Keith Jackson & Friends: PNG ATTITUDE

The land of the misdirected: a necessary history

JOHN FOWKE

IN APPARENT CONTRADICTION of the sense of what I said yesterday, I want to respond to Barbara Short’s comment on my Melanesian Way piece.

Answers from Papua New Guinea voices may be more interesting but may I step in to address what Barbara said, that "something has made them powerless; I need a PNG person to explain.”

The thing which has disempowered the ordinary people of PNG is the first of Australia’s two great mistakes in its guardianship of the nation-to-be, TP&NG.

I have drawn attention many times to the fact that political education in TP&NG was confined almost entirely to the example presented wherever a Local Government Council (now an LLG) was established.

How Anzac Day was marked in TPNG 50 years ago

 

Our sacred land and the lies, suffering & death

LEONARD FONG ROKA

ON 14 SEPTEMBER 2012, the blog New Dawn on Bougainville reported a story entitled Situation tense in Bana after a person was killed in the Jaba area of Panguna as a result of a conflict that started some three months earlier.

The conflict was a land related issue at the former Bougainville Copper Limited’s farm site at Mananau, purchased and settled by the Nagovis mountain people of Damane in the hinterland of the Bana district.

The crisis and death of the late Kakaleu was over a piece of land that over time had passed through a number of hands. Thus, as we know of oral history, it had been subjected to ‘addition and subtraction’ over time.

In my observation, both the killers and the killed were victims of an issue that went wrong somewhere down history lane, affecting a generation that adopted wrong stories and wrong land boundaries.

Don Bosgard, aristocratic president of the Angoram Club

DAVID WALL

ACCORDING TO CARDINAL NEWMAN “it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain.” If this is so, Don Bosgard more than fitted the bill.

It was my privilege to have known Donald Gordon Bosgard over a number of years in the Sepik District and after he retired to Sydney.

To say that he was of the old school would be an understatement. A dignified and refined man, always impeccably dressed and softly spoken in a clipped Anglo-Australian accent.

The Telefomin murders revisited: the gritty detail

Arguably 6 November 1953 was the blackest moment in the history of Kiaps in Papua New Guinea. BILL BROWN recounts the details of the day when two patrol officers and two policemen were murdered, and its controversial aftermath….

PHIL FITZPATRICK’S RECENT PNG Attitude article Days of the Kiap – The Savage Murders of Telefomin is heady stuff and a splendid narrative of those terrible events, but some of the assertions wander away from the facts. 

Back then we carried forward the fight against malaria

DAVID WALL

THIS PHOTOGRAPH WAS TAKEN BY my wife Deborah in 1973 while we were on patrol in the Pora Pora census division of the Angoram sub-district.

It shows John Pandum and me taking a blood sample in one of the half-yearly anti-malaria visits to the area.

The people of Pora Pora were prone to a lot of sickness: malaria, pneumonia, tropical ulcers, TB, influenza and many minor complaints.

It was amazing what could be done with penicillin, chloroquine and a few other simple remedies.

The helicopter attack on Kupe & Kepetu's capture

LEONARD FONG ROKA | Supported by the Jeff Febi Writing Fellowship

Leonard Roka continues his occasional series of first person accounts of events in the late 1980s civil war between PNG and Bougainville. These stories, untold until now, describe uninvestigated matters and articulate the traumas that continue to be experienced by many Bougainvilleans. Leonard witnessed the air attack on Kupe of July 1989 which is the subject of this article.

LOUIS KEPETU REMEMBERS WELL the words of the first Papua New Guinean soldier who angrily approached him.

‘Tete bai yu dai, yu stink kok. Kuapim Francis Ona! Acting Rambo nabaut lo kain liklik ailan hia olsem tru yupla gat kain gun olsem army gat’ (Today you will die, you stinking penis. Fuck Francis Ona! Acting Rambo on a tiny island like this as if you have the type of guns the army has).

Kepetu was then assaulted until he was weak by every soldier who hand a chance to punch-out his anger on him.

The genesis of conscripted teachers in the PIR, 1966-73

DAN WINKEL & TERRY EDWINSMITH

HENRY KEPPLE DACHS was a twin born to Jose and Elizabeth Dachs at Stanthorpe, Queensland in the 1930s.

After primary school he was sent to Brisbane Grammar School as a boarder with his twin brother Mathew (Matt). 

Both excelled academically, on the sports field andas Army Cadets. Both applied for and won scholarships to Duntroon.

Henry pulled out of attending the Royal Military College about five minutes before the train left South Brisbane Station, electing instead to do medicine at the University of Queensland.

The day the army torched Kavarongnau village

LEONARD FONG ROKA | Supported by the Jeff Febi Writing Fellowship

IN 1988, WHEN THE GOVERNMENT of Papua New Guinea was losing control of anti-Bougainville Copper and anti-PNG militancy in central Bougainville, its last hope was the defence force.

The military landing in Bougainville was expected to eradicate the militants. Starving out the Panguna rascals was the aim.

A BCL manager of the time is alleged in a US court case to have “encouraged the continuation of the blockade for the purposes of starving the bastards out.”

Arriving in Bougainville in May 1989, after a few setbacks, the PNGDF operations commander on Bougainville, Colonel Leo Nuia, gave a ‘shoot to kill’ order.

Under this direction, some Bougainvillean men were killed, women raped, there was torture, domestic animals killed, homes torched and gardens looted.

Days of the kiap: How we built Baimuru’s biggest canoe

CHRIS OVERLAND

I WAS POSTED to Baimuru Patrol Post in early 1970. The officer-in-charge of the station was Assistant District Officer Peter Harrison, newly transferred from Milne Bay District.

Despite my junior status as a kiap, I found myself placed in the role of advisor to the Baimuru Local Government Council. 

While what I knew about local government could be written on the head of a pin, I had sufficient understanding of basic finance and accounting systems to rapidly ascertain that the council was perilously close to broke.

Goya Henry: One-legged flier & PNG trawler skipper

DAVID WALL

WAS GOYA HENRY (1901-74) the first person to fly a plane under the Sydney Harbour Bridge?

I strongly suspect that he was – but, for me, more than that he was a truly outstanding man and a friend.

The remarkable thing about the old Papua New Guinea was that you were given the opportunity to meet people like Goya.

The Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia recalls him as a “particularly colourful litigant in the 1930s” and as “the first person with a wooden leg to be granted a flying licence - who delighted in stunt-flying under Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Old Custard Cock – mastarot & bridge-building isolate

JOHN FOWKE

THERE HAS BEEN SOME CHAT in PNG Attitude on Ludwig Schmidt of New Guinea. Allow me to cast some additional light on the subject.

The Schmidts were father and son, both Ludwig. The first Ludwig came in the gold rush days to Wau-Bulolo and then followed the interest created by the first flyover of the Wahgi Valley in 1932.

In 1933, a number of individuals or partnerships, all prospectors, applied for permission to enter what was then known as the Upper Purari.

As the only government presence then was the semi-permanent patrol camp established at present-day Kainantu, this was equivalent to that part of the Eastern Highlands east and south-east of the Benabena River.

Among the 33 applicants who received permission and who did enter the Upper Purari was Ludwig Smith Snr and his teenage son, known as Wiggy.

Attack at Numbaira: Don’t fight, we have rifles....

BOB CLELAND

I HAD BEEN ON A ROUTINE census, health survey and general administration patrol in the Taiora Division south of Kainantu in 1956.

We progressed well from village to village and when close to the southern extremity of the area I heard reports of tribal fighting further to the south at a village called Numbaira.

Two policemen I’d sent to have a careful look were warned off with fearsome threats and derisive insults, so I decided I’d better take the whole patrol in to investigate.

The Numbaira people lived on the headwaters of the mighty Purari River in the same valley system as the fearsome Kukukuku peoples. They had a reputation as warriors who loved a fight and resented intruders onto their land. They had attacked a Government patrol some years earlier.

Life of a young PO: case of the Baimuru patrol post

JOHN FOWKE

THIS PHOTOGRAPH IS OF Baimuru Patrol Post in the days when patrols were done and justice, dispute resolution, sanitary maintenance instruction and all sorts of other advice physically taken to the villages four times a year.

At the patrol post, government services including a branch of the Commonwealth Savings Bank and the Post Office were managed by me in addition to daily courts, public works, maintenance of airstrip and station surrounds.

These were provided under my own occasionally wrathful oversight. We spoke Motu to each other on the station, and we considered ourselves a team with a reputation to keep and with a job to be done.

Collision of values: how advertising came to the NBC

KEITH JACKSON

I ARRIVED IN WEWAK in November 1963. I was 18 and had just finished teacher training at the Australian School of Pacific Administration.

A decade later, by the end of 1973, I’d spent three years teaching in Simbu, a year editing school publications in Konedobu, two years as an ABC producer at its Boroko studios, and four years managing government radio stations in Rabaul and Bougainville.

I’d also just returned from six months as a UNESCO consultant in Java - and was very glad to be back in Papua New Guinea.

Independence wasn’t far away. The National Broadcasting Commission was about to be inaugurated. It was an exciting time.

Reflections on the Jimi road & the role of the kiap

JIM MOORE

IN 1965, I BEGAN MY kiap career as a Cadet Patrol Officer in Minj, being promoted to patrol officer and  posted to Tabibuga Patrol Post in the Jimi in late 1967.

The Jimi and the Waghi valleys are separated by the Waghi-Sepik divide, very rough country indeed - uninhabited and virtually uninhabitable.

Public Works had been asked to look for a possible road route from the Jimi to the Waghi and after aerial surveys said, “Forget it”. 

Tin gods, tin medals and the ineptitude of Canberra

PHIL FITZPATRICK

THERE IS A CURIOUS EPISODE in the history of the kiaps which is currently playing itself out in the hallowed halls of Canberra.  Indeed, it may be the final chapter.

It involves the issuing of a service medal and is the culmination of much lobbying by a small band of ex-kiaps led by Chris Viner Smith. 

The outcome has been an agreement to allow ex-kiaps to apply for the Police Overseas Services Medal, normally issued to Australians in civil service, like the police, who have served overseas.  Police officers involved in RAMSI, the intervention on the Solomons, are eligible for instance.

The basis of the kiap’s claim is their role as commissioned officers in the pre-independence Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary.  This, of course, is simply a technical device to enable the issue of the medal.  Kiap service involved considerably more than a policing role; some would argue that the police role was, in fact, very minor.

When the campaign began, and I’m not sure what kicked it off, there was a flutter of debate about the whole idea. Support and non-support for a medal was about evenly divided among those ex-kiaps who heard about it.

Hellman’s story: The yellow convoy arrived at dawn

LEONARD FONG ROKA

ON THE AFTERNOON of 3 July 1989, a troop of Kupe men and a kid were returning home after a day of boozing in the Siae area.

As they reached Kaino, dusk covered them and the child could not move on so they found a deserted house on the fringes of Kaino and spent the night under it.

At dawn the next morning, 4 July 1989, one of the Kupe men got up to pee and discovered the arrival of a convoy of yellow Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) vehicles that were used by the PNG Defence Force (PNGDF) in its operations.

He woke his men and they disappeared into a nearby cocoa plantation, leaving behind the bales of rice and tinned fish they were supposed to camel home to Kupe.

As the men descended through the Kaino brae towards the Bovong River, Karebu, a Bakabori man married in Kupe, was making his way to Bakabori village to finalise the harvesting of his cocoa plot.

New website delves into the Bougainville conflict

KRISTIAN LASSLETT

I HAVE SPENT the best part of a decade studying the Bougainville conflict. To that end I have interviewed over 50 senior officials from Australia, Papua New Guinea and Bougainville Copper Ltd.

Also, I have gone through thousands of documents including internal records from BCL and PNG and public records in Australia. Given the suffering and hardship caused by the conflict, it deserves nothing less than rigorous scholarly accounts.

