Papua New Guinea: Initiation and Independence

By Don Woolford

First published in 1976, Papua New Guinea was the first book to interpret the key events that led to the nation’s independence in 1975. In the book, journalist Don Woolford, a correspondent for the Australian Associated Press in Papua New Guinea, describes the ferment and excitement of the 1960s and 1970s, chronicling the former Australian territory’s political development from the first general election for a representative House of Assembly in 1964 through independence. Key figures in the transition, including Michael Somare, John Guise, Albert Maori Kiki, and Josephine Abaijah, make an appearance and their contributions are analyzed adroitly. Woolford’s access to these and other important individuals, as well as to literature produced for the moment that is no longer available, make this an inimitable and invaluable record of the remarkable years that led to the creation of the nation of Papua New Guinea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781921902192

Book preview

Index

Illustrations

Michael Somare

Sir John Guise

Tei Abal

Sir Maori Kiki

Julius Chan

Acknowledgements

Inevitably, in a book such as this, I am indebted to many people: Papua New Guineans and Australians; politicians, public servants, academics, journalists. They are too numerous to mention individually; a few would prefer not to be named. However, to four people I owe a special debt. They are Mr Jim Hall of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Port Moresby, and his wife Jill; Mr Ted Wolfers of Macquarie University and formerly of Port Moresby; and Mr Ray Goodey, formerly of the Office of Information, Port Moresby. Without their help the book may not have been possible. Certainly it would have been poorer. But while their contribution was great, the responsibility is, of course, all mine.

The jacket illustration Father and child, Telefomin Sepik District is reproduced by kind permission of the Government Office of Information, Papua New Guinea.

1

Time Before

For centuries Papua New Guinea slept, undreamt of by the expanding nations of Europe. Over these long years the peoples slowly developed social structures and attitudes that the white man was to alter but could not erase. They were never one people. They appear to have come as a result of several migration waves spanning thousands of years, and to the differences in stock have been added the differences that the immensely varied terrain has imposed. The Tolai of the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain is tall and powerfully built; the Motuan of the Port Moresby area is slim; the Highlander is short and stocky, the Trobriand Islander is the colour of milk coffee, while on the other side of the Solomon Sea the Bougainvillian is blue-black. The maritime tribes of the coast and islands are outward-looking people who sometimes developed elaborate trading patterns. The men of the Highlands tended to be inhibited by the immense, almost impenetrable mountains. For many of them the world, until recently, ended at the next ridge. The peoples developed intricate kinship structures and diverse rules governing land tenure and inheritance. The central feature was usually the extended family, which operated on a system of reciprocal obligations, now commonly known as the wantok (same language) system Linguists have identified about seven hundred languages.

In the beginning the white men came slowly. The first Portuguese and Spanish navigators simply skirted the island, roughly charting its outline. They were followed by the Dutch, British, and French. The contacts were brief, occasionally bloody. Only the edges of the great island were touched. Holland made the first great impact on the island’s history by simply drawing a line down a shadowy map. In 1848 Holland proclaimed the area west of 141 degrees east to be Dutch territory. This action, like others that were to follow, was done without concern for, consultation with, or even the knowledge of the people concerned. It was done to secure the south-eastern approaches to Holland’s flourishing empire in the East Indies. But by that act a million people were to pass out of the history of Melanesian New Guinea and into the history of Indonesia.

The white impact on the eastern half of the island became more substantial in the second half of the nineteenth century when European expansion was at its height. The early contacts were unofficial: traders, missionaries, and blackbirders chasing profits and souls. German companies, largely offshoots of the copra empire being built on Samoa, became dominant on the Gazelle Peninsula, the first area of heavy white involvement on the New Guinea side. Australians showed the greatest interest in the southern half. In 1884 the island was partitioned. Dr Otto Finsch sailed along the northern coast planting German flags. Commodore Erskine sailed into Port Moresby and hoisted the Union Jack. The border dividing German and British New Guinea was drawn laterally through the mountain chains of the interior. It was a cartographic convenience, for no white man had then seen the country it ran through. The division, like so many being made then, was done in the chancelleries of Europe for European diplomatic purposes. The partition was completed in 1899 when, as part of a settlement mainly involving Polynesia, Bougainville became German while the rest of the chain of islands to which it naturally belongs became the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. The boundaries of what was to become Papua New Guinea were now settled; the destinies of many peoples, still unaware of each other’s existence, were linked.

