Constructing a Parliament

The Independent State of Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia and United Nations trusteeship on September 16, 1975. For many in both Australia and Papua New Guinea, that was too early. In fact, it was more or less inevitable, with only the precise date a matter for dispute at the time. With the dismantling of the European colonial empires proceeding apace in the late 1950s and with the newly independent nations increasingly dominating the United Nations General Assembly, Australia came under growing pressure to grant independence to the United Nations Trust Territory of New Guinea and its natural partner, the Australian Territory of Papua. The United Nations Visiting Mission of 1959 was sharply critical of Australia’s performance in Papua New Guinea and the government was persuaded to accelerate development.

I was posted as acting assistant district commissioner to Kiunga in the Western District in January 1963. Now the river port for the giant Ok Tedi copper mine, Kiunga then was a small outpost some 800 kilometres upstream from the mouth of the Fly River and a mere thirty metres above sea level. It boasted a small white population of three patrol officers and a half-dozen missionaries plus a detachment of thirteen Papua New Guinean police. The Kiunga sub-district was the largest in land area—more than 100,000 square kilometres—in Papua New Guinea. It was probably also the wettest, with annual rainfall of up to 7.5 metres. At that time, there was one subordinate patrol post at Lake Murray, which with Kiunga itself served a population estimated at about 30,000. Part of the district, in the far north-west, was barely explored. The people lived largely as they had for centuries and the footprint of colonial government was very light indeed.

The Kiunga sub-district also bordered West New Guinea, then under United Nations administration pending a transfer of sovereignty to Indonesia on May 1, 1963. At that time, Indonesia was an uncomfortable neighbour with a stridently anti-colonial foreign policy. There was some uncertainty, at least in my mind, about its intentions towards Papua New Guinea. Accordingly, I asked my district commissioner for guidance, if not instructions, on my role should we experience any Indonesian incursions into our territory. I was conscious that Kiunga was a short day’s walk from the border and that a significant government post at Mindiptana was as close to the border on the other side. To my surprise and some dismay, my boss looked down his nose and, in a lordly voice, announced, “You will be told!” without quite concealing his disdain for my impertinence. That was not very helpful, although very likely he had no instructions himself.

Pressure from the United Nations to speed progress towards independence meant that some serious effort towards economic development of this remote and primitive area would at least have to be initiated. More significantly, the decision had been taken to establish a fully elected House of Assembly from a common electoral roll of all adults that did not yet exist. The timetable required the completion of the roll in 1963 with the first elections to be held early in 1964. As well, my immediate superior had instructed me to be on patrol in the border region when the Indonesians took over in West New Guinea at the beginning of May.

In due course, I set off on a patrol of about eight weeks not only to familiarise myself with part of the district and defend the border from the Indonesians—who were actually pretty quiet along this part of their new empire—but also to prepare the common roll for the House of Assembly elections. My patrol covered two census divisions, Atkamba along the southern stretch of the Ok Tedi (Alice River) tributary of the Fly, and Ningerum covering the northern stretch of the Ok Tedi and its tributary, the Ok Birim.

The Atkamba was traversed mostly by water in our large dugout canoe powered by a temperamental Archimedes twelve-horsepower outboard motor. Eventually we proceeded on foot into the foothills of the Star Mountains. The terrain comprised mostly primary and secondary growth forest with villages of some 150 to 200 people connected by footpaths, roughly two hours walk apart. A number of watersheds and many creeks had to be crossed and a couple of previously unrecorded villages visited and put on the map. I suspected from their rather raw state that they had moved from the Indonesian side of the border to ours. I was able to tidy up our very basic maps by taking a mass of cross-bearings from various villages. This was to have some value in the near future following some air force photographic surveys of the border.

Canoes with paddlers had to be hired to cross the fast-flowing Ok Tedi just above the junction with the Ok Birim. This involved a slow pull upstream in relatively slack water near the bank. Then following a politely worded order to me to sit still, the paddlers drove across the current, which did its best to rush us away to the Gulf of Papua. But the paddlers knew their stuff and we were progressively deposited on the northern bank while our benefactors reversed the process to get home.

Creek crossings were unremarkable, usually knee to waist deep. We had to keep a careful eye on recent weather to ensure we were not caught by sudden spates. Only two crossings remain in my memory, one which was chest deep with the exit comprising a roughly thirty-metre vertical bamboo ladder. The other involved following the creek knee deep through a tunnel carved by the water through the limestone rock.

From a native administration point of view, the area had been seriously neglected although, given its remoteness and our chronic lack of resources, there was little that could have been done in any serious way. The people were still quite primitive with no cash income of any sort. They were not seen as a source of labour and had nothing of value to sell. The area was peaceful although there had been some tensions in the Atkamba, the bulk of whose population actually lay in Indonesia. There had been some clashes on the Indonesian side between villagers and Indonesian troops who had been raiding village gardens to supplement their own meagre food supplies. My station interpreter turned up to work one day wearing an Indonesian combat jacket with a roughly repaired and once bloodstained rip. I suggested quite firmly to him that he would do well to hide the souvenir and wear the uniform generously provided by his employer.

