Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific

The islands also attracted visitors of genius who had serious academic intentions. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski who, at the outbreak of the Great War, pioneered new methods of fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands. Melanesia subsequently became a cultural laboratory for European anthropologists and one of the most closely studied of the ‘unknown regions’ on earth.

In 1906 Australia took responsibility for British New Guinea and the British Protectorate ceased to exist. The new territory was now to be called Papua. The first Lieutenant-Governor of Papua, Sir Hubert Murray, was an empire builder of Olympian accomplishments. He was a character who seemed to have stepped straight out of Boy’s Own fiction. Born in Sydney in 1861, he stood six foot three, weighed fourteen stone and was amateur heavyweight boxing champion of Great Britain. A rowing blue at Magdalen College, Oxford, and possibly the finest swordsman in Australia, he had read Classics and achieved a double first.

A career as an Australian barrister beckoned but he abandoned the idea as ‘too tedious’. In 1904 the post of Chief Judiciary Officer became available in New Guinea. In need of diversion, he replied to a newspaper advertisement and was offered the post. He adopted a paternalistic style of governorship, promising the Papuans, ‘I will not leave you. I will die in Papua.’ At the time he was considered progressive but now is considered by indigenous historians as being regrettably colonial. He greatly admired men who exercised self-discipline and refused to open fire on the most threatening of warriors. While travelling the country on his circuit he carried a portable library. His nephew recalls seeing him reading a Greek text in rough weather, seated in a chair lashed to the deck of his small government vessel Laurabada, holding it above the waist-high foam to keep it dry.

He wrote a number of excellent books recalling his tours of duty, full of wry observation. He mounted expeditions into the interior and developed a degree of understanding of native customs and languages unusual in colonial administrators of the time. His laconic style keeps one turning the pages. He describes murder in his book Papua or British New Guinea published in 1912:

… murder to these outside tribes is not a crime at all; it is sometimes a duty, sometimes a necessary part of social etiquette, sometimes a relaxation, and always a passion. There is always a pig mixed up in it somewhere … Cherchez le porc.

He later refers to the reputation of ‘… the Rossel islanders who were quite oblivious to the most ordinary rules of hospitality’ and ate 326 Chinese who had been shipwrecked on the island. He informs us that in some villages ‘a thief is punished by killing the woman who cooks his food’ as this causes great inconvenience to the thief.

Both his wives Sybil and Mildred clearly lacked the sense of humour required to survive the colony, hated every minute of it and left him alone for long periods. Rumours of his mistresses were legion. Government House became the dwelling of a bachelor, full of books, manuscripts, saddles and muddy riding boots on the veranda. In February 1940 he suffered his final illness but refused to be carried off the Laurabada at Samarai hospital. ‘You can carry me when I’m dead, but not before.’ He was seventy-eight and had been in office for thirty-five years. On the forty-first day of mourning, thousands of Papuans came together at the stilt village of Hanuabada in Port Moresby for the funeral feast. There was total silence among the lighted fires and torches except for ‘the quiet tapping of a thousand native drums’.

At the outbreak of the Great War, the small Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force, derisively called the ‘Coconut Lancers’ by my uncle, the Gallipoli veteran, released the German Government from further responsibilities in a minor military engagement at Bitapaka near Rabaul. ‘No more ’um Kaiser, God Save ’um King’ read the Australian proclamation issued to the bemused villagers.

Much of the German administration was retained. Those Germans who took an oath of neutrality were allowed to return to their properties. There was an abortive move to rename the German colonies the Kitchener Archipelago or even Australnesia. The Australian military administration replaced the more enlightened, or as they saw it, ‘soft’ German bureaucracy, with a regime of questionable severity. Both Germans and local people were treated with arbitrary and undisciplined brutality. A number of Germans were photographed being flogged in public.

