Germany, Britain and Australia in New Guinea

In November 1884 Britain and Germany divided and annexed eastern New Guinea, extending their interests west to the 1820s border laid down by the Dutch, which incorporated west New Guinea into their East Indies colony.

Colonialism came to eastern New Guinea in the usual pattern of the Pacific islands: traders entered first, then whalers in the eastern archipelagos in the 1820s and 1830s, followed by some failed missionary attempts in the 1840s and by more successful ventures later. In the 1870s, pearl-shell, turtle-shell and beche-de mer traders arrived from north Queensland, some of whom collected local copra. Several thousand New Guineans worked for these entrepreneurs before annexation occurred. British intervention was motivated by Australian colonial concerns that New Guinea should not fall into German hands, and finally pushed by an audacious and unauthorised move by Queensland in 1883 to annex much the same area as modern Papua New Guinea to Queensland, on behalf of Britain. Although Britain refused to honour Queensland’s move, a year later international politics had pushed it into a smaller annexation that became British New Guinea. At the same time Germany proclaimed an overseas mercantile territory, which empowered a chartered company to govern north-east New Guinea on its behalf. These colonially derived boundaries remain in place, now provinces of Indonesia, and British and German New Guinea combined into independent Papua New Guinea.

Germany’s colonial empire in the Pacific had followed missionaries and traders; its timing flowed from the unification of Germany in the 1870s and a subsequent move to obtain colonial territory. The German New Guinea Company had speculated that settlers would flock to New Guinea and purchase land. They failed to materialise, forcing the company to establish tobacco, kapok and coffee plantations.

Initially the company favoured Asian workers, importing Chinese, Malays, Sumatrans and Javanese. These labourers suffered high death rates and soon the labour policy changed towards Pacific Islanders. The plantations failed and in 1899 the German colonial government took direct control, extending formal imperial rule all along the coast but never far inland. The German colonial state was rudimentary compared with British and French colonial cultures. After 1900, German colonial law was centralised under imperial laws. A dual legal system developed whereby Germans respected indigenous property rights, but rather than following diverse customary laws they were translated into rights under German law, and local people remained outside the jurisdiction of ‘regular’ colonial courts. Indigenous local officials were appointed to organise government-sponsored activities, having to ensure that eligible young men signed on as labourers, and that others were available to build local roads. Head tax was imposed, forcing villagers to earn money or work off their debt in government service. The governor also encouraged villagers to begin copra plantations.

The German presence was small, limited to missionaries, traders and officials. Settlements and German economic control came to an abrupt end in 1914 when the First World War began and Australia seized German New Guinea, agreeing unwillingly to its transformation into a League of Nations mandated territory in 1921, still under Australian control.¹⁰

In south-eastern New Guinea, beginning with British missionaries and itinerant European and Chinese traders, colonial settlements grew out of the Australian frontier. By 1884 Britain had been pushed into declaration of a protectorate not a colony, the terms of which made it clear that Papuans were to be protected from exploitation. This set the tone of the administration, and even when Britain transformed its New Guinea territory into a colony in 1888, there was little emphasis on economic development.

The territory benefited from having two long-term administrators, Sir William MacGregor and Sir Hubert Murray. The main emphasis of MacGregor’s native policy, influenced by his earlier years in Fiji, was protection of land and labour. He introduced a native constabulary, an innovative system of village policemen, and allowed only limited labour recruiting. Initially only the government could employ Papuans outside their own districts; however, indentured labour slowly became incorporated into the pacification process. MacGregor introduced village coconut plantations, and Murray continued this scheme. MacGregor actively discouraged settlement by small-scale Australian farmers, preferring large-scale commercial enterprises. The result was an agricultural impasse, with the goldfields the main avenue for employment and enterprise.