Australia was to assume responsibility for British New Guinea upon Federation. This it finally did, changing the name to Papua in the process, in 1906. Hubert Murray, the most important and enigmatic figure in Papua’s colonial history, became Lieutenant-Governor, the post he was to hold until his death in 1940. In 1914, just after the start of the First World War, an Australian expeditionary force landed on the Gazelle Peninsula and, with the loss of five men, captured New Guinea. The territory was administered during the war by Australian military personnel and, after the post-war settlement, became an Australian administered territory under League of Nations mandate. The mandate was C class, which gave Australia a virtually free hand. The Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, regarded the arrangement as tantamount to the sovereignty he had originally sought. A succession of generals, none with any obvious qualifications for administering a colonial territory, headed the New Guinea Administration until the Second World War.

They were the lost days. Murray ran Papua with heavy-handed paternalism, doubt about the ability of Papuans ever to govern themselves, and virtually no money. But he did provide the Papuans with some protection from his more rapacious commercial compatriots. In wealthier New Guinea, where many of the German administrative traditions were continued, the planters, miners, and businessmen had a rather freer hand. They were the days of epic patrols into the interior to uncover gold, rich plantation land, and unimagined populations; of official Australian indifference so long as no enemy approached; of white enclaves vociferously demanding that the black be kept in his place; and of the blacks themselves, rarely considered except as units of labour, owners of land, and a shadowy threat to privilege—blacks bewildered and mute. They were also the days in which the different systems of government were to give added significance to the arbitrary boundary drawn through the mountains.

The Pacific war ended the era. Many thousands saw the white man was not all-powerful. The old masters and the new invaders competed for their loyalty. Many Australian soldiers were seen to be very different in attitude from the pre-war white, bringing with them a breath of egalitarianism which until then had not left home shores. After the war, with New Guinea a United Nations Trust Territory, the Labor government in Australia unified the administrations with Port Moresby the headquarters. A little of the wartime egalitarianism was continued under Eddie Ward as Minister and J.K. Murray as Administrator. Ward became known as Masta Pissim Pants because he refused to be carried on black shoulders from his boat to the shore, preferring to wade himself. Murray was derisively labelled Kanaka Jack because he invited black men to Government House. The Labor government fell in Australia and the Ward-Murray team was replaced by Paul Hasluck and Donald Cleland. Hasluck brought energy and an overall strategy to the Territories portfolio. He accepted the notion of self-determination, but believed it an almost limitless time away and, meanwhile, concentrated on development from the bottom. The enlarged Administration began making up for half a century of neglect in education, public health, and public works. But it was all so gradual. The emphasis in education, for example, was on the primary schools. While relatively large numbers of Papua New Guineans began getting into schools, very few went beyond primary. Elites were not encouraged. Despite the far greater efforts, therefore, men with the background to become leaders of a modern, black Papua New Guinea did not emerge.

Political advance was discouraged. The official policy was to allow change in accordance with the people’s wishes. The people did not know what to wish and, prompted informally by official and unofficial whites, said they preferred the safety of the status quo to the unknown dangers of responsibility. The African winds of change scarcely touched Port Moresby and failed utterly to reach the Highlands. A dependency syndrome developed. Many whites were anxious to reinforce this attitude and oppose anything that could be construed as radical. The whites had a disturbing year in 1960. Disengagement in Africa was approaching its height, and the Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, returned from a Commonwealth conference saying it was better for Australia to get out of Papua New Guinea sooner rather than later. Hasluck announced that the Legislative Council, a largely advisory body dominated by senior public servants, would be reformed with six blacks elected indirectly to it. Perceiving a challenge to their position, some white businessmen and planters formed the Territory’s first home-grown political party, the United Progress party. With a eurocentric platform and a few respectable black members, the party had some success in the election of 1961. But the whites were too scattered, too thin on the ground, and too bedevilled by personal animosities, and there was nothing to attract widespread black support. The party did not see out its first year. The election was notable chiefly for the success of a Papuan, John Guise. For some years his was the only voice of black nationalism.

Guise notwithstanding, the dependency syndrome persisted. Grassroot demand was for more schools, roads, hospitals, bridges, and all the other marvels of the Western world rather than for more political freedom. Pressures from the outside were mainly responsible for the next series of changes, changes that were to lay the foundations for the movement towards self-determination. In 1962, while a select committee of the Legislative Council was considering future constitutional change, a United Nations mission led by Sir Hugh Foot (later Lord Caradon) recommended that a national parliament be established. It also called for a university, a comprehensive national programme for economic development, and an end to the last remaining major piece of legal discrimination, the ban on blacks drinking alcohol. Heresies in 1962, the recommendations were all accepted within a few years. The degree to which the Foot report was responsible for these changes has since been debated hotly. In most, if not all, cases they were coming anyway, but the authoritative report provided important impetus. Certainly if Australia had waited for popular black demand they would have come more slowly.

