Boundary Bugger-ups

We’d been in Vanuatu five days and had purchased a car. We were ready to start building the house. Then Joel delivered upsetting news. There was a boundary dispute and our house site was in the middle of it!

Bethel is on kastom land. There is no title on kastom land however there are kastom landholders who had possession of land before written records began not that long ago.

Joel says that the kastom landholders in north-east Efate were worried about evil spirits who were particularly partial to the areas of Ekipe and Epule. The people living to the south avoided the area to the north and they didn’t want evil spirits as neighbours. They offered the land to people from Tongariki who were recognised for their ability to control spirits. Just when this transaction happened is not clear, perhaps 80 years ago, maybe longer. In Vanuatu, descriptions of time are loose. Years, months or numerals are not used as a handy way of describing actual time periods. Hardly anyone knows when they were born or how old they are without referring to a birth certificate, if they have one. Ni-Vanuatu talk about past events in terms of cyclones: so-and-so happened before Pam, or just after Uma.

Families from Tongariki sailed to Efate, they were skilled boat builders and fishermen. They settled on the land, managed the spirits, built houses and happily made gardens and plenty of pikinini. More families came, children grew up to make even more pikinini and today there are more than 2000 people with Tongariki heritage living in north-east Efate.

Joel’s family had a house in Ekipe village, near the beach. In the 1960s, Joel’s father wanted to branch away from the main village and settle his family just south of Ekipe so he ‘made kastom’ with a land holding chief from Epau. Making kastom is like a trade. You can make kastom with things like pigs, cattle, kava, mats and yams. In these modern times, money, vehicles and household goods can also be used to make kastom. You make kastom to your chief to keep him happy, or in exchange for land, or for a bride. Joel’s father built a house for the chief in exchange for the twenty acres of land now called Bethel.

Land boundaries are marked using coconut palms. Sixty years ago, sprouting coconuts were planted about thirty metres apart, to delineate the agreed boundary of land that had been gifted to Joel’s father. Sixty years ater, about one in three coconuts survived, others were rotting stumps though enough remained to clearly see the original boundary. We had removed some of the stumps ourselves when we had the escavator in to clear the block six months before. We’d knocked down six coconuts that were either in the way or due to fall as they were riddled with white ants. The escavator pushed and KER-THUMP! Down they crashed, rocking the ground beneath our feet, coconuts barreling along the ground like bowling balls.

‘That’s how we harvest coconuts in Australia,’ Tim informed the crowd of onlookers.

On hearing the rumour of waetman building a house at Bethel, the landholders paid an unexpected visit to walk the boundary. Unexpected? Nah! We fully expected this to happen and what came next. We just weren’t sure how much it was going to cost or how long it would delay us. They saw our clearing, safely inside the line of old coconut palms, on Joel’s side, and decided that it was actually their land. Before they left, they planted a line of sprouting coconuts right through the middle of the site, claiming the top half of our driveway as well. ‘Nice! We’ve got a new road’, they must have been thinking.

We were pretty sure that they’d just moved the boundary. We looked on Google Earth. Those satellite records go back quite a long time. In the oldest shots, the coconut boundary was clearly visible, right where Joel claimed it should be.

What to do?

We could try to negotiate with the chief who’d lodged the dispute. Joel tried to contact him in person and by phone with no success. Apparently this man had returned to his home on Emau Island, the island lying off the Ekipe coast. Rumour had it that this man had recently gifted the land to his daughter who had just got married. This is how curly things get. It’s like going down a rabbit hole, who knows where it will take you? Was it actually his land in the first place? Who would know and how could it be proven without written records? It’s quite normal for disputed land to be claimed by many different supposed landowners. And purchasing land here in Vanuatu is no guarantee that you won’t end up in the middle of a big, fat land dispute. It happens a lot and is an enormous waste of time, money and emotion.

We could offer money. I suppose it would be seen as making kastom. One of the problems with making kastom is that it’s not always a one-off deal. You are expected to periodically make further ‘payments’ for instance Joel contributes to celebrations held by the kastom land holder donating rice, mats or pigs to funerals, weddings or kastom ceremonies. We didn’t want to go down this rabbit hole. How much would it cost? How much more over time?

We could wait it out. No, we couldn’t. The longer we had to pay rent living elsewhere, the more money it cost. Goodness knows how long we’d have to wait.

Or, we could move the house further inside the boundary, beyond the line of newly sprouted coconuts.

