On The Grand Scale

Comparison, New Guinea Today is "Brash and Suburban"

Eccentrics And Adventure On The Grand Scale

When John Keith McCarthy says, towards the end of his book that he is sensitive and proud of his friendship with the native people of New Guinea, he sets his final imprint upon Patrol Into Yesterday. Whatever else the book is—and it is sometimes acid, as a good book should be, but mostly it has a chuckle or a laugh never far beneath the surface his sympathy with the people who now go by the unlovely name of New Guineans is abundantly clear.

HHEN Keith McCarthy became a \ patrol officer in New Guinea in i 27 he could not know that he had e Native Affairs Department uivalent of the Field Marshal s iton in his knapsack. He became ipua-New Guinea Director of ative Affairs a couple of years ago; it this book is not about that. In

fact, it does not rate a mention.

The largest part of the book is a record of intimate, personal contact with the country and its people, both brown and white, and as such it is something of a milestone.

Although all dimensions of admini strators on the Papuan side, from Romilly and Sir Peter Scratchley, in the 1880’s, to Jack Hides and W. R.

Humphreys in the late 1930’5, went into print at the drop of a hat, there has been, until now, a remarkable silence from the men of the old New Guinea service.

In fact, amongst the personal ac counts of Territory life, written by real Territorians, we can think of only two —Doris Booth’s Mountains, Gold and Cannibals; and Mick Leahy’s The Land That Time Forgot, and neither of these is with the Gov ernment.

Keith McCarthy’s book should go a long way towards bringing the record up to date.

The Old New Guinea It depicts, in its early sequences, a New Guinea that stopped with the war; a New Guinea compounded of isolation and lack of communications, when distance was measured in terms of a day’s walk; when European men outnumbered European females three to one in the towns and by many times more than that in the bush; when disease and death were sudden and swift.

It was a time when the world cared little about what went on in New Guinea and the echoes from the occasional voices in the League of Nations did not reach there for months. It was a time when our world was smaller and fresher and younger. And so were we.

Apart from all this, it was a time and a place that produced a climate

J . K. McCarthy is one of that small number of New Guinea men who have become something of a legend in their own life time. His 36 years with the Department of Native Affairs, which he now heads, have covered the most eventful period in the big Territory’s history. Here “PIM” reviews his long-awaited book on those years, “Patrol Into Yesterday”, which is to be published by Cheshire, Melbourne, at the end of November.

i which eccentrics on the grand ;ale could flourish. Today, by com arison, Papua-New Guinea is only rash and noisy and suburban.

Nostalgic Quality

It is this nostalgic quality which IcCarthy’s book recaptures so well lat it will twist the hearts, of old mers and make even the Round able planters of New Ireland (who articularly got under the skin of oung Patrol Officer JKMcC), weep ito their beer for the days now eyond recall.

McCarthy met his first Territorians rue, in the shape of his cabin-mates, m his way to New Guinea on the old darsina. There was Piggott, who preferred to be known as a barrister” iut turned out later to be a patrol (fficer, too; Fowler, a trader —a “thin iderly man with brown spots on iis face and hands”; and Schneider, l Government surveyor’s assistant.

Fowler always rose at 3 a.m. to have and had a box full of polished :ut-throat razors to do it. He put he light on and this woke Schneider vho demanded that it be put out.

“ ‘You’re a Hun stinker,’ said Fowler, apparently without rancour” —whereupon Schneider passed some ruder remarks about the quality of the razors.

“ ‘lgnorant Teuton,’ said Fowler, These are the best Bengal razors on the market.’

“And to show how good they were,” recounts McCarthy, “he cut a few hairs from the head of the still snoring Piggott as he lay in the lower bunk. But the razor couldn’t have been perfect, for the action woke Piggott. He instantly fell back in horror at the sight of Fowler with a razor held so close to his face.