After the war, Sir Hubert Murray advocated measures that would create the combined state of ‘Papuasia’, comprising Australian-governed Papua and the former German New Guinea. His dream was for it to have an educated and affluent indigenous population. However, after protracted discussions throughout 1920 and threats by the then Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, the League of Nations finally handed the entire former German possession to Australia in 1921, now to be known as the Mandated Territory of New Guinea. The capital would be Rabaul on the island of New Britain. Papua was to remain under a separate Australian administration with the headquarters in Port Moresby.

Great rivalry came to exist between these two Australian colonies. All German possessions in the Mandated Territory were expropriated – the magnificent German colonial buildings, the immaculate plantations, even wedding photographs. ‘More like looting,’ some residents thought. Many plantations were sold to Australian ex-servicemen who had little understanding of proper methods, more a romanticised vision of white verandas overlooking tropical lagoons, the plantation worked by armies of cheap labour. A fortune would be guaranteed. The young Errol Flynn ran such a plantation near Kavieng on New Ireland, deftly concealing behind that dazzling smile his complete ignorance of the copra industry. Particular bitterness resulted from the postwar inflation that made the German government’s compensation to German planters worthless when it finally arrived. The welfare of the indigenous population was of course ignored.

The influence of the previous military administration remained strong under the civilian mandate, many soldiers becoming government officers. Unfortunately, it signalled a return to some of the worst excesses of the Neu Guinea Compagnie. Punishment was often entirely at the whim of the District Officer or kiap (‘captain’ corrupted into Pidgin). There was little accountability and few criteria for the capricious penalties imposed by these men, referred to by some as ‘God’s shadow on earth’. Substantial authority was sometimes placed in the hands of inexperienced boys as young as twenty-one. They had come to New Guinea in search of ‘adventure’, and found themselves in control of enormous tracts of territory and large numbers of the indigenous population. Severe regulations were implemented such as the puritanical ‘White Women’s Protection Ordinance’ which meant that a Papua New Guinean male even smiling at a white woman was fraught with the danger of imprisonment. But scattered among the neurotic and unstable were many outstanding individuals who felt a strong sense of moral obligation to the colony and considered their service a true vocation. In time, university training and a career structure emerged, albeit military in flavour, and much was achieved in the fields of tropical medicine and construction work.

The Australian public were too preoccupied with the aftermath of the war and their own grim future during the Depression to take a close interest in faraway New Guinea affairs. The government of the day had a strategic interest in Papua and the Mandated Territory, ever hopeful of revenue from gold and petroleum. The colony was expected to pay for itself, many Australians feeling a degree of ambiguity about the whole notion of an ‘Australian’ colony. Local people suffered greatly under the rule of a nation that was struggling with an unclear view of its own national identity. Villagers scarcely understood the nature of the European wars that had carved up their land so barbarously and confused their allegiances. That there was not more violence speaks volumes for the adaptability of the Melanesians to the Australian mandate, those unpredictable successors to the severe certainties of German rule.

The Highlands up to this time had been considered uninhabited. In 1933 an Australian adventurer named Mick Leahy and his young brother Dan, together with the patrol officer, Jim Taylor, flew over the inaccessible Wahgi Valley for the first time in a Junkers aircraft and saw signs of intensive agricultural settlements. This valley was perhaps twenty miles wide and sixty miles long and contained a long meandering river. To discover if it contained gold they decided to explore on foot. The spectacularly-decorated local people wearing the brilliant plumes of Birds of Paradise had never seen white men and regarded them as their returned spirit ancestors descended from the skies. They in turn were impressed by the appreciation shown by the ‘wild men’ for Italian opera, played on a wind-up gramophone. The power of art effortlessly to cross cultural boundaries was commented upon until a little translating from the indigenous tongue revealed that the sounds emerging from the trumpet reminded the warriors of the screams of women selected for cannibal feast. Mick Leahy made further expeditions, but gold eluded him to the last. He gave an entertaining paper in 1935 in London at an evening meeting of the Royal Geographical Society where he described warriors with dried snakes and finger joints hanging from their ear-lobes.

