Legends, There

Afterthoughts

Of The Making Of

Is No End

with Percy Chatterton in Port Moresby

One of the most fascinating of my experiences during the half-a century in Papua New Guinea has been that of watching the growth of legend.

A persistent legend in pre-war Papua related to the pioneer London Missionary Society missionary, James Chalmers, who was killed and eaten at Goaribari Island in the Papuan Gulf country in 1901. All along the Papuan coast from west to east the story was told of how, on the day of Chalmers’ death, the sun was darkened from noon till afternoon. Those who told the story were probably not aware that in fact Chalmers’ death oc curred in the early morning, not at noon; and the resemblance of the story to the New Testament account of the crucifixion is unlikely to be accidental. Yet I have talked with elderly men who have said that they were boys at the time and that they remem bered it happening.

I have searched the records for a reference to some natural event which might have given rise to the story, but have failed to find one.

This sort of thing rather shakes one’s trust in eye-witness accounts of happenings. In this connection I recall an occasion when a rather spectacular event took place in a Papuan coastal village. A few days later I asked three of my students (adults, not children), who had been eye-witnesses of the event, to write for me an account of what had happened. The three accounts they turned in differed quite startlingly from one another in quite

important ways.

This kind of thing also makes one a bit cynical about the masses of ‘oral history’, the collection and publishing of which is now all the rage in academic circles. I am not implying of course that all ‘oral history’ is unreliable. On the contrary, in the 19505, an elderly man from a village on the shores of Hall Sound, about 60 miles north-west of Port Moresby, gave me a graphic account of the murder of two Europeans in that area in 1875. He drama tised the story in a one-man act of considerable histrionic merit.

I enjoyed the performance but took it with a grain of salt. How ever, some time later I came on a contemporary account of the event in an unpublished document in the LMS archives, which tallied point by point with the orally transmitted story handed down over four generations.

But in many cases the stream of oral history has been muddied by ingredients imported from the Bible, from European fairy tales, and even from the writings of eminent anthropologists. On one occasion a university student who had spent a vacation in his home village reported that the people of his village had a tradition that their ancestors had come from Egypt. My recollec tion is that this was published quite uncritically as a contribution

to ‘oral history’.

But to get back to the growth of legend. In the years since the war, stories have been cropping up all over the place of how, when the first missionaries arrived at the place of which the story is being told, they were met by hostile tribesmen intent on slaught ering them. At the last moment, a fearless villager sprang in front of them and declared that only over his dead body should the

strangers be harmed. Thereafter all was sweetness and light.

These stories, of course, provide marvellous material for dra matic re-enactment, and young people get a lot of fun out of blackening their faces and brandishing spears. But are the stories true? In a few cases they probably are; and of course there were some cases in which the missionaries really did get killed. But in many others, contemporary missionary accounts suggest a friendly and peaceful reception rather than a hostile one.

How then did the stories arise? I think it is because a new gener ation of admirers of the glorious Melanesian past have felt that it would have somehow been unmanly of their ancestors not to try to kill the intruders. Surely they must have done. So a new legend is bom.

The most recent crop of legends has nothing to do with mis sionaries; it is concerned with Papua New Guinea’s accession to independence in 1975. Already, only three years later, university students and other young nationalists are prating about ‘our fight

for independence’.

The fact is that the only people who had to do any fighting for Papua New Guinean independence were the successive Aus tralian Governments, which as time went on became more and more impatient with Papua New Guinea’s reluctance to accept the independence which Australia was so anxious to press upon it.

True, the Pangu Party had from its inception advocated early self-government and independence; but its supporters were heavily outnumbered by those of the United Party, which had been established specifically for the purpose of delaying indepen dence as along as possible. Right up to the end of 1971, when the second House of Assembly was prorogued. United Party spokesmen were declaring robustly that if they were returned to power in the forthcoming elections there would be no indepen dence for a long long time.

Six months later, Pangu’s Michael Somare became Chief Minister, and thereafter progress towards self-government and independence was rapid, to the relief of the Australian Govern ment. Nobody had to fight for it. But no doubt the legend of Papua New Guinea’s heroic fight for freedom will echo down the years.

It was echoed recently in a letter from a university student to the PNG Post-Courier. From there he proceeded to bundle together a declaration by Commodore Erskine in 1884, a punitive expedition mounted by C. S. Robinson in 1904, and a decision of the Australian Government implemented in 1906, and to blame Sir Hubert Murray, who began his long reign as Lieutenant- Governor in 1908, for the whole package.

He then went on to reject the names ‘Papua’ and ‘New Guinea’ as colonial impositions, and declared that the country must have a new name, a truly Melanesian name. His choice was ‘Niugini’. , I couldn’t quite follow this bit, but perhaps he thinks that phonetic spelling is a Melanesian invention.

UPNG’s library has a very fine ‘New Guinea Collection’ with a full range of contemporary records covering the whole colonial period. And the colonial period is one of the facts of history, how ever glad we may be that it is over.

It would be a good thing if more of our students had more recourse to this collection and so found out what really happened, instead of making up the history of their country out of their heads.