And so, in early 1964, Papua New Guineans went to the polls for their first national election. That election was the start of the movement towards self-determination. But the desire for responsibility did not immediately follow the granting of the appurtenances of democracy. As late as April 1969 the minister for territories, Charles Barnes, could still say he thought independence was twenty to thirty years away. And his conservatism was still supported by the apparent conservatism of the great bulk of the population. Yet four years afterwards the country was on the threshold of self-government.

The decade from the first general election was the period in which Papua New Guineans began realizing that many aspects of Australian rule were unsatisfactory and inequitable and that they had, after all, the capacity to govern themselves. They were also the years during which Australia itself began actively to disengage. The logic of these two related factors led Papua New Guinea to move with increasing rapidity from dependence to autonomy. Yet the decade, despite all the changes it brought, did not end with all Papua New Guineans facing the future with confidence in or loyalty to their new nation.

The decade is difficult to interpret. Until recently there was a widespread assumption among whites that traditional black society was inert and that the only dynamic factor was white leadership. This fallacy led to the comfortable belief that all Australia had to do was to provide the money, leadership, policies, and expertise and it could mould traditional societies into modern communities. But traditional societies, for all their fragmentation and primitive technology, had lives of their own. They moved, if almost imperceptibly to white eyes. When alien ideas were imposed they sometimes reacted in unexpected ways In some cases the old societies were so delicately balanced that the imposition of some aspect of modern life brought breakdown and chaos. In recent years the assumptions about traditional societies have been destroyed, most notably by the events on the Gazelle Peninsula. But it is hard to assess the degree of disruption, the strength of the resentments arising from the disruption or the relationship between a generally vague and ill-understood resentment and a conscious desire for political change.

Then there is the difficulty of trying to interpret events that occurred in a system which few of the main actors themselves understood perfectly. The House of Assembly, the Administrator’s Executive Council (later the cabinet) and the public service were all Australian structures. Whites usually understood the rules; blacks generally did not. The blacks operated within the new system in accordance with their own backgrounds and customs. This led to observers misunderstanding black actions. Significance was frequently seen in actions that, to Papua New Guineans, were quite natural. For example, journalists used to make much of ministers in the second House occasionally voting against the Administration and to see in it proof of a split in the government. In Canberra, such an interpretation would probably have been valid. But in Papua New Guinea it usually only meant that the minister concerned felt his obligations to his electorate or to a friend were more important, so far as a specific issue was concerned, than his obligations to the government. It did not necessarily imply any abandonment of support for the government. It was, perhaps, a little like a team of rugby players who were expected to play soccer. The spectators, who had come to watch a soccer match, developed all sorts of theories to explain the eccentric behaviour of the players who, because they didn’t know they were supposed to be playing soccer, thought they were behaving quite normally. Albert Maori Kiki, one of the more remarkable Papua New Guineans who will appear in this story, when asked to explain some apparently inconsistent political action, always smiled enigmatically and said, That’s New Guinea politics. The answer was both a gentle reminder that white politics are not the only sort of politics and a tacit admission that he was unsure of his way through the alien variety. This suggests that the only people competent to interpret Papua New Guinean politics are those with a thorough understanding of both the white structures and the black actions within them. Such people are rare.

There is also the problem of perspective. Most observers viewed events from Port Moresby. The capital, however, is not typical of the country. Its history of white contact is significantly different from most other areas. It is far from the main population areas. It is a rapidly growing cosmopolitan city in a country where most people live in villages. To most people it is remote and autocratic; the place, never visited, which gobbles up so much money and from where impersonal directives periodically issue. Yet Papua New Guinea is too diverse for any particular area to claim to be typical. And Port Moresby is, at least, the place where most decisions are made One can only remember that the issues that seem crucial from Port Moresby are not necessarily so important to the rest of the country, that the ideas expressed in the capital need not represent the views of the majority, and that the inequities and squalor that are so obvious there are unknown in many villages.

