This was published 8 years ago
Medical worker Pamela Foley was one of few white women in PNG
In 1946 an adventurous young woman named Pam Bakewell, a member of the Australian Army Medical Women's Service, got on a boat in Sydney to go to Japan to help with the occupying forces.
The boat got as far as New Britain, an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, and she got off to go to midnight mass. She asked the local colonel how to get to the church and he introduced her to another Catholic, an Irish lieutenant, Mick Foley, a very tall young man with very white skin and a shock of very red hair, who took her to the church and brought her safely back, as instructed.
Pamela Foley and her husband Mick enjoyed a remarkable life in Papua New Guinea.
Mick was instantly smitten, although Pam wasn't quite so sure. For one thing, she was already engaged to another man back in Sydney.
Then the medical women were asked to stay in PNG to help with repatriating Japanese troops and Mick continued his pursuit.
When Foley returned to Australia the following year, Mick kept sending letters and then flowers until she decided she was going to break the first engagement and go back to PNG.
Soon afterwards a letter arrived in Sydney for her mother, inviting her to the wedding and, because cloth was still scarce after the war, asking her to remake her debutante dress into a wedding dress. This was duly done and Mick and Pam were married at the beginning of 1948. He had to break the superstition about not seeing the dress before the service, though, as the local mud was so wet and sticky that the groom had to carry the bride into the church.
By then, Mick had been recruited to work in PNG and was a "kiap", a patrol officer. Eventually he became a district commissioner and member of the House of Assembly.
Mick was then stationed in Gasmata in southern New Britain and Foley settled down to make home in a place where there was only one boat every six weeks, a situation that made her inclined to be a terrific hoarder for the rest of her life.
She also quickly started picking up the PNG pidgin.
Mick also learnt pidgin and a number of dialects in his work, and was occasionally the first white man native tribes saw. Once he was speared by a tribal man who thought a man so tall and white-skinned must be the ghost of an ancestor returning and should be seen off.
In Gasmata, Foley was soon pregnant and her mother insisted that she return to Sydney for her first child, a daughter, Kerry. After that, however, she stayed in PNG despite its lack of medical facilities and over the years the family moved on to Kandrian, Rabaul, Kainatu in the Central Highlands, Mount Hagan and Kuniawa.
On the way, she gave birth to her second child, son Christopher, in the back of a Land Rover. A second daughter, Kate, was born on the floor of Kainantu council chambers during a meeting. Mother and baby were carried home by local stretcher bearers ("dokta bois") with police lanterns.
The third daughter, Mary, was born 2½ months prematurely on a trading ship in international waters, delivered by the first mate and christened by Mick with sea water just in case she didn't survive. Once the ship landed, Foley was handed the baby to hold for an 80-kilometre trip by Land Rover to the medical station in Wewak. She did make it to the hospital in Goroka for their final child, Peter.
Throughout their travels, Foley managed life and family as one of the few white women in the highlands, and one of even fewer of the white women who spoke pidgin. She cared for everyone, including junior officers and their families, and the servants, the "hausbois" and "meris". Once when the head boy, Korbul, bashed his third wife, she sent the wife to the hospital and stormed down to the "boyhaus" and when Korbul wouldn't come out and face her, threw rocks on the corrugated iron roof until the noise forced him out. He was threatened with instant dismissal if it happened again.
As Mick moved upwards in his work, Foley also took on entertaining visiting royals and government people. Prince Philip and Lord Mountbatten came at different times and were duly shown around the highlands.
Gough Whitlam, then the Leader of Opposition, stayed on a visit with his wife, Margaret, and Foley's main memory was that Gough wouldn't stop talking and Margaret had to drag him off to bed very late that night.
Paul Hasluck as governor-general and John Gorton as prime minister also stayed over and were looked after by Foley.
She cooked on fuel stoves for all the visitors, memorably on the day that everything went wrong and she managed to flavour the lemon meringue pie with kerosene. The visiting British diplomats ate it bravely, to her mortification when she realised what the odd flavour was.
She loved most things about PNG, but the thing she hated was having to send her children "south" for their high school education, the girls to Loreto Kirribilli and her old school Monte St Angelo, and the boys to St Joseph's Hunters Hill and Pius X in Chatswood.
Then, the early 1970s, Mick developed heart trouble and the family was sent back to Australia. Mick was asked to run the Red Cross in Darwin, but his cardiologist said he could no longer work in the tropics, so the family relocated to Sydney. In 1975, Mick died leaving Pam heartbroken and with three teenaged children still to raise.
She also had to get a job and she started working for a florist because she could go out to the markets for flowers then get the children off to school.
Soon that wasn't enough so she took an administrative position at ASOPA (Australian School of Pacific Administration) in Mosman.
Even after she retired from ASOPA in the 1980s, she continued working at St Michael's Catholic Church in Lane Cove until well into the 1990s.
She also did voluntary work with many charities, but primarily the Legion of Mary, Meals on Wheels and DART. She was also for many years secretary of the Retired Officers Association of PNG, and helped to support many other charities. Until she was 90, she volunteered at the Mater Hospital. She also liked to visit the Chatswood Catholic church and chat in pidgin with the Chinese women who had also lived in PNG.
She and her younger sister, Ann-Marie, a well-known needle-worker in Sydney, were very close and went to mass each week together and had dinner together on Sunday nights.
She did voluntary work until she was 90, still driving herself around. Then she had pneumonia, and two heart attacks but she came through it all.
Her last two years were spent at home, cared for by her family.
Pam Foley is survived by her children Kate, Mary and Peter, son-in-law John, daughter-in-law Emma, five grandchildren, three great-granddaughters and sister Ann-Marie. Her children Kerry and Christopher predeceased her.
Harriet Veitch