“Courtesy of the patriarchs’ path shown by ancient ancestral domain … retain or never,” bellows singer Hyginus Tagira to an appreciative crowd of metalheads at a festival in Kokopau, a bustling township in Bougainville.
Tagira is the flamboyant frontman of Conscience – pronounced Con Science – a four-piece metal band. He’s dressed the part, swaddled in a leather cape that must have raised his body temperature to dizzying levels in the fearsome afternoon heat. It’s still early in the festival but hundreds of Bougainvilleans were there, most wearing lurid heavy metal T-shirts.
Conscience is one of dozens of metal groups in the autonomous region of Bougainville, located on the far eastern fringes of Papua New Guinea and still haunted by the ghosts of a conflict that, while it officially ended more than twenty years ago, still reverberates. The civil war that began in the late 1980s was the most violent conflict in the Pacific since the second world war.
“We love this music,” says Sylvester Hatsiere, a fan who was in the crowd at the Kokopau concert. “It gets right into the blood and means, for a while, that we forget about the bad things in our lives.”
The genre attracts fans young and old, with live metal music in Bougainville most weekends. Hatsiere, former fighter turned cocoa planter, is a genre aficionado and rattles off a list of Bougainville metal band names – each a not-so-subtle nod to the region’s troubled past and uncertain future. They include War X, Trouble Zone, Crisis Survivors, Black Ops, Mortal Revenge, Dishonoured and Shadowfools.
The seeds of Bougainville’s thriving metal scene were planted two generations ago by Australian tradesmen who came searching for actual heavy metal. Gold and enormous reserves of copper were discovered near Panguna, in the mountains of central Bougainville island, in the 1960s. Extracting the copper was an engineering feat, requiring shifting 11m cubic metres of earth, and once the mine opened, getting the copper out of the ground was a 24-hour-a-day operation of heat, light, and pyrotechnic sparks.
Many of the tradesmen and miners who worked in Bougainville were metalheads, steeped in Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and later AC/DC and Megadeth. They left many fans in their wake. Hatsiere was a schoolboy in Arawa, a town on the coast purpose-built to house the miners, and recalls a thriving music scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Arawa had its own recording studio, own bands and its own guitar hero: Bernard Hanga of the band Politix. Hatsiere’s father had his own band, too: Jail Birds, named for a night when some members were slung into police cells.
The idyll came crashing down in the late 1980s. Conflict began, with some Bougainvilleans looking to strike out as a country of their own. The mine closed, Arawa was looted and expatriates evacuated. But the metal remained, growing darker and heavier over the years, “seeping into our veins and our brains,” as Hatsiere describes it and – like most music – providing relief from reality.
For many Bougainvilleans, that reality is bleak. Electricity is intermittent, roads often impassable, work opportunities limited. Rates of post-traumatic stress are high. Political progress is stalled. In 2019, almost 98% of Bougainvilleans voted for independence from Papua New Guinea, yet there has been stuttering progress in the talks process that has followed. The region’s small government is dependent entirely upon grants from Port Moresby. The mine – an estimated $60bn of resources still in the ground – remains shuttered, surrounding areas heavily polluted.
Steven Tau – a video producer in Port Moresby and historian of the genre – explains how in these circumstances, metal was a perfect soundtrack for Bougainvilleans young and old. The genre has a long history of drawing inspiration from difficult events and giving succour to those who feel disfranchised, lost and helpless. For Bougainvilleans having a tough time, metal was soothing, he explains. Tau, too, has his own band: Sanguma, the pidgin word for “sorcery”.
Back in Kokopau, Conscience finishes and Dooms Vein, another four-piece, is up next. Their manager, Mars Hanga, is the daughter of Politix guitarist Bernard Hanga and her brother plays in another metal band. She says metal showcases the talent of Bougainvilleans and has the power to create positive changes among communities that don’t ordinarily have a lot to cheer about.
“It gives us peace, this music, gives us real confidence and purpose,” she shouts over the happy din.
