Cutting through the coarse outer skin of the pineapple, Regina scored the eyes until the flesh was smooth. Juice coursed down the knife blade dripping though the slatted floor to the dusty ground below. She passed the pineapple on a tin plate and sat beside me on the floor, eyeing me keenly. Then she apologised for the taste of the pineapple, it was neither sweet nor fragrant compared to those grown in her own dusun. Cucumbers and bananas were also without aroma. Regina told me that in her own place, she could not open the skin of a baked banana without the intense aroma being discerned by others. At East Awin, cucumbers and bananas were not like those fruits of the same name that they had cultivated in their own place. It was much the same with Regina’s house at East Awin. It was the sort of building in which she would have previously stored kumbile tubers—it was not fit for habitation.^[1]

Regina had 15 children, and most of her daughters lived with her at East Awin. Her husband and sons had returned to Irian Jaya not long after the family’s arrival in 1992. It was said that they could not bear living on tinned mackerel and rice alone. Their appetites never sated, they chose to return to their own region in spite of the dangers. The dusun surrounding Regina’s village was abundant with deer, fish, coconut and sago. It lay in a border region where both West Papuan freedom fighters and Indonesian soldiers moved. At East Awin, Regina had constructed three houses, each one salvaged from the former. Timber foundation posts and sago thatch were purchased with money received in a bride-price payment from Regina’s son-in-law, a labourer in the local Ok Tedi copper mine. Each of Regina’s houses had been better than the last. But even the most recent was nothing like the house she had been forced to abandon. Her deprivation at East Awin served to remind her of previous comfort.

My first visit to Regina’s house commenced with a barrage of apology. Shortage of building materials meant she had been unable to set aside a room to receive visitors. She wanted to be able to offer a chair to sit on, and a table to eat at. Chairs and tables guarded against disorder, and to eat at a table was to eat in a ‘civilised’ manner. Regina expressed shame at hosting a visitor in such a place. Then she proceeded to list the qualities of the house she had lived in before fleeing. It had a tin roof, cement walls, electricity and running water, and had been built by a tradesperson. On their arrival at East Awin, she and her daughters had been obliged to sleep ‘precisely like animals: there were no walls’. They learned to build their own house, but these houses were not houses in which ‘to really live’. Rather, they resembled the sort of space in which Regina had previously stored the kumbile tuber. ‘We don’t choose to live like this,’ she told me. Yet, Regina and her daughters were able to reflect that, unlike other refugees in the world whom they had read about in UNHCR magazines in the school library, and who were penned like animals, West Papuans were permitted to choose a site and design and build their own houses at East Awin. They understood their relative fortune.

Some limits had been placed on refugee housing at East Awin. A plan to kiln-fire clay bricks was obstructed. According to a Muyu man who helped make the bricks, the settlement administrator prohibited the plan on the grounds that refugees were not permitted to build ostentatious houses, and must live in bush houses like the Awin landholders. His rationale was about equality: refugees must not appear to be privileged, or live differently to the local landholders. Houses at East Awin were characterised by their bricolage quality, made from whatever material was available. Shortage of building materials such as timber meant that many Muyu houses at East Awin were less substantial than the owner’s previous dwelling in the border camps where bush material was plentiful. One woman complained that she and her husband and two young children were forced to occupy one end of her father’s house, because there was not enough roofing material to build a separate house. The general rule of residence at East Awin was virilocal, that is, women shifted to the same camp and/or household as their husband’s parents. It had happened that a man had resided in the house of his wife’s family when they were from the same camp, but no man had shifted to his wife’s family’s home in another camp.

House size reflected the owner’s perception of the future. Initially on their arrival at East Awin, refugees had co-operatively built rectangular dormitories on the edge of camps. Then they had each constructed their own houses. Many times I heard: ‘We did not need very big houses because we were mid-journey.’ A house that was considered elaborate boasted a tin roof rather than sago thatch, and milled timber walls and flooring rather than adzed bush timber. Among Muyu people, such a house could invoke the envy of others. The risks are expressed in the aphorism: ‘A new house means you’re just looking to die.’ According to Markus, anything that differentiates a Muyu person from their neighbour is likely to draw the attention and envy of others. One needed to keep up the appearance of ordinariness by living in a house made from bush materials, wearing shabby clothes, not revealing cash in public, and not disclosing details of compensation or bride-price payments. Markus characterised Muyu people as wary, a disposition so naturalised that there is no word in the Yonggom language to describe it. The word ‘katkile’ is used to warn someone to be especially cautious to avoid causing envy or grievance in others.