Even common terms are misleading when applied to Papua New Guinea. It became fashionable to describe Pangu Pati, the country’s first viable political party, as radical. So, in the Papua New Guinea context, it was. Yet by most Third World standards Pangu’s policies have always been middle-of-the-road, and as independence approached, some people began to see it as the party of the establishment. The Mataungan Association of the Gazelle Peninsula was always, in one sense, more radical than Pangu. Because Pangu was already identified as the country’s radical movement, a stronger work, militant, was often applied to it. On the other hand about a million Highlanders were blanketed with the work conservative. Most of them were conservative in the sense that they expressed opposition to rapid political change. But it did not necessarily mean they were pro-Australian. In another sense the Mataungan Association was more conservative than the Highlanders. The Mataungans drew much of their strength from their support for traditional Tolai culture and their rejection of white political and economic structures, while the Highlanders often appeared anxious to tear down their old societies in their eagerness for an Australian-style economy. In general, in the Papua New Guinean context, radical applied to those who wanted relatively fast political change; conservative to those who, whatever their motives, wanted to slow this change down. As the decade proceeded this issue tended to dominate public discussion, obscuring other issues that in many respects were of greater importance to the emerging nation.

This book is an account of the decade of initiation from political and psychological dependence into the rigours and mysteries of national responsibility. It tells of Australian political leaders and stone-age tribesmen; of young black men anxious for change and older white men fighting a rearguard action against change; of hopes, fears, discontents, and misunderstandings; and how these things interacted and led through initiation into independence. It cannot claim to be fully balanced or comprehensive. It is simply one observer’s view of these bewildering, fascinating years.

2

The Initiation Begins

Preparations for the first general election began early in 1963, a year before the event. The Department of Native Affairs (DNA) began sending out patrols to prepare a common roll and to try to give the people some idea of what the election was about. Patrolling became more systematic and the political education aspect more pronounced later in the year when a high-level committee was set up to co-ordinate election planning. It was an enormous job. C.I. White, then commonwealth electoral officer for Western Australia and in Port Moresby as an adviser, told local officials: Never have you had a challenge like this. Nowhere in the world has anything like this been attempted. You are making history.

In all, five hundred patrols were made to twelve thousand villages, while sixty thousand pamphlets, plus aids like film strips and audio tapes, were used to try and explain the concept of a House of Assembly election and the mechanics of voting to a million illiterate villagers. The difficulties were exacerbated by quarrelling between DNA, which jealously defended its jurisdiction over relations with villagers, and the Department of Information and Extension Services (DIES), which regarded itself as the communications expert More seriously the kiaps, the DNA field officers, were associated with authority Their image of authoritarianism, coupled with compulsory registration to the common roll, gave to the election an atmosphere of compulsion. Many people wrongly believed they had to vote. Many people voted only because it seemed that the Administration, for some mysterious reason, thought they should. Others invested the election with their own magical beliefs Some groups, anxious to perform the correct ritual but hopelessly mixing cultures, abstained from sexual intercourse before voting. One Highland tribe held pre-election purification rites with pig’s blood. Some blacks were reluctant to stand from fear of being considered big-heads; others feared the shame that defeat would bring. The election was greeted with indifference, suspicion, and fear of penalties and as a new form of ritual. Rarely was it well understood.

There were forty-four open electorates which people of any race could contest and ten special electorates reserved for whites. The specials had been created because the Select Committee of the Legislative Council believed the new House would need the expertise of a core of private white members but feared that the overwhelmingly black electorates would not return them. A total of two hundred and sixty-seven candidates, including 32 whites, stood for the opens Six whites were returned. This meant that with the ten official members—senior Administration officers who were appointed to parliament by the Australian government—and the ten members from the specials, the racial breakdown was thirty-eight Papua New Guineans and twenty-six Europeans.

There were no political parties and virtually no national issues. Tribal or religious affiliation and customary status were usually the main determinants. In the Highlands, particularly, traditional values beat modern skills. The extreme example of this was Handabe Tiabe, a former fight leader and husband of six wives, who won Tari in the Southern Highlands, yet could speak neither English nor Motu nor Pidgin, the three official languages of parliament. For four years he was to sit in the House with a special interpreter at his side. Tiabe and many of his colleagues served their four years and then departed, having made no discernible contribution. There were, of course, exceptions: John Guise, Tei Abal and Sinake Giregire from the Western and Eastern Highlands respectively, Pita Lus from the Sepik, Paul Lapun from Bougainville, and Matthias Toliman from the Gazelle Peninsula. But the number of those who were to survive and play a significant role in national politics was small.

