad wasn’t happy.  He said no, you’re not marrying anyone from outside of Manus and definitely you’re not marrying a white man”.

19-39

SEAN DORNEY: “But when we did get married and I paid the bride price, I always felt very welcomed in the village. So did someone convince him?”

PAULINE NARE: “I did. I told him that they should be thankful that you actually had gone and taken every penny that you had in the bank and given it to him”.

19:49

Pauline dancing to Sean's song

[Singing]

20:08

SEAN DORNEY: “One of the great things about our relationship is that Pauline will always be a Papuan New Guinean and I will always be an Australian. 

20:23

Dorney interview

If only there were more relationships like ours, then the relationship between the two countries might be a hell of a lot better”.

20:30

Pauline and Dorney wedding photos

Our fathers never met but I’m sure they would have hit it off.

20:39

Stills. Dorney's parents

In fact, they were in New Guinea at the same time.

20:45

Archive. War footage

It was the Second World War and Manus was known as the Admiralty island.

20:50

Wartime newsreel

NEWSREEL ARCHIVE: “Striking suddenly in the south-west Pacific, General MacArthur leads combined sea, air and land forces against the Admiralty island, just north of New Guinea”.

21:00

SEAN DORNEY: The Americans took Manus back from the Japanese. 

21:09

Still. Pauline's family

Pauline’s father had been put to work as forced labour

21:12

Wartime newsreel

building an airstrip.

NEWSREEL ARCHIVE: “The airstrip and the landscaping were all done by the natives”.

SEAN DORNEY: My father, too,

21:16

Archive. Wartime. Dorney's father in jeep

ended up in PNG during the war as a doctor with the Australian Army.  This is some actual footage of him tending to the wounded in a jeep.

21:23

Wartime newsreel

NEWSREEL ARCHIVE: “Allied doctors worked unceasingly in fever laden heat”.

21:34

SEAN DORNEY: He’d been captured by the Germans on Crete, but incredibly, after escaping from his prisoner of war camp, he made his way back to Australia and then came up here to face the Japanese. 

21:38

Bomana War Cemetery

[Singing]

21:59

SEAN DORNEY:  The Pacific war took a lot of Australian lives.  At the Bomana War Cemetery just outside Port Moresby, there are more Australian soldiers buried in the one place than anywhere else in the world.

22:04

Dorney at Bomana War Cemetery

[at the cemetery] “Really, it was in defence of Australia that those guys died during the Second World War here. 

22:17

I was there that day at Kokoda when Keating got down and kissed the ground and then said, this place should be more significant to us than Anzac Cove”.

22:25

Wartime newsreel

NEWSREEL ARCHIVE: “When Kokoda was recaptured and the enemy driven out, the immediate threat of a battle for Australia was averted”.

22:36

End of Kokoda track

[Singing]

22:44

SEAN DORNEY: The Japanese got to within 10 kilometres of here,

22:51

Dorney at Kokoda

the southern end of the Kokoda track.  They were just 60 kilometres from Port Moresby.  My father’s war in New Guinea came a bit later after the Japanese were pushed back to the other side of these mountains.

“He had a heroic war, actually.

22:54

Photo. Dorney's father in uniform

He go the Distinguished Service Order, the DSO, for bravery for a time when they got cut off

23:10

Dorney

for three days, the unit he was with, and they had to repel the Japanese and he had to look after all the wounded. And he told me at one stage that they couldn’t use any light, so at night when anyone was wounded, he had to feel their wounds with his hands and try and bandage them up”.

23:16

Dorney with walkers at end of track

Forty-five thousand Australians have walked the Kokoda Track in the past decade.

23:34

“Can I ask any of you guys, you know, why you’re doing it?”

23:41

Australian man

AUSTRALIAN MAN: “My great uncle was killed in one of the beach head battles in late '42, early '43 -- actually I think he died in '43 -- and so I’m the first family member to come and see his grave at Bomana today and, yeah, walk the track”.

23:45

SEAN DORNEY: “My father was a doctor with the Field Ambulance.  His weapon of choice he told me was an Owen gun, which he had strapped to his back as a doctor. 

23:58

Walkers with trek leader

[to the trek leader] And how long is it going to take them?”

TREK LEADER: “Nine days. For us today it will just be a short half-day to, shall we say, break people in gently”.

SEAN DORNEY:  “It’s terrific to see these young Australians,

24:11

Drone shot. Walkers on track

you know, taking on the Kokoda Track and walking along it, but one of the things I would like to see is Australians taking far more interest in Papua New Guinea beyond just the Kokoda experience, because

24:26

Dorney at Bomana

our relationship with Papua New Guinea, we ran the place for 70-odd years, but so many Australians have no idea these days what’s going on up here”.

24:39

Islanders heading for church

Despite the strong tribal traditions, the major Christian religions remain hugely influential in PNG.  Of a Sunday, almost everyone seems to go to church. 

24:56

Islanders in church

My mother would have approved.  For many years she went to a Catholic Mass every single day.

25:09

[Congregation singing]

25:16

Man carries Dorney to beach

25:26

Islanders carry cross for prayer for Dorney

SEAN DORNEY:  Pauline’s people are also committed Catholics and some fervently believe faith can rid me of Motor Neurone Disease.  They are carrying this cross to where they will pray for me to be healed. 

25:43

Pauline and Dorney sit at cross, islanders pray and sing

[Singing]

26:03

Dorney at Brisbane Hospital

26:29

SEAN DORNEY: Back in Brisbane, I have volunteered to help the scientists search for a cure for Motor Neurone Disease. But no amount of high tech medicine can match this passion.

26:37

Islanders sing and pray with Dorney and Pauline

[Singing]

26:49

SEAN DORNEY: So far, no change but here’s hoping.

27:17

Dorney and Pauline leave Manus

SEAN DORNEY:  As we say goodbye – for me perhaps for the last time – I can’t help but feel that as someone who has spent so much of my career attempting to unravel the complexity and foibles of Papua New Guinea, I’m not that much closer to getting it right.

27:31

Kids in canoes/Islanders dance

We often hear about all the problems in Papua New Guinea and there is no denying it has its share. But Australians deserve to know about the positives too. And if village life remains as joyful and fulfilling as it is here in Tulu, then that a great thing.

27:49

Man carries Dorney to boat

And I wish them all the best!

28:12

Pauline waves. Boat departs

[Singing]

28:17

Credits start over drone shot of boat

Reporter - Sean Dorney

Producer - Ben Hawke

Camera - Craig Berkman

Editor - Peter O’Donoghue

Sound/Drone - Paul Castellaro

PNG Fixers - Tania Nugent, Joy Kisselpar

War footage – Australian War Memorial

Executive Producer - Marianne Leitch

Foreign Correspondent
abc.net.au/foreign

Copyright © 2018

28:28

Outpoint after credits

28:53