Now I have developed a website which features a case study on the Bougainville conflict, focusing on the period 1987-90.

The historical account includes primary and multimedia materials including the aforementioned records and interviews as well as documentary footage from Bougainville and letters written by the Panguna Landowners Association and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army during 1988-89.

Norm Liddle, engaging, likeable, occasionally stoned

DAVID WALL

IN THE COURSE OF OUR LIVES we meet people who are readily forgettable but a select few we never forget. In this category I put Norm Liddle.

Norm was that type of Australian, particularly Queenslander, now pretty thin on the ground – a man with a wide and varied experience of life who was readily adaptable to whatever circumstances he found himself in.

A friend of mine described Norm as "accomplished musician, skilled taxidermist, reptile hunter, ex-serviceman in both the army and the air force and pioneer forestry surveyor". That sort of man.

Whether in the Australian outback, cutting bush timber, fixing machinery, serving in RAAF and AIF or living on the Sepik River and in the Highlands, he took all in his stride.

I first met Norm in 1966 at Angoram. He was living in what was known as the Ex-Service Camp at the far extremities of the town boundaries on the banks of the river. It was there he had the beginnings of a sawmill.

Pathway to militancy: Growing up in Oune politics

LEONARD FONG ROKA | Supported by the Jeff Febi Writing Fellowship

Oune is a small enclave of people between Avaipa (Eivo) and Ioro (Panguna) with its own Nasioi dialect. The enclave covers the villages of Onove, Enamira, and Darenai that surround what is now referred to as the Panguna mine’s ‘upper tailings zone’ of the Kavarong River. Today, the area is commonly called the Tumpusiong Valley and referred to as being ‘along the dirt’ in Nasioi because of the mine waste that destroyed the valley.

The area is home to the late ABG president, Joseph Kabui, his elder brother, Martin Miriori, and another notable figure in Bougainville political history, the late Luke Robin, whose murder in Goroka in the early 1970s alongside his Buin brother, Peter Moini, resulted in increased anti-PNG and BCL feeling. Compared with most of the Panguna District, Oune is an area with many educated people.

AS THE MINING GIANT, Conzinc Rio Tinto Australia (CRA) was clearing the jungles and digging up the mountains of Panguna in the 1960s, downstream the Kavarong River daily dumped tonnes of waste on Clement Nabiau and his Oune people.

They watched as their food sources in the river and along the surrounding banks were biologically mutilated by a force beyond their understanding.

To the Oune people, CRA and the colonial government, dominated by New Guineans and white men, was beyond their reach. So their strategy was to wage war on the works in an attempt to politically rescue Bougainville.

In 1968 when the Oune people organised themselves, Clement Nabiau (pictured above) was 13 years old.

Under the leadership of Catholic mission-educated Michael Aite from the Avaipa area (nicknamed Makakii = physically slow growing person), the people created a village level governing body called Oune Mumungsina.

The inauguration was witnessed by Bougainville leaders Moses Havini and Leo Hannet. It had Dupanta village, on the border of Avaipa and Panguna, as its official headquarters.

Oune Mumungsina, as an organisation of the people, stretched its influence to the neighbouring villages of Bapong, Pisinau, Damara and the Kosia area of Avaipa.

To the Panguna people, the western-educated Aite was a rare leader and many cult groups dissolved and joined forces with Oune Mumungsina. Aite was now an authority across Oune, Panguna, Avaipa and beyond. He had political alliances and support for secession from other parts of Bougainville.

By this time, the works at Panguna were fast developing and the Tumpusiong Valley was engulfed beyond imagination by the fallout from the mine site.

Oune Mumungsina’s first strike against CRA was an order to people to uproot the survey pegs marking the area of the Special Mining Lease (SML) at Onove. Young children like Clement Nabiau followed the elders to unearth the pegs and bring them back to the surveyors’ camp at Dau, a stream at Onove.

According to Nabiau, the colonial administration response was a build-up of police at the Dau camp. This did not stop the people, so a kiap later called a meeting with the disgruntled people.

As the Oune people awaited the kiap’s visit, word reached the leaders that Guava villagers with their leader, Oni, who had earlier signed the mining go-ahead, had said that the anti-mining Oune people would be their future housekeepers and cleaners as they sit and slept in luxury from the mine benefits.

So the Oune leaders plotted that the coming meeting with the kiap would now be used for an attack on the Dau camp, the kiap and the police.

23 years on Charles weeps for his wife & daughter

LEONARD FONG ROKA | Supported by the Jeff Febi Writing Fellowship

OPERATION TAMPARA WAS THE PNG government effort - including riot police and Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) elements - to quell the Bougainville uprising of May 1989 to early 1990.

Tampara is a Nasioi word that means ‘good’, so the military code name stood for ‘Operation Goodness’ or ‘Operation Bringing Goodness to Bougainville’.

But it was damning for old Charles Bangki (pictured) of Mosinau village in Panguna who had fled as a refugee to the Kongara 1 area of the Kieta District.

For Charles and the other people of Kieta, the name of the operation was a contradiction. In fact, it hardened people’s minds and hearts against the PNG government and against New Guineans and Papuans.

By the end of the operation, the villagers fully supported the militancy led by Francis Ona.

The PNG government’s brutality against the Bougainville people, who were fighting against PNG and Bougainville Copper Limited’s exploitation of their island, was fierce. The government and BCL supported each other to suppress the militancy for once and for all with every measure available.

The government security forces, as they were known, torched villages and looted gardens; used airborne machine guns, deployed mortars against civilians and killed innocent people.

Two of the many victims were Mrs Maria Bangki and her two-year old daughter, Joyce Bangki.

Upon their arrival in May 1989, the PNGDF concentrated their energies in the areas surrounding BCL’s Panguna mine in the hope of arresting rebel leader Francis Ona.

They began their unlawful acts of torching villages from the west of the mine site, in the Tumpusiong Valley.

When Australia donated four Huey helicopters, the PNGDF took the inaccessible villages of Widoi, Poaru and Mosinau in the Toio River valley, east and south-east of Panguna.

The PNGDF attack on the Toio Valley was overwhelming for the war-primitive militants who had no high-powered guns or mortars.

With mortar platoons perched on the Guava-Kokore ridge shelling the valley below and hovering choppers raking heavy machine gun fire upon the jungles, the government troops torched villages alongthe Toio Valley.

It was then that Charles Bangki and his wife Maria decided to flee for safety with their children to the Bougainvillean highlands in Kongara 1.

In the Kongara area, the family were refugees but safe.

But in October 1989, the PNGDF choppers began routine daily visits into the highlands of Bougainville. Government troops began visiting Sipuru and Kakusira villages in Kongara 2 by road, blocking off Kongara 1.

On a late October morning, the government forces raided the village of Tairima that was a few minutes’ walk from the Bangki family at Dopari. Stunned villagers watched from a distance as the soldiers burned down their homes.

By midday, mortar platoons engaged Dopari village. The Bangki family and the people fled into the inhospitable jungle. Here they erected makeshift shelters to hide from killers and looters.

From the safety of the jungle, they watched as Dopari village went up in flames. People wept for their assets. Then helicopters opened fire on the jungle, keeping the people on the run.

How stonewalling contributed to the death of Pres Kabui

LEONARD FONG ROKA | Supported by the Jeff Febi Writing Fellowship

This is the 6,000th article to be published in PNG Attitude since it began in February 2006

DAVID PERAKAI (pictured), blood nephew of the late Bougainville President Joseph Kabui, was a founding figure in the militancy against Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) in 1988.

After the 1990 ceasefire between the Papua New Guinea Defence Force and the Bougainville Revolutionary Army he remained near his uncle and, with the dawn of the Bougainville Peace Process in 1997, he served as Kabui’s personal bodyguard until the president’s death in June 2008.

To Perakai, Kabui’s death was the ‘punishment’ of the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) because of Kabui’s approval of Canadian businessman Lindsay Semple, who’s firm Invincible Resources backed the Bougainville Resources Development Corporation (BRDC) without cabinet’s blessing.

The BRDC issue was recently addressed on the floor of the ABG parliament by President John Momis. But back in 2005-2008, the ABG House with its few big-mouth parliamentarians was not willing to deal with it systematically.

According to David Perakai, the late president had the desire to treat the BRDC-Invincible Resources affair independently and did not dip his hands into the K20 million of Lindsay Semple’s money.

The ABG, under Kabui, initially used some of this money to repatriate BRA/Bougainville Interim Government (BIG) overseas based activists Moses Havini, Mike Forster and Martin Miriori.

Some of this controversial money undeniably went into the pockets of BRDC/Invincible supporters; some went to the recently completed ABG housing project at Hutjena, Kubu and Sohano.

But Kabui’s parliamentarians protested against him by denying him access to clean funds for medical treatment overseas.

Just before the BRDC/Invincible Resources standoff, the late Joseph Kabui was admitted to the Pacific International Hospital in Port Moresby with a serious heart problem.

He was referred to the Catholic Church run Malhas Hospital in Townsville, Australia, for an operation to replace the main artery supplying blood to the heart.

Thus in June 2007 President Kabui, his wife and David Perakai were in Townsville where Kabui’s artery was removed and replaced with a plastic artery that required a review every six months at the cost of some K10,000. With other expenses like transport it would add up to K20,000.

Upon his return, the ABG row over BRDC/Invincible Resources erupted, dividing the government and arousing public condemnation of the president.

In light of his medical needs, and in an attempt to isolate the BRDC/Invincible Resources crisis, Kabui pushed for a proper budgetary allocation for his medical review. This was denied.

By this time another problem had surfaced in the ABG. The member for Central Bougainville Women, Magdalene Toro’ansi, was stripped from her portfolio for being a mole in the ABG.

Toro’ansi was known in the ABG for leaking confidential ABG agendas to Waigani before planned Waigani-ABG meetings. Thus all ABG meetings and negotiation strategies were unproductive. So the Bougainville Executive Council removed her to the backbench.

To cover up her disloyalty to Bougainville, Toro’ansi joined the anti-BRDC camp that included parliamentarians Robert Sawa Hamar, Thomas Lugabai and Francisca Semoso. This change added fuel to the anti-Kabui campaign.

The protestors claimed that President Joseph Kabui was misusing public funds in the pretext of medical trips.

With a settlement of the crisis nowhere in sight, the president’s health worsened as he faced the dilemma of missing the second medical review in June 2008. But with illness threatening he and David Perakai left for Manus where the Kabui chaired the Papua New Guinea governors’ meeting.

On Friday 6 June, the president and his team returned back to Bougainville without any rest when the protestors ordered a Bougainville Executive Council meeting to talk about the BRDC/Invincible Resources case by 1 o’clock that same day.

Just after midnight on the 7 June 2008, Joseph Kabui died at his residence in Hutjena.

For David Perakai and other parliamentarians and bureaucrats sympathetic to Kabui, there remain doubts as to why the President John Momis, after getting into office, cost the ABG some K80,000 for a medical review in Singapore with his whole family without any noise from parliamentarians!

This was a privilege that the late President Joseph Kabui had been denied.

Days of the Kiap – the savage murders of Telefomin

PHIL FITZPATRICK

THE MURDERS OF Patrol Officer Gerald Szarka, Cadet Patrol Officer Geoffrey Harris, Constable Buritori and Constable Purari near Telefomin in 1953 had a profound effect on the minds of every kiap and policeman in Papua New Guinea at the time and became a reference point that endured up to independence in 1975.

The 1950s in TPNG were the Shangri-La years, a sort of golden age for the kiaps and the police who worked with them. 

Patrols were everywhere walking into hidden pristine valleys and discovering large populations of happy and virile people who greeted them openly with smiles and brightly coloured feathers and flowers in their hair.