We decided to move the house. Not easy, not cheap but given the pressures of time, the best solution. We moved the site twenty metres north. The escavator would need to come back to push back more jungle and to make another track from where the new boundary cut off the track we’d made six months before. The new site had a bigger slope so the house design needed to be at a higher elevation at the front, backing level onto the slope at the rear. Because of the higher elevation, the house needed to have earthquake bracing underneath. Hear that big bang? That was the budget bursting. And there was more to come.

Joel insisted that there would be no need for us to pay for the escavator to return to clear the site and rework the driveway. He was terribly embarrassed by the dispute and horrified at the price of escavator hire. He organised six men to come up and hack at the jungle with bushknives and a chainsaw. They felled four more coconuts, a few sad looking citrus, pawpaws, a couple of custard apples and a large Whitewood tree which are used to make traditional outrigger canoes. For the next four days they hacked holes through bushes and creepers and discovered a large wasp nest which they disposed of by setting it on fire and running away as fast as possible. After a week of blistering work in sweltering conditions, they hadn’t made much of a dent in that solid mass of vegetation. It had been a valiant battle but my money had always been on the jungle.

Meantime, Tim had made arrangements for the JCB to return as soon as possible. Unfortunately we’d had recent rain, heavy showers on successive days although it had been fairly dry up until then. At the time, our driveway was a 250 metre dirt track created during the JCBs visit in July 2018. Grass had begun to knit over the dirt and we were hopeful that we might not need to add road base. Well, I was hopeful, Tim, not so much, he is more practical about these things. I was trying to avoid spending more money but he was thinking that a fully loaded container truck would have trouble making it up the track in a couple of months when our belongings arrived from Australia, let alone builders vehicles and trucks delivering sand, timber, iron and water tanks.

When it rains here, it often pours, maybe not for long but the downpours can be torrential. At the end of the week, Silas, again acting as the unofficial social director, asked Tim if he would drive everyone about seven kilometres down the road so that they could hunt crabs. This is how to go crab hunting, Bethel style.

1. Make an arrangement with someone who has a truck (Tim) to pick you up at 6:30 pm, just before dark.

2. Put on shoes with closed toes so the crabs won’t nip at them; Crocs (plastic clogs) are good for this.

3. Find tongs to pick the crabs up without getting nipped.

(Points 2 and 3 are my ideas; everybody else goes barefoot and grabs the nippy critters with their bare hands.)

4. Find a torch. It’s getting dark and there’s crabs running around out there!

5. Fit twenty people into the tray of the truck, seven people in the cab – more if they’re small.

6. Set off with high spirits, empty bags to be filled, thinking happy thoughts of crab cooked in coconut cream.

About ten minutes down the road, a massive downpour engulfed us. With so many people onboard, Tim had already been driving slowly but he was forced to a crawl and announced that he was going to drive back to Bethel. Elizabeth, snug and dry in the back seat told him to keep driving. ‘They wet. They no worry,’ she said, thinking that Tim was worried about the people on the back getting wet. It was too late to be worried about that, everyone was thoroughly drenched. Tim was concerned that the situation had suddenly become quite dangerous. Visibility was zero, the rain relentless, the gullies on the side of the narrow road were brimming over and he had the safety of thirty people to worry about. The windscreen wipers beat a rhythm of attack as he searched for a driveway where he could make a turn. Elizabeth, a non-driver, kept egging Tim onwards to the crab hunting grounds. He spotted a muddy track on the left and pulled into it, reversing back onto the highway, then forwards to complete the three-point turn. As he moved forwards and backwards, the crowd in the back squealed as tsunamis rolled across the tray body which was full of water; a mobile wave pool. They weren’t just wet, they were surfing!

Back to Bethel we drove. Driving under overhanging Banyan trees, drops of water the size of limes cracked on the windscreen and pelted our sodden passengers like hailstones, judging by their screams.

Parking under the awning at the front of the restaurant, Tim leapt out of the cab to ask the wet ones in the back, ‘Did you enjoy your swim?’

They did and to prove it everyone danced in the rain, laughing wildly, skins glistening and hair sparkling with water diamonds.

POSTSCRIPT

Two weeks after construction began Joel told us that the dispute had been resolved. The landholder agreed that the original boundary was the correct boundary. They’d made a mistake, an error that cost us thousands of dollars.

I won’t write the words Tim said when he heard that news but be assured that they were colourful.

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