How the Sound of Music’s von Trapp family ended up teaching music in PNG
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A couple of years ago I was on a reporting assignment on the island of Daru, Papua New Guinea. On a tight budget, I'd arranged accommodation at the local Catholic convent.
That's where I met the formidable Sister Doctor Martin Joseph, a Yorkshire-born vascular surgeon who had spent almost 30 years working in PNG. She had just been appointed to run the local hospital, then collapsing under the burden of what would soon be identified as the worst outbreak of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the world.
Sister Jo was something of a legend, so I was trying to persuade her to give me an interview about her PNG adventures. She would have to talk to her provincial [supervisor] about that, she briskly deflected, but dangled one intriguing morsel.
She recalled a trip she made a few years earlier, flying by sea plane to a beautiful, remote island in Milne Bay, to spend a few days performing surgery at the local hospital. Come Sunday she had gone to mass in the local open-walled church under the palm trees.
Papua New Guineans are enthusiastic worshippers and love to sing. Their choirs are full-throttle and often fabulous. But this one was something else.
"They were singing Palestrina motets," Sister Jo said.
They sang Bach. They sang a full Latin liturgy, impeccably.
"Who taught you these songs?" she asked at the end of mass.
"Maria von Trapp," they told her.
"As in 'How do you solve a problem like Maria'?" I asked. Yes, and no.
Returning to PNG for various assignments over the next couple of years, I poked around trying to find out more about the choir trained by the famous von Trapp family. I was curious about this unknown epilogue to a story that had struck such a chord in my culture and era.
I also wanted to tell this story as something of an antidote to the skewed picture created by my own work in PNG.
For several years I had been telling grim stories of disease and dysfunction and corruption. I wanted an excuse to share some of the country's glorious madness and to celebrate some little parable of the love and warmth and spirit and surprises you stumble over everywhere in "the Land of the Unexpected".
The woman played by Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, who became Baroness Maria Augusta von Trapp, stepmother and matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers, visited Fergusson Island after the singing troop disbanded in 1957.
So too did her stepdaughter Maria Agatha Franziska Gobertina von Trapp, who was portrayed as Louisa in the movie, and two children from the baroness's marriage to the widowed Georg — Rosmarie and Johannes. The four of them travelled to PNG as Catholic missionaries.
Baroness Maria stayed on the island for several weeks, best I can determine after talking to the few older locals who recall her time there, before travelling on to other parts of PNG with Monsignor Franz Wasner, the family's longtime musical director. But the grown children stayed behind in the main village of Budoya for several years.
Rosmarie taught small children at the village school. Johannes, a carpenter, helped build a new church and ventured into the wild interior with the men to hunt pigs. And Maria Franziska stayed, on and off, for around 14 years.
In 1965, when the rest of the world was captivated by the Hollywood rendering of her family story, Maria was living in Budoya under a range of fecund mountains nothing like the ordered Alps.
It's difficult to imagine a life further removed from the one she left in pre-World War II Austria, or where the family had settled and built fame and fortune in the US.
On Fergusson, she and her siblings lived as islanders, in huts made of bush materials without electric power, running water, doctors, communication with the outside world other than the mail boat and the radio. They ate what they grew in their gardens or fish brought in by the men in their outrigger canoes.
This younger Maria, in creating the choir, turns out to be a kind of real-life tropical version of the fabled Julie Andrews character. She travelled the length of the island on foot and, where she could find a track, on her bicycle, rounding up altos and sopranos and basses and training up the choir that endures to this day. The old people speak very fondly of her, and of her siblings.
Sometimes they sang in Latin, sometimes she translated hymns to local language, and sometimes she borrowed the melodies of local songs and superimposed on them the lyrics of her imported spirituals.
Today, under the exacting direction of choir mistress and nurse Cabrini Lemeki, who Maria adopted and educated, the aging original recruits pass on their knowledge to their own children and grandchildren.
Cabrini takes them through their paces using the methods Maria taught her, and with the help of the von Trapp books of sheet music which have survived, miraculously, mildewed and with the odd gecko egg squashed in the pages.
Topics: music, arts-and-entertainment, history, community-and-society, papua-new-guinea, austria
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