As the old kiaps and policemen now contemplate that great patrol post in the sky it is invariably set in the halcyon 1950s. Life was raw but simple, fulfilling and joyous. The events at Telefomin had a jarring effect on that naivety.

What happened at Telefomin was both unusual and disquieting. The people there had had contact with Europeans since before World War II and the patrol post had been set up in 1948. They were not newly-contacted people reacting to the shock of alien invasion. The patrol they attacked was undertaking a routine census.

Most disquieting of all was the fact that the attacks at three separate places occurred simultaneously, were deliberately opportunistic and appeared to have been well planned.

The opportunity to attack finally came when Szarka split his patrol, sending Harris to one part of the Eliptamin valley while he visited the other. This decision turned a strong, consolidated patrol into a weak and vulnerable one.

Jim Sinclair provides the following details:

Harris was attacked first, at about 7.30 a.m., while still in bed in the Terapdavit resthouse. He was terribly wounded with tomahawk blows and arrows.  One of his police constables, Kombo, was seized at about the same time and injured with blows from a heavy length of wood and a tomahawk, but he broke free, secured his rifle and shot one of Harris’ attackers, frightening them all into flight.

One of the other constables, Paheki, was also rushed and he, too, managed to defend himself with his bayonet, stabbing a tribesman in the back and another in the belly. The third constable, Muyei, a strongly built man, was outside basking in the sun, and he easily threw off the men who jumped him, running into the police quarters in time to save the medical orderly, Bunat, from a grisly death.

Days of the Kiap - Corporal Bosi & the mysterious Mokolkol

PHIL FITZPATRICK

THE TOLAI ARE BELIEVED to have originally come from New Ireland.  When they settled in the Gazelle Peninsula they pushed out the Baining, who fled to the mountains.  Those Baining on the coast not killed or eaten by the Tolai were used as slaves.

The surviving Baining retreated to occupy the foothills of the Rawlei Range and the land south west of Ataliklikun  Bay.

Other Baining villages were located north and south of the Warangoi River and in the hinterland west of the Rawlei Range. 

They are thought to be the descendants of the first people to reach New Guinea and its islands. Sometimes referred to as Negrito and in contrast to the tall and virile Tolai, they are small, stocky people.

One of the Baining groups caught up in the Tolai invasion was the Mokolkol, who were located on the narrow isthmus between Wide and Open Bays.

For many years they remained beyond contact of the German and then Australian administrations. All that was known of them were their sudden raids on coastal villages.  They would attack and then disappear back into the jungle. 

They became legendary and were regarded by their victims as devils from another world.  It wouldn’t be until 1951 that a patrol succeeded in reaching one of their hamlets.

The only weapon the Mokolkol used was a long-handled obsidian axe.  The stories of the deadliness of these razor sharp blades and the silence in which the Mokolkol approached struck terror into the hearts of people for hundreds of kilometres along the coast.

The Mokolkols were a small group of less than a hundred people. No one knew where they originated. 

Some said they were the survivors of a tribe wiped out by the fleeing Baining as they searched for new homelands.  Others thought they were the Baining descendants of deserters from German plantations.

The story goes that a German kiap had called together the people living in the Tol area following a number of murders.

The Baining were fingered as the culprits and without warning the German police opened fire on them, killing many. A few got away into the bush and their descendants were said to be the dreaded Mokolkol.

The first Australian patrol to attempt contact with the Mokolkols went into the mountains in 1931. The kiap found one of their recently deserted settlements and set up camp to wait for them to come back.

The Mokolkols returned four days later under cover of drizzling, misty rain and, swinging their long axes, hit the patrol hard. They left two dead and four badly wounded and disappeared.

Political reminiscences: A night with Olowei and Ikini

SINCLAIRE SOLOMON | PNG Post-Courier

BARRY BLYTH HOLLOWAY (pictured right late in life) and wife Ikini were with an older, quieter crowd in one section of the Bird of Paradise Hotel, Goroka, but as the evening wore on they found the younger, whiter and rowdier bunch of drinkers next to them more to their liking.

It was May, maybe June, 1977.

When the night is still young and never one to refuse an offer of a night cap, “no” was far from the Holloway mind when the younger revellers, including me, suggested that we retreat to the Post-Courier pad at West Goroka for “one for the road” and “let’s have one more just like the other one”.

This ritual constituted more booze, and a healthy drag of Goroka Gold, maybe a Henganofi Hedge, preferably the Hagen variety, Kundiawa Kool or the latest Weed from Wabag. Barry Blyth, not to be outdone by his hosts, produced from his pocket his own Kainantu brand.

Whatever was available, there was enough grass smoke, alcohol fume and noise to bring in the fire tender from the next street, or the cops two blocks away to drag off the dimdims and the only two natives among them – myself and Ikini Holloway.

Ikini single-handedly almost did that – she did not take too kindly to the hubby chatting up a budding Aussie painter by the name of Glendys. To demonstrate her displeasure in true Morobe fashion Ikini wacked her husband across the ears with the pointed heel of one of her ankle-length shoes.

Holloway retaliated likewise, a flurry of uppercuts landing on Ikini; the fiery Finsch curled up and covering her small body with both hands absorbed the punches. All seemed well orchestrated, rehearsed moves, as if done many times before in the past for a live audience.

The warring parties were eventually separated but not without a few more scratches to the battered, bruised and boozed bodies and torn clothing.

As Holloway bled and all hell broke loose a passing police van dropped by to check the commotion yet commonsense prevailed and all was forgotten as the drinking and the grassing resumed, and that was not for too long; it had been a long day, an enjoyable night and tomorrow was another day.

Ikini returned to Port Moresby the next day to her work commitments with the national radio and Glendys got what she craved after that night – Barry Blyth Holloway on canvass, in oil. She spent many days at the Holloway residence in Kainantu, with and without the model, to produce the masterpiece.

Wow! It had been an honour sitting in the tiny flat which I, a second-year Post-Courier cadet journalist, shared with senior Melbourne colleague Tim Grimwade, drinking and smoking with a well-known and liked politician who had just been elected to represent the people of Eastern Highlands in first post-Independence general election.

This very human side of Holloway was a one-off encounter I never saw repeated but whenever our paths crossed, in Port Moresby, thereafter – I in the Press Gallery and Holloway on the floor of Parliament, moving his heavy frame about awkwardly, clumsily when making a point - I used to wonder with amusement whether he had just “let’s one more just like the other one” before entering the chamber!

Days of the Kiap – Sgt Yauwiga, policeman & soldier

PHIL FITZPATRICK

ALTHOUGH THEY WOULD BE BAFFLED by modern police methods, it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that, pound for pound, an old time policeman in Papua New Guinea probably had more balls than ten of his equivalents today. 

Nowhere was this made more apparent than during World War II.

Papua New Guinea was hopelessly unprepared for war. As part of the scramble to meet the Japanese threat, the Pacific Islands Regiment was born.

Some 3,800 Papua New Guineans fought as regular soldiers with the regiment. And many of the recruits came from the ranks of the Royal Papuan Constabulary and the New Guinea Police Force.

They fought with the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU), some with the coastwatchers and others with the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles.

Others took part in fierce guerrilla actions with the Allied Intelligence Bureau or ‘M’ Special Unit.  Thousands more fought as ordinary policemen.

One such recruit was Sergeant Yauwiga (sometimes spelt ‘Yawige’) from the Sepik.

Yauwiga joined the New Guinea Police Force in 1930 and by October 1941, just before the Japanese invasion, attained the rank of sergeant. He was attached to the Allied Intelligence Bureau on Bougainville in February 1942.

He participated in the allied landings at Torokina in November 1943 and led guerrilla bands in northern Bougainville. He won the Distinguished Conduct Medal, the highest award possible for a non-commissioned officer, as well as the Loyal Service Medal.

He lost his left hand and the sight of one eye but survived the war.

He tells his own story in the book To Find a Path: The Life and Times of the Royal Pacific Islands Regiment, Volume 1 – Yesterday’s Heroes 1885-1950 by Jim Sinclair (Boolarong Publications, Brisbane, 1990, pp 285-9).

Here is Yauwiga speaking…. 

I stopped on Bougainville after all the Europeans had gone down to the Solomon Islands.  Only some policemen remained with the patrol officers. 

After about one week the Japanese bombed Kieta, so we collected all of the stores and all the material that we could from Kieta and took it and hid in various camps around in the bush. 

We had been in the bush for about one month when I heard that the Japanese had killed Sergeant Waramapi, who was working with Jack Read up in the northern section of the island, so I left Kieta with my line and went up into the area, and I found Waramapi’s wife and children and took them back down to the Numa Numa Plantation.

I then went up into the mountains near Buka Passage to a place called Aravia and there I found Jack Read with his camp, and I worked with him for nearly three years.  When we were first up at this camp the Japanese came looking for us. 

The Japanese had a line of about a hundred natives and about a hundred Japanese, split into two parties.  Some of the Japanese came up from the Numa Numa side, and the others came up from the Teop Plantation side.  They were trying to find where we were hiding up in the mountains.

We knew the Japanese were coming but Jack didn’t want to fight them and I became very cross and I said to him, “Why do we run away the same as women do?”  Jack told me that this wasn’t the job of the coastwatchers and since I was a coastwatcher scout it was not my job to fight because if I fought the Japanese how could I then watch and pass on the information about Japanese bombers and submarines and troop movements – that was my job. My job was not to fight.

I didn’t like this but it was the job they gave me.  I was told that if the Japanese came, if I could possibly escape, my job was to run away, so that I could live to spy another day.

One particular day when we were up in the bush near Ariva, we had our camp on the slopes of a small hill that was surrounded by big bush.  It was not the kind of place that you could run away from very easily and I was up on this ridge line above the main camp with an Australian signaller whose name was Allan Forbes and another policeman whose name was Wamulu, from Manus Island.

At a point down the trail that approached our camp I had bent a branch of a tree down and lightly fastened it onto the other side of the road and then later on while we were sitting up on the side of the hill I heard a noise as this branch of the tree was knocked out of position and swung back. We looked down the track and there were a lot of Japanese milling around us as the branch had knocked some of the Japanese over.

We yelled out to the others to get out of camp and the Japanese started to shoot at us with machine guns. The three of us quickly jumped behind a large tree and opened fire on the Japanese.

There was a mixture of Japanese and local natives in the group that was coming towards us.  In this engagement until we ran out of ammunition we killed twenty-five.

We then slipped away from the camp and made our way up the side of a mountain until we got to a ridge line.  The only way up was by waterfall and there we waited to see what the Japanese would do.

 

Days of the Kiap: How Papua New Guinea was built

SIR BARRY HOLLOWAY

This essay was written by the late Sir Barry Holloway while he was a student at the University of Papua New Guinea in the 1970s. The assignment task was for the, primarily new, UPNG students to write about a personal experience of bureaucracy for Prof John Ballard's Public Administration course on rural development and planning.

THE SETTING IS AN INLAND Patrol Post 'X' in Papua New Guinea and how in the mid-1950's the Patrol Officer of the Department of Native Affairs as it was then called, had to manipulate the law, public monies, government stores, specialist work forces, his authority and the truth to achieve development.

The successful 'operator' had to know how to work within and outside the formal structure of the bureaucratic organisation.

He depended very much on his personal relations among individuals for survival as many a Patrol Officer had gone to the courts, been dismissed, or sent away to more forbidding places for making errors in human relations.

The Officer of the Department of Native Affairs had to be a generalist and on this Patrol Post his duties included being in charge of police and prisons; he was also a magistrate and arbitrator and cared for the agencies of Treasury, Posts and Telegraphs, Public Works, Health, Education and Civil Aviation. One of the most important jobs was the opening of the hinterland and the consolidation of central government influence.

In this case study the P.O. wanted to get teachers and an education complex established on Patrol Post 'X'. Patrol Post 'X' rated very low for central government priorities; especially with regard to education as 'first contact' was still being made.