A number of them have an eye shot out. We concluded that they were peeping round the shield at an inopportune moment …

Mick himself had peeped into skull racks shaped like dovecotes. The Fellows awarded Leahy the prestigious Murchison Grant for his explorations. He is remembered as a dashing, romantic explorer who took brilliant photographs and filmed some of the most astounding footage of Stone Age people encountering Europeans for the first time. New Guinea provided a rich vein for what might be termed ‘Macho Adventure Writing’. The American author Jack London sailed the Snark through Melanesia in 1908. In his strange story The Red One published in 1918, he is unashamedly excessive throughout, continuing the general fascination with ear-lobes:

… her sex was advertised by the one article of finery with which she was adorned, namely a pig’s tail, thrust through a hole in her left ear-lobe. So lately had the tail been severed, that its raw end still oozed blood that dried upon her shoulder like so much candle-droppings.

During the Second World War all the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago fell quickly to the Japanese. The arrival of the Americans with their enormous quantities of ‘cargo’ had a profound impact on the local population. Even more influential was the equality with which they saw ‘black’ American servicemen treated by their white comrades. The notion of colonialism became an anathema in the post-war world. Australia was influenced by a United Nations recommendation in 1962 to prepare the country for independence. Russia under Khrushchev derided colonialism on the international stage with cutting invective. To the villagers of Papua and New Guinea, all the foreign powers were equally heartless intruders.

Every white man the government send to us

Forces his veins out shouting

Nearly forces his excreta out of his bottom

Shouting you bush kanaka1

KUMALAU TAWALI, from ‘Bush Kanaka Speaks’

Less abusively, but with a fiery idealism, my friend John Kasaipwalova, the poet and student radical, urged the destruction of the colonial yoke:

Reluctant flame open your volcano

Take your pulse and your fuel

Burn burn burn burn

Burn away my weighty ice

Burn into my heart a dancing flame.

JOHN KASAIPWALOVA, from ‘The Reluctant Flame’

In 1975 full independence from Australia was finally achieved. It was gained without bloodshed, revolution or violence. This in itself was a significant tribute to Melanesian tolerance.

In the decade following independence, economic and trade links with overseas countries were successfully established. Papua New Guinea has received over 10 billion dollars in development aid from Australia since independence was achieved in 1975. In recent years, however, the promising legacy of a Westminsterstyle government has degenerated through cultural hybridisation into a desert of self-interest, nepotism, corruption and violence. The development of wantokism,1 which evolved quite understandably from traditional community and family ties, is deeply at variance with the notion of ‘fair’ individual enterprise and parliamentary democracy. An egalitarian culture of mutual support dedicated to subsistence survival has clashed with the European individualistic, dividend-driven market economy creating a climate of desperate contradictions. There are no beggars in Papua New Guinea and, unlike many nations, no one would ever starve. The land is rich and fertile, the clan loyalties strong. Yet traditional cultures can no longer supply solutions to the types of internal and external dilemmas posed by the modern world.

Admiral Sir William Goodenough, the chairman of the 1935 meeting of the Royal Geographical Society addressed by Mick Leahy, clearly had a premonition after the paper was read when he commented:

How far and in what direction is the march of man going to interfere with these people? Every possible care should be taken that the people of New Guinea and their country are not exploited in any way.

True values of independence and respect for kastom are struggling hard to survive in the hearts and minds of the new generation growing up in the Bismarck Archipelago.

1My great-uncle, then Lieutenant N. T. Svensen, was an officer in the 15th Battalion (Queensland) 4th Infantry Brigade, Australian Imperial Force, that landed at Anzac Cove on the Gallipoli Peninsula on the evening of 25 April 1915. He made an entry at 6.47 p.m. in his meticulously-detailed diary, written by moonlight on a torpedo boat heading for the beach. ‘We are under shrapnel fire and two or three men have been hit already, one bullet within 18 inches of my foot.’ He distinguished himself in the campaign, was wounded and repatriated to Cairo.

1The term ‘Austronesian’ refers to one of the two major language groups in Melanesia. The other, older and more complex group is known as Non-Austronesian or Papuan. Austronesian may have originated in South-East Asia and all of its languages have a family resemblance, unlike the enormous diversity of the Papuan languages. Austronesian languages are spoken in Indonesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan.