Tensions existed at East Awin because everyone experienced shortage at some time, and was compelled to borrow from someone else. If a Muyu person borrows or requests something, they may become the subject of conversation and mockery later. Money is a particularly fraught thing to borrow. If too much time lapses before a person repays a loan, the borrower is vulnerable because the loan-giver will feel aggrieved. Many Muyu people had shifted outside their original camps that had become crowded to establish houses on vacant land along the edge of the main road into East Awin. This was because dense settlement increased people’s interaction, and increased the risk of being misunderstood or misrepresented. Among Muyu, such a situation easily led to dispute and the accusation of sorcery.

Sorcery may be performed using a departed person’s belongings. Regina explained that when her family eventually returned home to Irian Jaya they would gather their traces and old things for burning: ‘Otherwise the unknown contents of a person’s heart may cause trouble.’ Underlying Regina’s statement is the conviction that enmities that appear dormant eventually come to the surface. A new house could be surrendered to another family, but an older house ought to be burned. There were two reasons for this. First, a house becomes the most tangible trace of a person, and can be readily used for sorcery if abandoned intact. Second, a metaphysical relationship can be established between a dwelling and the occupants, and new occupants are at risk of being disturbed by the guardian spirit of the former residents. A guardian spirit may continue to occupy an empty house to dissuade intruders.

Regardless of origin, refugees at East Awin related the destruction of a house to destruction of the body or self. The analogous relation between dwellings and bodies is almost inevitable given the: ‘intimate relationship between the human body and the dwellings in which it is placed (and where it places itself)’.^[2] Muyu people conceive the kitchen hearth as the navel or centre of the house, where everything of value arrives. In a Muyu practice to mark the occupation of a new house, the hearth is set, lit for the first time, and celebrated as the source of life in the new house. A shaman or dukun prays that such things as game, garden produce and cash will be drawn to the hearth of the new house, and procured quickly and successfully. The dukun also requests that the new dwelling be kept warm, and manifest good fortune and prosperity. A church elder may install a ladder or steps to the house with a prayer requesting that many visitors enter and exit by way of the new steps. Like the dukun, the church elder blesses the hearth, seeking God’s protection of the occupants, and guarding against the house becoming cold or disaffected. Muyu perception of states of warmth and cold in the house are said to be associated with the death of a woman figure like a mother, and the loss of her nurturing presence.^[3]

A ‘dwelling place’ is defined by Casey as a place that must possess ‘a certain felt familiarity’.^[4] Familiarity is about ambience and structure rather than time of occupation or acquaintance. So a dwelling place becomes a kind of dwelling rather than a particular building.^[5] By way of example, at the front entrance to his house at East Awin, Markus had installed steps carved in semi-circular fashion out of a tree trunk. Referred to as kum, he described the steps in terms of familiarity, they were ‘the ancestral tradition of his Muyu tribe’. Kum requires a particular stepping motion that engages the entire body: the toes, ankles, knees, hips, fingers, wrists, elbows and shoulders. The action of ascending and descending kum at East Awin produces familiarity in Muyu refugees. Casey proposes that ‘inhabiting’ is an activity that is dependent on the body, and bodily movement. In residing, the body is an agent of habit memories that are formed over a period of time, and these memories are recalled through the re-enactment of bodily motions.^[6] Familiarity created by ‘habitual body memories’ allows people to orient themselves in a new place or residence. Muyu people at East Awin commented that they had adjusted to cooking over a hearth set into the floor, rather than the hip-level standing hearth that they were accustomed to. Similarly, they had adjusted to a hearth, and cooking activity, located in the middle of the house, rather than in a separate space. This adaptation was necessary because there was no sago at East Awin, and people cured alternative roof thatching with hearth smoke to increase its durability.

