The First Nations Writers Festival (FNWF) is a not-for-profit organisation that celebrates Indigenous voices through literature and story-telling from the Greater Pacific and beyond. Their fourth edition recently took place over 30th-31st May 2025. Baka Barakove Bina is a Papua New Guinean writer whose work touches on questions of place, home and the regional distinctiveness of the Pacific. We’re always fascinated by the overlaps between fields of art and literature with the design world, so we asked Baka to share some thoughts about them!

Timothy Alouani-Roby: Please tell me a bit about yourself first – what do you do and where are you from?

My name is Baka Barakove Bina but walk around as Baka Bina. I’m a grey lauto going silver very fast. I work at the National Court in Port Moresby as Deputy Registrar – National Court. I’ve got a few more years before I take my retirement.

Since 2000 I have been spending most of my non-working working time trying to write about my asples [village] with its environs, including and involving my tokples [language] and its stories. My other half is Emily Sakepe, and we have four grown-up children and a horde of tumbuna pikinini or bubus, a.k.a. grandchildren. We do collaborate on some of the stories and where she has worked on the stories, she is acknowledged, and the authorship attributed to her.

I have a  high school teaching diploma, another diploma in Magisterial Studies, a Bachelor of Laws Degree and a Post Graduate Diploma in Court Administration plus a horde of other workplace training certificates. I do very little lawyering.

My place is a spot in Kotiyufa village, which is 11 kilometres west of Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province. That spot includes a Tok Ples, called Tokano.  I can also hear but not speak several other Tok Ples bordering on my place.  I have talking fluency in my Tok Ples, Tok Pisin and Tok Inglis and can write a little bit in Tok Ples, and well in Tok Pisin and Tok Inglis.

Where my Tok Ples is, is where my place is, and it is where my heart is, and it is where my ples is – and with it a hope I will be buried when I die. My Tok Ples is set in a defined boundary set by geographical features. It defines me as a person, and it also provides me with the attributes that I have as a person.  

My place also defines what type of writings I do. My place is in the valley with all grasslands and a few muddy patches and four little streams draining through it. I have one small hill and a big river that flows through one side of it.  I have no big jungles though genealogy shows that I own four sides of a bigger mountain and vast bushlands and forest. I have not been to that place yet, so I don’t know what it looks like, though there are a lot of ballads of that place including an alleged small lake.

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Your writing delves into questions of place in Papua New Guinea. What makes place an important concern in your work?

Coming back to my place, the national highway cuts my place/village into two. With the highway comes a lot of traffic and a lot of people from different Tok Ples. In order to maintain communication with all these people with different Tok Ples, we all speak Tok Pisin to each other and we thus communicate.

With this traffic, it means we don’t often use our Tok Ples, especially with the growing young ones. We now talk to them more and more in Tok Pisin and so they are more fluent in Tok Pisin and not in Tok Ples.

Another issue I have with my place is it is in close proximity to town. The town is growing, and it is now two kilometres big, but I see it expanding to 15 or 20 kilometres in my lifetime. It may come to a stage where my village is no longer a village but part of a suburb following the national highway.

Now you can read into that a lot of changes and a lot of losses: 

1. There will no longer be the environment that I grew up in. The vast grasslands are now replaced with gardens and the mud plains are all dug up to make more gardens. These gardens are fenced in now so walking through them is not possible.
2. In old times, gardens were made for self-sufficiency so if there was a loss here or there it did not matter. Now every garden is made for the markets and if a child or children walked through and for hunger picked an ear of corn or kaukau, all hell would break loose with a lot of litigation and compensation. I write of the old times when children were children for the sake of being children. I write of times when children went into the grasslands to play and have fun. I write of times when children went to the mud plains and rolled in mud. I write of times when children made water and togoban slides from banana stems down sides of cliffs and sheer drops. I write of times when children did rock fishing at our only river and whirlpool. That means that we now have to change our way of living so that we incorporate these new worldly things.
3. With the town encroaching, that will mean a lot of tin houses and the round house has sort of lost its appeal. The roofing for the houses used to be kunai grass thatching but, with less and less kunai grass growing in the wild, there has to be a substitute – and the tin roof is that. The tin roof means a redesign in the shape of houses and rooms, the ability to make smoke in the house and the story-telling that would have happened around the fireplace and where children can sleep in with other children and be told stories.

I would like to do my bit to record what we had and will lose eventually. This little that I write down, I would like to record them in stories so that they can be enjoyed and not be some banal reading materials. I would like to give names and characters to the stories. It is the capture of innocent moments in time that are the important features to my writing of my place stories and my experiences in them.

