Port Moresby: Taim Bipo

By Stuart Hawthorne

This book is about Port Moresby-the capital of Papua New Guinea-but it is not about the city of today. Rather, it is about taim bipo (a Pidgin English term meaning 'previously' or 'as it was'), about how life was lived in Port Moresby in the two decades before 1975 when PNG was still under Australian control.

These were years of peace and

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kate Hawthorne
• Release date: Apr 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781763524408

Stuart Hawthorne

Stuart Hawthorne was eight years old when he moved to Port Moresby in 1957. He lived there for 20 years, leaving two years after PNG became an independent country. This book is his affectionate account of a time now gone - the 'taim bipo' of its title, when Port Moresby was an intimate village of expats and indigenous people, all intent upon re-building a country left badly damaged after WW2. Though his background is in other disciplines (philosophy and science), Stuart Hawthorne became, as he puts it, something of an accidental historian in 2003 with the publication of The Kokoda Trail: A history. Similarly, this book, 'Port Moresby: Taim bipo', is a significant history as well-a social history-of how his and other expatriate families who moved to PNG during the 1950s lived during the last two decades before independence. He does future historians a valuable service by capturing many of the small importances of daily life in pre-Independence Port Moresby as such things tend inevitably to become lost in the fog of time.

Book preview

frontflap

For

Ron and Meta,

my parents.

Front cover:

Police constables at Koki, 1957.

Previous page:

Detail from the fresco at St Mary’s Cathedral, Port Moresby, 1970.

Title page:

Port Moresby as viewed from the Administrator’s jetty at Konedobu in 1948.

Introduction:

Examples of Port Moresby’s drought-tolerant flora. All photos: late 1950s.

*Taim bipo (Pidgin English): previously, earlier (literally ‘time before’).

title

Also by Stuart Hawthorne:

The Kokoda Trail: A History

Copyright © N.S. Hawthorne 2011. All rights reserved.

Website: http://www.stuarthawthorne.com

Published by Kate Hawthorne.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process, nor may any other exclusive right be exercised, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

eISBN: 978-1-7635244-0-8 (ebook)

Contents

Introduction

Living there

Going to Port Moresby

At home

Weekend diversions

A paradise for kids

Good sports

Bomana War Cemetery

Enclosed by sea

‘The desire of our eyes’

A working port

Hanuabada

Hiri voyages

The yacht club

Gemo Island

Ela Beach

Old Port Moresby

The streets of Port Moresby

Koki Market

Sogeri Show

Town and country

The presence of the past

What happened?

The changing social scene

Going finish

Ba mahuta

Appendices

Appendix 1: Street maps of Port Moresby

Appendix 2: Individuals in group photographs

Appendix 3: Press clippings, 1969–1971

Appendix 4: Illustration sources

Index

The city of

Port Moresby

Port Moresby was declared the capital city in March 1949 following the post-WW2 amalgamation of the Territory of Papua and the Mandated Territory of New Guinea. For the following two decades, the town was run by the Administration, in the latter years of this period with the advice of a town advisory council.

In 1971, the Port Moresby City Council (its popular name though correctly, the Port Moresby Local Government Council) was created when the advisory council merged with three smaller advisory councils from surrounding areas.

In 1974, the National Capital District (consisting principally of the town environs and a little of the surrounding area) was established and Port Moresby became the district capital of the National Capital District as well as the provincial capital of the Central Province which surrounds it. Additionally, in 1975, the town (as opposed to the District) was re-declared the capital city of independent PNG.

In the early 1980s, the Port Moresby City Council was disbanded and replaced with an 11-member board of the National Capital District Commission.

Introduction

In 1960, the TP&NG Education Department, in conjunction with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, decided to produce a set of audio-tapes to help with teaching English in indigenous schools. The headmistress of Ela Beach Primary School in Port Moresby, Jo Keating, was asked to provide four children to read the simple English scripts and Helen Gunther, Daryl Watkins, Richard ‘Bluey’ Davies and I, all being around eleven years old, were selected.

