Great stuff, R-J. Bob Campbell is new to me. I couldn't agree more with you comments about Australia's inaction in respect of West Papua.

ARNOLD AP
(Alan Scott)

Where the people sing in the jungle trees
The songs they’ve sung for centuries
Melanesian melodies
Arnold Ap was one of these
A small brown man in the land next door
His voice is silent, he’ll sing no more
I wonder what they killed him for
He loved his people as I love mine
The stories told in dance and rhyme
Songs that came from an older time
Who’d have thought it would be a crime?

In the year of 1968, in the United Nations a big debate
Irian Jaya is a separate state
But there might be copper and there could be gold
There’s all that timber could be cut and sold
Democracy is put on hold
Now Indonesia’s in control
And since the Indonesians came, things can never be the same
Transmigration is the game
But Arnold went around the land with a tape recorder in his hand
Taped his people and the songs they sang
Arnold Ap was a dangerous man

He sent his tapes across the sea
To Honiara and Port Morseby
Melanesian harmony
But sedition takes the strangest shape
Some find it in the music tape
Thrown in jail was Arnold’s fate
Then killed when trying to escape
But his voice is there in the evening breeze
In songs sung down the centuries
Melanesian melodies

Arnold Ap is dead and gone
His spirit lives in his people’s song
People and land and soul are one
And his name will live while the fight goes on
While the fight goes on

I have no YT clip or audio for this one. The above is my transcription from a CD by Alan Scott and Keith McKenry 'Travelling through the storm'. Unfortunately, my copy from Trad & Now came minus the booklet. I think the lyrics are accurate, but I have no idea of the stanza or even line structure. It would be great if someone could correct it.

Arnold Ap

Singing for life

--Stewie.

The booklet doesn't have the lyrics, but it has these notes, written by Keith McKenry:

In 1963 Indonesia gained control of the former Dutch colony of West New Guinea, an act given legitimacy in 1968 by a farcical plebiscite (an "Act of Free Choice") overseen by the United Nations. Since that time there has been an on-going campaign of resistance by some ethnic Papuans to Indonesian rule.

Alan was profoundly moved by the story of Arnold Ap, curator of the Papuan Collection at the Anthropological Museum of Centerwashi University in Irian Jaya. Arnold was killed by Indonesian authorities in April 1983, supposedly while trying to escape lawful custody. He had been held without charges for alleged pro-resistance activities. Seemingly however, his real crime was collecting for posterity the songs and music of his people. "That could have been me," Alan observed, and wrote this, one of his few original songs. Published in the Cornstalk Gazette, July 1990.