What are some of the distinctive qualities of place in Papua New Guinea, or perhaps in specific regions?

You can join me to celebrate ‘the Goroka in me’ (Linda Bina 2023) as you read through some of my works. [It’s] testament to a feature that is endemic to Melanesians. Their distinctive ‘ples’ makes up their identity, physical features and the mannerisms that make a person. It is ‘the ples’ that make ‘a ples’ a unique feature for the person, and I guess it is in the mind of a person. It is the make-up of the person and the language of that particular person.

I come from Goroka in the Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea.  I speak the Tokano language which is the tokples for the Yuhu-yuhos who constitute seven villages, and they live slightly north-west of Goroka Town.  And that is where I relate and place my stories. You read my stories and in it you will find ‘the Goroka in me’.  And if you pool us together we somehow all look similar and act in a similar manner, and we all laugh about the same things. These very same things were not be something to laugh about in another place and language.

What I find distinctive may not be similar to another. In my Tokano Tok Ples a couple of villages use a term that is distinct to [them] and a speaker can be identified as being from one of the three villages by the repeated use of this phrase. Another unique feature of these three villages is that the skin tones of people from them are lighter. Apart from that, the customs and practises are all the same, we build similar types of round and square houses and so on.

What insights can writers bring to questions of place, home and belonging?

Writing tu and trikopi is what I am trying to do with my short stories. Why writing in Tok Ples? Who else will do it? Those of us speaking our Tok Ples now are some of the last ones speaking it. Tomorrow our language will die. As each active speaker stops speaking it and instead uses Tok Pisin and Tok Inglis in his or her communication with their children, their Tok Ples dies a natural death. Also, the ennui of waiting for someone to start writing in tokples – or the tokples will do the natural thing and die, because no person is writing in it.  

Some languages will survive – like Enga, Kuman and Kuanua – because they have a bigger population of their people still speaking their language, but most others will die or evolve into some creole… The new may sometimes not have the uniqueness of the place, home and belonging imbued into it.

Why do I write only Goroka stories? Those are my experiences. I don’t have a sea that I can craft stories around; however, I have rivers and creeks and pools and endless hours walking, swimming in and making mumus there. I don’t have jungles or big mountains, just kunai patches, gulleys, ridges and a small mountain – Mitega. My stories are for my language and are based around my own lands and rivers – my environment. So don’t expect sea or huge waterfall stories as I have none to tell. I don’t have animal stories except for piglets and mongrel dogs, bar the wild ones that we’d catch to convert into a tasty meal.

Building materials are sourced from nature. A house may last for 20 years with the kunai roofing repatched two or three times in its lifetime. If the drainage around the house were done properly, the house posts could stand in the dry soil for ages. If they were fortunate to have been built using Yomba (iron tree) posts, that house could stand forever with the walls and roofing replaced every decade. 

I will strive to write my one bit and can only wish for a writer from every language group in the greater Pacific now rather than later, because, tomorrow, we may not have a story to relate to. As a writer writes about his place, he or she will draw the reader into his or her place and home and what belongings they would have. It will be written into the story.

How important is diversity in terms of place and home?

Are there more stories to be told? I say yes, there are plenty to be told. A writer is a story-teller – all it needs is for the writer to have a little bit of imagination, some patience, discipline, and a dogged desire to sit down and join some words together in a sentences grouped into paragraphs and chapters. Before the writer realises, there will be some material to be published. I tell myself, time and time again, that the shortest sentence in the Bible is a two-worder… Jesus wept. It is no-brainer to string two words to be a sentence. It will be a start. It just needs dogged additions of more short sentences to make a cohesive paragraph.  

And that is where diversity is featured. Our ability to write our stories will show the diversity. Each and every writer can feature their place, their Tok Ples and their customary practises and we will have 860-plus diversity.

Do you have any favourite places, landscapes or works of architecture that you’d like to share?

I can only speak for myself, and I’d rather dream of having a cassock strung between two coffee trees in the shade of some clustered casuarina trees and one side recessing into a side of a gully. Somewhere a small freshwater stream would be flowing out a bamboo pipe, with birds chirping away the day serenading and lulling a person to sleep the day away. That is my favourite spot in the garden at Sogopex, where in my young days I had gone gardening with spades, bush knives and a pack of old Readers Digests.

I had looked down the small incline to dream of my own ‘Ijopega haus’ and woe the huge expense it was going to cost to build one. It could definitely house all my relatives.

One can have dreams, surely – and in my way with a ganine – MITA GHOIHA KUPII WHI-II HAHAA!!! and the women will ululate ‘ou ou ou’.

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Read this interview with Australian author, Amanda Lohrey, about similar questions of home and place in her writing