The Irresistable Charms of Dobu Island
by Nancy Sullivan

Ask me where I'd like to be shipwrecked without hope of rescue and I won't skip a beat: Dobu. It is a small circle of land floating in the southern D'Entrecasteaux. A more lush, beautiful place would be hard to find in all the world. Like a botanical garden with people inside, or a village overgrown by its garden, Dobu is the island image of Eden, if Eden were be peopled with friendly Melanesians. The village paths overflow with fruit trees like overhead boughs in a grape arbor, and people wave from their stoops as you pass their homes in neatly fenced plots surrounded by fragrant hibiscus and frangipani bushes. At the main wharf stands the handsome stone church, the first Methodist Church in the islands, and behind it a wide green playing field and a line of primary school rooms. Mangroves shade a shoreline path where people have parked decoratively painted outrigger canoes. Kids splash and squeal in a nearby swimming cove. Villagers greet you with gifts of betelnut. The nursing sisters show you their aid post's brand new childbirth wing. Ladies sit on a brilliantly fringed woven mat in someone's garden, feeding infants. Peace seems to be at home here.

I remember very well my first trip to Dobu, six years ago now. "Come this way," said a well-spoken young girl who took my hand. She led myself and my fellow travelers to her next hamlet, passing the home of a young German anthropologist who, she explained, had just left the island. They all missed her very much and wished she'd return. She spoke excellent Dobuan, the girl explained, and was like a sister to her. Across a rivulet, up a hill, and we were in a small settlement with a view out over the sea. A thirtysomething man in glasses and clean trousers strode up to me and introduced himself. His name was Andrew, he told me in English, and he had worked on the mainland, he was sure we should hire him on a ship, he was writing a letter of introduction right now, and he knew that a letter was what would do the trick, and he hated that everyone seemed able to write letters but him, and that since Independence there was too much letter-writing going on, and the expats, the Australians, they were the ones controlling the post office, so that he never received the letters he expected and because of that he never could get the work he wanted and people like I would come and exploit him because that's what white people like to do, they don't want to make friends at all, not really… (and so forth). Andrew held my hand through part of this, then rested it on my shoulder as I walked back down the path, trying not to excite him more than necessary. My young companion rolled her eyes and made circles in the air around her ears.

I looked at Vic Pasco, the Madang artist, who was traveling with us. Our eyes shared the glimmer of a good idea. "Aaah, Mr. Bannister," I called.

Mr. Bannister was part of our group whom, we'd quickly learned, had an interesting compulsive disorder: he never ever stopped asking questions. Vic kindly made the introductions.

Along the path toward the second hamlet we'd noticed a clearing to one side in which they were constructing a large bamboo platform. It was raised about four feet from the ground and covered roughly twenty by forty feet square, with a railing on the sides and tall posts at each corner. What was that? I asked my companion. She explained it was for a mortuary feast in a couple of weeks. They would collect food and stack it high on the platform and sing and feast through the night. People were coming from all over the island and from neighboring islands too. It was for an old woman who'd died months ago, and they'd waited to schedule the feast during the yam harvest.

The following month we returned to Dobu the day of the mortuary feast. It was the afternoon and we arrived to see the first tall marita fruits from pandanus palms being stacked on the platform, next to towering columns of sugarcane lashed to the corner posts, mounds of yams, a few sweet potatoes, bunches of bananas and betelnut, and the long ceremonial kuvi yams slung horizontally from bamboo poles. This was a funeral and a family reunion in one, where the woman's closest relatives would give back to all those who'd helped during mourning, and give reaffirm ties of blood and of obligation by certain gifts of food. The earliest arrivals had organized themselves at small sitting platforms around the edge of the clearing. One enormous pig, so obese it didn't look capable of walking, lay squealing on its side with his legs tied to a pole, somehow aware of his fate. Our boat was moored in the bay that night while the feasting and singing and storytelling went on all night in that clearing. We all of us, myself most of all, wanted to go ashore and see it. But we hadn't been invited and we were too many passengers to just idly stop by. So many of us sat on the back deck watching the orange glow of festivities and the flicker of candles behind a blackened stand of palm trees in the purple darkness of the shore.