In general, there was little point in doing anything more than basic administration among these neglected people, who nevertheless lived their lives generally peaceably. The existence of the government, albeit at a distance and with a locally appointed village constable, ensured that any problems would be either dealt with locally or referred to Kiunga.

The electoral roll was developed from the census recorded in books held in each village by the village constable. These books also included useful information for visiting officers and were a valuable resource that eventually disappeared. The electoral roll was to include all those adults eighteen years or older and had to be recorded on approved forms. Thus did bureaucracy penetrate to the distant fastnesses of the territory. The large forms with their heavy binders added an additional and not insignificant load for another carrier. Perhaps fortunately, the era of personal and laptop computers lay in the distant future, otherwise the normal bureaucratic aggrandisement would have had us using laptops with a couple of carrier loads of spare batteries. Naturally, the handwritten forms had to be typed in fair copy on the patrol’s return but, eventually, the roll was completed for the whole territory—for the most part by the relatively small corps of patrol officers—in what was a major administrative exercise.

Apart from the ordinary routine which was rarely uninteresting, the next important order of business was the conduct of the elections for the first House of Assembly for Papua New Guinea. For many in Papua New Guinea where local government had been established, elections were nothing new, even if those for the House of Assembly were rather more complex than the norm. But for the Kiunga sub-district, elections and their reason were something totally new.

The election was scheduled for February 1964 and every village had to be visited and votes received from as many of those eligible as cared to vote, all within a statutory three weeks. Even though I had been gazetted the assistant returning officer for the sub-district, I cannot recall more than forty years later how this was managed for the Kiunga sub-district, only that it was done, but it was a case of all hands to the pumps.

For my own part, I collected votes in the Ningerum census division, the most distant in the sub-district of those that had been thoroughly explored and contacted. The task was much more complicated than an ordinary census patrol. In addition to our usual camping gear and food supplies, we had to carry enough of the tough, locked and allegedly waterproof red plastic ballot boxes, a goodly supply of ballot papers and the heavy electoral roll. It took three days just to walk to my starting point, and then some forty villages had to be visited in the three weeks, followed by three days walk back to Kiunga. In general, I covered two villages a day, each being, with minor variations, some two hours walk apart. Necessarily, little time could be spent on ordinary village administration if I was to meet the legislatively ordained timetable.

With only occasional variations, each day would begin with the election process in the village in which I had camped while the patrol team packed up. We would then march on to the next, conduct the election and move on to the next overnight camp. This usually allowed time to do the necessary paper work, have my one meal of the day and deal with any urgent local problems. The days were necessarily long and we worked every day for the three weeks.

The main complicating factor arose from the fact that, because of its relatively small population, the Kiunga sub-district was only a part of the geographically very large Fly River electorate. There were no political parties active at that time and all the candidates came from the southern and more sophisticated part of the electorate around Daru. None had canvassed for votes in the Kiunga sub-district and all were totally unknown to the voters—including me. Thus all the candidates were effectively foreigners if not aliens from another planet. Not only did the voters in my area not know the names or policies (if any) of the candidates they had never seen, they had no little difficulty because of the language factor in pronouncing their names! Thus, in every village, it was necessary to conduct a brief education session not only to explain the election process and its purpose but also to list the candidates and drill the assembled voters in pronunciation.

The voting system was a secret preferential ballot along Australian lines although an exhaustive recording of preferences was not required. All adult males and females were entitled to vote but, because without exception all my villagers were illiterate, a whisper ballot system was used where the voter would whisper his or her choices to the returning officer—me—for recording on the ballot paper which the voter would then place in the ballot box. It was a theoretically sensible and valid system but had some amusing variations.

Our practice was to erect a tent fly and call the voters through one at a time. The routine worked smoothly but the formalities as actually practised would probably have horrified the theoreticians from the various bureaucracies up to and including the United Nations. A significant number of self-important, invariably male, voters would eschew their right to secrecy and bellow the name of their preferred candidate to the world at large. Perhaps this was no different from those Australian voters who publicly choose just one how-to-vote card before entering the voting chamber.

On one occasion, one self-important but significantly under-dressed elderly gentleman cogitated briefly, then hawked and spat onto my table. This almost certainly unintentional lèse majesté was too much for the duty police constable, who grabbed the “offender” by the scruff of the neck and the tuft of leaves at his rear end before running him out of the tent. It caused great hilarity among the audience and the returning officer concealed his own mirth with no little difficulty. After order was restored, the gentleman was allowed to record his vote.

Eventually, I completed my vote collecting and faced another three long days walk to get home. But the electoral authorities were impatient and sent a helicopter to meet me after the first day and collect the ballot boxes. Fortunately the pilot decided that there was enough room for me, so that a fifteen-minute flight saved me some sixteen hours walking. My incomparable Sergeant Keme brought the team home to a well-deserved break.

This strange experience was with local variations very likely repeated in many of the more remote parts of Papua New Guinea, but the notable outcome was the election of a functioning House of Assembly by a fundamentally democratic process. This first House became the legislative and political foundation of an independent Papua New Guinea and I remain deeply gratified to have been part of the process.