CHRIS OVERLAND
ADELAIDE - What constituted the "bloody early years" in Papua New Guinea was, in an historic context, not very bloody at all.
I realise that this will come as no comfort whatsoever to those whose relatives were shot and killed or injured by the early kiaps, but it is really important to keep things in perspective.
Imperialism in whatever form it arises is invariably a story of conquest and suppression. This has been true since time immemorial. It is what we humans do to one another in the pursuit of power, wealth and glory.
So, in Africa and South America, large scale killing and enslavement was common. Entire colonial armies ranged across the African landscape whenever the imperial power concerned deemed this necessary.
Similarly, in the USA, though they might wish to forget it, the so-called Indian Wars of the 19th century saw the US Army used to crush Indian uprisings and progressively remove them from their lands onto reservations. It was genocidal warfare, where repeated bad faith on the part of the US government led to conflict.
Closer to home, no-one knows for sure how many Aboriginal people were killed as the European settlers expanded into new territories but a figure of 20,000 is plausible. The main damage was done by disease though, which ran rampant through the Aboriginal people because they lacked any immunity to the new diseases that accompanied the settlers.
A dishonourable mention needs to be made of alcohol, cigarettes and bad diet, which always accompanied European imperialism. These factors are, arguably, still the most lethal legacy of the colonial era.
In PNG, there were certainly very violent incidents between the early kiaps and the people they encountered.
I have previously written about the appalling conduct of Assistant Resident Magistrate CAW Monckton, who shot his way through the Northern (now Oro) Province to bring it under firm colonial control.
I am also aware of at least one further incident in that province where vengeful gold miners massacred about 40 men, women and children in retaliation for the murder of three colleagues.
So, the issue is not whether or not there were people killed in PNG but the true extent of that killing.
The available verifiable evidence suggests that killings by patrol officers or police were comparatively rare. The official position of the colonial Administration was that shootings were a last resort measure and had to be reported.
Extrajudicial killings were regarded as a very serious matter. The long-serving Minister for External Affairs, Paul Hasluck (a lawyer by profession), insisted upon receiving a personal briefing on each and every case. He took it upon himself to decide each time whether the action had been justified by the circumstances.
That said, it seems probable to me that there were undocumented incidents that involved the conscious suppression of evidence. The trouble is, it is impossible to find out about this except through unreliable second or third-hand oral reports.
This makes establishing even a rough approximation of how many people were killed during the early exploratory work almost impossible to establish.
I think that almost no-one would disagree with the proposition that hundreds of people, perhaps even as many as 1,000, were killed in the pre-World War II era, with many fewer killed in the post war era.
Equally, the idea that there was large scale killing is highly implausible. Basically, there were far too many European missionaries and other civilians around soon after World War I for such activities to go unremarked and unrecorded.
We will never know for sure what the true count of extrajudicial killings really is. The best that can be said is that it will be larger than officially recorded but rather smaller that the folklore about the early days would suggest.
What we can say for sure is that it was dwarfed by the numbers killed in the inter-tribal conflicts that bedevilled PNG until they were largely suppressed by the kiaps.
The numbers of unlawful killings perpetrated by Papua New Guineans today, whether in the throes of electoral disputes, or during the despicable and evil attacks on so called witches, is mute testimony to the ferocity and injustice that was part and parcel of traditional PNG societies.