Old houses made of organic bush materials decomposed over time in the tropical climate. From these bush materials precious little could be retrieved or sold. Houses built from manufactured materials were dismantled or sold intact. Tin and milled timber fetched almost new prices at East Awin because of the convenience of on-site removal. Departing residents commonly sold their houses to neighbours, or houses were sold and dismantled for the extension of an existing house, or a new building. Some houses were gifted to relatives or friends at the time of the owner’s departure. The practices of selling, gifting and renovating houses reflects people’s conception of their house and garden at East Awin as their own property. Houses and gardens were conceived as refugee property in spite of the fact that these houses were located on land that, according to the owners, had not been fully compensated. This apparent anomaly was explained by Markus:

Refugees had built houses and gardens with their own labour, in a place that they had judged to be ‘empty’ upon their arrival. Neither camp nor garden areas had been cleared. They recalled their initial impressions of East Awin as wilderness which was both empty and engulfing. The rainforest was dense and crawling with snakes. Giant cockroaches scuttled about in the night and chewed the fingers—smelling of tinned fish—of sleeping children and adults. Needle-thorned plants had to be cleared. Extraordinary wind gusts tore off house roofs as they were laid, and coated tin dishes with dust. The irony of a dense rainforest being labelled ‘empty’ contains its own logic.^[7] For it is from the standpoint of a sedentary gardener that an uncultivated site can be labelled empty. Both Muyu refugees and Awin landholders are shifting cultivators, but it happened that the landholders had only sparsely settled East Awin before 1987. For Muyu, a place that is not empty is an occupied place or dusun, marked by habitation and cultivation and containing memories and histories.^[8] By extension, empty refers to the absence of features that make the landscape meaningful and productive for Muyu. Markus explained: ‘When we arrived here, there was not a single sago tree, cassava plant, breadfruit tree or banana palm. If the land was truly owned, the old people would have planted long-living trees.’ Naturally for the landholders, East Awin was both centrally located and entirely meaningful: it was their ancestral place.

The notion of space as empty is a fairly conventional response to any new space that is not the person’s own space. But it was the lack of cultivation and traces of habitation that rendered it ‘empty’ for Muyu refugees. Initially, the settlement administration had proposed that refugees use land on the northern side of the road, with the southern side reserved for landholders. But refugees had already begun to make gardens and hunt to the south. Gardening land was sought on the edge of rivers and streams inside the East Awin boundary, in preference to the higher inland area which was dry. Observers’ accounts support this:

Choice of garden site at East Awin was determined by water source. People marked their gardens in the forest by felling tall trees and clearing undergrowth. Some erected a sign by sinking a stake vertically into the ground, making a groove or fork into the top of the stake, and then inserting two pickets in a crossed position into the fork. They explained that the installation of signs was not Muyu customary law as their own boundaries had been defined and observed for generations, and were the subject of public knowledge. Muyu borrowed this method of marking from other people at East Awin, and there was no term in the Yonggom language to describe it. Other signs of ownership observed at East Awin included weeding around the base of a food-bearing forest tree such as the genimo, inserting pieces of barbed wire or thorns into the trunk of a coconut palm and tying a piece of coarse reed around a tree trunk. These signs indicated several possibilities: ownership in order to discourage theft, death of the tree’s owner resulting in the postponement of harvest until after a period of mourning, or simply that the owner wished to rest the tree in order to increase the size of its fruit or harvest. People also entered into spoken agreements with neighbours about mutual boundaries. The act of trespassing violated Muyu custom even at East Awin, and people knew not to enter another person’s garden to cut firewood, fish or hunt. Trespassing could anger the other person and lead to a dispute or sanction. People understood that they had rights to the rivers and streams that entered their gardens at East Awin, and to the trees and the animals that lived in the tall grass of that garden.

The notion that a person’s cultivated garden at East Awin constituted their own property was only relative. Gardens there were described as a ‘garden close by’ referring to its proximate and constricted space, and contrasting the owner’s prior extensive dusun. Some people described their garden at East Awin to be enclosed by the landholder’s dusun. Land use at East Awin has a generative effect. Using a portion of land by making a garden and planting sago and tree crops, as well as harvesting sago and catching fish beyond the East Awin boundary, can give those ‘unnamed’ tracts, a human history: ‘they ascribe to it a dimension of people’s memory’.^[10] In another context, Weiner has poetically described how acts such as pausing to inspect fruiting trees, cutting a piece of rattan from a tree overhanging a path, or gathering the edible larvae and leathery nest of a certain moth can turn an unnamed tract into a ‘conduit of inscribed activity’.^[11]

