How Bob Menzies got interested in PNG

On 2 April 1957, the PNG Deputy Director of Education, GT Roscoe, wrote a plaintive letter to the District Education Officer in Wewak. “I used to think,” said Roscoe, “that the Department was passing through a temporary crisis and some day we would be functioning normally, but I know now that crisis is the normal state of the Department and if it is ever to be any different, it will be after I am gone.”

In the straitened circumstances of 1957, Roscoe could hardly be blamed for his despondency, but in fact government education in Papua New Guinea was on the threshold of explosive growth: a rapid expansion, which just the following year he would begin to oversee when he took over as Director.

In 1957 there were between 300,000 and 500,000 school age children in PNG, of which less than 14,000 attended government schools with another 15,000 in registered mission schools. “It is accurate to say that only 10% of the native children of this Territory of school age are under effective instruction,” said Director of Education, Bill Groves.

The Australian Government had been under increasing pressure from the United Nations to accelerate educational development in the Territories but, as The Blatchford Collection reveals, progress in the first half of the 1950s was painfully slow. Then, in late April 1957, Australian Prime Minister Bob Menzies arrived for his first and, so far as we know, his only visit to Papua New Guinea.

Speaking at Ela Beach, Menzies said: “I shall in future provide a much more intelligent audience for [Territories Minister] Mr Hasluck than perhaps I have provided in the past. There is hardly a week in the year in which I don’t find a peremptory knock on my door and my friend Hasluck coming to see me, ingratiatingly, quietly, smoothly, explaining to me by fine logic what ought to be done, and before I know what happens I’ve cost the Treasurer another half million.

"This great Territory represents the greatest single experience that the Commonwealth has ever made outside its own immediate boundaries. We will be judged by it. It is because we know that we will be judged by it that year after year we pay more and more and closer and closer attention to it.”

Perhaps frustrated by the lack of any meaningful budget response to Menzies’ words, and emboldened by the imminence of his own retirement, Bill Groves decided to act. As the South Pacific Post reported in October: “Groves startled the Legislative Council last week with a plea to keep most native secondary students in the Territory and for ₤10 million a year, apart from the normal budget to meet the Territory’s education requirements. Hasluck told the House of Representatives that he believed Mr Groves had not been reported accurately. Groves said, “I can provide plans for the use of that money (₤10 million) tomorrow, and they won’t be elaborate or extravagant. Most will be spent on buildings. We need buildings, buildings and more buildings.”

This was too much for Federal Treasurer, Sir Arthur Fadden [left], who, arguing that his approach to PNG was ‘progressive’, “angrily threatened to close a news conference following press questions about more money for the education of natives in the Territory. He said that they could not get more money for the simple reason that the Commonwealth did not have the money.” An editorial in the South Pacific Post took Sir Arthur to task, suggesting “the Director of Education should be turned loose on him”.

“The Director of Education who is an erstwhile teacher should be encouraged to take his backward pupil, the Treasurer, by the ear and explain in simple terms the exact reasons why ₤10 million should be taken from the Colombo Plan and used to educate our own people. The Directory while he is at it, could also take a thin cane to the Treasurer for that complacent, ill-advised, and untruthful use of the word progressive.”

If a turning point is to be found in the expansion of public education in PNG, 1957 seems to provide it.

See full summaries of the 1957 educational records in The Blatchford Collection.