“Now an argument developed and it appeared to be getting serious so I lay quiet, hoping that I would not be noticed. Schneider suddenly produced a revolver from underneath his pillow and threatened to shoot the trader. Fowler turned, calmly cleaned his razor, and promised to cut Schneider’s throat.”

Eccentrics Galore And so passed the first night.

McCarthy was soon in the Territory and posted to Nakanai, to become overlord of 600 square miles of the wildest part of New Britain, A year later he got his first white visitor — Assistant District Officer George Ellis, an eccentric of a different kind.

The psychological kinks that eventually ended in tragedy were already apparent in Ellis in 1928 but he remained in New Guinea and in the service until 1942.

When Rabaul fell to the Japanese on January 23 of that year Ellis was ADO on the Sepik. The event set him to brooding more than ever and to drinking. At the time about 40 miners from all over the Sepik district were congregated at Angoram, on the river, and it was planned that they should be taken upstream and evacuated overland to the Highlands.

Ellis, for some reason, opposed the evacuation and regarded the men as deserters —although many of them had had to be ordered from their claims by Authority.

Ellis himself refused to leave. He hid large quantities of ammunition

about the station and prepared to resist by force when the District Officer ordered ADO Jim Taylor to take over from him. He armed his police with rifles and there ensued a two-hour’s shooting war before Taylor’s party retired downstream to Marienberg.

When they returned two days later they found Ellis dead in his bungalow, with his revolver beside him; and that a party of native police had gone berserk in the bush, deter mined to kill all the white men on the river.

They did kill Patrol Officer R. B.

Strudwick and three miners—Reg

Beckett, Jack Mitchell and George Eichorn— before they were hunted down and arrested by another patrol.

Today such an incident would scream around the world in news paper headlines. In early 1942, when most of the Pacific was fight ing for its existence, it passed almost unnoticed. McCarthy himself did not hear about it until long after wards because when the Japanese invasion began he was ADO at Talasea, New Britain, and in the first months of 1942 was wholly occupied in rounding up and rescuing the remnants of the 2/22nd Battalion who had been left to their fate.

The criminal negligence that pro duced the fall of Rabaul and its aftermath will never now be sheeted home to where it rightfully belongs.

McCarthy’s account of these dark days, when these hundreds of men, untrained in jungle survival, without medicine or the means of defence, dispirited and without morale, wandered or sat waiting to be picked up by Jap patrols in the New Britain bush, is perhaps one of the most gripping sections of this book.

He received the MBE for his part in rescuing these men—sometimes moving them almost by sheer physical force—but this is not mentioned in the book.

This war section leads on naturally to the post-war period of soberer worlds, a soberer McCarthy and certainly one with greater respon sibilities. * * * One day in 1936 this reviewer was sitting in a camp on the Ulahau River, between the mountains and the

Sepik coast, when a runner arrive! with a note.

“Charlie Gough has been killec down in the kunai,” another mine] had written simply. -‘He tried tc £ull’ a boy and the kanakas got him You may be needed. I’ll keep ir touch.”

However, G. W. L. (“Kassa”J Townsend, then District Officer Sepik, was not the sort of man tc need a posse of miners to help him do his work and no one was evei contacted. The thing was a week’s wonder in the district and in due course we learned that the murderers had been apprehended and had got ofi with a few years’ gaol.

No doubt we were suitably in censed at the time about the Admini stration’s “softness”, but I have never thought of Charlie Gough from that time until reading this book.

Gough's Murder

McCarthy was posted to Aitape in the mid-thirties and was one of the two European officers who ac companied Townsend on that occasion, found Gough’s body, buried it, and ultimately tracked down the killers.

He had known Charlie before Charlie had turned briefly and tragically into a recruiter—he was, at that time, Aitape’s lone European storekeeper.

“Gough . . . was successful in business,” says McCarthy, “despite the fact that he could neither read nor write. He ran his accounts by making notches on sticks and by a system of pencil markings and he could provide you, at any time, with a true statement of your account.