Markus began cultivating his garden at East Awin in 1987. In his description of it he named some areas with reference to events that had occurred there, and others as descriptive adjuncts:

A refugee’s garden conceived as bounded personal property is illustrated in two incidents recalled below. The first took place in the market at East Awin where a landholder buyer agreed with a refugee seller to take some fish and return shortly with the money. Some time later, the buyer returned to the seller empty-handed. She explained that she had changed her mind and would not pay money for fish that had been caught outside the East Awin boundary on her own land. Speaking among her friends afterwards, the refugee seller explained that she had caught the fish by her own effort, with a fishing line not poison, from the stream running through her garden located inside the East Awin boundary. She qualified her right to sell the fish based on two points: she perceived the place where she caught the fish, and the effort in catching it, to be hers alone.

The second incident involved rockpool draining, an activity practised by some Muyu who had sufficiently deep streams running through their gardens at East Awin. A group of young men bailed the water from a pool that was located in the garden of a person from a neighbouring camp. The group then collected the prawns and fish from the drained pool. They had not sought permission from the garden owner who claimed that since his wife’s death he had intentionally left the pool and surrounding garden idle. His wife had fished and irrigated the garden from this pool prior to her death. The man’s claim based on his prior cultivation of the pool and fallow garden was validated, and the young men were each required to pay compensation. Gardens were conceived as private property because of the cultivation efforts of the gardener, and because many refugees claimed that the PNG government had purchased the land of the East Awin settlement in the name of the refugees.

A shelter in one’s garden or dusun was considered a sign of habitation without which a garden could be considered unoccupied or empty. Some Muyu at East Awin constructed makeshift shelters known as pondok in their gardens. A very few were said to have built a dusun house in the rainforest outside the East Awin boundary. According to Markus, the landholders ought to receive compensation from the government for any dwellings outside the boundary. In any Muyu dusun in the homeland, a shelter or house would be occupied for several weeks at a time during hunting, or sago processing. Muyu people understand their dusun house to be their true house. It is a place where they feel at home, for their dusun is considered to be their actual place rather than their village house. For older Muyu, composite villages were artefacts of the Catholic Church and Dutch authorities created for the purposes of administration. There is no term in the Yonggom language to describe a village house. Living in a village was simply conceived as living outside one’s dusun. A village house was a place that one visited. Objects of value and other large items were stored in dusun houses rather than village houses, and it was dusun houses that were fully equipped.

In contrast, Muyu at East Awin removed their axes, machetes and cooking implements from their dusun house or makeshift shelter. This was done because trespassing was rife, boundaries were ambiguous, and people did not always respect each other’s property. Some people at East Awin locked their houses with padlocks, others curtained windows with steel mesh. Even locked houses had been broken into. If families were leaving their houses to travel to Kiunga, they would usually invite a neighbour or relative to stay to discourage theft, and to look after chickens or other animals.

During the time I was at East Awin, Samuel—a salaried schoolteacher in his fifties—built a house next to his old house, which was a dilapidated bush hut built on the ground with thatched roof and walls, and no windows. The new house epitomised what refugees described as a ‘good’ house. It was built 3 metres off the ground, and boasted a tin roof rather than sago thatch, and milled timber walls and flooring rather than adzed bush timber. Samuel’s decision to build an elaborate house with full tin roof, guttering, roof trusses, milled timber walls and flooring was commented on by other Muyu. The house was located in a prominent and public position outside the Saint Berthilla Catholic Church, on the edge of the marketplace. Samuel constructed his new house in spite of the offer of permissive residency enabling his family to live elsewhere in PNG, and the other offer of assisted repatriation. But his new house did not reflect his intention to end his journey and remain at East Awin. On the contrary, it reflected his political commitment to remain outside Irian Jaya until merdeka had been achieved. By constructing a comfortable house, he was increasing his family’s chances of enduring the deprivations of East Awin until it was truly safe to return to the homeland. According to Samuel, the event of merdeka was the only truly safe moment to return. Samuel’s story illustrates that ‘being mid-journey’ does not preclude stability or the possibility of a familiar dwelling place.