Monday, March 2, 2015

Assignment Papua New Guinea - 1968-75





    Adverting was not my first career choice. I’d wanted to be a traveler and a journalist. But I couldn’t get a job in journalism because I didn’t have a university degree. Advertising was my next choice - it was creative and better paid than journalism but I never got to the “better paid part”.
I spent five years in the ad business learning copywriting and media and printing and design and finally I was an account executive selling the American dream that had become Australia’s.

I felt a dark cloud descending. And as it thickened around me I struggled to find a way to escape. I thought about inland Australia. Mining companies paid well and life was rough in the desert. I considered joining the army, something to initiate and toughen and help me escape the malaise I felt. But the war in Vietnam was in the headlines every day and Australians were dying in a distant land, that made no sense and I quickly dropped the idea. And then, one day an old school friend suggested Papua New Guinea.

We were having lunch at a pub in one of Melbourne’s leafy neighborhoods when he told me about patrol officers, young men employed by the Australian government taming the wilds of Papua New Guinea. Suddenly the cloud lifted. I realized perhaps this was the answer - a way out - overseas travel and adventure all paid for by the Australian government. I loved the bush. I relished the idea of working outside, traveling far away from “Tip Top Bread/ As the baker said/ It is especially fine/ Hurry to the shop/ There you’ll make a stop/ When you see the Tip Top sign.” The banal and insidious nature of advertising was getting to me.