Michael Moran - Beyond the Coral Sea - Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific

A year or so later, a young lawyer, Christopher Robinson, was appointed Chief Justice and was acting as Governor of the Possession. He decided to go to Goaribari in one of the pretty gilded cabins of the steamer, retrieve the heads and capture the murderers for trial. He had learned that in the matter of identification of skulls, those that had artificial noses attached were from people who had died from natural causes; those skulls without noses had been killed, the noses bitten off by the killers. As fate had it, the party he assembled were chronically inexperienced in dealing with villagers or had only recently arrived in New Guinea.

In April 1903 the Merrie England once more anchored off the cannibal shores of Goaribari. Some of the highly excitable local people were enticed aboard from their canoes with trinkets and trade goods. The murderers were known to be among them. The ‘grand plan’ was that the constabulary would grab them upon a given signal. The plan went horribly wrong. Wild fights erupted all over the deck. The red-painted warriors remaining in the canoes attacked the ship with arrows which drew rifle fire from anyone on board who could lift a weapon. Nearly all lost control in the ensuing panic and blazed away at everything that moved on the water. One, a letter copyist, collapsed in a fit of shrieking hysterics at the sight of a man being shot. An unknown number of the inhabitants of Goaribari were killed.

The facts of the case were instantly sensationalised and exaggerated by an Australian press starved for scandal. The missionary from Kwato, Charles Abel, demanded a Royal Commission to investigate the circumstances of the reprisal raid. Robinson was vilified with sulphuric slander and offered up for immolation. The innocent steamer Merrie England was absurdly compared to the infamous Australian ‘black-birder’, 1 the slaving brig Karl , owned by the Irish physician, Dr James Murray. Robinson was summoned to Sydney and a junior magistrate appointed in his place as Governor. Like Timon of Athens he was now abandoned by all his false friends. He took the only course open to a gentleman of honour in those days. While the occupants of Government House in Port Moresby were peacefully sleeping, he wrote his account of the incident, accepting full responsibility for the actions at Goaribari. He then took his revolver, walked out to the base of the flagstaff in the moonlight and blew out his brains over the withered grass. He was thirty-two.

The marble obelisk, ghostly in the silver moonlight below my window at Samarai, commemorates this sad saga. Part of the inscription reads:

His aim was to make New Guinea a good country for white men. This stone was set up by the men of New Guinea in recognition of the services of a man, who was as well meaning as he was unfortunate, and as kindly as he was courageous.

The monument is now considered to be politically incorrect and the plan is to tear it down.

1 Pidgin for ‘launch’.

1 ‘Good afternoon!’

1 ‘There you are!’

1 This Latin phrase means ‘Under the Emperor’s Seal’. It was the highest academic honour in the Hapsburg Empire and only one or two were awarded in any one year. The recipient was given a jewelled gold ring carrying the Emperor’s seal which was conferred at a grand ceremony by a representative of the Emperor. Malinowski lost his ring.

1 On the inside front cover of the black notebook he inscribed in blue-grey ink: ‘A diary in the strict sense of the term,’ and immediately beneath: ‘Day by day without exception I shall record the events of my life in chronological order. Every day an account of the preceding: a mirror of the events, a moral evaluation, location of the mainsprings of my life, a plan for the next day.’ And beneath that: ‘The overall plan depends above all on my state of health. At present, if I am strong enough, I must devote myself to my work, to being faithful to my fiancée, and to the goal of adding depth to my life as well as to my work.’ The first entry, on page one, is ‘Samarai 10.11.17’ (quoted from Michael W. Young’s as yet unpublished biography of Malinowski).

2 Italics written in English and taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

1 The currency in use in Papua New Guinea. At current rates (2002), 1 kina equals about 25 pence.

1 The garamut is a type of slit drum commonly used in the islands. The carrying power of this simple instrument is extraordinary in the still air of tropical nights.

1 A ‘black-birder’ was a slave ship or the captain of one that forcibly abducted men from island villages for labour on the Queensland or Melanesian plantations. Dr Murray and his brig, the Karl , were notorious in South Pacific waters for sensational cruelty and murder in their pursuit of profit through slavery.

CHARLES ABEL

Letter from Kwato Mission to

his sons studying at Cambridge

My early morning walk around Samarai unveiled the islands of China Strait floating on glass, filtered through magenta gauze. Perfect silence reigned apart from the occasional fish breaking through the mirrored surface of the sea. The air was still and almost cool, the grass streets lightly scented with frangipani blossom. Scavenging dogs held their tails between their legs and cringed away from a lone fisherman heading towards the beach. Local children were screaming with joy as they entered the school in a crocodile line. I watched until lessons began; their enthusiasm and sense of mischief was electric. Papua New Guinea is a republic of children.

Wallace did not look too happy at breakfast. ‘I don’t sleep well these days. And then there is my arthritis. You will come down to the hospital with me, won’t you?’

‘Of course, but aren’t we going to Kwato today?’

‘Yes. I asked the pastor to come before lunch. His assistant will get a dinghy for you. But I won’t be coming. I’ve got accounts and letters to settle.’

I concealed my disappointment.

‘I suppose you don’t want the flying witches to get you!’

He suddenly became grave and serious. ‘If you fear the witches they have power over you. If not, they can’t touch you. I don’t fear them, Mr Michael.’ His tone indicated I had overstepped an invisible line.

‘Strange lights appear above the water at night and witches can kaikai you. On moonlit nights on Kwato, the spirit of Charles Abel appears. Ask the pastor about it.’

I changed the subject slightly. ‘Did your grandfather ever meet the Reverend James Chalmers?’

‘I’m not sure, but I do know after Chalmers was killed and eaten they tried to cook his boots! Ha! Ha! What do you think of that? Yes, the cannibals thought they were part of his feet. They boiled them for days but never could get them tender enough!’

‘Then, he must’ve known Charles Abel.’

‘Yes, we knew all the Abels. I was born on Kwato remember. I knew his son Cecil Abel. He was a good man. At Wagawaga Charles would walk up and down the beach at night praying in the moonlight. He was in strong communion with God.’

The cards were produced and the flight from reality began again. The government ministers came down for breakfast, faces transformed by friendly smiles. They ate quickly and headed off for the final day of the seminar.

‘Don’t forget the party tonight, Michael.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘We’ll send a councillor down to guide you.’

I ate a few more slices of sweet pineapple and perfumed paw-paw. The sun was up and the room heating slowly. The torpor of the day had already begun to set in.

The early European settlement of New Guinea is the scarcely credible story of competing missionary teachers of various denominations carving up the country – Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Evangelicals of the London Missionary Society (LMS), Methodists, Barmen of the Rhenish Mission, Anglicans, Pietists, Baptists, Protestants and Seventh Day Adventists. On first contact the indigenous islanders were described by both colonisers and missionaries as indolent, mendacious, ‘intractable little cannibals’, loathsome and depraved, filthy, ‘truculent mannikins’, sensual, lazy, and, in summa , ‘hopeless little degenerates’ – to list some of the more insulting labels assembled by the Governor, Sir Hubert Murray, in his book Papua or British New Guinea. The primary objective of missionaries was to save the endangered souls of the ‘natives’ from perdition and render them European in the shortest possible time.