For a day a week over six weeks, we were collected after school and taken out to the 9PA studio at Six Mile. The recording sessions usually finished about 5.45 pm and on the first five occasions, I got a lift home with one of the others who lived in my direction. On the last occasion, there was a mix up and everyone had gone by the time I emerged from the studio, a little later than usual. I couldn’t contact my parents because we didn’t have the phone on and as it was getting dark, I decided to walk the six miles home to Konedobu, even though it was unusual for white adults to walk any great distance alongside roads and almost unheard of for a young white child to do so alone.

vii

I walked for about an hour and a half into the darkening evening, past Boroko Drive and along Hubert Murray Highway, passing by Tabari Place and Four Mile, along the front of Murray Barracks and then up the long slope to the top of Three Mile Hill, to wind down to Matirogo and Calamity Corner at Badili. By then, I had walked a transect which crossed much of the then-settled part of Port Moresby’s environs, and along the way I had passed many indigenous pedestrians, all of whom wished a somewhat startled good evening and offered help to me, the lone European child. Though young, I was quite aware of potential dangers yet I was not frightened at any time by these always-courteous encounters and no reason to be even mildly apprehensive was ever presented. I was almost at Koki before somebody who recognised me offered a lift in their car and delivered me to my Lawes Road home, much to the relief of my parents.

viiia

I mention this incident to highlight the difference between Port Moresby as it used to be—what this book is about—and Port Moresby as it is now, several decades after independence. Today, it would be imprudent for a person of any race, child or adult, to attempt to walk the same path on their own even in daylight let alone after dark, for the route passes through parts of the city that have become truly dangerous.

viiib

This book records events and images of Port Moresby for the two decades from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s, arguably the most important period in PNG’s pre-independence development. It is about the place where a bunch of us post-war baby boomers grew up, the place we called home and, given our formative impressions, the place many of us still instinctively think of as ‘home’ half a century later. Of course, the passing years tend universally to invoke nostalgia, for all adolescence and all home towns are rendered important by the vitality of childhood experience. But Port Moresby, a white Australian town ruling a black country in the last years of old colonialism and still enjoying well into the 1950s, a curiously lingering post-war optimism, can justly claim to be in a class by itself. Our childhood there was unique and we were truly fortunate to live there in those times.

In compiling this book, I’ve had two aims. The first is to provide a repository for photographs and comment about this period of Port Moresby’s evolution. To date, there have been relatively few publications about Port Moresby, at least at the personal level, and it seems advantageous to posterity if this modest volume can capture some of this material before it is lost so that others may know of this interlude in Australia’s history.

ixa

The second objective has been to step forward, as it were, to defend the reputation and dignity of the town we once called home. Of all the population centres in post-independence PNG, Port Moresby is the place that seems to have fallen the furthest. In fact, this decline has been so severe it is noticeable on a global scale. In a series of annual surveys of 140 cities, an international business think-tank, the Economist Intelligence Unit, has consistently rated Port Moresby, along with Algiers, Harare, Lagos, Abidjan, Douala and Tehran to have the worst or near-worst ‘liveability’ of the cities examined. Despite intermittent spurts of effort by city authorities to halt this slide into perdition by fixing roads and restoring public gardens, this has been too little done too late, either from lack of commitment or lack of funds, or both. Today, overburdened by a quarter of a million unemployed squatters, Port Moresby is ravaged by lawlessness, corruption, incompetence and failed infrastructure. To see now our once lovely and gentle city rated in other urban surveys as the world’s ‘most dangerous’ and the South Pacific’s ‘filthiest’ is to suffer angst that is almost beyond expression.

ixb

I’ve tried to avoid this account being too autobiographical because this entails a singular viewpoint and rather narrow scope. My intention is wider than this and I have tended to use a lot of photographs rather than a lot of text so that the reader can interpret the material in the light of their own experiences rather than mine. Hopefully, such approach captures some of the essence of the place where all of us post-war kids grew up, at the same time and in more or less the same circumstances. Since this account deals with the contrast between ‘then’ and ‘now’, I’ve included a couple of chapters examining the reasons why a difference between the two periods has come to pass. My brief review of this very complex situation is far from being an exhaustive one but will serve to indicate how the legacy of the colonial past has affected PNG’s contemporary life.

Stuart Hawthorne, Brisbane.

Females are identified in the text and captions by the surname they were using at the time.

x

Workshop crew at John Stubbs & Sons factory, Port Moresby, 1956; Ron Hawthorne (second from left), Russell McDowall (right front).

Alas, the idea of ‘safety sandals’ never made it past the 1950s.

Living there

Life in post-war Port Moresby was characterised by a healthy sense of purpose. Two objectives in particular stood out.