1This historical word had a Hawaiian origin meaning ‘man’. A ‘bush kanaka’ was a Pacific Islander employed as an indentured labourer in Australia on the sugar plantations in Queensland. It came into more general colonial usage throughout Papua and New Guinea for any labourer. Initially a neutral word, it evolved into a rough form of colonial abuse, much resented by native labourers. It was also used in the islands as a term of what might be called ‘affectionate abuse’, so beloved of the Australian male when addressing each other or local ‘mates’, viz., ‘Come and have a beer you bloody kanaka!’

1Literally ‘one talk’ in Pidgin. People who share the same language, loyalties and cultural heritage. They perform shared activities and support each other as they come from the ‘same place’, village or province. The preferential nature of so-called wantokism is a source of much dissatisfaction in modern PNG and the explanation for numerous misplaced criminal accusations of nepotism in both the private and public sectors.

4. Death is Lighter than a Feather

Across the sea,

Corpses in the water,

Across the mountains,

Corpses heaped up in the field,

I shall die only for the Emperor,

I shall never look back.

Japanese Second World War Poem

No roads link Alotau, the provincial capital of Milne Bay Province, with Port Moresby. Boats are infrequent and no longer run to schedule. Fortunately, this has insulated the province from raskol activity which blights life in the Highlands. The relative isolation of Alotau meant that flying from Port Moresby was the only feasible alternative.

The ‘Islander’ light aircraft climbed laboriously out of barren Jacksons airport over the forbidding green of the Owen Stanley Ranges. A gothic landscape unfolded below, the precipitous ranges and valleys resembling the spires and flying buttresses of monumental medieval cathedrals draped in cloaks of thick, tropical vegetation. The gloom and mystery brought to mind the inconceivable hardships endured by nineteenth-century explorers who attempted to probe the interior of New Guinea from Port Moresby. Precipitous paths needed to be cut through thick jungle slowing progress to a mile a day. Sir William MacGregor, first Lieutenant-Governor and intrepid explorer, wrote in his diary of the ‘deathlike stillness’ that prevailed in the dripping fog that swirled about the moss-covered trees as he climbed Mount Victoria. Gurney airport, which services Alotau, occupies the same position it did in 1942. Charles Gurney was one of the colourful band of aviators who opened up New Guinea in the 1930s and was a squadron leader in the RAAF (Royal Australian Air Force). Below the spinning hub of the propeller, endless plantations of oil-palm unrolled sporadically through breaks in the low cloud.

The terminal was the usual fibro affair with slowly circulating ceiling fans. My luggage was quickly unloaded and packed into a truck. The road into town was severely potholed, with river fords constructed of shattered blocks of concrete. Torrents rushed across them into Milne Bay, threatening to sweep us away. It was hot and uncomfortably humid. Luxuriant vegetation swathed in mist fell like velvet curtains from the ranges lowering into the Coral Sea. The province showed little sign of development.

This formidably rich cultural area is known by Europeans as the Massim. The inhabitants speak Austronesian languages, unlike the majority of Papua New Guineans, who speak one or other of the 300 Papuan languages. Much of the Milne Bay Province consists of islands and the finely-carved artefacts reflect this marine environment. Spectacular ornamented canoes, weapons of ebony and black palm, red spondylus shell necklaces and armshells of tangled beauty, clay pots of abstract shape, and noble war shields are the legacy of the past. Gifted master carvers worked along this coast in the nineteenth century, but the production of such masterpieces has tragically declined in modern times. The culture of the north supports large village communities, whereas in the south, clusters of tiny hamlets nestle along the shore. Their belief in sorcery and magic is strong. Compulsive sweeping keeps the villages free of any personal waste that a sorcerer might fix upon and use in casting an evil spell.

