The Rev Pos Konea from Papua New Guinea was one of these students, who found international donors to fund his post-graduate studies at the Brisbane College of Theology (BCT).

Now, after four years of tragic mismanagement he is back in the PNG Southern Highlands, disillusioned with church and state, and particularly with the Australian academic establishment.

He is working to provide for nine children – six of his own and three adopted. His wife, Miriam, is travelling the country with a group of women engaged in AIDS education initiatives while Pos attempts to rebuild a house large enough for them all at home in Mendi.

Australia has a sentimental relationship with PNG highlanders through the so-called ‘fuzzy wuzzy angels’ who helped Australian servicemen survive the Kokoda Track during WWII.

PNG students do not qualify for Medicare in Australia

Pos Konea’s people met their first white man in 1951, but Pos is of that same highland stock as the wartime ‘angels’ – sturdy, steadfast, with a primal intelligence that gets the job done... whatever the cost.
Readers will remember that Common Theology financed a trip home for Pos Konea at Christmas 2004. At the time he was living at St Francis College, the Anglican campus of the BCT, in dismal circumstances, paying $80 a week for a room.

The college was no longer the august institution of the past century, had ceased to be residential and the buildings had fallen into disrepair.

Pos had made himself a garden in the grounds to grow some food – sweet potato and greens – because no food was available at the college and the alien fare on offer at the local supermarket was very expensive.

Christmas seemed to be a good time for a trip home to see his wife and children, get a good feed of wild pig, and do some research for his Masters Degree. It actually cost less for us to send Pos home than he would have paid to stay alone on campus over the Christmas holidays.

The downside was that when he returned to the college after the vacation he was told that his room was no longer available.

This surprised him as he had helped the new principal’s wife to establish a garden, and had made himself useful in various ways around the campus during the previous year.

His room was needed for an Anglican, Pos was told. He belonged to the Uniting Church college of BCT and would have to find alternative accommodation.

Pos used to take an hour or so recreation in the afternoon in the common room, now derelict and used as a storeroom, but where there was still a pool table. This got his body moving again after spending hours studying at his desk or in the library. This and the gardening kept him fit. Leaving the campus after a year building up these routines was not easy.

He found lodgings far in the outer suburbs, together with some Asian overseas students. The rent was manageable and St Augustine’s Anglican Parish in Hamilton donated the deposit on his room.

The trip to the college library and for lectures entailed a longish walk, a bus ride, and a train trip with a change of stations. Thus isolated, after several months Pos became ill.

PNG students do not qualify for Medicare in Australia. They are obliged to pay for private medical insurance which is very expensive for a PNG person, and which does not cover real medical expenses.

When Pos saw a doctor she prescribed a proper chair and desk for study. Weeks and months slumped over his ‘papers’ had seriously upset the metabolism of this sturdy highlander. Stress and malnutrition had also played a role.

Under doctor’s orders Pos made a raid on St Francis College to retrieve his own desk from his old room, and found a better chair to sit on during the days he spent poring over library books in pursuit of his Masters Degree.

A leading Uniting Church
theologian has since rated the chapters on tribal society as the kermel of the work

He joined the army of office cleaners who worked the graveyard shift for under-award wages in Fortitude Valley, in order to pay his rent and to buy the odd sack of rice to keep himself fed.

Here we must digress to make it clear that Pos Konea’s English was not good. In fact a lecturer at St Francis College pointed this out as a reason why he was not popular with staff.

I could not help noticing that Pos Konea’s English improved markedly with his confidence. If he felt confused he could be barely comprehensible. But if he felt confident in a friendly environment, his English became almost fluent.

By June 2006 Pos believed he was in the home strait. He had not seen his family for more than a year, but the end was in sight.

Meanwhile, your correspondent had become disturbed by the apparent lack of oversight for this overseas student, who was clearly out of his depth with the study course he had undertaken, who was paying large amounts of money into the college coffers, but who appeared to have inadequate supervision.

The fact that supervision was inadequate had become apparent much earlier, when Pos had asked another tenant on the college campus to type work for submission to his supervisor.

As there was nowhere else to meet they had to do the work in her bedroom, which was not ideal. She was an art student and was grateful for the money. But this work – a PNG highlander writing post-graduate biblical studies in a foreign language – was a bigger job than even her goodwill could cope with.

In August 2005 I phoned the principal of the Uniting Church college of BCT, with which Pos Konea was enrolled. Not only was I concerned about Pos’s welfare, but I was worried about other Pacific Islanders whom Pos had told me had “gone home disappointed”.

