Most Australians know comparatively little about their closest neighbour. While many of them would be able to rattle off the names of dozens of New Zealanders — sports people, politicians, actors, writers, artists — and name major cities and geographical features in the Land of the Long White Cloud, their knowledge of Papua New Guinea tends to be sketchy. The one place most Australians could name, Kokoda, has more to do with Australian than with Papua New Guinean history.
When you consider distance and population size, that relative ignorance is puzzling. It’s 1500 kilometres from Tasmania to New Zealand’s South Island, ten times the distance between Cape York and the New Guinea mainland. If it weren’t for crocodiles and sharks, an experienced swimmer would be able to cover the less than four kilometres from there to the closest inhabited Australian island, Sabai in the Torres Strait. Today, New Zealand has just over five million inhabitants, about as many as Queensland, while household surveys and satellite imagery put PNG’s estimated population in 2021 at close to twelve million, almost half the size of Australia’s.
Yes, lots of New Zealanders live in Australia. But in Cairns and other Northern Queensland towns the presence of Papua New Guineans is hard to ignore. And who knows, someday many more might come. PNG is a volatile country and its southern border is “porous,” as former Liberal senator Ian Macdonald once aptly put it.
But it’s because of its twentieth-century history that Australians may want to show a more lively interest in PNG. Early in that century, in 1906, Australia formally took over British Papua, the British colony established at the urging of Queensland twenty-two years earlier. When the first world war broke out, Australia seized German New Guinea; after the war, that former German colony was administered, separately from Papua, by Australia under a League of Nations mandate. Then, following the second world war, Papua and what had become the UN Trust Territory of New Guinea were combined under Australian rule, though it wasn’t until 1971 that the entity was renamed Papua New Guinea. In 1973, the colony became self-governing; two years later it was independent.
PNG is not entirely ignored in Australia — at least not now. In the lead-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the day of independence, 16 September 1975, Australian media coverage about PNG has been extensive. And some of it has been very good. But the history of Australian rule, which in one part of PNG lasted for more than ninety years, has barely featured.
Of course, it makes sense to celebrate PNG’s achievements over the past half century, explore the young nation’s manifold challenges and try to predict its future. But such a focus allows Australians to hold on to powerful myths: that Australian colonialism was incidental and benevolent, that the inhabitants of Australia’s colony were treated far better than Indigenous Australians, and that Australia gave independence to Papua New Guineans.
Under the headline “At 50, Papua New Guinea Deserves a More Complete Story,” the Lowy Institute recently published a post by Peter Raynes, the Fred Hollows Foundation NZ program director responsible for the NGO’s activities in the Pacific, who has worked in PNG on and off since the 1990s. Raynes’s narrative of how the Australian colony became an independent nation is fairly typical. “After the war, the global tide turned toward decolonisation,” he writes, making the process appear inevitable and unrelated to the specific circumstances in PNG.
Under growing international pressure in the 1960s, Australia began preparing Papua New Guinea for independence. But the timeline was short, and the adoption of a centralised Westminster-style parliamentary system proved ill-suited to the country’s traditional bigman leadership structures and its extraordinary regional and cultural diversity… A local House of Assembly was established in 1964, followed by formal self-government in 1972. Full independence was achieved on 16 September 1975 — bringing us to this year’s 50th anniversary.
The only named actor in this extract is Australia; the passive voice in the last two sentences suggests that Papua New Guineans played little part in how independence came about. That narrative has an obvious corrective: a small group of local leaders — the politicians Michael Somare, Albert Maori Kiki, Julius Chan, Iambakey Okuk and John Guise among them — played instrumental roles in the immediate lead-up to independence. But that corrective often implies that an indigenous elite existed only because Australia had invested in education, including creating the University of Papua New Guinea in 1966.
In reality, the momentum for independence was also influenced by Papua New Guineans who objected strongly to Australian colonial rule. People living around Port Moresby, on Manus and on Bougainville, and Tolai on the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain were prominent among them. In 1969 the latter formed the Mataungan Association, which fought for economic and political autonomy. When opposition leader Gough Whitlam addressed thousands of Mataungan supporters in their stronghold, Matupit, in January 1970, he considered it “one of the most moving experiences of our lives” and “the biggest election rally we have ever seen.” His encounter with militant Tolai helped to convince him that self-rule and independence couldn’t come soon enough.
Tolai living on the Gazelle Peninsula first encountered European traders and missionaries as early as the 1870s. Before other Papua New Guineans, they gained access to Western education. The Methodist missionaries used the Tolai language as a lingua franca to spread the gospel in other parts of the New Guinea islands.
The Tolai’s location helps explain why they played a prominent role in colonial New Guinea. They lived in villages near the colony’s administrative capitals: Herbertshöhe (Kokopo) from 1899 until 1910, and Rabaul until 1937. Rabaul’s port continued to sustain its economic importance after the second world war.
Tolai sometimes established amicable relationships with missionaries, traders, planters and the colonial administration. But they also had a long history of being a thorn in the colonisers’ side. In 1893 and again in 1902 the Germans were able to put down large-scale rebellions of Tolai only with the help of plantation labourers and Tolai from other districts. In each instance, the rebels suffered heavy casualties.