“ ‘Like a bloody old-time cricket scorer at Hambledon,’ said erudite Nick Carter [a planter in the district]. ‘He’s probably cutting a few more notches on the sly.’

“I learned later that things had been rather strained between Gough and Carter since Carter purloined the account ‘books’ which showed how much he owed Gough and attempted to substitute some notched sticks of his own. There had been an argu ment about just what was owed and Gough had threatened to bring in an auditor—presumably one skilled in woodwork—to settle it.”

Another Point of View But Charlie got restless store keeping; he tried prospecting, without profit, and recruiting, with similar results. The 14-year-old boy, who was to lead to his murder, in fact broke his “duck” and Gough sealed the bargain with an axe, a knife and

a lap-lap.

When the boy later deserted, tak ing the trade goods with him, Gough

with his dander up, went in pursuit.

No damned boy, he said, was going to put it over him, even if it was technically uncontrolled country in which he technically had no right to be. [lf I may interpolate into the McCarthy saga at this point, I might say that few of the dozen miners in that huge district, at that time, did not at some time trespass on “uncontrolled territory” in the country beyond Maprik—which was then, of course, just a native village and not the flourishing sub-station it sub sequently became. It was 18 months after we had established our per manent camp that a patrol officer found us to inspect our labour and to inform us that it was safe to go where we had been going all along.

He had little to say about the damp, miserable conditions in which our labour lived on a terrace above the river—probably because we ourselves lived in equally damp and miserable conditions on the river terrace opposite].

Gough armed five of his carriers and took his Winchester .44 and, in spite of the warnings of his men — because it was obvious by now that the village natives had reached a point where they would fight—he marched into the village. “Either the boy returns to me or you return the axe and knife”, he roared.

“The first spear whistled through the air as Gough reached the clear ing in front of the tall haus tambaran,” and it was followed by a shower of arrows. Gough fired

and was speared in the thigh. He half fell to the ground but he still fired. His carriers were with him yet but they had only two cartridges each and soon their shotguns were useless.

“ ‘More cartridges in my pack,’ gasped Gough, They were his last words. A man rushed at him and his spear took Gough in the neck.

As Gough fell, his carriers broke and ran. But they were not followed, for the attackers now had a helpless target and they continued to fire arrows into the body of the white man.” * * * Not all men share the same views; and in individualistic New Guinea there are almost as many views as there are men. In New Guinea, in particular, so much is a matter of opinion, with the actors still on the stage, that the time is still too soon to say who was right and who was wrong.

As a man who has devoted 36 years of his life to Administration service, Keith McCarthy is, as he very properly should be, an Administration officer first, last and always. Yet he writes as an officer who has broad points of contact —even if not always agreement—with all manner of men.

Patrol Into Yesterday may be one man’s opinion—but it is an opinion tempered by the genuine human-ness of the author, his extraordinary sense of humour and his gift of seeing the ridiculous in any situation.

It Had To Be Written His book is one that had to be written—and now more than ever.

Although the author himself sees post war developments as inevitable, he is probably also grateful that when he retires from the service towards the end of 1964 his years in the Terri tory will have covered the most colourful, the most eventful and the most fruitful of Australia’s admini stration in New Guinea.

Already the new thinkers see the Department of Native Affairs, which J. K. McCarthy now heads, and which has been the heart and core of Aus tralian administration in Papua-New Guinea, as obsolete.

As we said in the beginning—when McCarthy joined the service, that director’s chair, down the long corridor of the years, was figuratively there waiting for him to occupy it.

These days these things don’t happen.

They hire patrol officers on six-year contracts —and history turns down the last page of another chapter on colonial administration.

McCarthy’s book is beautifully produced, with maps, photographs and some of the author’s own drawings as decorations. —Judy Tudor.

(Patrol Into Yesterday. Pub

lished by F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne.

Price 47/6.)