The Rev Pos Konea and his wife Miriam.

I asked Dr David Rankin how many overseas students were studying at BCT. He told me that no special arrangements were made for overseas students, and then to my astonishment he put the phone down on me.

Pos Konea’s thesis emerged by July 2006. It was almost twice as long as it should have been. The Revd Canon Gary Fagg (well-known in the Pacific Anglican congregations) word-processed the oeuvre and I did the editing.

A leading Uniting Church theologian has since rated the central chapters ‘Mend Society and Social Justice’, about this PNG Southern Highland tribal society, as the kernel of this work.

The thesis was accepted by Pos Konea’s supervisor with minor corrections.

Pos had to leave the country by the end of July. His visa had run out.

Full of hope in September 2006 Pos applied for a post to teach religious education at Dauli Teacher’s College in PNG.

He wrote: “I have undertaken a Master’s Degree in Theology at Brisbane College of Theology through Trinity Theological College in Brisbane, Australia. I completed the course units between January 2003 and the end of 2004. In 2005 until June 2006 I did my research and wrote a thesis on social justice in the Old Testament (Hebrew Society) compared with social justice in traditional Mend society.”

Eight months later, in April 2007 Pos received a letter from the Dean of the Brisbane College of Theology apologising for the delay but saying that the final decision of the Committee of Deans was that Pos’s thesis was “too flawed to be able to be reasonably corrected”.

In fact, Dr Grahame Martin, one of the external examiners, had submitted that “the degree be awarded to the candidate subject to minor amendments, including typographical errors, being completed”.

However, the other external examiner, the Revd Gregory Jenks, had submitted that: “I am not able to recommend acceptance of the thesis in its present form and I do not think there is any way for the shortcomings identified to be addressed by revision and resubmission”.

So that was that. Pos was invited to appeal, or to accept a diploma instead. But that did not help his job prospects.

Imagine negotiating an appeal from a country which white men first penetrated in 1951. It is more expensive to phone PNG than to call the UK, even if you can find a phone contact in the first place.

It does not make sense to alienate respected citizens of that country

And what was Pos Konea to say to the people who had financially supported his bid for academic success?

At the Anglican Brisbane Diocesan Synod in June 2007 a question was asked to the effect: “How many overseas students studied at the Brisbane College of Theology... in the past five years?

“How many of these students obtained the qualification for which they registered?”

The answer to this question, delivered by the Revd Dr Gregory Jenks, by then Dean of St Francis College, was inconclusive but tended to the effect that no differentiation was made between overseas and Australian students. It appears that BCT makes no special arrangements with regard to accommodation, health or English language skills for Pacific Islanders.

By now some senior churchmen in the Anglican and Uniting Church orbit were concerned enough about the fate of Pos Konea to recommend that somebody should take up the matter as a case of dereliction of duty of care by BCT.

Not only was the student not served in basic matters of health care, subsistence and English language tuition, he was not given what he richly paid for – academic supervision.

But in the end nobody amongst the church hierarchy seemed able to grasp this particular nettle.

Pos Konea comes from significance bloodlines in PNG. Even before this terrible thing happened to him, he was under pressure to leave the church and go into politics, as an influential member of his society.

His relationship with his God is paramount to him and he would have preferred to stay in the church. Now he keeps his distance from the hostile world of western academia and does what he can informally to help PNG onto a stable political path, with particular advocacy for the neglected Southern Highlands.

The western Church has a long history with societies to whom we sent missionaries with the Christian Gospel to bring their peoples into a different way of life.

Fifty years since missionaries reached the Southern Highlands of PNG wars are still fought over boundaries – even a dispute over a chicken recently instigated a two-year war, with many human casualties. It is still a very different culture from our own – and we have much to learn from these people.

When indigenous men and women from societies we have influenced feel called to bring the Word of God to their own people within their own culture by training for ministry in Australia we should encourage them – not expect them to conform to our mores, not exploit and humiliate them to the point that they abandon their ministry.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is talking up the affiliation of Australia with the Pacific. We already have this abiding relationship with PNG because of the epic of the Kokoda Track.

It does not make sense to alienate respected citizens of that country when we could rather be building on the existing foundation of almost a century of careful, costly one-on-one relationships through mission.

Maggie Helass has spent thirty years in cross-cultural ministry and is Editor of Common Theology.