Massim communities are composed of clans ruled by symbolic totems representing an animal, bird, fish or plant. Children take the totem of their mother and it is forbidden for members of the same totem to marry or have sexual relations. In the past the punishment for illicit sex was death. In the almost complete absence of tourism, apart from hermetic groups of divers, the people subsist through fishing and agriculture. Crocodiles and turtles, pigs and megapodes (a small, dark-feathered scrub fowl), bananas and coconuts are being insidiously supplanted by modern supermarket foods, particularly cheap tinned meat like Spam that has scarcely altered since it sustained troops in the Second World War.

The Massim was one of the first areas of New Guinea evangelised by British missionaries in the late nineteenth century. The local people’s profound belief in the power of magic posed the greatest challenge to Christian conversion. The villagers continue to believe that supernatural spirits inhabit trees, streams, rocky places and swamps. Belief in Jesus has not removed the fear of sorcerers who kill by projecting fatal diseases and cannibalistic flying witches that become airborne after dark, snapping bones and tearing entrails. More seductively, erotic magic weaves love spells with flowers plucked in secret groves. More optimistically, a happy life after death is guaranteed by a magic that promises three states of Paradise and an afterlife where Hell is sensibly absent.

Alotau developed from the original Second World War American military base, but the capital was transferred officially from Samarai Island only in 1968. This islet, lying off the easternmost point of the mainland, had become inconvenient as it was only accessible by sea and overcrowded with residents. Alotau has the reputation of being the safest town in Papua New Guinea, a reputation jealously guarded by the inhabitants.

I had arrived in the sultriness of mid-afternoon. Hundreds of listless people were sitting under the rain trees in the shade cast by the awnings of prefabricated supermarkets. They were almost motionless in the oven-like conditions and appeared to be in shock, as if a terrorist bomb had recently exploded. Clumps of resentful youths were chewing buai,1 smiling women in colourful cottons suffered tugging children, a covered market baked in the heat. Banana boats skittered across the glittering harbour and rusting Taiwanese trawlers disintegrated at their moorings.

A path crossed a stream, and I climbed some steep stairs through an avenue of trees past the tables of female sellers of buai. This green globular betel nut, which is the seed of the Areca palm, is laid out in carefully measured rows and beside each nut lies a small betel-pepper stick, the fruit of the pepper vine. The husk of the Areca seed is removed and the tip of the green pepper spike dipped in lime, now usually contained in an old plastic film container. The mixture is then enthusiastically chewed. In the past the powder was taken from an attractive gourd or the shell of the young coconut, often decorated with intricate burnt-in designs and fitted with a woven or wooden stopper. A beautifully carved ebony spatula with a pig or human carved on the handle would be used to remove the lime. Some spatulas were made from the bones of relatives. The family would then be able to suck the bone when taking lime as an intimate reminder of the departed. Lime powder is no longer made from crushed coral by women in secret locations. Spatulas are seldom used.

Gallons of saliva are generated from the chemical reaction and the resulting vermillion juice is spat in jets like an uncontrollable haemorrhage. The effect is horrifying to witness and mildly narcotic to experience. The villagers say it ‘makes them feel strong’, ‘makim head good fella’. Certainly it makes people more talkative, but excessive use creates a drugged daze in the chewer. Nuts are often presented to visitors. In the past, if the point of an offered nut faced away from the stranger, it was a secret signal to kill him.

I was overcome by nausea and an atrocious bitterness during my first attempt at ‘wearing New Guinea lipstick’ as it was popularly known. Gales of laughter accompanied my facial contortions and twitches but much friendliness followed. Captain Cayley-Webster, travelling through New Guinea in the late nineteenth century, referred to betel as ‘a veritable pâté du diable’. Chewing is paramount in social relations in Papua New Guinea, and the cosmetic clash this creates with modern sanitised life has become a symbolic focus of cultural freedom and kastom. Betel is chewed by men and women when working in the gardens, attending feasts and travelling by canoe, when making love and meeting friends. Television advertisements encourage people to stop chewing because of risks of mouth cancer and to present a ‘clean image’, but for most it is a universal refuge begun early in life, a balm to the rigours of existence in these islands.