Footnotes

IJECENTLY I received a letter from an Austra lian missionary teacher in which he told me of a conversation he had had with some of his New Guinean pupils.

After asking him various things about his country they had asked him which was his own village. He explained that he had been bom in one Australian town, but that while he was a boy he had gone with his parents to live in another town. Later he had come to New Guinea and his parents had moved on to a third town.

One of his pupils said, “That is not what we mean. What we mean is where is your real home, where your grandfather lived and your father was bora, and where all your relatives live, and where you will go when you retire”.

The missionary replied that he did not have such a place, and that he belonged wherever he could buy some land or a house.

“They were rather shocked by this”, he wrote. “Did I mean to say that I had no place where I really belonged? For them this was a sad situation”.

Alas, here in Port Moresby there is an ever increasing number of Paguineans now in this “sad situation”.

Some of them came here from their villages 20 years or more ago. The longer they stay here the more impracticable it be comes for them to go back. Others

were bom here and have never known any other home. They are the forerunners of a new landless proletariat in a land in which until recently no one was landless. Soon they will become one of our toughest national problems.

Rural members of the House of Assembly have a simple solution to this problem. Round them up and send them back to their villages.

Now it is true that some of the more recent arrivals could, with advantage, be sent back to their villages if we were prepared to be ruthless at the expense of human rights, and if we could be reasonably hopeful that they would stay there when they got there.

But how do we send back to his village an

A Sad Situation

For Landless

Proletarians

unemployed teenager whose father migrated from Western Papua when he was a boy and whose mother is a New Irelander?

They come to see me sometimes, these families. Back in his home village dad was a kid in my mission school, 20 years or so ago. Now he brings his “foreign” wife and their well scrubbed, bright-eyed children to visit me. Inci dentally, in many years of teaching Papuan chil dren I used to find that the children of cross tribal marriages were generally among the bright est in the school.

They’ll need to be bright, too. If they can’t keep well to the front in the educational rat-race the outlook for them is indeed black. An illiterate teenager in a Paguinean village can generally win himself a livelihood by culti vating his tribal land. An illiterate urban teenager has little chance of becoming anything but a gangster, if male, or, if female, a prostitute.

In these days of automation even a spectacular increase in secondary industry won’t provide

jobs for all the unskilled urban labour that will soon be on our hands. The revised “Five Year Plan” just tabled in the House of Assembly clearly recognises this unpalatable fact. On the other hand, to re-ruralise young people who have lived the first 20 years of their lives in a town is a pretty tough proposition.

Hardly anyone, except a few church workers and welfare officers, seems to realise the serious ness and magnitude of this problem. Certainly our Budget-framers don’t, judging by the miserly sums they allocate to the Department of Social Develop ment. Unless this department is to be allotted more funds and more staff it had better be re named the Department of Social Stagnation.

With Percy Chatterton

in Port Moresby

I was really rocked a few weeks ago to hear that a senior public servant had said that economic development must take precedence over social development. Admitting the importance of eco nomic development, of what use is it going to be to us if it takes place in the midst of social chaos.

And something like that is what we seem to be heading for.

Some of our politicians are only too eager to jump on the law’n’order bandwagon, and are currently roaring for stiffer penalties, public hang ings, pass laws and forced labour for vagrants.

But whatever may be the case in Australia, here in Papua New Guinea the breakdown of law and order—discernible throughout the country but most noticeably in the Western Highlands and the Gazelle Peninsula of New Britain—is not so much a disease in itself as, rather, the symptom of a disease. That disease is the breakdown of the age old systems of social organisation and social con trol which served Paguineans well enough for thousands of years, but which are no longer effec tive in the towns or in any but the remotest of

the villages.

A new system must be found, and to be effective it must be based on small scale units, in the rural areas on villages and in the urban areas on settlements or “wards”.

In pre-war Papua we had village councils.

Or to be punctilious we had village councillors, who were appointed to advise the resident magis trate (our old-fashioned name for the district officer), and each descent group in a village nomi nated its councillor.

Inevitably, the councillors started to get together, if only to make sure that they didn’t tell the RM contradictory stories, and soon regular “council meetings” were being held. Before long the “council” was promulgating council rules,

conciliating and even adjudicating in disputes,

and generally acting as an instrument of social control.

All this was completely unofficial and the “council” had no formal authority behind it. But so long as the council’s decisions were felt to be fair and reasonable, the villagers accepted them as a preferred alternative to seeking a decision from a white man of unpredictable behaviour and sometimes of uncertain temper.

A wise RM looked the other way when the council’s rules and decisions were reasonable and acceptable, and only, when it appeared to be act ing harshly or unjustly, intervened to point out that it had no legal existence anyway.

In a rather naive period this system worked well, partly no doubt because the council meetings were, perforce, held in public. There was no official public gallery, but neither were there any facilities for privacy. Indeed, at one period a favourite game among the pupils of the mission school of which I was in charge was the holding of “council meetings”. Their superb mimicry of the eccentricities of some of the councillors could only have been based on a close study of the originals in action.

So happy-go-lucky a system wouldn’t work in these more sophisticated days, of course. But there is no reason why such councils should not be given a legal status and defined powers. In many cases, the same body could function both as a village, or settlement, council and as a ward committee of the local government council. In deed, to avoid confusion it would probably be better if these bodies were called committees rather than councils.

Over large areas of Papua New Guinea the descent group is still the basic unit of social organisation, and where this is so membership of the village council or committee should be based on descent group representation. But even this basic social unit is beginning to lose some of its former binding power, and any system of social control which we devise must be flexible enough to cope with a rapidly-changing scene.