In the early 2000’s some ancient pottery and canoe hulls were found in the Gulf Provence of Papua New Guinea, near the villages of Epemeavo and Kea Kea. No one knew where they came from or what the story behind them was.
An archaeological team from Monash University and the University of Southern Queensland travelled to the site to investigate. This film tells that story, and the bigger story of people trying to find their past and what has been lost to them.
In 2007 I went to a remote location in the Gulf Province of Papua New Guinea to film an archaeological expedition by Monash Uni and UniSQ. Near the villages of Epemeavo and Kea Kea ancient pottery and canoe hulls had been found, and the expedition was to investigate that. My role was to film everything and put it together as a doco.
It was filmed on HDV and finished on SD. I even to took the finished film to MIPCOM in Cannes, courtesy of Screen Queensland, but had no luck as distributors saw it as an educational film not a commercial documentary.
I was never entirely happy with the end result though and over the last year [2024-2026] or so I’ve been remastering it into HD. At the time HDV was extremely hard to work with in the editing suite – but now it’s a long forgotten format, and modern hardware and software is easily able to handle it. In HDV the data is recorded in non-standard packet sizes which a lot of hardware and software couldn’t decode, and so the best options was to transcode it to SD and finish the whole project in SD. But I knew there was more info in there and always wanted to do the film at its full resolution. So I rebuilt it shot by shot (unfortunately Premiere is a bit evil and not backwards compatible with its old project files). Each shot was then individually colour graded and the narration re-recorded and soundtrack remixed.
And so to cut a long story short I’m really happy with the result – I think it looks and sounds great and is a huge improvement on the SD version. Staying in that village was an amazing experience and I hope I captured just a bit of that in the film. The whole thing though is not really about the archaeology but it’s about a community of people finding their place in the world – after the tumultuous period of contact which largely cut them off from their own history and identity.
Because it was a remote location and I had a limited number of HDV tapes and camera batteries, I recorded virtually no birds. My whole focus was the archaeology and the village – in fact I had my 41st birthday there – it was very memorable. Bird wise though I did see one Papuan Hornbill (Rhyticeros plicatus) – and also two Red-cheeked parrots (Geoffroyus geoffroyi) at the dig site – I tried to film them but didn’t get much as they flew away quickly. I do remember their name in the local language is arri. My most memorable bird experience there though was in a small town before we left by boat to the village – I was walking backwards looking at a Sulphur-crested cockatoo – trying to work out which subspecies it was – when I walked into a lady behind me and trod on her foot – well she gave out to me in no uncertain terms! I didn’t understand a word of it, but knew exactly what she meant! At the dig site you’ll hear a bird calling occasionally with a very musical call – it was in the surrounding rainforest and I never saw it, however Birdnet tells me it is either a Hooded butcherbird (Cracticus cassicus) or a Rusty Pitohui (Pseudorectes ferrugineus).