This account of Bulolo is the imagining of the first contact between forest and machine; an episode outside the realm of an archive - part fabulation, part reportage. Not a reimagining because that would mean it refers to a verified, written, documented instance, of which there is none. A meeting of forests and giant machines. 8 monoliths, machines, brought into Bulolo Valley by other Junker aircrafts. Machines that inherited the alluvial gold deposits, the forest, the wildlife. Burrowing into the terra, piercing, extracting, felling primary forests, trading in wildlife.
Bulolo
Think of roads for a moment. Roads that come tottering towards forests. Forests that are fast losing any and all agency under the supremacy of a singular species. The supreme who have a language and use that to name these roads, crossroads and gates of forests. Names like Jalan Korea. Jalan - road, a road funded by Korean timber businesses - far away from Korea, on an island in the Pacific called Papua New Guinea.
Now think of invisible roads for a moment. Roads that do not exist on land. Not tar, no lime, no asphalt, not concrete - nothing. Roads that do not come tottering towards forests, but land into a forest. Like a meteor, or lightning, or an air plane named ‘Pride of Bulolo’.
Steel finished, silvery and oblong. A machine. Whirling, making ailing noises as it comes screeching from thin air into the long patch of grassland. Standing stark, jarringly against the forest, having ripped straight long lines in the soil, grass, insects - emitting noxious pheromones.
These days the aircraft Pride of Bulolo comes bearing modern medicine, a small supply of rice and a few passengers. Onlookers, who come from far off villages, stand in awe every Monday. Week after week. To watch this machine descend into the forest. An event that has become a functional marker of time.
Against the backdrop of a lush evergreen rainforest brimming with thousands of living creatures, big, small and microscopic - a machine, a doodad, a glitchy apparatus, a something put together with nuts and bolts - a flying metallic bird. What then a forest, that was home to 42 species of exquisite, marvellous, exceedingly intelligent birds think of this rickety thing? It was no match for the birds under its canopy, their iridescent feathers or their shape-shifting abilities, not a worthy opponent to their handsome nests or stupendous mating calls. No. It was an abomination, an object.
Did it intrigue the forest? Did the raging hormones of the nester think it was its own, like the crow that raises a koel’s young? Or did the foreign object meet with antibodies? Perhaps it evolved like the placenta - immunologically foreign but hiding in plain sight, stealing from the parent body?
Soon enough there were many of its kind, breeding like flies in monsoon. Small, big and colossal. Violating land, forests, matter. G-31, a special strain of the machine, advanced tri-motor, made in Germany - came to Bulolo’s forests in a bid to advance its case - to do what machines do - clear, cut, level, extract, transport - conditioned to be productive.
What is productivity in a forest? There is no 9 to 5. Only life, pulsing in the roots, chirping in the web of interlaced green, peeking from the peat, rumbling in its water. The only marker of time - night and day, life and death.
But machines were here, in hoards. Everywhere. Ethnographers with their compasses, its needles dancing to Earth’s magnetic pull. Documenting what is where. Viable, desirable. They cleared grasslands to make airstrips - pulling fibrous runner roots, invading the network of neatly laid out communication system. Then came the G-31s, airlifting interlocking parts of the monuments called dredges. Piece by piece, they assembled these monuments in the clearing of the forest, the monuments, they unearthed alluvium, soil for specks of gold. 9-5, all days of the week, all hours except lunch and smoke breaks. A piece of forest, now productive, producing, 11000 kgs of gold at the peak of extraction. And with gold, came the hugely viable timber. Came its bird life, feathers, they made glamorous hats. The machine extracted till it couldn’t. Then it took off. Just as it had come. Into thin air.
One can always trace a burning site by running a finger over that meandering line that signifies a road on a map. But places like Bulolo and many others in New Guinea will always seem self immolating. No road ever came seeking them. There are no meandering lines on this map. Nothing really ever happened here. ——
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