After MacGregor’s departure, the colony drifted aimlessly. Many tropical crops were tried, but only coconuts and rubber proved successful. Even so, by 1923 Papua’s plantations covered only one-third of the extent of those in the mandated territory. The Papuan role was as labourers, although the number employed between 1906 and 1941 never amounted to more than one-quarter of those in the mandated territory. Murray’s incredibly long tenure and his refusal to exploit the indigenous population held back economic development. Australian Papua was an unusual colony: blocked from Australia by the White Australia Policy, which restricted immigration from 1901, and controlled by a policy that could be interpreted as conservative but at the same time pro-Papuan at a time of peak colonial exploitation worldwide. This did not necessarily mean overall enlightened administration. Draconian regulations to protect white women from supposed attack by natives, for instance, were introduced in the 1920s.

Papua remained an Australian territory, as, de facto, did German New Guinea, although legally a League of Nations ‘C’ class mandate until it became a United Nations trust territory in 1945.

Strangely, the mandated and trust territory was always more heavily developed than Australia’s own colony, Papua, which Australia chose to regard as a ‘Territory’, never acknowledging the imperial designs that had kept eastern New Guinea in focus since the 1880s. The Australian military administration (1914—1920) taxed more heavily and recruited more widely than the Germans ever had, and corporal punishment remained a much-used deterrent. Australia wanted to annex German New Guinea but had to accept the mandate, attempting to settle the territory with ex-soldiers on the appropriated German plantations, which proved a dismal failure. The plantations fell into the clutches of two large Australian companies. The major change in the inter-war was the opening up of inland areas and the development of goldfields, which added wealth and increased employment.¹¹

New Guinea was crucial in the Pacific War; 300,000 Japanese, over one million Americans and several hundred thousand Australians fought on the island. Australia lost control of coastal and island New Guinea, but managed to maintain its hold over much of Papua. The war changed everything and afterwards, as in the Solomon Islands, there was no return to the old conditions. The international circumstances were also changing as the United Nations stepped up the decolonisation agenda. The administration of the two Australian territories was combined and indenture and penal sanctions were abolished. Despite labour shortages, copra and rubber plantations nevertheless survived, and the labour frontier spread to the newly opened Highlands in the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1960s and early 1970s, Australia pushed Papua New Guineans at an almost indecent pace into secondary and tertiary education and democratic processes, which led to hurried independence in 1975.

The pattern in indigenous leadership is similar to the other island nations of the Coral Sea: overwhelmingly male, village- and local-school educated, mission assisted and trained as part of local government, political associations and the public service.

One of the early supporters of local government, Vin ToBaining was born in east New Britain and educated in local schools. At 17 he began training as a Methodist pastor but abandoned studies in 1937 to work in the mission printery, where he rose to be foreman. In 1946 he became an interpreter for the administration and gained experience in local government, becoming vice president of his local council. In 1961, he travelled to the United Nations as a member of an Australian delegation. Then in 1965 ToBaining became president of the Gazelle local government council. He clashed with members of the radical Mataungan Association and joined the PANGU Pati, the first major political party, at its foundation in 1967, becoming chairman of the Melanesian Independence Front in 1968. From a later generation, Michael Somare became Papua New Guinea’s first prime minister and best- known politician. Somare’s parents were from the Sepik River district, but he was born in

Rabaul, New Britain, where his father was a policeman. He returned to Murik Lakes in the Sepik when he was 6 and experienced the Japanese invasion. After the war he graduated from teacher-training college in 1957 and became a government education and broadcast officer. He became interested in workers’ associations, then returned to study in Port Moresby where he matriculated and became a member of the Bully Beef Club, a politically minded discussion group which eventually produced the PANGU Pati. In 1967 Somare was one leader of a group that organised a submission on constitutional development and the next year he was elected to the House of Assembly. He became parliamentary leader of PANGU, the first chief minister in 1972 and the first prime minister in 1975. He has served in parliament ever since, as prime minister, a cabinet minister or leader of the opposition.¹²

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Source: Aldrich Robert, McKenzie Kirsten (eds.). The Routledge History of Western Empires. Routledge,2014. — 542 p.. 2014

Germany, Britain and Australia in New Guinea

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