When people ask about my childhood, I instantly tilt my head and grin. You see, it’s the easiest answer in my world.
I grew up on a coffee plantation in the Wahgi Valley, Papua New Guinea, until I was eleven. That’s where this starts.
The highlands shaped how I see – the particular quality of light before the mist burns off, the women arriving at first light with bilum bags across their shoulders, the way life continued around and through everything. When we left, I spent years trying to understand what I’d actually lost. It wasn’t the place. You can’t lose a place you were always going to leave. It was the lens.
Wahgi is what happens when I follow that lens honestly.
The Journal is the heartbeat – essays on artists, objects, places, and cultural practices that refuse easy categories. Agnes Martin’s solitude. Ryuichi Sakamoto’s between-worlds sound. What bilum bags teach about creativity inside constraint. Film, music, surf, memory, heritage – covered with the intensity of someone who actually cares, not someone meeting a deadline.
Some essays become something to wear. Most just become good conversations.
This isn’t a content account. It’s a living memoir of curiosity – of questions I couldn’t leave alone, of things I didn’t know I didn’t know until I started looking.
— Chauny