The P.O. wrote a letter to the District Officer explaining the need for a school at Patrol Post 'X'. The District Officer minuted it on to the District Commissioner and the District Commissioner wrote another letter to the District Education Officer. They also met each other at golf but there were many things to discuss other than a school at Patrol Post 'X'.

Eventually a letter came back from the D.E.O. through the D.C. and D.O., that no money was available to build a school and stating the few available new teachers were already posted for the following year. The D.E.O. indicated that three teachers might be available in 18 months.

The P.O. knew the D.E.O. personally and contacted him direct on the RTZ teleradio and informed him that the station staff and surrounding villagers were so anxious to have a school that hundreds of volunteer labour had come into the station and had already partly completed the school.

The D.E.O. had just come back from a short course at the London School of Economics and this sounded romantically similar to lectures, given by an Indian, he had attended and on a new method called 'Community Development'.

The D.E.O. was interested and promised a tour of inspection after the Christmas vacation and, if all was in order, could possibly direct three teachers to this project.

There was no school at Patrol Post 'X' nor had one been conceived of by the people, because they did not know what a school was. The P.O. sat down to plan the project and the first thing was to study the availability of money and manpower. His funds were as follows:

£1000 Minor New Works (Excavation airstrip)

£ 150 Minor New Works (establishment of latrines)

£ 800 Purchase fresh foods for prisoners

£ 400 Payment of carriers

£ 200 Incidentals

Out of these funds he very quickly calculated he could misappropriate £1,500 for the new school project.

Days of the Kiap: Story of brave Lance Corporal Anis

PHIL FITZPATRICK

FOR A LONG TIME the Kukukuku of the Eastern Highlands had the reputation as the most dangerous, aggressive and savage tribe in the whole of Papua New Guinea.

The stocky little fighters raided as far south as the Papuan Gulf and in early 1906 the outgoing Administrator of British New Guinea, Captain F R Barton established an administrative outpost on the coast at Kerema principally to curb their depredations.

When not raiding their neighbours the Kukukuku fought among themselves and when the first Europeans penetrated their boundaries they took them on too.

The famous ‘Outside Man’, Jack Hides, described the daring of the Kukukuku as ‘colossal’. District Commissioner Ian Downs whose adolescent interpreter had been presented to him one morning in 1937 disembowelled and impaled in sections on the defensive stakes of his camp boundary was less sanguine in his praise.

He later described the chill he felt when he momentarily mistook the shaven heads of Hare Krishna in the streets of Sydney for Kukukukus.

Downs reported that the Kukukuku had their own unique humour, ‘A theatrical pantomime of denials that they had ever attacked us followed by tearful demands for the return of their arrows’.

The term ‘Kukukuku’ was never used by the people it purported to describe.  The general consensus is that the word is derived from the Motuan kokokoko, which described the distinctive cassowary bone belts worn by Kukukuku men after the birth of their first child.

Other connotations are more derogatory.  Faced with this dilemma a number of researchers proposed the word Anga, which is almost universally used by the Kukukuku to describe the concept of ‘home’.

The word has caught on with some researchers but Ivan Mbaginta’o as curator of the J K McCarthy Museum in Goroka and himself a Kukukuku says that the term is not in common usage among his people.

Call them what you will, the man whose name is perpetuated in the Goroka Museum ran across the Kukukuku in 1932.

McCarthy, who later became the Director of the Department of Native Affairs, came away with several scars for his trouble. His brave colleague, Lance-Corporal Anis, from Madang, lost his life in the encounter.

There was a special relationship between the police and the kiaps. Together they were two parts of a unique team; one couldn’t have survived without the other. This relationship is epitomised in the writings of people like McCarthy.

There are several inconsistent accounts of McCarthy’s encounter and his 1933 patrol report differs here and there from the published accounts.

Despite these disparities there is no getting away from Lance-Corporal Anis’s extraordinary bravery. The following account is taken from McCarthy’s 1963 book Patrol into Yesterday (F W Cheshire, Sydney, pp 106-13)….

Days of the Kiap: Constable Okomba & the cannibals

PHIL FITZPATRICK

IN 1968, WHEN IT WAS APPARENT that self-government and independence for Papua New Guinea was imminent, the Australian government issued orders for all the so-called ‘uncontrolled’ areas to be brought to heel.

The Department of District Administration instituted a program of saturation patrolling in these areas to speed up the process. A sizeable chunk of uncontrolled area existed in the Nomad area of the Western District.

Assistant District Commissioner Rob Barclay was given the job of pacifying the infamous Biami (Bedamini) cannibals once and for all. In an article published in Quadrant magazine in September last year he described the process.

Of the Biami, Barclay wrote….

Shooting pigs to deter primitive peoples from attacking patrols was standard practice, but it didn’t work with them. They wanted us out, never to return. There was an uninhabited buffer zone around the Biami homelands which provided some protection for the surrounding tribes, who were all potential items on the Biami menu.

Primitive men were deathly afraid of the dark. It was the time when the evil spirits were abroad. No sensible person would leave his barricaded hut to see what might be happening beyond the light of the fire.

The Biami had no such qualms. They moved through the jungle by the fitful light of the moon and by the faint starlight, earning for themselves the title of “meat-eating flying foxes”. The flesh of their victims was an integral part of their diet, and their only really satisfying source of protein.

Most cannibalism around the world is ritual, the aim being to imbibe the powers of your victims, making you ever stronger and eventually invincible. But the Biami had no such tradition; they only wanted meat.

Their approach was highly organised. Raiding parties would steal silently through the night, and carefully deploy through the tangled gardens of the targeted long house, stationing themselves at the minor exits.

At the first glimmer of dawn, making the maximum uproar to disorient the sleepers, some would leap through the main entrance, howling like madmen, indiscriminately clubbing and axing the occupants.

The remaining house dwellers would pour out through the lesser exits, or simply barge straight through the walls in a mad panic to escape. The waiting warriors would axe them down as they bolted out of the house, and chase the more agile through the gardens, finishing them off there.

The corpses would then be dismembered, the manageable portions stuffed into string bags and borne off by the triumphant chanting warriors to be partially roasted on the long house fires.

Brains, eyeballs and testicles were particular delicacies. Much of the catch would be eaten practically raw. Eligible young women captured in raids would be forcefully married into the Biami to produce more warriors and women workers. Barren women were eaten or became slaves.

Let not PNG’s contemporary culture slip away from us

ARTHUR WILLIAMS | The Ancient Silures Tribe of Cardiff

I HAVE ALWAYS ENJOYED finding out the local history of any place where I was temporarily living.

Alas, even here in the UK, history appears to be as poorly treated as in Papua New Guinea, possibly because it wouldn't be fair to the millions of immigrants. Kids think Magna Carta is a new computer game.

I believe one way to get at the missing dormant local history is that, in the long holiday at the end of every academic year, high school children should be set the holiday task of sitting down with their grandparents to ask about their village roots and turn this oral history into a written report to be submitted when they restart school in February.

These could become part of the year's teaching materials and safely filed, digitally where possible.

In 1999 I was pleasantly surprised by our local environmental NGO on Lavongai when members were asked to compile a list of as many cultural sites within their ward, hamlet or village.

One person did an excellent report with details not only of various sites but also of the background and traditional legendary story behind each site. Some amazing snippets of taim bipo. Like the footprint in the stone up the Teimot River, which I once saw.

Incidentally we tried to do this project in order to have a detailed cultural study mapped for  the remaining pristine forests of central and eastern Lavongai with which landowners could use as bargaining strength with miners or loggers when they eventually came to 'develop' the island.

As you are aware, Australian aboriginal sacred sites are allegedly well protected against depredations by industrial barons.

Unfortunately I have already seen the total disregard for cultural sites in west Lavongai.

This included the destruction of one of the oldest type of living fir tree up beyond Buteilung and the destruction of so called 'upside down tree' near the beach by RH's Dominance Timber Company (indirectly supported by ex Premier Anis who told the company to ignore the cultural gorgor warning landowners placed on ships hoping to access Noipuos harbour where bulldozers erased the site).

Phil Fitzpatrick and others have previously pointed to the sad demise of Goroka's radio station files, the damp in the National Library archives and now you pinpoint the risk to the Post Courier's records.

I hope something may be done.

If you don’t know where you’ve come from….

PHIL FITZPATRICK

IF YOU DON’T KNOW where you’ve come from, how on earth can you expect to know where you are going?

Late last year I visited a village at the northern end of the Yuat Gorge. While the people are not in Enga Province, they are probably the most far flung Engan outliers in the highlands.

I asked them how they came to be so far away from Wabag and living in East Sepik Province.

None of them really knew. The village and surrounding hamlets had been in their present location for nearly 50 years and, apart from an old man, no one in the settlement was over 45 years old.

I knew how they came to be there because I had read Jon Bartlett’s patrol report. I explained their history to them.

When they lived further upriver in the mountains, their parents and grandparents had run afoul of a megalomaniacal luluai and tultul from a nearby clan group. Don’t know what a luluai or tultul is? Better ask your grandparents.

These venerable gentlemen, who had been appointed by the kiap at Kompiam, thought that their brass badges of office gave them open licence to lock people up for no reason whatsoever and then assault their wives and children.

The kiap at Kompiam was two days hard walking away, so the clan elders decided their best option was the age-old highland underdog strategy of looking for greener and safer pastures. Hence they came to their present location.

Jon Bartlett mentioned in his patrol report that, when he came across them in 1971, the clan elders had their Village Book with them. 

In the days of the kiaps every village or settlement had a special navy blue Village Book in which important information and events were recorded. 

When I asked them if they still had it they shrugged. The old man, who remembered fleeing downriver with his parents as a child, thought that someone had thrown it in the river after independence.

The reason I thought of this visit I made last year was the recent news that Jack Karukuru had passed away. Jack was one of the first Papua New Guinean kiaps and was a very famous man.

Yet very few people, apart from some other old kiaps, seem to know much about him.

I mentioned this to a friend who is also an ex-kiap and who spends a lot of time in Papua New Guinea. He nodded in agreement.

When he was a kiap he knew the local member of the House of Assembly, who is long deceased, very well. They were good friends. He was a man who never had much money but did much for his country.

When my friend recently went back to the village area where his friend lived and mentioned his name he was met with blank stares. “Wasn’t he once a big man or something?” someone asked. 

Fifty shades of Kiap: of stayers, players & ne’er-do-wells

BILL BROWN | Ex Kiap Website

WERE THERE EVER fifty shades of kiap? Were they shades, or were they eras?

The fifties, the 1950s, were the black-and-white years; for photography - and for race relations.

Port Moresby was a white town: the hotels were white, the clubs were white, and the big stores – Burns Philp and Steamships – were white.

Even the town end of Ela Beach was reserved to whitey. The hahine and kekeni, hawking bananas and other goodies, swung their grass skirts and their bare boobs through the town during the day, and took them home before dusk - and the curfew.

And Moresby was a male town; married men compelled to leave their wives in Australia until houses were built. Single white women were rare; there were only three in the whole of our headquarters, and only a few more in Public Health.

After work they vanished, disappearing into their hostels, referred to, perhaps inappropriately, as “The Stables” and “The Virgins’ Retreat”.

Native females were off-limits. Assistant Director, Alan Roberts, spelt it out at our induction: liaisons with “native females” were forbidden, and any breach of that rule would result in a severe reprimand, or instant dismissal.

Was that policy the underlying reason for the resignations of Assistant Director John Black, District Officers Jim Taylor and Bill Adamson, and some lesser lights? (1)

The 1950s were also the simple years. The Department had an impressive name: “District Services and Native Affairs”, but it had a simple system. District Officers ran districts - there were 14 or 15, depending on the year (2) - and Assistant District Officers ran Sub-Districts.

