A War Lession at Ghaobata

By Harold Maesulia. Follow me on Twitter.
I never grew up in Honiara, but at the age of 11 towards the end of my staggering primary years, my father decided to have us moved to Honiara for a reason which I think was a way to forget the sad death of my older sister who died a teen ager in 1996.

We settled in an outskirt community behind Honiara where my father had engaged an uncle to build a three bedroom house for us while we were still on Malaita.

My father was a primary school teacher and although I pretty much hate it, he was never stationary and year after year we would be toasted here and there in different villages just to allow him to do his work.

When we came to Honiara in 1997, the trend continued unstoppably. Although that wasn't new, I had a hard time chewing it because Guadalcanal would never be Malaita and I need a lot of adapting at that time cos even pidgin was still a tongue twister for the country boy who spent all his childhood years grazing with the Kwara’ae language.

My father’s first Guadalcanal post was at Ghaobata Primary School-a 10 minutes drive towards the sea away from the then CDC 1 SIPL substation now called GIPPOL 1.

Isolated and laid back as it was, I came to learn of what to expect from my dad before we moved in for he went there by himself during the first few days to see where we’d be staying.

Getting to bath from the well wasn't a strange thing at all cos we were forewarned by dad. And it took no time at all for us to be acquainted. We mastered the art of pumping water from the ditch to keep life going for the family in just days-a trade which we all shared enthusiastically as a family.

The school lies beside the flowing Ngalibiu River and is home to students from the surrounding grass covered areas as far as Koli Point.

The Guadalcanal planes gave birth to a wonderful piece of flat landscape for the well arranged Guadalcanal school. As we drove into the school’s green driveway on our first day, the piece of cement housed by a locally thatched roof besides the road snapped my attention.

What possibly that could be was my adventurous thought. It was not long when dad offered us that much needed orientation.

“This school had sprouted from the American’s World War II base,” said dad as we entered a galvanized-covered house, which looks to be tattering in age and looks but which would be ours for the whole of 1998.

I missed my rural Malaitan life already but childhood ego got me into discovering and it was from there that I came to know the story of the big piece of cement that stunned me earlier.

A close gaze saw two openings beneath the platform which then was merely a store of coconut husks and a breeding place for mosquitoes. It wasn't at all anything of little significant, although my childish mind then wasn't able to come to that term.

As we piped inside, someone told me that it’s an underground hideout for US soldiers back in the war days when they were in full force securing their airfield known as Koli Field just across the road but which by then was overgrown by grasses already.

As I piped over, a half cylindrical wear out steel depicting something like a house,which seemed to stand all the tests of times, remained upright among the swaying grasses in the cool welcoming Galekana (pidgin version of Guadalcanal) breeze.

Small strips of butamen marking the Koli field could still be visualized back then and while it stood there aimless and seemingly unworthy to most, its treasure was made known to me one day by an adventurous tourist. He came on a bike to the school and requested my dad if he could take a look at the field which seemed to stress as far as Koli point where the sea was.

We followed him noisily as he enjoyed a ride through the beautiful grassland much to our innocent delight.

According to history the airfield was built for b-24 Liberator heavy boomer operations, primarily by the Thirteen Airforce. The single strip run approximately NE to SW (parallel to Carney Airfield) and had several taxi ways off both sides. Surfaced by butamen with metal, Marsden Matting-like material for heavy aircraft it was completed in the middle of 1943 and was an added aid to America's campaign against the Japanese on Guadalcanal.

When we left at the end of the year, my childish mind was happy to escape the weird environment where not much was happening around to entertain a growing child. But now when I look back into history, I am more than glad to have a little bit of taste of what WW II remains look like.

I’ve slept on the very concretes laid by the 1940 soldiers (remember the school houses were just built on top of the original WW II concrete slaps. Not much has been done to change their shapes and sizes) and had come to see some of their neglected aminations which then were obtainable in the coconut plantations.

Whether Ghaobata has seen some sort of changes lately or not is but a thing which is beyond my reach to confirm now. I however wonder whether the locals in the area have ever taken any steps to preserve the historical sites for the future children to see because that's history in a making!

Photos: Top:Courtesy of Guadalcanal.com Above: Koli field today. Photo courtesy of http://guadalcanal.homestead.com/index.html