The Kiap’s Retort

In high civilisation’s sophisticated art of the “deadly putdown”, do Australians tend to be high scorers? Or are we amateurs still struggling to rise from some disregarded league in the suburbs?

To illustrate the nature of the “deadly putdown”, let me briefly recount a true moment in the life of Winston Churchill. Walking with a friend one evening near the Commons, the two passed closely by the haughty Labour leader Sir Stafford Cripps. Murmured Churchill, audibly in the evening: “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.”

You’ll agree, such a remark is the verbal equivalent of a sudden punch in the solar plexus; who of us can return a calmly-phrased retort to trump the exchange in a split second? That’s all the time human nature allows; anything slower falls flat, a limp anti-climax. Tough? Yes.

I should be pleased to think that in this very minor department of civilised public life, Austral­ians were at least holding their own. But I have doubts; too many raw and recent echoes in my ears of:

“Aw, come off it, mate. What would you know about English Property Law?”

“Siddown, mug. You think we got all day to sit around listening to you?”

“Sure, and pigs might fly, too, mightn’t they?”

The whole notion of any actual international standard for repartee is, of course, absurd, but any spectacle of sharply competitive individual discourse is my favourite spectator sport. Duellists with fine steel rapier or stiletto provide no more thrilling combat than worthy adversaries wielding only their fresh-forged words, and I intend to introduce you to one of the best of them.

He was my superior officer (I held very junior rank) in two separate units during the Second World War in the Pacific. I can assure you that there was vastly, vastly more to him than words. I respected him (and still respect him) as much as any man I ever knew. His name was George Wilfred Lambert Townsend, one of the most legendary of the famous New Guinea district officers, widely known to Europeans throughout the Pacific Islands by his nickname, “Kassa”.

In the First World War, Kassa saw active service in France and Belgium with our own AIF, returning to Australia in 1919. In 1921, the Australian Brigadier-General Evan Wisdom, Administrator of the New Guinea territories seized from conquered Germany, happened to meet young George Townsend, and offered him a job as a patrol officer. Arrived in Rabaul, Kassa found himself stuck in an uncongenial desk job, from which he fought himself free to start the life he really sought: that of a kiap serving in the multifarious responsibilities, hardships, dangers and fulfilments of the wide-scattered districts. By the end of his service, he had served in every one of them, but he loved the Sepik best.

A kiap’s range of duties might include traversing (on foot) and mapping some unvisited and wholly unknown stretch of territory; introducing the government to villagers who had never seen a white man; building the necessary basic housing for some impending government centre, including perhaps even a simple hospital, and using the rough bush materials, including serviceable thatching, growing on the spot; identifying and arresting offenders against the government’s new policy forbidding the excitements of headhunting; conveying the alleged wrongdoers to Rabaul, there to answer to the Supreme Court for their actions—possible crimes carrying the capital penalty; on occasion, actually hanging them, back in the region of their offence. Less dire were counting and recording villagers for census purposes, and collecting payment of taxes and fines, usually in New Guinea-minted coinage of either the German or the Australian regimes. These had a hole bored through their centres, for the convenience of users who, having no pants, perforce had no pockets, so carried their liquidity threaded on a thong.

Law enforcement in the districts fell to the police—sturdy black NCOs and constables, well-trained, tough, and loyal to their kiaps. Each man was armed with a .303 short Lee Enfield rifle of Second World War pattern, and with a long sword bayonet hung from his belt, very smartly employed indeed, though mostly on the parade ground.

The kiap’s equipment was rounded off (hopefully) by a logical and practical mind, a steady temperament and (perhaps) a slightly more than average endowment of human courage.

Kassa’s extraordinarily eventful life is covered by the Dictionary of Australian Biography (Vol. 12) in a brilliant article by Diane Langmore. His career in Mandated New Guinea (think Rabaul), in combined Papua New Guinea (think Port Moresby) and then, after 1946, as a valued specialist assistant at the United Nations in New York, is depicted in accurate detail and is significantly assessed. The personality is most acutely portrayed. I knew him well, and this is the man I knew: a loner, terse-spoken, averse to formality and fuss-pottery. My only point of difference is that she calls him “short and fair” whereas I would have said “medium-tall and fair”. Maybe the discrepancy arose from my so constantly looking up to him.

After the fall of Rabaul to the Japanese, and consequential attempt to consolidate Australian military command and civil control in Port Moresby, there was extensive duplication of office. Peacetime officials were in many cases also given military rank “just in case”. The Papua Club became insensibly an army mess as well as a toney colonial civilian establishment. In this period Kassa made several courageous rescue and intelligence expeditions into enemy territory. As a patrol officer in peacetime would have done, he financed various stores and supplies from the commercial establishments, to be settled up on return from the bush.

This time, he was roundly ticked off for delinquency, publicly and loudly in the Club bar, by one of the commercial big-wigs, proudly attired in a brand-new army uniform. Kassa, just in from the bush, made a cross and equally public retort.

Managerial type: Do you know who you are speaking to?

Kassa (in deadly putdown form): My grocer, I thought.

Well, it wasn’t bad for a boy from the jungle.