The District Officers roles did not change when they were renamed District Commissioners in 1951, and ADOs did what they always had done. They were the magistrates, the coroners, the senior police officers (3) and the gaolers.

They put people in gaol, and looked after them while they were in there. They released them when their terms expired, and even repatriated them.

They issued licences and they held court, at the Sub-district Office, where you also did the banking, received and posted mail, sent telegrams, had radio conversations, and paid customs duty.

Patrol Officers patrolled, and they explored - some of them. They ran Patrol Posts - some of them - but they were not the all-powerful District Officers, or the almost as powerful ADOs.

In my first term, I stretched it out to 33 months, I served in one district, two sub-districts, and under the three DOs and seven ADOs.

The District Officers, Michael Healy, Barter Faithhorn and James O’Malley were the first major shade, the pre-war “Papuans”, and in Papua, District Officers, Assistant District Officers and lesser field staff, even CPOs, were addressed as “taubada”.The term “kiap” was not known or recognized.

The ADOs, except for one, were from another shade: the post-war intake of ex-serviceman toughened by war and overseas service. Some, like Ian Holmes, had gained their experience with ANGAU, and were Territory-wise.

Others, also ex-servicemen, like Lin Foster, had little or no Territory experience, but were learning quickly. (There were many others that I had yet to meet; like Royce Webb, Mentioned in Dispatches in the Middle East in 1942, Des Martin ex Sergeant in the 6th Australian Infantry Division during the 1944-45 Aitape-Wewak campaign, and the fighter pilots: Bob Bunting, Paul Sebire and Gordon Steege.)

The exception was acting ADO John Gibson. He was not a worldly-wise ex-serviceman, but was young, fresh-faced, and almost callow. There would be many more POs and CPOs like him.

Ex Coastwatcher, ADO Malcolm Wright DSC took over from Gibson at Kairuku. A pre-war New  Guinea officer, he railed against the parsimony, the lack of training, and the frustrations of the Papuan system.

Bill Adamson added another view. A pre-war ARM, District Officer in charge of Central District when he resigned in 1948; he disliked the term kiap, he disliked the “Department of District Services and Native Affairs” name that had been borrowed from pre-war New Guinea, and he was incensed that a/Director E (Ted) Taylor, a pre-war New Guinea kiap, had changed the Resident Magistrate designation to District Officer.

Parallel histories – Steamships Trading Co and PNG

PHIL FITZPATRICK

‘Steamships Trading Company 1918-2008: A History’ by James Sinclair, Alan Caudell and Associates, Palm Cove Qld., 2008, 468pp.  Around $300 or K450 if you can find a copy.  I understand Bill Mcgrath at Pacific Bookhouse has one for sale

THIS MASSIVE BOOK is not commercially available and it has taken me a while to lay my hands on a copy.

It weighs 2.8 kilograms and measures 346x250x37 mm.  It is a sort of personal indulgence on the part of past Steamies directors and board chairmen. 

Lugging it from Steamies head office on Champion Parade to the airport in my backpack worked up quite a sweat.

Having read it, I would urge Steamies to consider bringing out an abridged version in a cheaper paperback. 

It is a book well worth reading because the history of the company runs parallel to that of Papua New Guinea.  The numerous crossovers are both fascinating and enlightening.

A paperback would also mitigate the aching arms that you will inevitably experience reading the present version.

Jim Sinclair is no Shakespeare but he is a very deft master wordsmith.  He is also meticulous with a capital ‘M’. 

He has been producing these sorts of commissioned volumes for some time now and they are building up to be a unique reflection on Papua New Guinea’s past.  He is currently working on a commissioned history of Edie Creek.

He told me that when he was posted to Port Moresby just before independence as a district commissioner with a vague portfolio and not a little spare time on his hands, that he noticed the Australian administration diligently junking what they thought were irrelevant records. 

Jim managed to insert himself between the dumpers and the dump and this material now forms an important resource for his writing.

He got a scare in this year’s floods in Queensland but fortunately it all survived.  He plans to leave it all to a selected institution when he finally runs out of steam.

But back to Steamies. The company kicked off around 1918
but a serendipitous event in 1924 was the impetus for its remarkable rise.  The Steamies website tells the story.

“The company's history began in 1919. Retired sea captain Algernon Sydney Fitch was growing apples in Tasmania for a living when he read about a barge named the Southern Cross going aground in the Bass  Strait.

“He decided to salvage it and travelled to Melbourne to raise 5,000 Pounds sterling and find a suitable ship for the salvage operations. He discovered a 90 ton coal burner, built in 1855, called the SS Queenscliffe. A group of businessmen backed Fitch and together formed a company which they appropriately called Steamships Limited.

“Fitch's plan had no connection with Papua and New Guinea. But what happens next was not in the scheme of things. The Southern Cross sank beneath the waves.

“To make matters worse the syndicate ran out of money whilst making the veteran Queenscliffe seaworthy. Fitch proposed that he sail the ship to Port Moresby and earn some money by trading along the Papuan coast. In 1924 the Public Company was formed”.

Steamies had many competitors over the years, including the mighty Burns Philp, but it outlived them all and is still thriving.

There are some good reasons for this, not the least being its long held policy of training and employing Papua New Guinean staff wherever possible. 

Coupled with this were a commitment to Papua New Guinea in general and a refreshing aversion to the profit-at-all-cost mentality.  It supported many charitable and other causes in Papua New Guinea, mostly in the background and without undue fanfare.  It has been a strong supporter of the Crocodile Prize since its inception.

Throughout its history, Steamships scrupulously followed the letter of the law, albeit sometimes reluctantly when it perceived the law as inappropriate.

In other words, while it could be a ruthless and intimidating adversary it was and still is an honest and ethical company.   Its  environmental credentials are a credit to it.  And, no, I haven’t got shares.

When you mention Steamies in Port  Moresby, people in the know will tell you that it has been taken over by Swires, the big British trading company based in Hong  Kong, and is no longer the Steamies of old.

This is technically correct but, as Jim Sinclair explains, Swires has had a very long history in Papua New Guinea and beginning in 1952 has had many active partnerships with Steamies.  That it now holds a majority shareholding is more luck than anything else.

The diversification of Steamies from the original shipping company into a multitude of businesses and then its retreat to its current core businesses of shipping, transport, manufacturing and hotels is an intriguing and mind-boggling journey which must have come close to driving Jim Sinclair nuts when he was writing the book.

Through it all, however and as Chairman Bill Rothery said in 2008, Steamies has been “proudly Papuan New Guinean for 90 years”.  He adds, This is a testimony to the determination and strength of its owners and managers over these years and to the growth and resilience of the country and its people.”

Steamies founder, Captain Algernon Fitch, had an uneasy relationship with Sir Hubert Murray, the famous Papuan Lieutenant-Governor, but they eventually came round to appreciate each other’s point of view. 

Sinclair suggests that it was probably Hubert Murray’s enlightened views eventually rubbing off on Captain Fitch rather than the other way around.

In any event, the good captain steered Steamies out of the total devastation wreaked by World War II and set it on a healthy course of expansion.  He was gone by the time of the equally devastating reign of Prime Minister Bill Skate.

Skate managed to wreck the Papua New Guinean economy in a very short space of time and also came close to wrecking Steamies and many other companies like it. Despite the valiant efforts of his successor, Mekere Morauta, the Skate effects are still felt today. 

Unfortunately Michael Somare in his second incarnation as Prime Minister failed, or wasn’t interested, in keeping up the momentum that Sir Mekere had generated.

It is not until you read the history of Steamies that you realise how bad Skate was and how many of Papua New Guinea’s chronic problems started with him.  If Somare founded Papua New Guinea, Bill Skate came close to sinking it.

A lot of people worked for Steamies over the years.  A lot were dedicated but  unassuming.  Some, like the bean counters, were downright tedious but there were also some delightful mavericks, rogues and eccentrics who gave the company an exciting flavour.

Jim Sinclair had access to most of the surviving managing directors and a lot of the current and retired employees.  He sprinkles their histories and views liberally throughout the text.  Some of the most colourful were the sea captains that Steamies trained and employed and who lent their names to the company ships. 

Sinclair also consulted board minutes, including those from the very first formal meeting in 1924, which not only survived the war but two conflagrations of the company headquarters in the 1970s, annual reports, old newspapers and numerous other sources.  How he is still sane is nothing short of a miracle.

It is a history well worth sharing with a much wider audience.  How about it Steamies?

Could PNG kiap labour use have been akin to slavery?

ROSS WILKINSON

KIAPS, OF WHICH I WAS ONCE ONE, were field officers with a variety of powers and functions in the Territory of Papua New Guinea Administration.

We would sit in council meetings as the legal advisors to councillors; informing them that they had (or had not) the power to make local laws and the extent of those local laws.

“Kiap, ananit dispela local lo, mipela Kaunsila, mi gat paua o nogat?” “Yes, Kaunsila, yu gat paua.” (Kiap, does this local law give me power? Yes, Councillor, it does.)

And with that, the local law usually passed unanimously.

At the same meetings we were also administrative advisors assisting the council and its kuskus (clerk) to give effect to the local laws once passed.

That role extended beyond the meetings and into the field, giving practical assistance to capital projects implemented from the council works (capital and maintenance) program.

For example, council submissions for capital works grants from the central government to enable major infrastructure projects to commence would include a total project cost funded by a government grant, supplemented by a council cash amount and balanced by an estimated “self-help” sum that represented the village labour component.

A local law, common to all councils, was the self-help or village labour contribution necessary to provide the self-help component that was written into the submissions for project grants.

In other words, to ensure that the self-help contribution could be met, the council’s local law gave it the power to enable this.  Also, once a project was completed, it had to be maintained for its lifetime.

So, once the grant was approved and the project commenced, it was the kiap (administrative advisor role) who went out to activate the project. This often meant weeks on patrol to survey and mark roads and airstrips, camping out and supervising construction.

The kiap could not do it alone. He needed village advice to ensure the project did not intrude upon traditionally significant areas, and then, he needed labour to do the physical work necessary to clear a line for the road survey or airstrip alignment.

Then, when the project commenced, the provision of physical labour, as promised in the grant submission, had to be guaranteed and this is where the local law came into effect.

The true story: Slavery and blackbirding in Queensland

JOHN FOWKE

ONE WONDERS AT THE VALUE of spending time putting together factual and objective commentary and opinion pieces for PNG Attitude when other contributors seem to be locked into personal concepts and prejudices narrow, not necessarily valid and apparently immovable.

Peter Kranz, Erasmus Baraniak and some others are erudite, energetic and interesting, but often a little annoying in this way.

I’m not sneering nor being difficult; just suggesting that we all reflect our own empirical knowledge and experience in the stories we tell, and we also reflect statements and prejudices we have absorbed and not bothered to examine or check for validity.

Put-downs and controversial expressions are easy and attractive to many who aspire to be noticed as outspoken men of ideas.

Personally I’m content to be thought opinionated and even dogmatic, but I only write in inspired rhetorical and bombastic flourishes to close friends.

We don’t want this blog, which has a noble and valuable reason for its existence and an increasingly wide positive reputation, to show signs of going the way of one or two other popular Papua New Guinea-based blogs. Spaces in which bile, racist comments and libellous allegations often flow

Peter Kranz and others who may not be able to get the “Queensland sugar slavery" bug out of their brains should scroll back to my piece published in PNG Attitude only a few scant weeks ago, The blackbird era: Queensland labour trade, 1863-1906, for a summary of the real nature of the recruitment and employment of Melanesian islanders in the early years of Queensland and northern NSW sugar plantations.

And for a full-length and erudite exposition, borrow from the UPNG library or purchase second-hand via Abebooks.com or Addall.com, Professor Clive Moore's excellent work Kanaka published in Port Moresby back in the eighties. It’s a good read.

