Tales of Our Northern Empire

I write this during the second week of June and withal, in a state of contentment. That tranquillity derives very little from the general state of our national affairs. As a new government brings down its first budget, serious perplexities trouble our citizens over a wide spectrum. The unrepresentative cabal of Green nutters may whisk legislative command away from the government; two recent prime ministers face investigations of the utmost gravity; the trade unions are so deeply and widely corrupt that for us to continue to accept them as the natural tail that wags the Labor Party dog is simply not on—if we wish to remain an authentically democratic polity. Perhaps our high world reputation, first for the invention and then for operating such a successful federal system of democratic civil government, is about to crash?

And of course the pulsating, potent, pregnant figure of Clive Palmer continues to loom … and loom. If I continue thinking thus, cheerfulness will creep out; better I revert to what was delivering such a glow a little earlier: the postman had just left a kindly signed copy of yet a third printing of Michael O’Connor’s remarkable little book, New Guinea Days: A Tale of Love and Adventure.

O’Connor tells of Australia’s now-vanished empire, of which he was an active and honourable member. Young Australians today—say, those of school years—would be surprised to learn that Australia ever had an empire, but we did, a small one perhaps, but perfectly formed. (The young are well accustomed, though, to being taught that Australians always played the eager role of bum-lickers in doing the dirty work of someone else’s empire.)

Ours began definitively on September 1, 1906, when the Commonwealth government proclaimed the Papua Act. This followed several years of stammers and stutters and false starts, while the government in London wound up its control of British New Guinea (think Port Moresby) and Australia took over under the lieutenant-governorship of that remarkable and redoubtable Scot, Sir William MacGregor (1846–1919). This singular man’s humanely protectionist colonial philosophies, attentive always to the basic needs of the indigenous peoples, became pervasive, and long so remained in the Pacific and elsewhere.

Hubert Murray was appointed Administrator in succession to MacGregor, and confirmed as Lieutenant-Governor in 1908. He had been serving there as Chief Judicial Officer for several years before that, and as Judge Murray he had early manifest his devotion—almost his consecration—to Papua. So far from restricting himself to sitting in the Supreme Court, and to policy consideration in Port Moresby, he joined vigorously and courageously in the actual explorations of the rugged and challenging terrain, and the contacting and control of the widely scattered and often warlike tribal people in their villages, many of whom were cannibals. His lifelong and oft-expressed admiration for the work of the Papua public service’s “outside men” (the resident magistrates, patrol officers and the like) was firmly founded on his own experience of its physical rigours, and its mental challenges to an officer’s resource and ingenuity.

Massively built, Murray, a lawyer, held a good Oxford degree and, just incidentally, was amateur heavyweight boxing champion of England. Yet he could hardly have been more Australian: a scion of the pioneer grazier Murray family of Yarralumla, today the site of Government House.

Murray worked hard at his visionary scheme for promoting parallel systems of economic development, under which the indigenous village folk, still protected by their traditional social organisation, might nevertheless prosper economically to produce a regular stream of cash income, to permit meaningful participation in the modern world. The immigrant (mostly white) community—coconut and coffee growers, gold and other miners, timber getters and so forth—would organise their businesses in the conventional way, but their activities would not be allowed unduly to disrupt indigenous life or interests.

Murray published his ideas about colonial government, and corresponded with leading British imperial figures such as the great Lord Lugard of Africa fame. The whole exercise was to Murray one of the profoundest intellectual challenge, equal in its way to the (relished) challenges to nerve and muscle posed in the field by exploration and pacification.

His ambitious plans faced many obstacles, but failure was more or less guaranteed by the stinginess of the Australian government’s refusal to finance for Papua anything more than a “skin-and-bones” administration. Murray never laid aside his harness. In 1940, aged almost eighty, with the Second World War raging, he set off in the government yacht Laurabada on an official tour of inspection of “his” Trobriand Islands. At sea he fell ill, and died in his sleep in the island port of Samarai. He was the longest-serving proconsul in the annals of the whole British Empire.

By a takeover very different from the prolonged civilian waffling that changed British New Guinea into Australian Papua, German New Guinea (think Rabaul) began its series of metamorphoses which made it virtually Australian.

As 1914 developed, it became ever clearer that no miracle in Europe could avert war between England and Germany so, in Melbourne, Senator George Foster Pearce, Australia’s Defence Minister in the then Labor government, prepared for war in the Pacific.