The select committee had recommended that undersecretaries be appointed from among the elected members. The role of under-secretaries was vague. They were understudies of sorts to departmental heads, to partially represent in the House those departments whose directors were not members and generally to gain administrative experience. They were appointed by the Administrator, Sir Donald Cleland, which meant the House had no control over them. Apart from the vagueness of their position—some complained they never knew what they were supposed to do and when not actually in the House were left to their own devices—there was suspicion that the whole thing was an Administration ploy to increase the number of members whose votes it could rely on and fear among those appointed that their necessarily long absences from their electorates would endanger their chances of reelection. There seems to have been some substance in that fear, because only three of the nine who served a full term as an under-secretary were re-elected. Furthermore, the appointments lopped off the entire educated black echelon from the backbench. No Papua New Guinean member, other than the under-secretaries, had been beyond primary school. The original appointments were Robert Tabua, John Guise, Edric Eupu, Dirona Abe, Nicholas Brokam, Paul Lapun, Matthias Toliman, Zure Zurecnuoc, Peta Simogen, and Sinake Giregire. Guise resigned when he was elected leader of elected members and was replaced by Lepani Watson. In addition, a ten-man Administrator’s Council, a proto-cabinet with advisory powers, was appointed. Its members were the two assistant administrators, John Gunther and H.H. Reeve, the director of native affairs, Keith McCarthy, two elected white members, Ian Downs and John Stuntz, and Guise, Abe, Brokam, Toliman, and Zurecnuoc.

On the eve of the second meeting of the House the elected members, feeling that despite their numerical superiority they could not match the expertise and organizing ability of the official members, decided to try and form an organization of their own. An informal meeting, which the white members left before voting took place, elected Guise leader of the group after Simogen, who had also been in the Legislative Council, declined nomination. But the organization did not last long. The fact that they were all elected members was in itself too slight a basis to provide the group with common purpose and cohesion. The whites had, in the main, different interests to pursue. They had also, naturally enough in this alien world of Westminster structures, greater confidence and expertise. They spoke more often and introduced three times as many private members’ bills as the black members did. Few of the backbench blacks, Guise excepted, did much more than ask questions and vote. They had neither sufficient understanding of the procedures nor sufficient grasp of events outside their home areas to do more.

The problem was aggravated by a basic conflict in the nature of the parliament. The House was supposed to be a training ground for political administration. Yet it was also supposed, while this training was in process, to run the country efficiently. As the official members, on whom the primary responsibility for administration fell, were in a substantial minority, much of their political activity was concerned with ensuring they had sufficient backbench support for their legislation to be passed. So the official members, the natural leaders of parliament, had a built-in propensity to persuade the backbench to a particular point of view rather than to encourage its initiative. Nor were the official members primarily politicians. They were senior public servants, answerable to no electorate, who tended to see-their parliamentary responsibilities as an irritating, time-consuming secondary consideration.

Yet there were occasional flashes of initiative. In 1966 Sinake Giregire was responsible for a landmark of sorts when a bill he introduced banning playing cards was passed. Giregire argued that gambling with cards was reaching epidemic proportions in the Highlands and that it was causing poverty and violence. The official members were not impressed with the measure, but Giregire gained sufficient support for it to be passed comfortably. The law, which many thought made the country look foolish and which was to cause many visitors bewilderment and indignation as they passed through customs, was the first for which a black member was solely responsible. It came to occupy a sentimental and symbolic place in the statutes, and for that reason, rather than its intrinsic merit, it survived several attempts to have it repealed.

A more significant initiative came from Paul Lapun, who in late 1966, and in the teeth of stern official opposition, persuaded the House to amend recently passed mining legislation so that the owners of land on Bougainville upon which huge copper deposits had been found would receive a share of the royalties. His achievement was particularly remarkable because his first attempt to gain the royalty for the dispossessed villagers had failed. By winning his point at the second attempt he showed that black members, with determination and skill, could lobby and argue effectively.

Meanwhile John Guise was securing his place as the country’s pre-eminent black politician. Despite the failure of the attempt to organize the elected members into a cohesive group, Guise was increasingly standing out as the black member who participated most frequently and effectively in parliament. This was recognized when he was elected chairman of a new select committee on constitutional development. The committee, set up to provide proposals to serve as a guide for the future constitutional development of the Territory, concentrated on internal changes to be brought into effect during the 1968 general election. The proposals it finally made, and which the House and, with some changes, the Australian government accepted, were modest. But the committee’s activities did provide the focus for the first real debate on Papua New Guinea’s future. At times the debate, particularly as it touched upon future relations with Australia, seemed to be conducted with more intensity in the metropolitan country than in the country most directly affected. This was particularly true of a proposal that Papua New Guinea should become the seventh state of Australia, a proposal which found substantial favour among white territorians. That such a scheme was not immediately and scornfully rejected by black leaders was an indication that the country’s sense of