Slavery was proscribed throughout the British Empire some 20 years before the period we are discussing, and parliamentary proscription was preceded by a period of active campaigning against the slave-trade and for universal emancipation beginning with the rise of evangelical Christianity in Britain in the late eighteenth century.

There was very wide acceptance and respect for William Wilberforce and the Wesley family as social leaders and opinion-makers. In fact slavery was abolished within Britain itself in 1807.

As soon as rumours of the brutality of the first two or three "blackbirding" expeditions conducted by the notorious sandalwood trader, Ross Lewin, and his associates began to spread, the Royal Navy's Sydney squadron began regular patrols between Australia's east coast, the islands of Melanesia and the sugar-growing districts in Fiji, where a similar phenomenon had arisen.

Laws governing recruitment, repatriation and conditions of employment were promulgated and an Inspectorate of Pacific Island Labour was created.

Much as the PNG Labour Department’s industrial inspectors travel to and check the remaining plantations in PNG today, so the Queensland inspectors used to travel on the ships licensed to recruit and to repatriate labour from the islands, carrying out inspections and interviews on the sugar plantations.

Belden Namah’s prison dreams: a couple of steps to go

KELA KAPKORA SIL BOLKIN | Supported by the Phil Fitzpatrick Writing Fellowship

THE SANDLINE INTERNATIONAL mercenaries arrived in Papua New Guinea in February 1997.

Brigadier-General Jerry Singirok, the army chief, denounced the Sandline deal and called on Sir Julius Chan to resign. So Sir Julius sacked him.

But the PNG Defence Force refused to cooperate with his replacement. Brigadier-General Singirok retained the support of the 4,700 members of PNG’s army.

All these events unfolded when I was a first year student at the University of Papua New Guinea.

The PNGDF soldiers made a new home at the university’s Forum Square.  The university students and the soldiers unanimously opposed Sir Julius hiring the mercenaries to flush out the Bougainville Revolutionary Army.

The police force was true to its constitutional duty and tried its best to protect the lives of civilians as well as public property and assets. But there were a couple of instances where the police and the defence force soldiers came close to firing shots at each other.

At the beginning of their protest, the students and the soldiers shared food from the university mess.  This show of solidarity and camaraderie was consistent with the traditional PNG way of preparing for tribal warfare.

There were five defence force officers heading the protest: Major Walter Enuma; Captain Bola Renagi; Captain Belden Namah; Lieutenant Michael David; and Second Lieutenant Linus Osaba.

These soldiers played a crucial role in stopping the mercenaries from going to Bougainville to kill and murder the BRA fighters.

Every time Namah took the podium in his full military regalia to deliver a speech he looked like the Napoleon Bonaparte that we had read about in history books.

He could truly talk and had the students, the soldiers and everyone standing on their toes with their adrenaline soaring.

That was the first time I had heard and seen Namah, albeit from a distance.  At the time I didn’t realise he would end up where he is now.

Civilians living in the various settlements in Port Moresby inundated the Waigani campus to show their support for the students and soldiers.

A couple of government vehicles were stolen and driven into Forum Square and burnt as a warning to the Chan-Haiveta government about what to expect if they sent the mercenaries to Bougainville.

Over the next two or three days the student leaders used rhetoric and demagogy to maintain the momentum of the protest.

Some dissenting students who claimed that the leaders were using the crisis for their own means were harassed.  So were students who didn’t get involved in the protest and tried to attend normal classes.

Fearing intimidation, they refrained from school work and sat at Forum Square listening to the student leaders talking about Tiananmen Square and the liberation movements in Latin America and Africa.

People like Fidel Castro, Che Ernesto Guevara, Nelson Mandela, Hugo Chavez and other revolutionaries were hailed and used as examples of the approach needed in the crisis.

While Australia's in denial, New Zealand has Waitangi

ERASMUS BARANIAK

WITH BUT A CURSORY glance at New Zealand, one cannot help but notice the relative strength, resilience and pride of a small country. This is self-evident in the spirit of its people.

This has not happened overnight.

It has evolved as a living testament to a deliberate and conscious social contract by the white population to integrate with the indigenous Maori culture, recognising its unique and inherent richness and its intrinsic power to hold them, to proudly set them all apart as New Zealanders together, from the rest of the world.

Its historical foundation, providing both the legal and moral high point is the Treaty of Waitangi, which remains to this day the beacon of racial equality to all New Zealanders irrespective of colour creed or religious persuasion.

The Treaty of Waitangi forms the basis of formal legal recognition of the Maori nations that owned and inhabited the territories prior to the advance of the British.

Whilst there are continuing challenges to work out in specific aspects of the Treaty, the content of ownership and compensation rights in respect of both land and water; there is no denial as to the historical legal ownership of the lands, seas and waterways by the original Maori inhabitants.

This forms the solid back drop to the formal and social acceptance of the whites by the Maori and in turn the Maori and their culture by the whites, as one people- the foundational bedrock on which a nation has been forged.

The Treaty of Waitangi marks the meeting of equals. It is the starting point from which an ongoing national conversation has evolved and continues to evolve as all New Zealanders, together, confront the legacies of the past and confidently face the challenges of the future, and build their nation together.

In sporting fields like in Rugby League, or in Rugby Union, the All Blacks wearing their predominantly black colors with either a white fern or a kiwi, become the embodiment and the living demonstration of the spirit of New Zealand in the distinctive war cry - the Maori haka.

Every New Zealand representative player, black or white, knows the haka of the ancient warriors, whose blood runs through their veins, from one generation of warrior men to the next. It has been whispered that the colours immortalise every All Black or Kiwi.

They feel the mystical connection to the land, even as the fern that grows on it or the kiwi that inhabits under its towering limbs, both, like the players themselves, are sired by that ancient soil now known as New Zealand.

It happens each and every time they dance the ancient haka. They feel a quiet hush come over the gallery, like that great white mist that slowly rises above the thermal pools of Rotorua on a winter’s day.

The place plays before them like a black and white clip of an old silent movie, in slow motion, and they sailing one of those majestic ancient hand-carved long canoes into Kaipara Harbour.

Then they see it! Behold! There gathered in the surrounding multitudes tattooed and wrinkled faces of their people past and present. The thunder of a great roar goes up and there pressing them and urging them ever upward, and ever onward, unto glory and greatness is the unmistakable deafening cry of the ancients.

Today, in this place, at such a time as this, this very moment, the All Blacks know destiny has become them, the past present and future has all become one, intermeshed in them.

History has it, many a team of Wallabies and all other wannabies have discovered, their spirits crushed to smithereens with uncompromising ferocity, and as each time and every time, the haka, like a requiem mass, is stomped on the ground before them; they know within their quivering mortal frames what awaits them.

Voice over PNG: the Central New Room's Jane Belfield

KEITH JACKSON

IT IS JANE BELFIELD’s 80th birthday today and, amongst the congratulatory buzz, presents and cake, I thought I’d write some words about her once unusual, perhaps unique, role in Papua New Guinea broadcasting.

Jane and her then husband Michael Belfield moved to PNG in 1956 after Michael was posted to the Epo Agricultural Station near Popondetta. Jane was to remain in PNG for 23 years.

The family also lived in Mt Hagen before moving to Port Moresby, as most of us did in those years immediately before PNG’s independence in 1975.

In the early days, Jane freelanced for the ABC and the Post Courier and was agriculture correspondent for the late and lamented Pacific Islands Monthly. She later studied for her diploma in journalism through the University of Queensland.

Around 1970, Jane was appointed to the position of assistant editor in the newsroom of the Department of Information and Extension Services (DIES). I was recruited at about the same time and became station manager of Radio Rabaul and then Radio Bougainville.

Jane and I were on the opposite ends of the country and at opposite ends of the news distribution system.

In those days, of course, there was no email or fax. We did not even have a teleprinter service. So information was distributed to the 18 radio stations scattered across the country from the Central News Room (CNR) in Port Moresby through a dedicated broadcast channel.

In addition to writing and editing the news, Jane was the voice of CNR, reading the news – written in simple English ready for translation into a score of local languages – in measured, carefully modulated tones, spelling out the killer words, and repeating anything she judged to be especially complex.

At the 18 radio stations, the news would be transcribed and then translated into Pidgin English, Hiri Motu and a clutch of PNG’s hundreds of vernacular languages; whereupon it would take its place along with locally-collected news in the many news bulletins that were broadcast each day.

And so, even before we met this lovely woman, most of us out at the stations felt we knew her well just through the medium of CNR.

Later, in 1973, when the ABC and the Department of Information and Extension Services amalgamated to form the National Broadcasting Commission, Jane became chief sub-editor and was one of the first white women to be offered a government contract in the new independent PNG.

Ironically, in my own new position of NBC director of policy and planning, I had less to do with Jane when we occupied the same building than when we had been 1,000 km apart.

But we both had the exhilarating experience of working in journalism when a new nation was born and on seeing it move through the rigours of independence.

Jane has had a luminous career and I wish her well on this momentous milestone.

Reflections: DC David Marsh & a chain of irrelevancies

BERNARD HOUSTON

1966

FOUR SCHOOL BOYS - two Foi, two Huli - and I walk from Lake Kutubu to Mendi via Paguare, Ewari, Augu, Halalinja, Nipa, Egenda and Iore.

Before I leave my school, Murray Rule of the Unevangelised Fields Mission in Inu, who has also walked this route, gives me a letter for District Commissioner David Marsh in which he offers his opinion regarding the suitability of the route as a future vehicular road.

Upon arrival, I give the letter to Marsh, who seems a very pleasant man.

“What do you think?” he asks.

I naively give an opinion: “If there is a great need for a road into that area, no doubt it will be built; otherwise the route is far too difficult.”

1967

When I step out of the aeroplane on my return to Mendi in February 1967, David Marsh and District Education Inspector Albert Baglee greet me.

This is most unusual and the reason quickly becomes apparent when Baglee tells me I am to be in charge of the Primary ‘A’ School.

“But I’m not qualified to teach European children!” I protest.

“You are experienced in multi-class teaching and will be quite capable of teaching in the school,” Baglee maintains.

His comment also explains Marsh’s presence. He has two young daughters, Susan and Dianne, who attend the school.

During the year I marry the new Primary ‘A’ School teacher.

1968

I meet Ida St Roche Kent, a friend of my wife’s family, who had been a Church of England missionary in Papua before World War II. She was fortunate to have been evacuated.

The ‘heroic’ Bishop Philip Strong (like the equally heroic General 'Dugout Doug' MacArthur, the ‘Hero of Bataan’) fled to escape the all-conquering Japanese after exhorting his field staff to remain to help the villagers during the coming difficult times.

David Marsh, who went to TPNG in pre-war days as a mining engineer, is closely associated with the Anglican Mission and, I am told, gives Sunday School lessons.

Ida St Roche Kent very likely knows of David Marsh. She certainly knows the other missionaries.

1976

Now back in Australia, I am appointed to the staff at Woodridge State School in Queensland. One of the female pupils is a mixed-race ex-TPNG girl, Louise Artango. I teach her brother the following year; he is a promising boxer.

2003

It is now many years later. I chance to read, Alan Powell’s book, The third force: ANGAU’s New Guinea war 1942-46 (Oxford University Press). David Marsh had been in ANGAU.

The author mentions Marsh as being one of the first to reach the site where Strong’s Anglican missionaries were last known to be. He found their graves. The mission party had been massacred by the Japanese.

War correspondent Raymond Paull wrote of the Buna massacre:

The rapid [Japanese] advance inland trapped many of the Europeans at the hospitals, missions and plantations on the Buna coast [of east Papua]. Few succeeded in eluding the enemy and crossing the [Owen Stanley] mountains to the south coast.