This truly gifted man, a carpenter latterly of Perth, but born in Mount Barker, South Australia, in 1861, had left school aged eleven. By natural endowment he showed from first appearance in public life all the maturest qualities of politician, administrator, statesman and gentleman. Any project, however complex or elevated, was in safe hands once George Pearce had the carriage of it. What debts to him his countrymen amassed in his thirty-seven years as a senator, in twenty-five of those years holding ministerial office! May we regard it as proof of his steady loyalty to Australia’s widest interests that about half those years in power were given in Labor cabinets, and half in conservative ones?

Since the ancient Greeks, more competent plans for amphibious operations had not been seen than those made under Pearce for the Allied occupation of all German territory in the Pacific governed from Rabaul, and for the related knocking out of the powerful German wireless station at nearby Bitapaka. This (with several others) directed German naval units, and controlled German armed cruisers, which preyed on Allied merchant ships. Colonel William Holmes (1862–1917) was ordered on August 10, 1914, to raise the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force for the Rabaul adventure. It took this returned veteran, decorated in the South African War, but a week to complete that task, and a week later he sailed his new unit to Rabaul. By September 20 he had captured Bitapaka wireless station after a short, sharp skirmish; occupied Rabaul and many other localities; and been proclaimed Administrator of German New Guinea. The early agents of Australia’s small imperium had at least no reputation for letting the grass grow under their feet!

My father served with the Expeditionary Force, and loved New Guinea, returning to live in Australia only when desperately ill from blackwater fever. Our little house in Melbourne’s outer-suburban Glen Iris was full of Islands artefacts, and as a little boy I revelled in his stories of life in the tropics. He predicted imminent hostilities with Japanese national expansion.

At the 1919–20 Versailles peace treaty settlement of the First World War our prime minister, Billy Hughes, pleaded (with “earnest intensity”) for Australia to be rewarded by possession of Germany’s former Pacific territories. His eloquence secured League of Nations “mandates” little short of Australian total sovereignty, but with certain enduring obligations to the indigenous people; this was sufficient to forbid the economy and the convenience of actually merging the Administrations of Papua and of the Mandated Territory, contiguous though they stood to each other, across a wholly artificial border on the same great island. It preserved a significant and unfortunate difference of doctrine and practice and wasted a great deal of money.

Hughes’s anxieties had little to do with Germany, but everything to do with the smashing victory Japan had scored over the Russian Pacific fleet in 1905. Russian warships till then had been active in New Guinea waters, leaving their names upon the map to this day (such as the Vitiaz Strait, that turbulent stretch of ocean which divides New Britain from the main New Guinea island). In the Versailles of 1920, it might almost have been said that there were forebodings of Kokoda in 1942.

My splendid aunts, whose qualities I have mentioned in Quadrant, gave me a copy of Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon for my thirteenth birthday. I was captivated by the improbably imperturbable Captain MacWhirr in this story written in English by a Polish sea captain for whom English was only his third language.

My literary thraldom to Joseph Conrad can thus be established as enduring for about three-quarters of a century, and the quantity of incense I have burned in his honour would now be adjudged environmentally unacceptable.

Conrad’s life—he was born in 1857 and died in 1924—covered a time of robust imperialism and colonial rule. Its themes were largely of adventure and heroism, exploration of unknown and perilous wilderness, brave stands by a few white men against savage native hordes. The historic events of Conrad’s years indeed make a grim sequence. The horrendous bloodbath of the Indian Mutiny ushered in his birth, and the First World War was barely over when he died. In between were the Maori Wars, the Sudan fighting, the two Boer Wars, and the horrendous Boxer Rebellion, so called, in China. He settled down in Kent to lead the quiet life of an English country gentleman, and to creating some of the most wonderfully wrought prose in the canon.

A recent essay of Theodore Dalrymple reminds us of the immense respect Bertrand Russell felt for the writings of Joseph Conrad, and especially for the quality of “intense and passionate nobility” which shines from every detail of his work.

This is deeply true, and it saddens me that I can think off-hand of no substantial body of recent Australian writing which shows the application of such dedication. Heaven knows, our national story offers material enough to employ a conclave of Conrads writing for years: Ludwig Leichhardt, and the enigma of his exit; the ill-starred and ill-matched Burke and Wills. Is it no more than my private fantasy that our Conrad may emerge from our own “empire”? Flashes of nobility appear in appropriate parts of Michael O’Connor’s New Guinea Days. The back cover of the new edition carries a quote from my old friend, the perspicacious Peter Pierce: “the author’s probity expressed in a tenor that suggests an age in Australian culture and moral bearing that has passed away”.

Let us pray—let us profoundly pray—that Pierce, though rarely wrong, is not on the money in this particular race.