On our way back from my friend's hamlet on the first trip, we stopped by a cluster of houses just behind that of the missing anthropologist. It was a family compound, squared by four houses in the midst of which a few adults, men and women both, were playing a game of darts. A really mean game of darts, the kind you place bets on. They invited us to join them and of course we couldn't resist. But these Dobuans were too good. One woman challenged me to try right away; she was a champ and thoroughly delighted when my dart struck the tree trunk a foot from the board. Others in our group weren't bad, and we attracted plenty of bet-layers who sidled up to the house verandahs and sat on tree stumps in the yard. Little kids came out and sat on the verandahs, along with one older woman. Two boys we'd seen earlier throwing rocks at small birds came in with a lizard they'd just caught, tied to a string. All that was missing from the scene was a barbie and cold beer. It was quite a while before we wanted to leave.

Even Mr. Bannister and Andrew seemed content, chattering over each other as they strolled to the next compound before coming back to watch the darts. I looked over at one point to see Andrew shaking is finger sternly in our Mr. Bannister's face, arguing some vital point about the Japanese occupation during the war.

It wasn't always this bucolic on Dobu. As recently as 1930 the island was fraught with dread beauty and mythological associations. Renown throughout the islands for witchcraft, headhunting and cannibalism, Dobu was visited in fear and superstitious awe. Its people were envied for their power and influence, while also despised as jealous and mean barbarians. Dobu has always been a critical link in the extended kula trade that knits together the Trobriand, Marshall Bennett, Amphlett, d'Entrecasteaux and Louisiade islands. Along with the Amphletts and Tubetube, it is a pottery-making island, exporting these vessels for bride-price and other ceremonies throughout the region. Tubetube, in the south, receives the best spondylus shell in the area, from Rossel island to the east and Port Moresby to the far west, which are made into the delicate and valuable necklaces worn everywhere in the Massim. Up north of Dobu, the Trobriand islands exchange valuable decorated armshells for the spondylus shell necklaces that the Tubetube men bring north.

In this way, Dobu stands at the intersection of northern and southern trade routes, bringing the shells and pots to the Trobriands in exchange for the armshells that get traded south. This function alone would make Dobu an important place economically for the Massim, strategically authoritative out of all proportion to its actual size. But that alone has never explained the immense influence Dobu has in the imagination of its neighbours. It cannot explain, for example, why the nearby big mountainous Fergusson and Goodenough islands speak Dobuan language, and why kula traders throughout the Trobriands and south to Tubetube speak it too. Dobuans, for their part, speak no one else's tongue but their own.

In 1930, the young New Zealander Reo Fortune conducted anthropological fieldwork on Dobu. As had virtually everyone in his generation, he had been influenced by the groundbreaking work of Dr. Bronislaw Malinowski before him, who had spent the WW1 years in the Trobriands and thereafter produced some of the most important works of twentieth century anthropology-books on the kula, Trobriand magic and customs, that shattered the western misconceptions about 'primitive economics' and, for that matter, 'primitive culture' in general. Scattered throughout these books are references to the beautiful and fearful islands south of the Trobriands, and in partiuclar, to Dobu. As Dr. Malinowski writes in the Introduction to Dr. Fortune's text, The Sorcerers of Dobu (1932, EP Dutton & Co, Inc, New York, NY: p. xvi):

"When I heard…that this country was going to be explored anthropologically by a young but very competent worker, my interests became riveted on Dr. Fortune's field-work. It was a venture of no mean importance t the value of my own material. That land, veiled for me just as it was for my Trobriand friends, was at last to be explored. The home of cannibalism, head-hunting, of daring expeditions; the country about which there circulated fabulous tales, partly native, partly European; the country where Trobrianders believed sorcery had been born…where as some said there were to be found crude sexual orgies; while others affirmed that women lived in perfect chastity-this country was to be unveiled at last.

It turned out, however, that all these rumors were less than true. Rather than being wild beasts of carnality the Dobuans were actually prudes. Their attitudes toward dating, sex and marriage were downright Victorian, Fortune discovered. Not that it didn't go on-just that people didn't talk about it. This is what had so frustrated generations of Trobriand visitors, particularly men. Whereas Dobuan men never had any trouble forming friendships in the Trobs, Trobriand men never seemed to have a chance with the supposedly chaste Dobuan women. Apparently, however, they just didn't know the rules.