The first, indigenous advancement, had become prominent because there had been a major rethink of the limited pre-war colonial perspective in the late 1940s and a much more vigorous and productive approach was now to be taken.

The second was rebuilding war-damaged Port Moresby. The town had endured over 100 air raids and tens of thousands of troops had passed through it during WW2 so there was a lot of damage to be repaired.

These were big tasks to take on. But for a population buoyed by post-war optimism, they seemed worth pursuing and just about everyone subscribed to at least one of these objectives. Everyone was pulling in the same direction and the collective feeling of fulfilment this engendered made for a satisfied work force and vibrant community life.

Going to Port Moresby p 3

At home p 7

Weekend diversions p 35

A paradise for kids p 59

Good sports p 75

Bomana War Cemetery p 95

Going to Port Moresby

Before the Second World War, Port Moresby had been a sleepy little place with a white population of around 600. But in the 1940s, it became prominent as the military headquarters for Allied operations opposing the Japanese push towards Australia. In the darkest days of 1942, plans were made to destroy the town in the face of its anticipated loss. Accordingly, not much care was taken (initially, at least) by the thousands of troops who passed through it on their way to the Kokoda Trail and other campaign areas in PNG.

After the war, the place was a mess. Given Australian financial constraints and global shortages in the immediate post-war period, and with some political hokey-pokey thrown in for good measure, it took the best part of a decade before rebuilding of the town could get underway. A call went out to Australia for experienced people to be part of this reconstruction effort and many families, including ours, went to Port Moresby in the 1950s in response to this recruitment drive. My father, Ron Hawthorne, had served in the AIF in PNG during the war, had liked the country and was eager to return.

I was eight years old when we moved from Brisbane to Port Moresby, ‘we’ being my mother Meta, brothers Graham and Russell, sister Rosemary and me. Dad had been in Port Moresby since 1955 but there had not been any family accommodation available so we had had to wait until May 1957 to join him.

Our journey to Port Moresby was a bumpy six-hour flight in a Qantas DC4, having left Brisbane about midnight after passing through the old igloo at Eagle Farm. We arrived at Port Moresby’s Jacksons Airport sometime after 6 am, so most of the flight was in darkness. My first glimpse of the New Guinea island was at dawn when I awoke among passengers engaged in the curiously hushed process of an airline breakfast. We were off the coastline near Tupuseleia (or Tubaseria, as it is now), where the pilot had made his landfall and had turned left for the descent to Jacksons.

We passed the slopes of a rain-misted Mt Astrolabe, its summit aglow in the rising sun yet with darkness still pooled in its gullies. By pressing my head sideways against the window glass, I could just make out a dark shoreline passing slowly by more or less underneath the plane. At eight years old, I’d hardly been anywhere so these mysterious sights were wonderfully exciting though my (then very young) sister slept through it all. Then the wheels and flaps grinded and thumped and we prepared for landing. As the plane’s wheels made first contact with the ground, there was a single loud ‘clack!’ and then a continuing clatter from outside as the plane rolled over the steel Marston matting of the old wartime runway which was still in use then. I had not flown before so didn’t think these noises abnormal but they gave my mother a fright.

It was going on 7 am and already bright and warming up by the time we left the plane, a different sort of air seeming to engulf you as you stepped through the door. We followed everyone else through a mist of light rain towards a small white shed, which turned out to be the terminal building. My father came out to meet us on the tarmac, as people were allowed to do then, before we had walked half the distance. I am sure Dad must have thought I was not pleased to see him because my ears had not yet adjusted to coming back to earth and everything I could hear seemed to be coming from far away. I was also becoming uncomfortable with the humidity as I was still wearing my now-damp Brisbane pullover.

Of those first moments at Port Moresby airport, I remember most of all the smells. The air reeked of a heady mix of wet concrete and aviation fuel, every now and again cut through by the distinctive sharpness of kuku (black twist tobacco), wafting across from native smokers looking on from behind a chain mesh fence. And then, as the native porters manhandled the luggage trolleys past us, the tang of their effort and sweat-stained clothes descended upon us. But over all this, there was a cleaner, mildly spicy aroma in the air, like that given up from a grassy field, which seemed to remain when these other smells blew away. This was the smell of our new country and at the time it all seemed very exotic to me, trying to take everything in at once.