Lt Louis Austin and an Anglican mission party travelling from Ioma to Tufi were betrayed to the Japanese by the natives of Perembata village. [The group consisted of] Miss Margaret Branchley, Miss Lillian Lashman, the Rev Henry Holland, the Rev Vivian Hedlich, Mr John Duffill, two half-caste mission workers, Louise Artango and Anthony Gore, and Gore's six-year-old son.

A surviving Japanese POW described how the youngest victim, the adolescent mixed race girl, Louise Artango, had been murdered.

I immediately think of that girl in my 1976 class who was a few years younger than the bayonetted girl. I ring Dale Artango, the brother of the girl I had taught.

He tells me his sister, Louise, had been named after an aunt killed by the Japanese in Papua.

2012

So it was that the Artangos had a long, close, emotion-filled if unknown connection with David Marsh.

This is the end of my chain of Marshian irrelevancies.

Patrolling in the fifties: boots, guns, cannibalism & kuru

BILL BROWN MBE

THE INTRODUCTION TO THE DDS&NA [Department of District Services and Native Affairs] Circular Instruction No 147 of 3 April 1952 said it all: “The policy of the Government is that all Restricted Areas in the Territory are to be brought under complete control by 31st May, 1955.”

Within a month of returning from my first leave, I was heading south from Kainantu to the Lamari and Aziana river valleys.

I had never been in a Restricted Area, but I was lucky; that 14-page circular was in the large foolscap format, and it was full of sound advice.

Cadet Patrol Officer Frank Harris accompanied the patrol for 11 days and at Suwaira and Obura, the first of the Lamari villages, we went through the motions of a census and compiling Village Registers.

Harris returned to Kainantu when we moved into uncontrolled territory, as I reckoned that one inexperienced person on the patrol, myself, was enough of a worry.

Gordon Linsley’s patrol in December 1951 may have been the first to visit the Lamari and Aziana. If it was, mine was the second (and I was to make another four).

Linsley and I both visited Barua, the Kukukuku villages on the left bank of the Aziana headwaters, which Jim Sinclair had visited from Mumeng in September 1951. Ten years later, in June 1960, Gus Bottrill and Otto Alder would establish a patrol post at nearby Wonenara.

We had two incidents on that 1953 patrol.  

At about midnight on 12 April at Konkonbira, Constable Pida fired a warning shot into the air.

The night guards had not stopped an intruder from entering the camp, but the shot from Pida’s rifle, a Lee Enfield .303, fired next to my tent had me awake and quickly outside. I had slept fully dressed except for my boots.

We stayed awake for the rest of the night, and by dawn, Good Friday, “about 80 armed natives had surrounded the camp... Women carrying reserve supplies of arrows formed a circle about ten yards behind their men folk.”

Ten days later in the Aziana at Oribinati, “just after we made camp they surrounded us and fired several arrows.”

District Commissioner Ian Downs read my report, decided I would run into more trouble and I was appointed as a Coroner.

Meanwhile to the west, just over the Goroka Sub-district boundary, John McArthur, also in his second term, was also patrolling to the south from Kumiava Patrol Post.

At Kumiava, on the foothills of Mount Michael, McArthur shared a grass patch with the Lutheran mission. They thought it was an airstrip, were there first and called it Tarabo

District Commissioner Downs decided to close the post at Kumiava and relocate McArthur to a new post in the more densely populated Fore area of the Kainantu Sub-district.

I was sitting alongside Harry West in the radio room at Kainantu when Downs came on air to discuss the move.

He announced that the new post would be at a village called Okapa. He liked the name of that village - it sounded like Okapi, a small African mammal.

West did not agree; he wanted to locate the new post at Moke in the centre of the population, but one did not argue with Downs, especially over the airwaves. West seemingly capitulated and named the new post Okapa but located it at Moke.

Past times: How the Bougainville psyche was subverted

 LEONARD ROKA | Supported by the Jeff Febi Writing Fellowship

 ‘Deprive a people of their ethnicity, their culture, and you deprive them of their sense of direction or purpose’ — Francis M Deng

IN RECENT TIMES the Solomon archipelago encountered two major conflicts and both had in play ethnicity and people’s internationally-promoted freedom of movement.

In 1988 erupted the Bougainville conflict. It was the fruit of the long influx of New Guineans since before World War II and a result of colonial demarcation and separating the island from its rightful place.

Then came the Malaitans versus the Guadalcanal islanders down south in the Solomons that came about because of the Malaitans’ occupation of Guadalcanal customary land around Honiara, recklessly denying the Guadalcanal natives the ability to develop.

These are the negative lessons of not fostering a development approach that people must have harmony with their own environment and humanity and society has to correct this, for ignoring it is denying positive progress.

A man can be progressive in an environment that is conducive and this has something to do with the protection of peoples’ ethnicity.

According to Francis M Deng, ethnicity is more than skin colour or physical characteristics, more than language, song, and dance. It is the embodiment of values, institutions and patterns of behaviour.

Ethnicity is a composite whole representing a people’s historical experience, aspirations and world view. Deprive a people of their ethnicity and you deprive them of their sense of direction or purpose.

This was the issue Bougainvilleans were subjected to by colonialism and later by the PNG government that led to the problems they are now suffering.

One could argue that the Bougainville conflict was the result of unequal distribution of Panguna mine benefits amongst landowners. The facts are that the roots of the crisis are found in the ill-treatment of the Bougainvillean people by colonialism and later by Papua New Guineans and their government.

Psychology and other sciences claim that people’s characteristics are the work of their environment. A Bougainvillean is a real Bougainvillean in a Bougainville that is free from foreign influences.

Papua New Guinean labourers in Bougainville plantations from the early colonial era the influx of Papua New Guineans seeking a fortune at the Panguna mine created turmoil in the native psyche.

Without them, Bougainville would have been a nation in the bliss of glory in the Pacific.

But that right to be a nation state was denied for the Solomon people by the Anglo-German Declaration of 1886.

The blackbird era: Queensland labour trade, 1863-1906

JOHN FOWKE

THE PRACTICE OF RECRUITING Islander labour for the Queensland’s nascent sugar industry has come into focus in PNG Attitude recently.

The trade has always been regarded as controversial, at first because of feeling running high against the importation of low-paid foreign labour from the islands or from China and Asia.

Later, condemnation in Australia and elsewhere turned on the presumption that much brutality had accompanied the recruitment of Islander men and women.

Semantics play a part here. In the days of the labour-trade, the use of the word “blackbird” or ‘blackbirding” was not pejorative.

Of course, in recent decades the terms have assumed a pejorative and even highly-emotional resonance, where the whole issue is deplored and stated as having been both illegal and “shameful.”

This view has been intensified over the years by various pulp-history writers of the “bushrangers, pirates and shipwrecks” variety. Hector Holthouse’s Cannibal Cargoes is an example.

There certainly were abuses in the early days before the recruitment trade was brought under control.

Men and women were forcefully removed from their homes; many were tricked; and island “bigmen” who became involved with the traders connived in raiding known enemy and weakened groups, capturing these people and passing them on to the traders for a fee paid in guns, ammunition, rum and trade-goods.

From around 1873, however, the trade came under Queensland State government control.

Officers under the Inspector of Pacific Islanders travelled on board licensed recruiting boats. The trade and the conditions of assignment, pay, work, housing and entitlements were subject to the same sort of control as applied to rural contract workers signed on and employed under the Highland Labour Scheme and the Native Labour Ordinance of the TP&NG Administration in decades prior to independence.

Bougainville war: My birth in the hour of a PNGDF attack

ISHMAEL PALIPAL

IT WAS LATE OCTOBER 1992 and the civil war on our Bougainville island was at its peak.

The PNG Defence Force was taking control of most of the coastal areas around the eastern part of Bougainville. With the help of Australian-donated helicopters the PNGDF forcefully moved to take over strategic parts of the eastern coastline.

It was a very destructive era of the war because many villages were burned down and the coastal villagers fled into the mountains to escape the raids.

From what I understood later on, the Bougainville Revolutionary Army guerillas were as one with the villagers (our fathers, brothers, uncles and cousins).

Therefore PNGDF had no choice but to destroy these people who stood against them and their interests on Bougainville.

It was on one of those dreadful days that my mother gave birth to me at the peak of a PNGDF raid on our village in Koiano in Kokoda (Kieta).

Just two hours after my birth, in the midst of the hovering military choppers and people darting into the bush, the PNGDF ground troops stormed our village.

At dawn I was born and most of our villagers knew not that I was born that terrible day.

Helicopters ruled our skies. At the rattling of the helicopters, our villagers woke up in confusion thinking they were under attack.

As I glean today, during the civil war of Bougainville, my people were fighting in harmony with nature. Thus in that day our village was raided, messenger birds began crying from the surrounding bushes as the helicopters were over head.

Everyone was alerted and the small kids were ordered to move to the mountains while adults and parents tried to get collect their belongings and other necessities to sustain them in the hideouts.

My mother was too weak to carry me to the mountains. So my father told my first born sister to take her two small sisters and go up to the mountains with the rest of the village kids and old people while my mother and me waited for father to pack our basic things.

Because of the previous knowledge of how the PNGDF would burn houses, my father was trying to pack everything.

As the villagers began to snail their way into the bushes the PNGDF soldiers quickly took over the village blocking the main exit point. They fired warning shots up into the air forcing the last group of villagers to come out of the houses and surrender.

My mother and father (with me) were in the midst of this small group. Everybody obeyed and quickly came from their houses their hands high in the air in surrender.

Linus Dino & the coming of BCL to Panguna

LEONARD FONG ROKA

LINUS DINO WAS A YOUNG MAN when the CRA arrived in his Dapera village in the Panguna area in the 1960s.

He was employed by the company firstly to clear the Pangkirangkuu area (pegging with the surveyors) then later as a cook.

In its effort to accustom themselves, CRA and other sub-contractors took a participatory-action approach with the landowners. Employment was localised and the foreigners had a cordial and mutual relationship.

Every BCL camp mess or catering service had local garden produce from the Panguna area, Kieta and parts of South Bougainville. According to Dino, and many other old folks, every week BCL had pick-up trucks that travelled the villages to buy food to feed the company employees and also to stock the supermarkets.

The locals had a steady income from BCL that empowered them and built a business climate. In fact, the last North Solomons Province premier and first Autonomous Government president, the late Joseph Kabui, had his education funded under this cordial BCL-people relationship.

My late great-grandmother, Joseph Kabui’s mother, earned a sufficient and steady income to pay for his education by selling her garden produce to BCL which enabled her son's political career.

She often sprouted lamentations that the BCL did us good earlier but later began killing us by systematically bringing non-Bougainvilleans into our land.

In the late 1970s this fine co-existence slowly ebbed for the ordinary people, but not for the educated elite of Bougainville who already held an upper hand in dealing with the company.

The Journal of Pacific History vol 33 cites that a 1964 patrol report described the people of the area [Panguna] as “among the least sophisticated in Bougainville". So, BCL's good relationship with the locals from the beginning was a time-buying period of stripping their conscience before imposing western conceptions of business administration without providing a concrete base of intellectual capacity-building.

Carefully, according to Dino, the BCL administration began to get rid of these local people to accommodate educated Bougainvilleans in its established offices.

The company also began importing food from Australia and Papua New Guinea and made greater use of more established non-Bougainvillean food growers around Arawa and other urban areas.

Local labourers in the mining operation were replace with Papua New Guineans and whitemen. Instead of saving the company by localising the workforce through educating the locals to take ownership of the mining operation on their own land, BCL made Dino and other people jobless and nobodies in their progenitors’ land.

John Roka’s sacrifice for the love of his Bougainville family

LEONARD FONG ROKA

SINCE 1988 BOUGAINVILLE HAS SEEN many lives lost and much property destroyed in the name of 'freedom'. All the deaths, though unjust, may not be for naught if they result in the betterment of the future of Bougainvilleans.

