In a Papuan village, among my family and clan and the living ecology that sustained us, I simply existed as a human being, rooted in ancestral land and bound by kinship. I was unaware that 'Papuan' or 'black' were words that could ever be used to describe someone like me. These were not identities I inherited. They did not exist in the cosmos I was born into. I was not yet a category. I was just a person among my people on my land, part of a memory older than any government.
That world ended the moment I began to leave it.
As I moved outwards — into the newly imposed Indonesian government districts, white missionary compounds and the growing urban settlements — I discovered a different reality waiting for me. Finally, I arrived in the coastal towns and cities administered by Indonesian institutions, populated by Indonesian settlers and policed by Indonesian security forces. It was at the threshold of this new world that I was first given names: 'mountain man', 'primitive', 'Irian', 'Papuan', 'black', 'Christian'. Embedded inside each of those names was a verdict that had not been disclosed to me in advance: backward, uncivilised, Stone Age, ignorant, dangerous, less than fully human.
I did not know why the world was built this way. I had no cosmology to explain it, no vocabulary to describe it, and no grammar to condemn it. I only knew, with the mute certainty of the body, that something had already been decided about me before I arrived; that the world I was entering had long been organised to criminalise, demonise, marginalise and misrepresent people like me; and that I had walked into an architecture of judgement, mistaking it for an open road.
Then I left West Papua altogether and came to Australia.
At first, it seemed almost gentle. I was new and naïve, and I was welcomed into Christian communities whose warmth was often genuine — love, care and compassion were offered freely, and I received them. For a time, I belonged — or at least I believed I did. I went along, Christian and fine. But slowly, beneath the surface of that welcome, an old pattern began to resurface: the quiet architecture of being treated as 'other' — as lesser, undeveloped, half-civilised, half-Christianised, half-human, not quite educated, not quite moral, not quite arrived.
It was only later, when I experienced the living conditions of the first tribes, clans and families in Aboriginal Australia, that everything began to make sense. I understood, without yet being able to explain how, that my story was already intertwined with theirs. Something ancient and unspoken connected us across the oceans that neither of us had chosen to cross. The puzzle of why I had always been seen, treated and measured differently began to take shape, piece by piece.
But even then, I had no power. No language. No vocabulary. There was no frame large enough to hold what was happening to me.
The more I moved through the wider human family — Pacific Islander, Asian, European; all supposedly gathered beneath one loving, heavenly God — the more fractured that family appeared. The promise had been 'one big happy family made in the image of God'. But the lived reality was something else entirely: a world quietly engineered to make people who looked like me feel guilty for existing — guilty of a crime we had never committed. I have since come to understand what that crime actually was. Being born as myself. It was having a body that could be labelled as black, Papuan, primitive, cannibal, savage and pagan — a body that was sentenced before it had done anything at all.
I now fully realise that my personal experience of rejection, demonisation and criminalisation was never merely personal. It was just one thread in a much larger tapestry: the global rejection, demonisation and criminalisation of black humanity. The same system that labelled me as 'primitive' in the highlands of West Papua drove the mass enslavement of black Africans across the Arab world and the 'New World' from the 1400s to the 1800s. It is the same architecture that has enslaved black peoples across Papua, Melanesia and Oceania, first by Asian powers and later by European ones. This same architecture lies behind the genocides and extermination campaigns waged against Black and Indigenous peoples in Australia, the Americas, Canada and New Zealand. This same architecture persists today in the ongoing rejection, demonisation and dehumanisation of black people, both individually and collectively, by almost every nation on this planet.
What happened to me in a government outpost, a mission compound or a settler city was not an isolated cruelty. It was a local instance of a global narrative written long before I was born and enforced by a hundred flags. This narrative is aimed with remarkable consistency at anyone whose body carries a colour and memory that the world has already condemned.
I now fully realise that this demonisation has been carried forward into the present day in the form of an extermination campaign against the Papuan people by Indonesia. This campaign is quietly and profitably underwritten by the industrialised world and is not incidental to the occupation of West Papua. It is its fuel. It is the underlying reason, motivation and presumption on which Indonesian rule rests and on which the exploitation of Papuan land, forests, mountains and mineral wealth by Asian and Western powers has been built. A people must first be unmade as fully human before their land can be taken as a mere resource. The demonisation is not a side effect of the extraction. It is its precondition.
Papuan agency itself has therefore been the target all along: the capacity to think, speak, know, understand, decide, choose and simply ‘be’ has been disabled or removed outright, so that what remains is a population imagined only as a problem to be managed or a territory to be mined — never as a people entitled to author their own existence.
This realisation marked the beginning of a lifelong intellectual journey. Every publication on this website stems from it. I did not set out to become a writer or a philosopher. I started with a smaller, harder question — the only one that mattered: Why?
For more than thirty years, I have followed this question wherever it has led me: into philosophy, anthropology, indigenous knowledge systems, history, cosmology, religion, politics and the deep architecture of civilisation itself. I was never really writing about myself. I was trying to understand what had happened to my world — to my people, my land, my memory and, ultimately, myself. I wanted to know what had been done, by whom, through what machinery and across how many generations to turn a human being into a category and a category into a verdict.
Everything I have written since has been an attempt to answer that question. This website is one small part of that ongoing endeavour — a fragment of memory, refusing extinction and offered back to the world that tried to erase it.
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