The leaders of the 1902 uprising, ToVagira and ToKilang, were killed by police patrols after a bounty had been put on their heads. According to his grandson, the colonial official in charge of the counterinsurgency kept a photo of their severed heads. An old Tolai woman I interviewed in the 1980s remembered ToVagira’s head being affixed to the wall of the German government offices at Kokopo. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe the story is merely a suitable image of the violence with which German colonial rule was associated.
By the time the Australians took over the German colony in 1914, the Tolai’s armed resistance had ended. But some Tolai kept protesting and rebelling against colonial rule. In August 1958, the Australian administration’s heavy-handed response to a protest on the Gazelle Peninsula even made it into the New York Times: “Two natives opposed to civilization in general and census-taking and taxes in particular gave their lives today in defense of their freedom,” the paper reported from Rabaul. “They were shot to death in a clash with Administration officers and police over a census in the nearby village of Navuneram.”
A commission of inquiry found the “view that the natives had planned to make an attack on the Administration forces” to have been “based on a reconstruction of the matter in the light of subsequent events and a preconceived idea,” which the commissioner considered to be incorrect. The commissioner also established that the two victims, ToVurete and ToVatuna, were shot in the back. No officials were ever prosecuted for their deaths, but Tolai remembered the name of the official who had fired the first two shots; he was murdered by Tolai in an unrelated dispute thirteen years later.
The conflicts between Tolai and their various colonisers — first the Germans, then the Australians, then the Japanese, followed again by the Australians — are remarkable not for Tolai violence but for the colonisers’ retribution.
The Gazelle Peninsula was home not only to Tolai and Europeans but also to many labour migrants from other parts of the country, most of whom lived either in Rabaul or on plantations. These labourers were involved in one of the most spectacular incidents of anti-colonial defiance in 1929, when thousands of them went on strike for better pay. In the year PNG gained independence, Australian historian Bill Gammage, then a young lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea, published an article about that strike that is still worth reading. His findings were based on archival sources and, importantly, oral testimonies of participants in the strike.
The strike collapsed almost immediately. Gammage provides an excellent account of how it began and how it ended, which I won’t rehash. But two other aspects of the history he recounted have stayed with me.
First, the Europeans were completely taken by surprise — not so much because the preparations were kept secret but because planters, missionaries and government officials couldn’t imagine Papua New Guineans disobeying orders and objecting to being treated badly. When they went on strike, many Europeans assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that the instigator was an Australian missionary.
The other part of the story concerns the aftermath of the strike. Although no one came to harm and almost all strikers returned to work within hours, the retribution was merciless. “Some strikers were flogged and then sacked or taken to court and charged with desertion,” Gammage writes. “Beating natives was illegal, but apart from issuing warnings… no government official dared or cared to enforce the law.”
In fact, some European residents considered the Australian administration too lenient. “Why, the only thing a native understands is a beating,” an Australian woman wrote in private letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Too much is tolerated and too little done, and, as everyone says, we are too small a community of whites to let the blacks get the upper hand.”
But the official response was also extremely harsh. Twenty-one men were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Because the Native Labour Ordinance didn’t allow for either the charges or the sentences, Gammage explains, the court used “the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899, adopted in New Guinea in 1921, a section of which laid down a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment for any conspiracy to commit an offence in Queensland.”
The labour migrants who went on strike in 1929 objected to their paltry wages. Most Tolai, meanwhile, were subsistence farmers, and some of them sold copra to European traders. But Tolai too resented colonial rule. At about the time of the Rabaul strike, men in Vunamami, a coastal village near Kokopo, formed an organisation they called kivung na pidik, or secret association. “Let us collect a bit of money and see what happens,” the initiator, Enos Teve, is reported to have said. Later that money was used to finance a copra drier. Tolai men in other villages formed similar kivung after 1945.
When I enquired about the kivung na pidik in the 1980s, I learned that those involved were unhappy about having to observe a 9pm to 6am curfew and being prohibited from wearing shirts. (The Native Administration Regulations stipulated that men not wear clothes on the upper part of their bodies.) They also resented the fact that they were barred from drinking alcohol.
“Whoever was caught drinking — off they went to jail for six months,” Polos ToPultima, who worked as a government clerk in interwar Rabaul, told me. “Six months in jail for every single time you were caught drinking. Enos saw all this, and he thought of the council, actually not yet the council, of the kivung. A kivung to collect money to have a say, so that a government would materialise and we would govern ourselves.”
Independence was not just the result of Australian tutelage, or of the leadership of people like Somare. A colonial dress code may seem to be a trivial matter, but the resentment it created, particularly among grown men, mattered. And the sense of injustice and humiliation lingered long after it had been consigned to the dust bin.
It’s up to Papua New Guineans whether they want to remember colonial injustice. Australians may want to be aware that such injustice was widespread and that it mattered a lot to Papua New Guineans, at least before 1975. They would also do well to remember that in the 1920s and 1930s, when New Guinean men were not allowed to wear shirts, Australians working in the colony saw nothing amiss. In fact, some of them would have been convinced that allowing “the natives” to dress like Europeans would spell the end of the colonial order. After all, the last thing they wanted was “to let the blacks get the upper hand.” •