In this article, I share the life and death of my father, John Roka [pictured], who was killed at the peak of the conflict in 1993. He died at 3pm on 18 March at the Kapanasi hamlet of Siae Village in the North Nasioi area of Central Bougainville.

My dad was born as John Kalago in 1954 at Manopo Village on Bali island of the Talasea district of West New Britain. Later he adopted the name John Roka.

He was educated at home and later was studying to be a Catholic missionary but, due to the economic boom in Panguna, he left for Bougainville. He was apprenticed at the Panguna Mining School and worked as an auto-mechanic at Bougainville Copper Limited's light vehicle workshop.

He met my mother Therese [pictured here with grandson Theophil], a blood niece of later rebel leader, Joseph C Kabui, whilst she was a student at Arawa High School in the late 1970s. They married in 1977 and I was born in Arawa in 1979.

In his own world-view, dad much loved Bougainville and did not even bother to take his family across to his relatives on Bali island. He enjoyed Kieta and the Kieta culture all through his working life and into the Bougainville crisis.

In the early 1980s we had our home in Kavarongnau hamlet in the Tumpusiong Valley of the Panguna District. But in later years our nuclear family, to the liking of my grandfather who was from Kupe-Topinang, resettled at Kupe on land purchased years back by my grandma from her in-laws.

Here we lived as the crisis unfolded in 1988.

My dad was always sympathetic to the early militants fighting in Panguna. He said their actions were good for our future. In the militancy, my uncles were in from the start.

In early 1990, the PNG Defence Force evacuated the Kupe villages to Kaino village, which had been turned a care centre. Here we lived.

And here my Bougainville Revolutionary Army relatives from Panguna came to visit for clothing, medicine and a break. The care centre assisted them (it was an all-Panguna affair then).

But, in late 1992, a radio message was transmitted through the Red Cross in Arawa for my dad to go home where his elder brother Joe and a brother behind him, Patrick, had been knifed to death defending their little brother over a sex-affair row.

So dad left through the Solomon Islands.

The night before he departed from Kieta, dad told my aunty Durinu with a laugh, 'I am leaving through Honiara and shall return through Buka. When I arrive here, it is you who will kill me'.

First House of Assembly Election, Yassip Mission, 1964

DAVID WALL

THIS PHOTO IS HISTORIC for what it depicts and the memories it conjures up for me.

Yassip, and its Catholic Mission, was in the area under the control of the Dreikikir Patrol Post.

In 1964 the Patrol Officer at Dreikikir was Jock McIntyre, a storybook Scotsman both large in statue and personality and the priest at Yassip was Fr Jünemann, a Hanoverian rather small in size but more than large in his spiritual qualities: humble, charming and devout.

According to Dr Shelley Durham, who spoke German with a Bavarian accent, Fr Jünemann’s accent was of the most refined high German variety.

Initially, Jock because of his Presbyterian background was a little ambivalent about the prospect of meeting Fr Jünemann when he was contemplating a patrol to the Kombi census division, the division where Yassip was.

But on meeting, these two charming, urbane and admirable individuals got on famously, particularly after the good Father produced a bottle of altar wine.

There’s no doubt Papua New Guinea threw up some extraordinary people the like of which I suspect we’ll not see again.

The extraordinary historic event in the picture is the villagers taking part in the democratic process of selecting a member of the first House of Assembly.

From memory, on this occasion it was Pita Lus who became the member for Dreikikir.

I don’t think Pita Lus was the candidate of choice for the Kombi people. But there we see the beginnings of the processes of democratic nation building.

The PNG army in Bougainville - dirty damned rascals

LEONARD FONG ROKA

IN 1989, WHEN THE POLICE (the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary) was getting nowhere in solving the Bougainville crisis, except in visiting brutality on Bougainvilleans, their 'little army' - the PNG Defence Force – was called in.

To the disgrace of the State, they continuously harassed the ordinary people, but what the PNG government had invested enormous resources on was of no use against the native militants.

Then on 11 April 1989, the Post Courier newspaper carried an article entitled Soldiers to step up action.

The author, Sema Rea, wrote that Defence Minister Arnold Marsipal had announced that his Chief of Operations on Bougainville, Colonel Leo Nuia, had issued the order 'shoot to kill' four days after two of his soldiers had been killed.

Under this order, our homes were burned or looted, our women raped, civilians tortured or killed, domesticated animals killed, and gardens destroyed by the infiltrating security forces, even though it was denied by some.

In the video documentary, Sandline Crisis, PNGDF helicopter pilot Charlie Andrews [pictured above] says:

Militarily we cannot stop the war. I mean, it is against our brothers and sisters out there. So most of the soldiers, the service men, God blessed them with big hearts, they are not out there to destroy and kill others unnecessarily.

In late 1989, a cocoa farmer from Kupe was in his plot at Bakabori when a PNGDF patrol came by. He was shot, had his feet attached to a tether and, still alive, was dragged downhill to the Bovo River with some captives. There he was buried alive and he died.

My brother and I were soon to walk into these killers but an escaping family rescued us.

Weeks later, the PNGDF troops stormed the mountainous villages of Kupe, where I grew up as my second home.

From our care centre, Kaino, we watched as two helicopters machine-gunned the mountain jungles and people, knowing that the militants at that point were all from Panguna.

The operation captured Louis Kepetu, who was taken by air to Panguna where he was tortured for months.

Back in my hamlet, Kavarongnau, in the Tumpusiong Valley of the Panguna District, the PNGDF arrived one day in 1989.

As the truck patrol was driving in, my extended family members escaped having gone through nightmares with the police.

My hamlet in those days was the only well-off homestead. It had family business operations and took its electrical supply from Bougainville Copper Limited.

As the Army entered, their first action was to help themselves to store goods and cash.

And then they torched our nine houses. My family stood just above a hillock and wept.

Later, the PNGDF shot dead a mentally retarded relative, Arenama, who was an elder brother of an old BCL friend and current member of the United Panguna Landowners Association, Michael Pariu, as they further tracked uphill seeking our escape routes.

The Angoram Club: Tributes to an institution long gone

DAVID WALL

BY THE NINETEEN EIGHTIES the Angoram Club had completely disintegrated. The building had been dismantled and the interior furniture purloined.

Sepik Robbie, Ralph Ormsby, Freddy Eichhorn, Peter England, Don Bosgard and Ron Lucas would be turning in their graves.

One past member would be particularly upset with the removal of the billiard table for it was on this fixture that he pleasured a young lady at the dead of night after closing time.

Edmund Carpenter in Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me! Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972, pp 74-75….

Angoram, New Guinea, 1969. Angoram is a chapter out of Somerset Maugham or Evelyn Waugh, the Yoknapatawpha County of Melanesia, belonging to the past, but intensely alive, full of color & characters, all gathered nightly in the Angoram Club, playing billiards under the Queen’s portrait (flanked by dartboard & crossed spears) or relaxing in broken furniture left over from World War II: crocodile hunters, gold prospectors, missionaries, adventurers, traders, remittance men, all drinkers & most smugglers, full of false dreams of the past & baseless hopes for the future, each sustained by some private dream of riches without labor.

Such towns need their gold rush or illicit diamond trade: in the Sepik, it’s primitive art. Looting the Amboim caves of archeological treasures netted big money, and while little of this reached the looters, it put the smell of treasure in the air, bringing the town to life, corrupting officials & missionaries alike, creating an atmosphere of intrigue & wealth & great conversations.

The Angoram Club’s volunteer bartender is a sensitive, witty Australian builder who, having failed at both architecture & suicide, abandoned his past to become the government carpenter in this remote outpost. His thirst for the printed word had reduced him to reading can labels, equipment instructions, even currency, until he discovered a set of the collected works of Aquinas, abandoned by a mad-missionary-turned-dealer-in-pagan-art. Late conversations usually end on some fine Thomistic point.

 

Colin Simpson in Islands of Men, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1955….

The sun lowered as a great red ball and, like its ghost, a pale full moon came up in the east, while the blazing orb was still above the horizon. We arrived, with the dusk gathering in the river bank casuarinas, at Angoram.

The Angoram Club has a bar and a billiard table in a hall big enough for dances. It has no staff whatever, and no cash-register. On the bar is a book. When you come in you put down a pound note and write your name in the book.

All beer is served by the bottle and, for spirits, you help yourself. The barman tells you when your quid has cut out and you put in another. The barman is the member whose turn it is to be barman that night. His duties finish when nobody wishes to drink any more.

 

David Wall in Sepik Blu Longpela Muruk, Swirl Bury St Edmunds, 2007….

The Angoram Club was the meeting place for the expatriates and the town’s few mixed-race residents. It had a shabby spaciousness about it and was situated next to the hotel facing the river.

The amenities consisted of tables and chairs with a bar, record player and billiard table. There was enough space to hold dances from time to time and the bar was largely run on an honour system, with members serving.

On this evening most members were present and James was welcomed by the president, Allen Warburton, a man in his fifties with a dignified air and a clipped spoken accent, a mixture of educated Australian and colonial British.

Katua Niugini - the story of the mine at Pangkirangku

LEONARD FONG ROKA

PANGKIRANGKU WAS A HILL situated at the location of the present day idle Panguna mine pit in Bougainville. Pangkirangku (later turned into ‘Panguna’ by colonisation) was the hunting ground for the Guava and the Moroni people who mostly intermarried each other.

Oral history says that the area was colonised by the people not in one wave but infiltrated by individual people, especially through marriage.

It happens that a family can be a first settler of a territory. Later, as they increase in numbers and emerge as a clan, the young men go back to the place of origin to seek a wife for a male son and she is brought to Moroni.

She settles with her new in-laws and expands the clan. In due course, her children inherit land through the many land ownership rites of passage known to the Kieta people of Bougainville.

But with the dawn of the Bougainville secessionist and anti-mining conflict in 1988, the militant leader, the late Francis Ona, had publicised that he was the major landowner of Pangkirangku. This was a negative a taint on the identity of the true owners of Pangkirangku.

Ona belonged to the Kurabang clan but his group of immigrants into Guava village was second in the line of migrations. (Measuring migration waves in oral history is fluid. They might be just a generation apart or decades.) Ona’s ancestors entered Guava from the southern Orami area, where the first PNGDF soldier was killed around 1989.

The first group of Kurabangs that entered and colonised the Pangkirangku and Guava areas came from the west in the direction of Onove and Evo. Thus the first group owned much of the Pangkirangku ridge that hosted the ore bodies that attracted CRA to mine it in the 1960s and sparked the Bougainville crisis that killed thousands of innocent Bougainvilleans.

Ona’s line of immigrants came into dominance in controlling land as they produced more female members in what is now Panguna. The original immigrants, family members of the brothers Dumenu and Anthony Ampe (pictured) of which more below, produced less females – who are the powers and owners of land in the Kieta society.

Seeing this unfortunate development, the members of the original immigrants began to transfer ownership to the second wave of settlers. In this process the family line of the late Francis Ona came into dominance in decision making in the Guava-Panguna area.

In the first wave of Kurabang, just before World War II, were born two brothers, Dumenu and Anthony Ampe.

The brothers were the rightful and inarguable chiefs and owners of the vast proportion of the customary land in the ridge and braes of the Pangkirangku.

As children, the brothers and their siblings enjoyed the jungle, wild rivers and gardens. Later, in 1950s, the eldest Dumenu became referred to as a retard. But he was a prophet.

In this state of mind, he left Guava and erected himself a makeshift shelter a safe distance away to the west of the main village on the Guava-Kokore ridge.

There, close to his abode, he selected a high point on the trail and began digging the earth with his bare hands like a child. Days he dug and nights he dug. When travellers encountered him he would cry, ‘I am destroying your beautiful land and your future is not good’ and laugh.