"The general attitude towards sex," Fortune writes (p241-2), "is in essentials that which in the present day and generation is terms Mid-Victorianism. It might be expected that complete pre-nuptial freedom in sex would breed a cleaner, less prudish outlook than that which we know as Victorian. The case is not so, however. Perfect freedom before marriage is associated in Dobu with a general attitude towards sex that can only be described as dirty, lascivious, and obscene below the surface, and rigidly decorous and euphemistic above the surface. …As it was in our own nineteenth century, sex is considered as fundamentally unspeakable….Shame, prudishness, and severe puritanical attitudes seem to be the best breeding ground for the concept of adulterous cut-and-run episodes as most highly desirable."

Relations between men and women were managed almost entirely by magic. Without a love charm to arouse and create desire, desire does not exist to the Dobuan, Fortune found. Men and women mate, he reported, only because men are constantly exerting magical power over women, and women over men. (It seemed the Trobrianders just didn't have the right magic.) But this custom made men and women wildly jealous of each other. If their own natural charms were not enough to draw and hold a mate, then they were constantly searching for and testing out counter-magic to deflect competitors and win over the wayward affections of their mate. Needless to say, the pursuit of happiness was anything but peaceful. It created malicious rivalries with suspicions of poisoning and even death between rivals, lovers, spouses and their families.

Unlike Trobriand women, the Dobuan women also had a reputation for casting powerful witchcraft. "The women of Dobu," Fortune writes (p.74), "do actually possess…incantations which they believe enable them to fly by night to make mischief, to kill, to dance upon the graves of their former victims, to disinter their victims and in spirit hold ghoulish feasting on them. Meanwhile, the woman as 'an empty skin' stays asleep in her house."

Looking back at Fortune's impressions we can almost read between the lines. Single, handsome, he was himself friends with a number of white traders who had taken Dobuan wives. It would be many months before Fortune himself would meet the young vivacious Margaret Mead on a ship traveling to the States (back from her fieldwork in Samoa) and fall in love, soon to make her his wife. But in Dobu, surrounded by the lovely soft-haired delicate Dobuan women, he was as unlucky as any Trobriander.

"I do not know many love charms," he writes (p.235). "There are many, but I encountered great difficulty in acquiring knowledge. The Dobuans are almost pathologically jealous. The men believed that I had no seductive qualities for their women as long as I knew no love magic. A man without love magic is not a real man, only half a man. Because of their jealousy, and of their disapproval of mixed blood unions and of mixed blood children, they were determined to keep me without love magic."

Indeed, it almost seems the nosey anthropologist made himself an object of fear for women young and old. He soon discovered that illicit liaisons were only conducted in the bush, and in a hit-and-run manner. This made it a little dicey for him to go wandering around the island.

"Whenever a woman alone in the bush hears a rustling sound approaching she runs for the village at top speed," he reports (p. 247). "If she remains careless of the intruder, and the intruder happens to be a man, he knows that she, by the very act of not running, has welcomed his approach. She may feign to run at the last minute when it is too late. The man then seizes her and a feint of violent seizure is performed…All men agree that a woman seized so never cries out or screams, or tells her husband afterwards. Three or four times I startled a woman in the bush. Always they were off like startled hares before I saw them. Once I went straight to the village and found an old woman panting there from her quick run up the hill. She had loitered behind her companions gathering bush windfalls."

It's a long time and many worldviews away from those days in Dobu, or at least it appears to be. Everyone is a practicing Methodist and neighbours no longer worry about head-hunting and cannibalism on the island. But when you think how far away this little island is, how remarkably lush it is, and how radiantly healthy and warm are its people, it's hard to dismiss the suspicion that it still casts a spell on outsiders. Indeed, I suspect Dobuan love charms will never fade away. On my last visit, I found myself walking down a path following the sound of children calling out my name. Was I dreaming? Had I been charmed? I called back and a young woman's voice came trilling through the foliage. "Nancy husat?" "Mi Nancy-yu husat?" Turning the corner, I found Nancy, my namesake, holding her pretty baby girl. Now I know I've been shipwrecked, never to be rescued, from this beautiful place. Kagutoki sinabo'ana gosega'a-Thank you friends.

To reach Dobu, fly to Alotau or Losuia and take a government boat or find a family traveling back and forth who might take a paying passenger. There are no guest houses on Dobu, but, as elsewhere throughout Milne Bay, hospitality comes naturally. For the cost of food and lodging you may find your own Dobuan family-just don't go wandering through the bush!