One time when I was visiting Sydney from the US, I got into a conversation with an elderly priest who had spent most of his working life on Bougainville Island.
We sat out under the gum trees, watching parrots whir by, and he told me about halting an incipient battle there once, between rebels and government forces, and about a boy he had known who people in the village thought was a fish in human form, and about one time a song was sung from one end of the island to the other without ever stopping, people singing it in turn for weeks, and many other things.
And then he got onto cricket, his favorite sport, which he had played as a boy and young man, quitting the pitch only when he was 40, in a ceremony attended by most of the people he'd worked with on the island; in the course of this event he had burned his cricket bat on the field, and marked everyone's forehead with a smudge of the ash.
We were all laughing, he said, but there was a sweet reverence to the moment which I do not forget. There are more sacramental moments than we know.
Talking about cricket on Bougainville sent him back to one particular cricket match which he had witnessed as a prisoner of the Japanese Imperial Army in early 1943. The Japanese had taken the island in 1942, he said, and he was imprisoned with many other residents, both islanders and Australians.
He continued: It was not an especially harsh camp initially, nothing like the camps in Burma and Thailand, and we were allowed to read and play cricket and conduct religious services. But then as the war turned against the Japanese, and the Allies took a corner of the island, things grew darker. There is a great deal to tell of that time when things grew harsh, but I wanted to tell you about this one day, when we decided to play cricket.
It was a Sunday, and we set up stumps in the morning, and dressed in the best clothes we had left, and made up teams and assigned positions. One captain was a minister, a remarkable man, and the other was a teacher. The camp